Nancy Pelosi and the New Deal/corporate split in the Democratic Party today

Joy Reid of MSNBC's AM Joy is a reliable defender of the Democratic establishment. Given the current mood among the party's base voters, even Establishment Democrats have to put on a convincing show of partisanship right now. If the Obama years are any measure, as soon as corporate Democrats win back the Presidency, they and their media supporters will revert to defending the weakest "bipartisan" compromises that cater to Republican conservatives as three-dimensional chess that is part of a very clever long game to someday, somehow, start achieving the sort of things that Democrats put into their official primaries.

This segment from this week, Why Are Democrats Attacking Nancy Pelosi? AM Joy 06/26/2017, deals with progressive criticism of Nancy Pelosi:

I'll confess again to being a bit of a Mugmump on the issue of replacing Pelosi as Democratic House leader. On the one hand, it probably would be a good idea to have a Democratic leader in the House who is not so identified with the Democratic politics of the Bush and Obama Presidencies. But as Jamal Simmons observes, Pelosi by most accounts has been effective in her job as Democratic House leader.

As a national spokesperson for the Democratic Party, I've been disappointed in the lack of clarity and focus that has sometimes affected her in interviews in which she was defending Democratic positions. But that's not a problem that affected her in her weekly news briefing today, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi holds news briefing PBS Newshour 06/29/2017:

But she also has the huge advantage of being a literal "San Francisco Democrat" from a safely Democratic district. That was and is a welcome departure from the long-standing Democratic approach of selecting top Congressional leaders from competitive districts, apparently on the theory that their ability to appeal to swing voters would be particularly helpful. But, as Pelosi herself is shown saying in the AM Joy segment, the Republicans are going to make a boogeyman (or woman) out of any Democratic leader. The Republicans just don't share the Democrats chronic desire to pursue "bipartisanship." Charlie Pierce gives his take on Pelosi's leadership in Okay, So You Kick Nancy Pelosi Out. Then What? Esquire Politics Blog 06/21/2017.

Joy begins the segment by calling Democrats who advocate a new House leader "haters and critics." She sets the segment up on the premise that Republicans demonized Pelosi's image, and now (progressive) Democrats have been naively suckered into carrying water for the Republicans' anti-Pelosi position. Joy cites as a major example of Pelosi's value to the Democrats the fact that she appointed Rahm Emmanuel to lead the DCCC (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) during the 2006 eleciton cycle. Rahm is the poster-boy for the corporate Dem position, famously telling advocates of the public option for health care in 2009 that they were "f***ing retarded." (Was Rahm Right? In These Times 04/06/2011) Ryan Lizza wrote about interviewing Rahm in his office when he was Obama's first White House Chief of Staff, "I noticed that over his left shoulder, on the credenza behind him, was an official-looking name plate, which he said was a birthday present from his two brothers. It read, 'Undersecretary for Go Fuck Yourself.'" (The Gatekeeper New Yorker 03/02/2009).

As a sideline, I would note that if the ACA (Obamacare) had included the public option that most Democrats wanted and which Rahm so memorably condemned, it would almost certainly have been more popular than it clearly is now, less vulnerable to Republican Governors' sabotage, and more durable in the face of the current Republican efforts to repeal it. Although I'm relieved and a bit pleasantly surprised as how durable it's turning out to be in the first half of 2017.

The AM Joy segment features four guests: former RNC Chair Michael Steele, Nation journalist Joan Walsh, actor-commentator Jamal Simmons and Roll Call's Michele Bernard. Three of the four join with the host in ridiculing the idea of Democrats replacing Pelosi as the House leader. Joy doesn't probe Michael Steele's dubious-sounding claim to be a master of strategic branding who fought successfully against other Republicans to make Pelosi a major image of the Democratic Party. He even says he got them to focus on making Pelosi the main target of their attacks instead of Barack Obama. (Say what?!)

Simmons mentions vaguely that the Democrats need a stronger identification with economic issues. None of the panel, including Joy herself, gives much attention in this segment to the substantive criticism that some progressives have made, not least of which is that she's too much a part of the corporate-financed model of politics that has metastasized since the Citizens United decision in 2010.

Joan Walsh, after 10:00, says:

The whole battle in the party right now, which is a false battle in my opinion, but it's there, between 'identity politics' - so-called - and class politics, that's being fought here too, but in ways that people won't say. Because Pelosi is a associated with gay marriage, being from San Francisco, but also being staunchly for it. She's associated with feminism. She's associated with these things that certain elements of the party think should be downplayed to appeal to white men, white, you know, rather than focusing on the base of our party, which is women, and particularly women of color.

I often quote Joan's analysis, usually with approval. But that particularly comment is one that bothers me. In fairness, her target isn't entirely clear in the brief time she had to speak. The segment featured criticism of Pelosi from Ohio Congressman Tim Ryan, who unsuccessfully challenged her in the House for her leadership position. And Ryan has stressed a particular approach to criticizing Pelosi.

Ryan has a strong prolabor voting record in Congress. Jim Newell reported on Ryan's campaign for the Democratic leadership in Tim Ryan Wants to Make the Democrats Great Again Slate 11/29/2016:

Ryan, who describes himself as “feisty,” has turned more aggressive in recent days. Though Ryan has criticized the party for prioritizing appeals to “subgroups” over a central economic message, his volleys against Pelosi veer close to an identity politics of his own—Make the Democrats Great Again—that relies on hackneyed imagery such as the beer drinker on Steel Street. “This election’s not going to be won at fundraisers on the coasts,” he told the Wall Street Journal, “it’s going to be won in union halls in the industrial Midwest and fish fries in the Midwest and the South.” Ryan also told me that his relative youth would serve the party well with millennials. (Ryan, 43, is not a millennial.)

The “union hall” thing did not sit well with Pelosi. “I’m not going to pay attention to, ‘I can’t step in a union hall.’ I’m a woman of steel in there,” Pelosi told the Huffington Post on Tuesday. “I’m constantly invited by the unions to go to their meetings. That’s just not, it’s just not true.” She also mocked Ryan for not being able to carry his district for Hillary Clinton, and she described his complaint that her proposed internal reforms would only strengthen her grip over the caucus as “pathetic.”

Back circa 1990, the major ideological fault line in the Democratic Party was understood to between traditional liberals of the Ted Kennedy/Walter Mondale mode and Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) that embraced neoliberal economics and hedged on "social issues" like abortion and even anti-discrimination issues. Bill Clinton was the embodiment of that approach. Any such broad distinction is inevitably oversimplified. The Republican were more than happy to portray Clinton as a flaming leftwing radical who was a wimp in foreign policy. And the labor movement nad the most prolabor Members of Congress were the bedrock of the defense of Clinton in the impeachment fight. Most DLC types didn't go as far off the tracks as Joe Lieberman eventually did. In fact, even the DLC got sick of Lieberman's antics sabotaging the Democrats before he left the Senate. On the other hand, the Democrats were all too eager to welcome Lieberman back into the Democratic Caucus after he actively campaigned for John McCain in the 2008 Presidential contest.

That traditional liberal/DLC-Blue Dog split among Dems doesn't describe the current major ideological fault line in the Democratic Party, which crystallized in 2016 in the Bernie-vs.-Hillary divide. At the moment, we can broadly describe the Bernie wing of the party as explicitly social-democratic, even militantly so. It's an outlook that openly embraces the spirit and content of the New Deal in a way even the liberal wing of 1990 was somewhat hesitant to do. On social issues, the Bernie wing is very much in favor of strong enforcement of anti-discrimination laws for racial minorities, women and the LGBTQ community. And supportive of a humane immigration reform that gives a straightforward path of citizenship to the millions of mostly Latino undocumented immigrants in the US. And though the foreign policy position of the Bernie wing may not be quite so consistent as on economic and social issues, it's broadly speaking a peace-oriented view with a healthy skepticism of US military interventions. And for the New Deal wing, campaign reform that's definitively overturns Citizens United is a major priority. Because, as Barack Obama himself said of the decision when it was first handed down:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

Unfortunately, Obama's sense of urgency proved to be relatively short-lived. But the New Deal Democrats tend to take those sentiments very seriously, even if Obama may not have.

In retrospect, Jerry Brown's Presidential campaign in 1992 was an early version of today's New Deal Democratic position, supportive of labor, minority rights, women's rights and immigrants, in favor of single-payer health care, and giving a central emphasis to reducing the role of money in politics. And that was 18 years before Citizens United! He was also in favor of a peace-oriented foreign policy that would take maximum advantage of the opportunites prsented by the fall of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union.

Today's corporate Democrats are not worrying about "Sister Soljah moments" or opposing same-sex marriage. On the contrary, they are straightforwardly in favor of women's rights and gay rights and minority rights. But they support neoliberal economic policies: deregulation, privatization (charter schools, private prisons, etc.), low taxes for the wealthy, international agreements to dergulate capital and corporations masquerading as trade treaties, praising of balanced budgets as an excuse to forgo Keynesian economic stimulus. They are also distinctly hawkish in foreign policy, though they typically rely more on "liberal internationalist" rhetoric than Cheney style neoconservative framing, though in practice they often come to the same thing. And they are comfortable with corporate-financed elections and supportive of them, despite ritual denunciations of Citizens United. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are outstanding current example of the corporate Democratic camp.

In this context, Joan Walsh's comment struck me. It almost sounded like she was identifying the New Deal/Bernie Sanders wing with the old DLC approach as though they were opposing minority and women's rights.

The reality is more that the corporate Dems emphasize those issues as a way to avoid advocating aggressively for prolabor economic policies.

Trump's election and major threats to American democracy

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about the outcome of the Presidential election. Because I assume it's obvious to everyone that in two months, the inmates will officially take charge of the asylum.

But I do know the incoming President made it a central campaign promise to deport all undocumented immigrants. Like on most everything, he was vague and sometimes self-contradictory on that. But he did promise that he would make a two-year push to deport them all. He explicitly referred to the deportation program under President Eisenhower, which was literally called Operation Wetback. It was a brutal operation that directly resulted in numerous deaths. And that was under Dwight Eisenhower, who in Republican terms then was considered a moderate or even a liberal.

That also involved about two million people forced out of the country. Today it is commonly estimated that there are 11-12 million, playing a far more significant role in the economy. American agriculture is almost completely dependent on *undocumented* labor. I've seen one historian claim that expelling 12 million people would be the largest forced migration in all of history. I don't know how it may rank in the Guiness Book of Humanitarian Horrors. But it would involve a lot of very real horror. Trump very recently promised that immediately after inauguration he would deport 2 million "criminal" immigrants.

For a bit of history on Project Wetback, see: Joshua Keating, Trump Praises Eisenhower’s Deportation Program, Fails to Mention It Was Called “Operation Wetback” Slate 11/10/2015; John Dillin, How Eisenhower solved illegal border crossings from Mexico Christian Science Monitor 07/06/2006.

Pilar Marrero in Incrédulos, grupos pro inmigrantes prometen “resistir” ante una presidencia Trump La Opinión 09.11.2016:

Donald Trump fue electo presidente de los Estados Unidos de América, sobre una plataforma que incluyó la promesa de deportaciones masivas, la construcción de un gran muro entre Estados Unidos y México y el reforzamiento del sistema policial fronterizo, triplicando la cantidad de agentes de inmigración y anulando medidas ejecutivas de ayuda a los inmigrantes.

[Donald Trump was elected President of the United States of America on a platform that included the promise of massive deportations, the construction of a big wall between the United States and Mexico and the reinforcing of the frontier police system, tripling the number of immigration agents and annuling executives measures to support immigrants.]

And she writes, "los grupos que por años han luchado contra las deportaciones y la militarización de la frontera, y por una reforma migratoria, buscan reagruparse y comenzar una lucha que se presenta titánica" ("the groups who have been fighting for years against deportations and the militarization of the frontier, and for immigration reform, are seeking to regroup and to begin a fight that appears to be titanic").

There is also the very real effect of systematic, segregationist voter-suppression efforts targeting especially black and Latino voters. Rick Perlstein summed up the state of play on those recently in GOP Voting Fraud Squads Are Nothing New Washington Spectator 11/04/2016.

Unfortunately, it's not easy to immediately evaluate those, as this article by Justin Elliott notes, What We Don’t Know: The Full Effect Of Voter Suppression and Voter ID Laws ProPublica Electionland 11/08/2016:

As journalist Ari Berman, who covers the voting rights beat, pointed out today, this is the first presidential election in half a century without the full protections of the Voting Rights Act. The 2013 Supreme Court ruling Shelby County v. Holder invalidated federal oversight of states with a history of voting discrimination.

But quantifying exactly how much the changes have depressed turnout is nearly impossible.

“It’s exceedingly difficult to measure the effects of voter ID laws,” says David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. That’s because, Becker notes, “it’s incredibly hard to know who’s choosing not to vote because of barriers.”

But "not easy" is far from meaning "impossible." There are ways to determine the effects of voter suppression, as the Justice Department did in the early 1960s in court challenging segregationist voter suppression laws then.

Ari Berman, who is quoted there, has been doing great work reporting on this nefarious practice in its various forms. He explained in a piece in May the stakes involved, Voter Suppression Is the Only Way Donald Trump Can Win The Nation/Moyers & Company 05/10/2016:

Unless there’s an unexpected turnaround in his terrible numbers among nonwhite and young voters, there’s only one way Trump can win the general election: by massively suppressing Democratic voters or hoping they don’t show up on Election Day. Trump could do this by supporting new voting restrictions adopted by GOP-controlled states (17 have new restrictions in place for the first time in 2016), urging his supporters to create chaos at the polls and running a breathtakingly negative campaign that demobilizes his opposition.

Trump’s support in the primary directly correlated with racial resentment toward African-Americans, Hispanics and Muslims. “The higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump,” wrote Tom Edsall in The New York Times. It’s not a stretch to imagine Trump supporters trying to block these same voters from the polls.

We probably won't have a decent picture of how that worked in yesterday's election for a while. As Ari noted there, "Studies have shown that restrictions like voter-ID laws can reduce voter turnout by 2 to 3 percent, with the largest drop-off among young, first-time and African-American voters."

Then there is campaign-financing system, which the Republican-dominated Supreme Court made orders of magnitude worse with their Citizens United decision. I wrote just after that decision in 2010:

President Obama addressed the issue in his weekly address on 01/23/09 01/23/2010, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People. As they often do, many of the words sound right (my emphasis):

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

But will he fight for real solutions? Sadly, he pleaded for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama administration and the current Senate leadership at least an offer of preemptive surrender.

We currently have one Party, the Republicans, who are both strongly partisan and willing to fight for their goals. We have another Party, the Democrats, who are lukewarm partisan and not notably willing to fight for the goals that are most important to their Party's own base and to the majority of the people.

Sadly, the Party that is made up of fighting partisans has also become an authoritarian Party hostile to democracy and the rule. (See Bush v. Gore, the Cheney-Bush torture policy, to take two examples among many.)

It really is remarkable for the President of the United States to say of a Supreme Court decision:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

But those words at this particular moment in time remind me of what's been so gut-wrenching disappointing to even Democrats like me, who never viewed Obama as some kind of democratic messiah. His actions haven't matched up to the urgency of his words.

There will be a lot to say about the 2016 election. For a long time. But this are some of the most urgent issues that stand out for me on the morning after.

Clinton and systemtic corruption in the Citizen's United era

"This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," said President Obama when the Supreme Court handled down its Citizens United decision in 2010, barely into the second year of his Presidency.

"I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," he also said.

Now, over six years after that, we don't hear much from our liberal Republican Democratic President except the occasional rhetorical flourish. Unfortunately, it's classic Obama. It was good to hear the President weighing in on the serious of the problem Citizens United was going to cause. But his actions never matched the grim seriousness of the situation he correctly described six years ago.

Lauren McCauley looks at how Hillary's defense of her speaking fees and the Clinton Foundation's donations give reason to wonder whether she will be any more serious about undoing Citizens United than Obama has been: 'Artful Smear' Attack Backfires as Clinton Accused of Denying Impact of Big Money Common Dreams 02/09/2016. McCauley reports:

Since last week's Democratic debate, Clinton has repeatedly accused rival Sen. Bernie Sanders of attempting to 'smear' her with insinuations that she's been bought through political donations, speaking fees, and other payments.

"What the Sanders campaign is trying to do is link donations to my political campaign or really donations to anyone's political campaign, with undue influence with changing people's views and votes," the former secretary of state told CBS' Face the Nation on Sunday, repeating statements made during Thursday's debate. "I've never ever done that and I really do resent the implication or as I said the other night the insinuation."

Kurt Walters, a campaign manager with the anti-corruption group Rootstrikers, told Huffington Post's Zach Carter that he understands how this "might be an appealing defense," given how this charge has resonated with voters and considering Sanders' recent gains on the frontrunner.

"But just like the Citizens United line of thinking," Walters adds, "it ignores all of the other ways that money influences politics beyond the explicit exchange of cash for a vote."

"Clinton, like our Supreme Court, ignores thousands of years of human experience in how money corrupts politics not just through quid pro quos, but also by shaping attitudes," agreed Pulitzer Prize-winning economics writer David Cay Johnston. [my emphasis]

Here are the things the President had to say about the Citizens United decision at first, Weekly Address: Fighting for the Public Against Special Interests 01/22/2016 01/22/2010:

The Roberts Supreme Court had a big week, including the Segregation Five gutting the Voting Rights Act

The Roberts Court continued its "pro-business"/pro-One Percent, anti-labor, anti-consumer course in its term that just closed. And it gutted the Voting Rights Act (VRA) with an anti-democracy, pro-segregation decision in the Shelby County case. Striking down DOMA in the Windsor case was a bright spot for equal rights in the last week of this term.

High Court Closes Term With Blockbuster Week of Decisions PBS Newshour 06/28/2013:

Mark Shields Michael Gerson give their quality-TV, generally safe and unenlightening musings on the recent direction of the Roberts Court in Shields, Gerson on Implications of Supreme Court Decisions PBS Newshour 06/28/2013 (transcript here):

This is notable for the lights going out for a few seconds. But it was only a few seconds, so Sleepy Mark didn't nod off entirely.

But before the lights went on the blink, Mark rouses himself long enough to state some obvious things:

JEFFREY BROWN: But when you take a specific case like the voting rights case, do you see that as tinkering or was that a dramatic change?

MARK SHIELDS: I think it's a dramatic change. If you take an act of Congress, which is more than a constitutional act, as Marcia pointed out, 15,000 pages of testimony by a 98-0 vote in the United States Senate it's extended, by 390-33 in the House -- you can't get 390 House members to agree on a Mother's Day resolution.

They extended it.

And, you know, the court basically, led by the chief justice, said, no, this is not going to be -- this is not acceptable to us. And somehow this -- there is an otherworldly quality about judges. They seem indifferent to the fact that once they say money is speech that we're going to have $4 billion dollar campaigns.

They seem indifferent to the fact that once they say the Voting Rights Act is suspended that the attorney general of Texas, Mr. Greg Abbott, says oh, we're going to go -- our Texas voter I.D. law, which had been held up by the Justice Department, is now going to be imposed. Under the Texas voter I.D. law, a valid student identification from the University of Texas at Austin is not adequate to prove who you are, but a concealed weapons permit is perfectly OK.

I mean, you can pack heat going into a -- going into a beer garden is fine in order to vote. I mean, so we're going to see -- I don't know. This is what -- the direction I see it's going.

Federal Appeals Court Judge Richard Posner makes an interesting point in Supreme Court 2013: The Year in Review
Entry 16 Slate 06/27/2013:

Shelby County v. Holder, decided Tuesday, struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act (the part requiring certain states with a history of racial discrimination in voting to obtain federal permission in advance to change their voting procedures — called "preclearance") as violating the "fundamental principle of equal sovereignty" of the states. This is a principle of constitutional law of which I had never heard — for the excellent reason that ... there is no such principle. ...

... Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's very impressive opinion (in part because of its even tone) ... marshals convincing evidence that the reasons Congress has for treating some states differently for purposes of the Voting Rights Act are not arbitrary, though they are less needful than they were in 1965, when the law was first enacted.

That evidence — the record before Congress — should have been the end of this case. For apart from the spurious principle of equal sovereignty, all that the majority had on which to base its decision was tenderness for "states' rights." One doubts that this actually is a primary value for any of the justices. ... It seems that the court’s regard is not for states' rights in some abstract sense but for particular policies that a majority of justices strongly favors.

The majority opinion in Shelby acknowledges that racial discrimination in voting continues, but notes that the situation has improved since 1965 and that the procedures in the current Voting Rights Act do not make a clean fit with the current forms and pattern of discrimination. Ordinarily however a federal statute is not invalidated on the ground that it’s dated. ... And the criticisms of the statute in the majority opinion are rather tepid. That's why the court’s invocation of "equal sovereignty" is an indispensable prop of the decision. But, as I said, there is no doctrine of equal sovereignty. The opinion rests on air. [my emphasis]

That concocted doctrine of "equal sovereignty" was a way to buy into the arguments that the pro-segregation opponents forefronted in 1965, that it was unfair because it singled out some states for greater scrutiny than others. But, as the copious documentation that Congress assembled then and in the reauthorizations of the act since have shown, there are certain areas of the country that merit special scrutiny of their voting laws because of well-entrenched and continuing patterns of discrimination. Most of those areas are in states of the old Confederacy. But Arizona and Alaska, not incidentally the states from which the 2008 Republican Presidential and Vice Presidential candidates came, were also covered by the preclearance provisions that Roberts and the rest of the Court's Segregation Five struck down.

His father Eric Posner makes this point: "Justice Thomas has integrity, but it’s the integrity of a madman. He is the Ron Paul of the Supreme Court." (Supreme Court 2013: The Year in Review, Entry 23 Slate 06/27/2013)

Tags: citizens united decision, doma decision, segregation, shelby county decision

Back to 1963 with the Roberts Court

Paul Campos writes that "four of the Roberts Five cast dissenting votes in the DOMA case that are completely impossible to reconcile with the legal principles they asserted in Shelby County." (This Supreme Court is a disgrace Salon 06/26/2013)

And wading through Scalia ranting dissent in the Windsor (DOMA) case, I was also struck by how wildly contradictory it seemed with his concurrence in the Shelby County case that gutted the Voting Right Act (VRA).

But Scalia's Windsor dissent after his concurrence in Shelby County is an example of the authoritarian's capability to hold wildly contradictory opinions and reasoning, in the former arguing for an absurd level of judicial restraint and in the latter practicing drastic judicial activism on the shakiest of Constitutional reasoning.

But it's also a reflection of the general conservative, segregationist, Federalist Society two-track approach to the judiciary. One the one hand, they argue furiously against liberal "judicial activism" and oppose to it a theoretical judicial restraint based on a so-called "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution. (I'm generalizing here; obviously there are a lot of nuances within the general ideological pattern.) On the other hand, they also make very active - and successful - efforts to get dogmatically conservative and Republican-partisan judges on the bench who in a case like Shelby County will rule on a crass partisan and simplistically ideological basis.

In the cases of Shelby County and Windsor, the former is far more urgent for the Republican Party because segregationist voter suppression has become a key Republican electoral strategy to counter demographic trends that seem to favor the Democrats, especially the rising percentage of Latino voters. I'll leave it to the experienced SCOTUS watchers to judge what Justice Kennedy's calculation may have been in voting with the majority on both.

Progressives and Democrats need to step up the pressure for restoring a sound sense of Constitutional interpretation and judicial responsibility to the federal bench, especially the Supreme Court. Because as has been the case more than once in the past, today's Supreme Court is becoming a very real threat to democracy and
Constitutional government:

• Bush v. Gore marked the end of this Court's claim to high regard. It was our equivalent of the Kapp Putsch, the attempt by anti-democracy reactionaries to overthrow the German Weimar Republic in 1920. Only the Democrats weren't close to having the gumption to mount a general strike to stop it, which is how German workers successfully blocked the Kapp Putsch. Not that anyone even suggested such a reaction in 2000! The Republicans, on the other hand, were willing to stage a "bourgeois riot" and more to overturn the results of the election. (Wayne Barrett, The Five Worst Republican Outrages Village Voice 12/19/2000)
• With Citizens United, the Roberts Court solidified its Roger Taney credentials. As President Obama said at the time, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections." Whether his actions on the issue since then have matched those words is another question. But he was dead right about it being a critical threat to democracy.
• In a lesser known 2007 case, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, the Court stood Brown v. Board of Education on its head. It blocked a voluntary school desegregation plan. Check out Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion on the Seattle case; he argues from the present segregationist-conservative dogma of "a color-blind interpretation of the Constitution" meaning that government cannot take into account race for the purposes of mitigating racial discrimination. He argues there that only if a school district is remedying previous de jure segregation explicitly imposed by law can a desegregation plan be allowed, which would effectively ban all school desegregation plans. Charlie Pierce says of Thomas' dissent in this week's Texas affirmative action ruling (Fischer v. University of Texas at Austin et al), "It's not often that you see anyone take this much utter self-loathing out for a walk without it ending up in gunplay or a dive off a bridge. ... If there's a sadder figure in American politics, I can't think of one offhand." (Justice Thomas Has A Few Things to Say Esquire Politics Blog 06/24/2013) And politics is really the right word there.

But isn't my argument a mirror-image reflection of the segregationist argument that Brown v. Board of Education and other civil rights cases those opposed racial discrimination were all violations of good jurisprudence and a deathly threat to Constitutional government?

Well, I guess it is: if you ignore actual history, sound traditions of Constitutional interpretation, the specifics of history, the realities of white racism, the utter cynicism of the Orville Faubuses and Ross Barnetts making those arguments, and reason in general.

Otherwise, it makes no sense to ignore the fact that any institution can be corrupted, including the court system. And when the the judiciary takes a bad direction and becomes an actual threat to democracy, supporters of democracy have to take account of that reality and take action to fix it. As Obama himself said of Citizens United, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest."

It's important to remember also that one characteristic of the Scalia-Thomas brand of authoritarian Republican judicial activism also involves overturning well-establish precedent and making decision with major consequences with a very narrow majority based on very strained and highly ideological rationales, as in Bush v. Gore and Shelby County. The Court at least for its more recent history had tended to only reverse major precedents with solid majorities or unanimous decisions. Brown v. Board of Education was a unanimous decision. A major part of the reason for that is that a narrow decision that reverses precedent and that is going to have far-reaching effects is more likely to be credible if it has a large or unanimous majority than a 5-4 one.

But it's also important to look at the real existing practice of the Scalia-ist conservatives, which includes to shameless inconsistency, crassly partisan-political rulings, crude ideology and, not incidentally, often shabby ethical conduct. The Supreme Court is not subject to the ethical rules that apply to other federal judges and courts. Thomas and Scalia have both come under very justifiable criticism for their ethical practices as Justices. (Andy Kroll, Clarence Thomas' Wife Cashes In as Tea Party Lobbyist Mother Jones 02/04/2011; Kim Geiger, Clarence Thomas failed to report wife's income, watchdog says Los Angeles Times 01/22/2011; Bill Mears CNN 05/06/2004)

Tags: citizens united decision, doma decision, segregation, shelby county decision

Serious frenemies: Obama and the Democratic base

David Dayen provides this video in his post, Union Coalition Promotes “Jobs Not Cuts,” Directly Targets Democratic Senators FDL News 11/20/2012.

David explains the background of the ad:

The coalition, which is spending upwards of six figures on the ads, is made up of AFSCME, the National Education Association, and SEIU. The targets in the TV ads include Senators in Colorado, Missouri and Virginia – which includes Democrats Mark Udall, Michael Bennet, Claire McCaskill, Jim Webb and Mark Warner. ...

Obviously, the days right after an election are among the worst times to exert pressure on lawmakers. But you can see this more as a signal, identifying those in the Democratic coalition most disposed to backing social insurance cuts, and pointing out that this union coalition fully plans to make them pay a price for such activities. It shows that the unions plan to keep up their outside game, though I’m sure this isn’t exactly what President Obama had in mind when he sought help on the fiscal slope negotiations. It shows that unions, for now, plan to keep an independent voice, focused on the core issue of the need for a growth strategy rather than an austerity strategy for the US in the coming years. [my emphasis]

This is what progressives and labor have to do to prevent the Democratic Party from turning completely into a corporate-dominated party with mildly socially liberal inclinations: make Democrats who vote against vital programs like Social Security pay a serious political price, particularly in the form of primary challenges for their choices against labor and the elderly.

This is a 48-minute segment of The Point that deals with, among other things, the perennially troubled relationship between Obama and progressives, i.e., the Democratic base. It features Alyona Minkovski of HuffPostLive, Progressives & Obama, Pundit Accountability, and Petraeus' Media Circus 11/16/2012:

Matt Stoller of the Roosevelt Institute appears at the first of that video. Matt has been a persistent critic of President Obama from the left, which inevitably annoyed some of Obama's more faithful liberal supporters. I don't share his enthusiasm for the idea of a third party. But his criticisms of the Obama Administration are usually well thought out. He blogs at Naked Captialism. He laid out some of his priority concerns in Obama’s second term: Can liberals trust the president? Salon 11/10/2012, including one of the Democrats' major accomplishments during Obama's first term, the Dodd-Frank financial regulation law:

The biggest institutional change wrought by Dodd-Frank was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Since Elizabeth Warren is now a senator and Obama won reelection, it’s unlikely that the CFPB will be changed in any significant way for the next two years. Aside from that, Dodd-Frank mandated that various regulatory agencies write new rules for the financial system. How these rules are written is largely up to the next treasury secretary. Should this person put focus on tax/budget issues, as is likely, then Dodd-Frank implementation will happen at the staff level, without significant political capital invested. As a former high-level administration official told me, this “will make it easier for the big banks and players to manipulate and control the process.”

Jeff Faux also elaborates some progressive criticisms of this Administration, Election Over: 5 Hard Realities Progressive Have to Face About Obama AlterNet 11/18/2012. AlterNet seems to really like numbered-list stories for some reason. This is one of Faux' particular concerns:

With no new substantial source of stimulus, our trajectory is toward a further erosion of living standards for the majority of Americans. Off-shoring and automation will continue to shed jobs with no offsetting increase in the demand for labor. Budget cuts—including cuts to Medicare and Medicaid—will widen the holes in the social safety net and further limit investments in education, infrastructure and technology upon which any chance at future prosperity depends. And the White House’s indifference to the dramatic erosion of organized labor (e.g., its reneging on promises to reduce the barriers to organizing) will continue to undercut the bargaining power of all workers—union and non-union alike.

The president’s Council of Economic Advisers will not admit it, but their default strategy for growth is to let American wages drop far enough to undercut foreign competition. That is the only possible policy rationale for Obama’s enthusiasm for the Trans Pacific Partnership, a further deregulation of trade that will strip away the last protections for American workers against a brutal global marketplace of dog-eat-dog. [my emphasis]

The Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement would, based on past history and leaks from the current negotiations, override a lot of critically important labor law in the US. Defeating that is not only important but a practical goal. He also has some good observations on the potential problems with "Obamacare." It has enough gaps that parts of it could become seriously unpopular, and would be open to weakening by a Republican President, just as Republican Governors are already trying to weaken it at the state level.

And then there's Citizens United, in which the Supreme Court decided to give American democracy over to be bought and sold by today's Money Power, to borrow a Jacksonian term. Charlie Pierce writes in Tom Udall's Bold Solution to Overturn Citizens United Esquire Politics Blog 11-20-2012:

The Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission has become so iconic in the three years since it was handed down that it has come to be as much representative of the overall corruption and incompetence inherent in how we run our elections in this country, so much so that the diabolical cleverness of the decision itself sometimes gets lost in all the justified hooting about how Citizens United completed the process of legalizing bribery in this country. It is a shrewd piece of work. The decision was so carefully written that it contains within it language that guarantees that the decision will prevail over any piece of legislation, either nationally or in the states — which is how Montana's century-old law banning corporate political contributions was thrown out by the Supreme Court, which relied on CU to declare the Montana law unconstitutional — that seeks to mitigate its obvious impact. It is a constitutional doomsday machine set loose in the area of campaign finance. There is no remedy to it except to bring it down from the outside.

President Obama himself at the time of the ruling said, "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself." And, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." As so often is the case, his subsequent actions showed he wasn't especially serious about his words. But this is an issue on which he can probably be pushed effectively by the base. Although, as Pierce indicates, it will likely take a Constitutional Amendment to fix it.

Tags: citizens united decision, obama administration, trans-pacific partnership

Charlie Pierce on the "worst crimes against democracy"

"The worst crimes against democracy are always the ones committed under the law," Charlie Pierce writes in We Are All Legal: 2012's Voter Suppression Carries On Esquire Politics Blog 03/06/2012.

He's writing with particular reference to the Citizen's United decision and voter-suppression laws. The latter was and is central to segregationist politics. Pierce points out how Obama's policy of not prosecuting criminal behavior of officials in the previous Administration missed an important chance to stymie the segregationist voter-suppression practice before it got as far as it has today:

The latest thing that happened was that a judge in Wisconsin on Super Tuesday issued a temporary injunction against that state's new voter-ID law that will keep the law from being used in Wisconsin's presidential primary election on April 3. However, the ongoing campaign of voter suppression around the country continues apace. It's important always to remember that none of this is happening by accident, that the fault in the system these laws are alleged to address does not really exist, and that this is actually a legacy of looking-forward-not-back. These various laws are a direct result of the U. S. Attorneys scandal during the administration of C-Plus Augustus. Local conservative pols in New Mexico, for example, wanted U.S. Attorney David Iglesias canned because he wouldn't pursue spurious voter-fraud claims with sufficient political enthusiasm. It was for this precise purpose that Karl Rove and the rest of the White House political team at the time sought to turn the Department Of Justice into a second-rate political chop-shop staffed by ambitious hacks and/or the product of Christianist diploma mills. Remember Monica Goodling? She was a prize. Because these people were allowed to skate without substantial penalties, the virus they loosed into the American political system was allowed to run wild in the states. There was no national consensus developed around the notion that voter-suppression is not a legitimate function of the government, not even when you try to gussy it up as some sort of consumer protection racket. [my emphasis]

Pierce reminds us that voter-suppression as well as unprecedented floods of money will be major features of this year's elections:

Nevertheless, it's clear that the fall elections will take place within two radically new contexts. One is the money context created by the Citizens United decision. The other, closer to the ground, is the context of the voter-suppression laws — and that's what they are, and suppressing votes is what they were meant to do — in the several states. This, I would almost guarantee, is going to set off ugly scenes at polling places around the country, as well as further disillusioning the very voters who lack any other avenue to exercise what little political power they have, which is also the point of these laws.

Tags: citizens united decision, voter suppression

Two big threats to democracy: "Citizen's United" money and voter-suppression laws

Elizabeth Drew is a solid Establishment reporter, meaning she doesn't normally stray far outside the confines of Beltway Village conventional wisdom. But within those (not inconsiderable) constraints, she does some good reporting and her analysis leans toward the liberal side.

She looks at the real problems for democracy presented by the flood of one-percenter campaign spending allowed by the Citizens United decision, along with the 1976 Buckley decision, and by the Republicans segregationist voter-suppression efforts in In Can We Have a Democratic Election? New York Review of Books 01/24/2012.

She describes both problems well. She also notes on a point raised by defenders of the Citizens United decision, "Though unions will play a part in campaign financing, they simply don’t have the resources that thousands of corporations have." She does express traditional liberal skittishness about the idea of a Constitution Amendment to overturn Citizen's United and/or Buckley. She puts it this way:

The most popular and most wrongheaded proposal is to amend the First Amendment to allow restrictions on spending in favor of or against a specific candidate. At least a dozen versions of this proposal are floating about, some offered by groups active in political reform such as Common Cause and Public Citizen, and also by individuals—all of whom should know better than to go down this quite dangerous road. The fatal flaw in all such suggestions is the assumption that the forces of good will remain in control of any tinkering with the First Amendment.

To submit the Constitution to the political process is to put it in danger of being opened up to the popular movements of the moment. Serious students of both campaign finance reform and the Constitution whom I have talked to are very troubled by this approach. A respected member of this group, speaking without attribution because he wishes to make no enemies in a tight-knit but competitive world, calls the effort to overturn Citizens United by changing the First Amendment “a fool’s errand.” He and a number of others point out that the idea of fixing the First Amendment in order to ban corporate funds, as several of these proposals aim to do, is altogether likely to lead to those funds being put into another form of contribution and still finding their way into the campaigns.

And it sets a very bad precedent. The Founders in Philadelphia wisely made it difficult to change this core document, by requiring the vote of two thirds of both the Senate and the House and ratification by three fourths of the states. They sought to protect the Constitution from being subject to shifts in popular opinion. Once the precedent is set, what is to keep countervailing forces from pressing for, say, a change in the First Amendment that would remove what remains of the constitutional wall between church and state?

This argument doesn't move me much. The last part of her pitch hardly makes any sense. The Constitution has been amended numerous times, so "the precedent" is already set. If the Christianists could have their preference, they would amend it again in numerous ways right now. The antiabortion movement has been pushing a Constitutional Amendment to achieve the banning of abortion for a long time.

I suppose it could be considered technically true that it would "amend the First Amendment", since the Court has based their opposition to campaign finance laws at least partially on the First Amendment. Both Citizens United and Buckley had dissenting votes from some Justices; there are good arguments to be made for the view that those decisions wrongly interpreted the First Amendment. Citizens United was based on the extremely dubious concept of the personhood of corporations, so a Constitutional Amendment eliminated that notion would overturn Citizens United without, I assume, touching the First Amendment in the sense Drew means.

As a practical matter, a campaign for a Constitutional Amendment to change the aspects of those rulings that are so destructive to the substance of democratic elections puts pressure on the courts and Congress to address the problems in other ways.

Drew brings up an important point that has been obscured by a few years time and by President Obama's disastrous and irresponsible decision to Look Forward Not Backward and not even try to prosecute what were almost certainly criminal attempts to misuse prosecutorial power during the Cheney-Bush Administration:

Defenders of these [voter-suppression] laws argue that they’re essential for preventing voter fraud—but in fact there hasn't been solid proof of such a problem. Voter fraud has been a Republican obsession, fantastical or not. Officials of the George W. Bush administration insisted that it was widespread, and in 2007 the Bush White House ordered the Justice Department to fire seven US attorneys—Bush appointees all—several on grounds of failing to pursue charges of voter fraud.

Some of the fired US attorneys said that they had seen no serious evidence of such a crime. There are rules against launching investigations of voting groups close to an election lest it amount to voter intimidation. It was later found that the Bush administration had been calling for voter fraud prosecution in the parts of the country of the greatest importance to George W. Bush's reelection in 2004, and "voter fraud" was a useful talking point for Karl Rove and others. The Justice Department inspector general later said that the firings of the US attorneys were "fundamentally flawed” and “raised doubts about the integrity of Department prosecution decisions." Other ruses were employed to discourage voting (such as telling blacks the wrong day of an election).

Look Forward Not Backward has meant in practice that these misdeeds by the Cheney-Bush Justice Department are fading out of much of the public memory rather than being thoroughly and professional investigated, as they should have been.

And that virtually guarantees that the next Republican Administration will repeat them and more.

Tags: citizens united decision, segregation

The Citizen's United Presidential election is officially underway

Charlie Pierce reminds us that the Iowa caucuses were the first official vote in the first post-Citizen's United Presidential election (Santorum's Demi-Victory Hangs the 2012 For-Sale Sign Esquire Politics Blog 01/04/2012):

The American political system is profoundly deformed. It is deformed by the now limitless power of unaccountable corporate money. (I would remind folks that, in 1972, unaccountable corporate money in a Republican campaign safe was what the Watergate scandal ultimately was all about.) Nothing that happened last night in any way changes that. The American political system is also deformed by the nearly limitless power of concocted narrative, reinforced by an elite political media locked into a self-contained, airless universe, and completely incapable of recognizing a luxurious farce even when there right in the middle of it. For six months, we have heard from the more polite precincts of this universe that the Republican field is made up of second-raters. (Politico, The Daily Racing Form of that universe, ran a piece only just yesterday saying exactly that.) Rick Santorum's sudden ability to garner 25 percent of the Republican caucus voters in Iowa last night doesn't change that simply because it happened. When that unaccountable corporate money is the silent engine behind the creation and maintenance of concocted narrative, the system cannot prevail left to its own devices.

This is the beginning of a watershed election in the history of the country. It is the first presidential campaign that we have had since the turn of the last century that has to be contested while everyone involved has to cooperate in the fiction that the whole process isn't completely for sale.

And if I haven't linked to it before, Tim Dickinson did a long piece for Rolling Stone last year on How the GOP Became the Party of the Rich 11/09/2011:

"It's a vicious circle," says [Nobel laureate economist Joe] Stiglitz. "The rich are using their money to secure tax provisions to let them get richer still. Rather than investing in new technology or R&D, the rich get a better return by investing in Washington."

It's difficult to imagine today, but taxing the rich wasn't always a major flash point of American political life. From the end of World War II to the eve of the Reagan administration, the parties fought over social spending – Democrats pushing for more, Republicans demanding less. But once the budget was fixed, both parties saw taxes as an otherwise uninteresting mechanism to raise the money required to pay the bills. Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford each fought for higher taxes, while the biggest tax cut was secured by John F. Kennedy, whose across-the-board tax reductions were actually opposed by the majority of Republicans in the House. The distribution of the tax burden wasn't really up for debate: Even after the Kennedy cuts, the top tax rate stood at 70 percent – double its current level. Steeply progressive taxation paid for the postwar investments in infrastructure, science and education that enabled the average American family to get ahead.

Tags: 2012 election, citizens united decision, republican party

2012 Presidential election - the horse race

The 2012 election is well underway. And our national press is treating it as even more of a celebrity "reality show" than ever. How far through the looking glass are we when we all know that "reality show" means a completely staged game show (Survivor) or a celebration of celebrity for the sake of celebrity (Keeping Up with the Kardashians)?

Focused on the horse race and the celebrity fest, our Pod Pundits are speculating happily about the Republican primary contest. With no horse race on the Democratic side - unfortunately! - the focus of the coverage right now is on the squabbling among the Republicans, an unattractive scene to most viewers.

But the front-loading of the primary season means that in a couple of months, the Republicans are likely to have a presumptive nominee. Then there will be nine months of focus on the horse race between the Republican nominee and Obama for the general election, with the celebrity spectacles of the Party conventions in the summer as half-time show entertainment.

Despite Obama's relatively strong showing in the polls right now for the general, it's going to be difficult for him to get re-elected. Unemployment is high and there are no visible signs for most people that conditions are likely to improve substantially. Europe is sliding into a recession, and even China is showing signs of being on the verge of a housing bubble that is about to pop. A new recession (the "double-dip") is possible in the US, especially if the euro crisis hammers the US financial system, which is very likely. The biggest private casualty of the euro crisis to date has been Jon Corzine's MF Global, a US-based company.

In the real world, it's hardly possible to fully separate policies from style in Presidential campaigns. But if we talk about it in terms of style, Obama's rhetorical gifts aren't as potent as they were in 2008, because the political context is different. Then, soaring but vague speeches about hope, combined with concrete proposals, some of which proved more durable than others, were confronting an unpleasant old man (John McCain) defending a Republican Administration that had become politically toxic.

Conventional horse race calculations would say that the incumbent President needs to make his opponent the issue. But the incumbent also has to defend his record, with which the public generally is not so impressed. And Obama has seriously impaired the effectiveness of his own rhetoric by his repeated cave-ins to Republican political bullying and blackmail, most notoriously over the debt-ceiling limit this past year. That seems to have been a jump-the-shark moment for his credibility as a negotiator with the Republicans, a no-turning-back moment in the sense that it will be hard for anyone to have high confidence that he will be willing to go to the wall for things his says he will fight hardest to achieve.

He's also spent three years now building a narrative in support of conservative economics - yes, conservative economics, not matter how hysterically the Republicans may characterize his austerity policies. In this case, his rhetoric about the government needing to tighten its belt just like families sitting around the proverbial kitchen table really seems to reflect his policy preferences. But it makes it far more difficult for him to draw a favorable contrast between his economic policies and those of the Republicans.

Two of his best issues could have been and should have been Social Security and Medicare, where he could have posed as defending them against the Republicans. But after he and his deficit commission chairmen and Democratic negotiators in Congress have repeatedly offered up serious cuts in benefits in both programs, it's hard to see how he can draw a strong contrast. Worse, the Republicans will use his proposals to cut Social Security and Medicare against him, even though their approach would be far more drastic.

And Obama's increasingly bizarre commitment to bipartisanship as some kind of governing principle in the face of an authoritarian, uncompromising Republican Party blunts his message. His Osawatomie speech earlier this month showed Obama at his partisan best. But in middle of making an eloquent case for progressive values (that he apparently doesn't actually share), he pepper-sprayed his own more confrontational rhetoric with bipartisan nonsense.

This isn't at all new for him. One of his best moments as President came when he denounced the highly partisan Supreme Court ruling in Citizen's United two years ago. (President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People 01/23/2011) "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," the President said. Not loony as Newt Gingrich's recent segregationist talk about ignoring court rulings Republicans don't like and arresting judges that irritate them. But that was a strong, even historic statement by an American President saying that a landmark ruling by the Supreme Court was a threat to democracy itself, putting it in the league with Dred Scott decision and the infamous, partisan anti-New Deal rulings by the Nine Old Men (as FDR polemically referred to the hostile Supreme Court).

Yet even there, he tossed out bipartisan references and declared this as his plan of action: "I instructed my administration to get to work immediately with Members of Congress willing to fight for the American people to develop a forceful, bipartisan response to this decision. We have begun that work, and it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done."

You can't build public support for dealing with a problem of crass, narrow partisanship and outright corruption on the High Court by pretending that everyone is on the same side. Although I was glad at the time to see Obama saying "it will be a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done." If the President is attacking the Supreme Court for threatening "our democracy itself" with a bad ruling - and he was, rightly so - it's essentially a solemn obligation for him to make it "a priority for us until we repair the damage that has been done."

Can you remember the last time you heard the President mention Citizen's United?

No wonder the Republicans call him President Pushover when they're not on TV calling him a Marxist Kenyan anti-colonialist Islamunist who hates America.

Obama has gambled his re-election on two major assumptions: that bailing out the giant banks would be the main thing that would be needed to get the economy back on track and make 2012 Morning In America II; and, that independent voters were more interested in seeing bipartisan process tilted heavily toward  Republicans' favored positions than they are in seeing progress on substantive issues.

Incumbency has great advantages in terms of setting the agenda, familiarity with the candidate and the ability to attract large amounts of campaign money. It's not easy to unseat a sitting President. And as unappealing as Obama's Herbert Hoover economic policies are, most people who pay close attention to the Republican candidate's policy proposals will find them worse, if not downright terrifying.

Still, Obama's is looking at a re-election fight in a depressed economy, possibly with unemployment on the rise and a year of bad economic news; his credibility has been seriously compromised, especially by the debt-ceiling fiasco; and, his ability to draw favorable contrasts to the Republican candidate is mitigated in a major way by his own conservative economic-policy inclinations and his almost-obsessive pitches to a bipartisanship that doesn't much interest even most independent voters.

It's going to be a long election year.

Tags: 2012 election, barack obama, citizens united decision

Art Pope, another wealthy political buccaneer given vastly greater power by "Citizen's United"

Marc Farinella, a Democratic political consultant who was Obama's 2008 campaign director in North Carolina, and is now an adviser to the state’s Democratic governor, Beverly Perdue, says, "In a very real sense, Democrats running for office in North Carolina are always running against Art Pope. The Republican agenda in North Carolina is really Art Pope’s agenda. He sets it, he funds it, and he directs the efforts to achieve it. The candidates are just fronting for him. There are so many people in North Carolina beholden to Art Pope — it undermines the democratic process." Farinella contends that the Citizens United decision is likely to make the problem worse. Because Variety Wholesalers is privately owned by the Pope family, Pope "has access to huge quantities of corporate funds," which now can be channelled freely into politics. Still, Farinella notes, “there are very few people in North Carolina who understand who Art Pope is."

- From Jane Mayer, State for Sale New Yorker 10/10/2011

The article is from a couple of months ago. But it describes another rightwing multimillionaire whose ability to have an outsize effect on elections has been magnified by the atrocious Roberts Court Citizen's United decision. His main area of influence is North Carolina. But the new field for the exercise of oligarchical power that Citizen's United provided is nationwide.

Obama's words back in January of 2010 just after the Court handed down this awful decision were very descriptive:

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. ...

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don't. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections.

Whether the President is giving enough attention to a problem that "strikes at our democracy itself" is another question. (President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People 01/23/2011) We'll see if the President tries to use his 2012 campaign to build up a public mandate to change the result of which he said - back then, anyway, "I can't think of anything more devastating to the public interest." Because the Art Popes and the Koch Brothers and likely-minded wealthy rightwingers are making use of the Roberts Court decision that "opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy."

Tags: art pope, barack obama, citizens united decision

Steve Walt on Occupy Walt Street and the democratic moment of 2011

Steve Walt seems to think we're experiencing a very significant manifestation of what Jerry Brown calls a "democratic moment". In Riding the wave of discontent Foreign Policy 10/18/2011, he's ready to declare this something like a world-historical moment, though he doesn't use that exact term. And this from a guy who is so cautious he doubted the Tunisia protests that kicked off the Arab Awakening would spread outside Tunisia's borders! (Unlike a lot of other foreign policy honchos, he quickly acknowledge his mistake.)

Speaking of the current state of information technology, he writes that it:

... allows events and ideas to spread much more quickly. As a result, demonstrators in Cairo can watch what's happening in Tunis and imitate it, and then other people in other countries get the idea that protest can be effective, even if their particular grievances are somewhat different. And so it spreads, as the radical idea of ordinary people taking action against the seemingly impregnable becomes increasingly contagious. Plus, each group can learn from each other and feed off the sense of being part of a larger process, instead of feeling like isolated and powerless individuals with scant hope of success. This sort of thing has happened before in world history (e.g., in 1789, 1848, 1919, 1989, etc.), but never in so many far-flung and widely different contexts.

He's a tad inconsistent on his historical comparisons, earlier including 1968 among them: " This wave of political contagion is more widespread than the "velvet revolutions" of 1989 (though not yet as significant), and perhaps the nearest analogue would be wave of youth-revolutions and upheavals that occurred back in 1968."

One of the historical problems/issues around the worldwide protests in 1968 is what was it that made them such a global phenomenon, affected so many different countries. Norbert Frei in 1968.Jugendrevolte und globaler Protest (2008) gives this question quite a bit of attention, without coming to a firm conclusion. I hope I'll be around in 40 years to look back and wonder why things happened the way they are happening in 2011. Hegel's famous metaphor for his view that we could only understand the real significance of historical periods only when they were passing from the scene is a reminder of our limitations of fully appreciating what's happening before our eyes: "When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in."

So I don't know if the Owl of Minerva has taken wing yet on whatever this is that's happening. But Steve Walt is pretty impressed:

There is, of course, a deeper taproot to all this. As my colleague Jenny Mansbridge reminded me in a superb talk I attended last week, (and which will be published next month in PS), the present combination of economic inequality and political gridlock is fatal to the proper functioning of democratic orders. In a capitalist democracy, corporate interests tend to be wealthier than the rest of society, and the state is the only actor powerful enough to intervene to prevent corporate interests from going too far and exploiting their position. This is what happened in the Gilded Age and again in the Roaring 20s, which eventually led to the Progressive Era and later the New Deal.

But if the political system is gridlocked, then the state cannot act quickly or decisively to retard corporate power. Even worse, as corporate interests grow stronger they tend to acquire greater political power (and especially when a tame Supreme Court helps them, as it did in the Citizens United decision). Instead of just hamstringing the state, corporate interests can get it to enact laws that favor them even more. The result will be rising economic inequality and precisely the sort of irresponsible and unregulated behavior that led to the Great Recession of 2007.

Put these three things together, and you have a recipe for global protests in very different countries. Despite the many differences between conditions in the United States, in Greece, in Egypt, in Syria, in Israel, or elsewhere, what unites the 2011 wave of global protest is the shared belief that the People in Charge do not know what they are doing, care more about their own wealth and well-being than they do about the common weal, or are simply too spineless and shallow to do what at least a few of them secretly know to be right.

That Citizen's United decision, one of the worst and most irresponsible in the history of the Supreme Court (right up there with Dred Scott and Bush v. Gore), really may turn out to be a legal decision that contributes greatly to a major political turning point, just as Bush v. Gore should have been.

I don't remember the last time I saw anything about our Democratic President Barack Obama mentioning the Citizen's United. But if he thought it was the menace to democracy that this guy did, he would be raising hell about it constantly:



Wow! He really calls the seriousness of this ruling out:

This ruling strikes at our democracy itself.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest.

Wouldn't it be great to have a guy like that for President?

Tags: barack obama, citizens united decision, occupy wall street

Why don't the Democrats demand impeachment hearings on Justice Clarence Thomas?

Rightwing Republican Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia have both been involved in partisan activities of a kind that, to put it mildly, is highly questionable for a Justice of the highest court in the US. Both Thomas and Scalia voted for the majority decisions in Bush v. Gore (2000) and Citizen's United (2010), two of the worst decisions in being destructive to democratic government that the Supreme Court has ever made.

The Democrats no longer have a majority in the House, which would have to make an impeachment vote. But the Dems can certainly use a push for impeachment hearings against Thomas and/or Scalia to raise a stick about the crass partisanship of those Republican Justices.

As Robert Reich notes at his blog in Clarence Thomas and the Politicization of the Supreme Court 03/03/2011, some House Democrats showed the moxie to make a public issue out of Thomas' conduct:

Back in 1991 when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Citizens United spent $100,000 to support his nomination. The in-kind contribution presumably should have been disclosed by Thomas.

At the very least you’d think that, given his connections with Citizen’s United and with the Koch brothers, Thomas would have recused himself from the Citizens United decision in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He would have recused himself, that is, if he were as concerned about the legitimacy of the Supreme Court as he says he.

Thomas has also failed to disclose financial information about his wife’s employment. Virginia Thomas is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization now receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to Citizen’s United. Among the things she’s lobbying for are the repeal of what she terms the “unconstitutional” healthcare legislation.

Because of his wife's direct involvement, seventy-four House Democrats have sent a letter to Justice Thomas asking him to recuse himself from any case questioning the constitutionality of the legislation. "Your spouse is advertising herself as a lobbyist who has 'experience and connections' and appeals to clients who want a particular decision," the legislators wrote. "They want to overturn health-care reform."

The Democrats needed to raise the roof in 2000-1 about Bush v. Gore. When the Court issued it's plutocrat Citizen's United decision, President Obama declared in his weekly address on 01/23/09, the White House transcript of which is grandly titled, President Obama Vows to Continue Standing Up to the Special Interests on Behalf of the American People:

But this week, the United States Supreme Court handed a huge victory to the special interests and their lobbyists – and a powerful blow to our efforts to rein in corporate influence. This ruling strikes at our democracy itself. [my emphasis]

This ruling opens the floodgates for an unlimited amount of special interest money into our democracy. It gives the special interest lobbyists new leverage to spend millions on advertising to persuade elected officials to vote their way – or to punish those who don’t. That means that any public servant who has the courage to stand up to the special interests and stand up for the American people can find himself or herself under assault come election time. Even foreign corporations may now get into the act.

I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest. The last thing we need to do is hand more influence to the lobbyists in Washington, or more power to the special interests to tip the outcome of elections. [my emphasis]

He called for a "bipartisan" solution, which has become for the Obama Administration has come to mean little more than preemptive surrender to the hardline Republican Party. The Republicans see no partisan incentive to set Citizen's United aside, any more than they saw one in opposing Bush v. Gore. And in fact, Obama and the Democratically-controlled Congress in 2010 did nothing effective to mitigate the disastrous effects for democracy of the Citizen's United decision. Even the mild requirement for reporting donors that the Democrats proposed didn't get enacted.

We should expect more on an issue which the Democratic President said "strikes at our democracy itself"! "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest," the President said. Accurate words. No follow-up even close to matching the seriousness of the words.

Some relevant stories:

Jed Lewison, Clarence Thomas defends wife, but not himself Daily Kos 03/01/2011

Ben Adler, The bigger Clarence Thomas scandal Salon 02/20/2011

Kim Geiger, Clarence Thomas failed to report wife's income, watchdog say Los Angeles Times 01/22/2011

Lee Fang, Group Requests DOJ To Investigate Scalia and Thomas Involvement With Koch Corporate Fundraisers Think Progress 01/20/2011

Warren Richey, Campaign finance ruling: Should Supreme Court justices have recused themselves? Christian Science Monitor 01/20/2011

John Dean, A Closer Look At The Case From Which Justice Scalia Has Refused To Recuse Himself: The Momentous Stakes, and the Larger Political Context Findlaw 03/26/2004

David G. Savage and Richard A. Serrano, Scalia Was Cheney Hunt Trip Guest; Ethics Concern Grows Los Angeles Times 02/05/2004

Tags: antonin scalia, citizens united decision, clarence thomas, supreme court

Parliamentary parties, structural deficiencies and big money in politics

Jack Balkin has a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion about the Constitutional separation of power in Parliamentary Parties in a Presidential System Balkinization 11/30/2010. Summarized very briefly, he argues that disciplined political parties that vote as a block make our non-parliamentary governmental system dysfunctional, which allows the Chief Executive to be a member of a different party than that of the Congressional majority.

Digby comments on his post in Parliamentary Mismatch Hullabaloo 12/01/2010. John Amato picks up the discussion in Parliamentary practices have destroyed American Politics C&L 12/03/2010.

Balkin's post is challenging because it looks at a longer-term issue - the Constitutional separation of powers that could only be changed by a Constitutional amendment - and at its implications for the next two years. I want to highlight one of his points up front, with which I very much agree:

... one important step would be to change the rules of the Senate and reform the system of filibusters and holds. Senate reform would mean that important legislation would require only a simple majority of both houses to be sent to the President, and executive branch appointments could be filled with only a simple majority of the Senate.

It would be hard to argue that our system presents challenges that parliamentary systems do not. Including the one he highlights, the fact that the Presidency can be held by a different party than holds the Congress. (And the Judiciary for that matter.) And while the Founders weren't assuming the presence of political parties in the sense we know them today, their guiding vision included the assumption that separation of powers recommended was vital to preserving freedom and preventing tyranny. Put a different way, they intended for the federal government's basic structures to be clunky. Part of the structural problem Balkin is addressing is due to the American use of winner-take-all electoral districts, which have tended in practice to lock in a two-party system, which can exist in parliamentary systems, as well.

But parliamentary systems have their own disadvantages. One present-day cautionary example is Israel, a democratic country with a parliamentary system and many parties. Whether Labor, Likud or Kadima wins a plurality, they typically have to include small, religion-based parties to put together a governing coalition. That has made it difficult in practice for any government to pursue peace negotiations, because the defection of one of the small parties can bring down the government. In another example, though not a typical one, the parliamentary system that emerged from our nation-building in Iraq has been trying for months to form a new government after their last national election.

Balkin argues that by becoming ideologically polarized, the Democrats and Republicans are now functioning largely as "parliamentary parties". And he sees that as unworkable:

The American system has long presumed that in periods of divided government, the President will be able to create coalitions with members of both parties in order to pass legislation. This is possible in part because, at least since the Civil War, and until very recently, American political parties have been agglomerations of heterogenous interests, and relatively ideologically diverse. (During the New Deal, for example, northern liberals, Catholics, and blacks coexisted in the same Democratic party as Southern whites). ... Parliamentary parties in most countries, by contrast, tend to be more ideologically coherent and centrally controlled. ...

But parliamentary parties are not well designed for the particular forms of give and take that are generally required in a presidential system. In a presidential system, members of different parties are expected to regularly cross party lines to form coalitions on particular questions (rather than on the formation of a government as a whole). Ideologically coherent and politically polarized parties do not perform these functions particularly well. Indeed, the most recent example of the rise of parliamentary parties in the United States is the party system shortly before the Civil War, in which political compromise increasingly became impossible.

He thinks that the Democratic minority in the new House will be as obstructionist as the Republican minority has been in the outgoing one. And that "is a disaster in the making for the political system in which we live".

I have reservations about his analysis. As he points out, we have had "parliamentary parties", i.e., parties able to enforce consistent discipline on voting in Congress on major issues, in the living memory of anyone alive today, except in recent years, according to Balkin's analysis. And since that's the case, we can't really say based on American experience that disciplined parties are unworkable in this system.

Another reservation is one he articulates in his post: the Republicans are far more disciplined than the Democrats. "Perhaps ironically, given their anti-European rhetoric, the Republicans behave more like a European-style parliamentary party than the Democrats, who still retain more moderates in the House and Senate."

A third reservation is his argument that "there is no reason to think that the Democrats will not eventually adopt many of the same tactics that the Republicans have perfected if, once again, they find themselves out of power." I'd have to say that this flies in the face of much of what we've seen these past two years. I can't improve on Digby's comment on this point. Her "Tip and Ronnie" reference is to the story, one of the favorite anecdotes of our Pod Pundits, that House Democratic Leader Tip O'Neill and President Ronald Reagan used to have huge political fights in public during the day and get together in the evening and have a beer together:

I actually think there is every reason to believe the Democrats will not adopt many of the tactics Republicans have perfected because they are just not temperamentally equipped to do it. I think they will continue to pretend, as the media still does, that the beautiful world of Tip and Ronnie will return if only these awful people would just stop making their congressmen and Senators do things they don't want to do until they are pushed hard by the people to change their ways. At this point they do not have a whole lot to lose by losing --- the revolving door takes very good care of them if they promise not to make too many waves, which is exactly what they hate.

She gets at something Balkin's post ignores, which is that there are good reasons we have different political parties. Thomas Jefferson, the first leader of what evolved into today's Democratic Party, thought it was a matter of deep-rooted human inclinations, in which some people are eager to adapt to the future and "embrace change" (to use a current favorite management buzz-phrase) while others are just stodgy conservatives. Okay, he put it more eloquently than that, but you get the point.

James Madison had a more materialistic explanation in the famous Federalist #10:

The latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man; and we see them everywhere brought into different degrees of activity, according to the different circumstances of civil society. A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government, and many other points, as well of speculation as of practice; an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power; or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good. So strong is this propensity of mankind to fall into mutual animosities, that where no substantial occasion presents itself, the most frivolous and fanciful distinctions have been sufficient to kindle their unfriendly passions and excite their most violent conflicts. But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society. Those who are creditors, and those who are debtors, fall under a like discrimination. A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of the government. [my emphasis]

Glenn Beck would likely take this as evidence that Madison was a Marxist, but this was written before Karl Marx had even been born, decades before actually, and the word "socialism" hadn't even been invented yet.

The paralyzing debility in our system today is the dominance of money, particularly in campaigns. This problem Balkin essentially dismisses with a resigned sigh: "The system of campaign finance that helps parties control their members seems well entrenched."

But it would be easier to change the campaign finance system than to institute a parliamentary system in the US. And, in any case, recent American experience gives very good reason for thinking - I would say dead certain - that the wide-open, deeply-corrupt approach we have to campaign financing that the Roberts Supreme Court made even worse this year with the Citizens United decision would corrupt a parliamentary system just as it has corrupted our current system. It is that more than what Balkin calls the Presidential system of government that is making our national government "pathological and unsustainable in the long run" and producing "bad and ineffective government that will harm the national interest" and creating "persistent forms of political pathology", to use his description of the problem.

Another key point is one raised by John Kenneth Galbraith in The Culture of Contentment (1992), and one I hope to discuss here in more detail soon. The dynamics of our politics means that that the more affluent voters tend to have a favorable view of government not being able to respond to problems promptly. If you live a gated community with its own security force, to take one example, you don't necessarily care if the federal, state and local governments take action to prevent layoff of public safety personnel. Why should you pay taxes for services that benefit someone else anyway? On a more macro issue, if the weather generally seems tolerable to you, you may just as soon see the government delay action on global climate change indefinitely because, hey, what do you care if some Third World coastal city gets flooded out of existence 50 years from now?

The delay of federal action that results from the institutional dysfunctions that Balkin identifies, in other words, itself often serves perceived class interests. Taking the urgently needed steps now on global climate change might mean that the Koch oil billionaires might have to shell out more money for pollution-control equipment, or won't get to profit from deepwater oil drilling as much as they might want to. A lot of dysfunction in the federal government isn't simply an unfortunate by-product of political developments. To a major extent, it's a conscious goal of the powerful and well-funded Republican Party.

Tags: citizens united decision, democratic party, republican party