Category: Civics

Judicial Temperament

It will come as no surprise to those who know me, and those few who follow this blog, that the shameful, shameless decision of the United States Supreme Court in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has been on my mind. As a participant in two unplanned pregnancies I am no stranger to abortion, and it’s fair to say that my life would be quite different in a world without the procedure. I’ve joked to my friends at Planned Parenthood that the so-called right to life movement (right to birth is closer to the truth — and “forced birth,” closer still) is the best friend they have: my monthly contribution increases every time a GOP Congress (or a benighted state legislature somewhere) approves repressive legislation. I have nothing but contempt for the contemptible men and the one woman who wrote and signed on to Dobbs. It upends long-established norms of personal liberty, effectively revoking a recognized right of individuals to make their most intimate decisions without state interference.

The Roberts court — whether the Chief Justice likes it or not — will forever be known as the place where individual liberty goes to die. The three most recent appointees flat out lied to the Senate when they said, “Roe v. Wade is settled law.” Settled law is settled: it’s not up for review. What they meant is, “It’s settled law until we have the votes to unsettle it.” Well, they have the votes. They have the power. And they have upended the very first thing every first-year law student learns about principles of judicial construction: stare decisis is the bedrock on which the common law is built; if people are going to rely on the rule of law (meaning, in no small part, what a judge says the law is) they have to rely on its consistency. It can’t change at the drop of a hat, or with the shifting winds, or when the balance of appointments to the Supreme Court reaches a tipping point. David Souter, when he met with the Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing, made exactly this point: I might not personally agree with the decision, he said, but it is the law and a rule by which people have been able to order their lives for decades; we can’t just overturn it because we don’t like it. If only Justice Souter were still on the bench.

Let it sink in: An arrogant group of unelected jurists decided to abolish a long-established individual right. They say that Roe v. Wade was “wrongly decided” — not for its conclusion (which they abhor) but for its logic. Trouble is, that’s an arbitrary metric when we’re fifty years in. They did what they did because they could, not because of any conviction that the logic of Roe was flawed (and in that much, I’ll agree — not so much as to Roe as to Griswold v. Connecticut, which found the right to privacy not in the Ninth Amendment to the Constitution (“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”) but in “emanations and penumbras” around, among other things, the Fourth Amendment (searches and seizures) and the Fourteenth (applying the Bill of Rights to the states).

Let this sink in, too: the Dobbs decision very directly jeopardizes other rights we take for granted. Much has been made of Justice Thomas’s concurring opinion, suggesting that decisions establishing other rights he disdains might also now be safely reversed. These rights include things that are by and large no longer controversial: same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, the use of contraception. May he Court begin, then, not with Griswold v. Connecticut (1965) — which ensured the right to use contraception — but with Loving v. Virgina (1967) — which struck down anti-miscegenation statutes. The arc of history is long, and it bends towards karma.

Public Service

An old friend — too long out of touch — contacted me the other day, out of the blue.

We are back in DC after 4 years in Santa Fe (which we miss every single day)

A post as a government official isn’t a dream job, it’s a call to service. Government is a machine, like anything else: it is one that can accomplish great things, or do great harm. The direction is set by whose hands are on the levers of power; the rate of progress, or the speed of the catastrophe, depends on the people behind the scenes. Thus the slow-moving train wreck of the previous administration, peopled at the top by incompetents, losers, and grifters. (In some notable cases, all three at once.)

This time around there are, in the White House and the OEOB, people who have put their lives on hold in order to be a part of something larger than themselves. My friend doesn’t need the experience, nor an added bullet point on the resumé, nice to have but unnecessary when you can already have your pick of jobs in your chosen profession.

We are, finally (if only temporarily) in the company of adults. We need more, at every level: it’s a thankless job, for which not everyone is well suited. You have to be a little selfless, and at least a little bit more idealistic than cynical. You have to believe that government can accomplish great things, and you have to understand, for example, that national health insurance is far cheaper than making the Emergency Room the provider of last resort.

If only that attitude were the prevailing one in the United States Congress, and especially in the Senate, where holding power is more important than using it for the purposes written into the Constitution: to provide for the common good and promote the general welfare. I for one am tired of seeing public service used for private gain.

Lies or Policy?

Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie, speaking last night at the Reagan Library on the future of the Republican Party, said that the GOP should denounce conspiracy theorists, “the ones who know better and the ones who are just plain nuts.” The party needs to embrace the truth: “Pretending we won when we lost is a waste of time [and] credibility.”

This in itself is not newsworthy. But a statement quoted in The Hill gives the game away: The GOP, Christie says, “needs to be the party that’s perceived to be telling the American people the truth.” Excuse me? This is a bit rich:

  1. We don’t need to tell the truth as long as we’re perceived as being truthful.
  2. Calling ourselves THE truth-tellers brands everyone else a liar.
  3. Divert public attention from policy differences by engaging in a food fight.
  4. Force opponents to defend against the name-calling.
  5. Above all, avoid an actual debate about policies that might help actual people.

When “public debate” is instead a shouting match, it’s the loudest voice — not the soberest reasoning — that wins the day. Screaming, “They are lying to you!” without evidence isn’t a factual statement, let alone a clear statement of policy goals. But it’s enough to distract from the real issues. Engaging baser emotions rather than logic and reason is both the tactic and the goal.

Such is the modern Republican Party: with no popular support for its few retrograde policies, it has become single-minded about clinging to power by any means necessary: Jim Crow registration policies, shorter early voting periods, constraints on voting by mail, removal of polling places. Ensure that the people who weren’t going to vote for you don’t have the opportunity.

Does Governor Christie include the hysterical allegations about non-existent voter fraud among the conspiracy theories his party should denounce? Or is that limited only to acknowledging that “Trump lost” and “vaccines work”? Someone should ask him that. Someone should ask him whether he thinks honest debate about actual policy proposals — rather than name-calling — wouldn’t be a better use of everyone’s time.

The Jackboot of Government

In the face of a surging pandemic, with infections rising daily across the country, you’d think that people would practice some common sense self-discipline. You’d also like to think that local governments would applaud and encourage anything that might turn back the tide. You would be wrong.

In the Granite State, Governor Chris Sununu has signed the “medical freedom” law ensuring that a COVID-19 vaccine can’t be required for entry to “access any public facility, any public benefit, or any public service.” This takes the state’s motto — “Live Free or Die” — to its logical extreme by making a mockery of those who just might want to live without the threat of contagion. “Live Free AND Die” might be more accurate.

In the Sunshine State, Governor Ron DeSantis — determined to show he’s got the chops to replace the former guy in the Oval Office — is trying to block any restriction on the cruise ship industry. The CDC thinks unvaccinated passengers should be barred from boarding a floating Petri dish; DeSantis disagrees, and would like the legislature to prohibit such restrictions by private companies, too. Not since Anita Bryant has any one person been such an embarrassment to Florida.

The Republican chorus decrying regulation has become farcical. If the market is going to decide, let it decide: the cruise ship industry isn’t asking to be free from CDC regulation and is perfectly capable of asking passengers to show proof of vaccine before boarding. It doesn’t need the jackboot of government regulators (the favored image of GOP antagonists to even sensible regulation) on its neck. Restaurants, concert venues, sports franchises — all can take sensible precautions, and should.

Indeed, as noted here, former GOP strategist (and McCain campaign manager) Steve Schmidt believes that such private pressure is the best way forward. And while I disagree with his assessment, I’ll also note the extreme irony of today’s straightjacketed Republicans: They can’t abide the idea of any public regulation, even those that protect the health of their own constituents; and now they can’t abide private actors who might have the temerity to suggest that hey, you can’t come in here if you might spread a deadly disease.

Did I say straightjacketed? They should be. Turns out the jackboot of government regulation fits them just fine.

The Consent of the Governed

I am still riled up about Steve Schmidt and vaccine mandates. Something has been bothering me about the libertarian streak in the Republican psyche — the part that wants to stop reading after the first five words of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law”). Something has been nagging at me, and until now I hadn’t been able to quite put my finger on it.

Libertarians are just one short step away from being anarchists: they prefer no laws, to laws that might regulate behavior or mandate safety standards of any kind (workplace, traffic, gun, drug, food, you name it). Because, you know, Freedom! And Liberty! “That government that governs least,” they declaim, “governs best.” We should all be Free and have the Liberty to decide what is best for ourselves, as individuals. And so we should, within limits. Setting those limits is the hard work of self-governance, something we as Americans think we’re quite good at. And we used to be.

Lately the “governs least” crowd has become the party of governs-not-at-all, by imposing parliamentary gridlock on Every. Single. Piece. Of. Legislation. A bill to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure? Not without sixty votes. To be clear: not without sixty votes to allow debate. The modern filibuster doesn’t require a supermajority to pass legislation; it requires a supermajority before the Senate can talk about legislation. If this strikes you as oddly undemocratic, you are not alone. It angers political observers at home, and bewilders those abroad. If de Tocqueville were writing today, “Democracy in America” would be a very different book indeed.

Self-styled libertarians like Rand Paul (R-KY) are one thing: they believe not in the concepts of liberty but in the soapbox a Senate or safe House seat provides them; they spout off because they can, and because their diatribes make good television back home and enrage the Other Side — whoever that might be. (As the latest Internet meme has it: Opposition to common-sense public health measures might be deadly, but at least we own the libs!)

Then there are more thoughtful libertarians, old-school Republicans like Steve Schmidt and Bill Kristol, who oppose “big government” because, well, it’s big and government should be small. People should be free to choose, they say, what is best for them: government shouldn’t decide for them. The problem with this argument, it seems to me, is right there in Jefferson’s text which they revere:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed

Deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed: ten words that define, it seems to me, majority rule, the very essence of self-governance in what we call democracy. Here, finally, is what has been bothering me all along about libertarianism generally, and about the opposition to government vaccine and mask mandates: “Government shouldn’t tell me what to do,” is all well and good, but it’s not “government” telling you: it’s your friends and neighbors. They speak through government, by virtue of their greater numbers at the polls. They tell you. They limit your personal freedom, according to their collective wisdom.

This is not the Wild West, and this is not the world as we all might wish it should be: this is the world as it is, and as it is requires that we all abide by the same set of rules: rules that limit our personal freedom, so that our behavior doesn’t impinge on someone else’s rights; rules that limit what we sell as food, as drink, as medicine; regulation of construction materials and methods. Glass-Steagall wasn’t an arbitrary and capricious limitation on banking; it was enacted to remedy conditions that led to the Great Depression: it created rules and structure, within which banks could operate freely. They couldn’t be under-capitalized and they couldn’t take excessive risks. The erosion of Glass-Steagall over the years, culminating in its repeal in 1999, led directly to the Great Recession of 2008.

History might not repeat exactly, but it certainly echoes. It might benefit us all if the champions of Liberty! and Freedom! bore that in mind before spouting off.

Bipartisanship

Questions for Senators Joe Manchin and Kirsten Sinema (and fifty Republicans): is it “bipartisan” to suggest that Joe Biden is not the President of the United States? To hold on to the fiction that the election was “rigged,” “stolen,” or “corrupt”?  To buy into the lie, or seem to, that Trump didn’t actually lose? To pretend that GOP senators will compromise on legislation in any meaningful way? To insist, year after year after year, that asking wealthy individuals and corporations to pay their own way, constitutes class warfare?

No, I didn’t think so, either. Senators, do the right thing: kill the filibuster, or amend the rules to require an actual filibuster. If Ron Johnson wants to thwart the will of the people, make him hold the floor to do it. Arguing that the filibuster increases bipartisanship — when all recent experience points the other way — is akin to saying that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. It’s myopic, historically inaccurate, and — at best — naive. Such naïveté should be disqualifying for anyone running for, or holding, public office.

What Leadership Looks Like

President Biden does not have the rhetorical gifts of Barack Obama. He isn’t a natural teacher like Bill Clinton, who can explain — ex tempore, no less — the most abstruse concepts in clear and unpatronizing language. He can’t twist congressional arms to pass legislation the way LBJ could like no other before or since. But anyone who paid close attention to his first address to Congress would have recognized real leadership. If it went unnoticed, perhaps that’s because for too long we have been without it.

The opinion pages and TV pundits and bloviators have all had their say; I’ll wager that few if any noticed this gem, tucked into his introductory remarks:

Universal public schools and college aid opened wide the doors of opportunity. Scientific breakthroughs took us to the moon. Now we’re on Mars, discovering vaccines, gave us the internet and so much more. These are investments we made together as one country. And investments that only the government was in a position to make. Time and again, they propel us into the future. That’s why I propose the American Jobs Plan, a once-in-a-generation investment in America itself. This is the largest jobs plan since World War II.

[Emphasis added.] Investments that only the government [can] make: This is a subtle rebuke to Republicans and free-marketeers. There are in this world some things that only government can do. It isn’t enough to hope that ambitious capitalists will undertake the basic research that leads to so much more; it isn’t sufficient to believe that government regulation is ipso facto oppressive and that corporations can better regulate themselves, with no ill public effect.

Just this past week, Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) opined that, “No policymaker would allow a company to dump toxic waste into a river upstream of a thriving town he is charged with governing.” This is like saying that no company would ever prioritize its profits over the interests of its customers by, say, cutting corners on workplace safety or using poisonous food additives. Except that it happens all the time. Rubio represents a political party ideologically opposed to government regulation of any kind. The only part of his statement that rings true is its cognitive dissonance.

Things only government can do. This gets at the very purpose of government, of good government. Republicans might be fond of quoting Jefferson — “That government is best, which governs least” — but they emphasize least while paying little or no attention to best. They know quite well that “least” doesn’t mean, as little as humanly possible; it means, just enough to get things right. There are things only government can do: provide for the general welfare and common defense, for example.

But really, that isn’t enough: good government should be aspirational — “We choose to go to the moon”1; good government should rise to the occasion; and good government should set new goals for itself as a nation, for its people’s betterment. Some great things aren’t ever going to be done by the private sector; some things, these things, only government can do.

  1. John F. Kennedy, address at Rice University, Sept. 12, 1962.

The Unthinkable

My Apple News feed includes headlines from Fox, to the mild consternation of my children. “Why do you want to do that to yourself?” Because I want to know what they’re saying; because it can be entertaining (in a Jerry Lewis kind of way); because the tenor and content help illuminate the why and how of our riven social fabric.

A few days ago the clickbait headline screamed: “A woman was angry because of the long wait at the Burger King drive-thru window. Then she did the unthinkable.” Hoping to be surprised, I clicked. I was not surprised that she opened fire through the window. Nor did I think this in any way unthinkable. It was, in fact, all too thinkable: it was in fact exactly what I thought.

A very modest suggestion: Let’s start using words to mean, well, what they actually mean.  An angry woman who arrives at the drive-thru window and pays for the next ten cars? As unthinkable as it is unlikely. That woman shooting into the store? Neither surprising nor unimaginable. This kind of event has become so common it’s not just not unthinkable, it barely attracts any attention any more. We are benumbed: a mass shooting in Boulder is neither unthinkable nor unimaginable.

A woman opening fire through a fast-food drive-thru doesn’t move the needle on our emotional, intellectual, and political outrage. That is precisely the problem — and precisely what the NRA wants.

Cognitive Dissonance (GOP Encore Edition)

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has announced that come Wednesday (6 January 2021) he will object to the certification of the Electoral College result. Purportedly 140 Republican members of the House will do the same. This is not simply madness, it is shamelessly attempting a coup d’etat. Here. In the United States of America, where we fancy ourselves a beacon of liberty to the world, champions of democracy and justice. Does it get any worse than this? One wants to believe, desperately, that it does not. One is certain, after the egregious anti-democratic behavior and unabashed self-dealing of the last four years, that it does, it can, and it probably will. With just over a fortnight left in this worst of all possible administrations, the damage gets worse every day.

The immediate damage is deliberate, and seeks to hamper and hinder the incoming Biden administration even before it gets started (as described here by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post). But the more lasting damage will be to our body politic generally, and — ironically, fittingly, and most deservedly — to the Republican Party specifically. The intellectual rot appears irreversible: when elected officials question not simply the legitimacy of an election, but the legitimacy of their own election, something is very wrong indeed. Apparently “democracy” and “free and fair election” are malleable terms. Fair elections are those in which “our guy wins” whereas any other result is ipso facto the result of unimaginable corruption and conspiracy.

But now come Hawley and with him Ted Cruz and ten more fully Trumpified senators who say they will not accept the outcome, as will 140 Republican members of the House. These people were elected on the very same ballots as Biden, and the inconsistency of their own twisted logic seems to bother them not one whit. We are forced to contemplate two, and only two, alternatives: that these elected officers are too stupid to realize the full implications of their false claims; or too craven to care. And which is worse in a public servant? Do we prefer them feeble-minded, or unscrupulous? Each of these dozen senators was invited to explain on television why they will not accept Biden’s clear victory; each and every one refused the invitation or declined to answer it. To dimwitted and unprincipled we evidently must now add rude. (That a sitting senator would refuse an invitation to appear on television is in itself another oddity.)

Forty years ago the GOP threw its principles overboard in order to win elections: in the place of conservative policy ideas that could be discussed, tested, and adopted (or discarded) as appropriate, the party adopted slogans and demonstrably false claims — the language of ad agencies and mountebanks. Tax cuts will increase revenue! Competition is a magical cure-all for all things political, economical, and educational! New immigrants — to this literal nation of immigrants — are coming to take your jobs! Politics became, in other words, a game. It was no longer about compromising to improve the lives of citizens and constituents; it was about winning elections and achieving, holding, and keeping power.

Decades of empirical evidence haven’t been enough to wipe away these failed ideas, emotional triggers masquerading as  public policy. Our society, our country, our world have all suffered needlessly as a result. We should all hope that the GOP’s most recent self-inflicted wounds prove at long last to be fatal.

Don’t Seat Them

Elections have consequences, intended and unintended. Into the morass of post-electoral fire-breathing and pearl-clutching comes a resolution introduced by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-NJ).  Relying on the Constitution — which the MAGA crowd claims to revere — Rep. Pascrell has a simple proposal to deal with the 126 House members who signed on to the bogus Texas lawsuit: Don’t seat them in the next Congress. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment says, in plain language, that they are ineligible to serve in federal office. Elections have consequences, after all. And those who would subvert our elections should pay a price.

The message to Democrats should be: Ignore the inevitable and insincere wailing about “persecution for political beliefs” that will follow. Don’t seat them. Ignore the tortured justifications for the over fifty lawsuits brought by the Trump campaign or its water carriers: there is no legally or judicially cognizable case and your complaints have been summarily dismissed by every court that has heard them. “We have a right to be heard in court” is not an excuse for willfully wasting time and money. It’s not a lost cause, and certainly not a noble one. It is an attempt to subvert democracy itself and install a permanent government of plutocrats and autocrats. Elections have consequences.

Republicans, we should note, are fond of repeating that elections have consequences. But let’s be clear: when Mitch McConnell piously intones that phrase, he means only the elections that keep him in the Majority Leader’s chair. The elections, in other words, that enable him to stymie legislation so desperately needed by the people of the United States — such as a second COVID relief bill that would enable people to pay their rent and put food on their tables; that would keep small businesses afloat and people employed; that would ensure sufficient PPE for health care workers, that would help the country get through the next perilous year with the coronavirus. But instead of useful legislation he peddles lie after lie after lie. “Compromise,” to McConnell, means, “Come meet me where I stand, while I keep walking backwards.” The House passed a $3 trillion relief bill; McConnell wanted half that; House negotiators moved to $2 trillion and McConnell wanted half that; now the bill on the table is $900 billion, and passage is in doubt. Politics is the art of the possible, but McConnell cynically moves the goal posts and then blames his Democratic opponents for failing to compromise.

Democrats, you have been playing the GOP’s twisted messaging game for a generation. Take charge, explain in plain language what is going on, and exact a price for the GOP’s sedition. Don’t seat them. Change the game, and make new rules. People will notice; you might even improve your majority. Elections have consequences, right?