U. S. Supreme Court Stays Montana Decision Undermining Citizens United
Late last year, the Montana Supreme Court handed down a decision that was widely viewed as openly defying the U.S. Supreme Court’s election-buying decision in Citizens United. Last night, the U.S. Supremes issued an entirely unsurprising order staying that decision. As a result, Montana will now face the same epidemic of corporate and other wealthy donor money that infected the other 49 states in the wake of the Citizens Uniteddecision.
There are, however, two possible silver linings in last night’s decision. The first is that the Supreme Court did not agree to the corporate parties’ request in this case to simply reverse the Montana decision without a full hearing or even necessarily an opinion. Yesterday’s order suspends the Montana decision “pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari,” meaning that there is still a possibility that the Court could give the case a full hearing that would almost certainly raise the question of whether Citizens United should be overruled.
The second silver lining is a separate statement from Justices Ginsburg and Breyer attached to yesterday’s order:
Montana’s experience, and experience elsewhere since this Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Comm’n make it exceedingly difficult to maintain that independent expenditures by corporations “do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.” A petition for certiorari will give the Court an opportunity to consider whether, in light of the huge sums currently deployed to buy candidates’ allegiance, Citizens United should continue to hold sway. Because lower courts are bound to follow this Court’s decisions until they are withdrawn or modified, however, I vote to grant the stay.
This statement suggests that there are at least two votes on the Supreme Court eager to reconsider one of the modern Supreme Court’s most erroneous opinions just two years after it was decided. Such a swift reversal would very unusual, if not entirely unprecedented. In light of the massive influx of corporate and wealthy donor money flooding our democracy and threatening to elect a generation of candidates personally beholden to wealthy benefactors, however, this kind of swift admission of error by the justices is entirely necessary.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, February 18, 2012
“The Little Man On The Wedding Cake”: Mitt Romney, Plain And Unpopular
Unlike Newt Gingrich, who can claim a regional base, Rick Santorum, who has a solidly defined political persona, or Ron Paul, who has something of a cult of personality, there’s nothing unique about Mitt Romney as a candidate. He is the definition of a generic Republican—a blank slate for the public to register its frustrations. Like Thomas Dewey—who played a similar role in the 1948 election—he is “the little man on the wedding cake.” Indeed, if there is anything close to a reason for his presidential campaign, it’s his vanilla appeal to the broad public, and undecided voters in particular.
Since the beginning of the year, however, that advantage has completely evaporated—the public has gone from slight approval of the former Massachusetts governor, to outright loathing.
In less than two months, Romney has gone from a positive rating of +8.5—43.5 percent favorable to 35 percent unfavorable—to an astonishingly negative one of -17.4, or 31.2 percent favorable to 48.6 percent unfavorable. What’s more, this comes as his name recognition has increased; the more Americans get to know Mitt Romney, the less they like him. This, it should be said, wasn’t true of John Kerry when he ran for the presidency in 2004.
Of course, because this poll measures all voters—and not just independents—this includes some Republicans who will return to the fold if Romney becomes the nominee. But the favorability gains that come with leading a unified party aren’t enough to overcome a deficit of this size. What’s more, it will do nothing for Romney’s standing with independents, which has also collapsed in the last two months. You can also expect these numbers to get worse for the former Massachusetts governor as he moves to bury Rick Santorum under a landslide of attack ads ahead of the Michigan primary. Voters aren’t keen on constant negativity, which has become Romney’s default position as the primaries drag on.
None of this is to say that Romney is doomed if he becomes the nominee, but the situation doesn’t look good. At this point, most Americans don’t trust him to stand up for their interests, a plurality of Americans don’t like him, and independents would rather stick to President Obama. It’s true that this could all change with a crisis in Europe or a war in the Middle East, but if that’s what you’re banking on, you’re not in a good place.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, February 16, 2012
“The Agony Of Suppressed Contempt”: Why Mitt Romney Hates Republicans
The Republican primary campaign has highlighted the barely concealed contempt in which Mitt Romney holds the electorate, especially the Republican electorate. One adviser has expressed his astonishment that GOP voters fall for clowns like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich:
“They like preachers,” the adviser said of the tea party demographic. “If you take them to a tent meeting, they’ll get whipped into a frenzy. That’s how people like Herman Cain and Newt Gingrich get women to fall into bed with them.”
That is an insult putatively directed at Romney’s rivals, but which reflects heavily on the voters themselves. Another fresh insult comes today, by way of John Dickerson, who reports that Gingrich’s assault on Juan Williams worked because “‘Williams was a stand-in for Barack Obama in people’s minds,’ said one Romney adviser.”
Gee, whatever could Williams and Obama have in common? Can this be interpreted as meaning anything other than that South Carolina Republicans are a pack of racist buffoons?
Romney’s disdain for the electorate is one of his more deeply rooted traits. During his father’s 1968 presidential campaign, Romney wrote, “how can the American public like such muttonheads?”
I find that contempt pretty well-founded, and it is a relief that Romney does not believe the nonsense he spouts during the campaign. But the persistent awkwardness of Romney’s campaign style reflects this basic tension. It’s easy to try to persuade somebody for whom you have basic respect. It’s persuading somebody whom you consider stupid — while you must conceal any trace of your disdain — that’s excruciatingly difficult. Romney’s awkward manner on the trail is the agony of suppressed contempt.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intel, February 1, 2012
Newt’s Real Legacy
Do you think that after all is said and done, Newt Gingrich will just go down in history as the politician who conclusively proved that voters don’t care about a candidate’s sexual misbehavior?
Imagine the history students of 2112, reading about the early 21st century on their vaporphones, or whatever they have by then. They would get to this presidential campaign and there would be a little footnote saying that despite a totally outrageous marital history, Newt Gingrich won the presidential primary in one of the most socially conservative states in the country. Maybe there would be a clip of him making the how-dare-you-sir speech to CNN’s John King.
Probably not exactly what Newt has in mind.
Perhaps things will go differently. Maybe, despite his blah debate performances in Florida, Newt will do well in this week’s primary, and go on to win the nomination, become president and build lots of moon colonies while saving America from Shariah law and the corrosive effects of the writing of Saul Alinsky.
But if not, he’ll still be the guy who managed to become a credible presidential candidate despite the three wives, the serial adultery, etc. etc. etc. He had a lot of help from the voters. In South Carolina, only 31 percent of the people interviewed by Public Policy Polling said they believed the second Mrs. Gingrich when she told ABC that her husband had asked her to share his sexual favors with his longtime mistress, who is now the third Mrs. G.
Presumably they believed Newt, who said that he had “witnesses” who were eager to go to ABC and denounce the story. Although the Gingrich campaign now says the proffered witnesses didn’t really exist. Except for his daughters by his first marriage. Who truly would not seem to be the best possible experts on whether Newt wanted to have whoopee rights to both their stepmothers.
If Gingrich loses the Florida primary, I hope it is for the crime of middle-aged-child abuse.
But about that open-marriage poll question: I believe that what the voters were actually saying was that they didn’t want to hear about it. The American public has a long history of ignoring the private lives of elected officials whenever possible. They gave up on politicians as role models somewhere around Richard Nixon.
Perhaps the critical moment came when voters decided to elect Bill Clinton president despite what were very clear storm warnings about his tendency to wander off, sexually speaking. Which was followed by the public’s very clear decision to keep Bill Clinton even after he was caught in behavior that, really, even the head of Hedonists Inc. could not possibly have thought was a good idea.
And it all worked out! Now Clinton is Beloved Ex-President Clinton, and everybody keeps sighing over how great things were when the prince of bad behavior was in charge.
That goes for the social right, too. They are going to go for the guy who they think will carry out their agenda. Even if he is, say, an anti-abortion crusader whose ex-wife swore that he took her to get an abortion. (See: former Georgia Congressman Bob Barr.)
The far right seems to be particularly indifferent to bad-behavior issues. Maybe this is because their supporters know that sinning social conservatives operate at a disadvantage. It is way easier to avoid the hypocrisy label if you’re a straying civil libertarian whose family values speeches mainly involve encouraging kids to donate money to feed impoverished people in Africa. You’re not going to be charged with speaking out of both sides of your mouth when the first side is talking about supporting Doctors Without Borders.
Conservative voters also like expressions of remorse and promises to reform. When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. “I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,” former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.
Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress … it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.
But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.) Everybody has something. Rick Santorum lusted in his heart for earmarks. Mitt Romney drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped on the car roof.
And Newt argues his checkered past is actually an advantage. He suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”
Take that, Mitt.
I once wrote a book on how gossip about politicians’ private lives impacts their careers, and it was a very interesting experience, as a result of which I know way more about Grover Cleveland’s sex life than most people would find reasonable. Until the 1970s, voters found it very easy to ignore things they would rather not know about prominent politicians, since the mainstream media didn’t report it. That rule began to crack about the time one of the nation’s most powerful politicians, the House Ways and Means Committee chairman Wilbur Mills, was caught trying to drunkenly fish a striptease dancer out of the Washington Tidal Basin.
Ever since then, we have been writing about the ways politicians misbehave in private, usually after an ex-lover or angry wife blows the whistle. And the voters frequently yawn. However, the people a misbehaving politician really has to worry about are not his constituents, but his peers. These days, a congressman’s colleagues will throw him overboard in a second. We all remember that Anthony Weiner was driven out of Congress after he got caught tweeting pictures of his underwear. While he was inhabiting it. I am going to go out on a limb and say that his constituents in Brooklyn and Queens were not charmed by this behavior, but you did not see any widespread calls within his district for him to resign. No, the people who forced Weiner to go away were the Democratic leaders, particularly Nancy Pelosi, who thought he was hurting the party in general.
Over the last few days, there has been a big-name Republican uprising against Gingrich, featuring everybody from Bob Dole to Ann Coulter. They aren’t personally offended by Newt’s marital history — or if they are, they can certainly live with it. But they’re totally afraid that if he actually got the nomination and people had to take a long, serious look at the whole Newt picture, the Republicans would be destroyed in November.
We’ll see what happens. But here’s the good news: Newt has always dreamed of being a figure in American history books, and I think he’s got that nailed.
By: Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, January 27, 2012
“Bait And Switch Cynic’s”: Obama Angers GOP By Standing Up For Middle Class
Republicans are furious with Barack Obama for waging a “divisive” populist campaign against Wall Street and America’s “elites” – because Republicans think that is supposed to be their job.
Together with the more confrontational tone he’s taken with Republicans since they rebuffed him on his middle class jobs package last summer, President Obama’s State of the Union Address on Tuesday is further proof he’s finally learned his lesson from the previous three years: That while he was off chasing independent “swing” voters said to prize compromise and moderation above all things, scheming Republicans had picked his pocket of those pitchfork-wielding populists who should have been Obama’s all along.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In both the physical world and in politics the law of gravity decrees that when things fall apart they are supposed to fall down. So, by all rights a second Great Depression that incinerated $16 trillion in household wealth and was brought about by the same kind of financial shenanigans and Wall Street recklessness that caused that first big depression back in the 1930s, should have provoked the very same kind of anti-business popular backlash that brought FDR to power then and should have created a Second New Deal now.
Yet, as populist historian Thomas Frank writes in his new book, Pity the Billionaire: the Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, so far the most visible response to the recent economic catastrophe has been a right wing campaign to “roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain and to clamp down on federal spending.”
The resurgence of the Republican Party so soon after the debacle of George W. Bush and the collapse of the financial markets in 2008 is a testament to human adaptability.
Rather than allow themselves to be crushed underneath a tide of middle class anger directed against the plutocrats and tycoons who stole their dreams away — as happened to Republicans in the 1930s – conservatives were determined this time around to lead the populist, anti-Wall Street revolt instead of be swallowed by it – even if it was a crusade cynically designed to serve the interests of the very same Wall Street that was responsible for the crisis in the first place.
Congressman Paul Ryan, for example, was both the author of the “kill Medicare as we know it” budget as well as an article in Forbes titled “Down with Big Business” in which Ryan argued that giant corporations could not be counted on to defend capitalism in its hour of need and so it was up to “the American people – innovators and entrepreneurs and small business owners — to take a stand.”
Conservative infatuation with “entrepreneurs” and “small business owners” was no accident. Like those prairie farmers who fed the Populist Movement of the 19th century, mom-and-pop hardware store owners are just as outraged by “crony capitalism” on Wall Street as they are by “European-style socialism” in Washington.
And so by passing the torch of free market capitalism from the international conglomerate to the local chamber of commerce conservatives knew they could give populist cover to a free market agenda that meant lower taxes for the rich and fewer regulations for Wall Street.
But the perfect expression of the Republican Party’s bait-and-switch cynicism came when Republicans tried to beat back Obama’s Wall Street reforms by pretending to be against Wall Street itself. Since “public outrage about the bailout of banks and Wall Street is a simmering time bomb set to go off,” wrote GOP pollster Frank Luntz in an infamous February 2010 memo to his Republican clients, the single best way for Republicans to kill Wall Street reform was to link it to favoritism of Wall Street — like “the Big Bank Bailout” instead.
And that is exactly what Republicans did, piously intoning how the Democrat’s reforms were really giveaways to the rich that sought to “punish” middle class taxpayers while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.”
Add it all up and everywhere you looked the GOP defenders of the Top 1% were warning of “a colossal struggle between average people and the elites who would strip away the people’s freedoms,” said Frank.
Corrupt and cynical though all of this might be, Republican efforts to portray themselves as champions of little guy standing tall against “the interests” was not wholly implausible, as leaders of the revivified Right found the soil for their misdirection to be uncommonly fertile.
Hoodwinking the Tea Party Right that the “elites”who brought down the economy lived in Washington rather on Wall Street was never going to be a heavy lift.
In their year-long study of the Tea Party movement, The Tea Party and the Remaking of the Republican Conservatism, authors Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson found that while Tea Party members might be impresarios of political organization they were largely ignorant when it came to “what government does, how it is financed and what is actually included (or not) in key pieces of legislation and regulation.”
The blame, they say, lies squarely with “the content of right wing programming,” especially Fox News, which, the authors contend, propagates falsehoods “often as a matter of deliberate editorial policy.” Thus, millions of frightened Americans were uniquely vulnerable to manipulation and misinformation by a corporate-sponsored “‘populist” movement that served the interests of the plutocrats.
But making matters worse, the Democrats have not exactly covered themselves in glory when it comes to making clear whose side they are on. The bank bailouts begun under George Bush are easily blamed on Democrats who both inherited them when they won the White House and voted for them when they controlled Congress. Corporate control of Washington is also a problem that undermines public faith in Democrats who are supposed to govern Washington. And when “Clintonism” is a word that means the “People’s Party” is catering to the interests of the rich and powerful — or when neo-liberalism” defines an economic system indistinguishable from conservative laissez faire — you can forgive the average voter for having trouble separating Wall Street elites from Washington ones.
With a powerful media network like Fox News at its disposal, able to “make viewers both more conservative and less informed,” it’s not difficult to understand how Republicans have been able to lead a mass revolt against “elites” that largely serves the interests of those very same elites.
But with his more recent moves to the left President Obama has begun to turn this around and win back a middle class that should have been with him from the beginning.
“After flirting with the role of the reasonable centrist after his party’s defeat in 2010, President Obama has decided to run for re-election as a full-throated liberal populist,” writes New York Times conservative Ross Douthat with a tone of resignation and disappointment more than agreement.
Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast agrees: “From Mitt Romney to Newt Gingrich to Glenn Beck, the conservative assault on Barack Obama comes down to this: unfettered capitalism is true Americanism.”
Among right wing conservatives, Obama’s efforts to use government to make American capitalism more stable and just isn’t the sort of rescue mission that both Democratic and Republican administrations have been waging since the New Deal. Conventional stimulus spending and jobs programs are instead “an alien imposition, hatched in foreign lands, and designed to make us less free,” says Beinart. And so Obama will either effectively answer that charge “or he will lose the 2012 election.”
My money is on Obama who’s recent course correction may turn out to be his own “Southern Strategy.” The original got its name back in 1968 after Richard Nixon had a Eureka! Moment when he realized there was no way Southern whites who voted with Barry Goldwater in 1964 and were now standing with George Wallace at the schoolhouse door belonged in the Democratic Party of Civil Rights and the Great Society. And today, they don’t.
Nearly 50 years later, Barack Obama seems to have had his own epiphany when he looked around at those who were shaking their fists at “Big Government” but who’d also been put out on the street by Big Banks and Big Business, and the President wondered: How can these people possibly be Republicans?
Proof that President Obama is onto something with his new, more populist approach is the fact that the unerring homing missile of popular resentments and discontents — Newt Gingrich — is going after plutocrat Mitt Romney as a “malefactor of great wealth,” while dancing on Romney’s grave with a victory speech in South Carolina that spit out the word “elite” 27 times.
The contortions that Republicans have had to go through to recast themselves as the Party of the People in order to advance an agenda lop-sided in its favoritism for the wealthy few exposes the structural deformities that have always bedeviled American conservatives.
Like lizards who camouflage themselves from predators, there has always been something chameleon-like about right wing conservatives compelled to adopt protective coloration to survive in a hostile liberal environment.
That is why right wing conservatives have had to learn to speak the language of liberalism — borrowing words like freedom, liberty and democracy in order to superficially appear to embrace ideas and ideals forbidden to them by their reactionary belief system.
That is why members of the Religious Right and Conservative Movement are more familiar with the liberal community organizer Saul Alinsky than Alinsky’s intended liberal audience seems to be, taking to heart his advice in Rules for Radicals that the way for political movements to get things done is to “go home, organize, build power.”
And immediately after the economy collapsed in 2008 and 2009, conservatism positioned itself as a popular protest movement for economic hard times, jettisoning “aspects of conservative tradition that were either haughty or aristocratic,” says Frank “while symbols that seemed noble or democratic or popular, even if they were the traditional property of the other side, were snapped up and claimed by the Right itself.”
Right wing conservatives knew a popular uprising by angry and distressed Americans against the Powers That Be was in the offing. But this time, unlike the 1930s, Republicans intended to lead that revolt instead of be victims of it.
No wonder, then, that Republicans are calling the President “divisive” when he tries to take back from them the backing of The People that rightfully belongs to him.
By: Ted Frier, Open salon, January 29, 2012
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