Tenther Judges “Radical Misreading Of The Constitution”: All Labor, Business Or Wall Street Regulation Is Unconstitutional
For more than two years, ThinkProgress has tracked “tentherism,” a radical misreading of the Constitution which claims that pretty much everything the federal government does is unconstitutional. Tenther lawmakers — who include members of Congress, senators, governors and at least one sitting Supreme Court justice — have claimed that child labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, clean air laws and the federal highway systemall violate the Constitution.
Even tentherism has a limit, however. While tenthers would all but eliminate our national leaders’ ability to solve national problems, they concede that state governments are still free to serve their citizens. Which is why a recent concurring opinion signed by U.S. Court of Appeals judges David Sentelle and Janice Rogers Brown is so disturbing. Under Sentelle and Brown’s vision, any attempt to protect workers, investors or consumers from unscrupulous businesses is in jeopardy:
America’s cowboy capitalism was long ago disarmed by a democratic process increasingly dominated by powerful groups with economic interests antithetical to competitors and consumers. And the courts, from which the victims of burdensome regulation sought protection, have been negotiating the terms of surrender since the 1930s.
First the Supreme Court allowed state and local jurisdictions to regulate property, pursuant to their police powers, in the public interest, and to “adopt whatever economic policy may reasonably be deemed to promote public welfare.” Then the Court relegated economic liberty to a lower echelon of constitutional protection than personal or political liberty, according restrictions on property rights only minimal review. . . . Thus the Supreme Court decided economic liberty was not a fundamental constitutional right, and decreed economic legislation must be upheld against an equal protection challenge “if there is any reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” for it.
To translate this a bit, Sentelle and Brown disagree with the fact that representatives chosen by the American people, rather than unelected judges such as themselves, get to decide America’s economic policy. At best, their opinion calls for a return to a discredited era when judges could simply toss out laws protecting workers or consumers that the judges did not like.
Yet Sentelle and Brown also appear to be arguing for something even more radical than that. Their opinion complains that “economic liberty [is] not a fundamental constitutional right.” “Fundamental rights” are the very most protected rights under the Constitution. The right to be free from race discrimination is a fundamental right. As is the right to criticize the government. Sentelle and Brown’s opinion, however, concerns a law that removes a loophole exempting certain dairies from a 70 year-old system regulating the milk industry. In their apparent view, a law that regulates how dairy executives operate their business is exactly as offensive as a law that bans black people from voting.
Nor would their opinion stop there. The minimum wage regulates how dairy executives operate their business. As do child labor laws. Or workplace safety laws. Or laws that prevent dairies from selling spoiled or tainted milk. In Sentelle and Brown’s America, these laws likely would also be just as constitutionally suspect as a law that gives special rights to white people and not to black people.
Nor would their opinion stop there, for, indeed, their opinion laments that “economic legislation” as a whole is left to the people’s representatives and not to judges. The likely implication of Sentelle and Brown’s vision is any attempt to protect workers, or to regulate Wall Street, or to ensure that food and drugs sold in the marketplace are safe, or to enact any law protecting ordinary American consumers must be treated with exactly the same constitutional skepticism judges would bring to a law that tosses people who speak out against President Obama in jail.
Yet for all the many, many laws they would strike down, for all the anarchy they would create by sweeping away literally centuries of regulation in a single constitutional whirlwind, one thing is conspicuously absent from Sentelle and Brown’s opinion. At no point do they cite a single word of the Constitution which supports their sweeping assault on America’s power to govern itself.
This is not a coincidence. Those words do not exist.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, April 16, 2012
From The “Book Of Mitt”: Nonworking Parent’s “Raise Indolent And Unproductive Kids”
For a guy who thinks being a mom is the hardest job in the world, and no one has worked harder than his wife, Mitt Romney sure has a funny attitude when it comes to other nonworking mothers who aren’t married to multimillionaires. As Mitt wrote in his book:
In some quarters, however, the American work ethic is waning. Some people devote themselves to find ways not to work.Some seem to take a perverse kind of pride in being slipshod or lackadaisical. In many cases, where our work culture has deteriorated, shortsighted government policies share a good part of the blame.Welfare without work erodes the spirit and the sense of self-worth of the recipient. And it conditions the children of nonworking parents to an indolent and unproductive life. Hardworking parents raise hardworking kids; we should recognize that the opposite is also true. The influence of the work habits of our parents and other adults around us as we grow up has lasting impact.
Not only does Mitt think poor mothers “need to go to work” so they’ll have “dignity,” and not only does he think that drug testing poor mothers is “an excellent idea,” but he also thinks that nonworking parents raise rotten children. Except, of course, for Ann Romney, the hardest working nonworking parent ever.
By: Kaili Joy Gray, Daily Kos, April 16, 2012
“So Much For The Phony Outrage”: Ann Romney Says Rosen’s Attack Was A ‘Gift,’ ‘I Loved It’
While the Romney campaign’s outrage machine was cranking on all cylinders last week over CNN contributor Hilary Rosen’s comments on Ann Romney’s wealth, the victim of Rosen’s barb doesn’t seem too offended — in fact, she’s thrilled. At a closed-door fundraiser last night, Ann Romney revealed that she saw the jab as a political “gift,” NBC News’ Garrett Haake reports:
Mrs. Romney acknowledged Republicans’ deficit at present with female voters, and urged the women in attendance to talk to their friends, particularly about the economy. She also discussed the criticism she faced this week, and her pride in her role as a mother.
“It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it,” Mrs. Romney said.
In case the phoniness of the Romney campaign’s response to “Rosen-gate” wasn’t obvious enough already, Ann Romney’s glib political calculation should make it clear.
Behind closed doors, Rosen’s comments were a “gift.” In public, Ann and her allies were deeply offended by the slight from Rosen (who is on the Center for American Progress Action Fund’s board). “Now that does bother me,” Ann said in a Fox News interview responding to the jab. On a conference call organized by the Romney campaign, female Republican lawmakers tried to outdo each other in expressing their offense and outraged at Rosen’s comments.
Update:
Discussing Ann Romney’s comment this morning, CNN’s Soledad O’Brien remarked, “It made it sound like it was about strategy and not about ‘what a great opportunity’ to talk about my family. It was more like, ‘Wow, I was able to score political points on an issue that could help my husband win.’”
By: Alex Seitz-Ward, Think Progress, April 16, 2012
“Don’t Tell Anybody”: Romney Offers A Peek Behind The Policy Curtain
“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later. But I’m not going to actually go through these one by one. What I can tell you is, we’ve got far too many bureaucrats. I will send a lot of what happens in Washington back to the states.”
“I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction,” he continued, adding that he would also support eliminating deductions for state income and property taxes.
Till now, Romney has been very specific about his intention to be very vague. Back in March, he told the conservative Weekly Standard, “one of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education…So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”
Sunday’s comments, however, were “overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below.” Romney thought he was speaking privately to a group of conservative donors. And so they offer, in theory, a look behind the curtain. The only problem is there’s not much there.
Romney’s tax plan — which extends all the Bush tax cuts and then cuts taxes even further — will cost the Treasury trillions of dollars in lost revenue. You can’t make that up by capping a few deductions for high-income taxpayers. And while it sounds very tough to talk about closing agencies, it doesn’t save you much money unless you’re also willing to cut the services they provide.
To make his numbers add up, Romney needs to close the largest and most popular deductions in the tax code and cut huge swaths of government social spending. And as of now, he’s not willing to talk about doing that. Not even in private.
By: Ezra Klein, Wonkblog, The Washington Post, April 16, 2012
GOP “Manufactured Controversies”: Editors And Reporters, There’s No Excuse For Taking This Stuff At Face Value.
Greg already flagged a brutally bad New York Times story about the Hilary Rosen flap earlier this morning, pointing out that the Times totally butchered Rosen’s (non-) involvement in Barack Obama’s campaign. He’s right — but that only scrapes the surface of what a bad job this story does with the phony controversy that broke out when Rosen said something stupid on CNN on Wednesday.
Let’s start with the headline: “Collision Over Roles of Women Sets Off Combative Debate Along the Trail.” Huh? That never happened. There was no “collision over roles of women,” and especially not “along the trail,” which is to say, in the context of the campaign. What actually happened is that one TV talking head, to be sure someone there to represent the Democrats, said something foolish which was immediately pounced on by Mitt Romney’s campaign…and by the Obama campaign as well. No collision. No debate.
The article took the entire “controversy” (as framed by Republicans) at face value:
The campaign for the White House spilled into the politics of motherhood on Thursday as a combative back-and-forth involving a Democratic strategist and Mitt Romney’s wife quickly revived a deeper, decades-old cultural debate about the roles of women in and out of the workplace.
Again: that never happened, at least not within the campaign’s context. Did some people use Rosen’s words as an excuse to wallow in a “decades-old cultural debate”? Sure. But no one who speaks for the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party in any meaningful capacity took the “objectionable” side of that debate. No officials from the Obama campaign or the Democratic Party said anything about stay-at-home moms that attracted criticism. And when one lone Democrat did say something, the Obama campaign and the larger Democratic Party network condemned it and said exactly the same things that the Romney campaign said. There was no campaign disagreement. Anyone who only read the Times story would have come away believing that there was an actual presidential campaign dispute over stay-at-home moms.
Here’s the bottom line. We’re going to have these manufactured controversies throughout the campaign. Both sides know how to take an awkward remark and turn it into a huge flap, regardless of whether there’s anything real behind it. Hey, editors and reporters: don’t fall for it! No one is really offended; there’s no there there, and you shouldn’t be afraid to say so. It’s fine to report what the campaigns are up to, but whether it’s Etch-a-Sketch or this one or the next dozen that are going to follow, there’s absolutely no excuse for taking this stuff at face value.
By: Jonathan Bernstein, The Washington Post Plum Line, April 13, 2012
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