“Patron Saint For The Far Right”: Robert Bork, Mitt Romney’s Secret Constitutional Weapon
Now that Mitt Romney has ground out a victory against the weakest GOP field in a generation and the most extreme in history, he’s now turning his attention to the general election. To use a particularly vivid metaphor, he’s shaking his Etch-a-Sketch as hard as he can, trying to erase his far-right pandering in the primaries. But despite his head fakes towards moderation, no one should doubt that a President Mitt Romney would enact a dangerously extreme agenda for our country, and nothing makes that clearer than the person he selected as his constitutional and judicial advisor: Robert Bork.
Yes, that Robert Bork.
In a primary dominated by sideshows appealing to the fringe element, important issues like the Supreme Court were rarely discussed in detail, but Romney’s announcement that Bork would be his judicial advisor is the clearest possible signal of how far to the right Romney has moved since his days as a “moderate” Republican in Massachusetts and of his willingness to embrace all the fringiest opinions of all his primary opponents.
Sure, Rick Santorum promised to attack legalized birth control, Ron Paul says the Civil Rights Act “destroyed” privacy, and Newt Gingrich thinks child labor laws are “truly stupid.” But none of them can hold a candle to the extremism of Robert Bork, the patron saint of far-right ideologues. And Bork’s choice in this infamous field? Mitt Romney.
When Bork was nominated to the Supreme Court in 1987, his nomination was rejected as too extreme by a bipartisan majority in a 58-42 vote. Since then he’s only moved further out of the mainstream.
Robert Bork insists that art and literature aren’t protected by the First Amendment. He defended the constitutionality of poll taxes and literacy tests for voters, and he called the Civil Rights Act “unsurpassed ugliness.” He’s defended state laws that made gay sex a criminal offense. As a judge he routinely ruled in favor of big business over individual Americans.
Perhaps most disturbing are Bork’s reactionary views on how the law treats women. Robert Bork doesn’t just think abortion should be criminalized, he thinks states should be free to outlaw birth control. He’s argued that the Equal Protection Clause doesn’t apply to women. And what seems almost too unbelievable to be real, he even ruled that a company is free to tell female employees to be sterilized or lose their jobs.
In any sane election, Robert Bork would be the hidden crazy uncle or at least denounced as a political liability, but then again this hasn’t been a sane election. Instead, Mitt Romney has bragged about nabbing the endorsement and held Bork up as a model for the judges he’d appoint to the bench, including the Supreme Court. He’s said he wishes Bork were on the court today. Any questions regarding the types of judges Romney would nominate?
With Election Day on the horizon, it’s all but inevitable that Mitt Romney will start reshaping his rhetoric for the general election. But regardless of his carefully calibrated statements or his poll-tested promises, no one should forget that by choosing Robert Bork as a key advisor, Mitt Romney has made crystal clear his frighteningly extreme agenda for America.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For The American Way, The Huffington Post, April 23, 2012
“Mendacious Mitt Strikes Again”: Another Dishonest Attack From The Romney Campaign
I’ve spoken before about the constant torrent of dishonesty from the Romney campaign. From the small issues (tax returns) to the big ones (Obama’s “apology tour”), Romney and his team have routinely lied to make a point or build a case. When it comes to the economy, for example, the Romney team takes every job lost in 2009, regardless of whether Obama’s policies were in effect or not, and attributes it to the president. It’s a distorted number—he claims two million lost jobs—designed to mislead voters with a false picture of the economy.
The Romney campaign has been criticized—repeatedly—for this misleading approach to economic numbers, but like a child that acts out in class, this has only encouraged their misbehavior. To wit, the Romney team now claims that the number of new business start-ups has declined by 100,000 as a result of Obama’s policies. As with the jobs number, this is only possible if you include the period of beginning in 2008 and ending in early 2009. If you take 2009 as your starting point, and end in 2011, there’s a decline of 12,000—a dramatic change from Romney’s claim. If you omit 2009—as the year when the recession ended—the number jumps to 29,000. Neither of these is good, but it’s far from the disaster that the Romney campaign describes.
Indeed, after debunking Romney’s numbers, the Washington Post fact checker Glenn Kessler goes to town on the campaign’s habitual dishonesty:
The bottom line is that experts at the agency that generated the data and the organization that analysed it, as well as the person who used it in congressional testimony, all say Romney is starting with the wrong date.
By using the 2008 numbers, Romney essentially is comparing pre-recession figures with post-recession figures, not data that reflects what happened under President Obama. Just as with job creation under this president, the results starting from 2009 are not great, showing a slight overall decline and then modest improvement once the recession ended.
As the president well knows, that uncertain result has made for a challenging reelection campaign. But Romney has goosed his figure so much that it has little credibility. [Emphasis added]
To a large degree, as Paul Krugman points out, Mitt Romney’s bid for the presidency depends on the collective amnesia of the American public. More than fifty percent of voters have to forget that Republicans were both responsible for this mess and refused to cooperate when it came time to clean it up. The Romney team knows this, and so they’re muddying the waters in order to obfuscate the degree to which the former Massachusetts governor hopes to repeat the performance of his GOP predecessor.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April 23, 2012
“I Had To Say I Believe In Science”: Jon Huntsman, GOP Is Like Communist Party In China
Jon Huntsman, a former Republican Party candidate for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination, Sunday evening in an interview said that the GOP is like the Communist Party in China. Huntsman, who was President Obama’s Ambassador to China, certainly is in a position to know. A former Republican Governor of Utah who worked in both the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations, Jon Huntsman last night also distanced himself from Mitt Romney, and attacked the Republican Party’s anti-science and anti-tax positions.
Buzzfeed reports that “the Republican Party disinvited him from a Florida fundraiser in March after he publicly called for a third party.
“This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off script,” he said.
Huntsman said he regrets his decision to oppose a 10-to-1 spending cuts to tax increase deal to cut the deficit at the Iowa debate lamenting: “if you can only do certain things over again in life.”
“What went through my head was if I veer at all from my pledge not to raise any taxes…then I’m going to have to do a lot of explaining,” he explained. “What was going through my mind was ‘don’t I just want to get through this?’”
That decision, Huntsman said, “has caused me a lot of heartburn.”
Huntsman jokingly blamed his failed candidacy in part on his wife, Mary Kaye, who told him she’d leave him if he abandoned his principles.
“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman recounted.
“So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you’re was an oddball,” Huntsman said, explaining why he was “toast” in Iowa.
Asked by journalist Jeff Greenfield if he could win the nomination of the Republican Party in Utah today, Huntsman said he could not, saying later that Ronald Reagan would “likely not” be able to win the GOP nomination nationally in this political climate.
On foreign policy, Huntsman questioned his former Republican opponents’ hard-line positions on China. “I don’t know what world these people are living in,” he said, not naming Mitt Romney by name.
Huntsman, a Mormon, was one of only two GOP presidential candidates who are open to supporting some LGBT civil rights. Fred Karger, a gay Republican candidate for the nomination, supports same-sex marriage. Huntsman only supports civil unions for same-sex couples. He was viewed as a sane Republican, which forced him out of the race early.
By: David Badash, The New Civil Rights Movement, April 23, 2012
“Committed To Decline And Despair”: It’s Time For The GOP To Grow Up
The United States needs two responsible governing parties if it’s ever going to address its most pressing problems.
I’ve grown so used to dismissing Tom Friedman’s work for The New York Times that when he writes something genuinely good, it comes as a surprise. To wit, in his column for the Sunday paper, he aruges that our political system has devolved into a “vetocracy”—a system where “no one can aggregate enough power to make any important decisions at all.”
The culprits, according to Friedman, are polarization, broken institutional norms—in particular, filibuster abuse—the massive proliferation of special interests, and the growing importance of money in politics. The ultimate outcome of this, says Friedman, is governmental paralysis:
America’s collection of minority special-interest groups is now bigger, more mobilized and richer than ever, while all the mechanisms to enforce the will of the majority are weaker than ever. The effect of this is either legislative paralysis or suboptimal, Rube Goldberg-esque, patched-together-compromises, often made in response to crises with no due diligence. That is our vetocracy.
This dovetails with a problem that Friedman only alludes to:
[I]f you believe the fantasy that America’s economic success derives from having had a government that stayed out of the way, then gridlock and vetocracy are just fine with you. But if you have a proper understanding of American history — so you know that government played a vital role in generating growth by maintaining the rule of law, promulgating regulations that incentivize risk-taking and prevent recklessness, educating the work force, building infrastructure and funding scientific research — then a vetocracy becomes a very dangerous thing.
If there’s anything that defines the current political moment, it’s the fact that—of the two major parties—one has completely abandoned the American consensus that Friedman describes. In the mythology of the Republican Party, government has never played a part in the country’s growth or prosperity—the “free market” alone is responsible for the nation’s current prosperity. Not only does this run counter to the historical record—to say nothing of observable reality—but it has resulted in a world where one party refuses to accept a role for government in anything.
As Friedman (obliquely) points out, this is a recipe for disaster. The institutions of the United States aren’t built for one-party rule, and we can’t make progress on pressing issues—climate change, health care, aging infrastructure—without a mutual understanding between the two parties. Republicans don’t have to abandon their preference for small government or their skepticism for federal programs, but effective action requires the GOP to back away from its opposition to the public sector, and reconsider the role of government in solving the nation’s problems.
Between Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan, the Republican Party is committed to a radical attack on the size and role of government. The Romney economic plan, which draws its ideas from Paul Ryan’s budget, would eliminate most non-defense discretionary spending, and funnel the savings to tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Vital government functions like environmental regulation, scientific research, and poverty reduction would be sacrificed on the altar of small government. This isn’t a sustainable state of affairs. A world where government completely withdraws from the lives of ordinary Americans is one where we all but commit to a path of decline and disrepair.
If there’s anything that this country needs right now, it’s a responsible and functional Republican Party. I won’t hold my breath.
BY: Jamelle Bouie, The American Prospect, April23, 2012
“Show Me Your Papers”: The Constitution Protects U.S. Citizens From Laws Like Arizona’s
Arizona’s frustration with our nation’s dysfunctional immigration system is understandable. But its restrictive “show me your papers” immigration law is unconstitutional and un-American.
The U.S. Constitution protects and safeguards our most fundamental rights—the rights that are the bedrock of our freedom and democracy. Each of us has the right to be treated equally and fairly, and to not be discriminated against on the basis of the color of our skin or the accent with which we may speak.
Arizona’s law violates these precious Constitutional protections. Already, in Arizona and other states with “show me your papers” laws, U.S. citizens who don’t happen to carry proof of their birth in the United States in their back pockets are being treated with suspicion and are facing arrest and detention until they can convince law enforcement authorities of their citizenship. This racial profiling and assault on personal freedom and security is both unconstitutional and un-American.
The U.S. Constitution was also written to safeguard and protect our fundamental character as a nation of united states. In areas where it is important for states to determine their own policies, the Constitution protects states’ rights. But in areas where it is important that our nation speak with one voice, the Constitution prohibits states from taking matters into their own hands.
Immigration is one of those areas involving our country’s relations with foreign countries and nationals where our nation needs to speak with one voice. Just as states cannot sign their own treaties with, or declare war on, other countries, so too states cannot enact their own immigration laws. If they could, the resulting patchwork of 50 different state laws would lead to confusion, conflict, and chaos.
Other nations would retaliate and treat U.S. citizens unfairly as they travel, work and study abroad. Citizens and immigrants alike would flee from one state to another, seeking freedom from discriminatory laws. Businesses would leave states where their workers and visiting foreign managers were subject to intrusive police demands for “papers.”
The United States could not survive as two nations—one slave, one free. Neither can the United States accommodate two sets of immigration laws—one that requires the Department of Homeland Security to enforce the laws that Congress enacts, and the other that requires all of us, citizens and immigrants alike, to “show me your papers.”
By: Jeanne Butterfield, Special Counsel, Raben Group, Published in U. S. News and World Report, April 23, 2012
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