“The ‘Toil And Trouble’ Of The Bush Dynasty”: The Resurrection Of A Dangerous Political Family
Here’s how I picture Jeb Bush, with his father George and his big brother George, huddled around a boiling cauldron: “When shall we three meet again?/in Florida, Texas or in Maine?”
Any resemblance to the Macbeth witches in thunder, lightning or rain is, of course, intentional. The Washington buzz that Jeb Bush will follow in his brother’s and his father’s footsteps in running for president is a bit scary for democracy. They are not done with us yet. Good and bad things come in threes.
Beware the current wave of nostalgia for Bush rule. They are not the brightest dynasty under the sun, but the House of Bush has staying power. If genial Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida runs, then we the people will be in for another pounding by an Eastern elitist family. They masquerade their cultural origins as south by southwest. But it all started with Prescott Bush, a Connecticut senator.
As the faithful gathered this past weekend in Texas to mark the 25th anniversary of the first Bush presidency, the Bush men are also re-engineering the family story with help from friends like Jim Baker and conservative cheerleaders in the national media. Even columnist George Will, who scorned the elder Bush, is on-message for Jeb as a moderate man of substance. He practically invented school choice. The rest of the story line goes something like this.
Apparently, the one-term president George H.W. Bush, aka “Poppy,” was a seasoned foreign policy hand who conducted the end of the Cold War with magisterial ease. Skeptics like me think it just happened to happen on his watch. His son, George W. Bush, upset a lot of China with wars of choice that proved feckless. But wait, we now know he has the perceptive sensibility of an artist. We know he could see into the soul of Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, after Putin “dissed” Bush’s dog Barney. The 43rd president told this tale as he explained his portrait of Putin – which is rather good, actually.
A pity that W. missed his calling. He never should have been president of the United States, and not only for his military misadventures. He never lost sleep over commandeering civil liberties. The “war president” did not write home much to a beleaguered, rattled public in the years after 9/11, though his visit to the site of the fallen towers is seen as a high point. While Washington slept, New Orleans wept as Hurricane Katrina raged past the broken levees of the beguiling city. The lame presidential response was the domestic analogue of the haphazard way the wars were being waged abroad. And then came the economy’s pitch downward.
The Bushes set great store by winning, any which way. The fury of the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court hearing back in 1991 went down the way it did because H.W. Bush would not back down on a divisive nominee who made many women’s blood boil. If you remember the Willie Horton political ads against Michael Dukakis in 1988, that was also Poppy’s way of doing business. He has said he’ll do whatever it takes to win, though vision was never his thing.
The family penchant for winning at all costs came to a head in Florida in the Bush v. Gore showdown in 2000. Shakespeare could not have set the scene or the stakes better, with the fate of the nation hanging on a state governed by a brother Bush. All family human resources rushed down there, with Baker leading the way and strategy. If the fight seemed fierce, the outcome felt preordained. The Supreme Court stopped the vote count cold. It was all over, by a 5-4 vote. Indeed Thomas was “the best man for the job,” as Poppy put it in 1991.
Let it not be forgot, this is how the Bush dynasty defines “one man, one vote.”
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, April 7, 2014
“A Deepening Criminal Probe”: Christie’s Simmering Scandals Grow More Serious In NJ
Two weeks ago, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s (R) handpicked legal team issued a report – it was more taxpayer-financed propaganda than legal analysis – clearing their client of wrongdoing. As part of the public-relations push surrounding the stunt, Fox News’ Megyn Kelly asked the governor, “So this report has just come out, it exonerates you completely. Do you feel exonerated?”
Christie responded, “Yes, I do. But I also always knew that this is where it would end.”
Except, literally nothing about the governor’s ongoing scandals has “ended.” On the contrary, as Rachel noted on the show on Friday night, the probe is growing more serious, not less.
A federal grand jury has begun hearing testimony in the criminal investigation of the George Washington Bridge lane closing scandal, and Gov. Chris Christie’s chief spokesman is among those who have testified, his lawyer said Friday.
The grand jury action is considered a major development in the ongoing controversy that has enveloped the Christie administration for months. What began as a preliminary inquiry into whether federal laws might have been “implicated” has morphed into a deepening criminal probe to determine whether federal laws have actually been broken.
And really, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Since these revelations on Friday, the developments have grown even more alarming.
David Wildstein, the former Port Authority official at the center of the George Washington Bridge lane-closings scandal, spent several days meeting with federal prosecutors in Newark last week, according to a report posted online by a Washington-based publication that says it covers “insider news” about the U.S. Department of Justice.
The publication, called “Main Justice,” is also reporting that Charlie McKenna, former chief legal counsel to Gov. Chris Christie, met secretly in mid-January with investigators in the office of New Jersey U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman.
Esquire’s Scott Raab had a related report on Wildstein cooperating with federal prosecutor’s office, which has reportedly added to the number of attorneys working on this case.
If Christie thinks his own lawyers freeing him of responsibility “ended” the scandal, he’s going to be awfully disappointed. Look for more on this on tonight’s show.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 7, 2014
“Beyond Corruption”: A Campaign Finance System Warped Beyond What It Would Be Under Any Reasonable Conception Of Democracy
There was a time in our history, thankfully long past now, when bribery was common and money’s slithery movement through the passages of American government was all but invisible, save for the occasional scandal that would burst forth into public consciousness. Today, we know much more about who’s getting what from whom. Members of Congress have to declare their assets, lobbyists have to register and disclose their activities, and contributions are reported and tracked. Whatever you think about the current campaign finance system, it’s much more transparent than it once was.
But if outright bribery is rare, should we say that the system is good enough? It’s a question we have to answer as we move into a new phase of the debate over money in politics. In the wake of last week’s Supreme Court decision in McCutcheon v. F.E.C., many liberals are nervous that the Court’s conservative majority is poised to remove all limits on how much can be donated to candidates and parties. For their part, conservatives seem to be preparing to open a new front in this seemingly endless battle, this time on the disclosure requirements that allow us to track who’s spending money to get their favored candidates elected. But those of us who worry about money’s distorting effects on the process would do well to acknowledge that the combination of more transparency and more money—much, much more money—has created a new reality with dangers that aren’t well described by the traditional conception of “corruption.”
Over the last few decades of campaign finance history, the immediate arguments have changed many times. Sometimes we argued over “soft money” contributions to political parties, sometimes we argued over phony “issue ads,” or 527 organizations and 501(c)(4) organizations, or corporate contributions and aggregate contributions. The specific locus of controversy keeps changing because political money always seems to find its way around whatever obstacles are placed in its path. And the fundamental divide that runs through all these arguments is, just as it has always been, that liberals want to reduce money’s influence over politics while conservatives want to increase it.
Conservatives might protest that that’s not really true; they just care deeply about freedom. But no one buys that for a minute. Their position on the issue is both practical and ideological. They know that if the super-wealthy are allowed to put as much of their money as they want into elections, Republicans will benefit more than Democrats. It’s no wonder that Republican party chair Reince Priebus called the McCutcheon decision a “very big victory for the RNC.” And they genuinely believe that’s as it should be; both the poor person and the rich person have the same right to donate large amounts of money to candidates, and if in practice it’s a right only the rich person can exercise, well that’s the way of the world.
And exercise it they do, with candidates, parties, and independent groups the grateful recipients of that civic-minded largesse growing larger with each passing election. But if your idea of “corruption” is only that which is illegal under bribery laws, that isn’t a problem that demands a solution. In the McCutcheon decision, Justice Roberts was quite clear in his belief that “Any regulation must…target what we have called “quid pro quo” corruption or its appearance…a direct exchange of an official act for money.” Large donations meant to gain the donor access or mere influence over lawmakers, he argued, aren’t enough. In his dissent, Justice Breyer took issue with this rather pinched view, saying “we can and should understand campaign finance laws as resting upon a broader and more significant constitutional rationale than the plurality’s limited definition of ‘corruption’ suggest.”
So maybe what we have here is in part a problem of nomenclature. If you don’t want to call it “corruption,” call it “distortion”—the creation of a system that is warped far beyond what it would be under any reasonable conception of democracy, even if nobody’s breaking any laws.
There is a meaningful difference. Most of the benefits big money looks for these days are spread beyond an individual, sometimes to an entire industry (like banks or oil companies) and sometimes to an even larger group of people and entities who have a common interest, like wealthy people who want to keep taxes on investment income lower than taxes on wage income. If someone like the Koch brothers succeeds in getting their favored candidates elected and their favored policies enacted, many billionaires and corporations will smile in appreciation. They won’t be doing it just for themselves.
There’s an important caveat, which is that money can have a great influence on the arcane details of legislation, where the public neither knows nor particularly cares what’s going on. Lobbyists still give plenty of money to members of Congress, and they do so to ensure the access that allows them to nibble at the nation’s laws for their clients’ benefit. In and of itself, money may not be able to buy a big, visible policy change—a reduction in the top tax rate or the killing of a minimum wage bill, for instance. But it can still buy an obscure provision in the nation’s banking laws, one that could be worth billions to some very interested parties but makes no front-page news.
Even disclosure of all campaign contributions to every type of independent group would probably have just a small impact in reducing the distortion money imposes on the system, in part because citizens can’t be expected to expend the effort to follow its every tendril. When a voter sees an ad casting aspersions on Senator Smiley’s opponent and hears “Americans for an American America is responsible for the content of this advertising,” what can she conclude? Not much, unless she happens to also read an article informing her that AfaAA is a creation of Oswald Greedyhands, whom some consider a heroic job-creator and others consider a nefarious exploiter of working people. Then she’s going to have to think about Oswald’s relationship with Senator Smiley, and learn about the Senator’s legislative record to see what favors he might have done for Greedyhands Industries. It’s a lot to expect of a citizen who has her own life to lead.
So even if the information is out there somewhere, and activists sound the alarms, so long as the money keeps pouring in, the system will bend inexorably toward the interests of those who fund it. A plutocratic system of government of, by, and for the wealthy isn’t necessarily “corrupt,” in the sense of being awash in specific, explicit bribes. But it isn’t particularly democratic, either.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The National Memo, April 7, 2014
“Justice Roberts Defends The Embattled Rich In McCutcheon”: With Laundered Contributions, You Can Now Buy Off Whole Committees
Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, in which the Supreme Court struck down aggregate limits on campaign donations, offers a novel twist in the conservative contemplation of what Nazis have to do with the way the rich are viewed in America. In January, Tom Perkins, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, worried about a progressive Kristallnacht; Kenneth Langone, the founder of Home Depot, said, of economic populism, “If you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.” Roberts, to his credit, avoided claiming the mantle of Hitler’s victims for wealthy campaign donors. He suggests, though, that the rich are, likewise, outcasts: “Money in politics may at times seem repugnant to some, but so too does much of what the First Amendment vigorously protects,” he writes:
If the First Amendment protects flag burning, funeral protests, and Nazi parades—despite the profound offense such spectacles cause—it surely protects political campaign speech despite popular opposition.
So the problem is that even Nazis are treated better than rich people—less constrained by public anger in their ability to speak out. Or pick your analogy: when thinking about people who want to donate large sums of money to candidates, should we compare their position to that of the despised and defeated, like the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois, in the nineteen-seventies, or of scorned dissidents, like flag-burners, trying to get their voice heard with their lonely donations?
As in Roberts’s opinion in Shelby v. Holder, in which the Court overturned parts of the Voting Rights Act last year, the people we think of as having the power are, in fact, embattled, the victims of schemes, driven by popular opinion, meant to “restrict the political participation of some in order to enhance the relative influence of others,” as Roberts put it. “The whole point of the First Amendment is to afford individuals protection against such infringements,” he wrote, adding:
No matter how desirable it may seem, it is not an acceptable governmental objective to “level the playing field,” or to “level electoral opportunities,” or to “equaliz[e] the financial resources of candidates.”
There is, apparently, a fine line between efforts to keep our political system from being for sale and a social experiment in levelling.
Roberts’s opinion left intact limits on how much a person can donate to a single candidate or party committee, but it took away the limit on how much money in total a person can give directly to candidates. Until this case, the totals were $48,600 to individuals and $74,600 to committees per election cycle. (Shaun McCutcheon, the plaintiff, said he wanted to keep giving directly to Republicans after he’d reached his limits; the Republican National Committee joined him in the case, saying it would be happy to take his money.) Roberts recognized, as the Court long has, that the government has an interest in preventing corruption which allows it to limit the size of a check that one person can hand one candidate. Earlier decisions allowed the aggregate limits in order to prevent donors from using multiple contributions to get around the cap, by giving to numerous committees that might pass the money around and get it to the candidate anyway. Stephen Breyer’s dissent—he was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—lays out a number of quite practical ways this could happen, but Roberts dismisses those arguments as silly.
“It is hard to believe that a rational actor would engage in such machinations,” Roberts writes, after examining how a person could donate to a hundred PACs to get money to a hypothetical candidate named Smith. He may simply be lacking in imagination here: the immediate effect of McCutcheon is likely to be the development of structures and vehicles for effectively laundering contributions through many small channels, and the emergence of specialists who know how to set these things up. Roberts might think that the complexity—the potential paperwork—is a guarantor against corruption, but he has too little faith. We’ve got the technology to get it done.
Roberts’s other argument is a little sad: “That same donor, meanwhile, could have spent unlimited funds on independent expenditures on behalf of Smith.” In other words, aggregate limits wouldn’t foster corruption, because using money to influence a campaign is much easier with the sort of independent expenditures that Citizens United makes possible.
Citizens United or no, McCutcheon will set up a large-scale experiment in how money is used and passed around, with new kinds of mega-bundling, and how coördinated donations either impose uniformity on a party’s far-flung candidates or help to solidify regional or ideological blocs. It may be a different kind of leveller than Roberts imagines; it could also be a way to financially fuel intra-party civil wars. And that is quite separate from the new potential for influence peddling. Instead of targeting a single Congressman, you can try to buy off a whole committee.
But then Roberts relies on a very narrow measure of corruption: “Ingratiation and access … are not corruption,” he writes, quoting Citizens United. (There are a number of citations of Citizens United in this decision.) The argument of McCutcheon, in effect, is that a political party itself cannot, by definition, be corrupted: “There is a clear, administrable line between money beyond the base limits funneled in an identifiable way to a candidate—for which the candidate feels obligated—and money within the base limits given widely to a candidate’s party—for which the candidate, like all other members of the party, feels grateful.” The gratitude may only be for a place of safety where donors, assailed by the popular opinion of bitter, poorer people, can find a little bit of solace.
By: Amy Davidson, The New Yorker, April 2, 2014
“Forgetting What Religion Is About”: When Did ‘Dependence’ Become A Dirty Word?
Too many Americans—including Christians—are afraid that helping the poor will create ‘dependency.’ They’re forgetting that’s what religion is all about.
Not long ago, I preached a Lenten sermon in which I made a lone reference to food stamps as being one of the ways we “love our neighbors as ourselves.” Judging from the reactions of a few congregants, you might have thought it was all I preached about. They went out of their way to tell me how such programs “breed” complacency, laziness, and—wait for it—dependency.
It reminded me of Rep. Paul Ryan, who’s always carrying on about America’s “culture of dependency,” and just realized a major budget proposal that would slash food stamps and other government measures that relieve the misery of the poorest Americans.
When did “dependence” become such a dirty word? We list our children on our income tax forms as “dependents” without stigmatizing them by such a designation. So why does “dependent” become an accusation when applied to other people’s children when they are in need of food stamp (SNAP) assistance, a free-school-lunch program, or housing assistance to rescue them from being homeless? Why is it wrong for someone blind, disabled, or elderly and frail to be “dependent” upon the society in which he or she lives for the basic necessities, when it is impossible for that person to provide for themselves?
And besides, it’s far from clear that a “culture of dependency” is what America has—in fact, we have something like the opposite. Independence may well be the modern day Golden Calf to which far too many of us bow down and worship. Independence is bound up in our national identity, both personal and corporate. After all, next to our Constitution, it is the Declaration of Independence to which we most often appeal. The rugged individualism which in many ways helped make our nation what it is may also be what is causing us to lose our sense of the common good.
The establishment of a social safety net is the most profoundly religious action a government can take. An underlying principle of the Judeo-Christian faith—indeed of most faith communities—is that God will judge humankind by the way we care for the most vulnerable in our midst. Think of all the people in the world we generally revere: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi, Clara Barton, Nelson Mandela, Dorothy Day, Albert Schweitzer, Dag Hammarskjold, Mother Teresa. All of them, in one way or another, reached out to the poor, the disenfranchised, and the marginalized, seeking to ease their pain and help bear their burdens.
When a government sets out to seek the common good, it realizes that there will be some among us who are less able to meet all their needs, chief among them housing, food and safety. And it’s not just a few of us who find ourselves in need at some point: as Mark Rank wrote on the New York Times’ Opinionator, “nearly 40 percent of Americans between the ages of 25 and 60 will experience at least one year below the official poverty line during that period ($23,492 for a family of four), and 54 percent will spend a year in poverty or near poverty (below 150 percent of the poverty line).”
Are there undeserving, even fraudulent people receiving welfare/food/housing assistance? Undoubtedly. But as a citizen of this great nation, I am willing to fund the undeserving few who slip by unnoticed and game the system, in order to provide for the many who are truly in need. Many of our national and state legislators seem to want to use the excuse of the undeserving few to gut the social safety net altogether, and by so doing, punish the many who are in real need.
In fact, most of the people who avail themselves of the government’s (in other words, our) social safety net are indeed dependent. Some of them will remain so: children (45 percent), the disabled, and the elderly (20 percent). Many more will remain so until we get serious about offering them the kind of assistance which might lift them out of poverty, like raising the minimum wage.
In 2012, 47 percent of people who received food stamp assistance were in families where at least one person was working. These so-called “working poor” are not lying around in Paul Ryan’s imagined hammock of ease, living off others’ hard work and generally having a grand time of it. They are working one or more jobs, and because of part-time work or low wages and extreme needs, are still not able to provide adequate food and shelter for themselves and their families. Politicians who claim to be “helping” poor people by depriving them of aid are either ignorant or cruel.
For Christians are called to care for our neighbors. Telling the Good Samaritan story, Jesus teaches that all people are our neighbors. And as for a few “getting away with murder,” Jesus reminds his followers that it rains on the just and the unjust alike, and that God will sort it all out in the end. Jews, Muslims, Christians, and followers of nearly every religion believe in helping those in need. So do most humanists and atheists. We are called to respect the dignity of every human being. And yet, we witness professed Christians like Paul Ryan putting forward budgets that would eviscerate our common safety net.
It’s time religious people stood up and laid claim to their desire and responsibility to care for the poor. It’s time to withdraw the stigma and condemnation from those who by necessity must be “dependent” on the rest of us. It should be our joy to serve them.
By: V. Gene Robinson, Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress, Washington, DC, and the Retired IX Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire; Published in The Daily Beast, April 4, 2014
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