“Taking Cover Behind What’s Left Unsaid”: The GOP’s Midterm Strategy Is As Hollow As Their Ideas Are
The most interesting thing about Senator Mark Pryor’s decision to tout his support for the Affordable Care Act in a well-financed, statewide television ad isn’t that he stands apart from other embattled Democrats this election cycle. It’s that Republicans scrambled to spin the story, insisting to reporters that Pryor couldn’t possibly be running on Obamacare if he won’t refer to the law by name.
This was poorly disguised Calvinball, a standard that Republicans invented for the special case of the ACA. Literally no other members of Congress are expected to refer to the laws they’ve helped pass by name or nickname. Republicans in the aughts weren’t expected to refer to the “Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act,” or “EGTRRA,” or “the Bush tax cuts,” or “the Bush tax cuts for the rich,” no matter how unpopular the moniker became. They ran on having cut taxes, and wanting to renew those tax cuts. And sure enough when President Obama set about trying to let “the Bush tax cuts” expire, he conveniently omitted the popular ones. Which is to say, the vast majority of them. He made those permanent.
Nevertheless, several reporters fell into line. And good for the ref workers. Score one for them.
But if Obamacare is a huge liability for Democrats, why are conservatives and GOP operatives desperate to control the narrative surrounding Pryor’s decision to run on the law? If your opponent’s stepping on rakes, why not just stand back and let him?
The answer is that with respect to both Obamacare and other issues Republicans must rely on diversions from policy and outcomes when expressing their substantive and strategic views. We’ve reached a point in the fight over Obamacare where the best thing Republicans have on their side is the law’s unpopular brand. Particularly in states like Arkansas, where President Obama is widely loathed but his signature law has cut the uninsurance rate nearly in half. It’s deeply silly to argue that Pryor isn’t running on Obamacare unless he refers to it using one of two unpopular slogans. But that’s the argument.
Instead, Pryor says, “I helped pass a law that prevents insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick or deny [sic] coverage based on pre-existing conditions.” Maybe he shouldn’t have said anything about “a law” at all, but that’s a niggling, semantic critique. That Republicans working to defeat Pryor are asking reporters to squeeze the word “Obamacare” into this sentence is an admission that they’ve lost the policy fight. They criticize Pryor for eschewing the label, because the label’s just about the only thing they’re comfortable assailing. In this way, they resemble Democrats six and eight years ago, running against the Bush tax cuts (for the rich), knowing that they had no intention of letting anything but the most regressive of those tax cuts expire.
In that sense, the GOP’s obsession with the moniker, and only the moniker, is excellent news for Obamacare’s political durability. But only if the people who cover politics are clear about the implications of the GOP’s rhetoric. Unlike Democrats, who were generally clear about the fact that they planned to make most of the Bush tax cuts permanent, Pryor’s opponent, Representative Tom Cotton, acknowledges that the pre-Obamacare status quo, in which insurers denied coverage to people with pre-existing health conditions, was “broken,” but nevertheless maintains that his goal is to repeal the law that makes that practice illegal.
Cotton repeated that mantra just this week, on the trail with Mitt Romney, who, in an amusing twist, tried to save Cotton from himself. “Tom Cotton is going to make sure that we change Obamacare, making sure that people can keep insurance and those that have pre-existing conditions can have coverage,” Romney said, “but he doesn’t want to see the federal government telling people in Arkansas what kind of insurance they have to have or making it more expensive.” Those are remarkably accommodating priorities. They’re just not ones Cotton is prepared to espouse just yet.
In this way, the politics of Obamacare in Arkansas mirror the politics of legislative brinksmanship in Kentucky. Just two days ago, Mitch McConnell, the embattled Senate minority leader who hopes to become majority leader next year, vowed to lard up appropriations bills with partisan policy riders and allow the president to choose between a veto, precipitating a government shutdown, and a bitter pill. A classic take it or leave it proposition.
McConnell said it would be up to the president to decide whether to veto spending bills that would keep the government open.
Obama “needs to be challenged, and the best way to do that is through the funding process,” McConnell said. “He would have to make a decision on a given bill, whether there’s more in it that he likes than dislikes.”
It wouldn’t be much of a challenge to Obama if McConnell plans to cave the moment the president whips out his veto pen. So the threat is pretty clear. Nevertheless, McConnell’s campaign wasn’t pleased by the ensuing deluge of stories about how a GOP majority would embrace high-stakes confrontations and potentially shut down the government again. And in a very narrow sense they have a point—McConnell never said he’d shut down the government. Political scientist Jonathan Bernstein, no McConnell partisan, was among those who defended McConnell on this score.
But much like Cotton can’t credibly claim to support protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions when his plan is to repeal Obamacare, McConnell can’t sidestep the implications of his publicly declared strategy. He can’t say “when we’re in power, we’re going to put two and two together,” and then get angry when the headlines say, “McConnell promises four.”
That won’t stop him from trying to, though. And to an unappreciated extent, the broader Republican strategy heading into November is to speak in abstractions, and take cover behind what’s left unsaid.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, August 22, 2014
“Making A Just Outcome More Likely”: The Prosecutor In The Michael Brown Case Must Go
Lots of people in and around Ferguson, Missouri, don’t trust Robert McCulloch, the prosecutor who is presenting the facts about Michael Brown’s killing to a local Grand Jury. In fact, more than 70,000 of them have reportedly signed an online petition calling for the appointment of a new, special prosecutor to replace him.
These critics have their reasons. They think McCulloch’s record suggests that he is unlikely to construct an aggressive case against Darren Wilson, the white police officer who shot and killed Brown, who is black. And without a serious effort at prosecution, these people say, a Grand Jury is more likely to conclude the case is too weak to pursue.
I don’t know if that assessment of McCulloch and his motives is correct. I also don’t think it matters. McCulloch should step aside.
I don’t say this because I’m sure that Wilson is guilty or deserves indictment. On the contrary, the precise circumstances of Brown’s death still seem murky. Pretty much everybody seems to agree on how the incident began twelve days ago—with Wilson stopping Brown in the street, an altercation ensuing, and then Wilson firing at Brown as he gave chase to him. But the witness accounts that have become public so far diverge on a few key points, including what Brown was doing when he eventually stopped and turned. At that moment, when one of Wilson’s bullets delivered a fatal blow to Brown’s head, was the 18-year-old trying to surrender? Or was he charging at Wilson? The angle of the shot has gotten a lot of attention, because it suggests that Brown, who was six-foot-four, had lowered his head before getting hit. But that could actually be consistent with either of the theories.
The twelve-member Grand Jury will eventually get to see more evidence. It will get the results of ballistic tests, for example, and it will hear a much fuller range of witness testimony than anybody in the public has heard so far. But more evidence won’t necessarily clarify what happened—or whether Wilson should face criminal charges. Not everybody will remember the event the same way. Tests can be inconclusive or contradict one another. The Grand Jury will ultimately have to decide whether there is “probable cause,” but that’s a pretty fuzzy standard and open to interpretation. Inevitably, a lot will depend on what kind of case the prosecutor decides to present.
The issue with McCulloch isn’t whether he’s capable of mastering and presenting the material. It’s whether he’ll do so in an impartial way. Prosecutors are always close to police, because they work closely on investigations. But McCulloch seems to have particularly strong feelings—strong enough that, when Governor Jay Nixon called in the state highway patrol to take over security in Ferguson a week ago, McCulloch criticized Nixon strongly and publicly. “It’s shameful what he did today, he had no legal authority to do that,” McCulloch said. “To denigrate the men and women of the county police department is shameful.”
One reason McCulloch may feel so strongly about cops is that several relatives have served on the force. (One of them, McCulloch’s father, died in the line of duty when he was shot by an African-American.) Critics have also taken note of a 2001 statement McCulloch made, in a controversial case of police shooting two unarmed men. McCulloch called the victims “bums.” McCulloch presented that case to a Grand Jury. It declined to indict.
“Nobody thinks Michael Brown can get a fair shake from this guy,” Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman, told the New York Times. “There is very little faith, especially in the black community, that there would ever be a fair trial.” McCulloch has bristled at such criticism and pledged to see the case through. “I have absolutely no intention of walking away from the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me by the people in this community,” McCulloch said in a radio interview. “I have done it for 24 years, and I’ve done, if I do say so myself, a very good job.”
It’s entirely possible that a fair-minded Grand Jury will conclude the evidence doesn’t justify an indictment, let alone a conviction, at least according to the legal standards of Missouri. As my colleague Yishai Schwartz has written, the state’s laws make it unusually difficult to convict a police officer who claims that he fired in self-defense. But the difficulty of the case is precisely why McCulloch shouldn’t be the one presenting it. It needs a prosecutor whose intentions and motives are not in doubt. Otherwise, people will assume a decision not to indict reflects lack of prosecutorial effort, rather than the facts of the case.
McCulloch has said that he will step aside if Nixon asks him to do so. Nixon (whose own motives are open to question) has declined to take that step, arguing that it would exceed his authority. It’s not clear exactly how far the governor’s power extends in cases like these. I’ve read and heard different accounts about what Missouri law allows. But nobody questions that McCulloch can decide to recuse himself, clearing the way for Nixon to name a special prosecutor.
McCulloch should seize the opportunity. It would demonstrate that he has the integrity some think he lacks. It would also make a just outcome more likely.
By: Jonathan Cohn, The New Republic, August 21, 2014
“Innocent Before Proven Guilty?”: The Bizarre Bipartisan Rush To Clear Rick Perry
If you’re planning a second presidential bid — especially if your last one didn’t go so well — getting indicted would seem to be, at the very least, a major roadblock.
But the news that Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) is facing felony charges has so far brought the man nothing but support and sympathy. As the Texas Observer’s Forrest Wilder put it, “Judging from the reaction of national pundits and journalists, the verdict in the case of State of Texas vs. James Richard ‘Rick’ Perry is already in: Rick Perry is not just innocent; he’s being railroaded by liberal Democrats in a vindictive, politically motivated prosecution.”
On both the right and the left, politicos have sympathized with the governor, arguing the case is nothing but a political witch hunt. “Sketchy” is how David Axelrod described the whole affair.
Rather than taking a hit, Perry has managed to turn his ordeal into an indictment of the apparently oh-so-powerful liberal establishment in Texas. He’s largely played offense. On Tuesday, he got booked, smiled through his mug shot, then went out for ice cream at Austin-favorite Sandy’s. His statement on the charges explained that “this indictment amounts to nothing more than an abuse of power and I cannot, and will not, allow that to happen.”
The greatest irony with Perry being cast as victim is that the many charges of cronyism and legalized corruption that have long dogged his tenure are now at risk of fading to the background — just part of those ostensibly trumped-up integrity charges.
But the highlights alone show a theme. Perry’s biggest backer, the late home-building magnate Bob Perry (no relation), once got his own commission, the Texas Residential Construction Commission, which largely shielded builders from consumer complaints. In another case, Perry mandated an HPV vaccine for all Texas girls after his former chief of staff, Mike Toomey, became a lobbyist for the vaccine maker, Merck. Then there was the time construction firm HNTB hired former Perry spokesman and friend Ray Sullivan less than a year after he left the governor’s office; from 2004 to 2009, when Sullivan returned to Perry’s staff, the company got $300 million worth of state contracts. (One $45 million contract, for disaster recovery, had to be canceled after the company disastrously mismanaged rebuilding from Hurricane Ike.)
For now, the indictment gives Perry more allies than he has any right to expect, which allows him to gain distance from charges of corruption on every front.
Of course, that might not last.
The charges aren’t nearly as straightforwardly bunk as many reports make them sound. In 2013, Travis County District Attorney Rosemary Lehmberg was arrested for drunk driving and displayed appalling behavior — screaming and crying and spitting — as she was pulled over and cuffed, all of it caught on camera. Many thought she should resign, but Perry uniquely stood to gain from her departure. Housed within the Travis County DA’s office is the Public Integrity Unit, which investigates and prosecutes corruption in the state. It’s one of the most significant checks on the power Perry has amassed in his 14 years in office. Had Lehmberg resigned, Perry would have appointed her successor.
Perry threatened to veto all funding for the Public Integrity Unit if Lehmberg didn’t resign. And when Lehmberg didn’t step down, the state funding got cut. But Perry, through intermediaries, continued to make offers in exchange for her resignation, including a promise to return funding to the office and another position for Lehmberg within the DA’s office. Though no one disputes that the governor has the power to veto funds or to call for a DA’s resignation, Perry’s guilt or innocence rests on whether these threats and promises amount to an illegal coercion of public officials.
Though some national pundits have claimed a liberal witch hunt because a left-leaning group, Texans for Public Justice, filed the complaint against Perry, it was actually a Republican judge, Bert Richardson, who gave the case to special prosecutor Michael McCrum, a man who’s received support from Democrats and Republicans. We still don’t know what evidence McCrum has gathered in his investigation.
It’s certainly possible that as the case drags out and more information comes to light, Perry will lose his glow of invincibility. Even if the evidence is not enough for a guilty verdict, it may still hang Perry in the courtroom of public opinion. But these aren’t easy cases to prove, and Perry has assembled an impressive team to combat the charges.
For now, Perry should be pretty pleased with turning what should have been a black eye into some sort of beauty mark. He might even go out and get more ice cream to celebrate.
By: Abby Rapoport, Freelance Reporter in Austin, Texas; The Week, August 22, 2014
“The True Foment Is Deeper And Broader”: Ferguson’s Schools Are Just As Troubling As Its Police Force
A day after his visit to Ferguson, Missouri, Attorney General Eric H. Holder stated in a press conference that, “History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.” To what history was he referring? Many assumed General Holder meant the longstanding tensions between the mostly black residents of Ferguson and the mostly white police force, but I believe General Holder meant a deeper and broader history that goes well beyond policing. The anger in Ferguson is not just in reaction to shabby treatment by the police, but also the city’s housing, educational, and other civic institutions.
The history of racial mistrust in Ferguson can be found in the legacy of residential segregation in the St. Louis metropolitan area, enforced from the early to the middle twentieth century through mechanisms such as racially restrictive covenants, zoning laws, realtors agreements, and assessors ratings, as research by Professor Colin Gordon demonstrates. Because of these longstanding policies, black Ferguson residents today are disproportionately renters without a strong political stake in the town’s governance and geographically concentrated in areas without economic power.
The broader perspective can be found by looking to recent events surrounding the school district that serves Ferguson residents. Michael Brown graduated from Normandy High School, which was located, until recently, in the Normandy School District. The facts here are a bit complex, but note that I said “until recently.” That is because the Normandy School district lost its accreditation in 2012 due to dismal standardized test scores. (Normandy was one of only three out of 500 school districts in Missouri to lose its accreditation.) The state school board took over the Normandy School District and renamed it the “Normandy School Collaborative.” By 2013, though, the new district also had lost its accreditation. Missouri law allows students of failed districts to transfer to higher-performing schools in surrounding suburbs, but the failing school district has to pay tuition and transportation costs to get the kids to their new schools. The 1,000 transfer students of Normandy obviously had no desire to remain in the “new” failed district, but the cost was high, so, incredibly, the state board voted to waive accreditation of the Collaborative rather than classify the new district as unaccredited. Ferguson’s teenagers were therefore trapped in a failed school because state politicians didn’t want to pay for them to transfer out.
These kinds of shenanigans put the policing of Ferguson into context. The protests we have watched unfold there are not simply about unfair policing in that town; rather, they are the result of a deep and broad collection of official decisions that residents, not surprisingly, interpret as demeaning to them. Viewed in this light the analogies that some have drawn to the riots of the sixties make more sense. The Kerner Commission, charged with investigating urban unrest, hypothesized that conditions in slum living such as poor housing, schools, and jobs fueled the violent reactions of residents, but the reporters also fingered as a prime cause of every riot during the period tensions between police and residents of so-called racial ghettoes. The Commission noted specifically that public confrontations between law enforcement personnel and residents of segregated urban neighborhoods, usually ordinary arrests or stops, as opposed to extraordinary and tragic events like the one in Fergsuon, specifically sparked many riots. Policing incidents may trigger social unrest, but the true foment is deeper and broader.
The lessons that police can learn to prevent incidents such as these also have broader application. My colleague Tom Tyler and I have written that police legitimacy is a key to promoting compliance with the law and better cooperation between police and the public. Decades of social psychological research shows that the foundation of legitimacy is in four components of procedural justice. Legal authorities such as police promote legitimacy by (1) treating people with dignity and respect; (2) making decisions fairly, based on fact and not on illegitimate factors such as race; (3) giving people a chance to tell their side of the story, what psychologists call “voice;” (4) and acting in a way that encourages those with whom authorities deal to believe that they will be treated benevolently in the future. The research is quite clear. People care more about these factors than outcomes. That is, it is often more important to them to be treated with dignity and respect while receiving a negative outcome, such as a traffic ticket, than it is to be treated poorly and not receive a ticket even in a situation where they clearly violated the law. The bottom line? The citizens of Ferguson want to believe that the authorities they interact with believe that they, Ferguson residents, count. Instead, again and again the message the Ferguson residents have received through official action, word and deed is that they do not.
Those of us outside of Ferguson received a lesson in what I have sketched out here when Captain Ron Johnson of the Missouri Highway Patrol came to Ferguson. It is true that his race and the fact that he grew up in the town helped smooth the way for him. It is also true that the fact that he went out and spoke to the demonstrators, listened to them, and explained what he was doing and why are all textbook components of procedural justice. When police authorities act in this way, if a tragic incident such as the shooting of Michael Brown occurs, police executives get a “moment of pause” rather than a riot.
City leaders and the Normandy School board can benefit from a greater commitment to legitimacy in their decision-making as well. Transparency and inclusiveness are keys. I believe that the citizens of Ferguson simply want to be treated as just that—citizens. It is far past time to provide them with what they deserve.
By: Tracey Meares, The New Republic, August 22, 2014
“A Nation Of Cultural Illiterates”: What’s Next In Ferguson? Let’s Try A Little Education
What next?
That’s what should concern us now. When the nightly dance of angry protesters, opportunistic criminals, and inept police clashing over the shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown finally ends, what steps should civic-minded people take to address the ongoing abuse of African-Americans by the criminal injustice system? Not just in Ferguson, Missouri, but in America?
There will be no shortage of good ideas: dashboard cameras, community policing, the hiring of more black cops, the removal of military hardware from police arsenals, sensitivity training. To these, I would add a suggestion that is admittedly less “sexy” than any of those, but which I think has greater potential to make fundamental change in the long term. In a word: education.
Beginning as early as the latter elementary years, schools should offer — no, require — age-appropriate cross-cultural studies that would, in effect, introduce us to us. Meaning not some airy-fairy curriculum of achievements and accomplishments designed to impart some vague intra-cultural pride, but a hard-headed, warts and all American history designed to impart understanding of who we are, where we’re from and the forces that have made us — inner-city black, Appalachian white, barrio Mexican, whatever.
You might consider this a utopian idea. Maybe it is. But I’ve never been able to shake a conviction that if you walk the proverbial mile in another man’s shoes, you inoculate yourself against your biases toward him. I believe empathy follows understanding.
Surely we could use some empathy just now. As America races toward a future in which no one race is numerically dominant, it remains largely a nation of cultural illiterates content to interpret various Others through lenses of stereotype and canard. If this has been a bonanza for certain politicians (“Elect me and I’ll keep you safe from the gays/the Mexicans/the blacks!”), let us never forget that this ignorance, these unconscious biases for and against, have real-world impact.
Michael Brown lying dead in the street is seemingly one image thereof. Here’s another:
Last Thursday at 2:30 in the morning, seven teenagers, ages 18 and 19, broke into the home of basketball star Ray Allen. Allen, who played last season for the Miami Heat, was not home, but his wife was. Waking to find strangers in her bedroom, she screamed and they ran.
Police say the teenagers, who had been at a party at a house near Allen’s in the tony South Florida suburb of Coral Gables, didn’t think anybody was home and simply wanted to see what it looked like inside. The kids were questioned and released. Authorities have thus far declined to prosecute, saying — incredibly — that under Florida law, there was no crime with which the group could be charged.
It ought not surprise you to learn that these kids were white Hispanics. And I challenge you — I double-dog dare you — to tell me seven black kids who invaded a home in a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the night would have likewise gotten off with a good talking-to. Black kids are strangers to such lavish benefit of the doubt.
And we have been too sanguine for too long about such inequality of treatment in a nation whose birth certificate says, “all men are created equal.” We have only the one country. And we can either tear it apart or figure out a way we can all live in it in justice and thus, in peace.
To do that, we must stop being moral cowards, stop embracing the idea that somehow, our racial and cultural challenges will resolve themselves if we just don’t talk about them. Ignore it and it will go away. Take a good look at the carnage in Ferguson and ask yourself:
How’s that working out so far?
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, August 20, 2014
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