“Divided You Win”: The ‘Second Amendment Folks’ Get To Have Their Way On Every Single Occasion, For All Eternity
I don’t watch the “Sunday shows,” but did find this opening comment from Donald Trump on This Week to represent not just his illogic but that of most Republicans:
BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response here at this podium ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it. We’ve become numb to this.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Well, he’s a great divider and, you know, you have a big issue between the Second Amendment folks and the non-Second Amendment folks. And he is a non-Second Amendment person.
So apparently, this means the “Second Amendment folks” get to have their way on every single occasion, for all eternity. The whole world could be plunged into fiery chaos, and you’d still find this small group of Americans buying up every gun in sight, and implicitly threatening the rest of us that they’ll use their firepower on us if we dare suggest that ten or twenty or thirty military assault weapons are enough for them. “Gun rights” have become a secular religion with its own oaths and litanies and most of all anathemas, and when politically aligned with the corporate Cult of the Golden Calf, one despairs of curbing its power.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 5, 2015
“For GOP, ‘Obamacare’ Is Inherently Bad, Even When It’s Good”: Focusing On Guns And Mental Health Means Talking About The ACA
In the wake of every mass-shooting – events that occur with heartbreaking regularity in the United States, but no other industrialized democracy – political rhetoric tends to follow a predictable trajectory. Democratic officials, in general, raise the prospect of new policies to curtail gun violence.
And Republican officials, in general, decry such efforts as anti-freedom, preferring to focus on practically anything else. For some on the right, mass shootings serve as an excuse to renew conversations about violent entertainment (though plenty of other countries enjoy similar cultural fare without violent consequences). For others, gun massacres are reason to start merging religion and public schools (as if the Second Amendment is inviolate, but the First Amendment is malleable).
But in recent months, a focus on mental health – which must have tested well with focus groups – has become one of the GOP’s principal talking points. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas), the day of the mass-shooting in Oregon last week, urged President Obama to back Cornyn’s bill “to address mental health factor in mass violence incidents.”
In the Washington Post over the weekend, University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack described some provisions of Cornyn’s proposal as “helpful and constructive,” but highlighted a missing piece of the puzzle.
Cornyn’s proposal does not address the most glaring issue in American mental health policy: the Affordable Care Act’s Medicaid expansion. Medicaid expansion was always the public health cornerstone of ACA. It remains the single most important measure to expand access to mental health and addiction treatment, serving severely vulnerable populations such as the homeless, addressing the complicated medical and psychiatric difficulties of many young men cycling through our jails and prisons.
I suspect that for many Republicans, the idea of “Obamacare” playing a meaningful role in preventing mass-shootings must sound ridiculous. After all, “Obamacare” is inherently bad, even when it’s good, and all of its provisions must be rejected because, well, just because.
But Pollack is entirely correct, and if GOP officials are going to ignore gun-safety measures to focus on mental health, they should probably grow up and reconcile their mental-health rhetoric with their mindless, knee-jerk hostility towards Medicaid expansion through the ACA.
Indeed, Pollack’s Washington Post piece added:
In 2013, the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) released a report endorsing Medicaid expansion. The report argued that “States that decline to expand Medicaid will miss as good an opportunity as they may ever have to address this shameful void in access to mental health treatment.” Addressing the connection between mental illness and violence, NAMI concluded:
“In the aftermath of Newtown, many politicians and policy makers have promised to take steps to fix America’s broken mental health system. Expanding Medicaid in all states would represent a significant step towards keeping those promises.”
My suspicion, based on years of conservative apoplexy about expanding Americans’ access to affordable health security, is that when Republicans talk about mental health as a substitute for a debate about gun policy, they’re creating a smoke screen. Many of these partisans aren’t serious about expanding mental-health services, so much as they’re pushing a talking point to circumvent an even less pleasant conversation about the frequency of gun deaths in the United States.
They can, however, prove these suspicions wrong fairly easily. Pollack concluded, “If any other politician suggests that mental health rather than gun policy is central to reducing mass homicides, ask where they stand on Medicaid expansion. Their answer will be clarifying.”
Let’s start with Senator Cornyn, who fought tooth and nail to block Medicaid expansion in Texas, despite the fact that Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the entire country. Any chance he’ll consider a new, more constructive posture on the issue as part of his renewed interest on the issue of mental health?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 5, 2015
“There Is No Such Thing As Settled Law”: If You Liked 10 Years Of The Roberts Court, You’ll Love The Next Republican President
There were plenty of terrifying moments in this month’s Republican presidential debate on CNN, but one of the most terrifying, to me, was when the candidates started to complain that the current U.S. Supreme Court isn’t conservative enough.
Specifically, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz went after Chief Justice John Roberts, who has led what law professor Erwin Chemerinksy has called “the most conservative court since the mid-1930s” but whose appointment the conservative far-right Cruz nonetheless called a “mistake.” What Cruz objected to was Roberts’ two votes to save the Affordable Care Act from frivolous conservative lawsuits. What he didn’t mention is that a less conservative right-wing Court would not have even entertained those politically motivated cases in the first place. In fact, the Court under Roberts has taken a stunning turn to the Right.
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the day Chief Justice Roberts was sworn in to the Supreme Court. In that decade, aided by the confirmation of fellow George W. Bush nominee Samuel Alito, he has led a Court that has radically reshaped vast swathes of the law, undermining constitutional protections for civil rights and voting rights, reproductive freedom, workplace fairness, the environment, gun violence, consumer fairness and representative democracy as a whole.
As People For the American Way explains in “Judgment Day 2016,” a new analysis of Roberts’ decade at the head of the Supreme Court, under his leadership the Court “has issued more than 165 5-4 decisions, many of which have bent the law and defied logic, seriously harmed the rights of ordinary Americans, promoted the interests of powerful corporations, and damaged our democracy.”
The most infamous of these is probably Citizens United v. FEC, which, along with a set of related cases, gutted the country’s campaign finance system, allowing wealthy individuals and corporate interests almost unchecked influence over American elections. But the Roberts Court’s gifts to Corporate America did not end there. Among the cases decided by the court’s five-justice conservative majority were Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co., which undermined women’s ability to seek equal pay for equal work; Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which upended religious liberty protections to allow corporations to deny full health insurance coverage to their employees; and AT&T v. Concepcion, which protected corporations that cheat large numbers of customers out of small amounts of money.
The Court’s conservative right-wing bent has extended to civil rights cases, most stunningly its 5-4 ruling gutting the enforcement mechanism of the Voting Rights Act, which had allowed the Justice Department to review changes in voting laws in areas with a history of racial discrimination in election practices. In other cases, the court has been just one vote away from wreaking havoc on civil rights laws, including the 5-4 decision in which Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the four moderate Justices to preserve the ability to effectively enforce the Fair Housing Act, another critical achievement of the Civil Rights Movement.
This Court will rightly be remembered by many as the one that guaranteed gays and lesbians the right to marry in Obergefell v. Hodges. But that landmark case, in which Justice Kennedy joined the moderate Justices, was one bright spot in a very bleak landscape.
It’s important to remember as well that Chief Justice Roberts, whom Republicans are now attacking as too liberal, wrote the conservative justices’ scathing dissent in that case. If conservatives get one more vote on the Supreme Court, Obergefell could be in danger. If there is one thing the Roberts Court has taught us, it is that there is no such thing as settled law. Despite predictions that the Republican Party would just fold up its tent on the marriage issue, its presidential candidates are campaigning with promises to appoint Justices who will overturn the decision.
Whatever issue you care about most in the upcoming election – civil rights, health care, reproductive freedom, LGBT rights, or others – it will almost certainly end up before the Supreme Court. And the composition of that Court, and whether it will protect our rights or defer to big corporations and right-wing interests, will depend greatly on whether a Democrat or Republican is elected as our next president.
By the end of the next president’s first term, four of the current Supreme Court Justices will be in their 80s, past modern Justices’ average retirement age of 78. This means that the next president will likely have the power to either turn back the Court’s rightward swing … or preserve or worsen it for decades to come.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People for The American Way; The Huffington Post Blog, September 29, 2015
“Voodoo Never Dies”: Never Forget That What It’s Really About Is Top-Down Class Warfare
So Donald Trump has unveiled his tax plan. It would, it turns out, lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
This is in contrast to Jeb Bush’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit, and Marco Rubio’s plan, which would lavish huge cuts on the wealthy while blowing up the deficit.
For what it’s worth, it looks as if Trump’s plan would make an even bigger hole in the budget than Jeb’s. Jeb justifies his plan by claiming that it would double America’s rate of growth; The Donald, ahem, trumps this by claiming that he would triple the rate of growth. But really, why sweat the details? It’s all voodoo. The interesting question is why every Republican candidate feels compelled to go down this path.
You might think that there was a defensible economic case for the obsession with cutting taxes on the rich. That is, you might think that if you’d spent the past 20 years in a cave (or a conservative think tank). Otherwise, you’d be aware that tax-cut enthusiasts have a remarkable track record: They’ve been wrong about everything, year after year.
Some readers may remember the forecasts of economic doom back in 1993, when Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate. What happened instead was a sustained boom, surpassing the Reagan years by every measure.
Undaunted, the same people predicted great things as a result of George W. Bush’s tax cuts. What happened instead was a sluggish recovery followed by a catastrophic economic crash.
Most recently, the usual suspects once again predicted doom in 2013, when taxes on the 1 percent rose sharply due to the expiration of some of the Bush tax cuts and new taxes that help pay for health reform. What happened instead was job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s.
Then there’s the recent state-level evidence. Kansas slashed taxes, in what its right-wing governor described as a “real live experiment” in economic policy; the state’s growth has lagged ever since. California moved in the opposite direction, raising taxes; it has recently led the nation in job growth.
True, you can find self-proclaimed economic experts claiming to find overall evidence that low tax rates spur economic growth, but such experts invariably turn out to be on the payroll of right-wing pressure groups (and have an interesting habit of getting their numbers wrong). Independent studies of the correlation between tax rates and economic growth, for example by the Congressional Research Service, consistently find no relationship at all. There is no serious economic case for the tax-cut obsession.
Still, tax cuts are politically popular, right? Actually, no, at least when it comes to tax cuts for the wealthy. According to Gallup, only 13 percent of Americans believe that upper-income individuals pay too much in taxes, while 61 percent believe that they pay too little. Even among self-identified Republicans, those who say that the rich should pay more outnumber those who say they should pay less by two to one.
Well, consider the trajectory of Marco Rubio, who may at this point be the most likely Republican nominee. Last year he supported a tax-cut plan devised by Senator Mike Lee that purported to be aimed at the poor and the middle class. In reality, its benefits were strongly tilted toward high incomes — but it still drew harsh criticism from the right for giving too much to ordinary families while not cutting taxes on top incomes enough.
So Mr. Rubio came back with a plan that eliminated taxes on dividends, capital gains, and inherited wealth, providing a huge windfall to the very wealthy. And suddenly he was gaining a lot of buzz among Republican donors. The new plan would add trillions to the deficit, which conservatives claim to care about, but never mind.
In other words, it’s straightforward and quite stark: Republicans support big tax cuts for the wealthy because that’s what wealthy donors want. No doubt most of those donors have managed to convince themselves that what’s good for them is good for America. But at root it’s about rich people supporting politicians who will make them richer. Everything else is just rationalization.
Of course, once the Republicans settle on a nominee, an army of hired guns will be mobilized to obscure this stark truth. We’ll see claims that it’s really a middle-class tax cut, that it will too do great things for economic growth, and look over there — emails! And given the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism, this campaign of obfuscation may work.
But never forget that what it’s really about is top-down class warfare. That may sound simplistic, but it’s the way the world works.
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, October 2, 2015
“The Byproduct Of A Tragic Myth”: You Don’t Need That Gun For Self-Defense
One of the most important pieces ever posted at Politico Magazine was written on January 14 by Evan DeFilippis and Devan Hughes. Titled The Myth Behind Defensive Gun Ownership, it’s worth revisiting again:
What do these and so many other cases have in common? They are the byproduct of a tragic myth: that millions of gun owners successfully use their firearms to defend themselves and their families from criminals. Despite having nearly no academic support in public health literature, this myth is the single largest motivation behind gun ownership. It traces its origin to a two-decade-old series of surveys that, despite being thoroughly repudiated at the time, persists in influencing personal safety decisions and public policy throughout the United States.
There is nothing beyond anecdotal evidence and one very flawed study suggesting that defensive use of firearms has benefits that outweigh the obvious societal drawbacks. The conclusion to the article needs to be ingrained into the DNA of the gun control debate:
The myth of widespread defensive gun use is at the heart of the push to weaken already near catatonic laws controlling the use of guns and expand where good guys can carry guns to bars, houses of worship and college campuses—all in the mistaken belief that more “good guys with guns” will help stop the “bad guys.” As Wayne LaPierre of the NRA railed in the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun.”
But the evidence clearly shows that our lax gun laws and increased gun ownership, spurred on by this myth, do not help “good guys with guns” defend themselves, their families or our society. Instead, they are aiding and abetting criminals by providing them with more guns, with 200,000 already stolen on an annual basis. And more guns means more homicides. More suicides. More dead men, women and children. Not fewer.
In the latest mass shooting in Oregon, of course, the “good guy with a gun” hypothesis fell on its face. Just as the potential “good guy with a gun” in the Gaby Giffords shooting came very close to firing on the wrong man and thankfully kept his weapon in check, an armed veteran in Oregon also wisely chose not to fire his gun lest he cause greater danger to himself and others.
There is no reason to believe that guns serve much if any social benefit beyond a few news stories now and again that are massively promoted by the gun lobby to further entrench the myth of effective self-defense.
Comedian Jim Jefferies also exploded the “self-defense” myth in a blisteringly funny and effective 3-minute bit:
But sadly, the same false arguments will continue to be used by gun proponents, in the same way that false arguments about climate change, taxes and abortion are consistently used no matter how often they’re debunked. The American right has gone so far off the rails that reality is no longer a relevant boundary on discussion. As with supply-side economics, the benefits of gun culture are taken not on evidence but on almost cultic faith by the right wing and its adherents.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Wasington Monthly, October 4, 2015
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