“Arrested Governance”: Do Everything You Can To Sabotage Government To Keep It From Operating Effectively
The Internal Revenue Service was closed today, as employees were furloughed due to sequestration’s budget cuts. Conservatives found this to be an occasion for side-splitting humor; Sarah Palin, for example, tweeted, “The IRS is closed today, feel free to use your phones.” Get it, because the IRS was tapping … um … well, never mind. In any case, today is a reminder that this scandal could be an opportunity for reform that clarifies the law on political and non-political groups, leads to a greater professionalization of the agency, and makes future misconduct less likely. Or it could wind up being just the opposite.
As Kevin Drum reminded us yesterday, one of the low moments of the Gingrich years in Congress was a series of hearings meant to expose IRS wrongdoing, in which horror stories of the agency’s abuse of taxpayers were told to lawmakers eager to hear them. In response, the IRS’s authority was curtailed and its budget slashed. The predictable consequence was less enforcement of tax laws (warming Republicans’ hearts, no doubt), but also an agency that had to do more with less.
If anyone was forced to do more with less, it was the office in Cincinnati, where a small number of poorly trained employees had to process thousands of new applications from groups seeking tax-exempt status after 2010. That isn’t to say there was no wrongdoing, but if you want an agency that does its job well and upholds the highest standards of professionalism, cutting its resources is not the way to get it.
But that could well happen again, and Republicans would be only too happy about it. It would be of a piece with the way they approach so much of what passes for their attempts at governing: Do everything you can to sabotage government and keep it from operating effectively, and then when it falls short, shout “See?!? We told you government can’t do anything right!”
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 24, 2013
“Misplaced Honor”: Whitewashing The Actions Of The Rebels
In the complex and not entirely complete process of reconciliation after the Civil War, honoring the dead with markers, tributes and ceremonies has played a crucial role. Some of these gestures, like Memorial Day, have been very successful. The practice of decorating the graves arose in many towns, north and south, some even before the war had ended. This humble idea quickly spread throughout the country, and the recognition of common loss helped reconcile North and South.
But other gestures had a more political edge. Equivalence of experience was stretched to impute an equivalence of legitimacy. The idea that “now, we are all Americans” served to whitewash the actions of the rebels. The most egregious example of this was the naming of United States Army bases after Confederate generals.
Today there are at least 10 of them. Yes — the United States Army maintains bases named after generals who led soldiers who fought and killed United States Army soldiers; indeed, who may have killed such soldiers themselves.
Only a couple of the officers are famous. Fort Lee, in Virginia, is of course named for Robert E. Lee, a man widely respected for his integrity and his military skills. Yet, as the documentarian Ken Burns has noted, he was responsible for the deaths of more Army soldiers than Hitler and Tojo. John Bell Hood, for whom Fort Hood, Tex., is named, led a hard-fighting brigade known for ferocious straight-on assaults. During these attacks, Hood lost the use of an arm at Gettysburg and a leg at Chickamauga, but he delivered victories, at least for a while. Later, when the gallant but tactically inflexible Hood launched such assaults at Nashville and Franklin, Tenn., his armies were smashed.
Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry Benning, a State Supreme Court associate justice who became one of Lee’s more effective subordinates. Before the war, this ardent secessionist inflamed fears of abolition, which he predicted would inevitably lead to black governors, juries, legislatures and more. “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Benning wrote. “We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.”
Another installation in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named for John B. Gordon, one of Lee’s most dependable commanders in the latter part of the war. Before Fort Sumter, Gordon, a lawyer, defended slavery as “the hand-maid of civil liberty.” After the war, he became a United States senator, fought Reconstruction, and is generally thought to have headed the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He “may not have condoned the violence employed by Klan members,” says his biographer, Ralph Lowell Eckert, “but he did not question or oppose it when he felt it was justified.”
Not all the honorees were even good generals; many were mediocrities or worse. Braxton Bragg, for whom Fort Bragg in North Carolina is named, was irascible, ineffective, argumentative with subordinates and superiors alike, and probably would have been replaced before inflicting half the damage that he caused had he and President Jefferson Davis not been close friends. Fort Polk in Louisiana is named after Rev. Leonidas Polk, who abandoned his military career after West Point for the clergy. He became an Episcopal bishop, owned a large plantation and several hundred slaves, and joined the Confederate Army when the war began. His frequently disastrous service ended when he was split open by a cannonball. Fort Pickett in Virginia is named after the flamboyant George Pickett, whose division was famously decimated at Gettysburg. Pickett was accused of war crimes for ordering the execution of 22 Union prisoners; his defense was that they had all deserted from the Confederate Army, and he was not tried.
Other Confederate namesakes include Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia, Fort Rucker in Alabama and Camp Beauregard in Louisiana. All these installations date from the buildups during the world wars, and naming them in honor of a local military figure was a simple choice. But that was a time when the Army was segregated and our views about race more ignorant. Now African-Americans make up about a fifth of the military. The idea that today we ask any of these soldiers to serve at a place named for a defender of a racist slavocracy is deplorable; the thought that today we ask any American soldier to serve at a base named for someone who killed United States Army troops is beyond absurd. Would we have a Fort Rommel? A Camp Cornwallis?
Changing the names of these bases would not mean that we can’t still respect the service of those Confederate leaders; nor would it mean that we are imposing our notions of morality on people of a long-distant era. What it would mean is that we’re upholding our own convictions. It’s time to rename these bases. Surely we can find, in the 150 years since the Civil War, 10 soldiers whose exemplary service not only upheld our most important values, but was actually performed in the defense of the United States.
By: James Malanowski, Contributor, The New York Times’s Disunion, The New York Times, May 25, 2013
“Correcting The Record Of Strategic Disinformation”: We Have The Most Conservative Supreme Court In Decades
In recent years, the United States Supreme Court has turned corporate treasuries into campaign slush funds for CEOs, demolished campaign finance laws, aided and abetted pay discrimination, made it much harder for consumers and workers to file class action lawsuits against corporations that have cheated them, and kindly delivered the White House to one lucky Republican from Texas.
Study after study has found that the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts and his predecessor William Rehnquist has swerved hard to the right, systematically favoring corporate interests over workers, consumers and voters — to a shocking extent.
So why does a plurality of Americans still think that the Supreme Court leans to the left?
A new poll from Public Policy Polling finds that 36 percent of Americans believe the Supreme Court is “too liberal,” compared with just 30 percent who find it “too conservative” and 29 percent who think it’s ideologically “about right.” The poll highlights a problem that has long plagued progressives who care about the courts: while the Supreme Court and lower federal courts continue to drive to the right, many Americans, strangely, have come to believe that the courts tilt to the left.
This misperception of the federal judiciary, and especially the Supreme Court, is no fluke. It is the residue of more than a half-century of propaganda by the right labeling the Supreme Court a bastion of runaway liberal judicial activists who supersede the will of the people to impose their own views on innocent Americans. This campaign began with “massive resistance” to landmark civil rights and civil liberties decisions of the Warren Court, most notably Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which desegregated the schools and prompted an “impeach Earl Warren” movement; Engel v. Vitale (1962), which struck down compulsory prayer in the schools and was blamed for the moral downfall of America; and Miranda v. Arizona (1966), which gave people basic rights in encounters with the police and was decried as “pro-criminal.” The campaign against the Court intensified with the response to Roe v. Wade (1973), which recognized the reproductive rights of women as a matter of constitutional privacy but has been depicted ever since by the right as the epitome of illegitimate judicial activism.
The movement to turn the clock back on civil rights and civil liberties in the courts has continued for decades and been bolstered by the Chamber of Commerce and big business, which want to see the federal judiciary enshrine new constitutional rights for corporations while dismantling public regulation.
In recent decades, right-wing leaders have worked in popular culture to attack the courts as a liberal peril while successfully organizing to dominate and control legal institutions to create courts that no longer look out for the rights of all Americans. They have set up law schools and legal societies to promote corporate and right-wing commitments, have promoted the appointment of reactionary judges and Justices, blocked the appointment of even moderate jurists, and defined a legal agenda that subordinates individual rights to government power and public regulation to corporate power. Right-wing success in remaking the judiciary in the image of the Republican Party has not led conservatives to curb their bitter attack on “liberal judicial activism,” a fantasy that is several decades out of date but indispensable to this smoke-and-mirrors operation.
Without mass education by progressives to reclaim the public narrative about the courts, popular illusions about the nature of our right-wing judiciary will persist. A perfect example of public confusion is the reaction to the Supreme Court’s narrow decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Chief Justice Roberts’ decisive vote to uphold the law was hailed on the left and seen as a stunning betrayal on the right. But what got little attention was how conservative the logic of the decision to uphold the ACA really was. While the final outcome was good news for progressives, Roberts’ opinion laid the groundwork for severely restricting the ability of the federal government to solve national problems under the Commerce Clause — harkening back to the gilded-age Lochner Era, when the Supreme Court routinely struck down regulatory protections for ordinary Americans.
The left needs to wake up. PPP found that less than half of Democrats recognized the conservative leaning of the Supreme Court. As the Supreme Court’s blockbuster decisions on marriage equality, voting rights and affirmative action come down this spring we may have some reasons to celebrate and others to mourn. But we will doubtless be reminded again that Supreme Court decisions often have much less to do with evolving legal theory than with which president appointed the Justices. Conservatives know this and liberals need to wake up to it as well.
Four decades into conservative control of the Supreme Court (through the Burger, Rehnquist and Roberts Courts), and well into President Obama’s second term, conservatives still promote the absurd story that the Supreme Court and judiciary are “liberal.” We must do everything we can to correct the record and dispel the lingering false impressions left by decades of strategic disinformation.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, May 24, 2013
“Memorial Day Deserves Better”: Between The Holiday Sales, Give Thought To Those Who Gave Their Last Full Measure Of Devotion
The observance of the 150th anniversary of the establishment of the Bureau of Colored Troops in the District occurred this week, only a few days before Memorial Day. It seems fitting that the sesquicentennial of the Colored Troops Bureau falls close to the day originally set aside to remember those killed in the Civil War.
More than 180,000 African American soldiers and sailors served in the Union Army and Navy. Nearly 68,000 died.
Those African American service members were honored Wednesday at a wreath-laying ceremony and a program at the African American Civil War Memorial and Museum on Vermont Avenue NW.
The event, organized by the museum’s founder and director, Frank Smith, was well-attended and inspirational but low-key. There was not even a cameo appearance by Mayor Vincent Gray or a member of the D.C. Council. If any D.C. elected official sent a representative to the commemoration, the gesture went unannounced and unnoticed.
Those “colored troops” deserved better from this city. After all, the 28th Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops and soldiers with Company E, 4th U.S. Colored Infantry, were among the units assigned to the defense of Washington during the Civil War.
Paid less than their white Union comrades, those black soldiers and sailors courageously fought in nearly 500 engagements, including, according to military records, 39 major battles.
My great-grandfather, Isaiah King of New Bedford, Mass., was one of the black Union soldiers. He enlisted at 16 and was assigned to Company D of the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry in 1864. He participated in the Siege of Petersburg that year. His unit, according to official records, was among the first Union regiments to enter Richmond on April 3, 1865.
The African American troops fought to keep the Union together and to free their enslaved brothers and sisters in the South. They volunteered to fight at a time when the country that sent them off to war did not treat them as equals.
In a speech urging President Abraham Lincoln to allow freed blacks to fight in the Union Army, the famed 19th-century black abolitionist and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass said: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket; and there is no power on the earth . . . which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship.”
Those black soldiers and sailors served, fought and died years before the 15th Amendment, granting African American men the right to vote, was ratified in 1870 — a right that, in reality, went unfulfilled for nearly a century.
But that is not what this weekend is all about.
This is the time to honor those Americans, regardless of race, religion, gender, national origin or sexual orientation, who have given their all in service to our nation.
“The blood of heroes never dies,” Moina Michael wrote in a 1915 poem.
The fallen from the Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the conflicts in between deserve a moment of respect. This ought to be a time when the living set aside their daily cares, albeit temporarily, to remember and honor those who made the supreme sacrifice.
Think of those boys who walked off farms and away from families to take up arms on behalf of a nation fighting to keep from falling apart.
Think of kids loaded on planes and ships and sent to foreign lands to fight in defense of their country’s interests. Think of the families left with only memories — and graves to decorate.
Doing that may be easier said than done.
Holiday observers will be competing against events such as Best Buy’s “Memorial Day Kickoff to Summer Event,”Home Depot’s “Memorial Day Savings” and “Marlo’s Memorial Day Sale — Furniture 50% Off Entire Store.”
The choice: Attend a Memorial Day parade or visit a cemetery to remember our fallen, or navigate to Coupons.com and get Memorial Day sales and “extra discounts on top of already low prices from hundreds of stores including: Macy’s, JCPenney, Home Depot, Target, Walgreens, DressBarn, and BabiesRUs.”
It may be all Memorial Day can do to get a word in edgewise.
In between the holiday sales and tips on how to enjoy a three-day weekend, give some thought to those in our country’s history who gave their last full measure of devotion.
That’s what this Army veteran will do.
By: Colbert I. King, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, May 24, 2013
“This Is Not 2009”: Democrats Have No Reason To Prematurely Throw Up Their Hands About 2014 Midterm Elections
With the scent of scandal encircling the White House, some Republicans are already licking their chops over the 2014 midterm elections, while some Democrats are pre-emptively licking their wounds.
Not so fast, folks. Retract those tongues.
While it is impossible to predict what might drive voter attitudes in an election 18 months away, there are quite a few signs that 2014 will be nothing like 2010, which produced tremendous success for Republicans.
First, the electorate is less conservative.
In May 2009, the Tea Party had just begun to flex its muscle and feel its power on a national level. Now, the movement has lost momentum.
An April 2012 Associated Press report included a finding from Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor, that the number of Tea Party groups had fallen from about 1,000 to about 600. And a Washington Post/ABC News poll released this week found that the portion of people saying they strongly support the Tea Party, just 10 percent, was the lowest they had recorded since 2011.
Furthermore, according to a Gallup poll released Friday, the shares of Americans describing themselves as economic conservatives and social conservatives are down by more than a tenth since 2009, after having risen sharply following Barack Obama’s election a year earlier.
The portion of Republicans who said their position on economic issues was conservative — the Republican Trojan Horse for a retrograde social agenda — has seen little movement since 2009, dropping just five percentage points, from 75 percent to 70 percent.
(On the other hand, the share of Democrats who describe their positions on social issues as liberal has increased, from 45 percent to 50 percent.)
Speaking of economic issues, the economy is experiencing a resurgence, at least in some quarters.
In May 2009, the United States economy was nearing the end of the Great Recession. The unemployment rate had risen to 9.4 percent from 5.5 percent the previous year. People were losing their homes to foreclosures in record numbers. The Dow Jones industrial average had fallen to about 8,500 from more than 13,000 the previous May. And the deficit tripled from the 2008 fiscal year to the 2009 fiscal year, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
This had Americans rightfully worried and near-panicked about their economic prospects.
Now the economic picture couldn’t be more different.
The unemployment rate has dropped to 7.5 percent. The Dow is above 15,000 and continuing to set records. The housing sector is rebounding — “Sales of previously owned homes reached the highest level in more than three years, with the share of foreclosure purchases shrinking, as the housing market continued its rebound last month,” according to a report Thursday in The Wall Street Journal.
And the deficit is shrinking faster than expected, according to a report released last week by the budget office. The report found that if current laws are unchanged, “Relative to the size of the economy, the deficit this year — at 4.0 percent of gross domestic product (G.D.P.) — will be less than half as large as the shortfall in 2009, which was 10.1 percent of G.D.P.”
This takes almost all of the air out of the Republicans’ economic argument.
Lastly, legislative unease has become about what Republicans haven’t done, rather than what Democrats have done.
By May of 2009, President Obama had already signed the huge — though many still believe not huge enough — stimulus package, Chrysler and General Motors were in need of a bailout and the ball was rolling on the president’s historic health care law.
Conservatives were railing against what they saw as an unprecedented, ominous and ultimately ruinous expansion of government, driven by the president and made possible by a Congress controlled by Democrats.
Now, the tables have turned. Two of the most glaring legislative failures this year have ostensibly been the work of obstinate Republicans: the failure to avoid the sequester and the failure to pass expanded gun background checks legislation. According to that recent Washington Post/ABC News poll, most Americans still disapprove of the sequester’s automatic spending cuts, and according to a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday, 81 percent of Americans still favor the passage of a bill expanding background checks.
The next hurdle will be immigration reform. But Republicans may find a way to derail that legislation, too.
The signs look positive for Democrats this spring. This is not to say that they should prematurely lift their glasses, only that they have no reason to prematurely throw up their hands.
By: Charles M. Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, May 24, 2013
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