“A Choice Between Two Supreme Court’s: This November, A Chance To Vote On Citizens United
In today’s polarized political climate, there are a few things on which American voters overwhelmingly agree. For all our disputes, we can find common ground in this: we’re completely fed up. About 80 percent of us don’t think Congress is doing a good job. Only about one third of us view the federal government favorably. In a precipitous drop, less than half of Americans have a favorable view of the Supreme Court. Across all political lines, 75 percentof Americans say there is too much money in politics, and about the same percentage think this glut of money in politics gives the rich more power than the rest in our democracy.
Interestingly, another thing that most Americans have in common is that 80 percent of us have never heard of Citizens United v. FEC, the case in which the Supreme Court ruled that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend unlimited amounts of money to influence elections. Our feelings of frustration with Washington are deeply connected with the widespread, and entirely founded, suspicion that our elected officials aren’t representing voters, but are instead indebted to the wealthy interests that pay for their campaigns. This distrust has only deepened as politicians and the courts have handed over more and more power to those with the deepest pockets.
Citizens United is only the most famous of the recent spate of Supreme Court decisions aimed at eliminating hard-won campaign finance regulations. In fact, shortly before Citizens United, the George W. Bush-created right-wing bloc of the Supreme Court issued major rulings that had already begun to undermine decades of federal clean election laws.
And we are only partway down the slippery slope. It keeps getting worse as the Supreme Court gradually dismantles state-level clean elections laws, as it did in Arizona, and clarifies that its sweeping decision in Citizens United applies to states as well, as it did in Montana. Indeed, it won’t be long before this or some future right-wing Supreme Court cuts to the chase and lifts the century-old ban on direct corporate contributions to political candidates, one of the most basic checks we have against widespread corruption.
Believe it or not, this November, we’ll have the chance to vote on whether this slippery slope continues, or whether we stop it and roll it back. Each of these regressive campaign finance rulings has had a monumental impact on our democracy. It’s easy to forget that they have been made by one-vote 5-4 majorities of the Supreme Court. That means we’re just one Supreme Court vote away from stopping the trend in its tracks — and even reversing it. Although Mitt Romney has flip-flopped on many issues, he’s crystal clear about how he feels on this issue and exactly what kind of judge he would appoint to the Supreme Court and the lower federal courts. He has said he believes “corporations are people” and he means it. He’s promised to nominate more Supreme Court justices like the ones who handed down Citizens United. And his chief judicial adviser, former judge Robert Bork, is legendary in his opposition to individual voting rights while advocating expansive corporate power. On this issue in particular, President Obama has been very clear and comes down unambiguously on the opposite side. Look no further than his Supreme Court picks so far. Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor have consistently resisted the right-wing court’s radical transformation of our democracy. In fact, his nominees now represent half the votes in the High Court who are standing up for democracy against “government by and for” the highest bidder.
Some 2008 Obama voters may not be thrilled by the last four years. Some may even be considering giving Mitt Romney a chance, despite their misgivings. But no matter who your candidate is, what issues you care about or on what side you come down on them, most importantly your vote this November will likely determine the Supreme Court for a generation. If Romney has the opportunity to replace one of the more moderate Supreme Court justices, the Court’s far-right majority will not remain narrow. The votes will be there to dismantle any remaining limits of money in politics for the foreseeable future. Conversely, future Obama appointments give Americans the chance to halt this downward spiral and the opportunity to reclaim our democracy.
Whatever the issues you most care about, this November’s election will be a choice between two Supreme Courts. And the two alternatives could not be more different. Quite simply, this is the chance that the overwhelming majority of Americans — who recognize that there is too much money in politics and that it is corrupting our government at every level — finally have to vote on it.
Will we seize this opportunity?
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, September 6, 2012
“Making Medicaid Matter”: The Real-World Impact For Today’s Struggling Americans
Much of the 2012 policy debate, such as it is, has focused on Medicare, and with good reason — the Romney-Ryan plan to replace the Medicare system with a voucher plan is important and worth scrutinizing in detail.
But in his convention speech last night, Bill Clinton not only stressed Medicare, he also delivered a forceful reminder about the importance of Medicaid and what would happen to the program under Republican rule:
“Now, folks, this is serious, because it gets worse. And you won’t be laughing when I finish telling you this: they also want to block-grant Medicaid, and cut it by a third over the coming 10 years.
“Of course, that’s going to really hurt a lot of poor kids. But that’s not all. A lot of folks don’t know it, but nearly two-thirds of Medicaid is spent on nursing home care for Medicare seniors who are eligible for Medicaid.
“It’s going to end [Medicaid] as we know it. And a lot of that money is also spent to help people with disabilities, including a lot of middle-class families whose kids have Down’s Syndrome or autism or other severe conditions.
And honestly, let’s think about it, if that happens, I don’t know what those families are going to do. So I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to do everything I can to see that it doesn’t happen. We can’t let it happen.”
The future of Medicare is obviously important and should be a central issue in the presidential race, but as Matt Yglesias noted, “Medicaid is the one where much more is at stake on the ballot.”
Why? Because the Romney-Ryan plan, with a position they’re not at all bashful about, would block-grant Medicaid, leaving states with fewer resources, and leaving the poor and disabled in even more jeopardy.
Remember, unlike Medicare, Medicaid is a partnership between federal and state governments. The program undermines state budgets in a big way during economic downturns — more people begin to rely on the program and states, which can’t run deficits, struggle badly with the finances — and the moment a Romney-Ryan administration gives states the flexibility to do so, Republicans governors will start improving their finances by taking health care from the most vulnerable, who don’t exactly have lobbyists looking out for them.
What’s more, as Clinton reminded us, for all of Romney’s talk about leaving seniors’ benefits intact, the moment the GOP guts Medicaid, plenty of elderly Americans will feel the effects.
There’s no shortage of policy differences between the two major-party campaigns, but this is one of the more dramatic areas of disagreement, especially as it relates to the real-world impact of struggling Americans. Medicaid deserves to be an important part of the national debate, and kudos to Clinton for giving the issue the spotlight.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 6, 2012
“The GOP Manufactured Freak-Out”: What The Constitution And The Democratic Platform Have In Common
Paul Ryan, Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and assorted media figures everywhere seem to be fascinated by the same omission from the Democratic Party’s platform.
The word “God” is notably missing from this year’s 40-page document, as David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network first pointed out.
“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential,” the party’s 2008 platform said.
This year, a similar paragraph instead states, “We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth — the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”
The Democratic platform honors religious freedom, but given the absence of the “g” word, the manufactured freak-out is now well underway.
It’s tempting to delve into an extended explanation of why, for believers, God probably doesn’t need perfunctory references in a political party platform, and why this trumped up story is silly, even by 2012 standards, but let’s instead consider another tidbit of news.
The United States Constitution — the foundation of our government, the basis for our laws, and a model for democracies around the globe for generations — includes no references to God. Literally, not one.
If the Constitution doesn’t mention God, I think the political world can probably keep its apoplexy in check over the Democratic platform. Unless Republicans and news organizations are going to start condemning the Constitution, too, demanding an explanation for its secular nature, let’s relax a bit.
BY: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 5, 2012
“Religious Symbolism”: Republicans’ Holy War On The DNC Platform
Republican and conservative complaints about the Democratic platform have crystallized in the last two days. The two main themes are pure questions of religious symbolism. If this election is about the economy, as Republicans constantly assert that it is, then their attacks on the DNC are way off topic.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Emergency Committee for Israel blasted out an article from the Free Beacon, a conservative website, complaining about the Democratic platform. ECI called it, “another shift by the Obama administration away from Israel and toward the Palestinians.” It is not entirely fair to call the language in the DNC platform an act of the Obama administration. The Republican Party platform, for example, calls for banning abortion in all cases, with no exceptions. Mitt Romney, however, is running a platform that would ban abortion except in cases of rape and incest and where the life of the pregnant woman is endangered. But, it’s fair to say there is some association between the party’s platform and its presidential nominee, and that the nominee has some influence over the text of the platform.
So, what is the objectionable portion of the platform? It does not mention Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, nor does it specify that the descendants of Palestinian refugees should be settled in a Palestinian state, not Israel proper, and it also does not condemn Hamas. The 2008 DNC platform did all of these things. Romney issued a statement complaining just about the Jerusalem question. The Romney campaign also sent out statements from its two token Jewish surrogates, Representative Eric Cantor (R-VA) and former Senator Norm Coleman (R-MN), attacking Obama on all three fronts.
When asked by The Nation for a response, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson wrote in an e-mail:
The Obama Administration has followed the same policy towards Jerusalem that previous U.S. Administrations of both parties have done since 1967. As the White House said several months ago, the status of Jerusalem is an issue that should be resolved in final status negotiations between the Israelis and the Palestinians—which we also said in the 2008 platform. We will continue to work with the parties to resolve this issue as part of a two state solution that secures the future of Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland of the Jewish people.
Meanwhile, the theocratic partisan propagandists at Fox News are decrying the absence of the word “God” from the DNC platform. As Media Matters notes, Fox downplayed the significance of the GOP’s platform, in order to minimize the public’s revulsion at extremist planks such as the one on abortion. But when it came to this non-issue, they couldn’t get enough of it.
Neither of these lines of attack is likely to resonate with swing voters. Rather, they are meant to rev up the evangelical right-wing base, which obsessively pushes religion into the public square and wants to expand Israel’s boundaries to fulfill a supposed biblical prophecy.
The Republican National Convention had two themes—that the GOP would tackle the biggest issues facing the country, and that it would try to expand beyond its base. These petty attacks do neither.
Update: On Wednesday night the DNC—reportedly at President Obama’s behest—amended its platform to reinstate the language from its 2008 platform regarding Jerusalem.
By: Ben Adler, The Nation, September 5, 2012
“The Advanced Class”: The Democrats’ Government Tutorial
Bill Clinton is typically described as the empathetic, feel-your-pain guy. But his greatest political skill may be as a formulator of arguments — the explainer in chief. And it’s no accident that the former president’s role in this year’s Democratic convention is very nearly as important as President Obama’s. What’s most striking about this conclave is that it bids to be a three-day tutorial session aimed at aggressively defending a view of government and the economy for which, over most of the past 40 years, Democrats have usually apologized.
It’s ironic that the 42nd president plays the co-professor with Obama in this advanced government class, for Clinton is associated with a determined effort to distance his party from its past. When Clinton pronounced in 1996 that “the era of big government is over,” it was taken as a concession to the new conservatism that swept to control of Congress just over a year earlier.
But Clinton’s rhetorical move was more tactical than fundamental. He never stopped believing in the power of government. And now that Republicans are putting forward the most emphatically pro-business, anti-government agenda on offer since the Gilded Age, he and his fellow Democrats now feel an urgency to assert the state’s positive role. The economic market, they insist, cannot deliver what the nation needs all by itself.
Thus, one of the most applauded lines of the convention’s first night came from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick: “It’s time for Democrats to grow a backbone, and stand up for what we believe.” Rarely has a party so fully embraced a declaration that implied its own past spinelessness. Speaker after speaker answered Patrick’s call.
While Michelle Obama’s speech,the performance of her life, was apolitical on the surface, it regularly came back to arguing, subtly and implicitly, that hardworking Americans who start out on the social ladder’s lower rungs can be assisted in their struggles by the e
empowering hand of government.In his keynote address, San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro was explicit about this: “We know that you can’t be pro-business unless you’re pro-education,” he said. “We know that pre-K and student loans aren’t charity.”
Over and over, government was presented not as an officious intermeddler in people’s lives but as an ally of families determined to help their children to rise.And there lay the other stark contrast between the Tampa Republicans and the Charlotte Democrats. The Republicans built their whole convention around an out-of-context quotation from the president (“You didn’t build that”) and offered as their counter-theme, “We built it.”But so often, as a friend pointed out, the message of Tampa came off more as: “We own it.” Working people and the dignity of labor receded almost entirely at a gathering whose real stars were investors, entrepreneurs and business leaders on whom others are dependent for employment. Pride arose less from hard work than from the ability to deploy capital.
Democrats are no less committed to the American dream, but their dream is built on individual and family struggle. While Republicans cast themselves as the party of “family values,” Democrats here spoke far more about upward mobility as a family enterprise.
Thus Michelle Obama’s description of her father as a man whose “measure of his success in life” came from “being able to earn a decent living that allowed him to support his family.”
Thus Castro’s definition of the American dream as “not a sprint, or even a marathon, but a relay.” He explained that “each generation passes on to the next the fruits of their labor.”
Democrats know that even if they convince a majority that Barack Obama’s approach to government is closer than Romney’s to their own, they still carry the burden of high unemployment. That’s the value of Bill Clinton’s witness. Many wavering voters remember the Clinton years as an all-too-brief journey through the economic promised land and will pay close attention to his stamp of approval on Obama’s way forward.
But Democrats are also aware that victory depends on encouraging voters to see Romney’s policies as a throwback — not only to the George W. Bush years but also to the rough-and-tumble economics of the pre-New Deal Era, to a time when capital decisively held the upper hand over labor. Their three-day seminar was designed to show, as Lilly Ledbetter of Fair Pay Act fame suggested, that Obama understands why an extra 23 cents an hour in a paycheck matters more to most voters than does a capital gains tax cut.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 5, 2012
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