“Someone Has To Do It”: Congressional Gridlock Leaves Lawmaking To The Supreme Court
One is the loneliest number and only one in 10 Americans trusts the United States Congress. And who can blame people?
The most visible congressional failure was the Senate vote that killed background checks on people who want to buy guns. It was a perfectly reasonable proposal. No one’s guns would have been taken away and national polls showed that nine in 10 Americans supported the proposal.
But that didn’t matter because the Senate was more responsive to pressure from the National Rifle Association than it was to public opinion. Gridley, damm public opinion, full speed backward!
The same tragedy is about to unfold with immigration reform. The Senate passed a compromise immigration proposal under which undocumented immigrants would have to get over a series of hurdles higher than the border fence to become citizens. To get the measure passed, Democrats agreed to GOP demands to hire 20,000 more border control agents. That’s enough of a force to conquer Mexico and more than enough to guard the border we share with our neighbor to the south.
Despite these concessions, House Republicans are doing everything they can to stop reform, and they will probably succeed even though national polls show strong support for citizenship for undocumented people if they meet a long list of requirements.
I could go on and on and on. What happens to a democracy when democratic institutions aren’t democratic anymore? Nothing good.
What if they gave an election and no one came. Well, we almost found out in two recent elections. Turnout was abysmal in the race for mayor in Los Angles and in the special Senate election in Massachusetts to select a replacement for John Kerry. Voters don’t see the point in going out to vote to elect people who can’t or won’t do anything to tackle the challenges facing the nation.
Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the Supreme Court.
When democratic institutions fail, undemocratic institutions step in. When the legislature stops legislating, the unelected Supreme Court rushes in to fill the vacuum. Someone has to make laws, and if Congress doesn’t legislate the federal court system will step in to fix problems. Like it or not, unelected or not, the Supreme Court has filled the vacuum that Congress created.
Historically, the Supreme Court has always been reluctant to void laws passed by the peoples’ elected representatives. But the court did just that on successive days last month. On day one, the high court nullified part of the Voting Rights Act. The next day, the court consigned the Defense of Marriage Act to the dustbin of history where it belonged.
The high court’s message to Congress was do something, just don’t stand there. Standard operating procedure in Congress these days is don’t do anything, just stand there. The world does not come to a grinding halt to accommodate Congress when it can’t get its act together.
When he ran for president in 1996, Ross Perot proposed the idea of having national referendums to make decisions on issues. Americans like the idea. A recent Gallup survey showed that two in three Americans supported it. Somebody has to make decisions. It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, July 11, 2013
“A Congress Divided”: Overcoming The Rigid And Obstructionist Partisanship Of House Republicans
The Senate provided the country a rare and modest glimpse of bipartisanship in its 68-32 passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill laboriously accomplished by the Gang of Eight — four Democrats and four Republicans. But overcoming the rigid and obstructionist partisanship of the House Republicans will be another matter.
House Speaker John Boehner, like a chief lemming leading his followers over a cliff, warned in advance of that Senate vote, in which 14 Republicans broke party ranks, that his flock would continue its obdurate ways on the politically explosive immigration issue.
“For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House,” Boehner proclaimed, “it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.” He obviously was referring to the GOP side alone, as if the House Democrats weren’t members of what senators call “the other body.”
It’s a party position that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert often insisted upon in his abbreviated tenure. It was designed to assure that the House Republicans would work their will on the full House in an our-way-or-the-highway invitation to stalemate.
Boehner in adhering to this posture endangers not only the prospect for meaningful immigration reform. He also jeopardizes his party’s political outlook in 2014 and 2016 and his own speakership. He continues to genuflect before the most conservative House Republicans, driven by Tea-Party recalcitrance, who nevertheless increasingly favor his disposal.
The 14 Senate Republicans apparently hope their support of the bipartisan compromise will ameliorate their party’s problem with Hispanic voters, so graphically demonstrated by their 70 percent vote against GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney in 2012. But the Senate version, heavy on fattened border security but allowing a path to American citizenship for undocumented aliens, will mean little politically if their House brethren refuse to buy into key elements of it.
President Obama did not hesitate to goad the House Republicans to follow the lead of the small band of Senate Republicans who followed GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida in getting off the naysay trail for once.
In all the Republican post-mortems after the Romney defeat, a deafening chorus was heard arguing that the party should address the wide loss of Hispanic, Asian and African-American voters in the 2012 election. Boehner, an astute and practical politician, surely got the message, but appears throttled by the Tea-Party constituency that now dominates his flock.
Until the 14 Senate Republicans cast their votes for the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform package, conservatives in both houses had at least the comfort of knowing they were all in the same boat. The challenge for Boehner, after one-third of the Senate Republican membership voted with the Democrats, is to prevent further leakage in his foundering House craft.
Obama and fellow Democrats, frustrated throughout the president’s first term by Republican congressional roadblocks, are looking to next year’s midterm elections to break the jam, expecting enhanced support from minority voters. The same elections could likewise determine Boehner’s political future if he continues to allow the most extreme elements of his constituency of the right to set a stubborn and resistant course to genuine immigration reform.
At a minimum, Boehner needs to get off his insistence that the House must and will go its own way on the issue, writing a package that can capture “a majority of the majority” membership. Such an outcome will only end in negating a rare example of Senate bipartisanship achieved in a Congress that once marked its most productive and laudatory days under both Democratic and Republican presidents.,
Last November, the Republican brand suffered a body blow with a presidential campaign that only reinforced its image as the party of the white and the well-off. The continuing fight over immigration reform can be a GOP opportunity to combat that view, but not unless Boehner and Co. seize it as their 14 Senate brethren have done.
By: Jules Witcover, The National Memo, July 2, 2013
“Congress Reinterprets Jesus”: Serve Banksters Or Serve The Poor?
Thank God for Congress, right? When things get out of balance in America, we can always count on our legislative stalwarts to recalibrate the scales of justice.
Take greed, for example. The barons of Wall Street, whose raw greed and casino scams wrecked our real economy five years ago, are back to shoving great gobs of bonus pay into their pockets. Meanwhile, the middle class remains decimated, and millions of workaday Americans who were knocked all the way down into poverty are still stuck there. In this nation of fabulous wealth, our poverty numbers are shocking and scandalous: 50 million people are officially poor; another 51 million are “near poor.” A third of our country!
You’ll be pleased to know, then, that only last week, U.S. House members turned their legislative guns on the greed that’s sapping the moral vitality of our society. Unfortunately, their aim was a bit off. Instead of popping the privileged, they hit the most unprivileged: families who need food stamps to make ends meet.
The food stamp program is out of control, they shrieked, noting that it’s been expanding even as the unemployment rate has been coming down. Yoo-hoo, knuckleheads, the jobless rate has ticked down largely because job-seekers have become so discouraged by the absence of opportunities that they’ve quit looking. Plus, getting a job no longer gets you out of poverty — just ask the barista who’s making your next latte about the joys of working for poverty pay. Food stamp rolls have reached record numbers, because — guess what? — there are record numbers of Americans in poverty!
Yet, the House called for cutting some $2 billion a year (and 2 million Americans) out of the program. On June 20, however, the members balked — not because the cut was too severe, but because it was not enough for Tea Party Republicans, who have been demanding a total food stamp gut job, proposing to slash the program by $25 billion a year.
Also, the GOP majority lost the votes of nearly all Democrats by adding a couple of fiendish amendments to punish poor people for the crime of being poor. One was to put additional work requirements on families seeking the food benefit. “We cannot continue to deny able-bodied people the dignity of work,” blathered a worked-up know-nothing named Steve Southerland of Florida. Then, Rep. Michele Bachmann had a tempest in her teapot of a brain, offering her support of Southerland’s amendment in a sort of Biblical falsetto: “If anyone will not work, neither should he eat.”
Hello, Michele — that’s not exactly in keeping with the moral message of the Biblical Jesus. Nor is it in keeping with reality — today’s poverty does not stem from any unwillingness to work. Indeed, millions of food stamp recipients are working, but not being paid enough to put adequate groceries on the family table. And many more are in desperate search for jobs that aren’t there.
In fairness, though, let me note that House Republicans did try to give hard-hit families something extra in this legislation: drug testing. Following in lockstep with the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council — which has been peddling this vile, insulting slap at poor people all around the country — the House majority added a urine-test provision to its bill. That really puts the mean in “demeaning” — and this from small-government poseurs who piously decry government intrusion into people’s lives!
Once again, the Tea Party congresscritters should have used their ever-present Bibles for instruction, rather than just for thumping. They would’ve learned that Jesus, at the Sea of Galilee, distributed free fish and loaves to everyone there — with no pee-in-the-cup requirement. And if he had wanted to test whether anyone was on drugs, he would’ve passed cups to bankers first, then to lawmakers.
A society’s response to poverty is one measure that speaks directly to its essential character. In particular, a wealthy society’s nonchalant tolerance of poverty in its midst, the willingness of that society’s leaders to disregard the spread of poverty and the callous calculations by some that it is permissible and even profitable to denigrate those mired in poverty — these are three flashing indicators of a meltdown in our society’s moral core.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, June 26, 2013
“Congress As It Actually Is”: When The Voting-Rights Challenge Lands On Capitol Hill, A Strong GOP Incentive Not To Act At All
The Supreme Court’s ruling on the Voting Rights Act was almost clever, in an ugly and deceptive sort of way. The five-member conservative majority conceded what a great law the VRA has been, and hailed its efficacy over the years. (In a curious twist, the justices believe the law such a great success it magically became unconstitutional when we weren’t looking.)
Today’s ruling even left Section 5 of the law more or less intact, endorsing at least the concept of pre-clearance before states and municipalities can change their voting laws. So what’s the problem?
Actually, everything. While the high court’s ruling may seem fairly narrow — the majority said they simply want Congress to replace an old formula with a new one — it also probably marks the end of the Voting Rights Act. Today’s ruling calls for a fix, but as a practical matter, it guts the landmark civil-rights law.
The ruling, a 5-4 decision by Chief Justice John Roberts, leaves the future of the law deeply uncertain because it will be up to a sharply divided Congress to redraw the map, if it can agree on one at all.
“In practice, in reality, it’s probably the death knell of this provision,” said Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUSblog and a Supreme Court analyst for NBC News.
If we wore some kind of Rawlsian veil of ignorance, and forgot everything we know about the contemporary U.S. Congress, this wouldn’t necessarily have to be considered a complete disaster. Given widespread voting problems, a competent and capable legislative branch of government might even see the ruling as an opportunity to pursue meaningful election reforms.
But if we drop the veil, we see Congress as it actually is — an institution where procedural abuses are the norm, an extremist caucus holds control of the lower chamber, the politics of extortion and hostage strategies is routine, and lawmakers struggle badly to complete even rudimentary tasks.
And it’s not just about Congress’ dysfunction. As recently as 2006, the Voting Rights Act was easily reauthorized by large bipartisan majorities, and signed into law by a Republican president. But by any fair measure, the radicalization of Republican politics has intensified greatly over the last seven years.
Indeed, I imagine GOP lawmakers will see a strong incentive not to act at all on this issue — with the 2014 midterms coming up, and Republicans in the majority in so many state legislatures (especially in the South), the party will likely be content to reject all pre-clearance measures and encourage red-state lawmakers to enact sweeping new voting restrictions without fear of Justice Department oversight. In the process, Democratic hopes for electoral gains next November will be further undermined by institutional, not political, barriers.
The war on voting, in other words, is just getting started, and is poised to claim more casualties.
There is one more angle to keep in mind, though. You’ll recall that the Republican National Committee has said it’s sincere about outreach to minority communities and expanding its base beyond the GOP’s overwhelmingly white, older supporters.
If Republican lawmakers refuse to work constructively on the Voting Rights Act, and perhaps even kill immigration reform, the setback for the party’s alleged outreach efforts will be immeasurable.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 25, 2013
“SCOTUS Hypocrisy”: To Conservative Justices, Congress’ Wishes Only Matter When They Line Up With The Conservative Worldview
The last two days have been clarifying when it comes to the Supreme Court. In ruling successfully against the Voting Rights Act yesterday and voting unsuccessfully to uphold the Defense of Marriage Act today, the court’s conservative wing has shown that it has little interest in following Chief Justice John Roberts’ famous directive to “call balls and strikes,” but instead is fully behind judicial activism in support of the conservative cause.
Today, the court’s liberal wing, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, struck down the Defense of Marriage Act – which denied federal benefits to married same-sex couples – as unconstitutional on equal protection grounds in a 5-4 decision. Kennedy wrote that DOMA “is invalid, for no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and to injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.”
Basically, according to the court, DOMA discriminated against those with legitimate marriages for no real reason and is thus history. U.S. News’ Robert Schlesinger put it correctly, writing, DOMA “was a vicious and discriminatory piece of waste and our union is a little more perfect without it.”
In their dissents, the court’s conservatives – Roberts, along with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – wrote that the majority should not have overruled Congress, which approved DOMA in 1996. Scalia even wrote that the majority’s opinion “is an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive. It envisions a Supreme Court standing (or rather enthroned) at the apex of government, empowered to decide all constitutional questions, always and everywhere ‘primary’ in its role.”
But yesterday, in ruling that Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional, the court’s conservatives – joined by Kennedy this time – had no such qualms about explicitly overruling Congress, which had renewed the law in 2006 by overwhelming margins: the then-Republican-controlled house voted 390-33 in favor, while the count in the Republican-controlled Senate was 98-0.
But no matter. In their opinion, written by Roberts, the conservative justices said, “Congress could have updated the [Section 4] coverage formula at that time, but did not do so. Its failure to act leaves us today with no choice but to declare [Section 4] unconstitutional.” As Scott Lemieux writes at Lawyers, Guns and Money, Roberts’ opinion includes only “astoundingly weak justifications for striking down a major act of Congress,” with nothing more than “some handwaving to obviously irrelevant provisions of the Constitution.”
So yesterday, according to the court’s conservatives, Congress had no business approving a law meant to keep states and localities from disenfranchising voters. Today, though, all due deference should be given to Congress’ awful attempt to render gay marriages nonexistent under federal law. Evidently, to those four justices, Congress’ wishes only matter when they line up with Congress’ wishes only matter when they line up with the conservative worldview. Otherwise, Congress is merely a speed bump. And that’s no way to run the highest court in the land.
By: Pat Garofalo, U. S. News and World Report, June 26, 2013
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