“Regurgitating Rick”: The Separation Of Church And State Makes Santorum Want To Vomit
Appearing on both ABC’s This Week and NBC’s Meet the Press this morning, Rick Santorum claimed that he “almost threw up” while reading President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech on the separation of church and state. When asked by an incredulous George Stephanopoulos to respond, Santorum held firm: “I don’t believe in an America where separation of church and state is absolute,” something that Kennedy explicitly called for. “To say that people of faith have no role in the public square, absolutely that makes me want to throw up.” And since such a barrier disenfranchises the religiously-minded while protecting secular opinion, Santorum claims, it is also a violation of the First Amendment.
Except, that is not at all what Kennedy was advocating.
I believe in a President whose views on religion are his own private affair, neither imposed upon him by the nation, nor imposed by the nation upon him as a condition to holding that office. I would not look with favor upon a President working to subvert the First Amendment’s guarantees of religious liberty; nor would our system of checks and balances permit him to do so.
It’s right there. People’s First Amendment rights to practice and preach their own morals or religious beliefs should never be subverted, rather it is a preach-y president that Kennedy warns against, one who lets his (or her) own religious views affect the decisions they make in office. And, as Kimberley Strassel pointed out in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, that possibility is exactly what frightens voters most about Santorum, who seems perfectly willing to govern the entire country on the basis of his personally-held beliefs.
Mr. Santorum’s mistake is in telling people how to live. His finger-wagging on contraception and child-rearing and “homosexual acts” disrespects the vast majority of couples who use birth control, or who refuse to believe that the emancipation of women, or society’s increasing tolerance of gays, signals the end of the Republic.
And it is a vast majority of Americans. A recent study by the First Amendment Center found that 67 percent of Americans agreed that there should be a “clear separation of church and state.” This is at least one issue where Santorum seems to be badly out of stop with not only the rest of the country, but the march of history.
By: Andre Tartar, Daily Intel, February 26, 2012
A “Wholly Legal Decision”: The Senate Cannot Take Away President Obama’s Recess Appointment Power By Pretending To Work
As ThinkProgress predicted yesterday, congressional Republicans did not wait long to whine that President Obama’s wholly legal decision to recess appoint Richard Cordray is unconstitutional. According to a blog post written by Speaker John Boehner’s staff, the Cordray appointment is unconstitutional because Obama defied an imaginary time-limit on his recess power and failed to respect the Senate’s decision to pretend that it’s actually doing something:
President Obama today made an unprecedented “recess” appointment even though the Senate is not in recess – “a sharp departure from a long-standing precedent that has limited the President to recess appointments only when the Senate is in a recess of 10 days or longer,” according to Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
It turns out that the action not only contradicts long-standing practice, but also the view of the administration itself. In 2010, Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal explained to the Supreme Court the Obama administration’s view that recess appointments are only permissible when Congress is in recess for more than three days.
First of all, Boehner needs to learn to count. For constitutional purposes, the Senate has been in recess since December 23. Although a single senator has opened a pretend session that lasts about half a minute — what is known as a “pro forma” session — every three days since then, these pro forma sessions have no impact whatsoever on the president’s recess appointment’s power. As Steven Bradbury and John Elwood, two key constitutional advisors during the Bush Administration, explained in 2010:
Historically, the recess appointments clause has been given a practical interpretation. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 67, the clause enables the president to keep the government fully staffed when the Senate is not “in session for the appointment of officers.” . . . [A 1905 Senate report] cautioned that a “recess” means “something actual, not something fictitious.” The executive branch has long taken the same common-sense view. In 1921, citing opinions of his predecessors dating back to the Monroe administration, Attorney General Harry M. Daugherty argued that the question “is whether in a practical sense the Senate is in session so that its advice and consent can be obtained. To give the word ‘recess’ a technical and not a practical construction, is to disregard substance for form.”
The Senate, of course, does not meet as a body during a pro forma session. By the terms of the recess order, no business can be conducted, and the Senate is not capable of acting on the president’s nominations. That means the Senate remains in “recess” for purposes of the recess appointment power, despite the empty formalities of the individual senators who wield the gavel in pro forma sessions.
Moreover, even if the Senate could stave off a recess by convening in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, it is simply not true that three days must pass before the president’s recess power kicks in. Though it’s true that Katyal once said that “I think our office has opined the recess has to be longer than 3 days,” an off-the-cuff comment by the Deputy Solicitor General does not have the power to change what the Constitution actually says. As the highest court to consider issue explained, “[t]he Constitution, on its face, does not establish a minimum time that an authorized break in the Senate must last to give legal force to the President’s appointment power under the Recess Appointments Clause.”
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, January 4, 2011
The Government Has Not Failed The People As It Did In 1860
For all its current shortcomings, the United States government remains intact, and the issues it faces are not as resistant to compromise as slavery, which means that 2011 was not as bad as 1860, a year that nearly ended the existence of the United States.
In 1860, “the government” failed on four distinct levels: a major political party, the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the electorate. At the Democratic National Convention in April, delegates from 10 states walked out in response to the nomination of a presidential candidate and the adoption of a platform of which they disapproved, and formed a breakaway party. That break severed one of few remaining national institutions, and opened the way for the victory of Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln. Before Lincoln took office, seven states left the Union.
Neither the legislative nor the executive branches responded well. An incendiary public letter decrying compromise issued by southern congressmen on Dece. 13, 1860, made it obvious that congressional attempts at compromise were exercises in futility. President James Buchanan simply counted days until he could get out of Washington, while members of his Cabinet, most egregiously Secretary of War John Floyd, actively aided secessionists.
Then as now, elected officials in Washington do not have a corner on blame, for if “We the people” in our Constitution’s preamble means anything, then government is not a faraway them; it is us. The electorate shares responsibility. Self-government works if and only if all parties abide by election results whether or not they like them. If a dissatisfied part of the electorate decides it need not be bound by election results, then self-government loses all legitimacy, and the American experiment in self-government fails, which was what Lincoln meant when he explained that secession in response to election results presented “to the whole family of man, the question, whether a constitutional republic, or a democracy–a government of the people, by the same people” could survive.
We may shake our heads in frustration, but we do not face issues as essentially impervious to compromise as slavery, nor do we seriously question the government’s survival, which reminds us that things could be worse. But 1860 should also remind us that if we are to look for the sources of our government’s problems, then “We the People” cannot exempt ourselves from some of the scrutiny.
By: Chandra Manning, U. S. News and World Report, December 30, 2011
Proposed “Anti-piracy” Legislation Dangerous And Unconstitutional
The proposed “anti-piracy” legislation is dangerous and unconstitutional. Congress is contemplating two bills that proponents insist will shut down “rogue foreign websites” bent on wholesale intellectual property infringement. In reality, these bills won’t do much to curb online piracy. What they will do is balkanize the Internet, undermine Internet security, and introduce a new, unconstitutional scheme of speech regulation.
Both the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate counterpart, the Protect IP Act (PIPA), would empower the attorney general to create a blacklist of sites to be blocked by Internet service providers, search engines, payment providers, and advertising networks. In other words, U.S. citizens would have access to an Internet that looks distinctly different from the one seen by residents of, say, Japan or Australia.
Leading constitutional scholars have explained why this blunderbuss approach won’t pass muster under the First Amendment. Leading Internet engineers oppose the legislation because it will undermine international efforts to shore up online security—efforts the U.S. government has actively supported. A broad coalition of human rights groups has also come out against the legislation, well aware of the contradictory message it sends about online censorship.
We’ve seen where this can lead: Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been obtaining court orders authorizing the seizure of domain names. The seizures are supposed to be directed at infringing sites, but perfectly legal sites have been caught in the net. And when those legal sites have tried to get their property back, they’ve been met with delays and obfuscation. For example, when the founder of a popular music blog tried to follow the government’s bewildering procedure for retrieving his domain names, the government abused the process, seeking secret extensions and declining to cooperate with the blogger to get the matter resolved. Finally, the government dropped the case, with no apologies.
But it gets worse: Private actors can also get in on the act. If an intellectual property rightsholder thinks a site is “promoting” infringement, that party can go to court to seek an order forcing payment processors and ad services to choke off financial support to the site.
The payment providers won’t be able to fine-tune their response so that only infringing sites are affected, which means an entire business could be under assault. Moreover, there are vigilante provisions that can easily be read to grant immunity for cutting off a site if there is “credible evidence” that the site promotes infringement.
For over a decade, we’ve had a system in place that gives rightsholders effective tools for fighting online infringement, while creating space for online innovation, economic growth, and creativity. These bills would rewrite the rules and give government and big content providers new powers to regulate the Internet, with little regard for the collateral damage it would cause.
SOPA and PIPA have sparked an explosion of opposition, including Democratic and Republican lawmakers, progressive and conservative public interest groups, technology companies and investors, constitutional scholars, and human rights groups (who know a plan for censorship when they see one). It’s been called a “geek lobby,” but you don’t need to be a geek to see that this legislation is a profoundly bad idea.
By: Corynne McSherry, Published in U. S. News and World Report, December 21, 2011
Cafeteria Libertarianism: Where The GOP Goes To Snack
You would have been forgiven for experiencing some ideological whiplash earlier this month when, after listening to two days of speeches emphasizing the profound threat that rights for gay people, legal abortion, and the freedom of religion pose to our society, the attendees of the far-right Values Voter Summit handed a resounding straw poll victory to self-proclaimed libertarian Ron Paul.
Paul’s particular brand of libertarianism has taken hold in the imagination of the Tea Party, allowing its leaders and activists to claim a patriotic devotion to absolute freedom while simultaneously supporting policies that curtail the freedom of women, gay people, and religious minorities.
Who wants to be called a Right-Winger, Neocon or a Neanderthal these days? Welcome to Cafeteria Libertarianism.
“Libertarianism” has become the new code word to cover all that conservative Republican politicians love. They love to invoke a libertarian philosophy when they cut taxes for corporations and the rich, rail against health care reform, take the ax to the social safety net, deregulate Wall Street and block clean elections laws. It’s about freedom, they say. Come on, let’s get the government off of our backs!
The trouble is, the current GOP’s newfound embrace of libertarianism is a hoax. What today’s GOP practices is what I call “cafeteria libertarianism”: picking some freedoms to champion and others to actively work against. It’s an attempt to make the same old policies sound more palatable by twisting a much misunderstood ideology — with a uniquely marketable name — to help make the sale.
Take California Rep. David Dreier who is anti-choice and ironically, to say the least, anti-gay. When asked by a local news station this summer how he could appeal to Tea Party voters, Dreier responded, “I describe myself as a small-‘l’, libertarian-leaning Republican. I want less government and lower taxes. I believe in a free economy, limited government, a strong defense and personal freedom, that’s why I’m a Republican.” Dreier’s supposed embrace of libertarianism came as a surprise to those of us who have been following his life and politics for years. But Dreier’s not snacking alone at the Libertarian cafeteria — “libertarianism” has become a code word for GOP politicians hoping to appeal to Tea Party voters and corporate funders without the rest of the country taking notice.
When Republican politicians call themselves libertarians they, with very few exceptions, mean they want a small government when it comes to corporate accountability and a big government when it comes to people’s private lives. They don’t want Congress to regulate mine safety, but they do want to penalize small businesses that offer abortion coverage for employees. They don’t want to get in the way of Wall Street bankers fleecing consumers, but they’ll spend endless resources throwing up any and all possible barriers to gay people who want to marry whom they love.
It’s this cafeteria libertarianism, actively pushed by the corporate Right and wholeheartedly embraced by the Tea Party, that has allowed Congress and state legislatures to launch an all-out assault on corporate regulation, workers’ rights, and campaign finance restrictions — all while simultaneously conducting an energetic campaign to intervene in women’s health care, throw up bureaucratic hurdles to the right to vote, harangue practitioners of religions they don’t like and decide who can and cannot get married. Of course you need some powerful intellectual trickery to pull this off — how else can you say that you’re all for states’ rights and at the same time support amending the Constitution to prohibit states to define marriage?
The expert at this kind of trickery is libertarian poster boy and perennial presidential candidate Ron Paul, who enjoys an admiring following in the Tea Party movement and among some liberals who like some of the items that Paul has selected from the libertarian menu. Paul, despite his reputation as a hard-line maverick, picks and chooses the liberties he supports just as much as the rest of the GOP: sure, he famously defied his party to oppose the PATRIOT Act and the War on Drugs, but he also called Roe v. Wade a “big mistake” and supports the federal “Defense of Marriage Act.” And he’s far from alone: the oxymoronic anti-choice, anti-gay libertarians are now legion.
Paul has also ably demonstrated why the GOP’s actual libertarian beliefs are misguided at best and dangerous at worst: when Hurricane Irene hit the east coast this summer, taking dozens of lives and causing billions of dollars in damage, Paul reacted by calling for the end of FEMA and saying disasters should be dealt with “like 1900.” 1900, of course, was the year of the infamous Galveston hurricane, the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. And at a Republican debate this summer, Paul was met with cheers from the crowd when he said that an uninsured man suffering a life threatening illness is an example of “what freedom is all about.” This is the new standard of freedom?
True liberty is the freedom to live our lives the fullest, care for our families in comfort and make our own decisions about life’s fundamental personal issues. That’s something we can’t do if our government isn’t there to ensure public safety, a healthy environment and a basic safety net when things go wrong… or if our government is dedicated to meddling in our personal lives.
Let’s all agree that we love liberty. But the pick-and-choose liberty and libertarianism that Tea Party Republicans espouse is not only intellectually dishonest, it’s monumentally bad for America.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President-People For The American Way, Published in Huff Post, October 19, 2011
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