“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
“Carly Failorina”: HP Employees Won’t Give Carly Fiorina A Dime
The employees at Hewlett-Packard, where Carly Fiorina was CEO for six years, don’t seem interested in seeing their old boss become commander-in-chief.
Of the 302,000 employees at the company, not one has given a reportable amount to help Fiorina fund her 2016 presidential campaign, according to the campaign’s most recent FEC filings, which lists all donations over $200. HP’s corporate leadership also doesn’t seem keen on the idea of Fiorina in the White House. Among the 12-member board of directors, just one, Ann Livermore, has given a donation above that threshold.
Also missing from the donor list are current CEO (and former GOP gubernatorial candidate) Meg Whitman, any members of the senior leadership team, and all but one member of the HP Board during Fiorina’s tenure there from 1999 to 2005. Tom Perkins, a venture capitalist and former board member who voted to fire Fiorina in 2005, has since had a change of heart and donated $25,000 to CARLY for America, the super PAC supporting her.
The lack of early financial support from almost anyone associated with Hewlett-Packard is hard to square with Fiorina’s own description of her achievements there. While she acknowledges the “tough choices” she had to make as CEO, Fiorina aggressively defends her six-year run as a time when she transformed the company from an aging dinosaur into a market leader.
“We doubled the size of the company,” she told the audience at the recent CNN debate. “We quadrupled its topline growth rate. We quadrupled its cash flow. We tripled its rate of innovation.”
But Fiorina failed to explain during the debate that the company doubled in size because she pushed HP to merge with Compaq in 2001. That merger led to a company with two times the revenue, but only half of the value.
Fiorina also laid off 30,000 HP employees, moved thousands of jobs to China and India, and was fired by the board after a period so tumultuous that some disgruntled employees continue to refer to her as “Chainsaw Carly” or “Carly Failorina.” Her severance package was worth an estimated $42 million.
Interviews with HP employees during and after Fiorina’s leadership reveal a deep and simmering well of discontent 10 years after she left the company.
Dean Soderstrom, a sales operations manager at HP from 1999 until his retirement in 2015, said he saw feelings for Fiorina among rank-and-file employees sour quickly after she took over.
“Right from the get-go with Carly, it seemed like it was a two-class company. It was her and the rest of us,” Soderstrom said. “Many of her employees were very disenchanted by her. When she was let go, I think for the right reasons, there was a lot of singing ‘Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead.’”
To Soderstrom’s point, Fiorina’s first year at HP not only included an immediate overhaul of the company’s famous corporate culture, widely known in Silicon Valley as “the HP Way,” but also instant celebrity status for Fiorina, who was the first woman to lead a Fortune 20 company. She appeared on the cover of more than 40 magazine covers in her first year, had her portrait hung in the company’s Palo Alto lobby next to the founders, and bought a Gulfstream IV for her travels. The previous CEO, Lewis Platt, famously flew coach.
“I don’t care if she’s a Democrat, Republican, or Independent. I would not support her for president,” Soderstrom said. “I would not give her two cents.”
Another former employee, who is now a CEO in Silicon Valley, and did not want his name used, said he would never consider supporting Fiorina for president and knows of none of his former co-workers who would. “My thoughts are no employee would donate to her campaign, ever,” he said. “She is a terrible leader, really, really bad. As bad as they come.”
A current employee, who also asked that his name not be used, said he felt HP never recovered from the changes Fiorina made. “HP is still not a happy place to work. It’s pretty much been a disaster for years, but I think Carly set the tone.” The company recently announced another round of 30,000 layoffs and a restructuring that will split the massive company into two smaller units.
Peter Burrows, the author of Backfire: Carly Fiorina’s Battle for the Soul of Hewlett-Packard, who covered Fiorina’s tenure at HP and remains in touch with current employees, said Fiorina started at HP with high hopes among staff that she would change the company, making it more relevant and nimble. Instead, she became the symbol of its demise.
“Everybody at HP knew the company needed to change and she sounded like she had the answers,” Burrows said. “That faded pretty quickly because it became clear that it was not translating into action and it began to seem empty.”
As her time at the company went on, the company’s performance sank, and layoffs were implemented, Burrows said people inside HP and throughout Silicon Valley began to put the blame for the company’s failures on the once high-flying Fiorina, an opinion that persists to this day.
“Most people think that she did not improve the company, that she made the company weaker, that she tore away some of its strengths,” Burrows said. “She had a small but incredibly loyal core group around her, but she lost the vast majority of employees.”
The Fiorina campaign did not respond to several requests for comment on this article.
By: Patricia Murphy, The National Memo, September 30, 2015
“Car-Lying; Carly Fiorina Lies Like A Boss”: Her Meaningless Specifics Are A Marketing Ploy, Not A Policy
The Central Intelligence Agency has some tips for spotting liars. Unfortunately, most of them also sound like stage directions for a GOP primary candidate: “Failing to answer.” “Attacking.” “Denial.” Even, “Bringing up religion.” One particular hint is unusually relevant these days: “Being too specific.”
Carly Fiorina’s continuing distortions about what she saw, or didn’t see, on the Planned Parenthood sting videos would set off alarms all over Langley on all those counts, but it’s her level of primary-color, pointillist embroidery on the truth—in that and other instances—that truly sets her apart from the rest of the field.
Call it Car-lying. Describing things into reality is a trademark of Fiorina’s, a style of mendacity that sets her apart from career politicians. Indeed, the reason she doesn’t come off as a politician is she’s still in marketing.
At Hewlett-Packard, employees said she “embellished” the company’s “future products, strategy and even history,” adding a fictitious personal visit from Walt Disney to the true story about Disney Studios being an early client. She was brought into HP to be brash and exciting, to “drive a stake through” the “community-minded” and “collaborative” “pocket-protector paradise” of cautious expansion that existed before she got there. And she did! The Compaq merger that defined her unsteady tenure was a function of her own salesmanship: “The moxie to risk shareholders’ money on a huge acquisition… exceeds the courage of most mortals,” as one more positive assessment put it. Or, put another way: “Fiorina had one significant weakness as chief executive: she just wasn’t very good at running the business.”
Perhaps the best example of Fiorina’s cynical hucksterism is her brief stint as a consultant to the very agency that might have seen through her: the CIA. Then-Director Michael Hayden asked her to serve on a board charged with helping the agency navigate “demands for greater public accountability and openness.” Her advice? Don’t stop doing the stuff that make people want to hold you accountable—mass surveillance or torture—just make people think you’re being accountable. Or, as she recommended: “be very creative about [being] transparent.”
Indeed, exuberant chicanery may be the only crossover skill Fiorina can bring to her campaign from the business world. She managed the business side of her last campaign about as successfully as she did HP, which is to say: Not only did she lose, but by paying off her self-funded loan to the campaign first, she got a golden parachute and her employees got the shaft.
Fiorina does more than tell the “big lie,” she tells a big lie of a thousand parts, throwing placeholder disinformation at her interrogators with such practiced cool that observers just assume she must know what she’s talking about. Hence the soup of numbers in her military requisition demands at the last debate: “50 Army brigades,” “36 Marine battalions,” “350 naval ships.”
Fiorina’s numbers came from a Heritage Foundation study—though not one that has anything to do with the question on the table, which at least began with “Have you met Vladimir Putin?” and drifted more fuzzily into “the military issue.” Heritage’s alarmist report is a faux-empirical “readiness” index, designed to either estimate the U.S.’s ability to conduct two simultaneous, conventional regional wars or goose defense spending (maybe both!); but it’s not an actual plan for a real-world military engagement. Do you think River City would have bought the con if it had been “a lot” and not 76 trombones leading the big parade?
Pressed by Chuck Todd on her Planned Parenthood video lies, Fiorina didn’t just repeat that she had seen something that does not exist, she accused the organization of something that the “sting” video’s makers hadn’t: “Planned Parenthood is aborting fetuses alive to harvest their brains and other body parts. That is a fact.” To be clear, with this statement, Fiorina isn’t just repeating a mischaracterization she already told (that Planned Parenthood “harvests” organs that are intact after an abortion). Rather, she is saying that Planned Parenthood aborts fetuses alive, for the purpose of harvesting their intact organs. She added, “Planned Parenthood will not and cannot deny this because it is happening.”
That last bit is a hoary nugget of rhetorical flim-flammery on par with “When did you stop beating your wife?” It tries to reinvent lack of engagement as admission of guilt. Except Planned Parenthood has denied allegations of illegally “harvesting” organs—and six different state investigations (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, South Dakota, and now Missouri) have backed up those denials.
Instructively, what’s disturbing about Fiorina’s falsehoods isn’t that she lied, or even that she seems to believe her own lies. It’s not even, really, that her lies get bigger every time.
No, what should give you pause is that by sheer force of articulated will she has fabricated her own reality, to the point that her Super PAC spliced together a different video to illustrate just what it is she said she saw. Think about it: If Fiorina had stuck to some kind of emotionally-charged but non-specific description of the video, there would be no second round of debate. As it is, Fiorina didn’t just lie—she created a storyboard.
The Super PAC YouTube contribution is as dishonest a use of found footage as any “Paranormal Activity” rip-off, yet somehow her supporters suspend their disbelief. That may be because, unlike fans of direct-to-on-demand ghost stories, Republican primary voters haven’t really seen anything like this before.
Confident generalization is the native language of a Washington professional; studied ambiguity is their background noise. The reason red meat works so well is most political speech is thin gruel. Pat truisms are what make politicians sound like politicians (and parties often indistinguishable from each other): it’s what makes America great, education important, families treasured, and apple pie delicious.
We talk about “dog whistles” because what politicians really mean or really want to communicate is usually cloaked by superficial inoffensiveness and preservation of plausible deniability is the lodestar of any halfway decent flack. Disregard for those conventions on a personal, philosophical level is why the howling, unambiguous racism of Donald Trump and the obvious yet soft-spoken bigotry of Ben Carson have broken through. On policy, however, the only thing that distinguishes their vagueness from career pols is its hilarious blatancy.
By contrast, Fiorina’s brazenly explicit prescriptions are almost pornographic: especially in the sense that what she’s describing is unattainable in real life. People see her steely, echoing assertions as discipline. But she’s not displaying the focus of a real leader—just the conscientiousness of someone who has to keep her lies straight.
By: Ana Marie Cox, The Daily Beast, September 29, 2015
“No Longer Code, It’s Now In Your Face”: GOP’s 2016 Festival Of Hate”; It’s Already The Most Racist Presidential Campaign Ever
It appears that the GOP has traded in its dog whistle for a bullhorn when it comes to bigotry in the 2016 race for president. It’s as if the Republican presidential candidates are regressing to a time long gone.
There was a time decades ago that conservatives, and even Democrats like George Wallace, could and would openly demonize minorities in the most vile terms to attract white voters. But soon they realized the need to be subtler because times were changing.
The late GOP strategist Lee Atwater summed it up as follows (and forgive me for the blunt language, but it’s what he said): “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968 you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.”
So began the racial “dog whistle,” or the politically acceptable way of telling white people in a coded message that we will keep you safe from blacks, immigrants, etc. The first Republican to utilize this is generally seen as Barry Goldwater during his run for president in 1964. Goldwater’s campaign sought to capitalize on the backlash among conservative whites to the recently enacted Civil Rights Act. One famous example came shortly after the July 1964 riots in Harlem when he stated, “Our wives, all women, feel unsafe on our streets.” The message being that blacks are coming to rape your women and I will protect you.
In 1968, Richard Nixon ushered in the Southern Strategy, which Nixon’s special counsel, John Ehrlichman, candidly summarized as, “We’ll go after the racists.”
Nixon used the dog whistle of opposing “forced busing” and promising “law and order,” which were polite ways to say he would slow down desegregation and protect white America from black criminals.
And it has gone on from there in varying degrees. There was Ronald Reagan’s invocation of “states rights” in his speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, and 1988 of course we had George H.W. Bush’s infamous Willie Horton campaign commercial.
Interestingly, during the 1996 presidential race, Bob Dole steered clear of dog whistles during his losing campaign. And George W. Bush, while supporting a constitutional amendment opposing gay marriage in 2004, refused to “kick gays” as some on the right urged him to do. Bush even rejected Muslim bashing after 9/11, instead making it clear that, “The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.”
Now, there’s no longer a need to be politically correct when demonizing minorities. The GOP has gone full bigotry.
GOP frontrunner Donald Trump appears to have cherry-picked the most effective dog whistles from past GOP campaigns and then injected them with steroids. Trump has plagiarized Nixon’s practice of appealing to the “silent majority” (white people) and promising “law and order.”
But he has gone much further. Trump not only released a Latino version of Bush’s Willie Horton ad which featured images of three scary-looking Latino men who had committed crimes, he has made stoking the flames of fear of Latino immigrants a central tenet of his campaign.
Trump told us in his very first speech as a presidential candidate that Mexico is “sending people” to America who “are bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” And on the campaign trail he has continued telling crowds that “illegals” had “raped, sodomized, tortured and killed” American women. (The GOP loves to invoke rape.)
Jeb Bush said over the weekend that Democrats lure black people to support them with the promise of “free stuff.” At least when Mitt Romney made his infamous comments that 47 percent of Americans support the Democrats because they “are dependent upon government,” he only implied it was minorities. But not Bush. (By the way, Goldwater made a similar remark in 1964 when he said, “We can’t out-promise the Democrats.”)
And Ted Cruz has unequivocally stoked the flames of hate versus the LGBT community with his recent remarks that the gay activists are waging a “jihad” against “people of faith who respect the biblical teaching that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.”
Then there’s Ben Carson, running neck and neck with Trump. Carson declared last week that Islam is incompatible with the Constitution and he would not support a Muslim American for president. On Sunday, Carson inadvertently summed up the GOP’s theme in 2016 when he told CNN’s Jake Tapper that only the media types are upset with these intolerant comments, “because the American people, the majority of them, agree and they understand exactly what I am saying.”
Yes, we do understand exactly what Carson and the other GOP candidates are saying. It’s no longer code; it’s now in our face. The GOP’s 2016 platform is that Latino immigrants are coming to rape you, blacks want handouts, gays are waging a holy war versus Christians, and Muslims are not loyal to America.
The scariest part of all this is that we are just a few months into the race. Who knows how much more ugly and hateful this campaign could get before November 8, 2016? But given the frontrunners in the GOP race, I would predict it might just become the most bigoted and vile campaign in the modern era of American politics.
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Daily Beast, September 29, 2015
“Outsiders Looking In”: Truly Off The Rails, It’s Just A Matter Of Time Before Trump, Fiorina And Carson Fade Away
I get the outsider schtick. America has seen it over the years, but rarely have the American people elected someone who is truly off the rails.
In this field of Republican candidates for president, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that Donald Trump, Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina are off the rails. Their current polling advantage is due to their outsider persona, no question, but none of them have, to use Richard Ben Cramer’s book title from the 1988 campaign, “What it Takes.”
Wendell Willkie ran as an outsider/insider business guy in 1940 against Franklin Roosevelt. He was an experienced, viable national figure, knowledgeable on the issues, but lost to FDR in his bid for a third term.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was hardly an outsider, though he had never held elective office before. He was an immensely popular general who had helped mastermind D-Day and was courted at times by both political parties.
Jimmy Carter was surely an outside Washington candidate. That did him enormous good in 1976, but he was still an accomplished governor, two term state senator and experienced politician.
Popular General Ulysses S. Grant and experienced government hands William Howard Taft and Herbert Hoover were other presidents never to hold elective office, but few questioned their experience or qualifications.
In 2015, you have to ask yourself when examining the candidacies of Trump, Carson and Fiorina whether they are truly presidential. Do they have the temperament, experience, knowledge and understanding of “what it takes” to run for president and be president?
Trump is clearly number one in the off the rails category. Everything is an attack, everything is a show, and everything is about him and his outsized ego. There is no uplifting message of substance, no indication he understands the nation’s problems or is ready to offer any concrete plans to solve them. This is a soap opera on steroids, “Entertainment Tonight” that is rapidly ceasing to be entertaining. It is a candidacy that is no longer, if it ever was, meaningful. Trump has no where to go but down and with each passing day of his antics he drops in the public’s estimation.
Carson is totally out of his league. There is truly no reason for him to be a candidate. He does not understand the issues. He appears not to have read the Constitution on just who can be president or even how the government works. He may understand brain surgery, but he doesn’t have the slightest understanding of basic foreign or domestic policy. His participation in debates and as a candidate subjecting himself to scrutiny will doom any future campaign faster than the Washington Nationals got swept by the New York Mets.
As for Fiorina, she is no wunderkind, as her career at Hewlett-Packard can attest. In fact, most analysts are appalled at her performance. Jeffrey Sonnenfeld pointed out that during her tenure the value of HP fell 55 percent, 30,000 people were laid off, and she invested $25 billion in the dying Compaq computer company. She walked away having made $100 million after her failure and her firing. Not exactly a record to run on.
But, more important, she does not appear to have the leadership skills or the temperament to be a strong leader in the political world. She does study her briefing books, she does prepare for the debates more than some of the others, and she is not shy and not afraid to mix it up. But at the end of the day, she shows her true inexperience by stating that she will refuse to talk to Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and shows very little understanding of issues, from Planned Parenthood to Iran.
So my guess is that even though these three have taken the lead in some of the polls they will fade quickly and then we will be back to more serious Republican candidates: Bush, Kasich, Christie, Rubio and Cruz. When voters get serious, Trump, Carson and Fiorina will be the outsiders, looking in, and wondering what hit them.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. Newsa and World Report, September 25, 2015
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