In Seach Of Human Liberty And Equality, The Constitution Is Inherently Progressive
Progressives disagree strongly with tea party views on government, taxation, public spending, regulations and social welfare policies. But we credit the movement for focusing public debate on our nation’s history, the Constitution and the core beliefs that shape American life.
This conversation is long overdue — and too often dominated by narrow interpretations of what makes America great.
Since our nation’s founding, progressives have drawn on the Declaration of Independence’s inspirational values of human liberty and equality in their own search for social justice and freedom. They take to heart the constitutional promise that “We the People” are the ultimate source of political power and legitimacy and that a strong national government is necessary to “establish justice, … provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty.”
Successive generations of progressives worked to turn these values into practice and give meaning to the American dream, by creating full equality and citizenship under law and expanding the right to vote. We sought to ensure that our national government has the power and resources necessary to protect our people, develop our economy and secure a better life for all Americans.
As progressives, we believe in using the ingenuity of the private sector and the positive power of government to advance common purposes and increase freedom and opportunity. This framework of mutually reinforcing public, private and individual actions has served us well for more than two centuries. It is the essence of the constitutional promise of a never-ending search for “a more perfect union.”
Coupled with basic beliefs in fair play, openness, cooperation and human dignity, it is this progressive vision that in the past century helped build the strongest economy in history and allowed millions to move out of poverty and into the middle class. It is the basis for American peace and prosperity as well as greater global cooperation in the postwar era.
So why do conservatives continue to insist that progressives are opposed to constitutional values and American traditions? Primarily because progressives since the late 19th century rejected the conservative interpretation of the Constitution as an unchangeable document that endorses laissez-faire capitalism and prohibits government efforts to provide a better existence for all Americans.
Progressives rightly charge that conservatives often mask social Darwinism and a dog-eat-dog mentality in a cloak of liberty, ignoring the needs of the least well-off and the nation as a whole.
As President Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1944 address to Congress, “We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. ‘Necessitous men are not free men.’ People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.”
Yet according to modern conservative constitutional theory, the entire Progressive, New Deal and Great Society eras were aberrations from American norms. Conservatives label the strong measures taken in the 20th century to protect all Americans and expand opportunity — workplace regulations, safe food and drug laws, unemployment insurance, the minimum wage, limits on work hours, the progressive income tax, civil rights legislation, environmental laws, increased public education and other social welfare provisions — as illegitimate.
Leading conservatives, like Texas Gov. Rick Perry, claim that Social Security and Medicare are unconstitutional. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) even argues that national child labor laws violate the Constitution.
They lash out at democratically enacted laws like the Affordable Care Act and claim prudent regulations, including oversight of polluters and Wall Street banks, violate the rights of business.
This is a profound misreading of U.S. history and a bizarre interpretation of what makes America exceptional.
There are few Americans today who believe America was at its best before the nation reined in the robber barons; created the weekend; banned child labor; established national parks; expanded voting rights; provided assistance to the sick, elderly and poor; and asked the wealthy to pay a small share of their income for national purposes.
A nation committed to human freedom does not stand by idly while its citizens suffer from economic deprivation or lack of opportunity. A great nation like ours puts forth a helping hand to those in need. It offers assistance to those seeking to turn their talents, dreams and ambitions into a meaningful and secure life.
America’s greatest export is our democratic vision of government. Two centuries ago, when our Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to craft the Constitution, government of the people, by the people and for the people was a radical experiment.
Our original Constitution was not perfect. It wrote women and minorities out and condoned an abhorrent system of slavery. But the story of America has also been the story of a good nation, conceived in liberty and equality, eventually welcoming every American into the arms of democracy, protecting their freedoms and expanding their economic opportunities.
Today, entire continents follow America’s example. Americans are justifiably proud for giving the world the gift of modern democracy and demonstrating how to turn an abstract vision of democracy into reality.
The advancements we made collectively over the years to fulfill these founding promises are essential to a progressive vision of the American idea. The continued search for genuine freedom, equality and opportunity for all people is a foundational goal that everyone — progressives and conservatives alike — should cherish and protect.
By: John Podesta and John Halpin, Center For American Progress, Published in Politico, October 10, 2011
Lynch Law Lives On Stage And In Troy Davis Execution
When you visit Atlanta, ask about the death of Troy Davis, an execution by lethal injection as miles of people across land and sea kept a vigil until it came to pass at 11:08 p.m. last Wednesday evening.
Nice to know law and order—or do I mean lynch law and order?—prevails in the stubborn deep South, whatever the world thinks. Davis was put to death despite a slew of supporters, including dignitaries and law enforcement experts, who found shades of reasonable doubt in his murder case.
In a stroke of amazing timing and relevance, Georgia’s capital city is the setting of a tragical musical, Parade, based on a true story of a 1915 lynching. I just saw the brilliant production on opening night at Ford’s Theatre on 10th Street here in Washington—the very spot where Abraham Lincoln was shot at close range, by someone he never saw coming in the dark. A vengeful son of the South, an actor, played a Shakespearean scene for all he was worth—MacBeth, Lincoln’s favorite.
On that tragic April night, Lincoln was heartily enjoying a comedy. Similarly, all seems bright at first in this Ford’s Theatre play. Parade’s exuberant ensemble charms with spring songs, costumes, and revelry as the curtain opens on Atlanta’s celebration of “Confederate Memorial Day” in April 1913. But the holiday itself reveals the defiance of Atlanta’s white society, keeping the anti-Yankee candles burning.
The theatre director, Paul R. Tetreault, expertly captures the tableau of a wounded world that tells itself, over and over, that it was never vanquished, despite the festering sore of the Recent Unpleasantness.
An old guard culture, hostile to outsiders, was the downfall for a Jewish New Yorker in his early 30s, Leo Frank, who made a good living as a factory superintendent. He was accused and arrested of a gruesome child murder. Playwright Alfred Uhry, author of Driving Miss Daisy, wrote the book for the Broadway play, launched onstage in 1998. Uhry has family ties to the story, in true Southern storytelling style. There are no secrets down there, except the ones they choose to tell years later.
Parade is no picnic as it wends its way through the Southern justice system on a murder case that became a national cause, like the Davis case. Frank was found guilty of fatally strangling a girl worker in his pencil factory. When he was sentenced to hang, there was an outcry from quarters who felt a virulent strain of anti-Yankee anti-Semitism played a part in the verdict.
The governor of Georgia a century ago, John Slaton, went against the will of Atlanta’s townspeople. His character, portrayed by Stephen F. Schmidt, exhibits courage and pathos, clear about the consequences of bucking the establishment. Governor Slaton reviews the conflicting evidence in Frank’s case and grants him clemency: life imprisonment instead of death by the state’s hand. That is precisely what Georgia state officials refused to do for Troy Davis.
Lead actor Euan Morton telegraphs Frank’s desperate plight with impressive restraint. Jenny Fellner, the actress who plays his wife Lucille, sparkles onstage with her singing voice and her journey to loving her husband, locked up and alone, more than she ever did.
Relentlessly, the end closes in. A well-connected mob of white men break into the jail where Frank is held, to take him for a long night ride. It was a well-planned thing. In the show as in life, the hooded men string Frank up—as he prays in Hebrew—and hang him, with picture postcards to show for it all. Very nice.
So if you get to Marietta, ask them about the tree where Frank was hanged. Yes, Georgia has lots of colorful local history, and the fun part is trying to see where the past ends and the present begins. Both the Davis and Frank convictions were reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court, which denied relief or mercy in both cases. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the famous justice, scolded Georgia for what he called a form of “lynch law” in Frank’s trial. But he was a damn Yankee in the minority.
Tetreault and others chose this timely tale to inaugurate The Lincoln Legacy Project, an initiative to spark a national dialogue on overcoming violence based on hate or bigotry. Parade’s history lesson could not be more sobering. Early in the 20th century, lynchings of black men were at an all-time high in the Southern states (including Maryland.) This was a spur to the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909. Ari Roth of Theater J, a partner in co-producing the play, notes Frank met the same fate as so many black men at the hands of mobs. Parade, Roth said, is a “galvanizing reminder of what can go wrong in our country when hate speech and raging angers aren’t tempered and set to rest.”
Amen. And let the conversation begin.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, September 26, 2011
Conservative Word Games Manipulate Immigration Debate
Gabriel Thompson’s “How the Right Made Racism Sound Fair–and Changed Immigration Politics” at Colorlines.com goes long and deep into the psychology of conservative lingo and terminology used by the MSM in the immigration debate. A teaser:
…Colorlines.com reviewed the archives of the nation’s largest-circulation newspapers to compare how often their articles describe people as “illegal” or “alien” versus describing them as “undocumented” or “unauthorized.” We found a striking and growing imbalance, particularly at key moments in the immigration reform debate. In 2006 and 2007, for example, years in which Congress engaged a pitched battle over immigration reform, the New York Times published 1,483 articles in which people were labeled as “illegal” or “alien;” just 171 articles used the adjectives “undocumented” or “unauthorized.”That imbalance isn’t coincidental. In the wake of 9/11, as immigration politics have grown more heated and media organizations have worked to codify language they deem neutral, pollsters in both parties have pushed their leaders toward a punitive framework for discussing immigration. Conservatives have done this unabashedly to rally their base; Democrats have shifted rhetoric with the hopes that it will make their reform proposals more palatable to centrists. But to date, the result has only been to move the political center ever rightward–and to turn the conversation about immigrants violently ugly.
Thompson, author of “Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do,” has written an excellent analysis which merits a close read — especially by Dem candidates and staffers who are involved in immigration politics.
By: The Democratic Strategist Staff, September 21, 2011
With The Death Penalty, “Probably” Isn’t Good Enough
The death penalty is a barbaric anachronism, a crude instrument not of justice but of revenge. Most countries banished it long ago. This country should banish it now.
The state of Georgia was wrong to execute convicted murderer Troy Anthony Davis as protesters and journalists kept a ghoulish vigil Wednesday night — just as the state of Texas was wrong, hours earlier, to execute racist killer Lawrence Russell Brewer.
That’s hard for me to write, because if anyone deserved a syringe full of lethal poison it was Brewer. He was an avowed white supremacist who had been convicted, along with two accomplices, of the 1998 hate-crime murder of a black man, James Byrd Jr. They offered Byrd a ride, beat him up and then killed him by chaining his ankles to the back of their pickup and dragging him for more than two miles. When police found Byrd’s body, it was dismembered and decapitated.
“I have no regrets,” Brewer said in an interview with Beaumont, Tex., television station KFDM this year. “I’d do it all over again, to tell you the truth.”
Sweet guy, huh? Still, I can’t applaud his death at the hands of the well-practiced Texas executioners. It’s not that I believe his life had any redeeming value, just that the state was wrong to snuff it out.
The Davis case drew worldwide attention because of questions about the evidence of his guilt. Davis was found guilty of killing a Savannah, Ga., police officer, Mark MacPhail, in 1989. The conviction was based almost entirely on eyewitness testimony, and in the two decades since that trial, seven of nine witnesses have at least partially recanted.
The case became a cause celebre. Luminaries who could never be accused of being soft on crime — such as former FBI Director William Sessions and former GOP Rep. Bob Barr — argued that Davis should not be executed because of doubt about his guilt.
Wednesday night, in his last words, Davis told MacPhail’s family that “I did not personally kill your son, father and brother. I am innocent.” Then a deadly cocktail of drugs was pumped into his veins.
The Davis case makes a compelling case against the death penalty — but not because it is exceptional. On the contrary, it’s fairly ordinary.
Despite what you see on “CSI,” there isn’t always DNA or other physical evidence to prove guilt with 99.9 percent certainty. Jurors often have to rely on witnesses whose field of vision may have been limited — and whose recall, imperfect to begin with, degrades over time. Even when there’s no “reasonable doubt” about the defendant’s guilt — the standard for conviction — there’s often some measure of doubt.
And there are questions of process. Were witnesses coerced into testifying against Davis? A few say now that they were. Did prosecutors prove their case? The jurors certainly believed they did. Could racial bias have been a factor? Unlikely, given that the jury included seven blacks and five whites. Should Davis’s attorney have done a better job of presenting a defense? Almost surely.
It’s a mixed bag. I can’t ignore the fact that over the years, not one of the many judges who examined the case concluded there had been a true miscarriage of justice. This suggests to me that Davis was probably guilty.
But “probably” isn’t good enough in a capital case — and this is why the death penalty is flawed as a practical matter. Someone who is wrongly imprisoned can always be released, but death — to state the obvious — is irrevocable.
In scores of cases across the country, newly examined DNA evidence has proved that inmates jailed for rape or other sexual crimes were in fact not guilty. It is not just likely but certain that some defendants now on death row are innocent. Even if only one is eventually executed, that will be a tragic and unacceptable abuse of state power.
There was a chilling moment in a recent GOP candidates’ debate when Texas Gov. Rick Perry was asked about having authorized 234 executions, more than any other governor in modern U.S. history. The crowd, drawn largely from Tea Party ranks, cheered this record as if it were a great accomplishment. “I’ve never struggled with that at all,” Perry said, referring to execution as “the ultimate justice.”
But he should struggle with it. We all should.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, September 22, 2011
How Southern Republicans Aim To Make White Democrats Extinct
State Rep. Stacey Abrams serves as the Georgia House Minority Leader.
Across the state, legislative maps are drawn to split voters along artificial lines to isolate them by race. Legislators see their districts disappear, themselves the target of racial gerrymandering. Citizens rise up in protest and demand the right to elect the candidate of their choice, but the ruling party ignores them. Racial groups are identified and segregated; their leadership eliminated. It is the way of the South. Only this isn’t 1964, the year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. This is Georgia in 2011.
But this time, the legislators at risk are white men and women who have had the temerity to represent majority African-American districts, and Latino legislators who spoke up for their growing Hispanic population. In crossover districts, where whites and blacks have worked together for decades to build multi-racial voting coalitions, the new district maps devised by the Republican majority have slashed through those ties with speed and precision. If the maps proposed by the GOP in Georgia stand, nearly half of the white Democratic state representatives could be removed from office in one election cycle. Call it the “race card”—in reverse.
Reapportionment is a dangerous business. Once every 10 years, the naked ambition of political parties wars with the dwindling hope of voters that this time their voices will be heard. In the South, the voting lines traditionally aimed for specific targets—racial discrimination that purged minorities, diminishing their numbers and political power. If a legislator had the poor fortune to be of the wrong race, that district would disappear for a decade or more. The voters who relied on you would find themselves isolated and polarized, the victims of racial gerrymandering.
For most of the nation, the battle lines are drawn by partisan leaders who search for the sinuous lines that will connect like-minded voters to one another and disadvantage those who have shown a preference for the other side. That, as they say, is Politics 101.
But for a handful of states, the stakes are higher. Below the Mason-Dixon Line and scattered across the country, a legacy of poll taxes and literacy tests required a special remedy—Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act has a simple goal—integrate the voting of minorities into the fabric of our democracy. For any state held to its obligations, no changes can be made to election laws without pre-clearance by the Justice Department. In the last decade, the minority population across the South has increased, and by any measure, the Voting Rights Act has been the engine of racial progress.
In Georgia, the gains made under the Act are undeniable. Districts populated predominately by African-Americans have routinely elected white legislators to speak for them. In enclaves across the state, white voters have punched their ballots to elect African-American and Latino representatives. Crossover districts, where blacks and whites and Latinos co-mingle, have grown in prominence–combining with majority-minority districts to comprise nearly 35 percent of the House of Representatives.
In 2011, Georgia should stand as a model for the South and a beacon for those who believe in the rights of voters. However, based on the maps passed last week by the Republican majority, we are in danger of returning to 1964.
Redistricting is fundamentally about voters, and in Georgia, minority voters comprise fully 42 percent of the population. More importantly, these populations have aligned themselves with majority white constituents to demonstrate political power. Under the proposal, Republicans will pair 20 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of Republicans in the state House and eliminate the sole remaining white Democrat in Congress from the Deep South. The House pairings pit black Democrats against white Democrats in four contests, white against white in another and eliminate multi-racial coalition voting across the state. When the dust settles, between pairings and the creation of GOP-leaning districts, Republicans stand to knock off 10 white Democrats—half the total number. They will pick up seven new seats, for a total of 123 Republican seats, 56 Democratic seats and one Independent. This will give Republicans a constitutional majority in the state of Georgia; in other words, they will be able to pass any piece of legislation without opposition.
Let’s be clear. It is absolutely the prerogative of the majority party to maximize its political gains. No one questions the right of the GOP to draw as many districts as it can legally muster. The issue is not whether the GOP can increase its hold, but how.
The GOP’s newly drawn voting lines in the state of Georgia reveals a pernicious new cynicism in our politics—the use of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon to destroy racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. It is no consolation if individual black legislators benefit in the GOP’s new scheme. The Voting Rights Act was never intended to protect a particular minority. Indeed, the highest goals of the Act, one of modern America’s most progressive pieces of legislation, was to encourage multi-racial cooperation and understanding. Precisely, what we in Georgia have begun to achieve. More alarmingly, this new strategy targeting white legislators is not limited to our state. If effective here, the cradle of the civil rights movement, the strategy is expected to be implemented in mid-term redistricting across the South. Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, and Virginia are watching closely.
Today, we all decry a national partisanship that seems unhealthy and corrosive. But there is nothing wrong with partisanship, when it is a battle of ideas. The Voting Rights Act is intended to ensure that differing ideas be heard, that no single voice drown out the rest. Sadly, that is not what we see rising in the South. The Voting Rights Act is in danger of not protecting the promise of a new day, but becoming a new tool in the politics of destruction.
By: Stacey Abrams, Georgia House Minority Leader, Published in U. S. News and World Report, September 19, 2011
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