“The Very Real Work That Needs To Be Done”: Republicans, Take Down That Flag — And Stand Up For Voting Rights
The abandonment of the Confederate battle flag by conservative politicians and organizations that previously defended it as a noble symbol of “heritage, not hate” is welcome, if long overdue. And the subsequent move by large corporations to stop selling the flag suggests that we may be experiencing an important cultural shift, that we may be entering a time in which it is no longer deemed acceptable to celebrate nostalgia for an era defined first by slavery and then by racial segregation enforced by officially sanctioned terror.
That kind of cultural change is, of course, a good thing, and the Confederate battle flag’s dramatically declining fortunes feel like a significant moment. Still, doing away with official reverence for the flag is largely a symbolic move that doesn’t come close to addressing the problems surrounding race in America, including disparities in treatment by the criminal justice system and the resurgence of voter suppression laws and other schemes designed to rig the elections in favor of powerful conservative interests. In recent days, the burning of black churches in Southern states, including one that had previously been burned down by the KKK, is a chilling and tragic reminder that violence aimed at the African-American community, violence with a long history, is not confined to a single act in a single city.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley’s decision to ask the legislature to take the Confederate battle flag from its position on the statehouse grounds came only after the murders at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. It is a sad fact of political life that it often takes a horrific act to galvanize sufficient political will to make necessary change, often after years of work have prepared the ground for what looks from the outside like a sudden shift. Civil rights activists, clergy, and Black lawmakers in South Carolina have been organizing against the official place of honor for the Confederate battle flag for decades, both before and after the flag was moved from the dome of the state capitol and raised over the Confederate memorial on the statehouse grounds in 2000. That activism continued as recently as two months before the Charleston shooting, when a group of African-American clergy taking part in a national gathering of People for the American Way Foundation’s African-American Ministers Leadership Council encircled the flag in protest.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley may be reaping praise for her rising political stock, or for outmaneuvering “the agitators,” in the words of one gloating tweet, but this is not really a story about courageous leadership on her part. It is, rather, a story about the GOP leadership finally coming to terms, at least symbolically, with the Republican Party’s increasingly untenable position, in an increasingly diverse country, of being in partnership with groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens that foster nostalgia for our white supremacist past and deep resentment about the nation’s growing diversity.
In fact, right-wing responses to the Charleston shootings have been a study in political calculation, reflected in the face of RNC chief Reince Priebus looking over Haley’s shoulder last week. The Haley press conference was in part an effort to save floundering GOP presidential candidates from dealing with questions about the Confederate flag without distancing themselves from right-wing base voters or GOP activists in South Carolina, an important early primary state.
Initial right-wing responses to the shootings were mind-boggling and important to look at. Some commentators on Fox News downplayed evidence that the murders were racially motivated. Some sought to blame drug use and anti-religious feelings. Some even blamed the murdered Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was also a state senator, based on his positions on reproductive choice and gun control.
National conservative leaders denounced the violence but were seemingly unwilling to engage with the violent racism that was at its root and bizarrely did all they could to find another explanation for the shooting. When asked if the shooting in Charleston was racially motivated, Jeb Bush said, “I don’t know.” Lindsey Graham tried to take the focus off race and advance the myth that the shootings were a hate crime targeting Christians.
Remarkably, even after the killer’s manifesto of racial hatred was released, some right-wing pundits continued to push the idea that the murders were an attack on Christianity, a “Satanic act” by someone with “socialist leanings.” That fits the right wing’s political narrative, which is grounded in dishonest claims that progressives are enemies of religious freedom. Republicans are counting on that narrative to help carry them into the White House in 2016, in part by reaching out to evangelical voters of color.
But taking down the flag is not going to change the Republican Party’s devotion to policies that harm people and undermine our democracy. As President Barack Obama said in his eulogy for the slain Rev. Pinckney, taking down the flag would be “one step in an honest accounting of America’s history,” but allowing ourselves to “slip into a comfortable silence” on difficult issues facing the country would be “a betrayal of everything Rev. Pinckney stood for.”
Voting rights advocates from around the country gathered in Roanoke, Virginia, on the day before Rev. Pinckney’s funeral to rally for a renewal of the Voting Rights Act, a centerpiece achievement of the civil rights movement that was gutted by the Supreme Court’s conservative justices to the cheers of many Republican politicians. We must make sure that the continuing conversation around the Confederate battle flag does not become a distraction from the very real work that needs to be done to dismantle the legacy of racism and bigotry that that flag represents. It’s not enough to take down the flag; we have to take down the discriminatory policies and practices that constitute that legacy. If Republican politicians truly want to reject that legacy, let them start by embracing the Voting Rights Advancement Act.
By: Michael B. Keegan, President, People For the American Way; The Blog, The Huffington Post, July 2, 2015
“Longer And Deeper Than Just A Few Checks”: The 2 Degrees of Separation Between Dylann Roof And The Republican Party
News that Earl Holt, president of the white-supremacist Council of Conservative Citizens, has donated $65,000 to Republicans, including Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Rick Santorum, has ricocheted around the media since The Guardian broke it last night. No wonder: It reveals a mere two degrees of separation between the racist murderer Dylann Roof, who says the CCC helped inspire him, and the GOP. It might be unfair to make this link if the support only went one way—after all, politicians can’t be held responsible for the views of everyone who gives them money. But the entanglement between the Council of Conservative Citizens and the Republican Party is longer and deeper than just a few checks, and for many years, it was mutual.
“The public sees the CCC and wants to think of it as an extremist group, which it is, but it’s also a group that’s had a foothold historically in mainstream politics,” says Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Before his killing spree, Roof published a half-literate manifesto crediting the CCC for his radicalization. He describes typing “black on White crime” into Google following the Trayvon Martin killing: “The first website I came to was the Council of Conservative Citizens. There were pages upon pages of these brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong.” After Roof’s screed came to light, the CCC didn’t bother to distance itself from the views of its sociopathic admirer. “[W]e utterly condemn Roof’s despicable killings, but they do not detract in the slightest from the legitimacy of some of the positions he has expressed,” it says in a statement.
In a phone interview, CCC spokesman Jared Taylor elaborated on this legitimacy. “Let’s say Dylann Roof has a talent for programming. If he goes out to Silicon Valley, he will find that Apple and Intel have set aside hundreds of millions of dollars to hire people who look like anybody but him,” he says. Another “legitimate grievance,” Taylor says, is the “overwhelming amount of black-on-white rather than white-on-black violence,” particularly rape.
Taylor sympathizes with the needs of Republicans like Cruz, who has returned the CCC’s donation, to distance themselves from the group. The presidential candidate, he says, “will come under tremendous pressure if he doesn’t give the money back. It’s not an easy situation.” That pressure has made it harder for Republicans to openly align with the CCC. “From time to time we have Republicans who are interested in our events, but it’s not as common as it has been in the past,” he says.
Indeed, in the past, Southern Republicans regularly patronized CCC gatherings; the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that 38 elected officials appeared between 2000 and 2004 alone, including Roger Wicker, now a Mississippi senator, and former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, a major figure in the Christian right, spoke there in 2001. “Southern politicians going to CCC events is just a reflection of the GOP’s traditional Southern strategy,” says Cohen.
In the last decade, Republican politicians have realized that, in the age of social media, association with the CCC can be dangerous. An inflection point was the 2002 resignation of Senate majority leader Trent Lott—who spoke to the CCC at least five times—after a firestorm caused by his praise of Strom Thurmond’s segregationist 1948 third-party presidential campaign, remarks that were amplified by the blogosphere.
But the overlap between the CCC and the GOP has never entirely disappeared, particularly in South Carolina. Two years ago, for example, Roan Garcia-Quintana, a CCC board member and self-described “Confederate Cuban,” resigned his place on Governor Nikki Haley’s campaign steering committee after his links to the group made news. CCC webmaster Kyle Rogers—whose online store, Patriotic-Flags.com, sells the same Rhodesian flag patch worn by Roof in one of his photos—was a member of the Dorchester County Republican Executive Committee. (It’s also worth noting that high-profile conservative pundit Ann Coulter was defending the CCC as recently as 2009.)
This is part of why Republican candidates have been so hesitant to acknowledge that Roof was actually motivated by racism, despite his own unambiguous words. On some level, they realize that if they admit the truth, they will be held politically accountable. And it’s in that context that Holt’s donations are notable. “You can’t help it in this world sometimes who admires you,” says Cohen. “The much more damning thing for the Republican Party historically has been the legitimacy that it has conferred on the CCC.”
By: Michelle Goldberg, The Nation, June 22, 2015
“John Roberts To America; I’m In Charge Here”: A Blunt Message To Politicians To Stop Abusing The Judiciary
When, just over two years ago, right-wing superlawyer Michael Carvin filed his first lawsuit seeking to deny Affordable Care Act tax credits to millions of individuals in states with federally operated exchanges, die-hard ACA opponents saw one reason why the Supreme Court might use an isolated four-word phrase to sabotage the ACA—that all five conservative justices would vote their political gut. As decision day approached, many ACA supporters (including me) suspected that the challengers’ political appeal might only be overcome if one or two of the conservative justices—Anthony Kennedy and/or Chief Justice John Roberts—would embrace states rights–based constitutional arguments to save the law.
Last Thursday, when the Court issued its decision in the case, King v. Burwell, all these hopes and fears about the political and ideological vectors at play, specifically, with Roberts, turned out to be dead wrong. The chief justice had bigger fish to fry—personal, institutional, and policy priorities—that led him to uphold the Obama administration’s decision to make tax credits available nationwide:
- Asserting his personal leadership of the Court, by mobilizing a 6-3 bipartisan majority, and taking the heat for writing a no-holds-barred, decisive opinion in the most politically divisive case on this year’s docket;
- Continuing an ever more evident drive to advance the Court’s power vis-à-vis the two elected branches, as the final decider and major direction-setter on the nation’s most fought-over policy issues;
- Sending a blunt message to conservative activists, lawyers, and politicians to stop abusing the judiciary as a handy back-door gimmick to reverse political defeats they have been unable to reverse in political arenas—in particular, to stop bringing cases designed to “undo” the ACA;
- Sending a subtle, gratuitous, but nevertheless quite discernible piece of policy advice to Republican politicians and policy-makers, in the form of a reminder of the ACA’s Republican ancestry in Massachusetts’ 2006 Romneycare reform law, referencing that model’s conservative credentials as a way to “expand coverage” while relying on private health insurance markets.
As the litigation made its way toward the high court, ACA opponents had been upfront about their bet that conservatives on the bench shared, and would act on their animus to the president’s signature legislative accomplishment. In September 2014, after the full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals had voted to vacate and rehear a 2-1 decision in his favor, Carvin candidly opined that raw partisan politics would drive the Supreme Court to preempt the appellate court’s consideration of the case: “I don’t know that four justices, who are needed to [grant review of the case] here . . . are going to give much of a damn about what a bunch of Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit think.” Asked if he believed he would lose the votes of any of the five conservative justices, he smiled and said, “Oh, I don’t think so.” Carvin’s cynical take was hardly unique; some of his allies openly forecast that Roberts would feel a need to appease conservatives who excoriated him for his 2012 vote to save the ACA.
Last Thursday, Roberts dashed conservative hopes and liberal fears of a partisan political decision. To the contrary, as conservative blogger Josh Blackman ruefully explained on a Federalist Society post-mortem conference call, the decision effectively seemed to elevate the ACA into a kind of “untouchable super-statute that is beyond reach.” Blackman characterized Roberts’s message as, “This is over . . . We’re through”—meaning, we’re through hearing cases ginned up by our clever lawyer friends to precipitate judicial de facto repeal of the law. Roberts’s brush-off of these core allies was foreshadowed by remarks he made at the University of Nebraska a few days before Carvin bared his cynical partisan take on the conservative justices. Then the chief justice said he was “worried about people having [the] perception” that the Court is no less a political body than Congress or the presidency. He attributed this trend to polarization in the elected branches, saying that he did not “want that to spill over and affect us.” Though widely disregarded at the time as standard civics class pap, it now appears clear that Roberts was serious and motivated by clear-eyed concern about the Court’s stature. As he observed in his 2005 confirmation hearings, “It is a very serious threat to the independence and integrity of the courts to politicize them.” King v. Burwell posed just such an institutional threat, and it was his job as chief justice to dispel it.
But to Roberts, protecting the Court’s reputation does not mean staying above the fray, much less retreating to the sidelines. On the contrary, the decision showed how focused he is on enhancing the Court’s power, well understanding that its non-political image is, ironically, essential to its clout. His opinion reasoned that, read in the context of the overall statute and Congress’ “plan,” the four-word phrase “established by the state” on which the challengers relied was “ambiguous.” When statutes are ambiguous, long-standing black-letter law requires courts to defer to an agency’s reasonable interpretation, rather than impose an interpretation that the court considers correct. But Roberts did not take that route. Instead, he said, the Court must decide for itself what the law means, on the ground—never before asserted so categorically—that the availability of ACA tax credits is “a question of deep economic and political significance that is central to this statutory scheme.” Of course, he then held that the administration’s interpretation was the right call. Administrative law experts were quick to note that, in the words of Ohio State law professor Chris Walker, “King v. Burwell—while a critical win for the Obama Administration—is a judicial power grab over the Executive in the modern administrative state.”
Roberts’s yen to project the Court as a player on the policy question of “deep economic and political significance” posed by the case was also manifest in another theme of his opinion, understated but audacious. Not only did he note the ACA’s roots in Romneycare, but he underscored that law’s record of effectiveness in reducing the “uninsured rate in Massachusetts to 2.6%, by far the lowest in the Nation,” and then went on to observe that the ACA “adopts a version of the three key reforms that made the Massachusetts system successful” (emphasis added), including the affordablity tax credits at issue in King, as well as the “individual mandate” that Roberts upheld as a pay-or-play tax incentive in 2012 in NFIB v. Sebelius. This and other notably favorable descriptions of the ACA in Thursday’s opinion seem aimed at Republican policy-makers and politicians. His message recalls his 2012 approval of the law’s individual mandate as an optional tax incentive—preferable, he wrote, because the “taxing power does not give Congress the same degree of control over individual behavior” as a Commerce Clause–based absolute mandate.
As I wrote after the NFIB decision, Roberts took this policy argument from a 2011 D.C. Circuit opinion by fellow George W. Bush appointee Judge Brett Kavanaugh; that opinion favorably portrayed the ACA as potentially “the leading edge of a shift” to “privatize the social safety net and government assistance programs.” In these opinions, Kavanaugh and Roberts seem to be pitching a line favored in conservative policy circles prior to the recent rise of tea party-style anti-government absolutism—keep and expand the national safety net, but privatize and regulate it through incentives rather than commands. With his decisions in NFIB v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell, however, John Roberts has gone further than merely touting that big-government conservative model for safety net governance, casting the ACA as a product of that model. He has used his power to entrench it—against demands from the left for a command-and-control version of the ACA individual mandate, and against conservatives’ strategy of killing the ACA in court. This, Roberts concluded, is “the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid”—and which, the chief justice made crystal clear, he will be loath to permit, in this case and any other challenge the law’s opponents might cook up.
By: Simon Lazarus, Senior Counsel to the Constitutional Accountability Center; The New Republic, June 27, 2015
“The GOP Gay Marriage Freakout”: The Modern Republican Party Is Operating More And More Like An Underground Crime Network
Marriage equality has won at the Supreme Court, but the fight over gay marriage is far from over. Now we enter the Republican temper tantrum phase.
Even before the Supreme Court’s ruling, several prominent Republicans had pledged to disobey any high court ruling in favor of marriage equality—and had called on their fellow Republican leaders to do the same.
For instance, Republican presidential candidates Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee have both signed a pledge that reads, “We will not honor any decision by the Supreme Court which will force us to violate a clear biblical understanding of marriage as solely the union of one man and one woman.”
Huckabee also challenged the authority of our nation’s highest court when he said, “The Supreme Court can’t overrule God.”
Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Steve King also called for Congress and any future Republican president to flagrantly ignore such a Supreme Court ruling.
Let’s be clear: These are current and former officeholders, who have taken an oath to uphold the laws of our nation, literally pledging to violate those laws as interpreted by the Supreme Court.
In any reasonable political environment, this should be a disqualifier for elected office. Certainly, measures should be considered to charge those of them who hold office with violating their oath.
Republicans in Congress recently filed suit against President Obama for using his lawful executive authority to de-prioritize certain deportations of immigrants. Said Republicans were outraged! Now here we have Republicans treading far beyond the legal gray area, actually pledging to violate their duties and break the law.
I’d love to say such behavior is unimaginable. But unfortunately, it’s becoming predictable within the GOP.
“If the court tries to do this it will be rampant judicial activism,” Cruz said before the ruling. “It will be lawlessness.”
No, actually, saying that as a senator or as president you will disobey the ruling of the Supreme Court of the United States of America—that is the very definition of lawlessness.
Of course this attitude comes from the same party that after 60 failed votes to repeal Obamacare and two now failed legal challenges rising all the way up to the very same Supreme Court, still pledges to keep trying to undo the law. The modern Republican Party is operating less like a responsible partner in governance and more and more like an underground crime network—continually abusing and threatening the otherwise democratic process if it doesn’t get its way.
So far, in the aftermath of the decision, Republican candidates have offered statements affirming their opposition to the ruling and leaning on the new, more modest GOP chestnut that “religious freedom” must be protected.
Governor Huckabee took to Twitter after the ruling, saying that the Supreme Court could no more overrule “God’s nature” than overrule gravity. But alas, just as it has in fights for justice and equality throughout history, the Supreme Court has done its job—interpreting the Constitution of our nation and applying it equally to all Americans.
Meanwhile, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker issued one of the more curious formulations. “I call on the president and all governors to join me in reassuring millions of Americans that the government will not force them to participate in activities that violate their deeply held religious beliefs,” he said in a press release. “No one wants to live in a country where the government coerces people to act in opposition to their conscience.”
Apparently, Walker is afraid people will be forced to get gay married. Don’t worry, America, that’s Phase 143 of the gay agenda. It’s still early. Right now, we’re preoccupied trying to uphold the basic values and laws of America—which elected officials of both parties should be doing, too. But frankly, when it comes to some Republicans, it’s indeed more likely that gravity will be overruled and pigs will fly.
By: Sally Kohn, The Daily Beast, June 26, 2015
“In A Terrible Predicament”: A Victory For Obamacare’s Challengers Will Be A Disaster For Republican Candidates
Once the conservative legal strategy that gave rise to King v. Burwell got off the ground, Republicans in Congress probably had no choice but to become cheerleaders for, or active participants in, the ensuing litigation.
The imminence of the decision in the Obamacare challenge, expected from the Supreme Court sometime this month, is exposing the terrible predicament the entire strategy created for the party.
The problems Republicans will encounter if they win King—eliminating billions of dollars worth of insurance subsidies—are fairly clear and have been detailed at length. But it is also quite conceivable that the whole effort will boomerang on the GOP even if the government wins in King, and the federal subsidies survive for those states using federally facilitated exchanges. A number of persuasive legal arguments point to a victory for the government. But one of the most likely paths begins with the Court concluding that the Affordable Care Act statute is ambiguous—that both parties’ readings of the law are plausible—and that deference should go to the government.
As Chief Justice John Roberts suggested with his one and only question at oral arguments, this would leave the door ajar for a future presidential administration to reinterpret the statute, and discontinue the subsidies.
It’s difficult to fathom that any Republican president would turn off the subsidies quite as abruptly as the challengers want the Court to do. But if the government wins in this way—on what’s known as the second step of the Chevron deference standard—it will create a new conservative litmus test for Republican presidential candidates. If elected, will you shut down the subsidies? I suspect most of the candidates will yield to pressure from the right and promise to do precisely that. Most immediately, this promise becomes a general election liability for the Republican primary winner. If that person becomes president, it will turn into an administrative and political nightmare, forcing states and the U.S. Congress to grapple with a completely elective policy fiasco.
King, as Josh Marshall noted recently, “is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican Party.”
That the case was conceived by conservatives and endorsed by Republicans has created an extensive paper trail tying the GOP to the consequences of a decision for the challengers. It has also forced Republicans to playact as if they can and will fix the problems that flow from an adverse King ruling. Initially the idea was to foam the runway for conservative justices eager to void the subsidies; it has become an accession to the reality that the public will hold Republicans to account for the ensuing chaos.
Among the pitfalls of the extended charade is that Republican presidential candidates will reject and condemn proposals to clean up a King mess if they even resemble constructive solutions.
“Things can’t be turned on a dime,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn told Politico. “People can run for president, but we’ve actually got to solve a problem.” Cornyn may have been thinking of his fellow Texan Ted Cruz, who wants to use King as a pretext to repeal all of Obamacare. But his discomfort with Cruz’ absolutism carries a whiff of inconsistency: Cornyn signed on to Republican briefs, first urging the justices to hear King and then asking them to void the subsidies. In January he eagerly anticipated that the Court would “render a body blow to Obamacare from which I don’t think it will ever recover.”
The promise of the King challenge has apparently faded since then. Republicans in Congress are quite likely incapable of solving the problem Cornyn was talking about in a way that pleases conservatives, and will be little better equipped if a Republican president discontinues the subsidies on his own. Six months ago, Republicans claimed excitedly that the path to repealing Obamacare outright ran through a victory in King. Now it seems that the best political outcome for Republicans would be to lose the case as conclusively and embarrassingly as possible.
By: Brian Beutler, Senior Editor, The New Republic, June 17, 2015
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