Gunning Down Immigrants — And Other Democratic Experiments
Here in Washington, the immigration debate is in stalemate. But in Kansas, there has been a breakthrough.
This striking achievement came about this week during a meeting of the state House Appropriations Committee on efforts in Kansas to shoot feral swine from helicopters. Republican state Rep. Virgil Peck suddenly had an idea. “Looks like shooting these immigrating feral hogs works,” he commented, according to a recording posted by the Lawrence Journal-World. “Maybe we have found a [solution] to our illegal immigration problem.”
Brilliant! Shooting immigrants from helicopter gunships! Why didn’t they think of that in Congress?
There are a few logistical problems with Peck’s idea, including the fact that Kansas isn’t a border state. But maybe Oklahoma and Texas will grant overflight rights for immigrant-hunting sorties.
Peck, the Republican caucus chairman for the state House, later suggested his brainstorm was a joke, although he also defended himself: “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person.”
Kansans may be surprised to learn that the immigrant-shooting idea was offered in their names, but they wouldn’t be the only Americans getting unwelcome news from their state legislators now that many Tea Party types have come to power.
When Louis Brandeis called state legislatures “laboratories of democracy,” he couldn’t have imagined the curious formulas the Tea Party chemists would be mixing in 2011, including: a bill just passed by the Utah legislature requiring the state to recognize gold and silver as legal tender; a Montana bill declaring global warming “beneficial to the welfare and business climate of Montana”; a plan in Georgia to abolish driver’s licenses because licensing violates the “inalienable right” to drive; legislation in South Dakota that would require every adult to buy a gun; and the Kentucky legislature’s effort to create a “sanctuary state” for coal, safe from environmental laws.
In Washington, the whims of the Tea Party lawmakers have been tempered, by President Obama and Senate Democrats, but also by House Republican leaders who don’t want the party to look crazy. Yet these checks often do not exist in state capitols. Though many of the proposals will never become law, the proliferation of exotic policies gives Americans a sense of what Tea Party rule might look like.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s attempt to strip public-sector unions of their power has gained national attention, as have various states’ efforts to imitate Arizona’s immigration crackdown. Arizona, meanwhile, moved on to an attempt to assert its authority to nullify federal law; the last time that was tried, we had the Civil War.
Less well known is what’s going on in Montana. Legislators there have introduced several bills that would nullify federal law, including health-care reform, the Endangered Species Act, gun laws and food-safety laws. Under one legislative proposal, FBI agents couldn’t operate in the state without the permission of county sheriffs. Legislators are also looking into a proposed resolution calling on Congress to end membership in the United Nations.
A “birther” bill, similar to proposals in various other states, would require presidential candidates — they’re talking about you, Obama — to furnish proof of citizenship that is satisfactory to state authorities. Montana has also joined the push in many states to restore the gold standard, and a Montana House committee approved legislation invalidating municipal laws against anti-gay discrimination.
Then there’s House Bill 278, authorizing armed citizens’ militias known as “home guards.” With the home guards mobilized, Montana would no longer have to fear a Canadian invasion. And while Montana repels the barbarians from Alberta, New Hampshire is contemplating a state “defense force” to protect it from the marauding Quebecois.
Some of the proposals are ominous: South Dakota would call it justifiable homicide if a killer is trying to stop harm to an unborn child.
Some are petty: Wyoming, following Oklahoma, wants to ban sharia law, even though that state’s 200-odd Muslims couldn’t pose much of a sharia threat.
Some are mean-spirited: Iowa would allow business owners to refuse goods and services to those in gay marriages.
Some are fairly harmless: Arizona took actions to make the Colt Single Action Army Revolver the official state firearm and to create a Tea Party license plate.
And some are just silly: A Georgia bill would require only “pre-1965” silver and gold coins for payment of state debts.
Even if the Tea Party gets its way in the legislature, it won’t be easy to stop residents of Georgia from using their greenbacks — at first. But compliance will undoubtedly increase once the state calls in those helicopter gunships from Kansas.
By: Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, March 15, 2011
Public Alert: What If We’re Not Broke?
“We’re broke.”
You can practically break a search engine if you start looking around the Internet for those words. They’re used repeatedly with reference to our local, state and federal governments, almost always to make a case for slashing programs – and, lately, to go after public-employee unions. The phrase is designed to create a sense of crisis that justifies rapid and radical actions before citizens have a chance to debate the consequences.
Just one problem: We’re not broke. Yes, nearly all levels of government face fiscal problems because of the economic downturn. But there is no crisis. There are many different paths open to fixing public budgets. And we will come up with wiser and more sustainable solutions if we approach fiscal problems calmly, realizing that we’re still a very rich country and that the wealthiest among us are doing exceptionally well.
Consider two of the most prominent we’re-brokers, House Speaker John Boehner and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.
“We’re broke, broke going on bankrupt,” Boehner said in a Feb. 28 Nashville speech. For Boehner, this “fact” justifies the $61 billion in domestic spending cuts House Republicans passed (cuts that would have a negligible impact on the long-term deficit). Boehner’s GOP colleagues want reductions in Head Start, student loans and scores of other programs voters like, and the only way to sell them is to cry catastrophe.
Walker, of course, used the “we’re broke” rationale to justify his attack on public-worker collective bargaining rights. Yet the state’s supposedly “broke” status did not stop him from approving tax cuts before he began his war on unions and proposed all manner of budget cuts, including deep reductions in aid to public schools.
In both cases, the fiscal issues are just an excuse for ideologically driven policies to lower taxes on well-off people and business while reducing government programs. Yet only occasionally do journalists step back to ask: Are these guys telling the truth?
The admirable Web site PolitiFact.com examined Walker’s claim in detail and concluded flatly it was “false.”
“Experts agree the state faces financial challenges in the form of deficits,” PolitiFact wrote. “But they also agree the state isn’t broke. Employees and bills are being paid. Services are continuing to be performed. Revenue continues to roll in. A variety of tools – taxes, layoffs, spending cuts, debt shifting – is available to make ends meet. Walker has promised not to increase taxes. That takes one tool off the table.”
And that’s the whole point.
Bloomberg News looked at Boehner’s statement and declared simply: “It’s wrong.” As Bloomberg’s David J. Lynch wrote: “The U.S. today is able to borrow at historically low interest rates, paying 0.68 percent on a two-year note that it had to offer at 5.1 percent before the financial crisis began in 2007. Financial products that pay off if Uncle Sam defaults aren’t attracting unusual investor demand. And tax revenue as a percentage of the economy is at a 60-year low, meaning if the government needs to raise cash and can summon the political will, it could do so.”
Precisely. A phony metaphor is being used to hijack the nation’s political conversation and skew public policies to benefit better-off Americans and hurt most others.
We have an 8.9 percent unemployment rate, yet further measures to spur job creation are off the table. We’re broke, you see. We have a $15 trillion economy, yet we pretend to be an impoverished nation with no room for public investments in our future or efforts to ease the pain of a deep recession on those Americans who didn’t profit from it or cause it in the first place.
As Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) pointed out in a little-noticed but powerful speech on the economy in December, “during the past 20 years, 56 percent of all income growth went to the top 1 percent of households. Even more unbelievably, a third of all income growth went to just the top one-tenth of 1 percent.” Some people are definitely not broke, yet we can’t even think about raising their taxes.
By contrast, Franken noted that “when you adjust for inflation, the median household income actually declined over the last decade.” Many of those folks are going broke, yet because “we’re broke,” we’re told we can’t possibly help them.
Give Boehner, Walker and their allies full credit for diverting our attention with an arresting metaphor. The rest of us are dupes if we fall for it.
By: E. J. Dionne, Op-Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, March 14, 2011
When Did Anti-Abortion Radicalization Become Acceptable?
On Thursday, the House Homeland Security Committee held a hearing on the threats Muslim “radicalization” poses to America.
Meanwhile, a woman seeking healthcare at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver, or anywhere in the country, was screamed at as she walked through the door. How about some Homeland Security for her?
Every day in this country, reproductive healthcare providers at Planned Parenthood clinics, and abortion doctors at other facilities, and the patients who need them, are routinely harassed and threatened. When did this become OK?
Dr. George Tiller, an abortion provider in Kansas, used to wear a bulletproof vest to work. He made the mistake of not wearing one to his church, which is where he was shot and killed. How many other civilian professionals have to wear a bulletproof vest to do their job?
We have so normalized the anti-choice extremism in this country that a certain level of mundane, daily ugliness has become unremarkable. It’s a yawner to policymakers, unfit for congressional hearings or regular news coverage.
And if the harassment inside the building isn’t enough, now policymakers are forcing harassment inside the building. Texas Republicans in the state legislature voted this week to force any woman seeking an abortion—even if she’s a victim of rape or incest—to undergo a sonogram and a lecture about the fetus. Similar laws have passed and are likely to pass in other states. Because, apparently, women are too dumb to think through the implications on their own.
This harassment even extends to ballot measures. Last fall I worked on the No on 62 Campaign, part of a broad-based coalition opposing an anti-choice amendment to the Colorado Constitution. Part of our training for the No on 62 Campaign included a briefing by Planned Parenthood security officers, many of whom have worked in law enforcement for years.
The Planned Parenthood clinic in Denver where we often met—and this is a pro-choice city in a pro-choice state—is ringed with a 10-foot-high fence, cameras, and manned by a guard at the gate. Every day, a group of about a dozen people parks outside with grisly pictures and bullhorns and screams at anyone—patient, provider, visitor—who enters the clinic. Even our campaign headquarters were the object of nasty phone calls—our pregnant admin person, who answered the phones, got called some ugly names at least a couple times a week. It became a humorous game of epithet bingo—“Have you been called a fornicating whore today?”
Our press conference in Colorado Springs was hijacked by the opposition, who shoved people out of the way to grab the microphone and start yelling. Our Facebook page was hijacked by the opposition posting gruesome pictures and accusing us of being “No on 62 Nazis,” and put up their own Facebook page stating the same. And when I accompanied one of our spokespeople, Jeremy Shaver from the Interfaith Alliance, to a debate, there were armed guards in the room keeping an eye on the other side.
It’s not the posturing about “outside agitators” that worries me. It’s the acceptance of a level of hatred directed at women, especially poor women, seeking reproductive healthcare and abortions. And it’s the acceptance of threats and violence directed at the doctors, staff, and healthcare workers trying to provide it to them.
By: Laura Chapin, U.S. News and World Report, March 11, 2011
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