“A Wise Latina Or A Right Wing Extremist”: The Decision Is Ours In November
Three years ago today, the first Supreme Court confirmation battle of Barack Obama’s presidency came to an end. Justice Sonia Sotomayor took the oath of office on August 8, 2009, after enduring days of hearings at which she had been lambasted by Senate Republicans for such offenses as calling herself a “wise Latina” and acknowledging, like many male nominees before her, the shocking fact that her life experiences had shaped her perspective on the law.
In the three years since, I’ve been relieved to have Justice Sotomayor on the Court. I haven’t agreed with all her decisions, but she has shown time and again that she understands how the Constitution protects our rights — all of our rights. In 2010, she dissented to the Court’s disastrous Citizens United decision, which twisted the law and Constitution to give corporations and the super wealthy dangerous influence over our elections. In 2011, she joined the four-justice minority that stood up for the rights of women Wal-Mart employees who were the victims of entrenched sex discrimination. This year, she was part of the narrow majority that upheld the Affordable Care Act, saving a clearly constitutional law that is already helping millions of Americans receive health care coverage.
Over and over again in the past years, the Supreme Court has split between two very different visions of the law and the Constitution. On one side, we have justices like Sotomayor who understand how the Constitution protects all of our rights in changing times. On the other side, we have right-wing justices like Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who are determined to walk back American progress, turn their backs on the values enshrined in the Constitution, and ignore decades of our laws and history. On issues from voting rights to women’s equality to environmental regulation, Americans’ rights are being decided by the Supreme Court — often by a single vote. Even the decision to uphold health care reform, in which Chief Justice John Roberts joined Sotomayor and the three other moderates on the court, would not have been as close as it was if the Court had not moved steadily to the right.
November’s presidential election will be a turning point for the Supreme Court. The next president will likely have the chance to nominate at least one Supreme Court justice, setting the course of the Court for decades to come. President Obama has shown his priorities in his picks of Justice Sotomayor and Justice Elena Kagan.
Mitt Romney has a very different vision for the Supreme Court. Campaigning in Puerto Rico earlier this year, Romney bashed Sotomayor — who also happens to be the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice and the Court’s third woman ever. Instead, he says he’d pick more justices like Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia, the core of the right-wing bloc whose decisions are systematically rolling back Americans’ hard-won rights. He used to say that he’d pick more Justices like Chief Justice Roberts, but changed his mind when Roberts ruled in favor of the health care reform plan similar to the one that Romney himself had helped pilot in Massachusetts.
So who would Romney pick for the Supreme Court? We’ve gotten a hint from his choice of former judge Robert Bork as his campaign’s judicial advisor. Bork’s brand of judicial extremism was so out of step with the mainstream that a bipartisan majority of the Senate rejected his nomination to the Supreme Court in 1987. Bork objected to the part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that desegregated lunch counters; he defended state laws banning birth control and “sodomy”; he was unabashedly in favor of censorship; he once ruled that a corporation could order its female employees to be sterilized or be fired. And, though it might not seem possible, since his confirmation battle Bork has gotten even more extreme.
Any justice appointed by Romney would likely fall in the footsteps of Bork in undermining workers’ rights, eliminating civil rights protections, siding with corporations over the rights of individuals, threatening women’s reproductive freedom, and rolling back basic LGBT rights. President Obama, on the other hand, has promised to pick more justices who share the constitutional values of Justice Sotomayor.
Three years into the term of Justice Sotomayor, the Court hangs in the balance. It’s important that we all know the stakes.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, August 8, 2012
“Hurting The Most Vulnerable”: Cutbacks To Unemployment Insurance Came Long Before The Great Recession
You may have heard that we’re in the middle of an unemployment crisis. It’s little wonder that an average of 365,500 people per week made new claims for unemployment benefits over the past month. These high numbers have been straining unemployment insurance programs at the federal and state level, and many states have run out of reserves to pay for them, triggering a reduction in benefits. But this crisis wasn’t inevitable. The pull back in unemployment benefits is just another result of state-level choices to cut taxes at the expense of state spending, spending that could be cushioning the blow of the Great Recession.
States are unable to adequately finance their unemployment insurance programs just when they are most needed not because they were unexpectedly overwhelmed. As a new report from the National Employment Law Project shows, it was because they failed to finance them during the good times like they’re supposed to. Here’s the way it works: federal law requires each state to collect unemployment insurance contributions from employers and deposit them into a state trust fund held in the treasury. During good times, the trust funds accumulate reserves so that claims can be paid out during downturns. This makes the program countercyclical, helping to pump money into workers’ pockets and therefore businesses (via their spending) when times are tough.
The problem is that employer contribution rates vary among and even within states. Not shockingly, business groups turn on political pressure to reduce employer contributions and taxes during good times before the coffers are adequately full. And too many states gave in to this temptation before the recession. As the report notes, “Thirty‐one states reduced UI taxes by at least 20 percent between 1995 and 2005.” Meanwhile, from 2000–09 the average UI contribution rate was .65 percent of total wages, “the lowest in the life of our federal‐state UI program.” That left many of the reserves underfunded, especially when they were called upon to respond to the financial crisis.
And now, of course, the demand for these benefits is at a historically high levels. So what have states done to address the fact that they don’t have the funds to pay them out? The solutions “have tended to focus more on curtailing and reducing benefit payments than on the revenue side of the equation,” the report says. That is, rather than looking at ways to hike taxes or employer contributions to make up the shortfall, most states have cut back on benefits for the unemployed.
Over the past thirty years, lawmakers have eroded long-standing features such as the duration of benefits that were “previously seen as untouchable,” and today’s responses follow that trend. Six states have reduced the maximum duration of benefits below twenty-six weeks, which has been the standard since the 1950s. Other states have put up barriers to benefits, like drug testing requirements and excluding seasonal workers. Several states and even the federal government have limited the number of unemployed workers who qualify, forced skilled workers to accept low-wage jobs and lowered the value of payments. Meanwhile, most states did nothing to raise revenues or “passed token policies that will raise a negligible amount of revenue”—the only states to buck that trend were Colorado, Rhode Island and Vermont.
This may sound familiar. That’s because tax cuts have gotten in the way of other important policies at the state level. As Mike Konczal and I showed earlier this year, a handful of ultraconservative state governments were responsible for the massive wave of public sector job losses the country has experienced during the recovery. But layoffs weren’t the only option for dealing with tight state budgets: many of these states also cut corporate taxes or taxes on high-income earners (or both). Estimates have shown that without these job losses, unemployment would likely be a full percentage point lower than what it is now.
And there’s another fiscally irresponsible choice a number of states have said they’ll be making soon: the refusal to expand Medicaid as part of the Affordable Care Act. The Supreme Court ruling that upheld the law struck down the part that would have all but ensured across-the-board participation, and now at least fifteen governors are indicating that they’ll opt out—despite the fact that the federal government will pick up the tab for the full price of expansion in the early years and 90 percent after that. One study even found that the expansion could actually end up saving these states money. But even if that didn’t pan out, Richard Kim recently made a clear case that there are some pretty painless ways for these states to find the money to expand Medicaid. The only catch? They require raising taxes. Either by undoing some unnecessary tax breaks or raising taxes modestly, the states that are threatening fiscal ruin at the hands of this mandate can actually easily afford what it’ll cost them. Small price to pay when Medicaid saves lives.
So-called “tough choices” aren’t always so tough. Some of the policies that are exacerbating the effects of the recession and hurting the most vulnerable among us have been implemented because states refuse to look at the revenue side of their ledgers. The choices to lower taxes or ignore raising them aren’t made in a vacuum. There are often painful consequences, borne by those who can least afford it.
By: Bryce Covert, The Nation, August 6, 2012
“Congress Goes Postal”: A Full Agenda Of Futile Symbolic Votes, On The Rare Occasions It’s In Session
Congress is gone. Yeah, I miss them, too.
All the members are off on a five-week recess, after which they’ll return for a few days, then go away again, then hobble back as lame ducks. This is going to do terrible things to the Congressional approval rating, which had climbed all the way up to 17 percent at one point this year. Now it’s sunk to BP oil spill level, and it’s only a matter of time before we’re back to the point where poll respondents say they have a more favorable attitude toward “the U.S. becoming communist.”
You are probably wondering what your elected officials have been up to. Well, the best news is that House and Senate leaders worked out a plan to avoid a government shutdown for six more months by agreeing to just keep doing whatever it is we’re doing now.
This is known as “kicking the can down the road.” Failure to kick the can down the road can lead to “falling off the fiscal cliff.” There are so many of these crises looming that falling off a cliff should be reclassified as an Olympic event.
Just this week, Congress failed to protect the Postal Service from tumbling, and the service defaulted on a $5.5 billion payment for future retiree health benefits. It was the first time that the U.S. mail system failed to meet a financial obligation since Benjamin Franklin invented it.
The Postal Service has multiple financial problems, and, earlier this year, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill to deal with them. It would not have fixed everything, or even resolved the question of whether the strapped agency would be allowed to discontinue Saturday mail delivery as a cost-savings measure. “It’s not perfect,” admitted Senator Tom Carper of Delaware, one of the sponsors.
At this point, the American public has been so beaten down by Congressional gridlock that “it’s not perfect” sounds fine. In fact, we’d generally be willing to settle for “it’s pretty terrible, but at least it’s something.”
The Senate plan would have definitely been preferable to the Postal Service default, which could be followed by an all-purpose running-out-of-cash later this fall. Carper was pretty confident that if the House passed a postal bill of any stripe, the two sides could work out a compromise during the long August vacation. That would presumably be a watered-down version of imperfection, which, as I said, is exactly what we’re currently dreaming about.
But the House leadership wouldn’t bring anything up for a vote. Speaker John Boehner never said why. Perhaps he was afraid voters would blame his members for the closing of underused post offices. There is nothing Congress cares more about than post offices, 38 of which the House has passed bills to rename over the past 18 months.
So, no Postal Service bill. You can’t deal with every single thing, and the House had a lot on its to-do list, such as voting to repeal the Obama health care law on 33 separate occasions.
Meanwhile, the national farm program was teetering on the cliff.
The farm bill has long been a classic Congressional compromise, combining aid to agriculture with the food stamp program, so there’s pretty much something for everybody. The Senate recently voted 64 to 35 to approve a new five-year authorization, which reformed some of the most egregious bad practices, like paying farmers not to grow crops. It was, I hardly need mention, not perfect.
Then, the House Agriculture Committee passed a bipartisan farm bill itself. Yes! In the House, people! Everybody was on board!
Then, the House leadership refused to allow it to go up for a vote. Boehner told reporters, “no decision has been made” about what to do next, without giving any hint as to when said decision might be coming along.
The problem appears to be Tea Party hatred for the food stamp program. But who knows? Boehner isn’t saying. Maybe his members want the power to rename the farms.
The House Agriculture Committee chairman, Frank Lucas, just kept making sad little noises. Lucas is from Oklahoma. His state is having a terrible drought. It’s been more than 100 degrees there forever. As a gesture of appeasement, the leadership did allow passage of a narrow bill providing disaster relief to cattle and sheep ranchers. The Senate dismissed it as too little, too late.
Meanwhile, several attempts to get a bill passed on cybersecurity for the nation’s power grid, water supply and financial systems failed entirely.
Maybe Congress will pick up the ball when it comes back to town for a couple of weeks this fall before the election. But it already has a full agenda of futile, symbolic votes plus the crucial kicking the can down the road.
Maybe it’s possible to have a negative approval rating.
By: Gail Collins, Op Ed Columnist, The Washington Post, August 3, 2012
“Short Memories”: If Only The President Would Make Speeches, Everything Would Be Different
The bizarre idea that Obama never tried to convince the public on health care reform.
Yesterday, psychologist and political consultant Drew Westen had yet another op-ed in a major newspaper (the Washington Post this time) explaining that all of Barack Obama’s troubles come from a failure to use rhetoric effectively. Don’t get me wrong, I think rhetoric is important—in fact, I’ve spent much of the last ten years or so writing about it. But Westen once again seems to have fallen prey to the temptation of believing that everything would be different if only a politician would give the speech he’s been waiting to hear. There are two problems with this belief, the first of which is that a dramatic speech almost never has a significant impact on public opinion. The second is that Barack Obama did in fact do exactly what Drew Westen and many other people say they wish he had done.
This is only one part of Westen’s piece, but I want to focus on it because it’s said so often, and is so absurd:
In keeping with the most baffling habit of one of our most rhetorically gifted presidents, Obama and his team just didn’t bother explaining what they were doing and why. To them, their actions were self-evident. But nothing is self-evident when your opponents are spending millions of dollars to defeat you. Instead, the White House blundered around with memorable phrases such as “bending the cost curve,” which didn’t speak to the values underlying the need for health-care reform.
My God, do people ever have short memories. They “didn’t bother explaining what they were doing and why”? Oh sure, if only Obama had, say, given a major speech about health-care reform, explaining to the public the principles behind his plan and the practical steps he would take! That would have changed everything! Oh, but wait—he did. Multiple times. Here‘s a speech he gave on it in June 2009. Here‘s a speech he gave on health-care reform to a joint session of Congress that September—maybe you’ve forgotten about it, but it was a pretty big deal at the time. Here‘s another speech he gave on it. We could go on.
Any time you’re tempted to say, “The President has never said X!,” you really ought to take some time to see if it’s true, because chances are he has. And in this case, the president made the case for health care hundreds of times. He did it on an almost daily basis for an entire year. The fact that his campaign of persuasion wasn’t as successful as many of us wanted it to be doesn’t mean he and his administration just forgot to talk to the public about health-care reform.
In fairness, when President Obama himself was asked about his biggest mistake in an interview not long ago, he said it was that he had spent all his time on getting the policies right and hadn’t spent enough time communicating with the American people. But that’s the presidential version of the job interview response, “My greatest weakness? I guess it’s that I work too hard.” The fact that he says it, and the fact that you might like to believe it’s true, doesn’t make it so.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 30, 2012
“The Patriarchy”: Why We Should Worry About The Soulless, Entitled Mitt Romney
Time to give Mitt Romney the dressage-down he so “richly” deserves. And it’s not just about money. Let me count the whys we should send this smug, vapid, preppie packing: power, sex, and religion. Frankly, I don’t give a damn about the dog issue, Gail Collins.
But if President Obama won’t give ’em hell, then allow me.
The best that can be said about the soulless Mr. Romney is that he was better than the field of fools and rogues running in the Republican primary. At first, I was willing to take him at his word as a sensible clean Republican who meant well and dressed the part.
I thought the 2002 Winter Olympics (which he ran) came off fine except for the part when President George W. Bush opened the games, saying to all the athletes assembled: “Welcome to the greatest country in the world!” How gauche and contrary to the spirit of the moment.
But as we got to know Mitt more and more, I liked him less and less. The cruel private school “prank” that he led on a fellow teen struggling with his sexuality, attacking him and cutting off his long hair, showed a darker side. He was leader of a pack. The presidency is absolutely about character and personality, as much as it is about policy. A handsome apology becomes a man, but his ungenerous words fell flat.
A brief confession. As a liberal, I secretly liked Ronald Reagan as an individual, for he had a certain charm and knew how to tell a story. Though I deplored some of his policies (not all), I detected a heartbeat under the presidential aura he displayed like a performance artist. Romney looks the part of an American president, but he doesn’t really act it. His genial side seems forced. Like the younger Bush, he may just want to be president to one-up his father George—who ran and lost. History’s closet rattles with father-son rivalries that turn out tragically. Not on our time, please.
Searching through news pages, debates, live speeches, and interviews in 2012, Romney has not said a thing—and I mean not one—that shows a whit of wit, compassion, charm, or insight. Since challenging (and losing to) the late great Sen. Ted Kennedy, he’s shifted his ground to antichoice with no good reason why. And how craven is it to deny your own healthcare mandate as governor because your opponent managed to make the model pass Congress to become law?
Have you no shame, sir?
Arguably, Romney has not given the electorate or the press reasons “why” for anything. His stance, when it comes to disclosing his robber baron compensation at Bain and tax returns over the years, is that we don’t need to know. Nor do we have the right to question his actions.
In that sense, Romney is behaving precisely like the patriarch he is. In two other roles, he simply hands down his word as a chieftain in the Mormon Church and as a leader in corporate America. What he says goes. Impervious, he does not brook dissent or even comment. His life has been like that, always in the power position, always in authority—or being prepared at Harvard business and law schools on how to brandish and maximize his power and wealth. Let’s give him this. Nobody in his generation did it better.
In San Francisco among subversive women, we had a phrase for a man like Romney: “the patriarchy.” The whole system wrapped up in one man. Romney, the father of five sons, could hardly be more perfect for this dubious title.
Because of the blatantly male lay leadership structure that dominates the Mormon Church, Romney can be counted on by society’s elders to keep the faith with the power distribution as is, between men and women. He is utterly capable of having a cabinet that looks like him, without missing a beat or calling up any new friends at the NAACP.
Such a sincere, lifelong Mormon in the White House would keep women the weaker sex, frozen or pushed back from workplace gains we’ve managed to make, thanks mostly to President Clinton. The Family and Medical Leave Act was a great thing for the women of Obama’s generation. We should be worried about the retro Romney.
Romney’s not just a man’s man. He’s a privileged white man’s man with an outrageous fortune. Power, secrets, compliant women, and nothing but the best of everything else are all the entitlement.
No, he’s not going to change for you and me—or the American people.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, July 17, 2012
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