“Reeking Of Politics”: Class War At The Supreme Court
On the eve of the Supreme Court’s much anticipated ruling on Obamacare, here is a simple test for detecting the politics behind a decision: When reading the rulings, look for the double standards and answers to questions not posed by the cases themselves. By those measures, the Supreme Court’s record in the past week fairly reeks of the justices’ politics.
Exhibit A is Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion in Knox v. Service Employees International Union, Local 1000, in which nonunion California state employees whose wages and benefits were nonetheless set through the collective bargaining process of SEIU — the state’s largest union — sued the local to get back a special dues assessment it levied in 2005 to fight two ballot measures. The union’s normal practice was to allow nonmembers to opt out of paying the roughly 44 percent of dues that went to matters not directly related to collective bargaining, such as election campaigns. In this instance, however, no such opt-out was allowed.
The issue before the court was whether mandating the collection of the special assessment from nonmembers violated their constitutional rights to free speech. Alito and the four other conservative justices ruled that it did, and liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg agreed in a concurring opinion. But Alito’s opinion didn’t stop there. It also changed the long-standing practice of allowing nonmembers to opt out of paying dues toward union functions outside collective bargaining, mandating instead that the unions “may not exact any funds from nonmembers without their affirmative consent.” In other words, unions would have to ask for nonmembers’ permission to collect political assessments and, possibly, any dues at all. “Individuals should not be compelled to subsidize private groups or private speech,” Alito wrote.
Alito’s ruling struck at the heart of American unionism. By laying the groundwork for creating a right for nonmembers to avoid dues payments, he came close to nationalizing the right-to-work laws that 23 states have adopted (though 27 have not). As Sotomayor noted in a somewhat astonished dissent (Ginsburg and Justices Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan dissented on this point as well), this wasn’t the question before the court. Neither side had argued that issue in their briefs or oral presentations. “The majority announces its novel rule,” Sotomayor wrote, “without any analysis of potential countervailing arguments.” And it did so in defiance of the court’s own Rule 14, which states that “only the questions set out in the petition or fairly included therein will be considered by the Court.”
Taken in context with the conservative majority’s other recent rulings, Alito’s opinion also revealed the most class-based double standard the court has exhibited since before the New Deal. In the 2010 case Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission — rendered by the same five justices who signed onto Alito’s ruling in Knox — the court ruled that corporations could directly spend their resources on political campaigns. These two decisions mean that a person who goes to work for the unionized Acme Widget Company can refuse to pay for the union’s intervention in political campaigns but has no recourse to reclaim the value of his labor that Acme reaps and opts to spend on political campaigns. Citizens United created a legal parity between companies and unions — both are free to dip into their treasuries for political activities — but Knox creates a legal disparity between them: a worker’s free-speech right entitles him to withhold funds from union campaign and lobbying activities, but not the value of his work from the company’s similar endeavors.
If you seek a precedent for this anomaly, might I suggest the following sentiment on unions written (not in a court ruling, mind you) by former president William Howard Taft in 1922, when he was chief justice: “That faction we have to hit every little while.” That’s the “legal” tradition to which Alito adhered: fear and loathing of workers’ organizations.
The club champion for double standards, however, is not Alito but Antonin Scalia. Dissenting from this week’s decision striking down major provisions in Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, he argued that Arizona has the sovereign rights of a nation in protecting its borders — a right he gleans through such a bizarre reading of the Constitution that not one of his fellow conservatives signed on to his dissent. Yet the same day, Scalia signed on to a Gang of Five decision declining to hear Montana’s case that its century-old law banning corporate contributions to political campaigns should take precedence over Citizens United. In the world according to Nino, Arizona has the rights of a nation-state, but Montana must submit to the Gang of Five. You’re sovereign when Scalia agrees with you; you’re nothing when he doesn’t.
Politics? Heaven forfend!
By: Harold Meyerson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 26, 2012
“We Don’t Need No Stinking Facts”: Reporters, Media Rewarding Mitt Romney’s Deceptions
People like me often complain about “he said/she said” reporting, which treats all claims by competing political actors as having equal validity, and doesn’t bother to determine whether one side or the other might not be telling the truth. There are lots of reasons why that kind of reporting is harmful, but it’s important to understand that it doesn’t just keep people soaking in a lukewarm bath of ignorance, it can actively misinform them, leading them to believe things that are false.
Today’s New York Times has a textbook example of what happens when political reporters can do when they refuse to adjudicate a factual dispute between candidates. In the story, Michael Barbaro doesn’t just allow Mitt Romney to deceive, he actively abets that deception in the way he constructs his narrative. Here’s the key excerpt:
In a speech here in Orlando, Mr. Romney seized on a statement that the president made on Monday about the Affordable Care Act.
In an interview, a television reporter had asked the president about a small business in Iowa, whose owner claimed that the president’s health care legislation had contributed to its closing in the state. Mr. Obama said that such an assertion of cause and effect was “kind of hard to explain.”
“Because the only folks that have been impacted in terms of the health care bill are insurance companies who are required to make sure that they’re providing preventive care, or they’re not dropping your coverage when you get sick,” Mr. Obama said. “And so, this particular company probably wouldn’t have been impacted by that.”
A gaffe? Mr. Romney treated it that way, and in his speech at a factory that makes air filters, he called the statement “something else that shows just how much out of touch” the president is. “He said he didn’t understand that Obamacare was hurting small business,” Mr. Romney said. “You have to scratch your head about that.”
Mr. Romney cited an online survey of almost 1,500 small-business owners, performed last July for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which found that three-quarters of them said they would be less likely to hire because of the burdens of the Affordable Care Act.
The candidates disagree about things many, many times a day, but because Barbaro’s whole story is about “gaffes,” his inclusion of this particular disagreement implies that Obama’s statement must belong in that category. After all, if what Obama said was a plainly accurate description of the Affordable Care Act, then not only wouldn’t it be a “gaffe,” the disagreement would actually be an example of Mitt Romney being dishonest. But Barbaro classifies it as a gaffe (and don’t tell me the inclusion of a question mark gets him off the hook for doing so), which can only mean that Romney is right, or at the very least that Romney has a reasonable case to make.
But of course, that’s not true. Not even remotely. Obama was absolutely accurate in what he said. First of all, there are no provisions of the ACA that have already taken effect that affect small businesses. Secondly, the provisions that will take effect in 2014 will benefit small businesses. So if there’s a business owner in Iowa who says he closed his business because of the Affordable Care Act, there are only two possibilities: either he’s crazy, or he’s lying. It’s as simple as that. It would make no more sense to ask the president, “Mr. President, there’s a guy in Iowa who says his business shut down because the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act mandated that he spend eight hours every day building life-size butter sculptures of Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, and that left him no time to balance his books. Doesn’t this show that the law is imposing impossible burdens on small business?”
I don’t doubt that many small business owners believe that the Affordable Care Act is one day going to impose some terrible, as-yet-to-be-specified burdens on them. After all, they’ve been told that many times by Republicans, by conservative media figures, and by pro-Republican groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I’m also sure that many small business owners believe that they’ve been abducted by anal-probing aliens, or that astrology is a science. But that belief doesn’t make it true. There is an objective reality here, and it isn’t a complicated one to figure out.
If the candidates have a disagreement about how the ACA affects small businesses, and a political reporter isn’t actually familiar enough with it to determine who’s telling the truth, he has a few choices. He could use that secret trick known to only the most experienced journalists, called “picking up the phone,” and call someone who knows what the Affordable Care Act does, and ask that person how it affects small businesses. There are a few hundred people in Washington who’d be happy to take his call and explain things. The reporter could also go to this thing called “the Internet,” which can prove quite helpful on matters like this one. If you type “Affordable Care Act provisions affecting small businesses” into Google, you get this handy fact sheet from the Kaiser Family Foundation as your first result. Read it and you’ll learn that most of the provisions relating to small businesses will make the coverage they obtain more comprehensive, and probably less expensive. You’ll also learn, if you didn’t know it before, that companies with fewer than 50 employees are exempt from the Act’s requirement to carry health coverage. It’s true that companies with over 50 employees will have to offer insurance to their employees, but the fact sheet will tell you, intrepid reporter, that 92 percent of companies with between 50 and 100 employees already do, as do 97 percent of companies with over 100 employees.
These aren’t complicated things to learn. You don’t need a public policy degree to grasp them and incorporate them into your reporting. You could even ask Romney or his representatives exactly what burdens they believe the ACA imposes on small business, and when they say, “Um, regulation and stuff!” ask them again to be specific, and when they can’t actually come up with anything, relate that fact in your story. Or there’s a final option available to you, one that this reporter chose, and many other reporters do every day: You can just not bother to find out the truth and share it with your readers. Why do they deserve it, anyway? Better to just wait for the next exciting “gaffe” and write four or five stories about that.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Writer, The American Prospect, June
“Corporations Are Not People”: Elizabeth Warren Rips Mitt Romney
Democrat Elizabeth Warren is running to unseat Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, but she took off today after Mitt Romney when she ripped the “Romney-Brown vision” of economic policy.
“Corporations are not people,” she told the crowd at Netroots Nation, an annual event. “People have hearts, they have kids, they get jobs, they get sick, they love, they cry, they dance, they live and they die. Learn the difference. And Mitt, learn this. We don’t run this country for corporations. We run it for people.”
Romney, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, was widely criticized for telling an Iowa crowd last year that “corporations are people, my friend.”
Warren is the biggest political star to speak at this year’s gathering of liberal bloggers and activists, and she drew an ovation both before and after her talk.
Warren and two other women candidates — Rep. Mazie Hirono, who is running for the Senate from Hawaii, and Darcy Burner, a Washington state congressional candidate — said Democrats need to make a better case to voters in favor of the Obama administration’s health care overhaul – and against Republican legislation on abortion and contraception.
“How much have we gotten out there and sold it? Not very much,” Warren said.
Republicans have pushed back on Democratic rhetoric about the Blunt amendment, which would have allowed employers not to cover contraception in health insurance, and a pay-parity bill rejected by the Senate last week. Both have been characterized as attacks on women.
“I do see this as a war on women. I don’t use these words frivolously,” Hirono said. “It’s so clear that there is an all out frontal assault on reproductive rights. Are people not paying attention?” Drawing a laugh from the audience, she added, “Do they not watch Rachel Maddow?”
Even an event centered on women in politics was not safe from sports analogies. Citing her role in creating the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Warren compared financial markets to football: It requires rules “and an official with a whistle to enforce them,” she said. “Without rules and a ref, it isn’t football, it’s a mugging.”
By: Martha T. Moore, USA Today, June 8, 2012
“Openly And Dangerously Reckless”: Republicans Are Unfit To Govern
One of this biggest economic stories of the past week was this:
The 17-country eurozone risks falling into a “severe recession,” the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned on Tuesday, as it called on governments and Europe’s central bank to act quickly to keep the slowdown from dragging down the global economy.
Just six months ago the OECD considered a 2 percent European contraction the worst-case scenario, but it now sees that as close to happening.
The report forecasts Europe falling further behind other countries, particularly the United States, whose economy is expected to grow 2.4 percent this year and 2.6 percent next.
Let me repeat: Europe’s economy is contracting, while the U.S. economy is growing. Europe’s economy is in imminent danger of contracting at the rate that just six months ago was considered the worst-case scenario, while the U.S. economy is expected to grow even more next year than this year. And just outside the Eurozone, this past week also saw England’s double-dip recession reported as even worsethan had been thought. In other words, as the world continues to attempt to dig itself out of the economic collapse that was caused by the banking meltdown, the United States is slowly recovering. Europe isn’t.
While Europe elected conservative governments at the worst possible moment, and then embraced the cruel stupidity that is economic austerity, the United States took a different path. The United States should have embraced a much more aggressive growth policy, but at least it didn’t slash and burn government spending the way Europe did. Europe’s economies and Europe’s people have been devastated by economic austerity while the tentative Obama stimulus package has stimulated tentative economic growth. Stimulus works, austerity doesn’t. Until the economy is fully back on its feet, more stimulus would be the best economic policy. Austerity would be the worst economic policy. So what do the Republicans want to do?
Mitt Romney would have let the auto industry go bankrupt. Mitt Romney thinks unemployment insurance is a disaster. Mitt Romney wants to cut Medicare and Social Security benefits. Mitt Romney wants to cut benefits on just about everyone who needs them in order to finance even more tax cuts for the extremely wealthy— people such as Mitt Romney. In other words, Mitt Romney wants to impose austerity on pretty much everyone other than the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney. In fact, Mitt Romney’s economic program is so unfair, and it so favors the very few who are in the economic class of Mitt Romney, that he doesn’t even want us to know its details. And that gets to the core of why Mitt Romney is unfit to govern.
The problem with Mitt Romney is not only that he doesn’t want us to know the details of his economic agenda, which suggests that it’s even worse than what we do know, and what we do know is bad enough, but Mitt Romney also doesn’t want us to know any details about Mitt Romney. Breaking with the tradition that voters should know as much as is possible about presidential candidates, Mitt Romney won’t release his tax returns. What is he hiding? Breaking with the tradition that voters should have at least some idea about a presidential candidate’s positions on major issues, Mitt Romney has flip-flopped so many times on so many issues that even one of his top campaign advisors openly admitted that Romney’s stands can be erased and rewritten without notice. Does he even have any principles or values, or is that he doesn’t want us to know what they are? What is he hiding? Mitt Romney has taken so many stands on so many issues that even he can’t remember where he is supposed to stand on them on any given day. Maybe what Mitt Romney is hiding is that there is no Mitt Romney at all.
For their part, Republican congressional leaders want to repeal the Obama health care law, which would explode the national debt. Republican congressional leaders offer nothing to replace the Obama health care law. House Republicans voted to end Medicare. House Republicans want to decimate health care spending. House Republicans want to take away a million Pell Grants. House Republicans want to punish low income Americans. House Republicans want to punish senior citizens. House Republicans want to punish women. House Republicans want to drive even more Americans from some semblance of food security into poverty. The House Republican budget leader wants to drive even more children into poverty. Whatever they may say they want to do, the agenda of congressional Republicans would be devastating for tens of millions of Americans.
Unfortunately, being wrong— even stupidly wrong— is not in itself proof of unfitness to govern. As the Bush-Cheney team proved, it is in fact now a prerequisite for any Republican aspiring to national office. But the destructive policy agenda of congressional Republicans is not even remotely the worst of it, because in order to impose these policies they have resorted to tactics that are nothing more than political extortion, and government cannot function by extortion. It cannot function when hard fought agreements are blithely broken for the purpose of further extortion. And that’s what the Republicans now are about. They operate like criminal thugs and they cannot be trusted to keep their word. And it’s not merely a game of daring high stakes brinksmanship, for merely playing the game is itself dangerously destructive.
When the Republicans last summer broke bipartisan precedent by threatening the full faith and credit of the United States in order to force the sorts of budget cuts that have shattered the economies of Europe, they agreed to a deal that itself will damage the recovery, but by forcing that deal they also triggered the first ever downgrade in our national credit rating. The Standard & Poor’s downgrade was problematic in itself, but S&P was very carefully explicit in its rationale:
The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy.
That brinksmanship was wholly the fault of the Republicans. Under both Democratic and Republican presidents, and with both Democratic and Republican Congresses, no one previously had been so petty and unhinged as to play chicken with the debt ceiling. The Republicans last year broke all precedent. Ownership of the consequences is theirs alone. And beyond revealing how dangerous they are even to have attempted political extortion by holding the debt ceiling hostage, the specifics of the Republican approach to the national debt also was specifically mentioned.
Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012, remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act.
Both the Republican policy and the means of imposing the Republican policy were specifically cited. As our own Hunter explained:
Parsing the S&P statement from a partisan standpoint, there are a few things to note. As cited above, the Bush tax cuts appear to be the only non-entitlement-related government policy specifically called out by S&P in their rationale for downgrade, and “Republicans in Congress” were specifically called out for “continu[ing] to resist any measure that would raise revenues.” It seems S&P comes down squarely on the side of believing revenues doneed to be increased, though it pointedly shies away from suggesting any numbers.Couple this with their plain and prominent citation of debt ceiling hostage-taking as a prime reason for the downgrade, and it would be difficult to argue any position other than that S&P is blaming recent GOP actions directly for their downgrade decision
All of which would be bad enough. All of which would by itself reveal how dangerous it is to allow such people any means of asserting any level of control over the making of economic policy. But now House Speaker John Boehner wants to play the whole game over again:
In the meeting—a day after a high-profile speech by Boehner in which he called for spending cuts paired with any future debt-ceiling hikes—the speaker told the president that “I’m not going to allow a debt ceiling increase without doing something serious about the debt,” according to the Ohio Republican’s aides.
Which has even his Republican Senate counterpart unenthused. Of course that same Republican Senate counterpart last year said that his single most important goal was to deny President Obama a second term in office. Despite two wars, international terrorism, a still staggering economy, rising poverty and homelessness, an impending climate crisis and a host of other issues on which one would think a national political leader would want to focus, the single greatest priority of the most powerful Republican in the Senate was to ensure electoral victory. And continued Republican efforts to sabotage the economyproved the man’s words.
The Republicans don’t want to solve the nation’s problems, they only want to gain and maintain political power. And in pursuit of that goal they are openly and dangerously reckless. And their new presidential standard-bearer not only wants to impose policies similar to those that continue to devastate Europe, he is a deliberately dishonest cipher, not only about where he stands on issues but even about whether or not he actually has any stands on issues. He doesn’t merely disinform, he openly mocks even the concept of informing.
Differences in policy are one thing, and history tends to reveal who was right and who was wrong. For example, the New Deal worked, while austerity doesn’t. And it’s perfectly fair for Republicans to continue to try to gut the New Deal while promoting more disastrous austerity. That’s politics, and if American voters want to swap the current slow but steadily improving economic recovery for the type of economic implosion and social upheaval now crushing Europe, they have every right to vote for the Republicans. They have every right to vote for whomever they want for whatever reasons or lack of reason they choose. But when Republicans shatter precedent by attempting political extortion that by itself endangers the full faith and credit of the United States, when they threaten to crash the economy if they don’t get their way, when they consider winning more important than responsible governing, when they consciously attempt to undermine the very concept of an informed electorate, that isn’t politics, it’s the deliberate destruction of politics. It makes mere thuggery appear relatively benign in comparison. It reveals the Republicans as not only ideologically and intellectually incompetent, but also as dangerously unstable of temperament.
With the modern Republican Party, the danger isn’t merely that they will succeed in imposing more disastrous policies, the danger is that even allowing them to have any influence at all on the process of making policy can and will be abused, with potentially disastrous consequences. Modern Republicans are not merely lousy at governing, they are unfit to govern.
By: Laurence Lewis, Daily Kos, May 27, 2012
“A Pathetic Scam”: Boehner On Health Care, “Everything Must Go”
For about three years now, congressional Republicans have sworn up and down that they’re hard at work on a health care reform package of their own. It’s going to be awesome, they said, and will meet Obamacare’s goals without all that unpopular stuff.
Sensible people gave up on actually seeing this vaporware quite a while ago, realizing that “repeal and replace” was a rather pathetic scam. But with the Supreme Court ruling on the Affordable Care Act due fairly soon, and with the possibility of a Republican White House and a Republican Congress on the horizon, there’s renewed interest in what, exactly, GOP policymakers intend to do on the issue.
There was some talk this week that Republicans, fearing a public backlash, would “draw up bills to keep the popular, consumer-friendly portions in place — like allowing adult children to remain on parents’ health care plans until age 26, and forcing insurance companies to provide coverage for people with pre-existing conditions.” (The interconnectivity of the popular and unpopular parts are generally as lost on Republicans as they are on the general public.)
The GOP’s base immediately said this would be outrageous. Yesterday, House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) joined them, making it clear that Republicans intend to kill the whole law, including the parts Americans like, want, and have come to expect.
House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) reiterated Thursday that he wants to repeal all of President Obama’s healthcare law if the Supreme Court doesn’t toss out the entire statute.
“We voted to fully repeal the president’s healthcare law as one of our first acts as a new House majority, and our plan remains to repeal the law in its entirety,” Boehner said to reporters. “Anything short of that is unacceptable.”
Let’s not brush past too quickly exactly what this means. The only “acceptable” outcome for Romney is one in which tens of millions of Americans lose their health care coverage, seniors pay higher prescription drug costs, small businesses lose their tax breaks, and the deficit goes up by hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
But there’s another point that’s gone largely forgotten: we’ve gone from a policy landscape in which Republicans agreed with 80% of Obamacare to one in which Republicans agree with 0% of Obamacare.
No one seems to remember this, but in September 2009, Louisiana Rep. Charles Boustany (R), the Republican who delivered the official GOP response to President Obama’s speech on health care reform, made an interesting declaration, telling MSNBC “about 80%” of the Democratic proposal is acceptable to Republicans.
Soon after, none other than Eric Cantor, now the House Majority Leader, said Republicans and Democrats agree on 80% of the health care reform measures.
Keep in mind, these comments came when the public option was still a key component of the Democratic plan — which suggests by the time the proposal was being voted on, Republicans liked more than 80% of Obamamcare.
This, of course, leads us to a few questions for Boehner and his cohorts. One, how is it congressional Republicans went from 80% to 0%, when the reform package itself did not move to the left? And two, if Republicans intend to get rid of “the entirety” of the law, including parts that enjoy overwhelming public support, why should voters back GOP candidates?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, May 18, 2012
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