“An Extension Of The GOP”: The Republicans Of The Supreme Court
In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.
The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.
The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same as most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.
Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.
Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.
Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this — including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.
This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.
First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers,” government keeps them “dependent,” the wealthy are “job-creators” so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).
The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.
Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.
Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class” for the purpose of a class action.
Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.
The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.
The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.
But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.
Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP.
By: Robert Reich, The Robert Reich Blog, July 1, 2013
“The Arrogance Of The Third Political Branch”: The Supreme Court Uses Judicial Activism For Conservative Ends
We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.
Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.
It’s true that the rulings voiding the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition 8 show how the liberalizing trend on some social issues is hard for even a conservative court to resist.
The Defense of Marriage Act was invalidated because one of the conservatives, Justice Anthony Kennedy, has joined much of the American public in an admirable move toward greater sympathy for gay and lesbian rights.
And the decision on California’s anti-gay marriage law was reached by an ideologically eclectic majority on procedural grounds. Five justices held that the case had been improperly presented because the state of California declined to appeal a lower court’s ruling voiding the law.
This led to a middle-of-the-road outcome. The court declined to declare a national, Constitutional right to same-sex marriage, but did give gay-rights advocates a victory in California. By leaving the issue in the electoral sphere in most states, the court opened the way for further advances toward marriage equality, since public opinion is shifting steadily in its favor, fueled by strong support among younger Americans.
The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.
The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.
Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.
The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.
Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.
Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era — and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption — by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.
Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.
The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”
In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.
Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.
It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 27, 2013
“I Want My Binky”: Justice Samuel Alito’s Middle-School Antics
The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court’s opinions announced Monday was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did.
The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn’t stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.
Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg’s left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.
His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words — and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.
Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was “possibly not” the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled — and Alito, seated at Kagan’s right elbow, glowered.
Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that “every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption’ today.” Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.
Alito is best known for his antics at the 2010 State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Citizens United decision. While other justices remained expressionless, Alito adopted a sour look, shook his head “no” and appeared to mouth the words “not true.” At the various oral arguments I’ve watched over the past few years, Alito’s eye-rolling, head-shaking and other expressions of exasperation are a fairly common occurrence, most often when Sotomayor has the floor.
Alito’s latest irritability came, ironically, on a day when the main headline about the court was comity: Justice Anthony Kennedy read an unexpectedly modest decision on affirmative action that left some racial preferences intact and commanded a 7-1 majority. Many in the audience expected bigger decisions, on same-sex marriage and voting rights (former justices John Paul Stevens and Alito’s predecessor, Sandra Day O’Connor, were both in the house), but those contentious issues were held for another day.
Beyond the broad agreement on affirmative action, though, were three 5-4 decisions Monday, two read by Alito with a dry and clinical delivery. In the first, he announced that the court was rejecting a jury award for a woman who was disfigured and disabled by a drug that didn’t come with adequate warnings. Despite the “dreadful injuries,” Alito argued, siding with the drugmaker and throwing out an appellate-court ruling, “sympathy for respondent does not relieve us of the responsibility of following the law.”
The second case Alito read, one of two cases Monday limiting claims of workplace discrimination, rejected an African American woman’s complaints of a racially hostile work environment. Alito argued that the employer was not liable because, under Alito’s narrowed definition, the person doing the harassing did not qualify as the employee’s supervisor.
Other conservative justices share Alito’s views but aren’t quite so dour in expression. Antonin Scalia is caustic and even incendiary, but often funny. Chief Justice John Roberts can be droll. On the other side, Kagan has tried to make the court more accessible to a lay audience by giving chatty lectures from the bench rather than reading from her written opinions, which also have been playful. In an opinion she wrote this month on a transportation case, she made reference to the 1980s song “867-5309/Jenny” by Tommy Tutone.
Even Ginsburg, no comedienne, can be colloquial and accessible. In her dissents Monday, she noted that an employee can avoid a harassing co-worker by telling him to “buzz off.” She also invoked the self-deprecating quotation defining a legal mind as one that “can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking about the thing which it is attached to.”
Ginsburg was tart, even acidic — but she confined her objections to words. That kind of judicial restraint would benefit her junior colleague.
By: Dana Milbank, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, June 24, 2013
“Without Spending A Dime”: How The Koch Brothers Are Buying Silence And Undermining Democracy
Between buying elections, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch shop for big pieces of American media and culture. And, hey, why not?
We already knew of the Kochs’ efforts to buy Tribune Company, the parent of the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, among other major newspapers. Then, last week, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer took a thoughtful, in-depth look at the machinations that led New York’s PBS station, WNET, to pull from the air a documentary critical of David Koch, one of the station’s biggest funders. The story raises plenty of questions about the extent to which the public owns public media and the role of money in the arts and culture (see anything at Lincoln Center’s David H. Koch Theater lately?). But it also provides a rare intimate look at what happens when big money begets massive influence, often without a dime changing hands.
Mayer describes the fate of two documentary films. One took on income disparities in America by profiling the inhabitants of one tony Park Avenue building — including David Koch. Under pressure, WNET aired the film but, in a highly unusual concession, offered Koch airtime to rebut it after it aired. The second film, “Citizen Koch,” made by the very talented, Academy Award nominated team of Tia Lessin and Carl Deal, explored the influence that Koch and others like him have on our elections in the post-Citizens United world. But in the face of Koch’s wrath, the film’s distributor, a public television player with a history of gutsy moves, uncharacteristically lost its stomach for the fight and dumped the film entirely. Regardless, Koch decided to not give a hoped-for gift after the first film aired. Without lifting a finger or even taking out his checkbook, Koch cast a pall over the documentary film world.
The process that led to “Citizen Koch” being pulled from the airwaves illustrates exactly the point that Lessin and Deal’s film makes: Money can not only buy action in our democracy, it can also buy silence. As former Republican presidential candidate Buddy Roemer points out in the film, “Sometimes it’s a check. Sometimes it’s the threat of a check. It’s like having a weapon. You can shoot the gun or just show it. It works both ways.”
Koch and his brother Charles, both billionaire industrialists, pledged to spend a whopping $400 million on the 2012 elections, the overwhelming majority of it on behalf of Republican candidates. But that doesn’t just mean that Republicans are jumping to please the brothers — it means that many of those in positions of influence, regardless of their political leanings, need to take into account whether or not it’s worth the trouble of unnecessarily antagonizing the Kochs. Just as the public is unlikely to hear about the film PBS didn’t run, it’s almost impossible to know about the principled progressive stands that our allies in government decided not to take.
Koch’s billions are a formidable political weapon, even without owning any influential newspapers. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United, it’s a more powerful weapon than ever, and we know it’s having an impact even when they don’t choose to deploy them. The result is a distorted government that responds to the whims of billionaires more easily than the needs of ordinary Americans.
As activists work to undo the damage being done by Citizens United, one of our main challenges is reminding voters of the dangerous, invisible effects that decision has on the country. It’s a remarkable irony that by trying to hide a film about the danger of money in politics, the Kochs may have made it clearer than ever before.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, May 31, 2013
“The Kleptocrats Are At It Again”: Congressional Radicals Anxious To Stop Disclosure Of Corporate Money In Elections
Perhaps I’ve been too harsh on congressional Republicans.
I had assumed that their vitriolic attacks on even the meekest of proposals to restrict the tsunami of secret corporate cash slamming into our elections stemmed from a hallucinogenic mix of partisan self-interest and Koch-induced plutocratic ideology. But I’ve since learned that they might simply need medical help.
Take Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who recently came unglued at a public hearing before the House Financial Services Committee. Mary Jo White, chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, had been summoned by GOP inquisitors to answer to a modest, straightforward proposal involving the disclosure of corporate political donations. Actually, it is not her proposal, but a citizen petition — signed by a record half-million Americans — asking the SEC to require that corporate executives reveal to shareholders how their money is being spent in elections.
That’s entirely reasonable — unless, like Garrett, you’ve got the political temperament of a live grenade. He exploded on White, demanding in a bullying manner that she “refuse to be bullied by these outside radical groups” who submitted the petition. He insisted that she declare, then and there, that the agency would not even consider the citizens’ proposal.
Yes, Garrett is a corporate toady, but that can’t explain his foam-at-the-mouth hissy fit. Then I learned about a new medical study that offers a clue about the source of such behavior. It seems that conflicts at work cause some people’s brains to release hormones that prompt them to fly into a rage and even threaten others. The researchers found out that corrosive hormones can make blood platelets stickier, causing the brain to go “boom,” creating angry outbursts of stupidity.
So maybe Scott’s problem is not merely toadyism, but the terrible tragedy of sticky platelets syndrome.
Still, one wonders: What did Rep. Garrett mean when he squawked about “outside radical groups” daring to submit that disclosure petition to the SEC? How radical is it to seek restraints on corporate chieftains who are pouring unlimited (and untold) amounts of their shareholders’ money into our elections?
The great majority of Americans — including rank-and-file Republicans — agree that, at the very least, the shareholders who own the corporation have a right to be told how much of their money is being spent on behalf of which candidates. This explains why more than 500,000 citizens have petitioned the SEC to require disclosure.
Who, you might wonder, exactly are these scary citizens, considered such a threat to corporate power that a congresscritter is tarring them publicly as radical outsiders? They’re professors from leading law schools, state and national elected officials, pension fund directors, public interest advocates and corporate shareholders. Not exactly outsiders, much less radicals.
And that’s what makes them so dangerous to the autocratic elites who run corporations as their own fiefdoms. Top executives want no accountability for the hundreds of millions of shareholder dollars they’re spending to elect corporate lickspittles like Garrett, so they feel it necessary to demonize the citizenry itself. Don’t question us, they demand, just trust us.
Uh … no. Far from earning trust, they’ve already wrecked our economy and betrayed our nation’s egalitarian ideals — while feathering their own plutocratic nests. Now they want free rein to pervert America’s democratic process with clandestine election campaigns secretly financed with other people’s money.
NO! These kleptocrats are the real radicals. It’s time to stop them, not only by disclosing their thievery, but ultimately by outlawing it — and retuning elections to the people. To join the effort, contact Public Citizen at http://www.citizen.org.
By: Jim Hightower, The National Memo, May 29, 2013
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