How Ron Paul Should Address The Newsletter Controversy
Michael Tomasky of the Daily Beast helpfully suggested that Rep. Ron Paul could quiet the furor over the newsletters that bore his name by giving an Obama-style “race speech.”
It’s not a bad idea.
In particular, Paul should adopt the following passage from Obama’s speech and make it his own:
“The profound mistake of Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country … is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.”
Libertarianism in America is bound to that same tragic past.
Dr. Samuel Johnson famously asked, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”
To read the racialist screeds found in Paul’s newsletters of the late ’80s and early ’90s is to be reminded that, in the darkest corners of the libertarian right, that yelping has never really stopped.
It’s a deeply rooted, Virginian-English yelp that grates on the ears of modern liberals and Burkean Yankee conservatives alike.
In Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, historian David Hackett Fischer wrote:
“The libertarian ideas that took root in Virginia were very far removed from those that went to Massachusetts. In place of New England’s distinctive idea of ordered liberty, the Virginians thought of liberty as a hegemonic condition of dominion over others and—equally important—dominion over oneself. … It never occurred to most Virginia gentlemen that liberty belonged to everyone. It was thought to be the special birthright of free-born Englishmen—a property which set this “happy breed” apart from less fortunate people in the world.”
In his hypothetical race speech, Ron Paul could acknowledge this “tragic past”—but insist that 21st-century American libertarianism need not be bound to it. Paul could say that the black community is being harmed by the sort of paternalistic government that, 50 years ago, secured their political liberty.
Granted, since he remains adamantly opposed to the letter of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, this would be an awkward straddle for Paul. But he has made a version of this argument in the context of the war on drugs.
Paul could remind us, too, that the Virginia conception of liberty was only half-hierarchical. Re-read the above citation and Fischer’s phrase “dominion over oneself.” This points to the libertarian ethos of self-reliance and independence that doesn’t require historical de-odorizing.
I doubt Paul would seriously consider giving such a speech. Yet even though I trace my conservatism to New England rather than Virginia, I’d still like to see him deliver something like it.
All conservatives have a dog in this fight.
By: Scott Galupo, U. S. News and World Report, December 27, 2011
How Southern Republicans Aim To Make White Democrats Extinct
State Rep. Stacey Abrams serves as the Georgia House Minority Leader.
Across the state, legislative maps are drawn to split voters along artificial lines to isolate them by race. Legislators see their districts disappear, themselves the target of racial gerrymandering. Citizens rise up in protest and demand the right to elect the candidate of their choice, but the ruling party ignores them. Racial groups are identified and segregated; their leadership eliminated. It is the way of the South. Only this isn’t 1964, the year before the signing of the Voting Rights Act. This is Georgia in 2011.
But this time, the legislators at risk are white men and women who have had the temerity to represent majority African-American districts, and Latino legislators who spoke up for their growing Hispanic population. In crossover districts, where whites and blacks have worked together for decades to build multi-racial voting coalitions, the new district maps devised by the Republican majority have slashed through those ties with speed and precision. If the maps proposed by the GOP in Georgia stand, nearly half of the white Democratic state representatives could be removed from office in one election cycle. Call it the “race card”—in reverse.
Reapportionment is a dangerous business. Once every 10 years, the naked ambition of political parties wars with the dwindling hope of voters that this time their voices will be heard. In the South, the voting lines traditionally aimed for specific targets—racial discrimination that purged minorities, diminishing their numbers and political power. If a legislator had the poor fortune to be of the wrong race, that district would disappear for a decade or more. The voters who relied on you would find themselves isolated and polarized, the victims of racial gerrymandering.
For most of the nation, the battle lines are drawn by partisan leaders who search for the sinuous lines that will connect like-minded voters to one another and disadvantage those who have shown a preference for the other side. That, as they say, is Politics 101.
But for a handful of states, the stakes are higher. Below the Mason-Dixon Line and scattered across the country, a legacy of poll taxes and literacy tests required a special remedy—Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The Voting Rights Act has a simple goal—integrate the voting of minorities into the fabric of our democracy. For any state held to its obligations, no changes can be made to election laws without pre-clearance by the Justice Department. In the last decade, the minority population across the South has increased, and by any measure, the Voting Rights Act has been the engine of racial progress.
In Georgia, the gains made under the Act are undeniable. Districts populated predominately by African-Americans have routinely elected white legislators to speak for them. In enclaves across the state, white voters have punched their ballots to elect African-American and Latino representatives. Crossover districts, where blacks and whites and Latinos co-mingle, have grown in prominence–combining with majority-minority districts to comprise nearly 35 percent of the House of Representatives.
In 2011, Georgia should stand as a model for the South and a beacon for those who believe in the rights of voters. However, based on the maps passed last week by the Republican majority, we are in danger of returning to 1964.
Redistricting is fundamentally about voters, and in Georgia, minority voters comprise fully 42 percent of the population. More importantly, these populations have aligned themselves with majority white constituents to demonstrate political power. Under the proposal, Republicans will pair 20 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of Republicans in the state House and eliminate the sole remaining white Democrat in Congress from the Deep South. The House pairings pit black Democrats against white Democrats in four contests, white against white in another and eliminate multi-racial coalition voting across the state. When the dust settles, between pairings and the creation of GOP-leaning districts, Republicans stand to knock off 10 white Democrats—half the total number. They will pick up seven new seats, for a total of 123 Republican seats, 56 Democratic seats and one Independent. This will give Republicans a constitutional majority in the state of Georgia; in other words, they will be able to pass any piece of legislation without opposition.
Let’s be clear. It is absolutely the prerogative of the majority party to maximize its political gains. No one questions the right of the GOP to draw as many districts as it can legally muster. The issue is not whether the GOP can increase its hold, but how.
The GOP’s newly drawn voting lines in the state of Georgia reveals a pernicious new cynicism in our politics—the use of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon to destroy racial, ethnic, and gender diversity. It is no consolation if individual black legislators benefit in the GOP’s new scheme. The Voting Rights Act was never intended to protect a particular minority. Indeed, the highest goals of the Act, one of modern America’s most progressive pieces of legislation, was to encourage multi-racial cooperation and understanding. Precisely, what we in Georgia have begun to achieve. More alarmingly, this new strategy targeting white legislators is not limited to our state. If effective here, the cradle of the civil rights movement, the strategy is expected to be implemented in mid-term redistricting across the South. Republican lawmakers in Alabama, Louisiana, North and South Carolina, Mississippi, and Virginia are watching closely.
Today, we all decry a national partisanship that seems unhealthy and corrosive. But there is nothing wrong with partisanship, when it is a battle of ideas. The Voting Rights Act is intended to ensure that differing ideas be heard, that no single voice drown out the rest. Sadly, that is not what we see rising in the South. The Voting Rights Act is in danger of not protecting the promise of a new day, but becoming a new tool in the politics of destruction.
By: Stacey Abrams, Georgia House Minority Leader, Published in U. S. News and World Report, September 19, 2011
“Enumerated Powers” And The Radicalism of The GOP Thought Process
Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry chatted with The Daily Beast yesterday, and was asked about his understanding of “general welfare” under the Constitution. The left, the Texas governor was told, would defend Social Security and Medicare as constitutional under this clause, and asked Perry to explain his own approach. He replied:
“I don’t think our founding fathers, when they were putting the term ‘general welfare’ in there, were thinking about a federally operated program of pensions nor a federally operated program of health care. What they clearly said was that those were issues that the states need to address. Not the federal government. I stand very clear on that. From my perspective, the states could substantially better operate those programs if that’s what those states decided to do.”
It’s worth pausing to appreciate the radicalism of this position. When congressional Republicans, for example, push to end Medicare and replace it with a privatized voucher scheme, they make a fiscal argument — the GOP prefers to push the costs away from the government and onto individuals and families as a way of reducing the deficit.
But Perry is arguing programs like Medicare and Social Security aren’t just too expensive; he’s also saying they shouldn’t exist in the first place because he perceives them as unconstitutional. Indeed, when pressed on what “general welfare” might include if Medicare and Social Security don’t make the cut, the Texas governor literally didn’t say a word.
Now, this far-right extremism may not come as too big a surprise to those familiar with Perry’s worldview. He’s rather obsessed with the 10th Amendment — unless we’re talking about gays or abortion — and George Will recently touted him as a “10th Amendment conservative.” Perry’s radicalism is largely expected.
It’s worth noting, then, that Mitt Romney seems to be in a similar boat. He was asked in last night’s debate about his hard-to-describe approach to health care policy, and the extent to which his state-based law served as a model for the Affordable Care Act. Romney argued:
“There are some similarities between what we did in Massachusetts and what President Obama did, but there are some big differences. And one is, I believe in the 10th Amendment of the Constitution. And that says that powers not specifically granted to the federal government are reserved by the states and the people.”
What I’d really like to know is whether Romney means this, and if so, how much. Because if he’s serious about this interpretation of the law, and he intends to govern under the assumption that powers not specifically granted to the federal government are reserved by the states and the people, then a Romney administration would be every bit as radical as a Perry administration.
After all, the power to extend health care coverage to seniors obviously isn’t a power specifically granted to the federal government, so by Romney’s reasoning, like Perry’s, Medicare shouldn’t exist. Neither should Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, the Clean Air Act, student loans, FEMA, or many other benchmarks of modern American life.
And if Romney doesn’t believe this, and he’s comfortable with Medicare’s constitutionality, maybe he could explain why the federal government has the constitutional authority to bring health care coverage to a 65-year-old American, but not a 64-year-old American.
By: Steve Benen, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly-Political Animal, August 12, 2011
Ron Paul And The Civil Rights Act Of 1964
Last May, then-candidate Rand Paul’s (R) Senate campaign in Kentucky ran into a little trouble. The self-accredited ophthalmologist explained in newspaper, radio, and television interviews that he disapproved of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, because the private sector should be allowed to do as it pleases. “[T]his,” Paul said at the time, “is the hard part about believing in freedom.”
Asked specifically by Rachel Maddow, “Do you think that a private business has the right to say, ‘We don’t serve black people’?” Paul replied, “Yes.” Seven months later, he won easily.
Almost exactly a year later, Paul’s father, Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul, explained his nearly identical beliefs about the milestone civil rights legislation.
MSNBC’s Chris Matthews asked the Texas congressman, “The ‘64 civil rights bill, do you think an employer, a guy who runs his shop down in Texas or anywhere has a right to say, ‘If you’re black, you don’t come in my store’?” And with that, Paul explained he would have opposed the Civil Rights Act, adding, “I wouldn’t vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.”
Matthews noted, “I once knew a laundromat when I was in the Peace Corps training in Louisiana, in Baker, Louisiana. A laundromat had this sign on it in glaze, ‘whites only on the laundromat, just to use the laundromat machines. This was a local shop saying ‘no blacks allowed.’ You say that should be legal.”
Paul didn’t deny the premise, but instead said, “That’s ancient history. That’s over and done with.”
I’d note in response that this isn’t “ancient” history — millions of Americans are old enough to remember segregation, and millions more are still feeling the effects. For that matter, that era is “over and done with” precisely because of laws like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The country didn’t just progress by accident; it took brave men and women willing to bend the arc of history.
Let’s also not lose sight of the larger context. In 2011, the United States has a member of Congress and a Republican presidential candidate who publicly expresses his opposition to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. And because we’ve grown inured to GOP extremism, this somehow seems routine.
Indeed, it’s unlikely Paul’s rivals for the Republican presidential nomination will feel the need to condemn his remarks, and probably won’t even be asked about them.
By: Steve Benen, Political Animal, Washington Monthly, May 14, 2011
Under The Supreme Court, Women May Get The Shaft In Walmart Suit
A class action suit that may include as many as 1.5 million women who claim sex discrimination on the job by Walmart is the biggest in U.S. history — though there are signs it won’t remain so for much longer.
The class action already has been approved by a federal judge and a federal appeals court, but it took a beating during argument at the U.S. Supreme Court last week.
Some analysts had said if the high court even accepted the case for review, instead of letting the lower-court verdict stand, it would be a sign that the 5-4 conservative majority wanted to strike the class certification.
Professor Deborah Hensler of Stanford Law School told the Chicago Tribune last year, “If the Supreme Court takes this case, it will signal this business-friendly court is hostile to class actions against corporate defendants.”
“This is the big one that will set the standards for all other class actions,” Robin S. Conrad, executive vice president of the National Chamber Litigation Center, an agency of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, told The New York Times. The center filed several friend of the court briefs supporting Walmart at the Supreme Court.
The implication is that Walmart, headquartered in Bentonville, Ark., and one of the world’s largest corporations, is just too big to be the target of a class action.
The company tried to emphasize the massive nature of the class in its petition to the Supreme Court asking for review.
“This nationwide class includes every woman employed for any period of time over the past decade, in any of Walmart’s approximately 3,400 separately managed stores, 41 regions and 400 districts, and who held positions in any of approximately 53 departments and 170 different job classifications,” the company’s petition said. “The millions of class members collectively seek billions of dollars in monetary relief under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, claiming that tens of thousands of Walmart managers inflicted monetary injury on each and every individual class member in the same manner by intentionally discriminating against them because of their sex, in violation of the company’s express anti-discrimination policy.”
The Supreme Court review does not involve the merits of the suit — whether Walmart is guilty of discrimination against women — but whether the enormous class action, driven by statistics, should be allowed to proceed or whether the women must sue individually or in small groups.
The case started in 2001 in San Francisco when six women filed suit claiming Walmart discrimination, in part because they were passed over for promotion in favor of men. One of the six says she was told, “It’s a man’s world.”
Washington attorney Joseph Sellers, who argued for the women before the Supreme Court last week, told United Press International last year, “There’s a substantial body of evidence that comes from Walmart’s own workforce data,” including “very sophisticated analysis” to show what company policy was. Despite the size of the class, Walmart can use that evidence in an attempt to show that there was no company-wide discrimination, just as plaintiffs can use the same evidence to show there was, he said.
“We have evidence that there is a culture at the company that condones or says women are second-class citizens,” Sellers said, some of it surfacing at managers’ meetings at strip clubs or at Hooters restaurants.
Sellers had to think fast on his feet last Tuesday — ironically during Women’s History Month — as justice after justice tried to shred his argument from the bench.
Four of the court’s five-member conservative majority — Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Antonin Scalia and Samuel Alito — were expected to give Sellers a tough time, with Justice Clarence Thomas asking no questions, as is his custom.
The four-member liberal bloc was expected to give him help. The female members of the court, Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan did their best to steer the argument in favor of the class action. Ginsburg argued the concept of gender discrimination into law in a series of brilliant cases in the 1970s.
But the fourth member of the bloc, Justice Stephen Breyer, barely spoke Tuesday, and kept his cards close to his vest.
The time allotted for Walmart’s lawyer, Los Angeles attorney Theodore Boutrous Jr., was relatively calm except for pointed questions from the women, but Sellers got a grilling.
Roberts was the first to strike, asking Sellers, “Is it true that Walmart’s pay disparity across the company was less than the national average” for similar retailers?
“I don’t know that that’s a fair comparison,” Sellers replied, adding Walmart was making that comparison “with the general population, not with people in retail.”
Kennedy was more acerbic. “It’s not clear to me: What is the unlawful policy that Walmart has adopted,” he asked Sellers, “under your theory of the case?”
“Justice Kennedy, our theory is that Walmart provided to its managers unchecked discretion,” Sellers said, with women getting fewer opportunities and less pay even with more seniority and higher performance reviews.
“Your complaint faces in two directions,” Kennedy said from the bench. “No. 1, you said this is a culture where … the headquarters knows everything that’s going on. Then in the next breath, you say, well, now these supervisors have too much discretion. It seems to me there’s an inconsistency there, and I’m just not sure what the (alleged) unlawful policy is.”
“There is no inconsistency any more than it’s inconsistent within Walmart’s own personnel procedures,” Sellers replied. A federal judge “found specific features of the pay and promotion process that are totally discretionary. There’s no guidance whatsoever about how to make those decisions. … But the company also has a very strong corporate culture … what they call the ‘Walmart way,’ and the purpose of that is to ensure that in these various stores that, contrary to what Walmart argues, that these are wholly independent facilities, that the decisions of the managers will be informed by the values the company provides to these managers in training.”
“Well, is that disparate treatment?,” Kennedy asked. “Disparate” or unequal treatment is a necessary element for discrimination.
“It is disparate treatment,” Sellers insisted. “It is a form of disparate treatment because they are making these decisions because of sex.”
Scalia echoed Kennedy.
“I’m getting whipsawed here,” he said. “On the one hand, you say the problem is that (local managers) were utterly subjective, and on the other hand you say there is … a strong corporate culture that guides all of this. Well, which is it? It’s either the individual supervisors are left on their own, or else there is a strong corporate culture that tells them what to do.”
Sellers replied that managers have broad discretion, but don’t make their decisions in a vacuum.
Scalia kept charging ahead.
“What do you know about … the unchallenged fact that the central company had a policy, an announced policy, against sex discrimination,” he asked, “so that it wasn’t totally subjective at the managerial level? It was, ‘You make these hiring decisions, but you do not make them on the basis of sex.’ Wasn’t that the central policy of the company?”
“That was a written policy,” Sellers said. “That was not the policy that was effectively communicated to the managers.”
Post-mortem evaluations of the argument were almost uniformly pessimistic for the class’s survival.
Lyle Denniston, dean emeritus of the Supreme Court press corps, wrote on SCOTUSBLOG.com that it took only a few minutes of argument “for a potentially fatal flaw … to stand out boldly.”
The basic claim in the suit is that Walmart maintains a common culture — “the Walmart Way” — to ensure uniformity in its 3,400 stores, Denniston wrote, but the corporate headquarters gives local store managers unlimited discretion to decide pay and promotions — resulting in lower pay and fewer promotions for women.
Kennedy’s point was those factors may seem contradictory.
But for a class action to survive under the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, “the legal and factual issues must share commonality” at a minimum, Denniston wrote. Much of last week’s argument focused on that key requirement.
In the Los Angeles Times, an article partly written by veteran Supreme Court correspondent David Savage said the statistics may support the women. Lawyers say two-thirds of Walmart’s employees were women though men made up 86 percent of store managers when the stats were gathered five years ago.
But the article said “the tenor of Tuesday’s argument suggested that the massive, decade-old suit may run aground before it can move toward a trial.”
The Times said even though the male conservative justices were more aggressively negative, all of the justices expressed at least some reservations.
The justices should rule before the summer recess.
Bottom line from UPI: Justices could certainly change their minds, but based on their behavior during argument, look for the class to be struck down by at least a 5-4 vote, and a larger margin, 6-3 or 7-2 or more, is certainly within the realm of possibility.
By: Michael Kirkland, UPI.com, April 3, 2011
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