“For Sale -Going Fast”: An Independent Judiciary — Buy A Judge Today
According to the New York Times the retention election of three Tennessee judges “has been preceded by an expensive and acrimonious campaign bolstered by organizations like Americans for Prosperity, which receives financial support from the billionaires Charles G. and David Koch and other conservative groups”. Those supporting retention of the judges have been compelled to raise “more than $1 million” to combat the effort to defeat them. Could there be anything more unseemly or contrary to the purposes for which the judiciary was established?
I do not doubt that there are persons out there (and even corporations now) who contribute to judicial campaigns for the purpose of electing or retaining judges who are fair, competent and impartial and who will carry out the applicable laws and enforce the state and federal constitutions. Then there are the other 99 percent who wish to influence particular matters or judicial philosophy in general. Judges are not and were never intended to be elected representatives. I cringe at the constant contention that judges should be held “accountable”. They are accountable to the laws and the Constitution. They should not be subject to the whim of those who find certain past rulings objectionable or seek to influence future ones by buying elections. Nothing could weaken the independence of the judiciary more than having judges removed or not re-elected because of prior decisions that they have made.
The whole concept of judicial independence is that judges should feel to rule as they deem correct without fear of retaliation. Nor should judges undertake the position with some feeling that they are indebted to those who have financed their election. Per the Times: “The Republican State Leadership Committee, a national group, plans to spend at least $5 million on judicial races this year.” Why? Because they want to influence future judicial decisions.
Let’s face it — this movement is exclusively a conservative one. Conservatives own it. Judges are to be ousted for “liberal” rulings like upholding same-sex marriage, ordering new trials in death penalty cases or generally ruling in favor of persons charged with crimes — stuff like upholding the Constitution. Judicial elections are degrading. Voters do not know whether or not the candidates are qualified. And finally money has further corrupted the process. I have said on prior occasions: Can you imagine a lawyer or a litigant walking up to a judge in the middle of a trial and handing the judge a check for his or her campaign? Would it make any difference if the check was delivered a week before? And isn’t it even worse now that the big boys are coming in with even bigger checks?
We should end judicial elections entirely, but until we do, we must find a way to limit the corrupting influence of money in the election process and stop putting the judiciary up for sale.
By: Judge H. Lee Sarokin, The Huffington Post Blog, August 7, 2014
“Every Republican Must Answer”: Has Barack Obama Really Been Waging A ‘War On Whites’?
Get ’em on record. Every last one of them. That’s what we need to do. Every single Republican presidential hopeful, Congressional leader, hell, any Republican who is running for federal or statewide office this fall needs to answer the question of whether or not there is a “war on whites” being waged right now by President Barack Obama. From where could such a preposterous idea come, you might ask? Where else, but from a House Republican?
“This is a part of the war on whites that’s being launched by the Democratic Party. And the way in which they’re launching this war is by claiming that whites hate everybody else…It’s part of the strategy that Barack Obama implemented in 2008, continued in 2012, where he divides us all on race, on sex, greed, envy, class warfare, all those kinds of things. Well that’s not true.”
That’s the truth according to Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, who uttered those words in an interview with right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham on Monday. This is not a local, county official. This is not one of a half-dozen candidates for a congressional seat. This is a sitting U.S. congressman. Last year Brooks voted for John Boehner to be speaker of the House. Right now, we deserve to know whether Boehner thinks the president started a war on whites back in 2008. But we don’t want to hear just from Boehner. We must hear from all of them.
The time has come for each and every Republican to decide where he or she stands. They must come out into the open and either embrace the race-baiters, or throw them under the campaign bus. But understand this, when an Alabama conservative says that the black president and his party have been waging war against white people, he is channeling the spirit of George Wallace declaring “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He is calling forth hatred. He is all but summoning violence.
Rational people know that there has been no actual legislation either proposed, supported, or passed by this president that has targeted white Americans as a racial group. Furthermore, as I’ve written elsewhere, Barack Obama has, through his words, sought to strengthen the bonds that bring all Americans together across racial lines in a way no previous president has done.
Mo Brooks is a hateful demagogue of the lowest order. That we know. What we don’t know is this: Are there any Republicans out there willing to stand up and reject his hate?
By: Ian Reifowitz, The Huffington Post Blog, August 7, 2014
“Wins When It Wins, Wins When It Loses”: The Tea Party May Be Losing Races, But It’s Actually Winning
While there are still a few primaries remaining this year, yesterday saw one of the last seemingly vulnerable prominent Republicans, Kansas senator Pat Roberts, prevail over his Tea Party opponent by eight points — not an easy victory, but not a nail-biter either. GOP House incumbents facing challenges from the right also won their races. Over the course of this primary season, the Tea Party has been able to claim only one significant victory, unseating House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.
From that, you might conclude that the Tea Party is waning, beaten back by a Republican establishment determined to rid itself of this meddlesome faction. But the truth is that in some ways the movement continues to get stronger.
The Tea Party wins when it wins, and it wins when it loses. Five years after it began and long after many people (myself included) thought it would fade away, it continues to hold the GOP in its grip. For a bunch of nincompoops prancing around in tricorner hats, it’s quite a remarkable achievement.
Republican incumbents found a variety of ways to overcome Tea Party challenges this year. Roberts did it with some old-fashioned opposition research — if his opponent, a radiologist, hadn’t posted gruesome X-rays of his patients on Facebook, he might well be on his way to the Senate. Lindsey Graham got conservative primary voters to look past some occasional moderation by going on TV every day to enact a kabuki of outrage at Barack Obama’s alleged betrayal of America on Benghazi, Syria, and whatever else he could think of. Thad Cochran expanded the electorate, exploiting a quirk in Mississippi election law that allowed him to convince Democrats to vote in his runoff.
The only one who didn’t succeed was Cantor, and that was largely because he ignored the threat until it was too late. But just about every time, what the incumbent had to do in order to win ended up strengthening the Tea Party, usually because it involved moving to the right (at least rhetorically, if not substantively) to survive. Even Cochran could end up helping them in the end, by convincing them that the only way they can be beaten is through sneakiness and ideological treason. Tea Partiers now look at Mississippi and see only a reason to keep up the fight.
That’s the magic of an insurgent movement like the Tea Party. A win strengthens it by showing its members that victories are possible if they fight hard enough. And because the movement has organized itself around the idea of establishment Republican betrayal, its losses only further prove that it’s doing the right thing. Furthermore, if ordinary Republicans have to become Tea Partiers to beat Tea Partiers (even if only for a while), the movement’s influence is greater, not less. Ed Kilgore noted a couple of the things Roberts had to do in order to win:
He voted against an appropriations measure that included a project he had long sought for his alma mater, Kansas State University, and opposed a UN Treaty banning discrimination against people with disabilities over the objections of his revered Kansas Senate predecessors Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum.
So they may not have replaced Roberts with a Tea Partier, but by making him afraid enough to move to the right, they did the next best thing.
As I said, I used to think this movement was going to wither and die. Today though, it’s hard to see its power waning anytime soon. If it ends up winning even when it loses at the polls, there’s no reason why it can’t go on for a long time, so long as it finds enough support within the Republican base and enough incumbent Republicans who fear it.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect; Published at The Plum Line, The Washington Post, August 6, 2014
“Rush Limbaugh And Impressionable Young Minds”: Coming Soon To An Elementary School Near You?
Last year, radio host Rush Limbaugh published a children’s book called Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims. For those unfamiliar with it, msnbc’s Traci G. Lee reported a while back that the book “tells the story of a fictional history teacher named Rush Revere, who travels back in time to experience the pilgrims’ journey to America and their first Thanksgiving in the New World.”
A year later, Conor Friedersdorf reports that at least one third-grade teacher has embraced the book to teach children about, of all things, the Civil War.
A woman named Ivy, an elementary-school teacher from Summerville, South Carolina, is using material from a Rush Limbaugh book as part of the history curriculum for her third graders. Her husband alerted her to the children’s title, Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time Travel Adventures With Brave Americans. She read it immediately. “And I said, ‘Okay, how am I gonna incorporate this book into the classroom?’ because the kids need to hear it,” she explained during a Wednesday call to Rush Limbaugh’s program. “They need to read this book.”
She recognized just one problem. “The dilemma is that we don’t teach the Pilgrims in the third grade,” she said. But a popular talk-radio host had written a book! The mere fact that it covered a period of history her students weren’t learning about wasn’t going to dissuade her from getting Limbaugh into the classroom.
The teacher, who called into Limbaugh’s show today, apparently explained, “So what I decided to do was to use your author’s note that explains the principles of the founders in our country as a way to introduce the Civil War. And from there, I decided, well, I’m gonna go ahead and read a little bit of this book ‘cause I need these kids to get excited about it. Even if I can’t finish it, I’ll give a book talk and then they can go out to the library and get it, and so forth.”
I guess the teacher deserves credit for creativity, if nothing else. “Ivy” is taking a Rush Limbaugh book about a talking horse on the deck of the Mayflower to teach kids about the Civil War, which took place more than two centuries later.
How? Because of American exceptionalism, of course.
As Friedersdorf’s piece went on to explain, the teacher told Rush, “[B]ecause of what you said in the book and the way that you explained the Founders’ passion for our country, it was because of that that slavery inevitably was abolished.”
Seriously? A school teacher responsible for instructions on history actually thinks this way? Does she not know what the Founders did on the issue of slavery?
After his chat with “Ivy” and before a commercial break, Limbaugh told listeners, “For people like Obama and Eric Holder, I believe – and there will never be any way to prove this because they would never admit this – but I believe that there is a genuine, long held, deeply felt contempt for the Constitution. And it’s all about slavery…. That’s the chip on their shoulder.”
Coming soon to an elementary school near you?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 6, 2014
“All Too Convenient”: Claiming “Obama Is Caesar” Is Sexier Than Saying “Steve King Is Right”
Ross Douthat premised his Sunday New York Times column on the assumption that President Obama’s expected plan to extend deportation protections to millions of undocumented immigrants would be an illegal exercise of executive power. An act of “Caesarism.” This seemed all too convenient, I responded, since the details of the plan don’t even exist and won’t for several weeks.
Douthat has now explained his assumption more fully.
It’s an article of faith among most conservatives that Obama’s existing deferred action program for so-called Dreamers (DACA) is itself illegal. Douthat was silent about DACA in his column, but followed up Monday by noting that he, too, believes DACA 1.0 was a (presumably unlawful) “abuse of power.” Which means his original argument wasn’t fallacious. It was just mistaken. Or probably mistaken, anyhow.
I’ll concede to Douthat that if we assume President Obama’s existing deferred action program is illegal, then expanding it by an order of magnitude would be illegal, too—and worse in the same way that murdering 10 people is worse than murdering just one person. But we shouldn’t assume that.
Douthat bases his conclusion that DACA is illegal on a simplistic reductio argument: If Obama can announce non-enforcement of immigration laws for a subset of unauthorized immigrants and grant them work permits, then “President Rand Paul [could announce] that, because Congress won’t reform sentencing as he desires, he’s issuing permits to domestic cocaine and heroin dealers exempting them from drug laws and ordering the DEA to only arrest non-citizen smugglers and release any American involved in cartel operations.” That would be absurd and obviously lawless—ergo DACA must be lawless, too. This is presented as a companion to a similar argument, originally put forth by Reihan Salam on the National Review‘s website. But Salam has since deleted that piece. In its place, Salam wrote this post, in which he appears, upon more rigorous inspection, to reluctantly concede DACA’s legality. Or at least to play footsie with the idea that DACA is legal.
“The American constitutional order doesn’t rest solely on statutes, or on judicial efforts to restrain the executive branch,” Salam concludes. “It also rests on norms. And the president’s apparent willingness to violate these norms is setting a dangerous precedent.”
You might think DACA is reckless. But that’s a normative judgment, which tells us nothing about its legality.
So let’s flip the assumption. If DACA combines a lawful exercise of prosecutorial discretion with a lawful provision of work permits—and Greg Sargent’s expert sources make a very strong case that it does—then the question for Douthat is, where along the continuum between a million-or-so potential DACA beneficiaries and the (perhaps) five million beneficiaries of an expanded program would it transform into the “lawless” abomination he decried in his column?
The obvious answer to that question is: We can’t say until we see the details. All we know is that Obama is contemplating a program that’s different in degree, not necessarily in kind, from DACA. Which is why my original response to Douthat’s column posited that he had assumed too much. I still contend that he did.
He hasn’t really grappled with that argument, beyond pointing out that it would be absurd to grant drug-use or tax-evasion permits to people. Instead, he focuses on my suggestion that his substantive opposition to deferred action—rather than legal or procedural concerns—is what’s driving his conclusions about its lawlessness.
He’s right that this isn’t much of an argument. But it wasn’t really part of my core argument at all. It was just a sidecar—an inference based on the fact that Douthat made sweeping conclusions about a policy that hasn’t been announced yet, and which might well be legal. If it is legal, then Douthat must retreat to his procedural objection—that, legal or not, protecting up to half the undocumented population from deportation would constitute a dangerous erosion of norms. But if upholding norms is his concern, then he can’t just tiptoe away from the collapsed norms that created the foundation for broad deportation relief. Congress could address the over-reach problem either by passing immigration reform, or by explicitly forbidding programs like DACA. To the dismay of Democrats, Congress won’t do the former. To the dismay of Representative Steve King and other House Republicans, Congress won’t do the latter, either. But that just means Congress is leaving the matter in the president’s hands. Clearly Douthat would prefer it if Congress tied those hands. But a column urging the Senate to pass Steve King’s plan to end DACA wouldn’t have been as tantalizing as one warning that the specter of Caesarism is haunting America.
By: Brian Beutler, The New Republic, August 6, 2014
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