“We Are All Charged With Pushing Forward”: President Obama Delivers A Speech For History
“This whole week,” said President Obama, “I’ve been reflecting on this idea of grace.”
That was the turning point of Friday’s eulogy for Clementa Pinckney, the Charleston, South Carolina minister who was, with eight of his congregants, murdered by a racist terrorist two weeks ago. It was the moment a memorable speech became a speech for history.
“According to the Christian tradition,” the president-turned-preacher explained, “grace is not earned, grace is not merited, it’s not something we deserve. Rather, grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.” Grace, in other words, is that which bridges the gap between creation and Creator, the staircase connecting the soil to the celestial.
And it is amazing. So the heart leapt when, moved by some ephemeral thing cameras could not see, Obama launched into a soulful, heartfelt and, yes, off-key rendition of one of the foundational hymns of the church. “Amazing grace,” he sang, 6,000 voices rising to meet him, “how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see.”
“As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy,” the president said, “God has visited grace upon us, for He has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He’s given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”
The president named a few of the things to which we’ve been blind, the issues upon which we have been lost. He spoke of gun violence, the hunger of children, the brazen hatred that inspired the alleged shooter, the soft bigotry that gets “Johnny” called back for an interview but leaves “Jamal” job hunting.
Though he didn’t mention it, it seemed not inconsequential that he said these things on the same day the Supreme Court affirmed the right of same-sex couples to marry. It seemed fitting that he returned that night to a White House bathed in colors of the rainbow. One could almost see history making a great, wide turn toward freedom.
And, too, one heard predictable howls of outrage. Sen. Ted Cruz called it one of the darkest days in American history, Rush Limbaugh predicted polygamy, some Southern states, as they did during the civil rights years, declined to be guided by the court’s ruling. But, it all carried a tinny, faraway sound, like a radio station from some distant town, drowned out by the thunder of rejoicing.
This is not to say those doorkeepers of yesterday are without power to interdict change. They are nothing if not stubborn and resilient. It is, however, to say that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. And, moreover, that the genius of the nation founded 239 years ago Saturday by a group of men we would now call sexist, racist and homophobic, was not its perfection as originally conceived, but the fact that it was built for change, built to become better, and continually expands itself to accommodate that long arc.
Are we not tasked with forming “a more perfect union”? It’s the ongoing work of America, work no one speech or court ruling can finish, but which we are all charged with pushing forward. Until one bright day, you look up and are surprised how far you’ve come.
That’s what happened Friday. And it might be the story of John Newton’s life. Newton, who wrote the hymn in which President Obama found solace, was a slave trader who changed by increments over the years until, by the end of his life, he was issuing grief-stricken apologies for his part in that evil business. If the first verse of his hymn is a paean to the redemptive power of grace, its third is a reminder that grace obligates us to push forward toward bright days not yet glimpsed:
“Through many dangers, toils and snares,” he wrote, “I have already come / Tis’ grace has brought me safe thus far / And grace will lead me home.”
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, July 1, 2015
“Enlightenment On Confederate Flag Was Long Overdue”: This American Swastika Is Unfit For Human Consumption
“You can always count on Americans to do the right thing — after they’ve tried everything else.”
That’s an observation widely credited to Winston Churchill, though it’s one he may or may not have ever made. Whoever said it, the truth of the axiom has seldom been more obvious than now, as we watch the fall of the Confederate battle flag. It is too early to say whether this will prove lasting. But the signs certainly point toward a seismic shift.
In South Carolina, where the Confederacy was born, a motion to allow debate on removing the flag from the grounds of the state Capitol passed by a vote of 103-10. Alabama has already removed its flag. Meantime, a number of major retailers, including Amazon, eBay, and Arkansas-based Walmart, have announced they will no longer carry the flag. Perhaps most amazing, Valley Forge Flag, a 133-year-old flag maker in Pennsylvania, has said it will no longer manufacture it.
We appear to be on the verge of a long-overdue national consensus that this American swastika is unfit for human consumption. And to think: All it took was the blood of nine innocent people.
Ever since 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof shot up Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the ground has been shifting beneath that flag, so beloved of the white, conservative South — especially after images emerged of Roof posing with one. “God help South Carolina if we fail to achieve the goal of removing the flag,” said South Carolina senator and presidential aspirant Lindsey Graham last week. He said this just days after telling CNN the flag was “part of who we are.”
The suddenness of the change in attitude toward that flag is bracing, reminiscent, in an odd way, of when the Berlin Wall fell: Nobody saw it coming — it happened. That said, it is hard to be wholly invested in cheering what is happening here.
Consider: The Confederate battle flag was not somehow made more racist by Roof’s alleged rampage. Notwithstanding claims by Graham and others that it has somehow been misused as a racist symbol by the likes of Roof, the fact is, the thing was used as such from the moment the first thread of the first flag was sewn in support of a treasonous regime that was, to borrow Mississippi’s words, “thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery.”
The flag was certainly understood as racist — that was the whole point — by those who resurrected it to signal massive resistance to the civil rights movement. It is still understood that way; why else is it ubiquitous at white supremacist rallies?
So what happened at Emanuel did not change the flag’s meaning; it only made that meaning harder to ignore. And while its fall is significant, you have to wonder if it really marks a fundamental change in the mind of the white, conservative South. Particularly since you can’t turn around in Dixie without running into some road, bridge, statue, or park honoring some individual who took up arms against the U.S. government in the name of perpetuating slavery — or without meeting someone eager to rationalize that, hiding behind abstracts like “honor” and “duty” to avoid admitting what the Confederacy really was.
The tragedy at Emanuel has forced a moment of clarity into this fog of cognitive dissonance. In days to come, we’ll see just how much that’s worth in terms of real change. Because at some point, the people of the white, conservative South must themselves take responsibility for their own racial education, for facing — and growing from — the truth about their beloved Confederacy.
Consider that it took an act of mass murder before they were willing to reckon honestly with their flag and its meaning. Yes, one is pleased to see that finally come to pass.
But the price of enlightenment seems awfully high.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, June 29, 2015
“The GOP’s Obamacare Alternative; Crickets”: Now Railing Against Obamacare Without Having To Come Up With A Replacement
Now that the Supreme Court has saved the Affordable Care Act for a second time, what do Republicans do? We already know they won’t tone down their rhetoric and will continue to call for repeal because that’s what Republican primary voters want to hear. The candidates will package together vague alternative proposals that they will pledge to pass and enact as the first act of their presidency.
But they don’t have even a remote chance of repealing the ACA, even if a Republican is elected president in 2016.
“The ruling is the last gasp,” says Chris Jennings, a health policy expert who worked in both the Clinton and Carter administrations. While the presidential contenders will keep alive the hope for their base that if elected they can sweep away Obamacare, Jennings says the issue will be dead and gone by fall 2016. The voters will have moved on.
Conservatives feel betrayed yet again by Chief Justice John Roberts joining with the liberals on the Court to uphold the constitutionality of the ACA, but they should thank Roberts. He saved the GOP from having to bail out 6½ million people, the majority of them in red states, who would have lost their health insurance if the Court had ruled the other way.
Now Republicans can continue to rail against Obamacare without the responsibility of actually coming up with a law to replace it. “This decision gives them a vast canvas on which to write,” says Jack Pitney, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “There’s no need for immediate replacement, so rhetoric will fill the vacuum of legislation.”
There will be proposals, enough to satisfy the GOP faithful that the presidential candidates are doing something to end the abomination of Obamacare. But these will not be serious efforts because it is not possible to write health-care legislation that leaves in all the goodies everybody supports, like no discrimination for preexisting conditions, and leaves out what people oppose, like the mandate.
A reading of the majority opinion written by Roberts reveals that he paid close attention to the argument put forth by the health insurance industry in an amicus brief. Without the subsidies, millions could not afford coverage and only those with significant medical expenses would apply, sending the ACA into a “death spiral.”
The Roberts Court handed another lifeline to President Obama, but the decision is also a huge victory for the health industry. Asked how difficult it is for the GOP to step in with their own plan to counter Obamacare, Ceci Connolly, a Health Research Institute Leader and a former Washington Post reporter covering politics and health care, countered with some hard numbers. “The 2.9 trillion dollar health sector is exceedingly complex and changing; it takes an enormous amount of time and work,” she said. “Not only has the ACA expanded coverage, it has pumped billions of dollars in revenue to the health industry, and going back would upset a very large and important market.”
If the subsidies were removed or denied, it would have cost the health industry $36 billion in premium revenue next year alone, Connolly told The Daily Beast. Hospitals would have seen their revenue fall about $9 billion. While still a fraction in a huge market, “that’s real money to the industry,” she says. “The legislative process is cumbersome to say the least, and it would be a steep climb to replace the ACA.”
If a Republican president is elected, and the GOP retains the Senate along with the House, “that’s a new ballgame,” Connolly said. “But by 2017 the law would have been implemented for seven years. It’s very hard to take away benefits and significantly restructure a market as big as the health care market.”
Connolly noted that the executives her research group talks to around the country anticipated the decision to come down the way it did. “They could not imagine the subsidies being taken away.”
The phrase that political scientists use is “past dependency.” Once a major policy is entrenched, it’s very difficult to change in a major way. We’ve seen that with social security and Medicare, programs that President Obama invoked in his remarks in the Rose Garden about the ACA’s rite of passage into “the fabric of America.”
By: Eleanor Clift, The Daily Beast, June 25, 2015
“Be Careful What You Wish For”: Dear Ted Cruz; Electing SCOTUS Judges Might Not Work Out As Well For You As You Hope
Flailing about for some sort of cogent conservative reaction to the Supreme Court decisions this week, National Review apparently allowed Ted Cruz to scribble out some meandering prose on its website. That may have been a mistake.
Ted Cruz’ solution to “judicial tyranny”? Direct election of SCOTUS judges. No, really. But let’s set aside the obvious fever dream futility of attempting to make this alteration to the Constitution to serve social conservative interests and take his suggestion at face value.
Direct election of judges has admittedly been a key page out of the conservative playbook for a long time now. Big money in theory keeps justices aligned to corporate interests, while conservative interest groups can ensure that judges fear to render verdicts against their pet issues from guns to gay marriage. As public policy, of course, this is a terrible idea: the entire point of having unelected judges is that they will feel free to protect the Constitution and the rule of law against the unjust tyranny of the majority. Making judges fearful of the public whim negates much of the entire purpose of having a judicial branch to check the legislative.
But even from a purely conservative utilitarian standpoint, that strategy tends to work best in more conservative states and where judges are elected in non-presidential cycles. Also, much has changed in the last decade in terms of popular opinion.
The underpinning of Cruz’ argument seems to be that the justices of the Court have instituted unpopular judicial tyranny on the public by upholding Obamacare and gay marriage. But it’s not at all clear that if Supreme Court judges were elected by popular vote, the results would favor conservative interests. The same demographic forces that make it increasingly difficult for Republicans to win presidential elections would carry similar headwinds against conservative justices. A nation that elected Barack Obama twice would be far likelier to toss out Scalia than Ginsburg.
Moreover, there’s no evidence that a serious public opinion backlash will arise against the Court over marriage equality and the Affordable Care Act, let alone one strong enough to engender a serious recall election threat under such a system. National public opinion has shifted dramatically in favor of marriage equality, and Americans strongly oppose repealing the Affordable Care Act. If Ted Cruz believes a populist backlash would scare the Supreme Court into submission, he’s obviously looking at the wrong polls.
Indeed, by far the most unpopular of the SCOTUS’ recent decisions was its stand on Citizens United: a full 80% of Americans opposed to the decision, and 65% of Americans strongly opposed. The public backlash over giving plutocrats and corporations unfettered purchasing power over our elections has been far stronger than any old-school conservative revanchist revolt against liberal judges.
All of which is to say, Ted Cruz should probably be careful what he wishes for.
By: David Atkins, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 27, 2015
“No Longer May Liberty Be Denied”: Liberals Just Had An Amazing Week At The Supreme Court
The conservative Roberts Supreme Court just gave American liberals the most joyous judicial week they could have asked for.
In a span of just two days, the rightward-leaning court all but settled Obamacare as the law of the land; reaffirmed key components of housing discrimination law meant to protect minorities; and granted gay Americans the right to get married in any state they wish.
The string of progressive victories left officials hugging and high-fiving at the White House, gay couples crying tears of joy on the courthouse steps, and hardline conservatives wondering on Twitter whether their erstwhile judicial heroes were now traitors.
To recap:
In King v. Burwell, decided Thursday, the court ruled 6-3 to reject a lawsuit brought by conservatives that would have stripped Obamacare subsidies from people who purchased their health coverage on the federal exchanges. A ruling in the plaintiffs’ favor threatened to unravel the system created by the Affordable Care Act, potentially causing millions to lose their health care coverage and wreaking havoc on state insurance markets.
The ruling marked the second time in three years the court had rejected an existential threat to Obamacare. As in the previous case, 2012’s NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the liberal wing of the court, this time along with Justice Anthony Kennedy, to keep the president’s signature law intact. Justice Antonin Scalia, writing in a typically scathing dissent, lambasted the majority’s reasoning as “interpretive jiggery-pokery” and “pure applesauce.”
In Texas Dept. of Housing v. Inclusive Communities, also decided Thursday, the court handed a victory to civil rights groups with a 5-4 decision that upheld so-called disparate impact claims. Joined by Kennedy, who often plays the swing vote, the liberal justices ruled that someone suing under fair housing law doesn’t need to prove that a developer or the government knowingly discriminated — only that the policy had a disparate impact, something that can often be demonstrated with statistics.
Had the conservative wing prevailed, plaintiffs bringing claims would have had the far more difficult task of proving intentional discrimination, which typically isn’t documented by those who practice it. Civil rights groups so feared an unfavorable ruling in such a case that the Obama administration sought to keep the question of disparate impact away from the Roberts court.
Finally, in Obergefell v. Hodges, issued Friday, the justices ruled 5-4 to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide, marking a triumph for the gay rights movement decades in the making. The liberal justices, who were joined again by Kennedy, determined that the Constitution grants anyone, regardless of their sexual orientation, the right to marry, effectively invalidating the bans against same-sex unions that still exist in 13 states. “No longer may this liberty be denied,” Kennedy wrote in his highly quotable decision for the majority.
Scalia penned another memorably incredulous dissent, opening by saying he chose to write separately from Roberts in order to “call attention to this Court’s threat to American democracy.” Insisting his concern was not the merit or lack thereof of gay marriage, he wrote that the majority’s “pretentious” and “egotistic” opinion lacked “even a thin veneer of law” and was chock full of “mummeries and straining-to-be-memorable passages.” “[W]hat really astounds is the hubris reflected in today’s judicial Putsch,” he seethed.
The good news for liberals wasn’t confined to just the high-profile cases. In Friday’s Johnson v. United States decision, which was overshadowed by the Obergefell case, the court ruled 8-1 that a section of the Armed Career Criminal Act, which is used to extend prison sentences, is “unconstitutionally vague.” The ruling may compel Congress to address the language of the law as thousands of prisoners seek to have their sentences reduced.
The majority opinion in the Johnson case was written by Scalia, giving progressive court watchers another reason to celebrate. As ThinkProgress’s Ian Millhiser explains, the Johnson opinion makes Scalia one of just two justices who’ve penned as many as eight majority opinions this term. If tradition is any indication, then Scalia probably won’t be writing another majority opinion before the court breaks, likely leaving the duty to one of his less conservative colleagues.
By: Dave Jamieson, The Blog, The Huffington Post, June 26, 2015
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