“Hanging In The Balance”: The Supreme Court, The Elections And Beyond
Just a few elections ago, I remember people wore button that said, “It’s the Supreme Court, stupid.” But during this fall election season, the future of the Supreme Court has received very little mainstream attention, even though decisions by that august body have an impact that can last far longer than the term of a member of the House or Senate and certainly longer than that of any single president. On the current court, four justices are 74 years old or older — two from each side of the ideological divide, and it is quite likely the next president will pick at least one new one.
What hangs in the balance? Many issues but of particular note is: Roe v. Wade. It need not be completely overturned for abortion to become out of reach for the vast majority of American women, or to undermine their autonomy in making this most personal decision. In fact 87 percent of all U.S. counties — counties in which 35 percent of all women in the US now live — already lack an abortion provider. Efforts to make abortion even more inaccessible continue apace, with many states passing huge increases in anti-abortion regulations after the election of 2010. The fate of those laws with this Supreme Court remains to be seen, but should any of them reach the court, a majority may well seize the opportunity to strike down Roe in its entirely or eviscerate it beyond recognition.
Years of progress on keeping the principle of separation of religion and state alive and well is also endangered. Despite a track record in the law that upholds government enforcement of anti-discrimination laws regardless of religious belief — for example, you can’t refuse to serve an African-American a cup of coffee based on a biblical belief of inferiority — the current court may give employers the right to cite their religious beliefs as a justification for discriminating against women by denying them insurance coverage for contraceptives, even when the employer isn’t paying for it.
Other reforms of the mid-20th century are also at stake. Laws that finally made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, religion, gender, and national origin are under attack. The basic principles may remain, but the ability to enforce them has repeatedly been weakened by the Supreme Court, most recently in the Lilly Ledbetter case when the court rendered an unreasonably narrow interpretation of the federal law against job discrimination. The long Supreme Court campaign against affirmative action could produce another setback by spring in Fisher v. Texas case heard October 10, if efforts to achieve diversity in higher education are overturned.
Voting rights protections, the bedrock of the 1960s civil rights revolution, are being unraveled in many states, and appeals to the Supreme Court are certain to happen in the next session. The new state laws undermine the idea that government should make voting as easy as is reasonably possible. The Supreme Court’s faulty 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, an Indiana case upholding photo ID requirement without any inquiry into their chilling effect, has reaped a whirlwind of efforts to disfranchise millions.
The Supreme Court’s willingness to reverse long-standing precedent in the service of an ideological agenda is epitomized by its decision in Citizens United where the court went out of its way to rule that corporations have the same free speech rights as living people. That ruling overturned a principle of 70 years’ standing and unleashed a flood of money into the election process that eclipses the Watergate era and has seriously altered the political landscape of this election.
A look back at the last decade is not encouraging to those who believe as I do that our courts should dispense justice in keeping with the progress we have made in upholding individual rights, ending discrimination, and adhering to our founding principles of liberty and justice for all. Often we can’t quite put our finger on the correlation between a judge’s background and life experiences and the rulings rendered by the courts on which he or she presides. But it is surely there. It is widely conceded that a majority of those who sat on the Supreme Court before the Civil War were in fact slaveholders. It’s pretty hard to imagine that their decisions weren’t influenced by that fact. The first black justice, Thurgood Marshall, did not serve until 1967; the first woman, Sandra Day O’Connor, not until 1981. Their life experiences, for centuries excluded from our judicial system, were certainly linked to their legal decision-making.
Today with the court polarized, every presidential nomination to the Supreme Court matters. Each can help further the progress our country has made in achieving equality and justice, or transport us back to a time when the courts ignored the rights of women and African Americans, of religious and ethnic minorities, of criminal defendants and others to equal treatment and due process. As voters, we bear the ultimate responsibility for making sure we know what kind of justice the candidates for president would likely appoint.
By: Nancy K. Kaufman, CEO, National Council of Jewish Women: Published in The Blog,The Huffington Post, October 25, 2012
“The Wonderland Of Employers”: Binders Full Of Women Aren’t Enough To Solve Pay Inequality
After two debates with almost no mention of women—even the abortion question in the vice presidential debate framed the issue as one of men’s personal beliefs instead of women’s rights—we finally got a solid question about equal pay from an audience member in the town hall presidential debate.
QUESTION: In what new ways do you intend to rectify the inequalities in the workplace, specifically regarding females making only 72 percent of what their male counterparts earn?
Mitt Romney knows this is a weak spot for him. He took a beating on his campaign’s unwillingness to offer support for equal pay legislation earlier this year, and his running mate, Paul Ryan, voted against the Lilly Ledbetter Act to secure a woman’s right to sue after she’s suffered pay discrimination. Even though Romney’s been showing off his moderate shtick at the debates, he wasn’t going to go far enough to say that equal pay is a right. Instead, he framed it as a matter of employer largess:
ROMNEY: … Important topic, and one which I learned a great deal about, particularly as I was serving as governor of my state, because I had the chance to pull together a cabinet and all the applicants seemed to be men.
And I went to my staff, and I said, “How come all the people for these jobs are—are all men.” They said, “Well, these are the people that have the qualifications.” And I said, “Well, gosh, can’t we—can’t we find some—some women that are also qualified?”
And—and so we—we took a concerted effort to go out and find women who had backgrounds that could be qualified to become members of our cabinet.
I went to a number of women’s groups and said, “Can you help us find folks,” and they brought us whole binders full of women.
Romney’s phrase “binders full of women” is what immediately grabbed the attention of the online hordes, enough so that a Tumblr collecting mockery of it has already been created. And while it was an amusingly daft turn of phrase (and the Internet never ceases to amaze), the real problem with Romney’s answer is that his only solution to the obstacles women face when seeking fair pay is that employers need to volunteer to pay it.
Romney went on to correctly observe that inflexible work schedules disproportionately affect women, but that’s a different issue from the wage gap, and even then, his only real solution is to leave it up to employers to decide if they care enough to offer flex time. He tried to soften this laissez faire approach to discrimination against women by promising that employers will be so desperate to hire when he’s president they’ll pretty much be forced to take women: “We’re going to have to have employers in the new economy, in the economy I’m going to bring to play, that are going to be so anxious to get good workers they’re going to be anxious to hire women.”
Even if Romney really could create the wonderland of employers begging for employees that he imagines here—a claim that earned him four Pinocchios from the Washington Post—there’s no reason to believe that new economy would somehow force employers to start treating female employees fairly. If the free market alone could fix the problem, then women during boom times would have, according to Romney’s logic, achieved equal pay. They did not. That’s because the problem is far more complex than Romney lets on here. A little bit more flex time is nice, but it doesn’t do enough to make up for the yawning gaps in affordable child care, for instance. Plus, Romney completely breezed by the continuing problem of discrimination, which is all the Lilly Ledbetter Act addresses.
He also breezed by his position on contraception, side-stepping his campaign’s support of another type of employee discrimination: employers who want to deny their employees the contraception coverage those employees have paid for. The reality, ugly as it may be to some, is that we need more aggressive government intervention to overcome the various social obstacles that prevent women from achieving true equality with men in the employment market. “Binders full of women” is an evocative image, but Romney’s utter unwillingness to address the true causes of inequality is the real story here.
By: Amanda Marcotte, XX Factor, Slate, October 17, 2012
“Voter Purging”: There’s A Lot Of Darkness In The Sunshine State
Florida ought to know better. And must do better, particularly on the issue of voting and discrimination.
But, then again, we are talking about Florida, the state of Bush v. Gore infamy and the one that will celebrate the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the only president of the Confederacy, with a statewide holiday on Sunday.
What am I getting at? This: Few states in the union have done more in recent years to restrict and suppress voting — particularly by groups who lean Democratic, such as young people, the poor and minorities — than Florida.
In May 2011, the state’s Republican-led Legislature passed and the Republican governor, Rick Scott, signed a sweeping election law that cut early voting short and imposed onerous burdens on voter registration groups by requiring them to turn in registration applications within 48 hours of the time they are signed or face fines.
The threat of fines has meant that many groups that traditionally registered voters in the state have abandoned the effort, and it appears to be contributing to fewer new registrations. According to a March analysis of registration data by The Times, “in the months since its new law took effect in May, 81,471 fewer Floridians have registered to vote than during the same period before the 2008 presidential election.”
But there is good news. On Thursday, a federal judge overturned the 48-hour deadline as unconstitutional, writing, in part, that “if the goal is to discourage voter-registration drives and thus also to make it harder for new voters to register, the 48-hour deadline may succeed.”
Recently, the state announced that it would begin another round of voter purging to ensure that no ineligible voters were mistakenly on the voter rolls. Seems noble enough. But the problem is that Florida is notoriously bad at purging.
As the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice pointed out last week: “In 2000, Florida’s efforts to purge persons with criminal convictions from the rolls led to, by conservative estimates, close to 12,000 eligible voters being removed” from the rolls. As most of us remember, George W. Bush beat Al Gore in the state of Florida that year, after the recounts and the Supreme Court stepped in, by 537 votes.
And as The Miami Herald reported on Thursday:
“So far, Florida has flagged 2,700 potential noncitizen voters and sent the list to county elections supervisors, who have found the data and methodology to be flawed and problematic. The list of potential noncitizen voters — many of whom have turned out to be lawful citizens and voters — disproportionately hits minorities, especially Hispanics.”
More good news: In his keynote address at the inaugural Faith Leaders Summit on Voting Rights, a joint effort by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Conference of National Black Churches, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. told the group:
“Congressman John Lewis may have described the reason for these concerns best, in a speech on the House floor last summer, when pointing out that the voting rights he worked throughout his life — and nearly gave his life — to ensure are, ‘under attack … [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.’ Not only was he referring to the all-too-common deceptive practices we’ve been fighting for years. He was echoing more recent fears and frustrations about some of the state-level voting law changes we’ve seen this legislative season.”
He didn’t mention Florida by name, but, on Thursday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the Florida secretary of state demanding that they cease the purge.
Florida has more electoral votes than any other swing state, and the battle to win it — or steal it — will be epic because the election is likely to be another nail-biter, both nationally and in the state.
In an NBC-Marist poll of battleground states released last week, President Obama was leading Mitt Romney in the state 48 percent to 44 percent. But as NBC News pointed out, the president’s share was “below the 50 percent threshold usually considered safe haven for an incumbent president,” and Romney has narrowed the races in Florida and other battleground states since earlier in the year.
A Quinnipiac University Poll also released last week had Romney leading Obama by 6 points in Florida, although there has been some debate about the methodology of that poll.
We can’t predict a winner, but we must insist on a fair fight. Voter suppression can’t be allowed to overshadow democracy in the Sunshine State.
By: Charles Blow, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, June 1, 2012
“No Excuse For Inaction”: The Awful Race Disparities That Still Haunt Us
Even though a black family lives in the White House, hardly anyone seriously argues that we live in a postracial society. That aspirational description of 21st century America came into vogue about four years ago, as President Barack Obama raced to victory in the 2008 presidential election, and a great number of black and white Americans wanted to believe the nation was finally closing the books on its discriminatory history.
But no. President Obama’s election didn’t suddenly sweep away all the accumulated consequences of past racism in our society. The preexisting racial disparities, so engrained in the fabric of our economy and culture, didn’t erase themselves in the wake of his victory.
As my Progress 2050 colleagues Christian E. Weller, Julie Ajinkya, and Jane Farrell make regrettably clear in their recently released report, “The State of Communities of Color in the U.S. Economy: Still Feeling the Pain Three Years Into Recovery,” racial and ethnic minority groups aren’t living in a paradise free of racial disadvantage. Quite the contrary, their research demonstrates that people of color aren’t benefiting apace with white Americans as our nation gradually rebounds from the financial collapse and economic recession that gripped us all when President Obama took office:
[T]he data we summarize in this report shows that communities of color are substantially less likely than their white fellow citizens to enjoy the opportunities that come from having a good job, owning a home, and having a financial safety cushion in the form of health insurance, retirement benefits, and private savings. This difference exists because economic opportunities eroded faster for communities of color than for whites during the Great Recession—and those opportunities have been coming back much more slowly for communities of color than for whites during the economic recovery.
The disparities Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell write about aren’t new. Anyone who’s paid scant attention to the drumbeat of sour economic news knows that white unemployment, while at near-record heights, never drew within spitting distance of the chronically high rates suffered by African Americans and Latinos. As a result of this one fact, my colleagues write, a host of other calamities followed for people of color during the economic downturn like toppling dominoes, including:
— Black Americans enjoying fewer job opportunities than all other racial and ethnic groups.
— Poverty rates, already higher for communities of color, rising faster in the recession and declining slower during recovery than for white Americans
— Homeownership, a major source of financial security, disappearing faster for black Americans during the recession and recovery than for white Americans
Those are old, bitter, and racially disparate facts. But what is especially galling is the yawning silence and indifference that seems to accompany the periodic recitation of them. Worse, there exists in some conservative quarters a refusal to acknowledge the truth and an eagerness to embrace discredited notions about postracialism. Acting as if racial disparities don’t exist or believing we’re now living in some fantasy world free of racial divisions is nothing more than an excuse to preserve the status quo. It serves to protect the advantages of those who are already employed and comfortable, while keeping racial and ethnic minorities locked out of the improving economy.
But despite the cloudy pessimism disclosed in the report, there also exists the opportunity for hopeful change. More than a catalogue of racial disparities, the report provides a roadmap for policies that, if implemented, would help equalize the burdens faced by people of color. Specifically, it suggests federal policies that would accelerate job creation, shore up unemployment insurance, raise the minimum wage, increase access to health insurance, and implement comprehensive immigration reform to protect workers’ rights.
Armed with the facts of disparity and a prescription for change, policymakers have no excuse for inaction. Reporting the bad news, as Weller, Ajinkya, and Farrell have done, removes the blinders from their eyes. Policymakers’ indifference to the pain of their fellow citizens can only be interpreted as willing refusal to ensure that all Americans—including communities of color—share equitably in the rebuilding and recovery of the nation’s economy.
By: Sam Fulwood III, Center for American Progress, Published in AlterNet, April 17, 2012
Social Inequality: The Paradox Of The New Elite
It’s a puzzle: one dispossessed group after another — blacks, women, Hispanics and gays — has been gradually accepted in the United States, granted equal rights and brought into the mainstream.
At the same time, in economic terms, the United States has gone from being a comparatively egalitarian society to one of the most unequal democracies in the world.
The two shifts are each huge and hugely important: one shows a steady march toward democratic inclusion, the other toward a tolerance of economic stratification that would have been unthinkable a generation ago.
The United States prides itself on the belief that “anyone can be president,” and what better example than Barack Obama, son of a black Kenyan immigrant and a white American mother — neither of them rich.
And yet more than half the presidents over the past 110 years attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton and graduates of Harvard and Yale have had a lock on the White House for the last 23 years, across four presidencies. Thus we have become both more inclusive and more elitist.
It’s a surprising contradiction. Is the confluence of these two movements a mere historical accident? Or are the two trends related?
Other nations seem to face the same challenge: either inclusive, or economically just. Europe has maintained much more economic equality but is struggling greatly with inclusiveness and discrimination, and is far less open to minorities than is the United States.
European countries have done a better job of protecting workers’ salaries and rights but have been reluctant to extend the benefits of their generous welfare state to new immigrants who look and act differently from them. Could America’s lost enthusiasm for income redistribution and progressive taxation be in part a reaction to sharing resources with traditionally excluded groups?
“I do think there is a trade-off between inclusion and equality,” said Gary Becker, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a Nobel laureate. “I think if you are a German worker you are better off than your American equivalent, but if you are an immigrant, you are better off in the U.S.”
Professor Becker, a celebrated free-market conservative, wrote his Ph.D. dissertation (and first book, “The Economics of Discrimination”) to demonstrate that racial discrimination was economically inefficient. American business leaders seem to have learned that there is no money to be made in exclusion: bringing in each new group has simply created new consumers to court. If you can capture nearly three-quarters of the economy’s growth — as the top 1 percent did between 2002 and 2006 — it may not be worth worrying about gay marriage or skin color.
“I think we have become more meritocratic — educational attainment has become increasingly predictive of economic success,” Professor Becker said. But with educational attainment going increasingly to the children of the affluent and educated, we appear to be developing a self-perpetuating elite that reaps a greater and greater share of financial rewards. It is a hard-working elite, and more diverse than the old white male Anglo-Saxon establishment — but nonetheless claims a larger share of the national income than was the case 50 years ago, when blacks, Jews and women were largely shut out of powerful institutions.
Inequality and inclusion are both as American as apple pie, says Jerome Karabel, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The Chosen,” about the history of admission to Harvard, Yale and Princeton. “I don’t think any advanced democracy is as obsessed with equality of opportunity or as relatively unconcerned with equality of condition,” he says. “As long as everyone has a chance to compete, we shouldn’t worry about equality. Equality of condition is seen as undesirable, even un-American.”
The long history of racial discrimination represented an embarrassing contradiction — and a serious threat — to our national story of equal opportunity. With Jim Crow laws firmly in place it was hard to seriously argue that everyone had an equal chance. Civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were able to use this tradition to draw support to their causes. “Given our culture of equality of opportunity, these kinds of rights-based arguments are almost impossible to refute,” Professor Karabel said. “Even in today’s conservative political climate, opponents of gay rights are losing ground.”
The removal of traditional barriers opened up the American system. In 1951 blacks made up less than 1 percent of the students at America’s Ivy League colleges. Today they make up about 8 percent. At the same time, America’s elite universities are increasingly the provinces of the well-to-do. “Looking at the data, you see that the freshman class of our top colleges are more and more made up of the children of upper- and upper-middle-class families,” said Thomas J. Espenshade of Princeton, a sociologist.
Even the minority students are more affluent, he noted; many of them are of mixed race, or the children of immigrants or those who benefited from affirmative action.
Shamus Khan, a sociologist at Columbia and the author of “Privilege,” a book about St. Paul’s, the prep school, agreed that there had been a change in the composition of the elite. “Who is at elite schools seems to have shifted,” he said. “But the elite seem to have a firmer and firmer hold on our nation’s wealth and power.”
Still the relatively painless movement toward greater diversity should not be dismissed as mere window dressing.
“After the immigration reform of 1965, this country went from being the United States of Europe to being the United States of the World. All with virtually no violence and comparatively little trauma,” Professor Karabel said. This is no small thing, particularly when you compare it to the trauma experienced by many European societies in absorbing much lower percentages of foreign-born citizens, few of whom have penetrated their countries’ elites.
Moreover, inequality has grown partly for reasons that have little or nothing to do with inclusion. Almost all advanced industrial societies — even Sweden — have become more unequal. But the United States has become considerably more unequal. In Europe, the rights of labor have remained more central, while the United States has seen the rise of identity politics.
“There is much less class-based organization in the U.S,” said Professor Karabel. “Race, gender and sexual orientation became the salient cleavages of American political life. And if you look at it — blacks, Hispanics and women have gained somewhat relative to the population as a whole, but labor as a category has lost ground. The groups that mobilized — blacks, Hispanics, women — made gains. But white male workers, who demobilized politically, lost ground.”
One of the groups to become mobilized in response to the protest movements of the 1960s and early 1970s was the rich. Think tanks dedicated to defending the free-enterprise system — such as the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation — were born in this period. And it is not an accident that the right-wing advocate Glenn Beck held a national rally on the anniversary of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Republicans now defend tax cuts for the richest 2 percent using arguments and language from the civil rights movements: insisting that excluding the richest earners is unfair.
Removing the most blatant forms of discrimination, ironically, made it easier to justify keeping whatever rewards you could obtain through the new, supposedly more meritocratic system. “Greater inclusiveness was a precondition for greater economic stratification,” said Professor Karabel. “It strengthened the system, reinvigorated its ideology — it is much easier to defend gains that appear to be earned through merit. In a meritocracy, inequality becomes much more acceptable.”
The term “meritocracy” — now almost universally used as a term of praise — was actually coined as a pejorative term, appearing for the first time in 1958, in the title of a satirical dystopian novel, “The Rise of the Meritocracy,” by the British Labour Party leader Michael Young. He warned against the creation of a new technocratic elite in which the selection of the few would lead to the abandonment of the many, a new elite whose privileges were even more crushing and fiercely defended because they appeared to be entirely merited.
Of the European countries, Britain’s politics of inequality and inclusion most resemble those of the United States. Even as inequality has grown considerably, the British sense of economic class has diminished. As recently as 1988, some 67 percent of British citizens proudly identified themselves as working class. Now only 24 percent do. Almost everybody below the Queen and above the poverty line considers himself or herself “middle class.”
Germany still has robust protections for its workers and one of the healthiest economies in Europe. Children at age 10 are placed on different tracks, some leading to university and others to vocational school — a closing off of opportunity that Americans would find intolerable. But it is uncontroversial because those attending vocational school often earn as much as those who attend university.
In France, it is illegal for the government to collect information on people on the basis of race. And yet millions of immigrants — and the children and grandchildren of immigrants — fester in slums.
In the United States, the stratification of wealth followed several decades where economic equality was strong. The stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed underscored the excesses of the roaring ’20s and ushered in an era in which the political climate favored labor unions, progressive taxation and social programs aimed at reducing poverty.
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the income of the less affluent Americans grew more quickly than that of their wealthier neighbors, and the richest 1 percent saw its share of the national income shrink to 8.9 percent in the mid-1970s, from 23.9 percent in 1928. That share is now back up to more than 20 percent, its level before the Depression.
Inequality has traditionally been acceptable to Americans if accompanied by mobility. But most recent studies of economic mobility indicate that it is getting even harder for people to jump from one economic class to another in the United States, harder to join the elite. While Americans are used to considering equal opportunity and equality of condition as separate issues, they may need to reconsider. In an era in which money translates into political power, there is a growing feeling, on both left and right, that special interests have their way in Washington. There is growing anger, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, that the current system is stacked against ordinary citizens. Suddenly, as in the 1930s, the issue of economic equality is back in play.
By: Alexander Stille, The New York Times Sunday Review, October 22, 2011
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