“Romney Embraces Judicial Extremism”: Supreme Court Is A Winning Issue For Progressives
A national poll released this week shows that in the wake of a number of blockbuster decisions, the Supreme Court can be a winning issue for progressives in 2012.
By big margins, Americans trust President Obama much more than they trust Mitt Romney to pick Supreme Court Justices, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released Tuesday. The poll, which comes two weeks after the Supreme Court narrowly upheld President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, shows that the Supreme Court is the issue on which the president has the clearest and largest lead over Romney — 11 points among all voters and 12 points among independents.
Americans know judicial extremism when they see it, and are rejecting Romney’s promise to bring an already far-right Court even further out of the mainstream.
The current Supreme Court is, by a number of measures, the most conservative in decades. Under the leadership of Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative majority on the Court has struck down hard-won clean elections laws, made it more difficult for women to sue for equal pay, squashed class action suits, and consistently favored large corporations over individual citizens seeking justice. Even the Affordable Care Act decision, while undeniably a victory for the president and for individual Americans, was excruciatingly close and packed with regressive language on the scope of Congress’ powers. The fact is, under a more balanced Court, the decision would not have even been close.
Mitt Romney, however, has promised to bring the Court even further to the right if he is elected president. Romney sent a clear signal to the far right when he chose former Judge Robert Bork to head his judicial advisory team. Bork, whose own Supreme Court nomination was rejected by a bipartisan majority of the Senate in 1987, has for decades set the standard for far-right judicial extremism. His outspoken extremism on everything from workers’ rights to censorship is detailed in People For the American Way’s recent report, “Borking America.”
Last week, Romney moved his position on Supreme Court appointments even further to the right. While the candidate had previously held up Chief Justice Roberts as a model for the type of Supreme Court Justice he would appoint, Romney changed his mind after Roberts voted to uphold the Affordable Care Act. Declaring one of the most conservative Justices in Supreme Court history to be not conservative enough, Romney has signaled that he would usher in a new era of conservative judicial extremism. Americans can only guess at how many rights could be lost under a Romney Court.
These new polling numbers show that Americans aren’t buying the Tea Party’s — and Mitt Romney’s — skewed view of the Constitution. Emphasizing the importance of the courts and the impact the next president will have on them will be a winning issue for President Obama in 2012. As the close call in the Affordable Care Act case showed, every issue that voters care deeply about — from Wall Street reform to health care to LGBT rights to consumer safety to intentional discrimination in the workplace to the right to vote in future elections — will ultimately end up in the hands of a closely divided, enormously influential, Supreme Court.
In a speech Tuesday, Vice President Joe Biden urged Americans: “Close your eyes and imagine what the Supreme Court will look like after four years of Gov. Romney. Imagine what it will act like. Imagine what it will mean for civil rights, voting rights, and for so much we have fought so hard for.”
Voters are beginning to imagine a Romney Court — and they’re rejecting what they see.
By: Michael B. Keegan, The Huffington Post, July 12, 2012
“America’s Sweetheart, Ginni Thomas”: Did A Justice’s Wife Leak Supreme Court Drama?
NPR legal reporter Nina Totenberg spoke to Bloomberg Law yesterday about the Supreme Court’s recent healthcare reform decision and the subsequent series of stories on the deliberations based on leaks to reporters from court insiders. She made this interesting observation:
“[The leaks] had the earmarks of somebody — somebody or two bodies — who are very angry. Now that’s not necessarily a justice. Could be a justice, could be a law clerk, could be a spouse of a justice.”
Totenberg goes on to say that of course she never tries to learn the identities of other reporters’ sources, but that’s still an interesting bit of … fairly specific speculation, there.
Of course, there is only one “spouse of a justice” that anyone has ever heard of, and it’s America’s Sweetheart, Ginni Thomas.
We already know her husband, Clarence Thomas, is an extraordinarily angry and bitter person, thanks to his memoir, “I Am Still an Incredibly Angry and Bitter Person on Account of That Time Anita Hill Told the Complete Truth About Me.” (And Clarence Thomas is apparently buddies with CBS’s Jan Crawford.) And Ginni made a living, for years, touring the nation telling everyone how awful and unconstitutional healthcare reform was, which means she was probably pretty upset when her husband told her John Roberts voted to kill liberty forever. She’s also known for having really poor impulse control, if her still-hilarious early Saturday morning voice mail for Anita Hill is any indication. So let’s all just assume she’s leaking everything, because she and her husband are so mad and crazy.
(Though Ginni Thomas is still doing video interviews in which she inexplicably doesn’t actually appear for Tucker Carlson’s “The Daily Carlson,” so why didn’t she leak to one of the Caller’s many fine reporters, like Mickey Kaus or the guy who says a black person probably stole his bike? She is an enigma!)
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, July 12
“Radical And Anti-Thought”: Remember The Party Of Personal Responsibility?
The House Republicans are going to vote today to repeal the ACA, and the message they’re going to be sending to people who have cancer or diabetes or any number of other diseases but don’t have insurance is simple, and forgive my bluntness in this non-family newspaper where such language, I’m given to understand, is occasionally permisslbe. The message is: Fuck off.
Matt Miller put the matter powerfully in his Post column yesterday:
Here’s what you should do, Mr. President. In the debates this fall, pull out a small laminated card you’ve had made as a prop for this purpose. Then remind Mitt Romney that the ranks of the uninsured today are equal to the combined populations of Oklahoma, Connecticut, Iowa, Mississippi, Kansas, Kentucky, Arkansas, Utah, Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, Nebraska, Idaho, Maine, New Hampshire, Hawaii, Rhode Island, Montana, Delaware, North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Vermont and Wyoming.
Read that list slowly, Mr. President. Then ask your opponent: Would America turn its back on the citizens of these 25 states if everyone there lacked basic health coverage? That’s what we’ve been doing for decades. You knew it was right to act when you were governor of Massachusetts, Mitt. How can you pretend we don’t need to solve this for the nation? And how can you object with a straight face when your own pioneering plan was my model?
Can I get an amen to that? And then he might add something like, “As you said many times yourself, Governor, the point of requiring people to buy insurance is to instill a sense of personal responsibility. No free riders. No trips to the emergency room that the rest of us pay for. Why did you believe in personal responsibility then but are against it now?”
I swear, as I noted yesterday, this is starting to smell to me like an issue the Democrats can win votes on this fall. Believe me, if I thought the opposite, I’d say so. I did think the opposite just a few weeks ago. What changed?
John Roberts, basically. Politically, his signing on to the decision lends a bulletproofness to the Democratic position, changes the whole mentality of the debate. If it had been Kennedy with the liberals, meh. But Roberts’ stamp of approval on the plan allows the Democrats some room to play offense. And that offense is built around one simple claim: Republicans would deny coverage to sick people and let them die.
Sprinkling a little personal responsibility sugar on top can’t hurt. Use their blind extremism against them. Here is a position that was once theirs, that they came up with and that they’ve now abandoned, just because Obama took it up. It’s a great marker of how radical and anti-thought they’ve become, that they’re now willing to let people suffer and die in the hopes that they can defeat a political adversary.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, July 11, 2012
“Escalation Of Tactics”: Supreme Court Leaks To Conservative Pundits May Have Started More Than A Month Ago
CBS News’ Jan Crawford confirms widespread rumors that Chief Justice John Roberts initially voted to strike down the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, but decided midway through the opinion drafting process that he could not support this constitutionally unjustifiable result. In what may be the biggest revelation of her piece, Crawford also reports that pseudo-moderateJustice Anthony Kennedy led the internal lobbying effort to bring Roberts back into the right-wing fold:
Roberts then withstood a month-long, desperate campaign to bring him back to his original position, the sources said. Ironically, Justice Anthony Kennedy – believed by many conservatives to be the justice most likely to defect and vote for the law – led the effort to try to bring Roberts back to the fold.
“He was relentless,” one source said of Kennedy’s efforts. “He was very engaged in this.”
But this time, Roberts held firm. And so the conservatives handed him their own message which, as one justice put it, essentially translated into, “You’re on your own.”
The conservatives refused to join any aspect of his opinion, including sections with which they agreed, such as his analysis imposing limits on Congress’ power under the Commerce Clause, the sources said.
Instead, the four joined forces and crafted a highly unusual, unsigned joint dissent. They deliberately ignored Roberts’ decision, the sources said, as if they were no longer even willing to engage with him in debate.
Crawford cites two unnamed sources, and there are a very limited universe of people who could have revealed this information to her. Only the justices and their personal staff would have access to this knowledge, and it is highly unlikely that a clerk or secretary would be willing to risk their entire career by revealing the Court’s confidential deliberations to the press. Crawford, moreover, is a very well connected conservative reporter who has, at times, worked closely with the Federalist Society to drive conservative legal narratives. Nothing is certain, but it is likely that one or both of Crawford’s sources is a conservative justice.
Moreover, as Linda Greenhouse points out, it is possible that the Court started springing leaks more than a month before Roberts handed down his opinion:
Around Memorial Day, a number of conservative columnists and bloggers suddenly began accusing the “liberal media” of putting “the squeeze to Justice Roberts,” as George Will expressed the thought in his Washington Post column. “They are waging an embarrassingly obvious campaign, hoping he will buckle beneath the pressure of their disapproval and declare Obamacare constitutional,” Mr. Will wrote. Although the court has been famously leakproof, Mr. Will and some of the others are well connected at the court, and I wondered at the time whether they had picked up signals that the chief justice, thought reliable after the oral argument two months earlier, was now wavering, and whether their message was really intended for him.
To be clear, at this point only two facts are confirmed: 1) According to Crawford, Roberts flipped his vote midstream; and 2) someone within the Court must have leaked her this information. It is perfectly appropriate for Justice Kennedy, or any other justice, for that matter, to internally lobby Roberts to try to obtain his vote in an important case. If a member of the Court has turned to conservative columnists like Will or reporters like Crawford in order to pressure and then embarrass Roberts, however, that would be a significant and unusual escalation from the justices’ regular tactics.
By: Ian Millhiser, Think Progress, July 1, 2012
“Completely Disingenous”: Can Romney Remain Absurd Until November?
If you will forgive yet another post on the implications of the Supreme Court’s ACA decision, it is important to understand that for all the “excitement” and “motivation” it may create among “base voters,” this development also makes every day on the campaign trail a tightrope for Mitt Romney. He was already going to have to navigate his way to November talking constantly about the economy and the federal budget even as he was stuck with economic and budget policies that would horrify swing voters if they were aware of them. And now there will be no escape from the subject of a national health reform initiative modeled on his own plan in a gubernatorial administration that now seems about a million years away from where he has landed ideologically in order to win his party’s presidential nomination.
National Journal‘s Michael Hirsh refers to Romney’s current positioning on health care as presenting an “Absurd Romney:”
The difficulty of Absurd Romney’s task is pointed up by Jonathan Gruber, an MIT economist who helped Romney design his 2006 health insurance program in Massachusetts. He says that the then-governor used reasoning and language very similar to that of Chief Justice John Roberts in arguing for the necessity of an individual mandate. While Roberts said that Congress did not have the right to mandate behavior, it did retain the right to “tax and spend,” including penalizing people for not buying health care.
“It’s a penalty for free riding on the system. That’s the way Gov. Romney talked about it,” says Gruber, who later became one of the key architects of President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, which was modeled in part on the Romney law. “Justice Roberts used similar language today.” Back in the 2000s, when Gruber demonstrated to Romney with computer models that, absent an individual mandate, one-third of Massachusetts’ poorest and sickest would remain uninsured (and drive up costs for everyone), Romney jumped on the point, instantly converted, says Gruber. Romney went at the problem “like a management consultant or an engineer” with no ideological taint, even against the advice of his conservative political advisers, Gruber says. “They were concerned about the politics of universal health care. He argued them down.”
Today, says Gruber, Romney is being “completely disingenuous” in arguing against a law whose principles he once embraced. And somewhat absurd. Gruber says Romney’s suggestion that, as in Massachusetts when he was governor, states should be permitted to decide on their health care plans is also disingenuous. Massachusetts could devise its health care law only because it had access to a large amount of federal money, a $385 million Medicaid grant that it needed to use to extend care to the poor. “He says the states could do it but not the federal government. Well, actually the states can’t do it” because they don’t have the money, says Gruber. “What he should be saying is that he ‘ll give the states a trillion dollars to come up with their own plans, but he’s not going to do that.”
Now some readers will say Romney and most of his supporters don’t give a damn about consistency, logic, or avoiding the appearance of being Absurd, and will just brazen it out. That may be true. But the thing about lying all the time about who you are, what you’ve done, and what you intend to do is that it frequently causes even the most disciplined dissembler to screw up or at least fail to make sense to voters with even minimal discernment. That’s the risk Romney is going to have to take nearly every time he opens his mouth over the next four months.
By: Ed Kilgore, Washington Monthly Political Animal, June 29, 2012
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