“The Initiative Process Just Got A Whole Lot Weaker”: How The Supreme Court Crippled Direct Democracy
Gay marriage advocates won a big dual victory in two cases decided by the Supreme Court on Wednesday. But one of the two decisions, the ruling that effectively struck down California’s Proposition 8, may have a very significant impact on governing that’s separate from the gay-marriage issue.
The Prop 8 ruling may have dealt a body blow to the ideal of direct democracy.
California voters approved Prop 8 in 2008. A district court decision later overturned the Prop. 8 law, and California’s elected officials refused to appeal. So the supporters of Proposition 8 sued instead. They won their case over whether they had the right to sue in the California Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court saw things much differently. The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, held that the plaintiffs lacked standing. The court ignored the underlying issue of gay marriage, and instead held that the anti-gay-marriage advocates couldn’t show they were harmed by the state government’s decision to ignore the initiative. The decision quotes an older Supreme Court ruling noting that the doctrine of standing “serves to prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.” But usurping the power of the political branches is exactly what the initiative is specifically designed to do.
The entire reason for initiatives is to bypass the office-holders in government. Former California Gov. Hiram Johnson, who was responsible for the state’s passage of the direct democracy provisions, said that the initiative would “give to the electorate the power of action when desired.” Frequently, the laws passed by initiative are unpopular or politically unpalatable with elected officials. Consider, for instance, California’s popularly approved initiative that stripped the power of redistricting from the state legislature.
The Supreme Court’s decision may mean that initiatives are now at the mercy of elected officials. Imagine a popularly approved referendum that is challenged and struck down in court. The government can just elect not to appeal — and thanks to the Supreme Court, no private citizens can step in to fill this void.
The track record of elected officials acting against their perceived self-interest is not good. You don’t just have to look at the sorry state of campaign finance laws, which frequently assist the incumbent, or in the use of redistricting to gerrymander impregnable districts. There’s also the initiative’s direct democracy cousin, the recall. In the past two years, we have seen numerous instances of elected officials across the country in local jurisdictions working to subvert the use of the recall against themselves or their colleagues. The officials may refuse to schedule a vote. In other cases, they sue under very questionable legal arguments to stop the recall from taking place. In one instance, a city council tried to kill the adoption of a recall law, only to be overturned by a charter commission and the voters.
Elected officials already have a great weapon. Supporters of recalls or initiatives have to pay legal fees out of their own pocket to force the elected officials to act. Elected officials usually have the luxury of defending the sometimes questionable decisions using government funds. But even that advantage pales in comparison to strength they’ve just been given by the Supreme Court.
Initiatives are frequently divisive and controversial, as Prop 8 shows. But the voters and officials of the 27 states with the initiative or popular referendum process in place are the ones who decided to grant people this power. They adopted these laws specifically to provide a way to bypass the governor and legislature and enact politically unpalatable laws. The Supreme Court may have just effectively shut that route down.
By: Joshua Spivak, The Week, June 28, 2013
“An Incompetent Glory Hound”: Darrell Issa Is Really Terrible At His Job
In case you lost track of the IRS scandal, here’s where it’s at right now: House Oversight Committee members are releasing dueling transcripts of witness testimony to the press. There is a big fight about it. It is maybe kind of boring.
Darrell Issa, Republican chairmain of the committee, has been selectively releasing snippets of testimony to the press, all of it designed to support his contention that the IRS targeting of conservative groups for additional scrutiny of their nonprofit status was a political maneuver ordered or somehow directed by the White House. There is literally no evidence for that claim and it’s not true but Issa is sort of bad at his job in many important respects. Democratic ranking member Elijah Cummings asked Issa to please release full transcripts of witness testimony, but Issa refused, so Cummings just did so, with a full transcript of the committee’s interview with an IRS employee who seems to have been the first one to flag a “Tea Party” group’s application for tax-exempt status for further review.
This employee describes himself as “a conservative Republican” and he states outright that there was no political motivation, and certainly no White House responsibility, for the IRS’s actions.
Issa’s response to this is to claim that releasing the testimony will hurt his investigation because it will provide a “road map” for future witnesses wishing to mislead the committee. (Denying that politics had anything to do with it, who else would have independently come up with that?) The right-wing media response has been to basically ignore the content of what Cummings released and to trash him for attempting to defend the White House.
Cummings isn’t trying to sway right-wing bloggers, though. He’s not even trying to sway the public at large. What he’s trying to do is get the press to say outright what everyone in Washington already knows: Issa never has the goods to back up his claims. Cummings is trying to make it possible for the press to challenge Issa’s credibility without violating their own rules of objectivity.
Of course, everyone in the political press knows that Issa is a publicity hound who regularly makes outrageous accusations and insinuations and rarely has any evidence supporting his more outrageous claims. Everyone in the press knows this, but conventions of objective journalism prevent them from saying as much to their audiences, and so 47 percent of Americans believe the White House directly instructed the IRS to target conservative groups.
In that respect the IRS investigations looks like a huge success. But Issa’s record is actually really terrible. He has investigated everything he can think of and nothing went anywhere.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s one job is to get scalps. He is supposed to force embarrassing resignations. He has not yet forced a single one. When Issa took control of the House Oversight Committee in early 2011, he announced plans to investigate WikiLeaks, Fannie Mae, corruption in Afghanistan, the FDA, the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission and business regulations. He has investigated Solyndra and Fast and Furious and Benghazi and come up with nothing. So far the acting commissioner of the IRS has resigned, because the president asked him to. Issa hasn’t managed one single clean hit.
What Issa has managed to do is create a series of very silly graphics hyping his investigations in the style of funny image macros and film posters. He has managed to make conservatives agree with him that Barack Obama is the most corrupt president in history and he has managed to make a large minority of voters feel that the White House is probably hiding something.
In terms of the 2014 elections, he is, so far, probably helping the GOP more than he is hurting it. So Issa’s record, honestly, is mixed. He is quite bad at his job in most respects, but not quite as historically useless as Tea Party mascots like Louie Gohmert. But it does seem to me that Republicans would be better served by not having an incompetent glory hound chairing the most politically useful House committee. I guess they don’t have a lot of great options, considering the rest of the House GOP.
By: Alex Pareene, Salon, June 19, 2013
“The Clueless Caucus”: The GOP Rebranding Is Doomed
When a company or an organization decides to do a rebranding, it does some research, maybe hires consultants, gets input from key employees, and then makes decisions about what the rebranding is going to consist of. This process can at times be excruciating, all the more so if the organization has some commitment to consensus; if you’ve ever suffered through a web redesign, you’ve probably had the experience of wondering, as the debate over the difference between particular shades of blue stretches into its third hour, just how much it would hurt if you plunged a pen through your ear into your brain. But at the end of the process, there’s someone in charge who will have the final say.
But when a political party decides to do a rebranding, things are a lot more difficult. In fact, it may not even be possible to get everyone to agree that the rebranding will actually take place. And once it begins, it can just go on forever, because the influence over the party’s brand is so widely distributed. Even after it’s over, you can’t just say to everyone, “Here’s the new stationary, and this is our new slogan; make sure you use it.” Because if they don’t like it, they won’t.
This is the problem the Republican party now faces. Many people within the party think a rebranding is in order, to cast off the party’s image as a bunch of nativist, misogynistic, rich old white guys and make itself more palatable to young people, women, and minorities. But the party is full of people who have troubling ideas about how a rebranding ought to take place, and people who don’t think there needs to be any rebranding at all. There are so many that Ed Kilgore was able to come up with ten different kinds of Republicans who can sabotage the rebranding effort.
So various members of the party keep causing problems by saying what they think, particularly when it comes to topics like rape, or reproduction, or really anything involving, you know, women. The latest, as you probably heard, was Congressman Michael Burgess, who, in support of a bill outlawing abortion after 20 weeks on the unsupported hypothesis that fetuses at that stage can feel pain, offered his hilarious belief that 15 week-old fetuses must be able to feel pain, since they’re already engaged in a pre-natal festival of onanism. “If they’re a male baby, they may have their hand between their legs,” he said, wistfully recalling sonograms he had seen. “If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe that they could feel pain?” The punch line is that before Burgess became a congressman, you know what he did for a living? He was an OB-GYN.
One way to look at this is, as Politico does, that the rebranding is being undercut by “the clueless caucus of the Republican Party.” But these kinds of things aren’t just coming from the same two or three people. Almost every time we hear some new outrageous statement from a GOP congressman, it’s someone entirely new. That’s because those beliefs are actually held quite widely within the party. There’s an almost endless supply of yahoo congressmen with retrograde beliefs, just waiting to make their dunderheaded debut on the national news.
John Boehner can’t stop these outbursts, because he’s not that kind of boss. This gets back to the difference between politics and other endeavors. Corporate CEOs and generals usually do poorly in politics because the hierarchical environments in which they flourished are so different from electoral campaigns and elected office. When you’re the boss, you can issue orders. That new electric nose-picker we’re releasing next month? The box is going to be blue, and if you’d prefer it to be red, you’re welcome to go find another job. You’ll be taking your unit up that hill, captain, whether you like it or not. But Boehner can’t fire the wingnuts in his caucus. What’s worse, they can fire him, by getting a different Speaker. Even when someone hasn’t been elected yet, it’s extremely hard to push them out of a race; don’t forget, they tried to do that with Todd Akin, and he just decided he didn’t want to leave.
And because the clueless caucus probably encompasses a majority of the party, the rebranding may well be doomed, unless somebody can rebrand the party by force. And the only one who can do that is a presidential candidate. So it may have to wait until 2016.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, June 20, 2013
“Congressional Political Dysfunction”: Alzheimer Research Cuts Show Folly Of Sequestration
Many Republicans, and Democrats, never thought the automatic across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration would take effect. After all, they might produce dangerous, if unintended, consequences such as potentially bankrupting the U.S. health-care system, along with millions of families.
Typical Washington hyperbole, right? It actually is happening under sequestration, which kicked in three months ago, a product of America’s political dysfunction.
Because the cuts only affect the margins of a wide array of defense and domestic discretionary programs, there mostly hasn’t been an immediate pinch; the public backlash has been minimal. The long-term consequences, in more than a few cases, are ominous.
There’s no better case study than Alzheimer’s disease. With the sequestration-enforced cuts at the National Institutes of Health, research to find a cure or better treatment is slowing.
Alzheimer’s, the most common form of dementia, is the sixth leading cause of death in the U.S. Five million Americans are afflicted with the disease. It costs about $200 billion a year, creating a severe strain for public health care and many families. Then there’s the emotional toll: The Alzheimer’s Association estimates that caregivers had an additional $9 billion of health-care costs last year.
“As the population lives longer, Alzheimer’s is the defining disease of this generation,” says Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, who’s trying to fight the sequestration restraints and sharply increase spending for research.
The latest annual report on health statistics from the Centers for Disease Control underscores her point. There’s been a lot of progress, in large part because of earlier NIH efforts: The number of deaths from strokes and heart disease is down more than 30 percent over the past decade, and cancer deaths have declined almost 15 percent. The reverse has occurred with Alzheimer’s. Over a decade, deaths have risen sharply, up 38 percent for males and 41 percent for women.
It’s expected to get worse. A report this spring by the nonpartisan Rand Corp. estimates that by 2040, the number of Americans afflicted will have doubled, as will the costs. Other experts say that as grave as those projections are, they may be underestimated. The Alzheimer’s Association says that under current trends the cost will exceed $1 trillion annually by 2050. That either would bankrupt Medicare and Medicaid or force huge tax increases.
Much critical health research in the U.S. generally emanates from the NIH, which has compiled a record of success with many diseases that has been the envy of the world.
The NIH’s funding is cut by 5 percent, or $1.55 billion this year, across the board. That means 700 fewer research grants are approved and 750 fewer patients will be admitted to its clinical center. The longer the automatic cuts go on, the worse it will get; medical breakthroughs rarely are instantaneous. They take years and build on previous studies and experiments.
Alzheimer’s research, pre-sequestration, was slated for a healthy increase this year. By moving a few discretionary funds, the NIH has avoided cutbacks.
Still, the funding falls dramatically short of the promise.
“In recent years, there have been some extraordinary advances, from genetics to molecular biology, that have given us insights into Alzheimer’s that we didn’t have before,” says Richard Hodes, a physician who heads the NIH’s National Institute on Aging.
About five in six grant applications currently aren’t funded. Hodes says money for some of those grants and increasing some of the clinical trials, also being cut by sequestration, would capitalize on these advances.
Senator Collins says that aside from the human dimension, this is a simple cost/benefit analysis.
“We spend only $500 million annually on Alzheimer’s research and it costs Medicare and Medicaid $142 billion,” she says. “It’s going to bankrupt our health-care system and we’re spending only a pittance on prevention.”
She wants to double the Alzheimer’s research budget immediately and then double it again — to $2 billion annually — within five years. For most federal programs, huge increases in spending would cause reckless waste and inefficiency. NIH is an exception. Fifteen years ago, its budget doubled in five years and the results were better than ever.
For NIH, there are other critical advances — in areas such as Parkinson’s or diabetes and some forms of cancer — that are slowed by the budget cuts. And the mindless sequestration, which doesn’t touch entitlement spending or the tax benefits enjoyed by the wealthy, forces reductions in programs such as Head Start for low-income kids, the nutritional program for women, infants and children, or the meals-on-wheels initiatives for lower-income senior citizens.
Congress did act once to reverse the damage wrought by sequestration: It undid some cuts affecting aviation.
There was an emergency; members couldn’t be inconvenienced by flight delays or cancellations when getting back to their districts. They don’t seem as motivated to help prevent or slow the spread of a wrenching affliction that costs a fortune.
By: Albert R. Hunt, The National Memo, June 10, 2013
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