“The Conscience Of A Corporation”: A Deeply Held Relationship With Five Members Of The Supreme Court
So here is Walmart, insisting that “our core basic belief of respect for the individual” is at odds with an Arkansas bill that would allow religious-based discrimination. And here is Marriott, slamming as “idiocy” similar measures in other states. And somewhere in there is the family-run pizzeria, asserting that Indiana’s new law allows them to deny wedding day pies to people whose choice of spouses they don’t approve of.
These businesses sell Chinese-made consumer goods, hotel rooms, and rounded dough burdened with pepperoni and extra cheese. Since when did they start spouting off about the deeply held convictions guiding their corporate consciences?
You can blame last year’s Supreme Court decision in the Hobby Lobby case for unleashing a herd of ponies that have gone off in quite unpredicted directions. There, in a partisan 5-to-4 ruling straight from Republican fever nests, the court gave certain corporations the right to challenge laws that they claim violate their religious beliefs. In that case, it was about contraception in the health care package.
Let’s pause to consider this new entity — a moneymaking organization no different from a lone human being who feels conscience-bound to live a certain way because of a deeply held relationship with God. Let’s pause, because five members of the Supreme Court would not.
One justice, the irrepressible Ruth Bader Ginsburg, warned of the consequences of giving corporations a soul: “The court, I fear, has ventured into a minefield.”
Ginsburg predicted that the court’s “expansive notion of corporate personhood” would invite profit-making companies to start using religion as an excuse to ignore laws they didn’t like. And indeed, states packed with right-wing legislators who see phantom persecution behind every new episode of “Modern Family” have clamored to give companies a spiritual opt-out clause.
So it is in Indiana. State lawmakers were also told to look before taking a big leap into spiritual exemptions for business. In a letter in February, legal scholars warned of corporations’ citing religious justification for “taking the law into their own hands.”
But, lo, look what happened on the way to forcing religion into the marketplace: The corporations — Apple, Nike, Yelp, Gap, PayPal, Big Pharma companies like Eli Lilly and the nine largest companies with headquarters in Indiana — have rebelled. They are saying: No, don’t give us the power to discriminate. We’d rather remain soulless purveyors of product to the widest possible customer base. Which is, I suppose, how capitalism is supposed to work. Bless the free market.
Indiana’s law is “not just pure idiocy from a business perspective,” said Marriott’s president, Arne Sorenson, but “the notion that you can tell businesses somehow that they are free to discriminate against people based on who they are is madness.”
Not March Madness, the culmination of which is what Indiana thought we’d all be celebrating in the Hoosier State this weekend. But political lunacy, of the type that’s been on display ever since the Republican Party hitched itself to the crazies who dominate its media wing.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. Walmart, which effectively killed the Arkansas bill a few days ago, remains locked in poverty wage mode, despite its recent boast of raising pay to at least $9 an hour. Apple, and most tech companies now strutting across the moral stage, continues to do business with countries where a person can be executed for being gay.
Their outrage is selective, and calculated: In corporate America, the branding conceit of the moment includes just the right dash of social activism. A little environmental nudge from your cereal, a talk about race from your barista — it’s mostly harmless.
Chick-fil-A learned a lesson in its journey from behind the grease counter and back over gay marriage. After condemning same-sex marriage and becoming a culture-war battleground, the corporate leaders of a company that professes to run on biblical principles now say they will stick with chicken talk. Everyone is welcome.
Good call. Nothing in the secular world keeps Chick-fil-A’s founders from free worship in private. For that matter, nothing in the secular world deprives any business owner of a lawful spiritual pursuit outside of the public square. Their profits will rise or fall because of consumer demand, rather than which side of a biblical exhortation the chicken-eater may be on.
All of this, the free market in tandem with the First Amendment, has worked pretty well in a clamorous democracy such as ours. It’s only when activist judges — thy names are Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and John Roberts — have tried to broaden the intent of the founders that we’ve gotten into trouble.
In 2010, those five judges created the notion of corporate personhood — giving companies the unfettered right to dominate elections. After all, Exxon is just a citizen like you and me. And in 2014, those five judges gave corporations a soul, a further expansion of business entity as a citizen. Well, they tried to. As the saying goes, a corporation will never truly be a citizen until you can execute one in Texas.
By: Timothy Egan, Contributing Op-Ed Writer, The New York Times, April 3, 2015
“We Should Just Go Ahead And Start Bombing”: The Insane Logic Underlying Republican Opposition To The Iran Deal
Republicans are, naturally, united in their opposition to the preliminary deal the Obama administration struck with Iran to restrain its nuclear program. And now, the presidential candidates in particular are going to compete with each other to see who can make their opposition more categorical. They’re all criticizing it, of course, and Scott Walker has already said that on the day of his inauguration, he’ll pull out of the deal. I’m guessing the rest of them will follow suit and pledge something similar. The question is: OK, so on January 20, 2017, you announce that we’re out of the deal (since we’re in the Republican fantasy world for the moment, let’s put aside the involvement of Europe and the UN). What happens next?
Well for starters, the Iranians would no longer be constrained by the things they agreed to. They could kick out all the inspectors and institute a crash program to create a nuclear weapon if they wanted. Are Republicans saying that Iran would never do that? I don’t think so. Yet in practice, the Republican position seems to be: 1) We can never trust the Iranians to adhere to the terms of any nuclear deal we sign with them because of their insatiable thirst for nuclear weapons, so 2) If there’s no agreement at all—no limits on nuclear research, no limits on the quantity and purity of uranium they can enrich, no inspections—then everything will be OK.
To be clear, I’m not saying this deal is perfect, though a lot of people who know a lot about this issue are arguing that it’s far stronger than what they expected (see here, for instance). But Republicans aren’t saying we need to reopen negotiations and push for something better. They’re just saying we should scrap the agreement, and then … well, they actually don’t say what happens then.
In effect, the Republican argument is, We’ve put this dangerous criminal in prison, but I don’t think this prison is secure enough. He might escape! So the answer is to tear down the prison and let him go. Then we’ll be safe from him.
So they ought to be asked: Are you proposing a re-negotiation of this deal? Or are you just saying that if we scrap it and reimpose sanctions on Iran, then they’ll capitulate to all our demands? And if that’s what you’re saying, is there any reason at all to think that might happen? After all, Iran has been under sanctions from the U.S., the EU, and many other countries for years, yet their nuclear program has continued. What will be different without an agreement?
We should hear conservatives out on all their specific complaints about this deal. They might have a case to make about particular weaknesses. But in every case, we have to ask: What’s your alternative? I haven’t yet heard an answer from any of them, other than the few honest enough to say what so many of them are thinking, that no deal will ever work and we should just go ahead and start bombing.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, April 3, 2015
“Rootin’ Tootin’ Shootin’ Presidential Candidates”: A General Conservative Nostalgia For A Time That’s Passed
There was a time not too long ago when Republicans knew that when an election got tight, they could trot out “God, guns, and gays” to drive a cultural wedge between Democrats and the electorate, since the GOP was the party that, like most Americans, loved the first two and hated the third. It’s more complicated now, both within the parties and between them, but there’s no doubt that 2016 will feature plenty of culture-war sniping. For better or worse, Democrats and Republicans really do represent two different Americas.
I thought of that this weekend reading this article in the Washington Post about the personal relationships the potential Republican candidates have with guns. That they are all opposed to any limits on gun ownership is a given, but more interesting is the role guns play in their own lives. With a couple of important exceptions, the potential Republican candidates fall into one of two categories when it comes to guns: those who grew up with them, and those who embraced them once their political ambitions matured.
Some of them have been building their collections since childhood. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) is up to 12 now, including an AR-15 assault weapon that he has talked about using if law and order ever breaks down in his neighborhood. Former Texas governor Rick Perry is so well-armed, he has a gun for jogging.
Others were city kids who didn’t own guns until later in life. Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) bought a .357 magnum revolver in 2010, the year he ran for Senate, saying the gun was for protection… [Ted Cruz] grew up in the suburbs of Houston and got his first exposure to guns at summer camp. But, as an adult, Cruz bought two guns: a .357 magnum revolver and a Beretta Silver Pigeon II shotgun, according to a spokeswoman… In Wisconsin, Gov. Scott Walker also didn’t grow up hunting. But he got his first guns in his mid-30s: a shotgun he won in a raffle and a rifle he got as a gift, said a spokeswoman for his political committee. Now he hunts deer, pheasants and ducks with his motorcycle-riding buddies… Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal purchased a snubnosed, laser-sighted Smith & Wesson .38 revolver after Hurricane Katrina. He still keeps it for home defense, although his home is now the heavily guarded Governor’s Mansion.
Far be it from me to question the sincerity of any politician’s enthusiasm for firearms, but buying a gun does seem an awful lot like the kind of thing a Republican politician does just because that’s what Republican politicians are expected to do. But there’s gun rights, and then there’s contemporary gun culture. The two are not at all the same, and it’s the latter some Republicans seem so eager to embrace.
There’s an important context here, which is that gun ownership has been steadily declining for about four decades now. Yet even as fewer and fewer people own guns, gun sales are increasing, which means that the people who do own them are buying more and more. Ask a certain kind of gun-owner how many he owns, and he’ll say, “More than I need, but not as many as I want.”
And it’s that culture that many Republican politicians feel the need to make their own. You could see it as part of a general conservative nostalgia for a time that’s passed, when the law was a distant force and a man might have to protect his homestead from rustlers and thieves. The trouble is that for many gun-owners today, guns are less tools with everyday uses than fetish objects. It’s the very fact that they serve no practical purpose in most gun-owners’ lives that makes them so emotionally powerful. When a guy like Lindsey Graham says that he needs his AR-15 in case “there was a law-and-order breakdown in my community,” he’s living in a land of fantasy, where a middle-aged guy who wears a suit every day is actually an agent of heroic violence, the very embodiment of physical capability and potency.
But the bare fact is this: There are places in America where gun ownership is common and expected, and places where it isn’t. And more Americans live in the latter. So when Republicans proclaim themselves representatives of the first type of place—in both ideas and habits—they put themselves at an immediate disadvantage.
But not all of them do. Jeb Bush, for instance, has the appropriate Republican policy stance when it comes to guns (along with an A-plus rating from the NRA), but he does not himself own a gun. (The only other potential candidate who doesn’t is Chris Christie.) Which makes perfect sense if we think about gun ownership being so much a function of geography. Unlike some of his opponents—the emphatically Texan Rick Perry, the extremely Midwestern Scott Walker—Jeb isn’t really from any particular place. As a member of the Bush clan, he grew up traveling a kind of elevated platform of wealth and power that traverses the country. Connecticut, Texas, Florida—wherever it was, it was essentially the same. That isn’t really his fault; when your grandfather is a senator and your father becomes president, and you go to Andover and summer at Kennebunkport, that’s the world you’re from. And it isn’t a world where people view guns as a vital cultural totem. If Jeb walked out on a stage holding a rifle over his head, he’d look even dumber than Mitch McConnell did.
We don’t think about Hillary Clinton representing any particular place either. She grew up in Illinois but left it behind, spent almost two decades in Arkansas then left for Washington, and now lives in New York, but doesn’t embody any of those places (or even try to). That’s fine with liberals, whose demands for cultural affinity are served well enough by someone who moved around a lot. The president she’s trying to succeed most definitely represented a particular place, though it was less Chicago specifically than American cities in general, the dense and diverse places liberals either live or want to live.
And that’s where all the Republicans have a problem. They continue to romanticize rural and small-town life, but the number of Americans who actually live in those places is small and getting smaller. Even if plenty of suburban Republicans still imagine themselves out on the range, that isn’t the American reality. Planting your flag there may seem necessary to win the Republican nomination, but it won’t do you much good the day after.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, March 30, 2015
“Notably Absent From This Debate”: Why Won’t Rand Paul And Chris Christie Take A Position On Indiana’s “Religious Freedom” Law?
Nearly a week since Indiana Governor Mike Pence signed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), igniting a nationwide debate about whether the controversial law invites discrimination based on sexual orientation, most potential Republican presidential candidates have taken the opportunity to bolster their conservative credentials.
“Governor Pence has done the right thing,” said former Florida Governor Jeb Bush on Monday.
“I want to commend Governor Mike Pence for his support of religious freedom, especially in the face of fierce opposition,” Texas Senator Ted Cruz said in a written statement. “Governor Pence is holding the line to protect religious liberty in the Hoosier State. Indiana is giving voice to millions of courageous conservatives across this country who are deeply concerned about the ongoing attacks upon our personal liberties. I’m proud to stand with Mike, and I urge Americans to do the same.”
Ben Carson, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, and former Texas Governor Rick Perry all expressed their support for Pence and Indiana’s RFRA law. (Meanwhile, Democrats Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have come out against it.)
But two likely 2016 candidates have been notably absent from this debate: New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul. What do they think about the law, and why have they been so quiet on the issue?
Samantha Smith, the communications director for Christie’s Leadership Matters for America PAC, did not return a request for comment on Wednesday morning. (I’ll update this if I hear back.) Christie’s past statements offer little light on where he will fall on the issue, but he has been shifting to the right on social issues in advance of the Republican primary. On Tuesday, he announced his support for a 20-week abortion ban. Given Christie’s shaky position within the party, and the fact that the rest of the field supports Indiana’s law, it would be very surprising if he joined with liberals in opposing it.
As for Paul, Sergio Gor, the communications director of RandPAC, wrote in an email, “The Senator is out of pocket with family this week and has not weighed in at this time.”
It makes sense that Paul is unplugging with his family this week: He’s expected to announce his presidential bid on April 7, the beginning of a long, grueling journey—and a victory would mean that these are his last moments of real privacy for a very long time. Could anyone blame him if he wanted to spend a few quiet days with his family? I couldn’t.
But it also seems a bit convenient that Paul is entirely unreachable while the controversy swirls. If his campaign launch is just six days away, surely Paul and his staff are in close communication. How long does it take to send a tweet or tell your staff to craft a statement?
It will be interesting to see how Paul reacts to the law—as he’ll be forced to do, probably no later than April 7—in light of his libertarian credentials. If he stuck true to them, not only would he support the law but also support the right of Indiana’s businesses to discriminate against LGBT people, something that the rest of the Republican field opposes. (They just disagree with liberals about whether Indiana’s law would allow discrimination.)
But if recent history is any guide, don’t expect Paul to stick true to his libertarian roots. Almost whenever he has faced a choice between traditional libertarian positions and mainstream Republican positions, he has chosen the latter in hope of winning the GOP nomination. Just recently, for instance, he called for more defense spending after saying for years that the military was bloated and needed further cuts.
In fact, Paul has already reversed himself on whether private businesses should be allowed to exclude people from their establishments for any reason. “I think it’s a bad business decision to exclude anybody from your restaurant,” he told the Louisville Courier-Journal in 2010. “But, at the same time, I do believe in private ownership.” He continued, “In a free society, we will tolerate boorish people, who have abhorrent behavior, but if we’re civilized people, we publicly criticize that, and don’t belong to those groups, or don’t associate with those people.” Just a few years later, as that position became controversial, Paul (dishonestly) said that he never held the libertarian position to begin with.
So while it is taking a while for Paul to give his position, it isn’t hard to deduce where he’ll eventually fall. Maybe he’s just waiting until the spotlight on Indiana dies down a bit, so that his libertarian supporters are less aware when he adopts the party line. But if that’s his plan, it’s not very presidential.
By: Danny Vinik, The New Republic, April 1, 2015
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