“Cruz’s ‘Tragic And Indefensible’ Reasoning”: Leave It To Ted Cruz To Render The Phrase ‘Judicial Activism’ Utterly Meaningless
By mid-day yesterday, hours after the Supreme Court had tacitly expanded marriage equality to several states, only one Republican U.S. senator, Utah’s Mike Lee, had issued a press statement. In the midst of an extraordinary societal shift on civil rights, Republicans – from Capitol Hill to the RNC – had effectively decided to take a pass on saying much of anything.
But it wasn’t long after that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) decided to weigh in. The fact that the far-right senator wasn’t pleased didn’t come as a surprise, but take a moment to soak in the Texas Republican’s incredible reasoning.
“The Supreme Court’s decision to let rulings by lower court judges stand that redefine marriage is both tragic and indefensible,” said Sen. Cruz. “By refusing to rule if the States can define marriage, the Supreme Court is abdicating its duty to uphold the Constitution. The fact that the Supreme Court Justices, without providing any explanation whatsoever, have permitted lower courts to strike down so many state marriage laws is astonishing.
“This is judicial activism at its worst.”
It wasn’t too long ago that “judicial activism” was a phrase that actually meant something. Folks on the left and right who were outraged when judges made up new legal rationales to justify controversial decisions could credibly use the words as part of a reasonable complaint.
In time, the phrase became diluted. Soon, every judge a partisan disagreed with became a “judicial activist,” whether the label made sense or not. Every ruling a partisan objected to became an example of “judicial activism,” even if it wasn’t.
But leave it to Ted Cruz to render the phrase utterly meaningless in a new and creative way: the Supreme Court, the senator now believes, can be guilty of “judicial activism” even when the justices literally haven’t done anything. Yesterday’s news was a breakthrough moment for equal-marriage rights, but in a practical sense, all the justices did was announce they wouldn’t hear some cases – something they do all the time, on all kinds of issues and areas of the law.
But that’s not all: Cruz then told everyone what he intends to do about this outrage.
The senator’s statement went on to say: “Marriage is a question for the States. That is why I have introduced legislation, S. 2024, to protect the authority of state legislatures to define marriage. And that is why, when Congress returns to session, I will be introducing a constitutional amendment to prevent the federal government or the courts from attacking or striking down state marriage laws.”
And what is S. 2024? It’s a proposal to empower states to discriminate against same-sex couples and ignore marriages performed in other states. Luke Brinker explained, “Gay rights advocates have dubbed the bill the ‘You’re Not Married Anymore’ Bill,’ noting that it would sanction a patchwork of state laws pertaining to same-sex marriage and jeopardize couples’ rights as they travel from state to state.”
Cruz, of course, is also reportedly eyeing a national campaign in the near future. The right-wing Texan may very well be taking early steps to lock up the anti-gay vote now.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 7, 2014
“RNC Unveils Its ‘14 In ‘14’ Plan”: A Stroke of Genius, Include More Women In Campaign Ads
When Democratic policymakers started a fight over the Paycheck Fairness Act, Republicans responded by dismissing it as a hollow, election-year stunt. Sure, it was a substantive policy response to a legitimate issue, but GOP officials said the debate itself was little more than a cheap political exercise – which women voters would see through immediately.
And speaking of cheap political exercises that women voters will see through immediately…
The Republican National Committee plans a new initiative, “14 in ‘14,” to recruit and train women under age 40 to help spread the party’s message in the final 14 weeks of the campaign. […]
They are encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads, have women at their events and build a Facebook-like internal database of women willing to campaign on their behalf.
I see. If Democrats push the Paycheck Fairness Act, they’re cynically trying to give the appearance of helping women in the workplace. But if Republicans include more women in campaign ads, that’s just quality messaging.
The “14 in ‘14” initiative, it’s worth noting, is actually a fallback plan of sorts. The original strategy was to push “Project GROW,” in which Republicans would recruit more women candidates to run for Congress in 2014. That project failed – there are actually going to be fewer Republican women running for Congress in this cycle than in 2012.
Presumably, “encouraging candidates to include their wives and daughters in campaign ads” is intended to compensate for the misstep, while hoping voters overlook the GOP’s opposition to pay-equity legislation and its preoccupation with issues such as restricting women’s reproductive rights and access to contraception?
Greg Sargent also had a good piece questioning the utility of the “14 in ‘14” plan.
Democrats are actively building their women’s economic agenda around the broader idea that women face unique economic challenges. A recent CNN poll found that 55 percent of Americans, and 59 percent of women, don’t believe the GOP understands the problems women face today. A Republican National Committee spokeswoman recently admitted that Republicans need to do a better job appearing in touch with women.
Republicans oppose a minimum wage hike; oppose Dem proposals to address pay inequity (while admitting it is a legitimate problem); and are telling women that their economic prospects can be improved by repealing Obamacare (and its protections for women). Indeed, they are even telling them that the push for pay equity is nothing but a distraction from the health law. Yes, Republicans could win big this fall with such an agenda. But this could also prove another area where structural factors ensure that Republicans win in 2014 in spite of the failure to address the need — which they themselves have acknowledged — to broaden their appeal to women with an eye towards future national elections.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 14, 2014
“Cashing In On Fear”: Agenda 21, The U.N. Conspiracy That Just Won’t Die
It’s been called “the most dangerous threat to American sovereignty”; “An anti-human document, which takes aim at Western culture, and the Judeo-Christian and Islamic religions,” that will bring “new Dark Ages of pain and misery yet unknown to mankind,” and “abolish golf courses, grazing pastures and paved roads,” in the name of creating a “one-world order.”
It’s been the subject of several forewarning books and DVDs; there are organizations dedicated to stopping it and politicians have been unseated for supporting it. Glenn Beck has spent a good portion of his career making people scared of it.
Not sure what it is? You’re not alone.
The Daily Beast got a sneak peek at a new report by Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit civil rights group, which deconstructs the mythology of Agenda 21 and the organizations, individuals, and even elected officials who’ve spent years promulgating the conspiracy theory surrounding it.
Before diving into the fiction that has inflated Agenda 21 to fear mongering status, we must first understand the facts. What, exactly, is Agenda 21?
While the name might sound a bit ominous, Agenda 21 is a voluntary action plan that offers suggestions for sustainable ways local, state and national governments can combat poverty and pollution and conserve natural resources in the 21st century. (That’s where the ’21’ comes from. Get it?) 178 governments—including the U.S. led by then-President George H.W. Bush—voted to adopt the program which is, again, not legally binding in any way, at the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro.
It wasn’t long after Agenda 21 was introduced that right wing opposition began to swirl. The SPLC points to Tom DeWeese as one of the first to pounce on the U.N. plan. In 1998 DeWeese founded the American Policy Center, a group based in Remington, Virginia that focuses on “environmental policy and its effect on private property rights” and “the United Nations and its effect on American national sovereignty.” The SPLC report quotes DeWeese as describing Agenda 21 as a “blueprint to turn your community into a little soviet,” promoted by non-governmental organizations that pressure governments to enforce it. According to DeWeese, “It all means locking away land, resources, higher prices, sacrifice and shortages and is based on the age old socialist scheme of redistribution of wealth.”
DeWeese has continued to deride the dangers of Agenda 21 well into the 21st Century, making appearances on Fox News and fitting in nicely with the Tea Party movement. The American Policy Center was just the first of many anti-Agenda 21 organizations to spring up in the past 15 or so years and the SPLC points out the 11 most pervasive.
To those who don’t closely follow the carryings on of fringe conspiracists, Glenn Beck might be the most recognizable face of the modern Anti-21 movement. Particularly during his reign at Fox News, Beck used his cable TV soapbox to scare his loyal viewers. “Those pushing…government control on a global level have mastered the art of hiding it in plain sight and then just dismissing it as a joke,” the SPLC quotes Beck saying around 2011 while waving a copy of the 294-page Agenda 21 document on his show. “Once they put their fangs into our communities and suck all the blood out of it [sic], we will not be able to survive.”
Never one to miss an opportunity to cash on in people’s fears, Beck published a dystopian science fiction novel in 2012 called Agenda 21, about a version of America where mating partners are arranged, children are raised away from their parents in group homes, and the book’s heroine spends hours walking on a sort of treadmill that generates energy in an apartment in a planned community. In the book’s afterword, Beck warns, “[I]f the United Nations in partnership with radical environmental activists and naive local governments get their way, then the themes explored in this novel may start to look very familiar, very quickly.”
But while Glenn Beck can technically be dismissed as nothing more than a fringe figure, a conspiratorial talking head—no matter how large his audience may be—the elected officials who have taken a similarly strong stance against Agenda 21 cannot. In the report, the SPLC points out Newt Gingrich, who said he would “explicitly repudiate” the plan if elected president during his 2012 White House bid; Oklahoma Sen. Sally Kern and Arizona state Sen. Judy Burges who both introduced anti-Agenda 21 legislation that ultimately failed; and former Georgia Senate Majority Leader Chip Rogers who “organized a four-hour, closed-door anti-Agenda briefing in October 2012” during which “attendees were told President Obama was using ‘mind control’ techniques to push land use planning, and that the U.N. planned to force Americans from suburbs into cities and also was implementing mandatory contraception to curb population growth.” U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has claimed that Agenda 21 sought to abolish “golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.”
And as recently as 2012, the SPLC writes, the Republican National Committee’s platform included the line, “We strongly reject the U.N. Agenda 21 as erosive of American sovereignty.”
Several anti-Semitic, neo-Nazi groups have also jumped on the anti-Agenda 21 bandwagon, seizing the opportunity to blame the controversial document on none other than the Jews.
“Anti-Semitism is basically a conspiracy theory,” the American Jewish Committee’s Ken Stern told the SPLC. He explains how neo-Nazis have linked Agenda 21 to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a falsified document that is alleged to reveal a secret Jewish plot to take over the world. “It’s Jews conspiring to harm non-Jews, and that conspiracy explains a lot of what goes wrong with the world,” Stern said.
To be sure, not all of Agenda 21’s opponents are on the far right of the political spectrum. The group Democrats Against U.N. Agenda 21 hosted a conference on the plan in California in 2011. Its founder, “self-described lesbian feminist Rosa Koire,” wrote the book Behind the Green Mask: U.N. Agenda 21, which claims the the plan will ultimately lead to the U.S.’s economic demise.
In fact, the anti-Semitic crowd’s interest in the Agenda 21 conspiracy theory sort of explains why it appeals to all of its followers, regardless of political leanings.
“Any time you get some sort of UN program that suggests any kind of change in the way people live, even if it seems outwardly benign and even voluntary, it’s going to be taken up by people with a conspiracist bent,” Michael Barkun, a Syracuse University political scientist and scholar of conspiracy theories, told the SPLC.
At this point in the explanation, it bears asking whether any of this matters. Is the federal government—or any state or local subsidiaries—even considering implementing any of the plan’s suggestions for sustainable development? The SPLC report states plainly: “For all the agitation, it’s not clear.” 98 percent of people who responded to a June 2012 poll by the American Planning Association said they didn’t know enough about Agenda 21 to support or oppose it. Six percent said they were against it, while nine percent stated that they were in favor.
The SPLC does note that some politicians, like Chattanooga, Tennessee Mayor Ron Littlefield, have denounced the anti-Agenda 21 conspiracists as modern-day Joseph McCarthy’s who will finally tire the public with their scare tactics. Still, they write, “an enormous number of politicians, commentators, activists, conspiracy theorists and others have swallowed the story of the anti-Agenda 21 zealots making any kind of rational discussion of the environment and related issues extremely difficult.”
“And that is the basic problem,” the report continues. “Dealing with the serious problems that confront our nation and our planet becomes incredibly difficult when the public discussion is poisoned with groundless conspiracy theories.”
By: Caitlin Dickson, The Daily Beast, April 13, 2014
“The Dick Morris Award For Pre-Election Hype”: Pre-spinning Elections Is Even More Obnoxious Than Spinning The Results
I know I have zero influence over the rhetoric deployed by Reince Priebus, but still, I’d like to start a backlash against this particular formulation by the RNC chairman:
The way Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus sees it, 2014 won’t be an average election for the party out of power. It’ll be a “tsunami” wave election.
At a Christian Science Monitor Breakfast on Tuesday Priebus said Republicans would see massive gains in the 2014 election, especially in the Senate.
“I think we’re in for a tsunami election,” Preibus said. “Especially at the Senate level.”
“Wave elections” are big-trending events beyond normal electoral expectations. We have two recent examples in 2006 and 2010. “Tsunami” elections, if the term means anything at all, means really big wave elections. 1974 and 1994 are pretty good examples; 2010, at least at the state level, might qualify as well.
It will be normal, not a “wave,” for Republicans to make sizable gains in the Senate this November, if only because of inherently pro-Republican midterm turnout patterns, the tendency of the party holding the White House to lose seats in midterms (especially second-term midterms), and an insanely pro-Republican landscape of seats that happen to be up. If Republicans pick up eight or nine Senate seats, that might represent a “wave.” They’d have to exceed that significantly before we can talk about any sort of “tsunami.”
So cut out the crap, Reince. Pre-spinning elections is even more obnoxious than spinning the results, unless you are angling for the Dick Morris Award for pre-election hype.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, March 18, 2014
“Demographic Death Spiral”: 2014 May Be White Enough For The GOP, But What Comes Next?
Overshadowed amid Sarah Palin’s unique interpretation of Dr. Seuss, Wayne LaPierre’s overheated vision of America’s apocalyptic decline, and all of the other craziness at the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, Republican pollster Whit Ayres gave a fact-based presentation to the gathering of right-wing activists. What he said should terrify the GOP.
Ayres, whose firm counts the RNC, NRSC, NRCC, and several influential Republican politicians among its clients, appeared on a panel on Saturday to discuss electoral trends and the future of the GOP.
The slides from Ayres’ presentation, which are available on his firm’s website, reiterate something that many Republicans have long warned: America’s changing demographics leave the increasingly white GOP at risk of entering what Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) memorably described as a “demographic death spiral.”
In short, as the Republican pollster explained, the white proportion of the American electorate is declining at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, Republicans are performing much worse among non-white voter groups. If the party doesn’t change something — Ayres suggests immigration reform as a good place to start — it will cease to be viable in national elections.
One particular point in the presentation stood out, however. Turning to the midterm elections, Ayres declared to hearty applause that “we’ve got some good news: We’re going to have a great 2014. We’re going to hold the House, we’re going to pick up the Senate, it’s going to be a great 2014.”
“One of the reasons why,” he explained, “is that the percentage of whites in the electorate is about five points higher in the off-year elections.”
Perhaps Ayres — who, like most pollsters, does not have a spotless record when it comes to predicting elections — should remember what he said in 2012 before asserting that the whiteness of the midterm electorate will bring his party certain success in 2014. Back then, he explained his party’s failure to elect Mitt Romney as president by noting that “it is a mistake to place rosy assumptions on a likely electorate that are at variance — and substantial variance — with recent history.”
Democrats immediately called foul on the crowd’s warm reception to Ayres’ assertion.
“It says a lot that top Republicans believe that lower minority participation in the electoral process is something to celebrate. They know that when the electorate represents more Americans and more voices, they lose,” DNC Director of Voter Expansion Pratt Wiley said in a statement.
In fairness to Ayres, he made it perfectly clear that Republicans need to diversify their party, instead of relying on shrinking the electorate.
“Some people see it as a problem,” he said of America’s demographic shift. “I see it as a real opportunity.”
“Conservative values of free markets, and limited government, and low taxes, and good education, and reward for hard work appeal across all boundaries regardless of race, color, religion, or national origin,” Ayres argued. “Conservatives can be very successful in the new America if we reach out and adopt an inclusive tone, bring people into our coalition, and aggressively campaign in their communities.”
That theory sounds very good on paper — and very familiar. That’s because it’s almost identical to the RNC’s post-election “autopsy report,” which was released almost exactly one year ago. Back then, the RNC suggested that “if we want ethnic minority voters to support Republicans, we have to engage them, and show our sincerity.”
Indeed, one has to wonder whom Whit Ayres thought he could convince that America’s ascendant minority populations could be a positive development. Certainly not the white nationalist-led group manning an English-only booth at the conference. Or racial provocateur Ann Coulter, who used her CPAC speech to decry the “browning of America,” and warned that if immigration reform passes, “then we organize the death squads for the people who wrecked America.” Or the CPAC attendees who delivered a resounding victory in the conference’s presidential straw poll to Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), who has spoken out against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Ultimately, Ayres may be right, and the combination of a whiter electorate and a friendly electoral map could deliver a big win for the Republican Party in 2014. But it couldn’t be clearer that the GOP’s broader demographic problem hasn’t been solved — and in fact, it’s actually getting worse.
By: Henry Decker, The National Memo, March 11, 2014. Graph via Northstaropinion.com
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