Prairie Weather

Whoa! Here's food for thought

If I understand it correctly, Yale Law's constitutional law professor Jack Balkin's post (excerpted below) shows how Congress can reclaim its rights and rein in those of the Supreme Court. 

...Modern doctrine has not been faithful to the text, history and structure of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. These amendments were designed to give Congress broad powers to protect civil rights and civil liberties; together they form Congress’s Reconstruction Power.

Congress gave itself broad powers because it believed it could not trust the Supreme Court to protect the rights of the freedmen. The Supreme Court soon realized Congress’s fears, not only limiting the scope of the Reconstruction Amendments but also Congress’s powers to enforce them in decisions like United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1875) and the Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883). Due to these early cases, Congress was often forced to use its Commerce Power to protect civil rights. Modern decisions beginning with City of Boerne v. Flores, 521 U.S. 507 (1997) and United States v. Morrison, 529 U.S. 598 (2000) have compounded these errors.

When we strip away these doctrinal glosses and look at the original meaning and structural purposes underlying the Reconstruction amendments, we will discover that the Reconstruction Power gives Congress all the authority it needs to pass modern civil rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That was the original point of these amendments, and that should be their proper construction today.

When it enforces the Reconstruction Amendments, Congress is not limited to remedying or preventing state violations of rights. It has long been recognized that Congress may reach private conduct through its Thirteenth Amendment powers to eradicate the badges and incidents of slavery. But Congress also has the power to enforce the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause-- a guarantee of equal citizenship that, like the Thirteenth Amendment, contains no state action requirement. The Citizenship Clause, designed to secure equality of citizenship for freedmen, gives Congress the corresponding power to protect the badges and incidents of citizenship. Congress may therefore ban discriminatory private conduct that it reasonably believes will contribute to or produce second-class citizenship.

In addition to its powers to enforce the Citizenship Clause, Congress may also reach private action to prevent interference with federal constitutional rights. In conjunction with its powers to enforce the Guarantee Clause, Congress may therefore reach private violence designed to deter political participation, terrorize political opponents, or undermine representative government. ... more here

In an earlier post, Balkin looks at what we might expect between now and 2012.  For strong stomachs only.  Steve Benen's current discussion is part of the big shiver running through the country as many confront a scary future.

Fresh start for health care reform on the Hill. Optimism. However..

Well-armed troops on both sides are lining up to fight the fresh battle for health care.  The Hill reports that "the summit has altered the political landscape."

Earlier this month, the chances of comprehensive health reform passing by June 30, 2010, hovered in the low 30s, according to the Intrade Prediction Market. The odds have since jumped to 44 percent.

Even though the summit attracted headlines such as "deadlock" and "stalemate," it accomplished many of Obama's goals.

The White House was well aware that Republicans and Democrats were not going to reach a deal at the seven-hour-plus meeting. The summit was intended to turn the page on the Democrats' 2009 mistakes on health reform and improve their message heading into what will likely be a bitter reconciliation battle.
Democrats, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), acknowledged that the summit didn't attract GOP votes. They did point out that it increased the chances that a bill will be signed into law in 2010.

But wait!  Look at what Senate Democrats and the White House have to deal with, according to Dan Eggen in WaPo.

Reacting to President Obama's recent statements that he will move ahead with legislation, health insurance companies have enlisted hundreds of lobbyists in a full-court press against the proposed overhaul, which would force dramatic cuts and increased regulation on the industry. At the same time, insurers are pushing back against a separate bill approved by the House last week that would remove the industry's antitrust exemption.

Pharmaceutical lobbyists are also targeting Obama's plan, which includes administration proposals to secure an extra $10 billion in cuts from the industry and to ban deals between brand-name and generic drugmakers that keep cheaper medicines off the market.

The ramped-up effort is particularly evident among conservative advocacy organizations, many of which had optimistically halted spending after Democratic reform plans were cast into doubt by the January loss of a Senate seat in Massachusetts. The 60 Plus Association, a conservative group, announced a $500,000 television advertising campaign last week aimed at 18 centrist House Democrats, all of whom voted in favor of reform legislation last fall but whose support is now seen as wobbly.

The National Right To Life Committee -- which strongly opposes the Senate version of the health-care package -- has launched its own grass-roots campaign to pressure dozens of antiabortion Democrats in the House, who are crucial to passage of a final bill. Americans for Prosperity, a conservative Arlington-based group, also says it bought $250,000 worth of television advertising last week and is laying plans for more ads and rallies in March.

"I think a lot of people thought we had it licked, so it was natural to let up a little bit," said Tim Phillips, president of the Arlington group, which organized hundreds of antireform demonstrations over the past year. "All those thoughts are gone now. We are re-engaged in a big way."

Fortunately, there are hold-outs.  The AARP has promised to stay quiet, "lower the temperature" of the debate and   Pharma won't be running ads against the bill. 

But MoveOn held a successful virtual campaign to influence the Senate, and other pro-health legislation activists have jumped into the fray.

Richard Kirsch, national campaign director for the pro-reform group Health Care for America Now, said the organization plans a large-scale demonstration in Washington on March 9 targeting a policy conference by AHIP, the insurance lobby.

The group also ended an eight-day march last week from Philadelphia to Washington in honor of Melanie Shouse, an Obama supporter whom activists say died of breast cancer because she had no access to health insurance.

"The message we have is simple: Congress should listen to us, not the insurance industry," Kirsch said. "They have to make a decision and decide whose side they're on."

Citizens United decision more dangerous than we thought

A former associate general counsel to the Federal Elections Commission has taken a lawyerly look at the recent Supreme Court allowing limitations on corporate "investment" in elections and finds yet another threatening feature.  The decision allows a far greater protection of corporate secrecy than first believed.

A 1986 Supreme Court decision, Federal Election Commission v. Massachusetts Citizens for Life, opened the way for certain narrowly-defined nonprofit groups to advertise for and against political candidates. However, the 1986 decision forbade corporations and unions to give money to nonprofit organizations that financed advocacy advertisements. The Citizens United decision lifts that ban.

That means that those nonprofit groups, which are not required to disclose their donors, can now use corporate contributions to buy political commercials, and the corporations can potentially operate behind the anonymity of their donations.“Clearly, that’s where the action’s going to be,” said Kenneth A. Gross, a Washington lawyer who advises corporations on political law.

While last month’s decision allows corporations to spend without limit on advertising for or against candidates, if they do so directly, they will have to report their expenditures and identify their donors. Mr. Gross said corporations are often loath to have their names attached to such advertisements. The nonprofit groups, with their legal ability to withhold donors’ names, offer an attractive alternative, he said. ...NYT

After all, the Tea Party is just another '60's-style movement. Not.

Two days before Stack’s suicide mission, The Times published David Barstow’s chilling, months-long investigation of the Tea Party movement. Anyone who was cognizant during the McVeigh firestorm would recognize the old warning signs re-emerging from the mists of history. The Patriot movement. “The New World Order,” with its shadowy conspiracies hatched by the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. Sandpoint, Idaho. White supremacists. Militias.

Barstow confirmed what the Southern Poverty Law Center had found in its report last year: the unhinged and sometimes armed anti-government right that was thought to have vaporized after its Oklahoma apotheosis is making a comeback. And now it is finding common cause with some elements of the diverse, far-flung and still inchoate Tea Party movement. All it takes is a few self-styled “patriots” to sow havoc.

This Sunday, a post-CPAC Sunday, Frank Rich is more than worried.  Is the Tea Party movement just another cyclical bust-out, an echo of the 1960's? 

Not for those of us who remember the '60's.  Rich sees another cycle on rearing it's ugly head.  CPAC and the Tea Party movement are on the same track as Tim McVeigh before Oklahoma City.

In the heyday of 1960s left-wing radicalism, no liberal Democratic politicians in Washington could be found endorsing groups preaching violent revolution. The right has a different history. In the months before McVeigh’s mass murder, Helen Chenoweth and Steve Stockman, then representing Idaho and Texas in Congress, publicly empathized with the conspiracy theories of the far right that fueled his anti-government obsessions.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Rich sees another February 2010 event as being much more significant in the long run than CPAC or the Tea Party convention, and it had nothing to do with either. 

Joseph Stack's suicidal aerial assault on Austin's IRS offices and his anti-government rant are more likely to be seen by historians as "a flare with the dark afterlife of an omen" than any right wing hullabaloo in Tennessee or D.C.  For Frank Rich, "the acrid stench of 1995 is back in the air."

Violent imagery and invective, once largely confined to blogs and talk radio, is now spreading among Republicans in public office or aspiring to it. Last year Michele Bachmann, the redoubtable Tea Party hero and Minnesota congresswoman, set the pace by announcing that she wanted “people in Minnesota armed and dangerous” to oppose Obama administration climate change initiatives. In Texas, the Tea Party favorite for governor, Debra Medina, is positioning herself to the right of the incumbent, Rick Perry — no mean feat given that Perry has suggested that Texas could secede from the union. A state sovereignty zealot, Medina reminded those at a rally that “the tree of freedom is occasionally watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” 

Some of this talk is just that -- talk -- along with naive and pretentious posturing.  The language is taken from school history books and historical novels aimed at kids.  Certainly one fatal flaw in our culture has been our habit of teaching one-dimensional American history.  "Blood" and "patriots" are easy to say.

In his Times article on the Tea Party right, Barstow profiled Pam Stout, a once apolitical Idaho retiree who cast her lot with a Tea Party group allied with Beck’s 9/12 Project, the Birch Society and the Oath Keepers, a rising militia group of veterans and former law enforcement officers who champion disregarding laws they oppose. She frets that “another civil war” may be in the offing. “I don’t see us being the ones to start it,” she told Barstow, “but I would give up my life for my country.”

Siss boom ah!  Support our troops!  Watch ourselves on TV afterwards!

Here's something Rich doesn't mention.  Waco doesn't get much attention anymore.  No, not Waco the back gate of Bush2's ranch but Waco the fire, Waco the violent, angry government intervention, Waco the Siege.  Before 1995 and Waco there was the fire-bombing by government of a sect in Philadelphia.  Mind you, the victims of the latter were black and the government was mostly local so that siege was, well, more forgettable.

But we can't deny -- we progressives -- that our government whether temporarily in the hands of one or another political party has indulged in violent and murderous activities here and abroad that are unacceptable to many of us.  So we really need to keep in mind that horror-stricken reactions to government excesses  aren't confined to the right.

Every now and then, in this blog, there's been speculation about the relationship of the Tea Party to the Republican Party.  It continues to look like a destructive relationship politically -- destructive to existing Republicans who have allowed themselves to be absorbed by the far right.

The distinction between the Tea Party movement and the official G.O.P. is real, and we ignore it at our peril. While Washington is fixated on the natterings of Mitch McConnell, John Boehner, Michael Steele and the presumed 2012 Republican presidential front-runner, Mitt Romney, these and the other leaders of the Party of No are anathema or irrelevant to most Tea Partiers. Indeed, McConnell, Romney and company may prove largely irrelevant to the overall political dynamic taking hold in America right now. The old G.O.P. guard has no discernible national constituency beyond the scattered, often impotent remnants of aging country club Republicanism. The passion on the right has migrated almost entirely to the Tea Party’s counterconservatism.

Best one minute summary of the health care summit available

H/t 3 Weird Sisters

Health care (health insurance reform) debate. Rant.

I've been listening to two hours' worth of intelligent analysis of the White House "summit" this morning.  Hard not to bang head against wall and start ranting.  Maybe another time. 

The second hour is a less argumentative listen than the first, but both are important.  Taken together, they are an indictment of an immoral opposition to basic human decency.

Where we've gone wrong as a country, where our morality is badly outdated, and where we conspicuously lag behind the rest of the developed world lies in the insistence of many that health care be dealt with as a free market issue.  Until we free ourselves from the belief that our "free market" (a myth) can provide us all with the best coverage, we're not going to get anywhere.  It's not only impractical given the numbers of people who are excluded, for one reason or another, from the equal opportunity within that market, it's impossible -- like any theory based on a myth. 

The other barrier standing in our way is the conviction of too many Americans that, damn it, we shouldn't have to make sure others have just as good health care as we have if  they haven't the means to pay for it.  Whenever I hear that, I hear similar voices who -- until not very long ago -- were saying, "Yes, they're basically inferior and, mark my words, slavery was a very good deal for them."

The argument against universal coverage must be turned around.  Those who attack universal health care can be put on the defensive.  A pie chart of government spending, based on data from the Congressional Budget Office, offers the weapons needed to make the case. 

That pie chart is a shocking reminder.  It shows total military spending at 54%  while all spending on Health/Human Services, Soc. Sec. Administration, Education Dept, Food/Nutrition programs, Housing & Urban Dev., Labor Dept., and other human resources comes in at 30%. 

You don't have to be anti-war or anti-military to agree that those numbers are clear evidence that our value system is worse than upside-down. Let's stop calling that 54% "defense" spending.  It's not.