Monthly Archives: February 2011

It’s a Mad, Mad World

Well, I see that a new poll has found that 51% of likely GOP primary voters believe Obama was not born in the United States. (The poll did not offer a breakdown between those who believe he’s Kenyan and those who don’t think Hawaii is part of the U.S.) The percentage of “birthers” was even higher among those with a positive impression of Sarah Palin.

It is really rather amazing to see the tenacity of this assertion, especially in the face of so much evidence to the contrary. Equally mystifying are the large numbers of Republicans who continue to insist that the President is a Muslim (many of the same people who condemned his former Christian pastor).

I think there is really a simple explanation for both accusations. We live at a time when it just isn’t considered acceptable to use the “N” word, or to be forthrightly bigoted against African-Americans. And that, at least, is progress. But it presents a dilemma for the folks whose real problem with the President is the color of his skin. Better–or so these folks evidently think–to cloak your racial animus by attributing your disapproval to the illegality of his election, or to your opposition to (okay, bigotry about) his “real” religion.

It must be really awful to live with so much fear of people who don’t look like you.

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State’s Rights and Wrongs

“States’ Rights” are back.

The last time a significant number of states resisted federal edicts was during the 50’s and 60’s, when they were fighting desegregation and insisting  that the big, bad federal government couldn’t tell them that “equal protection of the laws” meant giving actual equal rights to black people.

This time around, “states’ rights” has a new name: nullification. But it’s really the same old song; indeed, both the words and the music are all too familiar.

Nullification is the theory that states have the right to reject federal law. It is a discredited theory that ignores pesky constitutional details like the supremacy clause, not to mention the last hundred years or so of constitutional jurisprudence.

Ostensibly, what set off the current political tantrum was the Affordable Care Act, aka health care reform. Like a two-year-old screaming “you can’t make me!” to his mother, legislatures in several states are in the process of declaring that the federal government can’t force them to comply. (Those legislative shrieks of defiance are likely to have precisely the same effect as the shrieks of the two-year-old—which is to say, none. Mothers and the federal government will always have the last word.)

The real question raised by current efforts at nullification is: why? What is so terrifying, or awful, about reforming the health-care system so that 50 million uninsured Americans will have access to at least a minimum level of care? What is so totalitarian/Socialist/Nazi-ish about telling health insurers that they can’t deny you coverage you paid for simply because you got sick? I understand differences of opinion about the particulars of the reform—I would have preferred a different approach myself—but policy disputes don’t spawn the sort of hysteria we are seeing.

It becomes a little clearer when you see what other elements of federal law the more reactionary states are rejecting. Arizona was the first state to enact a draconian measure targeting immigrants, even though immigration is a matter reserved to the federal government, and other states—including Indiana—are scrambling to do the same.  Listen to the rhetoric about immigrants, then listen to the fury over health care, and you will hear an ugly common theme: everything that’s going wrong in this country is “their” fault. And who are “they”? Poor people, brown people, gay people…anyone who is different, anyone who is “other.”  Unlike “us,” “they” are all undeserving.

History teaches us that inter-group tensions increase during bad economic times. People are anxious and fearful and looking for someone to blame.

I just hope the recovery picks up steam before we “nullify” America.

Why We Are Freaked Out

A friend sent me this brief video played by Sony at a recent shareholders meeting.

I’ll think about this the next time I hear someone cry “I want my country back!” As it vividly shows, the pace of change has accelerated dramatically–possibly more dramatically than many people can handle. It doesn’t make angry, uninformed and venomous behavior excusable, but it does help us to understand the source of much of the discomfort.

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Tea Party Originalism

David Schultz is a colleague (and co-author of my recent textbook, American Public Service: Constitutional and Ethical Foundations) who has written a timely article for Salon. It’s the sort of article that should be read by the very folks who won’t read it, because it actually takes one of the Tea Party’s avowed purposes—constitutional originalism—seriously.

“With reverence and awe, Michele Bachmann and the Tea Party pay homage to the original Constitution and framers who drafted the document in 1787. The House of Representatives, in a nod to them, began its session this year by reading it. Bachmann even brought Antonin Scalia to a seminar on the Constitution for members of Congress, where the Supreme Court justice instructed members to read the Federalist Papers and follow the framers’ original intent. Moreover, many of the Tea Party’s political positions, such as opposition to President Obama’s healthcare reform program, are rooted in their adherence to the original document.

But what if they actually got their way? If a Tea Party constitutional reading suddenly took sway and we returned to the original document as conceived, what would the American republic look like?”

David begins by pointing to the obvious: the right to vote wasn’t part of the original constitution. Voting rights were largely left to state law, and in 1787 most states limited the franchise to white, male, Protestant property owners, age 21 or older. There was no direct popular voting for president or the United States Senate, and there wasn’t even language that addressed voting for members of the House of Representatives. It took the 17th Amendment, adopted in 1913, to allow for people to vote for their senators (an amendment many Tea Party activists wish to repeal), and the 19th Amendment before women could vote.

As David points out, Michelle Bachmann—self-proclaimed devotee of the Constitution—could neither vote nor serve if we still followed the original document. The Senate wasn’t chosen by popular vote originally, and the President still isn’t.

“Even if we consider the Bill of Rights, which was adopted in 1791, to be part of the original Constitution, there are still many limits on its use. Most importantly, as written, the Bill of Rights limited only national power — not state power. Notice how the First Amendment begins by declaring, “Congress shall make no law. ” … a state could take an owner’s property through eminent domain without compensating him.

Subscribe to an original intent reading of the Constitution and states are free to disregard individual rights, including free speech, property, religion and others. States did just that in the early years of the Republic and into the 20th century before the Supreme Court used the 14th Amendment to apply Bill of Rights provisions to the states. Most recently, the Supreme Court (with Scalia supporting it) used this incorporation tactic to apply the Second Amendment right to bear arms to states. A Tea Party constitutionalist could not have done this. So much for states as protectors of individual freedom.”

Then of course, there are aspects of the original Constitution that even most Tea Party members find inconvenient. In their much-ballyhooed reading of the constitutional text on the floor of the House at the beginning of this session, these fearless defenders of originalism simply omitted that pesky provision about slavery.

It’s hard not to see similarities between the way so many of these “God and Country” zealots read the Constitution and the way they read the bible—very selectively.

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Spin Cycle

I get so disheartened listening to political arguments about health care reform.

It’s not that I am a big fan of the bill that finally passed. I would much rather have seen “Medicare for All,” for policy reasons not germane to this post. But I have been astonished by the venom that the bill has engendered. It’s bad enough that crazies like Glenn Beck compare Obama’s effort to provide health care to the uninsured with Nazism. The despicable lie about “death panels,” hyped by Sarah Palin and her ilk, was equally odious. But perhaps the most annoying of these efforts at disinformation has been the recent effort by presumably serious GOP lawmakers to persuade the public that the Affordable Care Act–which they dub sneeringly as “Obamacare”–is a “jobs killer.”

This all started when the Congressional Budget Office reviewed the Act. Along with concluding that the reform bill will reduce the deficit significantly over the next ten years, the CBO noted that the measure will allow a number of people to leave the workforce. Congressional Republicans immediately cited this as evidence the Act was a “job killer.”

What the CBO found, however, had nothing at all to do with the number of jobs. It had to do with the number of people who are currently working only because they need affordable health insurance.

In other words, there are people who are only working because they desperately need employer-sponsored health insurance. These are people who have the means not to work full-time, if they have access to a health insurance market that currently shuts them out. Many of these workers will choose to retire early because they will now be able to buy their own health insurance.

This is what Republicans mean when they say that health care reform is ‘destroying jobs.’

There’s a reason many of us despair of ever having reasoned, rational discussions of policy. When ideology and political posturing trump reality, the common good–not to mention common sense–gets lost in the spin cycle.