January 2012 – Sheila Kennedy

Two Wrongs, Eroding Rights

January 21st was the 2-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United.

The anniversary was marked with a number of protests, and an even larger number of news articles and blog posts documenting the dramatic growth of political “Super Pacs” and other unaccountable third-party political actors in the wake of that decision. We have seen an almost unimaginable amount of money being spent to influence–okay, buy–elections.

As a guest blogger for the American Constitution Society recently wrote, “people are expressing outrage about the corrosive effect of big money in politics, particularly in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. FEC.

This outrage is well founded – in a report Public Citizen published one year after the Court’s disastrous decision – we found that spending by outside groups jumped to nearly $300 million in the 2010 election cycle, from just $68.9 million in 2006. The donors for nearly half of this independent money spent remain undisclosed. And, that’s just a taste of what’s to come. The influx of independent expenditures in allowed by Citizens United will bump up election campaign spending to record levels in 2012; by some accounts to as much as $8 billion, dwarfing previous records.

We want to get big money out of politics, but do that, you have to engage the very system that is weakened and undermined by that money. The deck seems stacked. How does an ordinary person find a way to make that change happen?”

The entire post is worth reading, and the author concludes–as have many others–that we need a constitutional amendment that would overturn the decision and confirm that corporations are not people.

I agree that such an amendment is warranted, if incredibly difficult to pass. But as a retired Judge told me several months ago when we were discussing the case, the real travesty was the earlier decision in Buckley v. Valeo, in which the Court equated money with speech. That was the decision that made Citizens United possible.

We all know that wealthier people have more clout in every society; they always have and probably always will. Wealth buys privileges–it allows people to get better educations, join organizations that are influential, have more leisure, hire lobbyists, and access a wide variety of other social “megaphones” that allow them to influence others. That’s just reality–an inescapable consequence of free speech in a market economy, and in my view, an acceptable if regrettable trade-off.

But Buckley and Citizens United vastly increase the power of the rich at the expense of everyone else. Rather than helping to level the playing field by upholding laws that would have moderated political advantage, those decisions dramatically increased the disparity.

If money is speech, and corporations are people, the 1% will always own the political process.

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What is Ballard Smoking?

When the dust cleared after the November elections, Indianapolis was left with divided city government. The Mayor is Republican. The Council majority is Democrat. The challenge for the next four years will be to get along–to make decent policy despite partisan divisions.

An article in this morning’s Star suggests we’re not getting off to an auspicious start.

Indianapolis has been struggling for several months to enact a smoking ban that actually has some teeth. After a couple of false starts, the Council has produced a (bipartisan!) draft, to be voted on tonight. But according to the Star,

“The proposal’s effect on veterans halls and private clubs has become a focal point of debate and has raised the likelihood of a mayoral veto.

As written, the proposal would give those places an exemption from the smoking ban but only with a hard choice: Keep smoking, or allow children on the premises. But not both.

Mayor Greg Ballard said Friday through a spokesman that unless the council removes the restriction on children tonight, he will veto the measure. That statement was his most forceful yet since the council resumed the years-old smoking ban debate two months ago.”

When Ballard first ran for Mayor, he promised to support a smoking ban. When actually faced with an earlier iteration, he withdrew that support, and he’s been a roadblock ever since. The question is: why? The current compromise protects children from the documented health hazards of secondhand smoke, while still allowing adults in private clubs to smoke. That seems entirely reasonable. But my question goes well beyond the merits of this particular ordinance.

If he is to achieve any of his goals, Ballard will have to be strategic in his relationship with the City-County Council. He will have to choose his fights carefully. Is this really an issue on which he wants to spend his small store of political capital? Is the American Legion’s pique so important that he’s willing to start the new term with a fight that will further divide the branches of local government and further diminish the prospects for cooperation?

Wrong on policy, wrong on process, and politically short-sighted. Welcome to the start of a long four years.

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Settling Scores and Legislating Badly

To this day, despite my aging memory, I can still vividly recall my law school Income Tax class–and not just because it was taught by the legendary Larry Jegen. The class was my first introduction to the phenomenon of laws like the one Jegen called “the crazy cousin rule.” This otherwise inexplicable provision, written in the appropriately impenetrable language of the tax code, allowed a tax deduction for any support rendered to certain relatives in mental institutions. Presumably, the author of the measure had such a relative, and he was using his elective position to write tax laws that would benefit him personally, by allowing him to recoup some of the costs involved. Public policy had nothing to do with it.

Which brings me to Mike Delph and his attempt to abolish the use of Grand Juries in Indiana.

As faithful readers of this blog (there are some, right?) will recall, I blogged about this odd proposal a while back, expressing my puzzlement. A more savvy observer of the political scene posted a comment, suggesting a motive for this seemingly bizarre effort: Delph, he said, was a friend of Charlie White, the Indiana Secretary of State who had been indicted by a grand jury on charges of theft and vote fraud.

That seemed petty and irrational even for Mike Delph, but an article about Charlie White’s upcoming trial in this morning’s Indianapolis Star has leant support to that explanation. In the lengthy background piece, Delph is quoted at several points about his friendship with White, and his conviction (no pun intended) that the charges were politically motivated. According to Delph, he and Charlie often pray together in Charlie’s office.

Now it all makes sense. A grand jury indicted his friend. Abolish grand juries.

It needn’t stop there. If your friend is mistakenly arrested by the police, abolish the police; if a doctor’s treatment harms your friend, abolish the practice of medicine….

I don’t know the content of those devotions in Charlie’s office, but may I suggest adding a prayer for less grandiosity and more common sense?

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“Individual” Achievement

Today’s New York Times had a story about a Long Island teenager named Samantha who made a scientific breakthrough important enough to land her on the list of semi-finalists of the Intel Science Talent Search. The young woman is impressive–very bright, very hard-working, exactly the sort of youngster most parents want to produce. It is likely that she will grow up to contribute significantly to the store of public knowledge on which civilizations build and advance.

But that wasn’t why the Times ran the article.

What made this one young woman’s achievement so noteworthy was the fact that she and her family had been hit hard during the recession. Her parents had also been badly injured in an automobile accident, and the family even experienced a period of homelessness. Until then, hers had been a pretty typical middle-class family, and what happened to them, unfortunately, could (and did) happen to other hard-working, self-sufficient families. Their story, and their daughter’s, is thus a cautionary tale on a number of levels.

America is a land that lauds individual achievement. And so we should–we all benefit from their contributions. But it is also important to recognize that no individual achieves in the absence of at least minimal social support. As the saying goes, we all stand on the shoulders of others. Usually, that bromide is taken to mean that each breakthrough in human understanding builds on discoveries that have come before–that science builds on previous scientific knowledge, for example. But it also expresses a deeper truth.

Congressman Steven Isaacs, who represents Long Island, took his high-achieving constituent to the State of the Union; according to the Times, he wanted his Republican colleagues to pay attention, “since they are so determined to starve government programs, weaken the safety net and shun public investment in education and science, all while slashing rich people’s taxes. ‘How does a middle-class family with a daughter who’s a genius find themselves in a homeless shelter through no fault of their own?’ Mr. Israel said. ‘This isn’t just about a celebration of her tenacity.’”

One of the most damaging consequences of the rhetoric of the Right flows from the dogmatic insistence that achievement is a solitary activity, and that the social safety net is a “giveaway” to “them”–“them” being the assorted slackers eager to live off the largesse of “us” hardworking, productive folks. Conservative pundits constantly lecture that “they” need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, seemingly oblivious to the social supports, privileges and plain good luck that have enabled their own comfortable lives.

Here’s the deal: Without government support — public schools, state research institutions and the county shelter that kept her family safe — there is no way that Samantha, brilliant as she is, could have accomplished what she did. Her scientific discoveries will eventually benefit all of us. Those benefits are a return on our investment of tax dollars.

When America is no longer willing to invest in the infrastructure that makes achievement possible, Americans will no longer achieve.

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Our Despicable State Legislature

What can anyone say about Indiana’s legislature that adequately captures the perversity, the stupidity and the venality of the place?

It is hard to believe the sheer amount of embarrassing antics they have managed to cram into a short session. From the patently unconstitutional (teaching creationism, really? Every court that has ever considered the matter has said the same thing–you can’t teach religion in public school science class) to the teaching of cursive (breaking news: you weren’t elected to the school board, and by the way, what happened to your pious devotion to local control?) to Right to Work (go ahead and spend zillions of dollars on slick ads promising jobs, but everyone knows this is all about hardball politics and Republicans weakening the unions because they have the votes), our elected Representatives have spent the session giving the middle finger to the citizens of Indiana.

As if they hadn’t done enough harm, they have now killed the bill that would have allowed Indianapolis to hold a referendum on whether to tax ourselves to support adequate public transportation.

Think about this. These are the lawmakers who’ve been pontificating about the importance of job creation–that’s how they’ve justified Right to Work, which–according to unbiased research–has absolutely no effect on job creation. Good public transportation, on the other hand, is a proven job creator and economic development generator.

So why the hypocrisy? Why deny the citizens of Indianapolis the right to decide for ourselves whether we are willing to pay a few extra bucks on our tax bill for decent transportation?

It is galling enough that we have to go hat in hand to the State for permission to conduct our own business. It is absolutely infuriating that the legislators whose rural districts survive by virtue of taxes generated in central Indiana–the state sales and income taxes that come primarily from the urban areas they routinely piss on–are the ones willing to kill the goose that lays their golden eggs. Our transportation bill was killed by the very people who would share the benefits without contributing to the costs.

I wish I thought we would throw these bums out in November, but Indiana political history suggests that we will go like sheep to the polls, and vote for the same old same old–after all, these are the candidates who promise to arrest immigrants, keep the “wrong” people from voting, and push gays back into the closet where they belong.

Harrison Ullmann was right: Indiana has The World’s Worst Legislature. But we elected them.

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