Category Archives: Random Blogging

Class Warfare

One of the reasons I left the GOP was impatience with party rhetoric equating taxes with theft.

It seems to have become a Republican article of faith that it is “immoral” to tax people for the services they receive, let alone for purposes of redistribution (i.e., using tax dollars to help poor folks). Those who work, we are told, should be allowed to retain the fruits of their labor. (I guess it is impertinent to ask what portion of those “fruits” are the result of living in a society that provides roads and bridges on which to ship goods, police protection of social order, courts to enforce contracts, and all the other infrastructure necessary to conduct a trade or business.)

So how do these principled critics of redistribution and “theft” justify the Wisconsin Governor’s attack on public workers—and his effort to take money from them in order to enrich the wealthy?

It should be emphasized that public workers in Wisconsin are not responsible for the state’s fiscal problems, and stripping them of their bargaining rights won’t solve those problems. According to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, the Governor was the one who precipitated the state’s projected $137 million shortfall. Just last month, he and the Republican-controlled legislature gave away $117 million in tax breaks, mostly to businesses and for private health savings accounts.

If it weren’t for those tax breaks, according to the state’s Legislative Fiscal Bureau, the state would have had a surplus.

It’s interesting. Every time someone suggests reversing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 2%—tax cuts that left current rates at their lowest point in fifty years—the GOP screams about “class warfare.” I want to know why it is class warfare when we ask the rich to pay their fair share, but it isn’t class warfare to take money from hardworking public servants to pay for tax breaks for the rich.

I’d also like to know when the party of fiscal responsibility became the party that robs the poor to give to the rich.

I guess redistribution is okay when it’s upward.

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As My Grandma Would Say….

From Chris Rock’s mouth to God’s ears!

Scott Raab: Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected. It was one of the high points in American history. And all that’s happened since the election is just a shitstorm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that?Chris Rock: I actually like it, in the sense that — you got kids? Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last — this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re fucking knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.

Downside of Democracy

Many years ago, during a discussion with a friend whose husband served in the Indiana House, she said something I’ve always remembered: “The problem with representative democracy is that it is representative.”

This session of the Indiana Legislature seems intent on proving the point.

If you’ve been following national news, you may be thinking that those we elected to the General Assembly couldn’t possibly be as crazy as, for example, the South Dakota lawmaker who sponsored a bill that would have made it legal to shoot abortion doctors (he withdrew it in the wake of the publicity), or the Arizona legislator who responded to the horrific shootings in Tucson by sponsoring a bill to allow concealed guns to be carried anywhere, or the Wisconsin Governor who is threatening to call out the National Guard if public workers protest his efforts to strip them of bargaining rights they’ve had since the 1950s.

But you’d be wrong.

Think an anti-bullying bill should be a slam-dunk? Think again. The Senate Committee killed it on a 3-5 vote. Opponents expressed an uncharacteristic concern for the First Amendment rights of schoolchildren…especially their right to express anti-gay sentiments.

Speaking of child safety, surely a bill to require all child care providers to meet health and safety requirements—staff criminal history checks, fire safety, drug testing and the like—should be a no-brainer? Wrong! Advance America’s Eric Miller brought in God’s folks to testify that the bill gave government “too much authority over Church ministries,” and the bill died without a committee vote.

Wisconsin isn’t the only state trying to strip public employees of bargaining rights—here in Indiana, a bill to abolish Indiana’s merit system has emerged from committee. And Mike Delph’s effort to have Indiana emulate Arizona by targeting people who “look like” they might be illegal immigrants is moving along nicely (never mind that Arizona’s convention bookings declined 36% in the wake of that state’s law, and never mind that immigration is an exclusively federal responsibility).

And of course, our “representative representatives” aren’t content with defeating the anti-bullying bill, and reviving the bill to amend the Indiana Constitution to ban same-sex marriage. Taking their war against gay Hoosiers up a notch, there’s an upcoming committee vote on a bill to prohibit state universities from providing domestic partner benefits.

The haters and the crazies are well represented in the Indiana General Assembly. The rest of us, not so much.

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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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