OMGs of the Day…

Sometimes, it’s really hard to choose the most appalling news of the day.

I could begin with the continued embarrassment that is Dick Lugar’s campaign.

Yesterday, Lugar was one of 31 (male) Republican Senators who voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act; evidently, “true Indiana conservatives” consider laws against wife-beating an infringement of their liberty. Today, we learn that Lugar has invited aging crooner Pat Boone to campaign for him. Whatever his merits as a singer, Boone is primarily known today as a right-wing crank. He is a creationist. He has compared gay activists to terrorists. He is a “birther” who insists that Obama was not born in the U.S. and is not a Christian. He is exactly the sort of person the Dick Lugar I once admired would have avoided like the plague.

Granted, Mourdock is a toad. But watching Lugar frantically shed what is left of his integrity in an effort to appeal to the baseness of the GOP base has been endlessly disheartening.

Lugar is hardly the only public figure who has allowed his ego to trump his judgment. Today’s news also focuses on Eugene White, who seems equally intent upon disgracing himself.

It seems that White is doing everything he can to torpedo the impending State takeover of several IPS schools. He’s refusing to turn over student information, spreading misinformation to IPS parents, removing equipment from the targeted schools and otherwise making the transition as difficult as possible–all without any apparent regard for the children whose education is supposed to be his first concern.

I am no fan of State Superintendent Tony Bennett, who clearly has an ego problem of his own, and I harbor grave doubts about the wisdom of the state takeover. But White’s response is infantile and destructive–a description which, come to think of it, has characterized his entire tenure at IPS. A school board that took its responsibilities to children seriously would have fired him long before this.

Whatever happened to public servants who wanted to–you know–serve the public?

Comments

Nimble We Aren’t

There is a report in this morning’s Indianapolis Star—buried between breathless reports about the Colt’s new quarterback, true, but an actual story with real news in it–about efforts to address Indianapolis’ longstanding sewer problem.

When it rains, tons of raw sewage are dumped into our water supply. Citizens, which bought the water and sewer utilities last year, is beginning construction of massive tunnels beneath the city to divert that sewage and correct the problem–and not so incidentally, fulfill the City’s obligations under a 2006 consent decree with the EPA.

I was delighted to read that we are finally going to address this problem. But I couldn’t help marveling over the amount of time it has taken.

I was in City Hall from 1977-80. Indianapolis’ sewer problems were already a regular topic of conversation at cabinet meetings. The City had been in discussion with the (then new) EPA since the Lugar Administration. (I wouldnt say there was a lot of resistance to demands that the problems be fixed, but an engineer with DPW reportedly protested that it would be cheaper to clean White River than comply with federal demands.)

It took from 1975 to 2006 for Indianapolis to agree to stop dumping raw sewage into our drinking water. It took another six years to begin remediation. Of course, City leaders have been trying for almost that long to address our need for decent public transportation, and we’re nowhere close to getting that job done.

If it took us 37 years to begin fixing a problem that everyone acknowledged we had, a problem we knew how to solve–how many years do you suppose it will it take to fix public education?

Comments

An Interesting Exchange

Like many other civil libertarians, I have been deeply disappointed by President Obama’s willingness to continue many of the security practices of the Bush Administration. It is especially galling because–unlike Bush–Obama quite obviously knows what the Constitution requires, and has nevertheless been willing to engage in surveillance and other practices which most civil libertarians believe cross the line.President Obama gets blamed for many things he clearly doesn’t do, but in this area, disappointment in his performance is justifiable.

Because I have been pretty critical of Administration policy in this area,  I was interested in the following observation posted on the Law and Courts Listserv, a scholarly exchange to which I subscribe.

In response to a post suggesting an equivalency between the policies of the two administrations, Professor Alexander wrote:

“Eugene says the Bush antiterrorism policy “is quite similar to the Obama Administration’s antiterrorism policy.”
I like many others have been deeply disappointed in aspects of the Obama Administration’s policy on detainees and counterterrorism, as well as the efforts by Congress and judges on the D.C. Circuit to force the administration to continue Bush policies. But Eugene’s statement is simply not the case. Contrary to the Bush administration:
     * Obama has withdrawn from combat operations in Iraq and plans to
withdraw from Afghanistan in 2014;
     * Obama found and killed bin Laden;
     * on his first day in office Obama
             1) revoked all the Bush administration OLC memos, executive
orders, and directives on interrogations;
             2) ordered an end to torture, and cruel, inhumane, or
degrading treatment, and compliance with the Army field manual
(regardless of whether one thinks that is the end-all of good
interrogation practice);
             3) ordered all CIA prisons worldwide to be closed;
             4) ordered the closure of Guantanamo — it is decidedly not
his fault that the facility remains open;
             5) ordered that the Geneva Conventions are the “minimum
baseline” for treatment of any individuals detained in “any armed conflict”;
             6) ordered that the International Red Cross be given access
to all detainees;
     * Obama ordered the trial in Art III court of KSM and the other
captured 9/11 plotters — again, not his fault that they must be tried
in military commissions;
     * in March 2011 Obama issued an executive order directing that the
government comply with Art 75 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva
Conventions “out of a sense of legal obligation” — thereby
acknowledging the binding nature of international law in connection with
the detention of suspected terrorists — and urged Congress to ratify
Additional Protocol II;
      * the Obama administration revamped the military commission
procedures so that — although not as good as Art III courts — they are
much improved over the Bush versions;
     * in particular, evidence obtained by cruel, inhuman, or degrading
treatment is barred;
      * it appears that DOJ and DOD are pursuing and concluding military
commission plea bargains so that evidence in MC trials (such as the KSM
trial) will conform to Art III standards;
     * the President and Attorney General have repeatedly declared that
waterboarding is torture and is illegal (in stark contrast to Bush,
Cheney, and Yoo, who have gleefully affirmed torture as good policy); and
     * no prisoners have been transferred to Guantanamo and the
administration has repeatedly stated that none will be.”
Clearly, Professor Alexander has been following these matters far more closely than I have.
Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that being better than the Bush Administration on civil liberties is hardly a “get out of jail free” card. But this list did make me feel better.
Comments

Romney Sells What’s Left of His Soul

If there is any lingering doubt that Mitt Romney has sold what passes for his soul to the extreme right, his appointment of Robert Bork as his “legal advisor” should remove it.

I remember when Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court was rejected by the Senate in a vote that included several Republicans. I was a pretty partisan Republican at the time, but even so, I found his nomination both mystifying and appalling. It’s fashionable among people who are unfamiliar with Bork’s writings and positions to bemoan the “nasty politics” that denied him a seat on the high court, but that sanitized version of history is simply inaccurate. While politics undoubtedly played a part, the reason Bork was rejected was that his views were far, far out of the legal mainstream.  His diatribes have–if anything–gotten more extreme since.

As law professor Jamin Raskin reminded readers in a recent post to the American Constitution Society blog,

  • Bork condemned as “lawless” and “a new low” the Supreme Court’s decision in Roper v. Simmons, which banned state execution of juveniles — a practice that he would allow despite the fact that no other country in the world sanctions it. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion.
  • Bork rejects the Supreme Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey upholding a woman’s right to choose an abortion.  He is adamant that Roe v. Wade be overturned and states be allowed the power to prosecute women and doctors who violate criminal abortion laws.  As Bork states, “Roe, as the greatest example and symbol of the judicial usurpation of democratic prerogatives in this century, should be overturned.  The Court’s integrity requires that.” (See The Tempting of America)
  • He attacked the Supreme Court for its 7-1 decision in U.S. v. Virginia barring the state-funded Virginia Military Institute from discriminating against women. He argued that the “feminized Court” had reached its conclusion based on “sterile feminist logic” and rejected the mainstream view that sex-based classifications by government trigger heightened scrutiny.
  • Bork deplores the Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas striking down state laws that criminalize gay sex and has advocated amending the Constitution to declare that marriage is between “one man and one woman.”  (He even championed for a while a constitutional amendment permitting a simple majority of Congress to overturn the Supreme Court’s constitutional holdings, but appears to be backing away from this position.)
  • Bork lambasted the Court’s decision to uphold affirmative action as constitutional, despite the consensus of most universities, and even the United States armed services, that such programs are needed to counter historical discrimination and promote diversity in these institutions.
  • He has an embarrassing record on voting rights, vehemently opposing the fundamental constitutional principle of “one person, one vote” and defending the constitutionality of the poll tax and literacy test in state elections. 

I read Bork’s “Slouching Toward Gomorra” when it first came out; in it, Bork essentially took the position that he and other members of an “enlightened” elite should decide what other (lesser) Americans could read. Despite the effort of many on the Right to rehabilitate Bork’s image, the man’s own works testify to his profoundly anti-democratic views. If there is any doubt of the utterly radical nature of Robert Bork’s positions, the evidence is in his own articles and books, his own words. It is unnecessary to consult secondary resources.

The obvious question is: Why on earth would Mitt Romney choose Robert Bork–as extreme and polarizing a figure as can be found–to be his legal adviser, the person he would listen to when choosing Supreme Court nominees, the person he would consult about the constitutionality of policy proposals?

Why, when he has secured the nomination, would he embrace someone beloved only by the farthest fringes of the lunatic Right? If it’s time to shake up the Etch-A-Sketch and try to look reasonably moderate, this is a seemingly inexplicable choice.

I can think of only two possible answers to that question: either Romney really is an extremist who only played a moderate in Massachusetts; or he is making a final, desperate Faustian bargain in an effort to earn the trust of today’s reactionary GOP base.

Either explanation makes him a fraud. Bork makes him a dangerous fraud.

Comments

Bishops, Nuns and Righteousness

One of the criticisms regularly leveled at organized religion is that theological rigidity and ritual formalities inevitably crowd out human compassion and the thirst for justice.

Enter the Vatican, and its recent reprimand of American nuns for emphasizing issues of health care and social welfare over same-sex marriage  and contraception.

As (Catholic) Andrew Sullivan writes

I don’t think the bishops will either ever forgive the nuns for backing universal healthcare as the highest priority rather than the control of women’s contraception. Their witness to a balanced and sane Christianity put the cramped authoritarianism of Dolan et al in an unflattering light, and Dolan takes his orders from Rome. An example of the nuns’ alleged “doctrinal problems”:

In 2009, a woman arrived in the emergency room at St. Joseph’s hospital in Phoenix. She was twenty-seven years old, eleven weeks pregnant, and she was dying. Her heart was failing, and her doctors agreed that the only way to save her life was to end her pregnancy, and that her condition was too critical to move her to another, non-Catholic hospital. The member of the ethics committee who was on call was Sister Margaret McBride. She gave her approval, under the theory that termination of the pregnancy would be the result but not the purpose of the procedure. The woman, who had four small children, went home to them. When the Bishop Thomas Olmsted of Phoenix heard what happened, he excommunicated Sister Margaret on the spot. A Church that had been so protective of priests who deliberately hurt children—keeping them in its fold, sending them, as priests, to new assignments—couldn’t tolerate her. A spokesman for the diocese called her a party to “murder.”

The report criticizing the nuns noted in passing the good work they did with the poor and in running schools and hospitals, but focused upon what it called a “grave” doctrinal crisis. It said the sisters were promoting radical feminist themes and criticised US nuns for challenging the bishops, who it said were “the church’s authentic teachers of faith and morals”.

Those of us who are not Catholic may be forgiven for drawing some unflattering conclusions about the male hierarchy of the Church from this unseemly effort to chastise the American nuns. From the outside, at least, it looks like a sclerotic group of insiders intent upon keeping control of an institution in crisis, of diverting attention from its own serious problems. It also looks like a group of men defending their authority over women who are increasingly unwilling to take their marching orders from bishops far removed from the realities of daily parish life.

Every religious community, ultimately, must choose between the righteous and the self-righteous. The lines between them aren’t necessarily easy to determine; there are reasons humans develop traditions and rules, and those reasons are often very good ones. That said, when a controversy pits the compassionate against the imperious, it’s hard not to take sides.

I’m with the nuns.

And I have to say, I have a feeling the Bishops may live to regret picking this particular fight.

Comments