Llewellyn King: Oh for real conservative values, not Trumpism

President Gerald Ford, in 1974. He was a true conservative.

WEST WARWICK, R.I.

If Mitch McConnell’s toadying Senate has its way, we are to have a more conservative U.S. Supreme Court come the elections in November, even though it looks like the current concept of harsh conservatism will be roundly rejected in them.

One branch of government, if President Trump and McConnell have their way, will be handed over to an extreme vision of conservatism that has no deep-seated philosophy behind it. It is a corruption of a noble stream of political thought and its consequence is a political class that adheres to narrow, divisive issues that have an oppressive social effect. Taken together these have the result of seeming to be heartless and causing pain to the poor and under-educated.

That isn’t the conservatism we had known for decades: the conservatism of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and the two George Bushes. It is a political virus that threatens the Grand Old Party with years of loss of elective office.

If these new aberrant Republicans use their form of judicial activism to keep alive Trumpism, they will be ensuring today’s ugly discord for a long time.

The issues that divide us aren’t the solid Republican values of yesteryear of limited government, free trade, market solutions, open opportunity, strong defense, active scientific inquiry, educational excellence, personal freedom and privacy and universal prosperity. Not the cramped and spleen-imbued issues that are about to dominate the Senate GOP’s foraging for like-mindedness in the coming hearings.

They are out to burden conservatism with narrow views on a few issues that aren’t intrinsically conservative, including:

·       Abortion

·       The death penalty

·       Health care

·       Sexual preference

Rigidity on these matters – except for sexual preference -- has the effect of laying a disproportionate burden on the poor and, therefore, stimulating the far left of the Democratic Party, empowering the followers of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D.-N.Y.).

Take just two matters. The abortion issue falls heavily on the poor. Nobody suggests that it is a good means of birth control, but unwanted pregnancies do occur. They can break up families, cause economic burdens and bring children into untenable poverty, social dysfunction and other misery.

What women do in private shouldn’t be governed by the Senate or the court.

End Roe v. Wade and rich women will still be able to go to another country or in other ways pay for a safe end to a pregnancy. Appointing a staunch religious anti-abortionist to the Supreme Court is to put a thumb on the scales of justice and to blur the line between church and state for a transient political purpose: reelecting Trump.

The death penalty, which has failed spectacularly as a proven deterrent to murder, likewise falls mainly on the poor -- often the poor and mentally challenged. The record shows that rich people aren’t taken to the death chamber at dawn. Superior lawyering from the moment of arrest keeps them from later capital punishment. What is the ultra-conservative value proposition then?

The same imbalance extends throughout our remarkably punitive legal system that punishes those on society’s bottom rungs more aggressively than those at the top.

Families were destroyed and social mayhem resulted in the mortgage excesses of the last financial crisis. I saw it devastate one of my employees of that time: a struggling Black man of impeccable character but limited education who was talked into unwise refinancing by rapacious mortgage lenders. He lost his home, his good name, everything. No one across the length and breadth of the scandal went to prison for the damage that their greed inflected.

All the other right-wing issues of the day have the same characteristics: They defend the upper reaches of society, those with money, and are harsh and inconsiderate of the rest.

Health care glares in this. A patchy and capricious system will become worse for tens of millions of Americans if the legal attack on the Affordable Care Act by the Trump administration goes against the sick in the Supreme Court — a court weighted against ordinary people in pursuit of a suspect interpretation of conservatism.

Radical conservatism is also out to extinguish the labor movement, or what is left of it. A robust labor movement is a bulwark against the pitiless downgrading of the worker from dignity to subservience, living in fear and rewarded inadequately.

The rush to the bottom is becoming a national sink hole. We can all fall into it eventually.

Llewellyn King is executive producer and host of White House Chronicle, on PBS. His email is llewellynking1@gmail.com. He’s based in Rhode Island and Washington, D.C.

Robert P. Alvarez: Don't let pandemic ravage the November election, too

The Balsams, a fancy resort hotel in Dixville Notch, N.H., in the White Mountains, and the site of the "midnight vote" that makes it the first place to vote in U.S. primary and general elections in every election year.

A ballot from the 1936 elections in Nazi Germany — nice and simple!

Via OtherWords.org

First, it was a public-health crisis. Now, it’s ravaging the economy. And for it’s next trick, the coronavirus is threatening to undermine the 2020 election.

Unless, that is, Congress steps in to ensure we can vote by mail.

If you’re curious what the worst case scenario is, look no further than Wisconsin, where a gerrymandered GOP legislature forced voters to the polls over the orders of the Democratic governor — and against the advice of public-health officials.

Wisconsin Republicans not only declined to send every voter an absentee ballot. They also appealed — successfully — to the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court to prevent voters who received their ballot late (through no fault of their own) from having their votes counted.

It was a transparent ploy by Wisconsin Republicans to support a conservative incumbent on the state Supreme Court by suppressing the vote. It failed — his liberal-leaning challenger won — but they struck a huge blow to voting rights in the process.

Fallout from the coronavirus exposed structural weaknesses in everything from our health care and education systems to market supply chains and labor rights. It also made painfully obvious the fragility of our electoral process.

Unfortunately, states have received little help from Congress in shoring up their elections. Just $400 million of the $2.2 trillion stimulus bill was earmarked for helping states cover new elections-related expenses stemming from the pandemic.

When it comes to providing the financial support necessary to ensure our elections are safe, accessible, fair, and secure, the last coronavirus response bill was a dereliction of duty.

Will it be safe to gather in large numbers by November? And even if it is, will voters feel comfortable standing in line, for up to six hours in some cases (thanks to GOP poll closures, but that’s another story), next to strangers?

If not, it’s fair to assume some voters will elect not to vote due to safety concerns. And that should undermine public confidence in the outcome.

The obvious solution is expanding voting by mail.

Unfortunately, Donald Trump is fiercely opposed to this. “They had things, levels of voting, that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again,” he said.

Let that sink in. The president — who himself voted by mail — openly views the right to vote as a threat to his presidency and party.

Americans shouldn’t have to choose between their health and their right to vote. In the midst of this pandemic, states with overly cumbersome processes for absentee voting are complicit in voter suppression. Period.

To fix this, we need to ensure no-excuse absentee voting in the next coronavirus bill — and that’s the bare minimum. Beyond that, we also need pre-paid postage for mail-in ballots and an extended early in-person voting period.

We need accessible, in-person polling places with public safety standards that are up to snuff. That means election workers must know they’re safe, and must have access to personal protective equipment.

We also need to develop and bolster online voter registration systems, and run public information campaigns giving voters localized, up-to-date voting guidelines.

To complete this nationwide, we’re looking at a $2 billion price tag. That’s just 0.1 percent of the $2 trillion package Congress already passed — and if it ensures our democracy doesn’t die in this pandemic, it’s worth every penny.

Robert P. Alvarez is a media relations associate at the Institute for Policy Studies. He writes about criminal justice reform and voting rights.

James P. Freeman: Applying data analysis to Supreme Court nominees

U.S. Supreme Court Building.

Last autumn, techrepublic.com concluded, with its feature “How big data won the 2017 World Series,” that America’s pastime was more the cold science of analytics than the graceful art of, say, a George Springer swing. This fall, progressives hope that big data will win the day to thwart Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Supreme Court.

When the book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game was published in 2003, it acted as a catalyst for Major League baseball teams to “start taking data-based decision making more seriously.” The employment of metrics was also rooted in cost-effective ways to win. The prize was the Fall Classic.

Baseball, already known for its rich sediment of data, hired experts to “make data-driven decisions based on predictive analytics.” Perhaps the biggest manifestation of data predicting outcomes is the use of “the shift” — a technique where a coach will move his defensive players to one side of the field knowing, in advance, that a hitter will put a ball into play there a statistically significant number of times. (Shifts increased from 2,350 in 2011 to 28,130 in 2016). TechRepublic notes that teams with a “prowess with data” — the once moribund Boston Red Sox, Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros — are recent World Series champions.

Some now believe that these methodologies can be applied to Supreme Court nominees.

Data for Progress is, in its own words, “the think tank for the future of progressivism.” Claiming that “a new generation of progressives is rising,” it wants to be the Elias Baseball Analyst for left-leaning causes. Using scientific techniques to support progressive activists and issues, it also aims to “challenge conventional wisdoms about the American public that lack empirical support.”

Areas of its research include: “Multilevel Regression and Poststratification analysis,” to provide “reliable sub-national opinion estimates on progressive issues;” “deep learning textual analysis of media;” and “data mining and analyzing social media data for politicians and pundits to find interesting trends and patterns.”

Pitchers and catchers beware!

In another sign of the miniaturization and mobilization of complex matters on social media, Data for Progress prefers to distribute its research over the internet because “data can only help interpret the world.” (Many credit its co-founder, Sean McElwee, with inspiring the “Abolish ICE” movement based upon a tweet he posted in early 2017.)

Today, however, McElwee is focusing on the Supreme Court. And his opposition to Judge Kavanaugh.

Data for Progress believes that a Kavanaugh seat on the high court would set back progressive causes in areas such as voting rights, Medicaid, corporate pollution, unions, gerrymandering, and, most urgently, abortion rights.

A key component of its approach is that ideological implications can be measured. Data for Progress uses a political science methodology called Judicial Common Space, which seeks to answer, among other things, why courts make the decisions they do. Judicial politics, like a Chris Sale slider, can be measurable and explainable. Or can it?

Justices are “scored” or measured in similar ways that members of Congress are measured for their roll call votes. So, Justice Sonia Sotomayor appears on the left of the spectrum and Justice Clarence Thomas appears on the right. But, like all computer modeling, how Kavanaugh fits into the equation — hence, how he would affect the ideological balance of the court — is entirely hypothetical.

Data for Progress suggests that judicial reasoning is necessarily a linear process; past judicial decisions are a measurable and definitive predictor of future decisions. This in turn determines where judges stand on an ideological plane.

For Data for Progress — even if its quantitative analysis stands close scrutiny — prospective liberal justices are acceptable and conservative justices are not. Big data is now political fodder for modern progressives.

But history may prove McElwee and Data for Progress wrong.

In a recent piece for The Nation, McElwee argues that “Democrats Must Stop Pretending the Supreme Court is Apolitical.” He worries about the looming “threat” of a Supreme Court that could “reverse progressive legislative accomplishments.” When did Democrats stop believing the court was apolitical?

In 1937, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, attempted a ''court-packing” plan. His motivations were entirely political. He intended to shape the ideological balance of the court so that it would cease striking down his New Deal legislation. And in 1987, Democrats launched a full partisan attack on the nomination of Robert Bork to the high court. The conservative jurist was soundly defeated over what conservatives believe were purely political motivations. There is a long history of partisan battles in picking Supreme Court justices.

And Data for Progress’ fears of the court — and, by extension, the nation — being held hostage by conservative justices for years to come may be mistaken. In fact, big data may prove Data for Progress to be just another political lever of the progressive organ. And render their rantings moot.

Fivethirtyeight.com concluded three years ago that “Supreme Court Justices Get More Liberal As They Get Older.” The “ideological drift” of justices is cited in a 2007 academic paper. The authors of the study, using scores based on data from the Supreme Court Database, write that: “Drift to the right or, more often, the left is the rule, not the exception.”

A 2005 New York Times expose, “Presidents, Picking Justices, Can Have Backfires,” should be a reminder to Data for Progress that, despite a wealth of data, Supreme Court justices’ ideology is malleable and subject to change. As President Eisenhower learned of  Chief Justice Earl Warren and President George H.W. Bush learned of Justice David Souter.

Whatever their political persuasions, Americans are now keeping score in two spectator sports because of big data.

James P. Freeman is a former banker and now a New England-based essayist. This piece first appeared in Inside Sources.

Martha Burk: Employees have 'religious' freedom, too

Via OtherWords.org

When Obamacare — aka, the Affordable Care Act — became law in 2010, it mandated coverage of birth control without co-payments.

Some employers didn’t like the rule, and Hobby Lobby hated it so much that the company filed a lawsuit to stop it. Company owners said they didn’t believe in contraception and claimed that covering it for female employees violated their religious freedom.

Understand, the Obama administration went to great lengths to exempt churches and church-related institutions from the rule, while still guaranteeing their female employees the right to birth control if they wanted it.

Then the Supreme Court stepped in, siding with Hobby Lobby and ruling that “closely held” corporations with religious objections could join religious employers in excluding birth control from their insurance plans.

Now the Trump administration has gone a giant step further. They’re now allowing any and all businesses, including publicly traded ones, to also cite “religious or moral objections” in denying their employees contraception coverage.

Wait a minute.

Corporations not only have religious freedom but now moral principles, too? I didn’t even know they went to church, and I’m pretty sure I’ve never seen one get down on its knees and pray.

On the other hand, I know women — who are actual people — have religious freedom under the Constitution, too. What about their right not to be forced to bow to their employers’ religious beliefs or highly suspect “moral” principles?

Massachusetts, California, and the ACLU have filed lawsuits to stop the rollback. Good luck. Besides Hobby Lobby, the conservative majority in the Supreme Court ruled years ago in the Citizens United case that corporations have constitutional rights, and they’ve consistently ruled in favor of their corporate buddies over women in employment discrimination cases.

On top of that, six of the nine justices are male, and most of them of rather conservative religious persuasions. The odds look to be stacked against women.

Expanding so-called corporate citizen rights deeper into health care could ultimately affect everybody, not just women.

Christian Scientists are opposed to all kinds of medical treatment, including for diabetes, cancer, and meningitis. Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t believe in blood transfusions. There are undoubtedly other religious taboos on medical procedures.

Enterprising businesses that want to save money could cite “religious freedom” to exclude virtually any medical treatment from their insurance plans. Surgery, antibiotics, immunizations — you name it.

Where will it end? We don’t know. Even if the lawsuits are ultimately successful, a decision could take years.

All I know is that I don’t want my neighborhood corporate citizen making my health care decisions.

Martha Burk is the director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) and the author of the book Your Voice, Your Vote. 

Chris Powell: Supreme Court is now almost entirely political

The contention over Supreme Court nominations like President Trump's of Judge Neil Gorsuch and President Obama's of Judge Merrick Garland has become so bitter because decades ago political liberals began using the court as a super-legislature and political conservatives could not resist the urge to follow suit. Maybe now the country can acknowledge at last that the Supreme Court is no longer a court at all -- that, as newspaper columnist Finley Peter Dunne's fictional Irish bartender, Martin J. Dooley, opined more than a century ago, "The Supreme Court follows the election returns."

If liberals are in power, the court somehow discovers that the Constitution requires enactment of every liberal nostrum, and if conservatives are in power, the court requires every important legal question to be answered favorably to conservatives. Connecticut's two U.S. senators, Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy, both liberal Democrats, confirmed as much this week upon Gorsuch's nomination, both expressing skepticism if not quite outright opposition, though not one question yet had been put to the nominee. It is enough that Gorsuch is considered a conservative.

"I want a mainstream judge, not an ideological partisan," Murphy said, and Blumenthal echoed him, as if they too aren’t ideological partisans and wouldn’t settle for a nominee who was a flaming liberal like themselves. Similarly, of course, when President Obama, a liberal Democrat, nominated liberal judges, conservative Republicans bleated about wanting "mainstream" nominees even as they would have been delighted with flaming conservative nominees.

Democratic senators are incensed about Gorsuch's nomination because they feel that the Republican majority in the Senate stole the current vacancy on the court from President Obama, refusing to consider Garland and maintaining the vacancy for most of a year until the presidential election changed control of the White House.

This was indeed crude politics, but appointments to high federal office are actually the Senate's own; the president's power is limited to nomination. Besides, Democratic senators this week played their own crude politics, refusing to attend committee meetings so they could stall some of the president’s Cabinet nominees. As for the legal and political issue believed to underlie the struggle over Gorsuch's nomination -- abortion -- it was the political left that wanted to constitutionalize it with the Supreme Court's decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, rather than leave the issue as a legislative prerogative of the states.

Since the country remains divided on abortion, no one should be surprised if the political reversal in Washington prompts attempts to de-constitutionalize the issue, especially since even some legal scholars who favor abortion rights acknowledge that the Roe decision was bad law.

But in the ideological hatefulness that dominates politics today, anyone who tries to make fair distinctions risks getting lynched by one side or the other.

xxx

Not everything in Connecticut is crumbling. Bradley International Airport, in Windsor Locks, is steadily improving, and the other day Gov Dan. Malloy and the Connecticut Airport Authority announced that another airline will join Bradley's stable. The airline, Spirit, a no-frills carrier, will fly from Bradley to Orlando, Fla., once a day starting in April, and, starting in June, once a day to Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Spirit also will offer spring and summer flights from Bradley to Myrtle Beach, S.C., four days a week starting in April. The airport authority will extend $400,000 to the airline in promotional expenses and fee waivers, not a big bribe. Now all state government has to do is figure out how to get Spirit's Connecticut passengers to come back from down south.

Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
 

Jim Hightower: A Koch brother's pseudo-academic investment

Via OtherWords.org

First came withering hoots of laughter when the honchos of George Mason University named their law school the Antonin Scalia School Of Law — or ASSOL, for short. It was an honor Scalia might’ve merited, but very embarrassing for the university.

Even though administrators quickly changed the name to the Scalia Law School, their embarrassment turned into shame. It turns out they’d sold the naming rights to none other than Charles Koch, a multibillionaire right-wing extremist.

For years, Koch and other moneyed corporatists have quietly pumped millions into pseudo-academic centers on college campuses to promote their laissez-faire ideology, including a handful at George Mason itself.

But here was Virginia’s largest public university letting the infamous Koch brother and another un-named right-winger give $30 million in exchange for branding George Mason’s law school — one of the university’s core academic institutions — with Scalia’s name.

Students and faculty rebelled at the idea that integrity of their university, supposedly a center of enlightenment and erudition, was to be identified with a judge notorious for veering into racist and homophobic rants, and for being the Supreme Court’s most obsequious servant of plutocratic corporate rule.

Rebellion turned to fury when it came out that the ‘donation’ also required school officialsto commit taxpayer money to finance 12 new professorships and two new centers to promote the Koch brothers’ fantasies of free-market plutocracy.

The university’s president calls this perfidious transaction a simple ‘'naming gift.’'  But who is he to put the name of the people’s law school up for sale? And why was it sold in a secret, no-bid process?

Koch wasn’t making a gift. He was buying a public asset — including the university’s integrity.

Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.