Politics

[GoIrish41]

Technically not about the Presidential election but worth reading just to laugh (and maybe cry).
Getting to Know Robert Morrow: Newly elected GOP county chair causing a Republican revolt - News - The Austin Chronicle

How this guy got elected to anything is truly mind boggling.

Sounds like a natural Trump VP candidate.

 

[phgreek]

not presidential but still election 2016...smh


'OMG': NRSC couldn't delete this cringeworthy tweet about Tammy Duckworth fast enough [pic] - twitchy.com twitchy.com

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">And they deleted it (but here it is in case you were wondering): <a href="https://t.co/tZmXPlQXvp">pic.twitter.com/tZmXPlQXvp</a></p>— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) <a href="https://twitter.com/BecketAdams/status/707300188575162368">March 8, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

Personally I find it unlikely someone who lost their legs in war would pose a systematic threat to veterans issues...but while someone points out the inartful language, they may want to acknowledge the motivation to call her out too.

People from both sides love to play the satirist game...when they aren't.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

President Obama SNUBS Nancy Reagan's funeral so he can speak at hipster festival South By Southwest | Daily Mail Online

Pretty disappointed by this. I know the choice is his, but still I am disappointed.

It's very common.

Obama takes heat for skipping Nancy Reagan's funeral for festival | Fox News

Obama, though, hardly is setting a precedent by missing the funeral of a former first lady.

The Clintons did not attend the funeral of Pat Nixon in 1993. In 2007, President George W. Bush did not attend the funeral of Lady Bird Johnson, though he had no scheduled events that day.

And in 2011, Obama did not attend the funeral of former first lady Betty Ford.

President Carter also did not attend the funeral of Mamie Eisenhower in 1979, while President Reagan did not attend the funeral of Bess Truman in 1982.

 

[zelezo vlk]

They also did do a ton of security and clearance for his speech. Between all of the factors, this isn't too big of a deal to me.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

 

[phgreek]

US Attorney General: 'We May Prosecute Climate Change Deniers'.

“This matter has been discussed. We have received information about it and have referred it to the FBI to consider whether or not it meets the criteria for which we could take action on,” said Attorney General Loretta Lynch, responding to a question from green activist Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) at a Senate Judiciary Hearing."

I think Whitehouse's assertion is a stretch.

Tobacco companies were found to have conducted their own studies, understood the acute health impacts of tobacco, and not only funded and produced bogus data and advertisements, they added more substances to make tobacco more addictive.

The big energy intersts have complied with myriad of EPA standards...oftentimes when the EPA themselves do not understand what they codify....read big energy interests take it upon themselves to explain to the EPA what they are asking for and how to regulate it. So there is such a chasm of intent here between tobacco companies and big energy interests, it is insulting to compare the two in any meaningful way. Further, I am not aware of an instance where big energy has falsified data, and as I said they have complied with regs, therefore, they must accept some level of human impact, or they'd still be trying to roll back the clean air act. I think it is fair for them to question what that impact is beyond acute health issues, and decide when to push back.

I think the comparison between tobacco and big energy ends with acute health affects ...but even then, the differences ought to be self-evident.

 

[drayer54]

Most energy companies that I know of, including those in the oil field, have acknowledged climate change.

The issue is what to do with it. How many jobs is fighting climate change worth? Is a carbon tax really that much of a game changer?

 

[Buster Bluth]

The issue is what to do with it. How many jobs is fighting climate change worth? Is a carbon tax really that much of a game changer?

If the effects are accurate, it's worth every oil and gas job ten times over.

We're getting better, it's really as simple as getting away from coal by using natural gas while green energy grows. We're on the right path.

What doesn't help are the stances of many in the GOP, namely Ted Cruz, who want to remove all green energy subsidies that are encouraging such growth in the industry that we are <20 years away from cost competitive solar energy. Goldman Sachs words, not mine.

 

[BGIF]

Here's a short quiz Charles Murray developed to gauge how insulated one is from mainstream American culture.

76 points

With range spreads up to 69, this is as valid as reading a horoscope.

The only show I checked on the TV list were shows I watch with my wife, "quality time". I watch most of my shows in the man cave. My wifes doesn't care for most of the show or movies I do.

I grew up in a one of those white bread suburbs Buster hates. The town was founded in 1663 and there were two adults that were college grads in my neighborhood. I lived in the Central Ward in Newark for 3 years and did volunteer mentoring/teaching also was a card carrying teamster (Ballantine Brewery). BS Civil Engineering. U.S. Army. MS Environmental Engineer, PE. Project Engineer/Project Manager Designing Water and Wastewater Treatment plants plus Resource Recovery Facilities (Sludge and MSW). Moved to equipment side and moved to Houston. Worked in 47 stats and some 2 dozen countries.

First house was another suburn (again with no interstate highway around). Second house was semi-rural 30 years ago. Built up now with an Interstate a mile west of me and an Interstate a mile north of me. But I still live in an unincorporated highway. There might be a dozen college grads in my mixed race/mixed religions neighborhood. Houses range from less than a 100K (trailer) to $500 K.

 

[Buster Bluth]

I grew up in a one of those white bread suburbs Buster hates. The town was founded in 1663

Chances are I have almost no criticisms of a town founded in 1663.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's John D. Wilsey just published an article titled "What Would Tocqueville Say About Trump?"

I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country; whilst the latter may turn to some advantage the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws. The importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. It may be regarded as a central point in the range of observation, and the common termination of all my inquiries. So seriously do I insist upon this head, that, if I have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence of the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, of the manners of the Americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, I have failed in the principal object of my work.

So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in volume I, chapter 17 of his classic work on American political and social institutions, Democracy in America. Tocqueville, a French lawyer and member of the aristocracy, came to the United States in the spring of 1831. He traveled around Jacksonian America for nine months, and returned to France in the winter of 1832. In 1835, he published the first volume of Democracy, which was received with enormous enthusiasm in both France and England. He published the second volume in 1840. The book continues to be one of the most far-reaching analyses of American culture ever written.

Tocqueville was convinced that the underlying reason for the success of democracy in America was the “manners” of the people. By manners, Tocqueville meant the value-assumptions of the Americans, their overall “character of mind.” He went on to say that manners referred to “the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people.”

In his statement above, Tocqueville said that American manners form the foundation for the success of the American experiment in democracy. This is striking for a couple of reasons. First, when Tocqueville used the term “democracy,” he had in mind much more than simply government by the people. He had a much more expansive definition of democracy—he equated democracy with equality of condition, the fact of the absence of feudal hierarchical social structures which had broad social and political ramifications.

Second, Tocqueville did not think that democracy was an unmitigated good. Rather, he assumed that democracy tended toward the tyranny of the majority. Equality of condition in a society would gravitate toward excessive individualism among the populace. This individualism would thus result in the people turning inward, away from civic duty and toward their private interests. As a result, the people would become civically lazy. They would lose interest in engagement with local affairs, become satisfied with nationalization of politics and the centralization of rule. They thus would learn to love only themselves, and cease to love each other. What kept democratic despotism in check was the uniquely American habit of voluntarily associating together in local bodies such as reform organizations, civic societies, and most of all, churches. This cultural and political habit—or manner—of localism thus was fundamental to the protection of liberty.

What influenced the manners of the Americans? In a word, religion. Tocqueville observed that Christian morals pervaded American society, and the Christian religion shaped and formed American manners. He said, “In the United States, religion exercises but little influence upon the laws, and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the manners of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state.” Furthermore, Tocqueville observed that the Americans themselves believed religion to be indispensable to their republic.

So, more than geography, more than laws, more than anything else, manners—informed by religion—were the basis for American greatness and the only means of preserving freedom, according to Tocqueville.

Lest we rely on an idyllic picture of antebellum America, we should remember that Charles Dickens made his famous visit to America just 10 years after Tocqueville. He was not impressed. He famously wrote to his friend William Macready in 1842 that “this is not the Republic of my imagination” and “I would not condemn you to a year’s residence on this side of the Atlantic, for any money.” He was also disgusted by how Americans sought to profit off of his visit to America, and described being nauseated by their tobacco spitting. He called Washington “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” Tocqueville was also realistic about Americans, noting that they were more obsessed with money-making than any society he had encountered. The quotable Tocqueville—that is, the usable Tocqueville—is celebratory of America, but a careful reading of Tocqueville alongside other contemporary accounts yields a more complex picture.

Trump as Case Study

Still, if Tocqueville was right about manners and their significance to American democratic institutions—and full disclosure, I believe that he is—then we are surely living in interesting times. The phenomenon of GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump becomes an interesting case study in Tocqueville’s writings about manners. It is hard to be neutral about Trump. Ezra Klein recently expressed what many worried Republicans are thinking—namely, Trump is fun, but are we really prepared to have him represent the United States to the world? And what attracts voters to Trump? Seventy-eight percent of Republican primary voters in South Carolina liked him because he “tells it like it is.”

And how does he do that? He insults. He uses profanity. He bombasts. If you’re really interested, check out this catalogue of Trump insults on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. (Spare yourself. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.) This kind of behavior reveals what he thinks about human dignity. Forget about his pro-choice stances, if you can. Forget about his racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant policy positions, if you must. Just note what comes out of his mouth.

Trump’s statements shock many. I hear a lot of my evangelical Christian friends express their befuddlement, asking things like “Who is supporting him?” and “I don’t know anyone who backs him.” Clearly, a lot of people are. And instead of being shocked by Trump and his buffoonery, we should be shocked at ourselves.

After all, Trump is not an anomaly. He is a reflection of American culture. He is the image of the coarseness and incivility in American culture that has grown more and more pronounced until today, when it is acceptable for a major presidential candidate to refer to one of his opponents as a p***y. He ought to have his mouth washed out with soap. (That was my grandmother’s form of waterboarding.)

When we see Trump, we see ourselves. Trump is a credible candidate today, and he would not have been credible in the past. Trump has always been a boor, but American manners have not always been boorish enough for Trump to find a place in public discourse. Now they are. We have no one to blame but ourselves, we who have become narcissistic, uncivil, civically lazy, obdurate, gullible, uncouth, easily offended, and in the prophet Jeremiah’s words, we are so implacable, we do “not know how to blush.”

One of the insidious realities surrounding Trump’s rise is how many evangelical Christians have latched onto him. To be fair, evangelicals are split in their support of Trump. But many evangelicals continue to flock to him. In South Carolina, 34 percent of Trump’s voters were born-again evangelicals, and 31 percent said that it was important that the candidate share their religious values. Jerry Falwell, Jr. of Liberty University and Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas have publicly endorsed him. Franklin Graham has come short of a full-throated endorsement, but has spoken favorably of him. Graham has been especially supportive of Trump’s idea of banning Muslim immigration to the United States, ironically as a part of his “campaign for God.”

What does the rise of Trump say about the state of American evangelical Christianity? This subculture is sometimes hardly distinguishable from the coarse American society in general. Over the past few generations, text-based authority has been replaced, in large measure, by subjective authority. Individual constructs of pragmatics, feelings, preferences, and sensibilities have taken the central place of authority that the Bible had in other periods of history (prior to the introduction of existentialism and Protestant liberalism in the early 20th century). When textual and orthodox tradition is neglected and replaced by self-actualization as religious authority, then religious culture coarsens. And if Tocqueville was right about the influence of religion on manners, then the coarsening occurring in religious culture has had, and continues to have, a direct effect on the coarsening of culture in general.

Tocqueville’s Solution?

Today’s cultural decay is a complicated problem, to be sure. But if Tocqueville is any guide, there is wisdom in two more observations he made in Democracy in America.

First, Tocqueville noted that Americans were not especially virtuous, but they did have an abiding self-interest, and they recognized that their interests were promoted by the public interest. In other words, the best way to achieve private goods was to guard the interests of the whole. Tocqueville famously called this reality “interest rightly understood,” and posited that it prevents society from descending into moral chaos. It may not make all people in society virtuous, but it does raise those up who are particularly lacking in virtue: “I regard it as their chief remaining security against themselves.” Yet the principle of interest rightly understood does not come naturally to people. It must be taught, and again, religion has a role to play in the instilling of this principle.

Second, and most importantly, if society is to preserve liberty, it must be vigilant and determined to be proactive in doing so. For example, to exercise the principle of interest rightly understood, “daily small acts of self denial” are required. Because egotism is the basic vice of the human heart, the selfie culture is the natural tendency in an equal society. And despots encourage egotism. Tocqueville said of the despot, that he “easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.” And when they do not love each other, they will not seek to govern themselves but they will be satisfied to leave the responsibilities of government with the despot. This statement fits Trump, perhaps like no other statement from Tocqueville does.

Supporters of Trump are looking for the easy way out of what ails the country—an ailing military and economy, the failure of U.S. leadership in the world, illegal immigration, and the rising tide of secularism and the growth of the influence of those who profess no religious faith. They are looking for someone who can “make America great again” by “bombing the s*** out of” ISIS, by getting rid of all illegal immigrants, by making sure that everybody says “Merry Christmas” around December-time. And of course, Trump assures us that if he is elected president, “we’ll win so much, you’ll get bored of winning.” If we are to believe Trump, all we have to do is elect him, and all our problems will go away.

Tocqueville wrote that despotism promises all the answers, but it can only deliver despotism: “despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills.” Under a despot, the “nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which it produces, until it is roused to a sense of its misery.” But liberty, Tocqueville stressed, is the fruit of long-term commitment, determination, and labor. And contrary to despotism, of which fruits can be measured in the short term (i.e. “he keeps the trains running on time”), liberty can only be appreciated once its effects have taken time to develop. “Liberty … is generally established with difficulty in the midst of storms; it is perfected by civil discord; and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.”

Cultural decline is never an inevitability. And there is no such thing as a point of no return. The statement, “we live in a coarse society” may be a truism, something most of us know intuitively. But human beings have free will, and they have it within their power to reject indignity, incivility, and boorishness. To put it bluntly, it is not necessary to use vulgar words to describe our political foes. But it is necessary to refine our manners, at least if we aim to preserve our liberty.

Trumpus delendus est.

 

[Cackalacky]

Here's a short quiz Charles Murray developed to gauge how insulated one is from mainstream American culture.

66.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's Rod Dreher just published an article titled "A Hard Case, For Trump":

The Washington Post‘s great Stephanie McCrummen profiles Ralph Case, a struggling small-town Ohio businessman who has placed all his chips on Trump. Excerpts:

It was in so many ways the moment that 38-year-old Ralph Case had been waiting for, one building since June, when the single father with a one-truck renovation business was watching TV in his living room. A breaking news alert flashed on the screen, followed by the scene in a brassy lobby in New York City. “Rockin’ in the Free World” was blasting. A crowd was facing an escalator. And then, gliding down it, came the man Ralph recognized as the “great builder” and reality-show host Donald J. Trump, who was announcing his bid for president.

“Oh. My. God,” is what Ralph remembers thinking. As Trump spoke of an America that doesn’t “have any victories anymore,” he felt something stirring inside — “like something hit me in my gut.”

“I’m thinking, it’s time,” Ralph recalled. “Like, this is big. This is bigger than big.”

He became a Trump supersupporter. McCrummen details the hardscrabble life Ralph Case has. More:

It seemed to Ralph that the whole political world was mobilizing against Trump, and by extension, people like him — an everyman with an 11th grade education, aching knees and chronic ailments requiring four prescriptions and a monthly IV infusion to keep him going.

All of it only affirmed Ralph’s instinct: that Trump was an outsider telling the truth about America’s decline. “He’s honest,” said Ralph. “And the truth hurts.”

“Hey, Ralph,” said a volunteer named Mike, arriving at the office to pick up signs. “You see what the Republicans are trying to do to us? It’s just sad. They will never get another vote from me.”

“Me either,” said Ralph, who had actually rarely voted before but was now so energized that he had called the John “Couchburner” Denning radio show that morning, waiting on hold for 35 minutes to tell people about the new office on Tuscarawas Street, where a portable sign in the parking lot said “Tru Headquarters” because he’d run out of letters. Now people were streaming in.

Read the whole thing. I’ve read it twice, and man, my heart breaks for this guy. He’s like a walking John Mellencamp song. If Trump doesn’t make it, he’s going to be crushed. And I am completely confident that if Trump does make it to the White House … he’s going to be crushed. Him and his boys. And these people, from the story:

There was the veteran who couldn’t care less that Trump was vulgar: “I feel he’s talking to me when he talks,” said Terry Smerz.

There were Lucia Zappitelli, who worked for 30 years at Diebold until her division was outsourced to India — “He tells it like it is, and we are sinking,” she said — and Pam Henderhan, who was handing out the phone number for the Republican Party so people could complain.

It’s people like Ralph Case, Terry Smerz, and Lucia Zappitelli — 30 years at Diebold, and then her job goes to India — that make me deeply sympathetic to Trump. I don’t think the Republican Party or the Democratic Party really cares about them. The tragedy, though, is that Trump is playing these people. My friend Michael Brendan Dougherty, who has also written sympathetically about Trump’s crusade, details how the candidate is already falling apart. Excerpt:

Indeed, the transformation is already showing. On policy, Trump is caving to normal Republicanism. He’s trying to get elected by pining for someone to finish the dang fence but has amnesty on the mind. He’s promising to protect American workers from unfair competition, but angling to pass a plutocratic tax reform. By the end of his campaign the only thing he’ll have added to the Republican Party is a reputation for crudity and disorderly violence.

His nationalist challenge to the status quo is disintegrating before our eyes. Instead of the inevitable transformation of the American right, Donald Trump is just the most successful huckster, selling gold coins and survival seeds to a scared public.

MBD and National Review‘s Kevin D. Williamson got into a heated argument last month about Trump and the white working class. The WaPo’s Jim Tankersley summarizes their exchange here, and adds a few comments from his interview with MBD, which concludes like this:

(MBD says When conservatives think of American trade negotiators and diplomats working to lower the barriers to American capitalists investing in overseas workforces, they see it as a core function of government, not as a kind of favor to wealthy clients of the American state. But if the same negotiators had in mind the interests of American workers instead, they see it as corrupt protectionism, that coddles the undeserving. There is a huge failure of imagination on the right. And a failure of self-awareness. It may also be that I don’t see conservatism’s primary duty as guarding the purity of certain 19th century liberal principles on economics. I see its task as reconciling and harmonizing the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.

That’s how I see things too. Now, KDW has excoriated the Ralph Cases of the world in the pages of National Review, in an essay that has enraged some on the Right. It’s behind a paywall now, but here’s an excerpt:

If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.

Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.

Well.

If you haven’t read KDW’s reporting from Appalachia’s white ghettos, you really should. He is not a guy writing from the comfort of a Manhattan office. For one, he lives in Texas (he was born in the Texas Panhandle), and for another, he has been out into the field. KDW’s verdict in his new piece is far too harsh, and somewhat misguided, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. But let me say what I think he gets right.

My late father was born and raised in rural poverty in the Deep South. He spent most of his career working as the chief public health officer in our parish, which is the most rural one in the state of Louisiana. Nobody gets rich working as the state public health officer. He dealt with real poverty every single day, both in the course of doing his own work, and in the parish health unit, where his office was. He was a compassionate man, but also an unsentimental one. For him, poverty and human behavior was not an abstract problem. It was one he lived.

My dad made a fool of me from time to time, and I deserved it. There was a time when I was a snotty college student, and having a good old time with my buddies making fun of a poor, simple man. Daddy let me have it good, shaming me for looking down my nose at that man. That man had lived a hard life, and was not smart. He had made mistakes. But he did not deserve the scorn of smart-ass college boys like me and my friends. Daddy didn’t make that man into a Bruce Springsteen hero. He just saw him as a human being who deserved respect.

During my crusading liberal days in college, I was full of ardor and right-thinking on the subject of race and poverty. I dismissed my dad’s conservative views as typical hard-hearted Reaganism, and fumed over how someone like him, who was raised working-class and was culturally working class, could sympathize with Reagan, that old racist. What it took me years to see was that however shaped my father’s views on race and poverty were by his generation’s attitudes, they were also deeply informed by years of observation of how poor black people, like poor white people, lived. He would try to explain to me how nobody who lived the way so many of the black (and white) poor did in our parish could ever hope to break the cycle of poverty. It took education, and hard work, and self-discipline, especially staying off of drink, drugs, and avoiding having children outside of marriage. You had to be sensible with your money, he would tell me (I didn’t know until many years later how hard he and my mom, a school bus driver, struggled financially during my childhood).

I didn’t want to hear it. I had my theories from my books and my favorite magazines and op-ed writers. What did my dad know, anyway?

I’m not retrospectively canonizing him. Like every one of us, my dad’s take on the world was limited by his circumstances. The point is, my dad’s lack of sentimentality about the lives of the rural poor came from the inside out, and from working with and among them. They were by comparison only an abstraction to me, a kid born in the late 1960s at the end of the long postwar boom that had propelled people like my dad into the middle class.

The thing I remember most about my dad was how much contempt he had for people who would not work. He was an old-timer who really didn’t respect office work as “real work” (you can imagine how much stress this caused in our relationship). He had to work at a desk when he was the public health officer, and hated every minute of it. He preferred to be working with his hands, and literally, until the day he died, would tell anybody who would listen what a damn shame it was that we lived in a society that devalued physical labor, and tried to push everybody into college.

All of this is to say that when I read Kevin D. Williamson’s essay, I hear in it the voice of my father. Daddy would take the side of a hard-working man, white or black, in a heartbeat, but a man he judged as lazy, or wanting a handout — they were nothing but trash to him, whatever their race. And if you didn’t live by a code of honor — hard work, self-discipline, respect for self and others — you were no kind of man in his eyes. I remember once passing the house of a poor white family down one of our country roads, and remarking on the ramshackleness of their house. Daddy did not feel sorry for them. He told me that the mother and father of that family were struggling, but that the father drank all his wages up, and was “no-account.” The mother, she had her own problems. He pointed out how hard they made the lives of their children by their slothful, self-indulgent behavior. Daddy was as hard on them as he was on the rich people in town that he thought didn’t do their duty to their kids and their community.

Worst of all in my father’s eyes were those people who were content to sit on their butts “like a stump full of owls eating dirt daubers,” in his memorable phrase, allowing their kids to suffer and everything to fall apart around them when they could be doing something, anything, to provide. My father would at times point out people in our town to my sister and me as examples to emulate, or to avoid imitating. “That sumbitch wouldn’t hit a lick at a snake,” he would say about a fellow who was lazy (and who might be rich or poor).

Someone who was content to wallow in self-pity instead of getting up and going somewhere to find work to provide for his family — that kind of person would have been contemptible in my dad’s eyes. Life, for him, was about struggle. To win at life was to struggle honorably. That was the main thing. To have to leave your town would be a tragedy, maybe, but better that than to pity yourself and depend on the charity of others. His was a code of honor held by many of the white working class in his day, and he believed in it fiercely. He would have had nothing but scorn for the “vicious, selfish culture” of some poor and working class white people — and black people too. My father would have given KDW a thumbs-up on that.

But here’s the part of my dad that I don’t find in KDW’s essay.

Daddy was one of those people referred to on retirement plaques as a “dedicated public servant.” Thing is, he really was. He never bragged about it; he just did it. He thought the honorable thing for a man to do was to help out his community, to be of service to others. Now that he’s gone, I look back on the things my dad did for this place, and I marvel. In his job as the public health officer, he helped bring running water and sewerage to the houses of poor people who had never had it. He set up and administered programs that did real good for people. When I was a little kid, I would go with him on his rounds of our parish during the week he would provide free rabies vaccinations for the dogs of country people. He didn’t have to do that; he knew that it would help folks out. And on and on. He helped start our neighborhood volunteer fire department, and served as its first chief — this, in a time when he could have relaxed in retirement.

In short, he loved this place and its people, and believed that being a good man meant caring about the common good. Towards the very end of his life, he despaired of this at times, but the sum of his life’s work was to leave his community better than he found it. For my father, this was a real thing. He often became frustrated with what he regarded as the foolishness of people to get caught up in parochial, self-interested concerns, at the expense of the greater good, and at times, towards the end of his life, confessed to despairing of the work he had done over the decades. As readers of my Dante book will know, I think my dad made a false idol of community, family, and place, one that caused him and me a lot of heartache, though we worked it all out before the end. Still, the life he spent in service to his community is a model to me of the public-spirited man.

I know that in his final decade, he was concerned about how hard it was for young people born and raised here to stay in the parish. The kind of jobs that were available to men of his generation had largely disappeared. We had (and still have) a problem with affordable housing here. In his eyes, it was bad enough that my generation would leave here in search of work because we chose to do so. Much worse were his generation’s grandchildren who wanted to stay here, but could not because there was no work for them.

What do the winners in the information economy owe to those who have not done well? A man used to be able to make a good living by the strength of his back and his willingness to work. That’s the world my dad grew up in, and that shaped his outlook on life. Now, many Republicans have lost touch with how hard it is for people who don’t have the education or the natural intelligence to navigate this new world. Back in 2005, when George W. Bush, fresh from his re-election triumph, undertook a crusade to privatize Social Security, I found myself thinking about my dad and the people back home. That scheme was for people like me: successful middle-class professionals who knew how to take advantage of investment opportunities, or (in my case, because I’m an idiot on math) afford the professional advice on how to manage investments. Most of the working people back home would have been set upon by the kind of people who pay big money to political campaigns, and been fleeced. I don’t think that G.W. Bush intended to hurt these people. But I think Republicans, especially policy people in DC, suffer from what MBD calls a failure of imagination. They don’t understand that not everybody is an A student, and not everybody can figure the complexities of modern life out. There is among a lot of Republicans a contempt for the working poor and working class — a contempt of which that the people who hold it are unaware — that says people not smart enough to be self-contained, successful individualist libertarians kind of deserve what they get. Too stupid to figure out how to invest your Social Security allotment? Sucks to be you.

That’s part of what I hear in KDW’s essay, that attitude. Having trouble reaching your bootstraps because you were born with arms too short, or you threw your back out permanently? Sucks to be you.

I wish my dad were still around to talk to about Trump, and the Ralph Cases of the world. I wonder what he would say. Again, he was not a sentimentalist, but rather a practical man. In fact, he was so uninterested in tradition that if it had been up to him, he would have bulldozed antebellum houses to make a shopping center if the land would be more profitable that way. He and I got into a hot argument a couple of decades ago about whether or not Wal-mart ought to come to town. I think he got the best of me, to be honest. He pointed out that it was easy for me to decry the potential aesthetic spoil of our town, because I didn’t live here, and I didn’t have to drive way out of the way to get things because most of the small stores in town had long since closed. And during the last big political controversy in our parish, he was adamantly on the side of the forces of progress, because he believed that the “let’s keep everything the way it is” people, whether they realized it or not, were dooming our parish to obsolescence and permanent decline. I say all this to you to point out that he did not believe in the idea of a permanent arcadia.

That said, he was the kind of man who would almost certainly have taken Michael Brendan Dougherty’s side here:

It may also be that I don’t see conservatism’s primary duty as guarding the purity of certain 19th century liberal principles on economics. I see its task as reconciling and harmonizing the diverse energies and interests of a society for the common good.

He was one of the most intelligent men I’ve ever known, but he hated theory. Hated it. The only Shakespeare he knew or cared anything about was the company that made fishing reels, and he couldn’t have given a fig about Aristotle or even Tocqueville. What he understood in his bones was that the things that make life worth living are goods that come to us in family, and in community. A good life is something that ought to be shared, and shared across generations. He used to talk with bitterness about the merchants who left the parish after the catastrophic 1927 flood, which followed a long period of economic decline. He was born in 1934, and was too young to remember any of it, but he had it fixed in his mind that those people had abandoned us.

Whenever this would come up, I would explain to him that those merchants back then almost certainly had no choice but to leave for the city, because there was no economy around here anymore, not after the flood and the boll weevil, and certainly not during the Great Depression. He was a smart man, and at some level must have understood what I was saying. Still, he was convinced emotionally that they ought to have found some way to have stuck it out. Because you know, they were us. We were one community. That’s how he saw it. Where was their loyalty? To the “almighty dollar,” as he would put it? Or to, you know, all of us?

I don’t know what my dad would have thought of Trump. He died late last summer, as Trump’s campaign was taking off. The last thing we watched on TV together was Trump’s rally in Mobile, but he didn’t comment on it. I think that my dad would have instinctively taken the side of Ralph Case, and Terry Smerz, and Lucia Zappitelli. But he wouldn’t have agreed that they were owed a living in their town. I suspect his view would have been that the best policy is one that makes it easier — not easy, but easier — for people to stay where they were born and raised, and where their family’s roots are. That’s what I think it meant to be conservative, to my dad: to give decent men and women willing to work hard and live honorably — not like common trash, sponging off their neighbors — the opportunity to make a decent life for themselves in their hometowns. He was a George Bailey kind of guy. He unquestionably shared KDW’s low opinion of “no-count” people whose poverty he saw as largely the result of deficient character. But he reflexively sided with the little guy with the hard work ethic, and he would give people a chance if he thought they were salt of the earth folks doing their best.

Here’s who my dad was. He owned a trailer park for a couple of decades (money from those rental spaces helped put my sister and me through college), and kept the monthly rental fee somewhat below market rate. He knew the people who rented spaces from him were hard workers, and that they struggled to pay their bills. He had a soft spot for working men and women — and if they were working at the mill or the plant, they were making more money than he was at the health department. I can remember my mom complaining to him from time to time, quite reasonably, that really, Ray, you can’t let So-and-so keep taking advantage of you like that. They’re way behind on their rent. Don’t you see that they’re cheating you? There were times when my dad had to face that fact and evict people. But he hated to do it, because, I think, he remembered what it was like to have little, and to fight to hang on to that. He was a soft touch as a landlord, not because he was dumb, but because he stood with the little guy, always. He was a Reagan Democrat all the way.

We were watching the news one day during the last year of his life. I don’t know what the particular story was, but I remember watching him sit in his chair, shaking his head. “I’m glad I’m not going to be around to see much more of this,” he said. The world had long since passed him by. He did not believe America was headed towards greatness, that’s for sure.

My heart hurts for Ralph Case. He’s the kind of man my dad would have befriended, helped, and fought for. He’s the kind of many my dad did befriend, help, and fight for. And he’s going to get run over.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

TAC's Rod Dreher just published an article titled "What Is a Good Society?"

Reader Geoff Guth has a great comment:

I recently moved back to Arizona to (finally!) complete my education. Until the semester begins, I’m supporting myself by driving a tow truck. So I’ve got an interesting perch to observe some of the problems of the working class first hand.

There’s a guy I work with I’ll call Steve. he’s probably about my age, The sweetest guy you’ll ever meet: friendly, generous with his time and effort if you need a hand. He works hard, consistently scores well on his evaluations. And he’s found his niche, because he pretty clearly has some kind of learning disability. He’s good at his job, but he’s never going to advance any further. He’s not going to go out and start a business.

Can we not have an economy that works better for him? When you talk about the problems with privatising social security, I think about Steve and nod my head. When I think about the virtues of single payer health coverage, I think about Steve, who is absolutely not equipped to navigate all of the choices and variables of the private health insurance system we have.

Then there’s “Joe”, who was born into the dysfunctional kind of environment you’ve been discussing with KDW. He’s got a past that includes drug abuse and prison and association with some really bad people. He’s a great teacher, very conscientious at his work. He’s raising kids on his own. He works nights so he can be there during the day. He picks up extra shifts (for which he doesn’t get paid overtime due to a loophole in the law) to make ends meet. He has made the choices to repent and to turn towards a better path.

In exchange for about 50-55 hours a week, these two guys can expect maybe $30k at most. By any measure, they’re doing the right things, making the right choices.

And this is work that is absolutely vital to the community. If we don’t do our job, your commute doesn’t happen.

Contra KDW, who seems content to throw up his hands when confronted with these problems, we know, from the experience of other nations, that there are ways of helping my co-workers live better and with more security.

That is not to suggest that we don’t have an issue with the culture or that we shouldn’t encourage people to make better choices. I’ve had that I. my own life and I’m deeply grateful for it. But we also need better encouragement and better support for people who are doing the right thing.

A $15/hour minimum wage would give every man Jack at my workplace, many of whom are doing the right thing by supporting their families, a pretty substantial raise. Canadian-style single payer (which I have seen first hand and which I know works fairly well) would lift a major burden from them. Maybe there are better solutions that these; maybe there are market reforms that would work better. But all too often, these arguments to the culture from conservatives strike me as nothing more than an excuse to do nothing.

Which brings us back to the attraction of Trump: he has actually correctly diagnosed the problem that the working class (emphasis on working) needs help and support and they have not been getting it.

This is a very good comment. I once read a remark apocryphally attributed to either Peter Maurin or Dorothy Day, I forget which, that defined the “good society” as a society that makes it easier to be good. By that standard, we should structure our society, including our economy, in ways that make it easier for people in it to be good, to do the right thing.

But to do that requires agreeing on what goodness is, and what it looks like in community. This is not something we are prepared to do. If we can’t really agree on a goal, even a broad goal, then we can’t even talk about what we have to do collectively to reach it. Reader Chris Rawlings makes a good point about how the way the most successful (socially and materially) Americans live can be extremely alienating to others:

I also think that one big impediment to the upward mobility of working class whites is how unattractive American success these days really can be. America’s cultural standard is hugely alienating, even to Americans. When working class whites see “success” they see 19 year-olds in New Haven marauding against “microaggressing” professors at one of the country’s most prestigious schools. They see tech designers in skinny jeans and ironic t-shirts modeling the newest iPhone, iWatch, or iWhatever. They see grown men—Olympians!—being feted in the media for supposedly “courageous” decisions to live as women. They see a lot of things that don’t make sense and don’t seem right (and, in fact, are not right).

The same phenomenon is at work throughout the West. French leaders continue to grapple with the challenge of integrating millions of Muslims who find crepes, egalitarianism, and pristinely-spoken French to be bothersome relics of an imagined French moral supremacy. And, conversely, you have plenty of German and French voters, as a reaction to that, who also want to throw aside traditional European pluralism for a meatier nationalism that likewise roots itself in something other than le “triomphe” de l’egalite.

The reality is that the same culture that conservatives’ wildly free market has created has become an odious farce, devoid of anything substantive and transcendent enough to inspire people to cultivate and safeguard it. And without a national, cultural “center,” you have a kind of societal chaos that we have now, where nationalists, technocrats, and nihilists tumble together toward a post-liberal future.

All that Reagan-era language from conservatives about “freedom,” without any reference to what freedom is for, has helped produce this mess. Remember Barbara Bush’s 1992 GOP convention speech, in which she tried to blunt the culture war rhetoric of Pat Buchanan? She said, “However you define family, that’s what we mean by family values.” She surely meant well, but that line showed how vacuous the Republicans were about this stuff. They wanted to instrumentalize the language of moral traditionalism to drive votes, but didn’t really want to affirm moral traditionalism if it contradicted with Freedom, and Individual Choice. A society in which Individual Choice is the highest good, not what is chosen, is one that cannot do anything other than fragment.

Hence the secession movement among moral traditionalists who are ceasing to identify the good life with shoring up the American imperium. Reader Dominic1955:

[Quoting me: “If you aren’t troubled by KDW’s question — “Why didn’t someone say something?” — then you aren’t thinking about it hard enough. If I saw a situation (again, non-criminal) in which children were suffering and the parents, or parent, appeared neglectful, there’s not the slightest chance that I would say a thing to them.”]

I wouldn’t either. At best, they’ll just think something like “Who the hell does that guy think he is and what kind of nerve does he have telling me how to do X?!” more likely they’ll just tell you to eff off, at worst it might come to blows.

I’m thinking strategic retreat is about the best option as well, and no liberals, that is not merely “I got mine social Darwinism”. I did get mine, but while the working poor might be a new set of tires away from disaster, I’m not there but I’m a bad car wreck or a serious illness away from disaster. I do have to look out for number 1, its my duty as a husband and a father. I got mine and I would be derelict of duty to decide to go trying to “save” other people from their largely self-inflicted vicious poverty.

Other people in my group think the same way-one could say we were “privileged” in that we were raised by responsible people who imparted to us some degree of work ethic and morals but regardless of the nuts and bolts of it, we need to preserve it against any and all encroachment. That isn’t just material things, its also culture, its also religion, its also philosophy and thinking. That’s why I’m in favor of a Benedict Option, I see it happening all around me in embryonic form as we type.

The poor we will always have with us-same with dysfunctional and self-destructive. Sinners all of us, we can only do so much with what we all have. We will never “fix” the whole world or our own country and its a dangerous pipe dream to start down that road to Utopia. Whether people are honest about what they are doing or not, and most progressives will never cop to chasing Utopia, the tendency must be rejected.

And not only the poor, but the dissolute middle and upper classes. As I was writing this post, a reader e-mailed this. I’ve slightly edited it to obscure certain details, for the sake of privacy. The reader knows people directly involved; she’s not just passing on hearsay:

Last week, a high-school honors teacher at [a very upscale school in the reader’s area] discovered his honors students—nearly all of them—were involved in a cheating ring. The administration arranged a sit-down with all of the students and the teacher who had uncovered the cheating conspiracy. Rather than dressing down the students and devising a punishment and process for restitution, the administration invited the students to tell the teacher how they felt after having been found out. Of course, this turned into a free-for-all roast of the teacher—he was too tough, they were driven to cheat by his unrealistic expectations, etc.—after which the students felt much better and “relationship was restored.” And their parents, apparently, were pleased with how the administration handled the crisis.

To borrow a phrase from Chris Rawlings, that rich school, and that wealthy community, has become “an odious farce, devoid of anything substantive and transcendent enough to inspire people to cultivate and safeguard it.”

What kind of children are those wealthy parents and the administrators of that school raising? If my children were attending that school, I would do everything possible to get them out of it, because I would not want them corrupted by the values of the students and parents who make up that community. It takes a village to raise a child — and when the village has gone bad, all the money and appearances of bourgeois stability in the world will not save it.

What is a good society? What are we prepared to do to defend it, and pass it on to our children? Hard choices are upon us, and they’re going to get harder.

 

[phgreek]

quiz score 63...meh.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

This is scary stuff.

Kansas Supreme Court impeachment bill advances in state Senate | The Wichita Eagle

Stung by court decisions on school finance and death penalty cases, lawmakers are working toward creating a specific list of impeachable offenses, including “attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power” and “attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of government.”

In other words, if they don't interpret our law in the way we think they should, we can get rid of them in favor of someone who will.

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="und" dir="ltr"><a href="https://twitter.com/vj44">@vj44</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/POTUS">@POTUS</a> <a href="https://t.co/ne69cfNCxn">pic.twitter.com/ne69cfNCxn</a></p>— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) <a href="https://twitter.com/SalenaZitoTrib/status/712745333000765440">March 23, 2016</a></blockquote>
<script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Sounds like the Little Sisters of the Poor have a reasonable hope of a 5-4 decision in their favor:

Prof. Michael McConnell — in my view, one of the two top Religion Clauses scholars in the country — was kind enough to pass along these thoughts about the Zubik v. Burwell oral argument, and I thought they were very much worth passing along in turn. (Note that Michael co-filed a friend-of-the-court brief in this case on behalf of several former Justice Department officials.)

The Zubik oral argument: What is the point of this mandate?

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the non-profit religious organization contraceptive mandate cases under the caption of Zubik v. Burwell. In general, the argument confirmed my impression that the government has very little reason to force these religious parties to violate tenets of their faith.

1. First, it was surprising how little the “substantial burden” argument figured in the government’s argument. In all but one of the cases before the Court, the government won solely on lack of substantial burden, with only the D.C. Circuit reaching the government’s affirmative defense of strict scrutiny. But Solicitor General Donald Verrilli spent most of his 45 minutes talking about strict scrutiny, at several times actively trying to avoid the substantial burden question. Indeed, he asked the Court to assume for the purposes of argument that it was to apply strict scrutiny under RFRA. 47:28ff [i.e., p. 47 of the oral argument transcript, line 28, and forward]. Eventually, Justice Kennedy asked Verrilli bluntly if he was conceding the religious exercise/substantial burden part of the case. 45:10ff. And a few minutes later Justice Ginsburg interrupted to ask him the same question. 61:18ff. So it seems the Court will have to resolve the case on the basis of governmental interest, which I have always regarded as its weakest leg.

2. On that point, it is revealing that the Solicitor General tried to change its characterization of the government’s interest – from promoting contraceptive access to promoting contraceptive access specifically through the petitioners’ healthcare plans. Verrilli made clear that only “seamless” contraceptive access through petitioners’ healthcare plans would meet the government’s claimed interest in the case. Indeed, when Justice Sotomayor tried to make the argument that a two-plan system would pass muster, Verrilli disagreed with her. 83:2-18.

One of the problems with this admission is that the government is essentially trying to define the use of a particular means as the compelling interest in itself. That approach to strict scrutiny is entirely circular; it essentially eliminates the least restrictive means analysis by baking the means into the alleged compelling interest.

The Solicitor General never explained why simply allowing petitioners’ employees to purchase health plans on the exchanges would not fully satisfy the government’s interest – as it does for millions of other employees who do not get contraceptive coverage from their employers (those who work for small employers or exempt religious employers, or have grandfathered plans). This point was a major focus of the religious plaintiffs’ argument. See, e.g., 25:22ff, 30:6ff, 34:4ff. And in its brief, the government flatly declared these alternatives were perfectly adequate:

If a small employer elects not to provide coverage (or if a large employer chooses to pay the tax rather than providing coverage), employees will ordinarily obtain coverage through a family member’s employer, through an individual insurance policy purchased on an Exchange or directly from an insurer, or through Medicaid or another government program. All of those sources would include contraceptive coverage.

Gov’t Brief at 65.

Indeed, even as to the employees of these petitioners, the government implicitly concedes that the option of purchasing a plan on the exchanges is just fine, because the government has proposed that petitioners drop their plans and send all of their employees to the exchanges. ETBU Reply Br. at 28. It is hard to fathom why the Court would accept an argument that the exchanges are fine for millions of other people and fine for all of petitioners’ employees, but then suddenly unsatisfactory if only used by the subset of employees who just want a different plan than what petitioners currently offer.

The government’s last gasp is to argue it lacks authority under current law to permit petitioner’ employees to participate in the exchanges on the usual subsidized basis. Putting aside the fact that less restrictive alternatives frequently require changes in the law, this argument does not pass the straight face test. This Administration has exercised extraordinary ingenuity in “interpretation” of the ACA; indeed, it created the existing “accommodation” system, which includes payments of up to 115% of the cost of contraceptives using exchange user fees as the source of payment, out of the whole cloth of administration discretion. It could easily solve this problem if it wanted to.

3. Justice Breyer is evidently struggling with the case. He asked several questions of lawyers for both sides about where courts should “draw the line” about which religious exercise claims get protected and which do not. He seemed skeptical of the idea that the government could win simply by invoking the notion of third party harms. 62:6ff. And he seemed equally skeptical that petitioners should automatically prevail over any statute with exemptions. 38:16ff. As a pragmatic man, he must be puzzled that the government is going to such lengths when it appears so completely unnecessary.

4. One of the most telling moments of oral argument came during General Verrilli’s final two minutes, when Justice Alito highlighted a key government concession—that because some of the petitioners, including the Little Sisters, have a self-insured church plan, the government actually lacks authority under ERISA to make their third-party administrator provide contraceptive coverage. “In that situation,” Justice Alito asked, “will the Little Sisters still be subject to fines for failing to comply?” General Verrilli’s response was astonishing: “No, we don’t think so.” In other words, the government said it has no plans to actually enforce the mandate against the Little Sisters—and, by extension, any of the roughly 500 other religious organizations that have self-insured church plans. And even if the government coerced these organizations to sign its form, this would not make contraceptives flow.

This raises an obvious question: If the government has no plan to enforce the mandate against the Little Sisters, why has it been resisting their case for the last three years? Apparently, the government knows it would be senseless to fine the Little Sisters $70 million per year when the forced compliance would not make contraception coverage available anyway. Why did it wait until oral argument in the Supreme Court to make this crucial concession?

At a bare minimum, the concession establishes a complete lack of a compelling interest, or any interest at all, in forcing the petitioners with self-insured church plans to sign a form that will have no legal effect. More broadly, if Congress did not vest the agencies with authority to make the mandate work as to roughly 500 religious organizations, how compelling could its interest be with respect to the others?

* * *

Religious liberty cases are difficult when there is a genuine conflict between religious convictions and achievement of a democratic goal. How can courts say which of a legislature’s objectives reflect a “compelling” – as opposed to merely a “substantial” – interest, without intruding on the legislative domain? But where, as here, the government can fully achieve its purposes by modest adjustment of means, the judicial task is straightforward. That is why even this deeply divided Court has reached unanimous rulings in all but one RFRA or free exercise case in the last decade.

It is probably too much to hope that the Court will reach anything close to unanimity in a case with the symbolic and cultural valence of this one, but as soon as we get into the weeds of regulatory detail, it becomes obvious that there is no real conflict here. Not a single woman needs to be denied access to contraceptives through a seamless process – and the Little Sisters of the Poor can be left alone to carry on their good works without being required to be the government’s handmaiden for the provision of contraceptives. At a time of rising divisiveness and polarization, it would be greatly calming if the Court could unite in this case to protect the rights of many with absolutely no injury to anyone else, or to the public good.

Still hard to believe that the Obama administration is suing a group of elderly Catholic nuns who provide hospice care to the poor because they don't want to the be complicit in the provision of birth control.

But when Disney threatens to cease filming in Georgia if the state passes its own modest RFRA law, I guess it's par for the course.

 

[IrishLax]

This is scary stuff.

Kansas Supreme Court impeachment bill advances in state Senate | The Wichita Eagle



In other words, if they don't interpret our law in the way we think they should, we can get rid of them in favor of someone who will.

I'm sorry but what right do they have to interpret a law DIFFERENT than how the framers of said law meant for it to be interpreted?

Judges are not supposed to be activists and super-legislators. Unchecked judiciary power can have dire consequences.

 

[pkt77242]

I'm sorry but what right do they have to interpret a law DIFFERENT than how the framers of said law meant for it to be interpreted?

Judges are not supposed to be activists and super-legislators. Unchecked judiciary power can have dire consequences.

My problem with the law is that it is pretty vague.

“attempting to subvert fundamental laws and introduce arbitrary power” and “attempting to usurp the power of the legislative or executive branch of government.”

Read more here: Kansas Supreme Court impeachment bill advances in state Senate | The Wichita Eagle

Is declaring a law unconstitutional usurping the power of the legislative branch? Is a ruling against the death penalty usurping the power of the executive branch?

The justices already face retention elections every 6 years, so there is a way to remove them, this law on the other hand feels like a swipe at the judicial branch for rulings that the legislative branch didn't like.

 

[phgreek]

My problem with the law is that it is pretty vague.

Is declaring a law unconstitutional usurping the power of the legislative branch? Is a ruling against the death penalty usurping the power of the executive branch?

The justices already face retention elections every 6 years, so there is a way to remove them, this law on the other hand feels like a swipe at the judicial branch for rulings that the legislative branch didn't like.

Yea...I HATE judicial activism. But since the ability to remove justices as a normal course already exists, this seems unnecessary and kinda hints at the legislative folks having a red ass.

Now, you want to do this at the SCOTUS level, and enumerate some real criteria...I'm all ears.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

I'm sorry but what right do they have to interpret a law DIFFERENT than how the framers of said law meant for it to be interpreted?

Judges are not supposed to be activists and super-legislators. Unchecked judiciary power can have dire consequences.

As pkt pointed out, it's very vague. It's also undermining the job of the courts and, therefore, the very purpose of checks and balances. Their job is to interpret the law. If it's deemed to be unconstitutional or the wording of the law is such that certain legislators don't like the way the court interprets it, the legislature needs to write a new law.

 

[IrishLax]

As pkt pointed out, it's very vague. It's also undermining the job of the courts and, therefore, the very purpose of checks and balances. Their job is to interpret the law. If it's deemed to be unconstitutional or the wording of the law is such that certain legislators don't like the way the court interprets it, the legislature needs to write a new law.

So that the court can give a warped interpretation again?

I agree the wording the the "impeachment" law is broad and vague, but judicial is a real problem that is completely undermining the entire concept of 'checks and balances'... these people are being empowered to completely change legislation based on nothing more than their feelings on that given day. They're becoming super legislators with unchecked power, and moreover in many cases (depending on which judge your talking about and where) they answer to literally no one.

 

[IrishJayhawk]

So that the court can give a warped interpretation again?

I agree the wording the the "impeachment" law is broad and vague, but judicial is a real problem that is completely undermining the entire concept of 'checks and balances'... these people are being empowered to completely change legislation based on nothing more than their feelings on that given day. They're becoming super legislators with unchecked power, and moreover in many cases (depending on which judge your talking about and where) they answer to literally no one.

I think that your argument is more valid at the federal level. But judges answer to the public in elections in many states (not sure the number). Iowa is a perfect example. After the state supreme court ruled that limiting gay marriage was a violation of the equal protection clause, 3 of the supreme court justices were voted out in the next election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varnum_v._Brien

I would argue that they did their jobs effectively. Some people say that was judicial activism. I'd wager if it was Kansas and this law had been in place, the legislature would have tried to impeach them.

 

[GoIrish41]

Obamacare Enrollees Are Sick And They're Getting A Lot Of Health Care

 

[woolybug25]

It's time to talk about black privilege - CNN.com

 

[GoIrish41]

It's time to talk about black privilege - CNN.com

If I can't join an all-white club, celebrate white history month, and use the "N" word, what is the point of living?

 

[phgreek]

It's time to talk about black privilege - CNN.com

I'm not a fan of the impacts to my life of things like the Federal 8A program...based on the informal feedback I get from contracting officers, HubZone is a far better program in terms of ALL performance measurables (cost, schedule, deliverables), yet 8A still enjoys the lion share of preference in federal contracting. Would I call it black/brown privilege...no because "X privilege" is not a beneficial concept regardless of the color of skin you substitute for X. Black privilege is bullshit, and white privilege may have historical basis, but as the old guy in the article demonstrates...people only know their specific experiences...and things they perceive as perpetrated against them, which is generally as it will always be. I know the volume of $$$ I've lost because of the 8A program is so staggering, if I stated it no one would believe me anyway...so you bet your ass, I'm not a fan, and I really am not tickled to be the designated loser to make up for historical transgressions perpetrated against Brown people, women, etc....but the moment I do the X privilege thing, I've lost, my kids have lost.

Now, lets let Ben Shapiro speak for himself on white privilege:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrxZRuL65wQ


Here is a much longer interview about everything from political candidates to privilege (he dislikes trump as a candidate as well):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Qrlnn35gBo

 

[phgreek]

Obamacare Enrollees Are Sick And They're Getting A Lot Of Health Care

...is this the segway to more taxes or single payer....just want to be clear what I'm railing against

 

[Legacy]

So that the court can give a warped interpretation again?

I agree the wording the the "impeachment" law is broad and vague, but judicial is a real problem that is completely undermining the entire concept of 'checks and balances'... these people are being empowered to completely change legislation based on nothing more than their feelings on that given day. They're becoming super legislators with unchecked power, and moreover in many cases (depending on which judge your talking about and where) they answer to literally no one.

Do you mean to say that having the legislature determine and try justices on decisions they make does not "undermine the entire concept of checks and balances"? Such a step would be the legislature increasing their power over the judicial.

If the legislature was Democratic in both houses, would you feel comfortable in letting them impeach a strict Constitutionalist like Scalia "based on nothing more than their feelings on that given day"?

On the legislative front, wouldn't the legislature be more representative if elections for all officials were every two years or within a Parliamentary system so that the executive branch could be recalled on a no confidence vote and be replaced by a vote of the people?

That way neither executive or legislative branches would have "unchecked power" and "answer to no one"? (As pointed out, the judiciary is elected every six years, which is not unchecked nor answering to no one.)

This is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

 

[phgreek]

Do you mean to say that having the legislature determine and try justices on decisions they make does not "undermine the entire concept of checks and balances"? Such a step would be the legislature increasing their power over the judicial.

If the legislature was Democratic in both houses, would you feel comfortable in letting them impeach a strict Constitutionalist like Scalia "based on nothing more than their feelings on that given day"?

On the legislative front, wouldn't the legislature be more representative if elections for all officials were every two years or within a Parliamentary system so that the executive branch could be recalled on a no confidence vote and be replaced by a vote of the people?

That way neither executive or legislative branches would have "unchecked power" and "answer to no one"? (As pointed out, the judiciary is elected every six years, which is not unchecked nor answering to no one.)

This is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

I have struggled with this concept...the lifetime appointment of justices allows for significant issues to be perpetuated for periods beyond what the chief executive can visit upon the country...longer than any legislator would likely be able to.

SO...I was never all that uncomfortable, and understood the benefit of the lifetime appointment until more recently. Now, I'm concerned with clear and obvious political operatives on the bench creating tings out of thin air...

We need to end the lifetime appointment w/o periodic review. If no one can come up with a review system which maintains the balance of power, I can certainly handle a single 12 year term on the bench, but I can no longer support lifetime appointments, because people on the supreme court no longer restrain themselves from CREATING law. As such, with the toothpaste now out of the tube, I cannot see my way clear to believing this won't turn into a tit for tat on political motivations.

It is time to transition the SCOTUS so term limits serve to constrain any one justice's time weighted influence, thus restraining them all. I would start by booting the longest serving, and then one every 6 years based on the length of their term(longest to shortest) until we've cycled through the existing, and any new appointments would have a 12 year stint...then GTFO.