Tag Washington Post

Oh, for a little straight talk now that spring is in the air

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The political reaction to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is the clearest evidence I’ve seen lately of the sclerotic thinking that passes for wisdom and strategy in American politics.  Not saying I’m surprised, mind you, just saying.

Don’t get me wrong: every vacancy on the Supreme Court of the the United States, ever, has been the occasion for political plotting and pontificating…that’s the nature of the beast.  Maybe there was more lip service paid in the past to observing “a decent interval” before going public, but we know that one reason the successful professional political players are successful is that they don’t let an opportunity to gain advantage go to waste.  In this case, Scalia’s body hadn’t made it home to Virginia before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced his intention to block anyone nominated by President Obama in the hope that a Republican wins the presidency this November.

Why?  Because “The American people should have a voice in the selection of the next Supreme Court justice”?  Excuse me, Mr. Majority Leader and avowed Obstructionist-of-Obama-in-Chief, but that’s not the way it’s done and we all know it.

There isn’t—or shouldn’t be—any disagreement on the facts: the Constitution gives this president the responsibility to nominate a new justice in this case, not the next president; many of the same Republican senators now insisting that the process must be put on hold for the good of the nation had very different opinions when the question came up during the last few months of George W. Bush’s presidency.  (Yes, plenty of Democrats have more than a passing acquaintance with hypocrisy as a political tool, too, starting with Chuck Schumer on this same topic eight years ago; I’m sure some of you have more examples.)  Also true is that the Constitution gives responsibility to the Senate to approve or reject that nominee, with no timetable or deadline for doing so.

There’s no question that McConnell and the Republican majority have no legal requirement to approve President Obama’s nominee, or even to put the nomination to a vote.  They may make the political calculation that stonewalling for a year is the better path: bet on winning the White House and holding the Senate so they can have their pick of ultraconservative judges, versus running the risk of losing both and allowing the Democrats to choose another Douglas or Brennan (if one can be found).  I wish they would just say so, instead of going to the well for another round of the Obama Apocalypse that (inexplicably) plays so well with a certain portion of the electorate.  Andrew Prokop at Vox.com wrote them a first draft of such a speech:

Justice Scalia was a strong, solid conservative. And whoever Barack Obama nominates to replace him is certain to be well to his left — and will likely be very, very, very far to his left.

This would upset a balance of power in the Court that has existed for decades. Instead of a five-vote majority that is generally conservative, a Scalia replacement appointed by President Obama would allow a new majority bloc of five solid liberals to form. On issues affecting free enterprise, the sanctity of human life, and federal power, sweeping new liberal rulings could reshape law and precedent across America.

I believe this would be a disaster for the country. Most members of my party believe this would be a disaster for the country. And most of my party’s voters believe it would be a disaster for the country.

So I’m going to do my best to stop it from happening.

(snip)

…in suggesting that President Obama shouldn’t appoint any replacement for Scalia, and that he should just leave it to the next president, I am rhetorically going further than others have in the past.

But really I’ve just hit the fast-forward button. We would have ended up opposing whomever Obama nominated, because that person would, of course, have had liberal views. And my party’s senators would never have approved any other Obama Supreme Court nominee anyway, because they’re terrified of losing their seats in primaries.

So maybe my “no nominees in the final year” position hasn’t explicitly been taken by anyone before, but it hardly means the death of our constitutional democracy. The near-term upshot is that one Supreme Court seat stays vacant for a year. Some closely divided cases will effectively remain unresolved for a bit. Big deal.

Advice from the right to the right-er

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Anybody can sit back and disgorge him-or-her-self of comments on the outrageous stuff in the news and on the Web; tut-tutting what Donald Trump says doesn’t really require you to burn many calories.  This year I’m renewing my effort to keep an eye out for things that are less obvious, but offer some insight that we could all find useful.

You don’t have to be conservative, or “a conservative,” or even “a Movement Conservative,” to get something out of Jennifer Rubin’s “Right Turn” blog in the Washington Post (there’s a link in the Blogroll over there) , and I’d like to offer this link to her recent list of suggested resolutions for Republicans for this year.  Here are my favorites, with comments.

“2. Do not imagine that the entire party is made up of the most vocal, extreme elements in talk radio. There is no sign — not in respected polling or election results — that the party is entirely, or even primarily, made up of nativists and “very conservative” voters. You might think so if you are elected from Texas or Alabama, but thinking that is a microcosm of the country leads to disastrous results.”

  • Many of us forget this one.  The most radical elements of the GOP make the most noise and have worked their tails off to become politically powerful within the organization; but as is true with many groups, the loudest members don’t necessarily speak for the majority.  But the non-radical center had better come to play, or one day there won’t be a place for them in the party of Lincoln and Reagan.

“3. The country has accepted gay marriage, so move on. There are not sufficient states for a constitutional amendment nor is any president going to be able to stack the court with justices willing to overturn the gay marriage ruling. (The court won’t even find Obamacare unconstitutional.) Preaching defiance of the court is crazy talk and simply tells voters that Republicans are out of touch.”

  • Time to let this one go: it isn’t about the sacrament of marriage in your church, it’s about equal protection and equal treatment under civil law, and you don’t want to be arguing against that.

“7. Give up the fixation on the mainstream media. Yes, there is coverage that is tilted, invariably in the liberal direction. Yes, conservatives are held to a different standard. It should be called out. But so what? It’s not an excuse for failure, and voters don’t want to hear a lot of whining about how the deck is stacked. Moreover, Republicans benefit from being tested in interviews and debates by those with whom they disagree.”

  • Journalists are supposed to question the statements and beliefs of candidates and officeholders; they do it to Democrats and Libertarians and independents, too, but we don’t hear them complaining like you.  If you don’t like the critical attention, get a new line of work.

First step on the new path…don’t know where it’s going to lead.

There are good reasons not to run around shouting “Islamic terrorist”

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The whining is so tiresome, and the motivation so transparent, that I usually shake my head and ignore it each time the usual suspects launch a new “Dontcha Just Hate Obama” offensive.   Last week when the president talked about efforts to fight back against recruitment efforts by terrorist groups, we all got to see the righteous indignation of true Americans who were appalled, appalled I say, by the president’s refusal to refer to the terrorists as “Islamic” terrorists or extremists or zealots or whatever.

I gotta wonder, what effing difference does it make if the terrorists are Muslim?  Really.  If they’re terrorists, if they’re waging war on America and Americans, we have the right and the responsibility to fight back.  It doesn’t matter why they’re doing it unless we can use that to persuade them to stop.  (I have a similar feeling about “hate crimes:” murder or assault or whatever the crime is, it’s a crime because it’s against the law, not because of why they did it.)

But, haters gonna hate.  And even though I believe that words can work wonders, I’ve long since given up on the idea that valid, cogent argument grounded in demonstrable fact may ever again be persuasive once one has chugged the Kool-Aid of the radical right.  However, when I came across this terrific unpacking of reasons why it makes absolute sense in a reasonable world for the President of the United States to choose his or her words carefully, I wanted to share.

While [Barack] Obama has not used those words, he has acknowledged Islam plays a role in the Islamic State’s strategy. Obama has said that even though the Islamic State uses religion to justify its extremism, its ideology does not mesh with mainstream, modern Islamic thought.

“They try to portray themselves as religious leaders — holy warriors in defense of Islam.  That’s why ISIL presumes to declare itself the ‘Islamic State.’ And they propagate the notion that America — and the West, generally — is at war with Islam,” Obama said at the White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism last week. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

(snip)

Why such a careful choice of words? Experts we contacted offered a few theories.

For one, the Islamic State is just one of numerous jihadist groups that the United States is fighting in the Middle East and North Africa, including al-Qaida and its affiliates. And the Islamic State has several qualities that set it apart from other jihadi groups, such as their desire to immediately create a caliphate. In that sense, it would be misleading to lump these groups into one singular enemy code-worded Islamic extremism, said James Gelvin, a history professor at the University of California Los Angeles.

Additionally, several countries helping the United States fight the Islamic State and other terrorist groups are Muslim nations, including Jordan and Saudi Arabia. In those cases, it is in the United States’ interest not to be at war with a religion.

(snip)

The Islamic State adheres to strict, literal interpretations of the Koran and Islamic teachings rooted in 18th-century religious philosophy called Wahhabism. This ideology, the dominant faith in Saudi Arabia, is focused on a return to the “truth faith” of the first caliphate established after the death of Mohammed, a time when Islam was not “polluted” by Christianity, paganism or governmental interference, said Richard Brennan, a Middle East expert at the nonpartisan think tank RAND Corporation.

The result is a puritanical practice of Islam that views government as a problem within society, as a man’s allegiance should only be to allah. For some recruits, the Islamic State represents a “fight against the normative world order” of Shia rule, Sunni suppression, and Western colonization and invasion, Mohammed said. “The idea is that after centuries of weakness, some Muslims are fighting back.”

The Islamic State goes even further than traditional Wahhabism by adhering to takfir — which is the belief that some people who say they are Muslim are not truly Muslim, and therefore there is reason to kill them, Gelvin said. The vast majority of the Islamic world tends to believe that if someone professes they are Muslim, then they are, no matter how they specifically practice their faith.

Even al-Qaida and other Islamic extremist groups don’t accept takfir, Gelvin said.

(snip)

Just as Muslims worldwide refused to take up [Osama] bin Laden’s brutal brand of Islam, the vast majority of Muslims are also not heeding the call of the self-proclaimed caliph of the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Tufts University religion professor Kenneth Garden said accepting the terror group’s self-description would amount to “an own-goal” by the United States.

“I am confident that eventually the butchers of ISIS and their like will be roundly rejected and fade away,” Garden said. “But I am afraid this is the work of a generation. There is no quick fix for this, and little role for non-Muslim voices.”

And then, there was Jon Stewart on The Daily Show noticing with exasperation that Obama apparently “still thinks he can persuade us through reasoned argument.”  See for yourself (click the pic):

image

It’s a good news/bad news Friday

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

The good news comes from the Supreme Court of the United States, which has decided that it will hear arguments on whether or not same-sex couples have a right to marry. This New York Times story summarizes the cases from Ohio, Tennessee, Michigan and Kentucky that are at the heart of an appeal of a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit which the High Nine have now agreed to consider.

The court said it will hear two and a half hours of argument, probably in the last week of April. The first 90 minutes will be devoted to the question of whether the Constitution requires states “to license a marriage between two people of the same sex.”

The last hour will concern a question that will be moot if the answer to the The first one is yes: whether states must “recognize a marriage between two people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state.”

This is very exciting: within just a few months we’ll have a ruling from the country’s highest court on whether same-sex marriage is to be permitted in all 50 states, not just the 36 states and the District of Columbia where it is legal now.

Now, the bad news: the Southern Education Foundation believes that “For the first time in at least 50 years, a majority of U.S. public school students come from low-income families.”  The Washington Post has a good summary of the report.

Half of all public school students in America are poor?  Half?!  (More than half in 21 states; Mississippi at 71% has the highest percentage.)  I find myself surprised by this confirmation of how far the abandonment of our public schools has gone by those who can afford other options.  (Full disclosure: although most of my education was in public schools, I attended and graduated from a private high school.)  A free public education for all was a great example of America’s commitment to a society where everyone has an opportunity to succeed.  We all paid our share for public schools, even those who sent their kids to private school or whose kids had finished school or who never had any kids at all, because it meant a better-educated society and that was a benefit for all of us.

But more and more, people became unhappy with their public school systems.  When the quality of the education declined people got upset that their kids were being cheated out of their futures; in some cases it was court-ordered desegregation that made people unhappy with their public schools.  Many of those who could afford to moved to suburban school districts and took their tax money with them, leaving the city schools with less and less money to spend on teachers and books and buildings.  Which meant even poorer quality education, which prompted more parents to flee, and the cycle continued.

Today people are trying to get voucher laws passed that will in effect allow their school tax money to pay for their kid’s education in private schools, taking even more money out of the system that is the only resort for the poor, the students whose families can’t afford private schools or charter schools or anything other than the old school down the street.

I understand that parents want the best for their children; I get it that despite recent improvements our economy isn’t as strong as it once was and a lot of people don’t have the jobs and income they want and deserve.  Still, I’m saddened at how many people seem to feel that abandoning the greater good for American society—the education of everyone else’s children—is the best way for them to take care of their own.

The inexorable march of justice

Pat Ryan 5 Comments

Another one bites the dust…

Another one bites the dust…

A federal judge struck down Pennsylvania’s ban on same-sex marriage Tuesday, handing gay rights advocates their second legal victory in as many days and striking the last remaining ban in the Northeast.

The state’s laws, which ban same-sex marriages, were struck down as unconstitutional by U.S. District Court Judge John Jones III, who ruled in favor of the 23 plaintiffs whose lawsuit was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and others.

“We are a better people than what these laws represent,” Jones wrote of same-sex marriage bans in his ruling, drawing comparisons between the civil rights movement and the modern gay marriage movement. ”It is time to discard them into the ash heap of history.”

(snip)

The ruling, from US District Judge John Jones, makes Pennsylvania the second state this week and 11th state since the Supreme Court’s 2013 ruling on same-sex marriage to have its ban overturned in court.  But it’s possible the ruling will eventually be put on hold as it works through the appeals process, which would prevent future same-sex couples from marrying. (The American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania is urging Gov. Tom Corbett, a Republican, to not appeal the ruling.)

Jones, like judges in previous same-sex marriage cases, cited the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution and deemed Pennsylvania’s statutory ban on same-sex marriages unconstitutional. Unlike many other states, the state constitution in Pennsylvania doesn’t have a provision barring same-sex marriages.

So, where do we stand?

same-sex_marriage_us_map

What’s with Montana and North Dakota?