Authoritarianism And The Nature Of Government: Voting Rights In North Carolina, Obama's Persecution Of Ed Snowden

Governments by nature tend towards the authoritarian. Even when a liberalish type, like Obama, is elected, its almost inevitable that when something like Ed Snowden happens, the government errs on the side of repression. All governments. European governments are either flipping out or feigning flipping out over Snowden's revelations that the U.S. was relentlessly spying on all of our allies all the time. But have any of these any governments agreed to give Snowden political refuse from the American gulag which is looking to devour him? Françoise Hollande, the Socialist president of France has threatened the U.S-E.U. trade agreement over U.S. spying but has he offered Snowden refuge? Non... although he did bar the plane of Bolivia's President from flying over French airspace yesterday when the CIA claimed Snowden was aboard. Neither has the country founded on the principles of Mahatma Gandhi offered refuge. Wikileaks applied for political asylum for Snowden in 21 countries. So far they've all said NO, including Ecuador, Russia, Poland and liberal democracies like Austria, Finland, India, Brazil, Ireland, Norway, and Spain. Let's see if Bolivia, Cuba, Iceland, Italy, Netherlands, Nicaragua, Venezuela or Switzerland comes through.

And then there's an even uglier kind of authoritarianism when we're not talking about liberals, but about conservatives. It seems that within moments of the very right wing, very partisan Supreme Court majority gutting the Voting Rights Act (because it had accomplished what it set out to do), right-wing state governments proved that it hadn't accomplished anything at all in their hearts; several moved swiftly and with determination to block minorities from being able to vote.

In order to fully understand what the five Republican appointees on the Supreme Court have been up to when they make decisions that affect our democracy, as they did last week on voting rights, you need to understand what the Republican Party has been up to.

The modern GOP is based on an unlikely coalition of wealthy business executives, small business owners, and struggling whites. Its durability depends on the latter two categories believing that the economic stresses they’ve experienced for decades have a lot to do with the government taking their money and giving it to the poor, who are disproportionately black and Latino.

The real reason small business owners and struggling whites haven’t done better is the same most of the rest of America hasn’t done better: Although the output of Americans has continued to rise, almost all the gains have gone to the very top.

Government is implicated, but not in the way wealthy Republicans want the other members of their coalition to believe. Laws that the GOP itself championed (too often with the complicity of some Democrats) have trammeled unions, invited outsourcing abroad, slashed taxes on the rich, encouraged takeovers, allowed monopolization, reduced the real median wage, and deregulated Wall Street.

Four decades ago, the typical household’s income rose in tandem with output. But since the late 1970s, as these laws took hold, most Americans’ incomes have flattened. Had the real median household income continued to keep pace with economic growth it would now be almost $92,000 instead of $50,000.

Obviously, wealthy Republicans would rather other members of their coalition not know any of this-- including, especially, their role in making it happen. Their nightmare is small-business owners and struggling whites joining with the poor and the rest of the middle class to wrest economic power away. So they’ve created a convenient scapegoat in America’s minority underclass, along with a government that supposedly taxes hardworking whites to support them.

This is where the five Republican appointees to the Supreme Court have played, and continue to play, such an important role.

First, wealthy Republicans have to be able to spend as much money as possible to bribe lawmakers to do their bidding, tell their version of history, and promulgate several big lies (the poor are “takers not makers," government keeps them “dependent," the wealthy are “job-creators" so cutting their taxes creates more jobs, unions are bad, regulations reduce economic growth, and so on).

The five Republicans on the Supreme Court have obliged by eviscerating campaign finance laws. Their 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, along with the broad interpretations given it by several appellate judges (also Republican appointees), has opened the money floodgates.

Second, wealthy Republicans want to quietly reduce the impact of any laws that might limit their profits, even though they may help struggling whites as consumers or employees. The easiest way to execute this delicate maneuver is to make it harder to sue under such laws.

Here, too, the five Republicans on the Court have been eager to oblige by tightening requirements for class actions and limiting standing to sue. In their recent Comcast Corp. v. Behrend decision, for example, they threw out $875 million in damages that a group of Philadelphia-area subscribers had sought from the cable giant, reasoning that the subscriber plaintiffs hadn’t proven they constituted a “class" for the purpose of a class action.

Third and finally, wealthy Republicans want to minimize the votes of poor and minority citizens – and further propagate the myth that these people are responsible for the economic problems of struggling whites – through state redistricting and gerrymandering, voter-identification requirements at polling stations, and the use of almost any pretext to purge minority voters from voting lists.

The five Republicans on the Court obliged last week by striking down a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that sets the formula under which states with a long history of discrimination must ask the federal government or a judge for approval before changing their voting procedures.

The significance of Shelby County, Alabama vs. Holder was made plain Thursday when the Court effectively nullified two cases involving Texas voter laws by sending them back to lower courts to reconsider in light of Shelby. One was a voter identification requirement, enacted in 2011, that a federal judge had rejected on grounds that it imposed a disproportionate burden on lower-income people, many of whom are minorities. The other was a redistricting plan, also rejected by a federal court, in part because it would block minorities from gaining a majority vote in almost all districts.

But now both are effectively reinstated, as are the efforts of several other states to suppress votes.

Supreme Court justices are appointed for life in order to ensure their independence from politics. But when it comes to the core political strategy of the Republican Party, the five Republican appointees are, in effect, an extension of the GOP. 

And no state has moved with greater malice towards implementing that Supreme Court's anti-democracy diktat than North Carolina. The right-wing GOP legislature and governor want to use the Supreme Court decision to disenfranchise young people, Hispanics, poor people and, most of all, African Americans. Still horrified that they have a Democratic senator and that Obama won in 2008, North Carolina Republicans are taking an ax to voting rights. They're instituting a voter ID law meant to discourage Democrats and they're ending Sunday voting, same day registration and early voting as much as they can get away with.

North Carolina NAACP President William J. Barber II, who has seen generations of black candidates elected thanks to the landmark civil rights-era law, objected to [state Senate Rules Committee Chairman Tom] Apodaca's dismissal of federal protections that had become part of the civil rights fabric of the South. "He refers to a law to undo 250 years of slavery and another 100 years or more of Jim Crow … as a headache," Barber said.

Rosanell Eaton, 92, remembers the humiliation for blacks who sought to cast ballots in North Carolina before the Voting Rights Act. In 1939, she said, she hitched a mule to a wagon and rode to the courthouse in Franklin County, N.C., to register. Three white men, probably illiterate, demanded that she recite the preamble to the U.S. Constitution.

Eaton, the valedictorian at her rural high school, recited the preamble word for word.

"They were so ignorant they didn't know if I said it right or not-- but they registered me," she said.

Last week's Supreme Court decision "starts taking us right back to the old days," she said. "Now it's easier for these Republicans to do anything they want to us, without the controls we had."

The Voting Rights Act changed the South by expanding black voting and black officeholders. In 1965, the 11 Southern states of the Confederacy had three black state legislators. By 2009, the number was 321 of 628 nationwide, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

...The new moves by state officials to adopt ID requirements and other changes in the voting laws can have a critical impact on black voting strength, civil rights leaders say. Blacks represented 22% of North Carolina's registered voters in 2012 but accounted for 34% of voters without a driver's license or state-issued ID this year, according to Democracy North Carolina, a liberal advocacy group. The group says blacks in 2012 made up 29% of early voters and 34% of same-day registration voters.

Since taking control in North Carolina, Republicans have passed or proposed legislation that Democrats say discriminates against minorities. This month, Republicans repealed the Racial Justice Act, passed by a Democratic Legislature and governor. The act allowed death row inmates to be re-sentenced to life in prison without parole if they proved racial discrimination in jury selection or sentencing.

Other Republican-controlled states, from Florida to Alaska aren't even waiting to see if North Carolina can get away with it. They're already moving the same direction. Texas Republicans are petrified of Hispanic voters turning their red bastion blue. So they're coming up with plans to keep them from voting, since they've already figured out that that is a better fit for the party base than trying to win them over to vote for Republicans.

Ed Snowden: "In the end the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised-- and it should be."

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People For The American Way Makes The Case For Defeating Conservatives

Yesterday we tried our hand at explaining how the Supreme Court's narrowly partisan decision to void the Voting Rights Act is a catastrophe that is not ameliorated by the nice pat on the head they have the LGBT community the following day. Few organizations have fought harder and as effectively as People For the American Way when it comes to LGBT equality. This week, the organization's president, Michael Keegan, warned about the consequences of the Voting Rights Act decision, warning that we MUST remember what they did in 2016.

It's been a week of mixed emotions for those of us who care about civil rights. There was the elation today when the Supreme Court overturned the so-called Defense of Marriage Act-- the discriminatory law that has hurt so many Americans in its nearly 17 years of existence-- and let marriage equality return to California. There was the anger when the Court twisted the law to make it harder for workers and consumers to take on big corporations. And there was the disbelief and outrage when the Court declared that a key part of the Voting Rights Act that was so important and had worked so well was now somehow no longer constitutional.

But throughout the week, I have been reminded of one thing: how grateful I am that Mitt Romney will not be picking the next Supreme Court justice.

It remains true that this Supreme Court is one of the most right-leaning in American history. The majority's head-in-the-sand decision on the Voting Rights Act-- declaring that the VRA isn't needed anymore because it's working so well-- was a stark reminder of why we need to elect presidents who will nominate Supreme Court justices who understand both the text and history of the Constitution and the way it affects real people's lives.

We were reminded of this again today when all the conservative justices except for Anthony Kennedy stood behind the clearly unconstitutional DOMA. Justice Antonin Scalia-- no stranger to anti-gay rhetoric-- wrote an apoplectic rant of a dissent denying the Court's clear role in preserving equal protection. If there had been one more far-right justice on the court, Scalia's dissent could have been the majority opinion.

Just think of how different this week would have been if Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were not on the court and if John McCain had picked two justices instead. We almost certainly wouldn't have a strong affirmation of LGBT equality. Efforts to strip people of color of their voting rights would likely have stood with fewer justices in dissent. And the rights of workers and consumers could be in even greater peril.

As the Republican party moves further and further to the right, it is trying to take the courts with it. This week, we saw what that means in practice. As we move forward to urge Congress to fix the Voting Rights Act and reinforce protections for workers and consumers, and work to make sure that marriage equality is recognized in all states, we must always remember the courts. Elections have real consequences. These Supreme Court decisions had less to do with evolving legal theory than with who appointed the justices. Whether historically good or disastrous, all these decisions were decided by just one vote. In 2016, let's not forget what happened this week.

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The Supreme Court sends a message to would-be job discriminators: Discriminate away, baby!

The new president signs the Lilly Ledbetter Act in January 2009, with Lilly Ledbetter visible seen behind him and members of Congress looking on.

by Ken

Howie has already called attention to the Roberts Court's extremist coup with its Voting Rights Act slapdown. I suppose it's possible that the five thug-justices really don't understand what they did, but the signs all over the country are that the message has been received by the country's vote suppressors, indeed all the felons who have been toiling so prodigiously to disenfranchise people they don't like. Last week he wrote:

The 5 conservative bastards did something far more destructive the day before by striking down the Voting Rights Act. It's a much bigger deal than letting gays marry-- because it will inevitably lead to a far more conservative and intolerant government, one that could do a great deal of harm to, among others, the LGBT community.

Now I really don't want to minimize the importance of the rulings striking down Section 3 of DOMA and affirming the demise of California's Prop 8. There are a lot of people for whom marriage equality is a paramount issue, and it's kind of astonishing to find the weight of the Supreme Court -- not least as conservative a court as this one -- behind it, even with all that remains to be done. There should also be a certain amount of momentum. If the homophobes are worried that it may be hard to prevent marriage equality from spreading, or being forcibly spread, to the 37 holdout states.

At the same time, there's no sign of a groundswell of support at either the federal or state level for making equality in such arguably more important areas as employment and housing the law of the land. I think such developments are more possible now that they've ever been, but it's hard to detect a lot of momentum carrying over from marriage-equality victories.

And the happy vibes of those rulings are overshadowing other dark doings of the Roberts gang. Myself, I don't think it's any coincidence, as is suggested by the stage-managing of the dispensing of the term's decisions in those final weeks.

The New Yorker's Jeffrey Toobin focuses in a new blogpost, "Will Ginsburg's Ledbetter Play Work Twice?," on the decisions that "Sammy the Hammer" Alito read the same day he was noticed ridiculing Justice Ginsburg while she read her dissents. Toobin recently did >an interesting profile of the justice, "Heavyweight: How Ruth Bader Ginsburg has moved the Supreme Court" (available free to subscribers only), noting that her history isn't that of the standard liberal people generally assume, given her focus on issues outside the standard ideological boundary markers, like job discrimination against women.

In the new post, Toobin notes that those cases "recalled the biggest loss -- and biggest victory -- of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's career on the bench."

The subject was job discrimination, which is prohibited by Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Six years ago, the Court threw out a case that a woman named Lilly Ledbetter brought against her long-time employer, Goodyear Tire & Rubber. Ledbetter had been paid less than her male counterparts for many years -- something she didn't know until shortly before she left the company. The Justices, in an opinion by Samuel Alito, said that she had waited too long to bring her case, and extinguished her claim on statute-of-limitations grounds.

Ginsburg wrote a strong dissent in the Ledbetter case, in which she was joined by three other Justices. She called on Congress to amend Title VII and undo the damage of the Court's decision. She pointed out that it was unfair to force Ledbetter to sue before she knew she had been a victim of discrimination. But Ginsburg knew that Congress, not the Court, framed the meaning of any federal law. She said Congress could, and should, amend Title VII to make it clear that Ledbetter and others like her had the right to sue. "The ball is in Congress's court," Ginsburg said, in an opinion that she read from the bench.

"Ginsburg's timing was exquisite," Toobin writes.

In 2007, Democrats had just retaken control of the House of Representatives and were on the verge of winning the Presidency. The first bill that Barack Obama signed as President was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, just as Ginsburg had hoped. A framed copy of the bill, inscribed by Obama, has an honored place in Ginsburg's Supreme Court chambers.

It was a pair of Title VII cases that Sammy the Hammer screwed up Monday, joined naturally by his four fellow thug-justices for 5-4 majorities.

In Vance v. Ball State University, the Court narrowed the definition of "supervisor." This is important because plaintiffs can win in Title VII cases only if they suffer discrimination from a supervisor, not from a peer in the workforce. In the other case, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center v. Nassar, the Court cut back on the definition of "retaliation," which is a key term underlying many Title VII cases.

In the dissent (joined by Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan) that she read from the bench, she wrote, ""The Court's disregard for the realities of the workplace means that many victims of workplace harassment will have no effective remedy." And as Toobin notes, she "ran her Ledbetter play again," writing:

Six years ago the Court read Title VII in a similarly restrictive way. In 2009, Congress corrected that error. Today, the ball lies again in Congress's court to correct this Court's wayward interpretation of Title VII.

The chances aren't great, though, first because the job-discrimination cases "they will be swamped by the other, more dramatic cases at the end of the term"; second, because "there is no compelling figure, like Ledbetter, to bring the cause to life."

But, most important, the politics of the day are different. In 2009, Democrats controlled sixty votes in the Senate, as well as the House of Representatives. The new President's honeymoon was in full swing. Today, the Republican House shows little interest in the plight of victims of job discrimination; the Senate, too, has a Republican veto in the form of the filibuster. This time, Ginsburg's call was no less eloquent, but it's far less likely to be heard.

There is a temptation to think that the cases decided are merely technical refinements to Title VII law. The very fact that the Supreme Court took the cases, and then wrestled them to 5-4 decisions, suggests otherwise. And there's the additional message factor. Once again the Roberts Court has sent a signal that the kinds of people who need the kind of protection Title VII was designed to provide sure ain't gonna get it from this court. Discriminate away, baby. We've got your backs.

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Court And Spark

When I was 16 I hitchhiked from Brooklyn to Los Angeles so I could stow away on a ship to Tonga. In Brooklyn there had never been anything like the billboard campaigns along Route 66 in state after state in the middle of the country to impeach Earl Warren. Warren was a moderate Republican Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, appointed by President Eisenhower, and Fred Koch, the money behind the virulently anti-American John Birch Society and the father of today's vile Koch brothers, made it his life's work to impeach Earl Warren (as well as Eisenhower and Kennedy). Fred Koch is the evidence that society should confiscate all the wealth of sociopathic individuals who use that wealth to undermine society itself. Lee Fang devotes a whole chapter of his new book, The Machine, to the evil Koch family.

The true story of the Koch family’s dedication to rightwing politics begins back one generation with the father. Fred C. Koch, a hardscrabble Texan of Dutch ancestry, founded the Koch Industries empire and pioneered a strategy for advancing conservatism that was pivotal in shaping the modern American right. He unapologetically attacked his enemies, branding them communists, or worse. He paid for groups to help whip up a grassroots army filled with populist rage against the united Nations, Justice Earl Warren, and President Kennedy. He helped begin the process of evicting moderates from the Republican Party. And he instilled in his sons a philosophy that a proper “American businessman” should “fight like a tiger” when someone tries to “take a few thousand dollars away from him.”

Fred, a racist who detested the civil rights movement, probably could have never imagined a black president of the United States. But Fred laid the groundwork for his sons to try to tear the first one down.

...Because Eisenhower allowed the Panamanian flag to fly over the Panama Canal, Fred surmised that the president was “beginning to surrender” to the “Communist conspiracy.” Fred wrote that “a former Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs told me that certain members of the State Department helped put Castro in power and guide his every move.” Fred believed Democrats, as well as moderate Republicans, were actively enabling Castro, who he called the “Mao Tze-tung of the Western Hemisphere.”

In December of 1958, in the living room of a brick Tudor house in a quiet Indianapolis neighborhood, Fred was summoned for a meeting with eleven other staunch anticommunists who shared his fervent belief that Christian society and free markets were at grave risk of slipping away. Robert Welch, a candy manufacturer who had been financing and authoring a series of pamphlets articulating his anticommunist ideas for half a decade, presided over the special gathering. Welch bellowed that there had been an “800% expansion of Communist membership in [the] last 20 years” and that the recent surge in inflation and “collectivism” was part of a red plot to destroy American civilization. After two full days of nearly uninterrupted lecture, Welch presented his solution: a new organization to fight the left in every corner of America. Named after a Baptist missionary serving as an American soldier, who was reportedly killed by the Chinese in 1946, the John Birch Society was born. Welch wanted to make Birch a martyr and proclaimed him the first American death in the war against communism. The men at the meeting, many of them leaders of the powerful National Association of Manufacturers, agreed they would level the playing field with the communists and commit to “fight dirty.”

Welch parlayed his expertise in marketing candy into a multifaceted strategy for advancing his paranoid anticommunist beliefs. He recorded simple how-to videos, developed a door-to-door strategy for his organizers, and stressed the importance of advertising to his allies. Fred’s wife Mary later remarked that she had always been impressed with Welch and his approach to politics. Welch was a “very intelligent, sharp man, quite an intellectual,” she told the Wichita Eagle.

The Birchers, with plenty of seed money from Fred and his cohorts, spread quickly throughout the nation, hiring field operatives, hosting training sessions, and publishing hundreds of thousands of Welch’s Blue Book of anticommunist theory and monthly newsletters proclaiming new examples of communist infiltration. The Belmont, Massachusetts, headquarters of the Birchers initially hired twenty-eight employees, in addition to many volunteers who labored to fire off $4,000 worth of mail every week. As a founding member of the national John Birch Society Council, Fred served as a liaison to paid coordinators, who in turn worked with volunteer chapter leaders and ordinary members. Under the seemingly benign motto of “Less government, more responsibility,” the Birchers recruited upward of 50,000 people in a massive rollout campaign during the spring of 1961. In the wake of the Kennedy victory and a relatively liberal Republican Party, the Birchers filled a vacuum of conservative leadership.

Through monthly bulletins and taped lectures from Welch, individual members were asked to advance the cause in their local communities. Goals would include tasks such as attending meetings of “Communist fronts” like the ACLU to shout down “disloyal” speakers or to organize “spontaneous” petition gatherings to impeach Earl Warren. Despite their belief that every liberal group in America was truly a front group for communists, the Birchers themselves were obsessed with using dummy organizations to better achieve their agenda. Welch recommended that members assemble various fronts like: TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil), which connected civil rights groups and African American organizations with communists; TRAIN (To Restore American Independence), a group to mock the united Nations and pacifists; SYLP (Support Your Local Police), a particularly effective recruiting tool after the Watts riots; and MOTOREDE (The Movement to Restore Decency), which lobbied against sex education, birth control, and abortion.

A Bircher-led red scare rekindled McCarthyism in towns across the country. In Amarillo, Texas, the local Bircher leaders, including the mayor and a retired brigadier general, led a campaign to purge a clergyman accused of being a communist sympathizer. They also rid the libraries of “communist” books, which included Pulitzer Prize–winning literature, and punished teachers who had been accused of disloyalty. According to historian Rick Perlstein, Centralia, Missouri, became a “virtual Birch fiefdom; the owner of the factory that employed half the town’s workforce made membership practically a condition for advancement.” In Fred’s hometown Wichita chapter, which included its own paid Birch Society organizer, Time observed that “student members of the society are trained to tell their cell leader of any ‘Communist’ influence noted in classroom lectures; by phone, parents belabor the offending teacher and his principal for apologies and admissions of guilt.”

The rapid rise of the Bircher movement sharply divided the GOP. In early 1961, the national press reported on Welch’s view that Dwight Eisenhower was guilty of “treason,” and that his brother Milton Eisenhower was probably his “boss within the Communist party.” This prompted a harsh rebuke from a group of Republican elders. “It is unbelievable that any sane person would make such accusations,” said North Dakota Republican Milton Young during a speech on the Senate floor. Liberal Republican Senator Thomas Kuchel complained he was being targeted by Birchers in his reelection bid.

However, a faction of Southern lawmakers and Republican politicians found strength in the Bircher brand of conservative populism. Dixiecrat Congressman L. Mendel Rivers of South Carolina extolled the Birchers as a “nation-wide organization of patriotic Americans.” Congressmen John Rousselot and Edgar Hiestand, both California Republicans, were card-carrying Birch Society members. Life reported that Republican defenders of the group believed that the Birchers would serve as a vanguard for the “conservative renaissance in America whose main respectable apostle is Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.”

When I was a schoolboy, the giants on the Supreme Court appointed by FDR were beginning to retire-- Felix Frankfurter, Hugo Black, William O. Douglas. Truman's, Eisenhower's and Kennedy's appointments weren't as profound, just kind of mainstream. LBJ's last appointment was Thurgood Marshall, a brilliant jurist who was also the first African-American to serve on the Court. Even 75% of Nixon's dreadful conservative appointments were kind of mainstream-- Warren Burger, Harry Blackmun and Lewis Powell-- and it wasn't until his final appointment, the hideous William Rehnquist, that the GOP decided to turn the Supreme Court into an ideological and highly partisan arm of the Republican Party. Rehnquist came to prominence as an Arizona attorney who would work on Election Day trying to prevent Blacks and Hispanics from voting. Reagan made him Chief Justice when Burger retired. The Court started transitioning from a conservative bastion to a reactionary one. Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, John Roberts and Samuel Alito are dangerous far right ideologues and corporate whores who work every day of their lives against the interests of ordinary American families. Hopefully when Scalia and Kennedy, each 77 years old and fighting off senility, retire President Hillary Clinton will replace them with more mainstream justices. But, for now, the GOP and corporate America control the Supreme Court, just the way Fred Koch had planned long ago. E.J. Dionne:

We prefer to think of the Supreme Court as an institution apart from politics and above its struggles. In the wake of this week’s decision gutting the heart of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, its actions must now be viewed through the prism of the conservative movement’s five-decade-long quest for power.

Liberals will still win occasional and sometimes partial victories, as they did Wednesday on same-sex marriage. But on issues directly related to political and economic influence, the court’s conservative majority is operating as a political faction, determined to shape a future in which progressives will find themselves at a disadvantage.

...The marriage rulings, however, should not distract from the arrogance of power displayed in the voting rights decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts. His opinion involved little Constitutional analysis. He simply substituted the court’s judgment for Congress’ in deciding which states should be covered under the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, which required voting rules in states with a history of discrimination to be pre-cleared by the Justice Department.

The court instructed Congress to rewrite the law, even though these sophisticated conservatives certainly know how difficult this will be in the current political climate.

Whenever conservatives on the court have had the opportunity to tilt the playing field toward their own side, they have done so. And in other recent cases, the court has weakened the capacity of Americans to take on corporate power. The conservative majority seems determined to bring us back to the Gilded Age of the 1890s.

The voting rights decision should be seen as following a pattern set by the rulings in Bush v. Gore in 2000 and Citizens United in 2010.

Bush v. Gore had the effect of installing the conservatives’ choice in the White House and allowed him to influence the court’s subsequent direction with his appointments of Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito.

Citizens United swept aside a tradition going back to the Progressive Era-- and to the Founders’ deep concern over political corruption-- by vastly increasing the power of corporate and monied interests in the electoral sphere.

Tuesday’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling will make it far more difficult for African-Americans to challenge unfair electoral and districting practices. For many states, it will be a Magna Carta to make voting more difficult if they wish to.

The Constitution, through the 14th and 15th Amendments, gives Congress a strong mandate to offer federal redress against discriminatory and regressive actions by state and local governments. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in her scalding but very precise dissent, “a governing political coalition has an incentive to prevent changes in the existing balance of voting power.”

In less diplomatic language, existing majorities may try to fix election laws to make it far more difficult for their opponents to toss them from power in later elections. Republican legislatures around the country passed a spate of voter suppression laws disguised as efforts to guarantee electoral “integrity” for just this purpose.

Recall that when conservatives did not have a clear court majority, they railed against “judicial activism.” Now that they have the capacity to impose their will, many of the same conservatives defend extreme acts of judicial activism by claiming they involve legitimate interpretations of the true meaning of the Constitution.

It is an inconsistency that tells us all we need to know. This is not an argument about what the Constitution says. It is a battle for power. And, despite scattered liberal triumphs, it is a battle that conservatives are winning.

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Right To Vote/Right To Marry: The Red States

Barney Frank retired from Congress last year. Obama picked a series of crooked Wall Street operators for positions he should have tried filling with brilliant and proven tribunes of the public like Barney and Brad Miller (D-NC), who also resigned last year. I'm not certain what Brad is up to now but Barney has certainly not faded away. Having been for so many years the most noteworthy openly gay Member of Congress, media turned to him in droves for comments about the grudging and narrow Supreme Court ruling that struck down DOMA and kind of struck down California's hateful Prop 8. And Barney, who recently married his partner, was as gleeful as all members of the LGBT community. Like me... well, probably more than me. I'm less an assimilationist and, although I'm happy for the folks who wanted and needed this, I fear it is another deadly blow against what helped make the gay community unique and nonconformist.

But, like Barney, I'm not exactly singing the praises of the Supreme Court. The 5 conservative bastards did something far more destructive the day before by striking down the Voting Rights Act. It's a much bigger deal than letting gays marry-- because it will inevitably lead to a far more conservative and intolerant government, one that could do a great deal of harm to, among others, the LGBT community. Thursday Barney was on MSNBC's Morning Joe and he said that if he had been empowered to decide one Supreme Court decision this week, he would have taken up the case on the 1965 Voting Rights Act and not the Prop 8 marriage ban that is no longer supported by California voters anyway. He explained that the "terrible decision killing the Voting Rights Act" is far more harmful to the country than the marriage equality case. "Racial discrimination," he asserted, correctly, "has been much worse [than discrimination against the LGBT community] in this country and if I could have frankly picked one decision this week,  I'll be honest, it wouldn't have been the gay marriage one. I wish I could have reversed that terrible decision killing the Voting Rights Act because I think there are still serious issues there in democracy." It would be amazing if Scalia, who's 77, wakes up in hell tomorrow and Obama nominates Frank to replace him. And if we all get unicorns for our birthdays.

This wasn't lost on Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) and Keith Ellison (D-MN). They got it just right when they commented on the Supreme Court rulings this week in a joint statement:

“We celebrate today’s decision by the Supreme Court to respect the right of all Americans to marry who they love. The road to today’s victories started 44 years ago at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, where the gay community made a public stand against institutional discrimination. Since that day, LGBT Americans have worked tirelessly for equal rights under the law. The decisions made by the Supreme Court today reaffirm those rights and move our country closer to fulfilling the promise in our Constitution of equal rights for all.

“While today’s rulings were a positive step forward, yesterday’s Supreme Court decision to weaken the Voting Rights Act endangers voting rights and is a troubling step backward. We should celebrate the victory for marriage equality by working together to defend the voices of millions of Americans who may face increased discrimination at the polls after yesterday’s decision. Senator Harry Reid has already vowed that the Senate will act quickly to fix the problems created by yesterday’s ruling. The House should follow his lead as soon as possible.”

So what can, realistically, be done to fix the problem before the Republican just start barring minorities from voting across the Old Confederacy and in states they control like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, the Dakotas and Indiana? The Senate is where it will start, of course. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), chairman of the Judiciary Committee: "I intend to take immediate action to ensure that we will have a strong and reconstituted Voting Rights Act that protects against racial discrimination in voting." He says he plans to start right after the 4th of July break. Unfortunately, Leahy's counterpart in the House is an old line unreconstructed Confederate and racist pig, Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) and he's not likely to allow any kind of protections for minorities to get through his committee, which is stuffed full of teabaggers and bigots and boasts some of the most contemptible partisan extremists in Congress, like Steve King (R-IA), Trent Franks (R-AZ), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Lamar Smith (R-TX), Spencer Bachus (R-AL), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Randy Forbes (R-VA), Trey Gowdy (R-SC), Ted Poe (R-TX), George Holding (R-NC), Doug Collins (R-GA), Ron DeSantis (R-FL) and Jason Smith (R-MO).

Pelosi was whistling in the wind when she said "I would like to see something called... the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would address the concerns that the Court put in its decision about Section 4. It’s really a step backward and it’s not a reflection of what is happening in our country in some of these places. And when we put that bill together, when it was passed last time, it passed overwhelming, overwhelming 98 to nothing in the Senate and 390-something to almost nothing in the House. And it was bipartisan and we came to terms on it, in a way that we were all jubilant about the passage of it, Democrats and Republicans alike.”

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Now that we've heard from everyone else about marriage equality, let's hear from the cartoonists!

"Harry's decided that if the federal government
won't defend our marriage then he's got to."

"I have been gay all my life, and for most of it gay marriage was not even on the table. In fact, for many years the only time you saw anyone openly gay was on television, and they were hiding behind a screen with their voice disguised.

"I am thoroughly convinced that at some point in time same-sex marriage will be a non-issue. For the most part. Eventually. Sort of. . . .

"Did I mention  that I'm on vacation? I'm waiting for the sun to come out. I am not waiting for any government body or bodies to validate my relationships or determine my personal happiness. I am happy for everyone, gay and straight, who is happy about whatever it is the Supreme Court did."

-- New Yorker cartoonist Bill Haefeli

by Ken

Regular readers will recognize the infinite-dot technique of the above cartoon as the domain of New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff, and indeed in his blogpost this week, "Keep Calm and Carry On Being Funny," he has joined the chorus of commentary on the big Supreme Court decisions on same-sex marriage. "Both the jubilation and the jeremiads" that followed seemed to him "a bit overwrought," he says. After all, same-sex marriage is "still banned wherever it was banned, and the banning hasn't been ruled unconstitutional, even if it's unconscionable."

Bob being, as we know, a perpetual worrier, he has another worry now that DOMA has been dinged. "I worry that people may take matters into their own hands, with dire consequences" -- consequences like those he has imagined in the cartoon atop this post. (Note that all the cartoons should be click-expandable.) Bob does acknowledge, though, that "maybe now I'm the one who's getting overwrought."

For a "calmer perspective," he turns to New Yorker cartoonist Bill Haefeli, "who has mined this area of the cultural landscape for some time. And he offers us these cartoons of Bill's, from 1999 and 2000, respectively.

"If Heather has two mommies, and each of them
has two brothers, and one of those brothers
has another man for a 'roommate,' how
many uncles does Heather have?"

"I'm sorry, Jim. I love you, but I hate Vermont."

If you intuited a story coming on, well, you know our Bob, don't you? Here's the report Bill submitted to him.

Hi Bob!

I am on vacation.

Part of my vacation is taking a break from the news—that constant static of noise about things that, for the most part, have no specific bearing on one's day-to-day existence. I've heard vague rumors that the Supreme Court has done something positive in terms of same-sex marriage. I am gay. This could affect my day-to-day existence. I think I heard the word "momentous." I think I am supposed to be excited about this. Uh… O.K. A while back, when a state I do not live in legalized same-sex marriage, a straight friend of many years called me up to congratulate me on this advancement of my civil rights. I patiently explained that there were still forces opposed to my civil rights, the Forces of Evil, who were not about to give up and were plotting against me. All the while, the Forces of Good were strategizing, too, and there would be a long back-and-forth involving voters and three branches of governments in fifty states and the federal government, too, and reversals and appeals and amendments and acts and laws and even if all my civil rights were universally acknowledged legally there would still be individuals and groups who would not be on board and can I stop now? I am boring myself. I am on vacation, and even if I were not on vacation I would be boring myself.

Don't get me wrong. I am not pessimistic. I have been gay all my life, and for most of it gay marriage was not even on the table. In fact, for many years the only time you saw anyone openly gay was on television, and they were hiding behind a screen with their voice disguised.

I am thoroughly convinced that at some point in time same-sex marriage will be a non-issue. For the most part. Eventually. Sort of.

Did I mention that I am on vacation? I'm waiting for the sun to come out. I am not waiting for any government body or bodies to validate my relationships or determine my personal happiness. I am happy for everyone, gay and straight, who is happy about whatever it is the Supreme Court did.

Look! Here comes the sun!

All of which prompts from Bob this reply: "Thanks, Bill. Exactly the kind of under-wrought perspective I was looking for."


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Could Morris Bender have diagnosed what's wrong with "Sammy the Hammer" Alito?

It's a shame he already has the nickname Sammy the Hammer. Otherwise we just might want to go with Smilin' Sammy.

by Ken

The other day, in recalling how the five right-wing thugs on the Supreme Court made their way there, Howie made passing reference to what the Washington Post's Dana Milbank in his Tuesday column called "Justice Samuel Alito's middle-school antics."

I think this requires a little more attention. Not that there's anything we can do about it short of impeachment, which of course isn't going to happen. Still, the more exposure we get to the mind as well as the manners of Sammy the Hammer, the more he's coming to seem to me as utterly useless a pile of protoplasm as our beloved Justice Clarence Thomas.

Dana has now logged a lot of years in our nation's capital as a reporter rather than a thumb-sucker, meaning that he has spent a lot of time observing the local fauna at close-up range, and he is now emerging as a singularly valuable guide to behaviors that go beyond the range of "Washington normal." Early this year, for example, I admired the important distinction he drew in a column called "A House radical is now in the meanstream." He was writing about the return to Congress of Texas wacko Steve Stockman, having discovered that the loony GOP representative who was threatening President Obama with impeachment if he used an executive order on guns was a loon he remembered vividly from a memorably loony single House term in the '90s, swept into office in the Republican tide of 1994.

However, Dana wrote, there's an important difference. Back then, "he proved too much even for the '94 revolutionaries; his classmates came to shun him and voters in his competitive district sent him packing." No more: "His views, outlandish in the House of 1995, are more at home in the House of 2013." For example, Stockman had just been "one of 179 House Republicans to vote against aid to Hurricane Sandy's victims." The vintage-2013 Steve Stockman "can still bring the crazy," Dana concluded. "The problem is he's now just one of many purveyors."

DANA TARGETS "SAMMY THE HAMMER"

"The most remarkable thing about the Supreme Court's opinions announced Monday," Dana wrote in his Tuesday column this week, "was not what the justices wrote or said. It was what Samuel Alito did."

The associate justice, a George W. Bush appointee, read two opinions, both 5-4 decisions that split the court along its usual right-left divide. But Alito didn't stop there. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg read her dissent from the bench, Alito visibly mocked his colleague.

Ginsburg, the second woman to serve on the high court, was making her argument about how the majority opinion made it easier for sexual harassment to occur in the workplace when Alito, seated immediately to Ginsburg's left, shook his head from side to side in disagreement, rolled his eyes and looked at the ceiling.

His treatment of the 80-year-old Ginsburg, 17 years his elder and with 13 years more seniority, was a curious display of judicial temperament or, more accurately, judicial intemperance. Typically, justices state their differences in words -- and Alito, as it happens, had just spoken several hundred of his own from the bench. But he frequently supplements words with middle-school gestures.

This was not unique behavior for the Hammer, Dana wrote.

Days earlier, I watched as he demonstrated his disdain for Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the two other women on the court. Kagan, the newest justice, prefaced her reading of an opinion in a low-profile case by joking that it was "possibly not" the case the audience had come to hear. The audience responded with laughter, a few justices smiled -- and Alito, seated at Kagan's right elbow, glowered.

Another time, Sotomayor, reading a little-watched case about water rights, joked that "every student in the audience is going to look up the word ‘preemption' today." Alito rolled his eyes and shook his head.

Nor is the Hammer's disdain exculsively reserved for female Supreme Court justices.

Alito is best known for his antics at the 2010 State of the Union address, when President Obama criticized the Citizens Uniteddecision. While other justices remained expressionless, Alito adopted a sour look, shook his head "no" and appeared to mouth the words "not true." At the various oral arguments I've watched over the past few years, Alito's eye-rolling, head-shaking and other expressions of exasperation are a fairly common occurrence, most often when Sotomayor has the floor.

On the day in question, Dana points out, the most dramatic business was the High Court's "unexpectedly modest decision on affirmative action," a rare demonstration of judicial "comity."

Beyond the broad agreement on affirmative action, though, were three 5-4 decisions Monday, two read by Alito with a dry and clinical delivery. In the first, he announced that the court was rejecting a jury award for a woman who was disfigured and disabled by a drug that didn't come with adequate warnings. Despite the "dreadful injuries," Alito argued, siding with the drugmaker and throwing out an appellate-court ruling, "sympathy for respondent does not relieve us of the responsibility of following the law."

The second case Alito read, one of two cases Monday limiting claims of workplace discrimination, rejected an African American woman's complaints of a racially hostile work environment. Alito argued that the employer was not liable because, under Alito's narrowed definition, the person doing the harassing did not qualify as the employee's supervisor.

Dana goes on to differentiate the Hammer's loutishness with some of his conservative colleagues' less antagonistic ways of expressing themselves.

* "Antonin Scalia is caustic and even incendiary, but often funny."

* "Chief Justice John Roberts can be droll."

And "on the other side":

* [Elena] Kagan has tried to make the court more accessible to a lay audience by giving chatty lectures from the bench rather than reading from her written opinions, which also have been playful. . . ."

* Even [Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, no comedienne, can be colloquial and accessible. In her dissents Monday, she noted that an employee can avoid a harassing co-worker by telling him to 'buzz off,' and she argued that 'the ball again lies in Congress's court to correct this court's wayward interpretations.' She also invoked the self-deprecating quotation defining a legal mind as one that "can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking about the thing which it is attached to.' Ginsburg was tart, even acidic -- but she confined her objections to words. That kind of judicial restraint would benefit her junior colleague."

But I don't think Sammy the Hammer's problem is merely lack of restraint. We've seen repeatedly the dark side of his life story, the way his brain seems to be hammered into unbendable, impenetrable orthodoxy by the romance of -- so he seems to think -- having lifted himself up by his bootstraps from an immigrant's son -- the story that played so heartfully during the confirmation hearings that whitewashed his lurking radicalism. Never mind that both his parents were teachers. That doesn't fit the romance so well. He seems to look at every situation that comes before him as if he's thinking: "I made it all on my own. Why shouldn't you?" (My guess, by the way, is that a closer look would show that our Sammy had a whole lot more help along the way than he seems to remember.)

In one of my favorite Mary Tyler Moore Show episodes, from the final season, "My Son, the Genius" (I looked it up, and see that it was written by series co-creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns along with one of the major MTM writers, Bob Ellison), there's a plot line that has Ted and Georgette Baxter at wit's end over their adopted son David's troubles in school. Then another plot line brings them into contact with the crankily geezerish father-in-law of one of Lou Grant's daughters, Morris Bender, played to infuriatingly geezerish perfection by that exquisite character actor Ned Glass (pictured here). Morris begins by announcing (this is just from memory; I haven't seen the episode in decades): "I'm an old man, and I've seen a thing or two," then proceeds to suggest that sometimes when a child fails in school, "there's a simple explanation, and it's so simple but nobody thinks of it." Yes? Everyone's listening to the wise old man. "Maybe," Morris says, "the kid is just stoo-pid."

In fact, the problem turned out to be the opposite. David was so bright that he was bored by school. But I wonder whether Morris hasn't unwittingly diagnosed Justice Sammy, now becoming known for both his smugly self-satisfied judicial inanities and his repulsively boorish behavior. Maybe, I'm suggesting, he's just stoo-pid.

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Your Supreme Court at work and play -- as same-sex marriage slips through the portals of privilege

-- from NYTimes.com's "Afternoon Update"

"Today's Supreme Court decision is a victory for all Americans, and brings our nation one step closer to the promise of equality and justice for all. The DOMA decision ensures that married gay and lesbian couples are recognized by the federal government, and that their families receive equal treatment in the eyes of the law. There should be no more discrimination based on where you're from, what you look like, or who you love. Today's DOMA decision is a historic step in the fight for equality. The federal government must ensure that no one is degraded or demeaned by the law, and that all couples receive the legal recognition and respect that they deserve."

-- Florida Rep. Alan Grayson, in a statement today

"Today's rulings are a major step forward for the country, but for Floridians they fall short of justice and are more than anything a call to action. For those of us who live in states like Florida where our marriages are still not recognized, today's decisions are a reminder that we cannot wait for justice to be handed to us, we are going to have to get engaged and fight. . . .

"While Florida couples who marry elsewhere will receive some federal benefits, unfortunately many federal protections related to marriage are based solely on whether the marriage is recognized by the state in which the couple lives. Today our rights as Americans are not based on our shared citizenship, but upon our geographic location. . . ."

-- Equality Florida Executive Director Nadine Smith, in
a statement today (Nadine issued a video "call to action")

by Ken

A historic day, yes, but when you break it down, and fit together the pieces of the other decisions the Supreme Court has announced in its end-of-term festivities, it's all recognizably our hard-right-wing Roberts Court at work, dragging the law back into the Dickensian heyday of the Industrial Revolution, if not the glory days of the Spanish Inquisition.

Earlier today Howie wrote about yesterday's ghastly Supreme Court voting-rights debacle at the Supreme Court's end-of-term festivities, and homed in on the five bozos I described on Tuesday as far-right-wing-stooge (FRWS) justices -- and specifically how they slithered their way onto the High Court, with often-inconsequential opposition. Crikey, these are life forms that have no business sitting on any bench that isn't bolted down in a park.

I would never say that I could have predicted how the major decisions would come down. The way I argue it is that once they do, we can usually see the theatrical hand orchestrating it all. So, for example, on Monday we got the seemingly moderate decision on affirmative action -- "moderate" in that contrary to the expectation of many of us, the majority didn't shitcan affirmative action altogether. Justice Scalia left no doubt that he would have been happy to do so, and my assumption is that there would have been four votes to do so. I'm guessing, though, that try as FRWS justices might, they couldn't get a fifth vote for that. What we got instead was a seeming "unity" ruling, a 7-1 remand, sending the case back to the lower court for a closer look, to make absolutely sure that there wasn't any unallowable racial-preference funny business going on. Naturally, those judges have been put on alert to look really, really hard -- would anyone care to bet what they're going to find?

The message was pretty clear to the state of Texas, which immediately announced that for the next election it's putting into effect the election revamp it passed in 2011 designed to screw voters the right-wing establishment doesn't like out of their right to vote. Let's assume that the Supremes' FRWS Five aren't total morons (I'm not entirely sure in a couple of cases, but let's give them all the benefit of the doubt), and know that for all the right-wing screeching about "voter fraud," there has been no indication of any such thing happening, whereas dating back at least to the stolen presidential election of 2000, Republicans have been devoting more and more resources and time to election-stealing, and seizing control of the voter rolls has been a principal tool. Most of its strategies to date have been anywhere from probably to flagrantly illegal, but look here now, we control the law!

Which is where Justice Scalia's ruling in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona takes a turn for the comical. The issue, you'll recall was the illegality, according to the 7-1 majority, of Arizona adding a requirement while using a federal form. Uh-uh, said our Nino, you can't do that. And "if a reader of the Scalia opinion stopped at the top of page 13," wrote ScotusBlog's Lyle Denniston, "the impression would be very clear that Congress had won hands down in the field of regulating federal elections."

But from that point on, there is abundant encouragement for what is essentially a states' rights argument: that is, that the states have very wide authority to define who gets to vote, in both state and federal elections.

On the particular point at issue in this case -- Arizona's requirement of proof of citizenship before one may register to vote or actually vote -- the Scalia opinion said that a state was free to ask the federal government for permission to add that requirement. And, Scalia said, if that doesn't work — either because the federal agency that would deal with such a request is either not functioning or says no -- then a state would be free to go to court and make an argument that it has a constitutional right to insist on proof of citizenship as an absolute qualification for voting, in all elections.

The opinion seemed to leave little doubt that, if Arizona or another state went to court to try to establish such a constitutional power, it might well get a very sympathetic hearing, because that part of the Scalia opinion laid a very heavy stress on the power of states under the Constitution to decide who gets to vote.

And again, since Justice Nino isn't a moron, he surely knows full well that the agency to which Arizona would make this request is completely crippled by virtue of having no members, thanks to the Republican philosophy of non-governing: blind obstruction. So Arizona would get no answer to such a request, would go back to court, and . . . well, you get the idea. Ha ha ha!

What's more, in the process we get to see Justice Nino being, it appears, unpredictable. Mmm, no, that's just an illusion. But I think a not entirely accidental one. The FRWS Five seem to have become a lot more sensitive to the optics of their shredding of the Constitution and constitutional precedent, which for a number of frightening years has been unapologetic. Note, for example, that in the voting-rights decision, Chief Justice Roberts essentially blamed Congress for screwing up, failing to come up with constitutionally acceptable criteria for subjecting states and localities to Justice Dept. scrutiny of their voting procedures. Of course in the decades that the Voting Rights Act has been in force, and in all the times it has been reauthorized by Congress, nobody ever told them that the existing criteria were unconstitutional. (To which I assume the Chief would answer, "Well, nobody asked me!") And once again, the Chief, not being a moron, knows full well that at present there isn't the slightest possibility that Congress could rise to the occasion, because the House is effectively controlled by the kind of people who love the idea of being able to exclude people they don't like from the voting rolls.

Once again, the message to the states is: Discriminate, baby, we've got your back!

Note too how the voting-rights case, Shelby County v. Holder, was neatly sandwiched between the "moderate" non-eradication of affirmative action and today's decisions in the two same-sex-marriage cases. I am prepared to give the Court credit for coming right out and declaring Section 3 of DOMA unconstituional. That's the one that has prevented any federal agency from extending any marital benefits to same-sex couples, and it was nice to have a relatively unequivocal declaration that this is an unconstitutional form of discrimination.

That was all that was needed to decide the case, and traditionally the Supreme Court doesn't rule any more broadly than is needed to decide a case. Of course this is a tradition that the Roberts Court has regularly trashed, since going beyond what's needed to decide a case has been one of its favorite hobbies. In fact, the opportunity to do so has frequently seemed part of its reason for taking certain cases. In this case, though, it means that while the federal government is going to have a hard time going foward treating parties to a same-sex marriage differently from parties to an opposite-sex one, it doesn't mean that same-sex couples have been found to have any inherent right to the institution of marriage. If they're legally married, the ruling says, they have to be treated the same as any other couple that's legally married. In addition, neither the case nor the ruling required the justices to deal with the right of states to refuse to recognize other states' same-sex marriages -- that's protected in Section 2 of DOMA, which hasn't yet been touched.

But even in the matter of the DOMA rejection, as those NYT article blurbs up top suggest, the Court has more than anything followed the trend taking hold in the country. Remember that when same-sex marriage was finally authorized in New York State, a lot of important support, financial and otherwise came from Republican businesspersons. The business community has indeed been grasping that homophobia is increasingly "bad for business." It makes it harder to recruit qualified LGBT candidates, and it makes it hard to sell to LGBT consumers and straight consumers who understand the issue at stake. Go back to Rep. Alan Grayson's statement at the top of the post: "Today's Supreme Court decision is a victory for all Americans." There's someone who gets it, and getting this has been spreading to more and more of the country's mainstream.

So again, give the Supremes credit, but not that much. And in the Prop 8 decision, while the result will be to reinstate the District Court ruling that Prop 8 is just plain unconstitutional (and not merely at odds with the California state constitution, as the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had argued, since it took away a right -- one that had been established by the courts -- for no reason except to discriminate against LGBT folk), and same-sex marriage is clearly going to be legal in California again, but the ruling is unlikely to have any impact outside California. It's conceivable that the District Court ruling could be cited in other jurisdictions, but federal District Court rulings have no automatic application anywhere else.

And so the Roberts Court may have bent a little in its mission to uphold the rights of the privileged and white, but it didn't really bend all that much. It certainly didn't break.

I don't suppose this is terribly diplomatic, but then, it's aimed at people who have never had any impulse toward diplomacy in dealing with us. Like Michele "Mighty Mouth" Bachmann, who sent out a tweet saying, "No man, not even a Supreme Court, can undo what a holy God has instituted."


MEANWHILE, NOTHING CAN SHAKE JUSTICE NINO FROM
HIS DIVINELY ORDAINED MISSION TO HATE THE HOMOS

JUNE 26, 2013

SCALIA ARRESTED TRYING TO BURN DOWN SUPREME COURT

POSTED BY ANDY BOROWITZ

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) -- In a shocking end to an illustrious legal career, police arrested Justice Antonin Scalia today as he attempted to set the Supreme Court building ablaze.

Justice Scalia, who had seemed calm and composed during the announcement of two major rulings this morning, was spotted by police minutes later outside the building, carrying a book of matches and a gallon of kerosene.

After police nabbed Justice Scalia and placed him in handcuffs, the [Justice] appeared "at peace and resigned to his fate," a police spokesman said.

"He went quietly," the spokesman said. "He just muttered something like, 'I don't want to live in a world like this.' "

Back at the Supreme Court, Justice Scalia's colleagues said they hoped he would get the help he needed, except for Justice Clarence Thomas, who said nothing.

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Democratic Senators Who Voted To Confirm Fascists To The Supreme Court

Justice Ginsburg, who, like Bernie Sanders and Chuck Schumer, went to my high school, James Madison in Brooklyn, knows what she's talking about when she says the decision by the 5 right-wing Republican activists on the Supreme Court, each of whom is also a corporate whore, produced an anti-democratic ruling stinking of "hubris." She pointed out how illogical their nakedly partisan arguments were:

In the Court’s view, the very success of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act demands its dormancy. If the statute was working, there would be less evidence of discrimination, so opponents might argue that Congress should not be allowed to renew the statute. In contrast, if the statute was not working, there would be plenty of evidence of discrimination, but scant reason to renew a failed regulatory regime.

Our fellow Madison alumnus, Bernie Sanders, was even more to the point: "The Supreme Court has turned back the clock on equality in America by striking down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act. The landmark civil rights law that Congress passed almost five decades ago, and reauthorized with overwhelming bipartisan support only seven years ago, has been an important tool to protect voters in places with a history of discrimination. The law is as necessary today as it was in the era of Jim Crow laws. We must act immediately to rewrite this vital law." I think Republicans have a different agenda than Bernie. Speaking for all the racists and bigots who dominate the GOP, neo-fascist Congressman Jeff Duncan (R-SC) was positively giddy with the decision:

Today’s Supreme Court’s ruling invalidating the preclearance requirements contained within the Voting Rights Act is a win for fairness, South Carolina, and the rule of law. The preclearance requirement forced South Carolina to spend millions of dollars to defend a photo identification requirement for voting that had already been ruled constitutional by the US Supreme Court. The court’s ruling will hopefully end the practice of treating states differently and recognizes that we live in 2013, not the 1960's.

Michael Keegan, President of People for the American Way called the Supreme Court riling a "terrible blow to the Voting Rights Act."

As the Supreme Court swerves further to the right, our constitutional liberties continue to take a beating. Today, the Supreme Court seriously undermined an important piece of the premier civil rights legislation of the past century-- legislation that civil rights heroes gave their lives for. This decision sends a chilling message to all those Americans who continue to face politically-motivated hurdles on their way to the ballot box.

In his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice John Roberts pledged to behave like an umpire-- just calling balls and strikes, and staying out of the game. Today that umpire upended decades of civil rights law. His decision substitutes his own opinions for the findings of America’s elected representatives in Congress, who found numerous cases of ongoing, racially-based political gerrymandering and trickery. Moreover, it does so in an area in which the Constitution specifically and intentionally gives Congress wide discretion. Reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act received near unanimous support in both houses of Congress just a few years ago, and was signed into law by President Bush. Today’s decision is a blatantly inappropriate exercise in legislating from the bench. Conservatives who have spent decades decrying judicial activism should take note.

In two separate cases yesterday, Justice Ginsburg called on Congress to fix the damage done by decisions handed down by our nation’s highest court. That need is even greater today. Congress should move quickly to enact a coverage formula under Section 4 to protect voters whose right to participate in our democracy was badly undermined today. The American people deserve no less.

So how did these 5 corporate whores and GOP political hacks wind up on the Supreme Court? Who's to blame? Glad you asked, especially in light of a tweet from Matt Canter, Deputy Executive Director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee:

These are the 5 right-wing extremists on the Court with some info about how each got there, chronologically. First came Reagan's second pick, Antonin Scalia, who got the job when Reagan elevated former GOP Arizona voter fraud operative William Rehnquist to be Chief Justice. Although Scalia is probably the most extreme ideological rightist appointed to the court since Jackson appointed Roger Taney in 1836, he faced no opposition from the Judiciary Committee and was unanimously confirmed by the Senate. Among the Democrats voting for him were Joe Biden, Carl Levin, Ted Kennedy, Max Baucus, and Pat Leahy. Take a bow, guys.

Reagan's next appointment was Anthony Kennedy, who had previously drafted California Governor Reagan's pro-corporate and very reactionary tax policies. He was Reagan's third choice after the Senate rejected Bork (who almost made Scalia seem mainstreamish) and Douglas Ginsburg, who withdrew after it came out he was a pothead. He was confirmed 97-0 in 1988. The same bunch of Democrats still kicking around today who voted for Scalia-- Biden, Levin, Baucus, and Leahy-- also voted for Kennedy.

Then we get Clarence Thomas, George H.W. Bush's second appointment-- and, ironically, the second African-American to serve on the Court. (Bush's first appointment was David Souter who has already retired.) Because Thomas was so clearly unqualified in every way, this was a very contentious confirmation process. Thomas' career has always been serving as a professional Uncle Tom for the GOP and he's easily the least qualified justice nominated to the Court in the 20th Century, Jeffrey Toobin remarking that he was the only "plausible" African American the GOP could come up with to replace Thurgood Marshall, who would be a lockstep corporate whore and right-wing ideologue. He hasn't disappointed. The American Bar Association was astounded about his unsuitability for the appointment. The Senate Judiciary Committee voted 7-7 and sent his nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation. He was confirmed by a 52-48 vote on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin for approval in more than a century. All the normal Democrats (plus mainstream Republicans Bob Packwood and Jim Jeffords) voted against him. But 11 conservative Democrats, mostly from the South, joined the Republicans to confirm him. None of the Democrats are still in the Senate except Dick Shelby (AL), who soon after switched parties and joined the GOP.

The final two monsters on the Court, Roberts and Alito, were nominated by George Bush. Bush nominated Roberts to take over from Sandra Day O'Connor when she retired in 2005, but just as the process was getting underway, Rehnquist-- who was already horribly senile-- finally died. Bush realized they could slip Roberts-- a total Chamber of Commerce kind of guy-- in as Chief Justice. With Ted Kennedy, Richard Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Dianne Feinstein and Joe Biden voting against him, the Judiciary Committee approved the nomination 13-5. The following week he was confirmed by the Senate 78-22, all the Republicans and exactly half the Democrats voting for him. Democrats still serving in the Senate today who voted to confirm Roberts:

• Max Baucus (MT)
• Tom Carper (DE)
• Tim Johnson (SD)
• Mary Landrieu (LA)
• Patrick Leahy (VT)
• Carl Levin (MI)
• Patty Murray (WA)
• Bill Nelson (FL)
• Mark Pryor (AR)
• Jay Rockefeller (WV)
• Ron Wyden (OR)

Do you think they would vote for him again today? I might add that among the other Democrats who voted to confirm Roberts were Russ Feingold, Joe Lieberman (before he was kicked out of the party), and Blanche Lincoln. Among the 22 senators voting NO were Barack Obama, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton.

And the final piece of shit in a judicial robe, also nominated by Bush-- after his girlfriend Harriet Miers was laughed out of Washington by Democrats and Republicans-- was Sam Alito, another Big Business hack. Bush nominated him for the O'Connor seat in November, 2005 and he was approved by the Judiciary Committee on a 10-8 party line vote. John Kerry decided to filibuster the nomination because Alito was so extreme. The filibuster was shut down in a 72-25 vote, paving the way for confirmation. The cloture vote was the one that counted and the Democrats still serving today who crossed the aisle and voted with the GOP to end the filibuster were:

• Max Baucus (MT)
• Maria Cantwell (WA)
• Tom Carper (DE)
• Tim Johnson (SD)
• Mary Landrieu (LA)
• Bill Nelson (FL)
• Mark Pryor (AR)
• Jay Rockefeller (WV)

This week Alito was caught making juvenile faces while women members of the Court read their opinions. Among the Democrats backing the filibuster were Obama, Feingold, Clinton and-- finally-- Leahy.

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