Supreme's Greatest Hits

The Supreme Court seems to have ended its session and begun summer vacation with a bang.  Three major decisions over the past several days have reflected what I heard one commentator refer to as the most "liberal" court in decades.

To which I did a double take.  But when I thought about it, we did have some really significant wins.

The surprise decision was the one that supported the Fair Housing Act of 1968.  Surprising in light of the demolition of the Voting Rights Act, which gave states the right the do whatever damn thing they wanted to keep selected groups from voting, and which they wasted no time following through.  Chief Justice John Roberts, with his Pollyanna smile, declared there was no need for voting rights protection because racism was dead.  Leaving me wondering what rationalizations he made to justify the red-state rush to legalize voter discrimination immediately after the decision.

Not one to ever learn from his mistakes, Roberts was one of the four who voted against supporting the Fair Housing Act.  But he did weigh in with us liberals on the case that had my heart beating fast.  The state health care exchanges, with federal subsidies, remained intact, leaving a lot of folks like me with our Obamacare.  The vote was 6-3, with the core group of idiots, Scalia, Thomas and Alito holding down the right wing-nut opinion.

For those of you who are thinking Roberts may be sliding to the left, his opinion had nothing to do with the rights of Americans to have affordable health care.  His decision, just like the one in favor of Obamacare three years ago, was purely pro-business.  If you recall back then Roberts' opinion had pretty much everybody's head spinning, including his own.  He twisted and corkscrewed the law, arguing not the obvious one that was in question regarding the Commerce Clause, but that the individual mandate was a tax, and the feds were within their constitutional right to levy that tax.

So.  I'm thinking Roberts knew quite well that the insurance industry would take a crippling blow if it lost all us customers that could no longer afford health insurance without the federal subsidies.  And there are quite a lot of us.

Scalia, on the other hand, and despite his contention that his decisions are based purely on constitutional originalism, consistently bases his decision on what feels good to him.  This is the guy, after all, who believes that the devil is a real person.  So let's assume logic doesn't have as much to do with his thinking process as he would like us to believe.

Along with his imaginings of the devil and what the founding fathers believed we should be doing all these years later, Scalia has the kind of rigid and fragile psyche that just can't take much confrontation.  And so when he writes his dissents (which Chris Hayes noted are extremely wonderful and entertaining, especially because they are dissents) he tends not to sound all that educated, or intelligent, or even rational.

In his dissenting opinion on the Obamacare decision he calls the majority opinion "interpretive jiggery-pokery" and "pure applesauce," legal terms that no doubt go back to the founding fathers.  He snipes that since the Court has backed Obamacare in two major decisions, "we should start calling this law SCOTUScare."  And in an overwrought, pubescent and melodramatic fit, he sums it up by saying, "Words no longer have meaning...."

Roberts predictably let his right-wing flag fly in the marriage equality decision.  No surprise there.  It was purely a human rights case, and human rights will not sway our Chief Justice.  And I was not at all surprised that Kennedy was the deciding vote in favor of marriage equality, as he has voted in favor of gay rights before.


I'm thinking that a couple of things are happening with the Supremes.  Justice Kennedy retains his position as the swing vote.  I believe that he is a romantic, and he likes to feel like he is being wooed.  It also seems to me that he is easily influenced by the new guys on the block.  It happened when Roberts and Alito took up the cause of the right a decade ago, and now we have the left-leaning Kagan and Sotomayor.

Roberts is going to vote pro-business and against human rights.  The only individual he is going to support is the individual corporation.

The most fun these days is watching the narcissistic Scalia as he comes apart at the seams.  And even better, the more that happens, the less likely Kennedy is likely to want to be seen siding with him, leaving him sitting alone at the cafeteria table with Clarence Thomas and Sammy Alito.

Without taking away from these important victories, though, I am concerned about one group of decisions, those affecting women's privacy and health care rights.  Hobby Lobby, which has never blinked about paying for insurance that covers vasectomies, won the right to deny women contraceptive coverage.  Even Kagan and Sotomayor voted against a woman's right to be safe from harassment at an abortion clinic, refusing to support a state's right to determine an appropriate buffer zone from protesters.

At this point, with state and federal legislators pushing ever more extreme anti-abortion bills into law, pro-choice groups are afraid to take a case to this Supreme Court, fearing the complete overturn of Roe v. Wade.  This could happen, but we need to take our cue from the fearlessness and persistence of the LGBT community.  We need to continue to take cases to the Supremes, and we need to find new arguments, just as Burwell did with Obamacare.  We can't stop fighting, and we can't let our worry about the bias of all those Catholics on the bench slow us down or even cause us to hesitate.  As disappointed as I have been in the women's reproductive health care decisions, it is only by showing our strength that they will eventually be swayed.

So have a good summer vacation, Supremes.  We are counting on you to keep us entertained next time around. 

Awesome in North Carolina

I know, I couldn't wait to get away from SC politics, so here I am, in North Carolina.  Well, it couldn't be helped.  It's a timeshare week that I hoped to rent to help cover my recent blue state getaway, and since I couldn't rent it I figured I'd head on out to Atlantic Beach and see how much it's changed in five years.

My resort is still fairly nice, hasn't changed much, and it's lovely to have the beach a short walk away.  The skinny little island, however, is just sad.  It's been way too wet lately, and the standing water and drizzle combined with the fact that ugly three-story tall houses two feet away from other three-story tall houses have been stuck any wherever they barely fit make it seem that the whole thing is just going to sink fairly soon.  I walked the main drag to the causeway yesterday and it's so trashy it's depressing.  It pretty much seemed like a testament to greed and refusal to care.  After my time at the beautiful beach towns in Rhode Island, I couldn't have imagined a greater contrast.

But today I decided to head out to neighboring Morehead City to find Sugarloaf Bakery.  Despite my poor sense of direction, my GPS got me there with no problem.  Traffic was light and I took a careful u-turn and parked in front of the tiny building, and looked up to see a cop car with lights flashing pull up behind me.  The 30-40-ish African American officer took a few seconds to check out my out-of-state plate and no doubt my blatantly liberal bumper stickers.  

I couldn't figure out what I might have done wrong, so when the cop walked over and I asked "What did I do?" I was very obviously not faking it.  I had taken a u-turn under a small unobtrusive sign that said "No U-turns."  I apologized and explained that I was looking for the bakery and hadn't been here before.  He looked up at the bakery and commented, "They have great cheesecake.  The best in the state."  And then he explained to me about the u-turns and told me -- nicely -- not to do it again.  And left.

The tiny bakery was supposed to have opened at 11, but the sign on the door said that due to roof damage from the rains they would be opening at 12, and it was just a couple minutes before.  So far, I'd been lucky all the way around.

The shelves of goodies were still being stocked, and the woman behind the counter described the different sweets.  I bought too many, and as we said our good-byes I told her I was glad they were open and that I hadn't been given a ticket.  She replied that she had noticed my bumper stickers and that she had seen me being stopped for something that people do all day.  Given that I had been let off with the recommendation to try the cheesecake, I really didn't think the stop had been because of the bumper stickers.  The man was, after all, a police officer, and he was a black man, so I thought that I had those two details in my favor.

But she is a Democrat, and we talked about the sad state of North Carolina in the maws of the Republican party and the Kochs, and treading cautiously with a small business in the belly of the beast.  Being from SC, I commiserated, and I told her how astonishing it was to see NC get taken down, and how proud I was that with groups like the SC ACLU, we managed to not have a single anti-abortion law passed in this last legislative session.  Then I got the great opportunity to talk about being fearless, taking chances (like plastering pro-Obama care and anti-Citizens United bumper stickers on your car).  It was a very happy meeting.

And the more conversations I have like this, the more I heartily believe that there are far more of us out there than our Democratic politicians believe.  They just need to know -- we just need to know that we are not alone.  We need to know that our representatives, our candidates, will really stand up for us.  Elizabeth Warren did it in 2012.  In South Carolina we have a few who are unafraid to speak up on issues like women's reproductive rights and gun control, and they even get elected.  Fearless women like Gloria Bromell-Tinubu.  Heck, there are even a couple of men who proudly fight for marriage and workplace equality and women's reproductive freedom.

And that is what it is going to take.  Because we really are the ones who are fighting to protect the American people.

So speak up.

Will the Democrats Stand Up?

West Wing spoke to many of us over a decade ago.  I was so in thrall to its message that I actually went out and bought the entire series, and determined that someday I would start from the beginning and do it again.

About a year ago, I decided the time was right.  I have been watching one episode a week now, and find to my surprise/dismay, the same political games and the same attacks on the same groups, with the exception of the recent gains made in marriage equality and marijuana legalization.  Women are still fighting to keep our reproductive freedom and privacy; African Americans' right to vote is still under attack; the same programs that make some small dent in the struggles of the poor are being picked at by corporate and right-wing vultures.

So when Bruno Gianelli, campaign organizer for Bartlett's

re-election campaign said this:

  

I threw my bowl of popcorn to the floor and stood up and cheered.

In spite of the fact that the republican party has become more destructive with each passing year, and in spite of the fact that the goal of these right-wingnuts is to take from the poor and middle class to make the wealthy even richer and more powerful, I am hearing Democrats talk about the possibility -- no, the likelihood -- that we could lose the US Senate.

Even as more of us benefit from the Affordable Care Act, democrats, rather than take this as the cue to turn moderate republican voters (most republicans) to our cause, are tip-toeing around the fact that this program just might be a success.

Here in South Carolina, we support democrats who do not support women's reproductive rights or LGBT freedom, who do not openly support President Obama, or the Affordable Care Act, or Food Stamps, who incredibly vote in favor of allowing guns in bars.  Our candidates will continue to force us to live in a right-to-work-cheap state because they just have no clue as to how anyone could be helped by a union.

That's it, really.  Too many democrats running for office that appear to be clueless about what it is to be a Democrat.  It's almost as though the thought process is, "Gee, there's already a republican running, and I really want to win this election, so I may as well run as a democrat."

I'm with Bruno Gianelli on this.  I've had it with politicians expecting me to vote for them because I'm a Democrat and, well, they are running as democrats.  Not good enough.  If you want my vote, start now by acting like a Democrat.  That means fighting for individuals who may not have the financial clout, or may be in the minority, or may be too beaten down to get out and vote for you.

You never know.  If our candidates fearlessly run as the opposing party, they may actually be heard by young men and women who really haven't seen a reason to turn out and vote -- yet.  Those poor people that are so easily dismissed may be staunch supporters if they think you might honestly make a difference in their lives.

Our state and county democratic party needs to try a lot harder to invite people in, and to get them heard.  They need to stop looking for the safe candidate and begin to look for real Democrats.  They need to stop thinking that cheerleading is going to convince voters that their candidate is going to make a difference.

Barack Obama has had a tough uphill slog.  I have been among his critics.  But I have to say that, once he decided to talk and act like a Democrat he began to get things done.  If he were starting his presidency today, knowing what he knows now, he just might be pushing for universal health care.  He is not equivocating about raising the minimum wage, although shamefully, some congressional democrats are starting to do that dance.  His eventual support for marriage equality has helped in the progress that has been made.  He is fighting for the vast numbers of people who have been imprisoned for minor drug possession.

He's not perfect, but he's certainly given our politicians some coattails that they can hold on to.  They just need to stop cowering in the corner.  As Bruno Gianelli said:

"No more.  Let's have two parties."