The Case for Eight Justices

Our own Lindsey Graham is having just too darn much fun at his town halls.  He loves the attention, loves to perform.  And doesn't give a rat's ass what we Dems have come to say.  He's not there to listen.  Buffered by misinformation about Planned Parenthood and abortion funding, a now regular misquote of Joe Biden's, and truly ironic comments about Democratic partisanship, his message is basically that Donald Trump is president, and we should just "get over it."

Graham justifies defunding Planned Parenthood to prevent the government from funding abortions, which it doesn't.

And after House republicans voted over fifty times to repeal the Affordable Care Act at an estimated cost of over $75 million, with big money behind challenges going to the Supremes, Graham is accusing DEMS of being partisan, and advising us to "get over it?"

And then there is the Joe Biden quote, that he has gleefully dragged out whenever asked about the Senate's refusal to even hear Merrick Garland's nomination by President Obama.

First of all, since when do republicans propose to follow anything Joe Biden advises?

Apart from that, the reality is that Joe Biden actually suggested that IF a seat became vacant during an election year, the nomination should not happen until after election day -- NOT until the newly elected president takes office.  The reasoning being that an election season should not be sullied by a contentious Supreme Court nomination debate (There are plenty of other things with which to sully it.).  His point being that the nomination should occur by the sitting president, but after Election Day.

Never passing up an opportunity to twist the truth to their advantage, republicans quickly named the misquote the "Biden Rule," and drag it out whenever convenient, happily during Obama's last year in office.

So let's stick the "Biden Rule" where it belongs and get on with the real issues about the Gorsuch nomination.

Most of us plain old American citizens don't really understand how important the Supreme Court is to the actual face of our day to day democracy.  We know about Roe v. Wade, and the more political of us know why Citizens United was bad, but truly, as we go about our daily lives, the make-up of the Supreme Court is the most important force in America.  The successful nominee will determine the direction of our country, and our lives, for decades.

It has been a bad time for the country because the Supremes have been ruled by narcissistic right wingnuts like Scalia, paranoid right wingnuts like Clarence Thomas,  and bought and paid for right wingnuts like Chief Justice Roberts for a very long time.  I can imagine the rage over the vacancies leading to the appointments of Sotomayor and Kagan during Obama's term.  After the initial shock, I imagine the republican response to Scalia's death was, "enough is enough --  NO MORE OBAMA JUSTICES!"

Of course we were stunned when McConnell pulled the "Biden Rule" from out of his ass, although we should not have been.  The republicans in Congress had done nothing other than plot to retake control for the eight years of Obama's presidency.  Their entire agenda had been centered around "NO."  They were primed to obstruct.

So, all the excuses to keep the quite moderate and well-respected Merrick Garland off the court are bullshit.  He was the legitimately chosen and extremely competent nominee and was denied a hearing and a vote.  The end.

But Dems being Dems, we are witnessing the waffling and spinning off that seems to always go on, and always results in splits that diminish our power and our message to the people.  That message being that we are standing together because it is the right thing to do and we feel that strongly about it that we will risk our careers to stand together.  You know, like the republicans did to regain Congress.

So, whether to filibuster or not?  Jeez, the justifications I've heard for voting for Gorsuch rather than filibuster have truly made me want to pull out my white hair.  He's going to get the votes anyway?  So I'll just help them along???  How about:  We don't want the republicans to change the rules and eliminate the filibuster, because then we can't use it next time.  Now that is truly the Democratic principle we all know and love, the one that says we should all cower and hope nobody notices that we aren't taking a stand.

Then we've got our perennial Dems in name only:  Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp, this time joined by Joe Donnelly.  Overlooking what was done to their sitting president and his nominee, they are claiming that they are voting yes because Gorsuch is qualified.  And they are afraid if they vote no they won't get re-elected.

Neil Gorsuch is the kind of right-wing obsessive-compulsive weasel who has made lots of bad decisions, but know just how to cross his t's and dot his i's so that they won't be overturned.  He is farther right than Antonin Scalia, and doesn't have his sense of humor.  He is John Roberts on steroids.  He is a moral twin to Mike Pence, who believe that God has granted them the power to make the poor and powerless swing in the breeze.

Fun fact:  Mike Pence reports that he will not dine alone with a woman who is not his wife.  I imagine his hair turned white from the amount of scrubbing he does to try to get the dirty thoughts out of his head.  I also wish the not-dining-with-women-alone thing were true of Gorsuch; it would be a great relief to our three woman justices once he is confirmed.

But enough comic relief.

The big money is on Gorsuch.  There are lovely ads put out by the Judicial Crisis Network telling us to call our Senators and tell them to confirm this wonderful man.  No surprise, the Judicial Crisis Network is a right wing dark money group which in fact fueled their self-named judicial crisis immediately after Obama nominated Merrick Garland.  It appears that McConnell isn't all that smart or politically determined; what it takes is those big guys who have kept the idiot in office all these years to tell him what stand to take.

Googling these dark and dirty groups, going backwards till my head spun, I came up with the Wellspring Committee run by Ann Corkery, moneyed religious right attorney who doesn't just put her money where her mouth is; she puts her mouth there too, as with an article for RealClearPolitics explaining how the Dems opposition to Jeff Sessions is based on falsehoods and,

"One, the left's reflexive opposition to all things Donald Trump.  Two, the left's prep work for the next confirmation battle over Trump's nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court."

As far as facts and arguments go, we could say she's like Ann Coulter, but smarter.  And much richer.

The other nice thing about Corkery, Wellspring, Judicial Crisis Network, and all those other dark money groups is that they don't have to tell you who they really are and what they really do.  Corkery's twitter feed is a private group -- I didn't know you could even do that.  Secret money, secret affiliations, secret lives.  What we do know about all these groups and all this money behind Gorsuch is that their primary function is to protect their own power.  They are the people behind the corporations that run the country.  They are the "christian" conservatives that continue to put their money into controlling the rest of us with their fake family values, funding opposition to women's rights so that only women with money and influence can determine their reproductive lives and their futures.  They include the NRA and the Kochs.  JCN not only welcomes into their fold Dems who cave like Manchin and Heitkamp, they take to task their right-wing Supreme Court jurists who find against their interests, calling out Chief Justice Roberts for his decision on Obamacare.

If you want to try to follow the money, this is the article to read:

https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/wellsprings-flow/

And while you are there, please feel free to donate to Open Secrets, a group that we are really going to need to ferret out the dark money during these dark days.

So, we have Dems that are doing all they can to slow down the inevitable appointment of extremist Neil Gorsuch.  He will rule against minorities, against women, against voting rights.  He will always, always rule in favor of corporations and the religious right.

A shame the Dems couldn't get it together, like, right from the beginning of this battle.  They knew Trump couldn't have come up with a qualified nominee (one who could speak in complete sentences with words of more than one syllable, and who hadn't been indicted on anything) all on his own.  The deal that has made Paul Ryan Trump's lapdog may have had more to do with choosing the right Supreme Court justice than with agreeing on repealing Obamacare.  We all know that other than furthering Trump's fame and fortune, he really doesn't care what gets done.  We know he was handed a list of acceptable nominees, and can only assume he closed his eyes and pointed to Gorsuch.

Dems united in this battle, refusing to accept anyone who was not Merrick Garland, and the DNC putting money into ads and publicity insisting on same, might have still gotten us Gorsuch, but might have put things off for quite awhile.  The fuss about having to have nine justices just doesn't hold water.  I think the Supremes have done just fine with four and four.  Because in order to accomplish anything, four would have to be persuasive enough to convince a fifth to come over.  I put my money on my team.  I believe the women justices are smarter and more determined than those characters on the right.  I believe Kennedy has been persuaded more than once since his pal Scalia has found out once and for all whether satan really exists.

Without a skeevy Mike Pence being able to cast a deciding vote as he does in the Senate, an eight judge court might be the closest thing to nonpartisan, democratic decisions we will have.

What can we do?  We can make that call that the Judicial Crisis Network wants us to make.

Call your Senator:  202-224-3121 and tell them NO to Neil Gorsuch.

The Thing About Health Care

First of all, let me just say that “health care” and “health insurance” are two different things.  But somewhere along the way, we have started to call health insurance, health care.

I remember the days when a health insurance plan did not necessarily provide a person with health care.  There were abominable deductibles and co-pays, and lots and lots of health care that just wasn’t covered.  Remember that?  It wasn’t so long ago.

And then, to republicans’ great consternation, Obamacare required minimum standards that were actually standards and not rip-offs.  The complaint from the right-wing was not at all about quality of care, it was about… freedom of choice.  That’s right.  The government was telling you that you would no longer be allowed to buy a sub-standard health insurance plan.

Shortly after the ACA became a real thing, I heard a guy at the optometrist’s office complaining to the receptionist about his Obamacare.  “I do get more stuff covered,” he admitted, grudgingly.

But now the good old days are coming back.  We consumers will once again have freedom of choice, by which I mean freedom to choose health insurance that you can afford even if it doesn’t really provide adequate health care, and even the freedom to be uninsured.  "Boy howdy!" as Rachel Maddow would exclaim.

And then there is the current big debate among the majority lawmakers over tax credits.  What tax credits mean is that when you pay your taxes, you will get a credit for a certain amount to go towards payment for health insurance.  So, if your health insurance costs $3,000 a year, you would have to pay $3,000 less in taxes.  Sounds good, right?

But suppose your income is so low that you only owe $1,000 in taxes?  What happens to that other $2,000 of health insurance cost?  That, friend, is what our lawmakers are bickering about.  The less evil among them believe the government should pick up the other $2,000, while the Ted Cruzes and Paul Ryans -- we know who you are -- believe we should just go suck eggs.

Until the ACA came along, Medicaid covered low-income seniors, children and the disabled.  If you were an adult working, say, at McDonald's, and you were most likely not earning a living wage, you most likely couldn't afford health insurance and you did not qualify for Medicaid.  For much of the country, Obama's Medicaid expansion changed that, providing federal dollars to cover those whose earnings put them somewhere between a rock and a hard place.

Republicans saw the injustice in providing health insurance to the working poor, however, and got the Supremes to agree that governors could decide whether or not they would take the free money.  And some of those anti-tax governors just could not go along with taking tax dollars, especially if they weren't going to benefit big corporations.  Here in South Carolina, where Nikki Haley refused to accept the Medicaid expansion, that meant you qualified if you earned less than $12,000 a year, and had less than $7,300 in savings.  So I am thinking (and this whole thing is about as clear as earwax) that if you are a low-income worker in SC, the good news is you may be no worse off after Congress and Trump get done with health insurance.

Sadly, that will be true for a whole lot more Americans.  And for those of us whose income qualified them for health insurance through the ACA, tax credits will mean a lot more of us will be falling through the cracks.  The good news about this, though, is that those fools will probably also repeal the mandate, so if you can't afford health insurance, you won't get fined for not being able to buy it.

The republican congress did not show up much in the eight years of Obama's presidency.  Mostly they were there to block any proposals made by the president and congressional Democrats.  That meant filling their time with lots of votes to repeal Obamacare.  These days I have heard more than once that they are like the dog that caught the car.  And I am really proud to say that, beginning with the Woman's March on January 21, we have been a big part of their problem.

We have shown up at town halls, made phone calls, protested, marched, written letters to the editor, and pretty much kept legislators awake nights wondering how they can sneak this travesty by us while we are watching their every move.

Apparently, even the Americans who voted R have finally woken up to see that something they need badly is being snatched out of their hands.

There is a lot of crap flying these days.  We are trying to fight as much of it as we can.  There are bad things that will happen.  For awhile, corporations will be having a big party, overindulging and then throwing up all over our country.  The rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer, until those of us who have been buying the stuff that make the plutocrats fat can't afford it anymore.  It happened in 2008.

But this time we anticipated it, and we didn't just let it get reported in the news.  We took to the streets, and we are fighting it.  I don't know if the republicans are going to be able to turn health care into the tragedy it was before the ACA, or if they will just mangle it beyond recognition.  I do know that their decision will take them down.

And then we get to build it again.

Compromising Women's Rights, Again

I was alarmed, but not altogether surprised, to hear that one of Hillary's possible VP choices is Tim Kaine.  As I scan through articles about possible VP's, Kaine keeps coming up as the most likely because he is "safe."

Jeez Louise, isn't this the year we ought to finally stop going for "safe?!"  We have learned that that idiot with the ducktail can say any damn thing he wants and only garners admiration from his followers for saying any damn thing he wants.  Remember W???  He was admired because he said whatever came off the top of his head, and told voters if they didn't like it they didn't have to vote for him.

And this is the year -- this was the week -- that Dems led by John Lewis made history by recalling the sixties with a sit-in on the floor of the House.  Finally, finally, we were able to say enough killing, we will risk our careers to do the right thing.  Wow.  That doesn't happen often among Dems.

Meanwhile, Tim Kaine, along with nearly every other damn Democrat, supports the second amendment.  Because you sure can't begin a fight for gun control unless you reassure all the paranoids and wackos out there that you aren't going to take away their guns.  The man from the state that in 2007 ended up with 33 young people dead at Virginia Tech would propose to limit high-capacity weapons to ten bullets.  That means only ten dead as opposed to fifteen.  That's just pathetic.

But I want to talk about Tim Kaine and abortion.  Tim Kaine is one of those I don't believe in abortion but I support a woman's right to choose people.  Really.  What that attitude has gotten us over the years is more and more abortion restrictions as the people who are really passionate about women's rights -- limiting them, that is -- are willing to dig in the dirt to find any wormhole that will allow them to take away another path to access of that right.

The half-hearted support for women's right to choose by those who "don't believe in abortion" has led to an appalling lack of understanding of just how under attack women have been.  It has led to women on the Supreme Court joining with men in a 9-0 opinion to reverse Massachusetts' ruling allowing a buffer zone banning protesters around abortion clinics.  Nine justices saw the protests as a first amendment free-speech issue rather than the harassment and threat to women's rights that they really are.

Hillary had a number of women on her VP list, but the Dems are afraid that having two women on a ticket would jeopardize her ability to win.  I believe it was Amy Klobuchar who was asked by Rachel Maddow whether choosing two women would jeopardize Hillary's chances.  She replied that we have a long history of same sex candidates running together successfully on the presidential ticket.  Hmmm.

And then there is the fear of going too liberal.  Hillary, who won the nomination by claiming that she is a proud progressive.  Imagine the Dems surprise when Bernie supporters don't jump on board because Hillary's VP choice is just another safe moderate.

I am hoping that all the excitement about Tim Kaine is a circle jerk by moderate Dems who want to reassure themselves that Hillary isn't really going to try to shake things up the way her fight against Bernie led us to believe.  I wonder at the media that continues to act like Bernie doesn't count.  After all the people he got out to vote, I have heard it said more than once that he no longer has any power and that he should just concede and get out of the way.  This could be the way the Dems shoot themselves in the foot again, this time, when it seems that we have everything, including a hateful batshit crazy opponent, in our favor.

I like Elizabeth Warren in the Senate rattling all those cages, and apparently she likes it too.  But  Sherrod Brown, another VP possible, is one of my all-time favorite people, fearless and progressive, and with that sexy whiskey voice that I could listen to forever.  And then there are actually a number of extremely qualified women, Klobuchar included.

And that takes me, once again, back to abortion.  If the first woman presidential nominee does not feel confident enough about the fight for women's rights to choose a solidly pro-choice candidate for VP, she will be telling us all that women's reproductive rights are not important enough to fight for, right from the start.  If this is the year of the woman, this should be the year that we no longer allow others to philosophize, proselytize, waffle or opine on how a woman's reproductive life should be legislated.  It is time to stop listening, not just to the opinion of the anti-abortion brigade, but to the moderate equivocators.  For once, we need to start with Roe v. Wade and fight against all the bites that have been taken out of that freedom since 1973.  Ignoring the abortion fight means a lot of women are not going to be voting, because they will see that, once again, politicians are not fighting for them.

Here's another perspective.

How bizarre would it be for someone to say, "I don't believe in being gay for myself, but other people have the right to be gay."  Or, "I wouldn't believe in affirmative action for myself, but it's okay if other people want to believe in it."

It's the "believing in it" that has allowed pseudo science, religious bigotry and false facts to twist legislation around against far too many individual rights.  Women have the right to privacy, to the best medical care available, to a doctor-patient relationship not impaired by government oversight.  They have the right to affordable and accessible health care whether it is for abortion or a head cold, contraception or high blood pressure.

It would be absurd for someone to opine about whether high blood pressure really exists or needs to be treated.  Because opinions on abortion by those against abortion have been given validity, we are reaping hundreds of bad laws.  The laws that have sprung up around when and where a woman can have an abortion, whether she can access birth control, and forcing her to pay; the laws that force doctors to lie or not answer questions accurately about contraception and abortion; the laws that impose restrictions on clinics that force them to shut down; the laws that allow harassment and threats in the name of freedom of speech.  They all come from that crack in the window that lets people whose lives are not affected have opinions on women's reproductive rights.

And all y'all can have your opinions.  I don't have to listen to those opinions if I don't want to.  Unless you are in charge.  This is why we Dems need to fight for candidates that will fight for us.  Without compromise.  Without equivocation.  

And "moderate," "safe" candidates like Tim Kaine just don't cut it.

Nino, We Knew You Too Well

The death of Antonin Scalia yesterday left me remarkably speechless.  It took a night of turning the event over in my mind before I could write about it.

Because he was so obviously going to be rattling his cage with the Supremes forever, it was inevitable that I would have from time to time imagined his death as the only likely way to move the Supreme Court forward.  There, I said it.

He may be a larger than life evil figure to me, not just because of his power, but because we are both full-blooded Italians.  Scalia more than fulfilled the stereotype I grew up with of Italian men.  He was a mafioso with an Ivy League education.  He was convinced that he was the smartest person in the room, and held contempt for those who he saw as beneath him.  Which was most of us.

He was rigid and held to simple and self-serving philosophies.  Calling himself an originalist, he was a proud founding member of the Federalist Society.  However, as with all obsessively rigid people, Scalia could blatantly hold a conflicting opinion if it served his interest, and wholeheartedly deny the conflict.  He condemned activist judges, except, of course, when it was him.  Because he was always right.

He was best friends with Justice Ginsberg, a friendship which totally flummoxes me.  We've all heard of warring attorneys enjoying after-hour friendships.  But I can't imagine someone as moral as Ginsberg being able to stick all that in a compartment so she can enjoy a glass of wine with Nino.  I have imagined that he must have enjoyed having all those women on the bench of late.  Not because he valued their opinions, but because he could engage in flirtatious sparring with intelligent female opponents.  What fun!

I do believe though, that as Obama's appointees became more influential, and at times he was even abandoned by fellow right wingnut Chief Justice Roberts, Scalia's narcissistic wit began to deteriorate.  Loose associations having to do with broccoli and his most recent failure to self-censor his racism suggest that Scalia was not quite as clever as his self-promotion made him out to be.  Perhaps it was the inevitable legalization of gay marriage that pushed his homophobic old mind over the edge.  In fact, it was after the DOMA decision that Scalia told an interviewer that the devil is real:

Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

No.
It’s because he’s smart.

Scalia was "Despicable Me" with less charm and more power.  He was not at all embarrassed at his conflicts of interest during his time on the bench because, after all, he was right.  He was indeed above the law, which is a scary position for one of the most powerful jurists in the land.

After a good night's sleep I find that it will be easier to accept the absence of Scalia.

It will come as no surprise that Mitch McConnell has already said that a new justice should not be appointed until after the election.  He would have said the same thing if Scalia had died two years ago.  Senate republicans have routinely chosen to leave seats vacant during Obama's presidency in the hope of filling them with more desirable right-wing candidates after the presidential election.  This has left a shameful backlog in the courts, but, hey, it's not about justice, it's about politics -- and power.

So for at least a year we will have an eight-member Supreme Court.  This will no doubt mean a lot of 4-4 decisions, meaning no decision.  Which I see as an improvement over the status quo.

I worry though.

I worry about how hard Ruth Bader Ginsberg is taking the loss of her friend.  To be honest, it's not completely motivated by empathy.  I worry about her health.  We need her more than ever now.

I worry about Clarence Thomas.  What on earth is he going to do without his buddy to hide behind, and say all the horrible things Thomas would like to say if he wasn't so bottled up with rage?

The ground shifted a little for me when I heard the news last night.  But I imagine the earth shifted a bit more for those remaining eight members of the most exclusive and sheltered club in all of this country.

We have survived a do-nothing Congress, and in fact, were better off for it.  Perhaps the remaining Supremes will just hang in and bide their time for a year or more as well.

As for Antonin Scalia, his last day on earth was spent at a friend's ranch, doing what he most enjoyed, hunting down and taking shots at the smaller and weaker among us.   

The Ironic Cherry Reads...

...The Invisible Bridge 

"If the people believe there's an imaginary river out there, you don't tell them there's no river out there.  You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river."

This is the quote that prefaces the book "The Invisible Bridge" by Rick Perlstein.  It is attributed as "Advice to Richard Nixon from Nikita Khrushchev."

The book is a doorstop, some 800+ pages.  If you have time to read only one book, this is the one you should read.  As the subtitle says, it chronicles the time -- bridges the time -- of "the fall of Nixon and the rise of Reagan."

If you have been sitting here in 2015 scratching your head and wondering how we got here from the amazing sixties, this is the book that will clear it up for you.  Yes, we had Roe v. Wade, and civil rights legislation, ended the war in Vietnam and began to end pollution and save the planet.  We had desegregation, a war on poverty and more kids went on to college than ever before.

But we liberals never saw the backlash coming.

The abortion wars began as soon as they ended, fires fueled by rage at the Supreme Court justices that made a woman's right to abortion the law of the land.

It was in the 70's that the textbook wars began, with a mild mannered Christian woman named Alice Moore speaking up at a Texas school board meeting, and refusing to back down until school boards in Texas and across the country removed books that offended with their words of sex and science, integration and art.  Evolution was banned from textbooks and classrooms, as well as "The Grapes of Wrath."

Lest we yanks feel smug, it was in Boston where fierce rioting went on over school busing.  "Two groups of people who are poor and doomed and who have been thrown in the ring with each other," was how columnist Jimmy Breslin described the battles between whites and blacks.

And in today's headlines we have a dozen odd republican candidates for president keeping those same wounds open.  They may be using Mexicans instead of African Americans, but their followers I assure you see them as pretty much the same problem.  You can't publicly pledge to send blacks back where they came from these days, but ending Obamacare and the Voting Rights Act is nearly as satisfying.

While Hillary is wasting her time apologizing for emails, we must know that this has nothing to do with what is going on with the upcoming election.

Remember that big brouhaha over Obama's 2008 comments on guns and religion?  We need to go back and listen to those comments again:

"You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. 

And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Yes, they continue to cling to their guns and religion, and they are fueled by opportunistic politicians.  And what we see is craziness and rage.  We see nobodies like Kim Davis regaled as a hero for refusing to obey the law and used by fools like Mike Huckabee to promote his own small-minded religious agenda.  And those people who live in their own ignorance and isolation thrive on the narrative that the freedom of others to live differently will deny them their religious freedom.

And there you have that invisible bridge.  There won't be better jobs and the kids will either bail out or follow in the footsteps of fear and denial.  And the politicians will continue to pretend that they care about "religious freedom" while they deregulate and cut taxes for the rich.  And they will cut services to those same isolated small towns, health care and education, roads and schools, police and firefighters, blaming the government.  These pols have created and perpetuated this vicious cycle, wherein ignorance leads being frightened and vulnerable to lies and manipulation, which leads to more isolation and ignorance.

What is different now than it was in the 70's is that we have a Supreme Court that has been molded by the right-wing to reflect that bizarre religious paranoia.  Since Reagan the Supremes have formalized the union between corporate power and religion.  Small businesses haven't noticed that they have not been included in all the freedom of speech that is being bought, and politicians are giving them nothing but lip service.  But the pols have taken up the fight for the religious fanatics.  Because while they are wasting time and dollars with votes and court battles to end Obamacare, voting rights and Planned Parenthood, they are seeming to serve those small town old-timey values while their real constituents, the billionaire capitalists, are allowed to continue to freely run the country.

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. 

Killing Obamacare

I am outraged by assaults by the republicans on abortion rights and voting rights, but these are issues that are not personally going to affect me.  What I am personally concerned about these days is all the efforts that are going into killing Obamacare, still.  The latest assaults could well succeed.

Antonin Scalia, narcissist extraordinaire and the mouthpiece most damaging to the honor and credibility of the Supreme Court, is the most likely nail in the coffin of the Affordable Care Act.  He believes that in looking at legislation, intent should not be considered, even if it is verifiable.  The only consideration should be the exact words in the law.  Unless, that is, it goes against his own belief of what the law should be.

In this case, the whole of Obamacare is resting in the four words, "established by the state."  Despite the fact that no one involved in the debate or writing of the law believes that the intent was to exclude those states who refused to create an insurance exchange, Scalia will hold forth with the claim that those words are in the bill and must be followed.

Now that the ACA is the law of the land, and people have become very happy with having affordable insurance, the republican party is being a bit more sneaky about killing it.  They have already come up with an alternative that would continue the ACA until 2017, but only if the individual and employer mandates are discontinued.  Those extremists who believe tax subsidies should only go to wealthy corporations are proposing tax credits rather than subsidies.  So basically, if your income is so low you pay no taxes, voila, no tax credit.

Because I turn 65 in 2016, and it seems even the rabid republicans can't kill Medicare in that short a time, I let go a sigh of relief to hear that I could still have insurance even if Scalia gets his way.  But that doesn't make the problem a lesser one.  Killing the mandate kills the funding for the ACA.  What the republicans understand is that Obamacare only works if everyone participates.  And what they also understand is that most voters are mostly concerned with what affects them immediately.  They will be angry if they lose their insurance coverage.  But if the republicans can blame Obama and the Democrats, which they have done successfully for some time now, it is a win-win for them.  They can continue to be the anti-tax party and the freedom party.

What they understand all too well is that people don't care about health insurance until it affects them.  That is why forcing insurance companies to offer better plans only matters to those who had inadequate insurance that they needed.  Those who didn't need it are quite loud and angry about having to pay more for what amounts to better insurance.  And some that are quite stupid will yell about paying more even when they use that better coverage.

I worry about what the Supremes will decide in June.  As should we all.  Because I might be okay till I turn 65, but my kids might not.  They might end up having the same vulnerability to illness that too many of us Americans experienced up until Obamacare was passed.  It was a terrifying time, and the republicans, frankly, don't give a damn.  They can turn our fear and tragedy to votes.

What we can do at this point, is be educated about this.  And inform others.  Keep an eye on the Supremes, and be willing and ready to fight our South Carolina legislators, both state and federal, to preserve affordable health care.

Underground Racism

It seems fair to say, despite the pontifications of Chief Justice John Roberts, that racism has not come to an end.  I wonder why nobody has asked him to share his wisdom regarding the shootings of black men by white police officers.  It must have something to do with that ginormous buffer zone the justices have protecting them from the actual real world.  Which also explains why we would never expect Clarence Thomas to have to worry about white cops.

It was inevitable that we in South Carolina would have our turn in the national spotlight over a police shooting.  In fact it happened too briefly a year ago, and other times before that.

I was surprised to hear an MSNBC reporter yesterday note that of over 200 police shootings in South Carolina, none were convicted of a crime.  I recalled the terrifying dashcam video of last summer's shooting of an unarmed black man who was reaching for his license and registration after being stopped for not having his seat belt on.  It turns out that the officer involved was fired and charged with assault and battery, but not yet tried.  It seems we need to keep a close eye on that case.

Because it should be obvious to anyone other than five members of the Supreme Court that racism is alive and well.  And not just in the south.  The stereotypes of dangerous black men and black women who live high off the welfare system haven't died; they had just gone underground.  It may be that it took a black president to bring the paranoia out in the open.  And it took authorities like the majority of the Supreme Court to give their blessing to racially motivated aggression.

Where was all that racism before it became legal to deny blacks the right to vote via the voter ID bandwagon and selectively limiting polling places, hours and locations?  And we hadn't had quite such a rage against people on welfare and food stamps since Ronald Reagan's bullshit about the welfare queen in the Cadillac.  While the media was enjoying the Obama birth certificate nonsense, the racists were beginning to crawl out from under their rocks.

As a white woman, I can testify to the fact that there has always been racism.  Because every now and then, someone would say to me something along the lines of "You know what they're like."  Wink, nudge.  I find it bizarre, and yet, if you're like me, when it's happened to you white folk who are reading this, you may not have said, "No, I don't," or, "Yeah, probably like me."  We don't confront the crazies because, well, they are crazy.  After all, they've made assumptions that all we white folk are like they are and believe what they know to be fact.  So, like me, you probably backed away from the conversation, maybe discretely shaking your head as you went.

We know the racists are out there.  We know the stereotypes.  The only way to change that nonsense is for white and blacks to live, work, go to school with each other.  We've known that for a long time.  And yet even when schools are integrated it is pretty likely that the social groups aren't.  And even a liberal democrat such as myself finds that I am in a social group with white women.

So we self-select.  But we still need to talk among each other.  We need to share space.  And most important, we need to stop the racists from perpetuating the racist myths.  We need our politicians to stop playing to our fears.  We need to insist that our judges don't hold ridiculous stereotypes.  We definitely need to screen those who hold racist beliefs out of our police forces and our schools.

My mother used to tell the story of a teacher in her elementary school (circa 1925) who hated Italians.  She thought they were dirty and stupid.  As my mother walked down the stairs, this teacher gave her a little kick to help her along.  We've mostly all been there.  These days it's the Hispanics who are called dirty and stupid.  Segregating ourselves from others who are different, stereotyping those we don't know well enough to understand, this may be the human condition.  But we are all in a position to step up and stop the nonsense when it happens.  The media needs to do it, the courts need to do it.

But I don't see that on the horizon.  Fox News, the right-wing politicians, and big corporate powers like the Kochs have too much to gain by fueling the hate.  Until our authorities step up, as Lyndon Johnson did when he said no to racism and put his full power behind the American law and a true belief in equality, we will have to whip out the cell phones and make the cops wear body cams.  It won't end racism, and the cameras won't be enough.  We've had blacks shot and strangled on camera, and the cops gotten off by not-so-grand juries and prosecutors who were on the side of the cops.  It will take vigilance, protests, media focus to stop the killing of innocent blacks that has gone on throughout the country's history.  It is good that the tragic killings of Trayvon Martin and of Michael Brown in Ferguson woke us up from our delusions.  But we need to understand that those talks that dads have with their black sons about the police have always gone on, and we need to know that the society that makes that necessary has got to change. 
  

...and If You Hate Obamacare...

I am one of those South Carolinians waiting with bated breath for the U.S. less-than-Supreme Court to rule on the Affordable Care Act.  It infuriates me that in this country, so many who are fortunate enough to have health care security will continue to rant and obstruct the program that has given so many of the rest of us the same.  The what's-in-it-for-me crowd is so blinded by greed and rage that they are unable to see how, in fact, making health care a right instead of a privilege has been a major factor in the dramatic upswing in our economy.

We have gone in a short time from an economy crippled by high unemployment, in which the younger job-seekers were shut out because we older folk had to hang on till we were eligible for Medicare.  We stayed with jobs we hated, jobs that hurt our aging bodies, jobs that often did not pay a living wage, so that we could cling to that health insurance that each year cost more and covered less.  Employers called the shots because they knew they had something we needed -- and it wasn't that barely living wage.

The health insurance industry, with a strong house advantage, never lost the insurance gamble.  They took in the young and healthy and priced out of the game anyone who actually might cause them to have to pay out.  The cost of people growing sicker and dying because of lack of adequate health care never showed up on the health insurance industry bottom line.

It is true that the health insurance industry made sure to take care of its own when reform became inevitable.  They made promises in exchange for the ability to make even more money.  They did this by allowing our government to subsidize those fat premiums.  And their lobbyists made sure the public saw the government as the enemy and not the industry itself.

So for pretty much the entirety of President Obama's terms in office, we have been listening to the uninformed parroting the vitriol against health care reform.  I've heard people complain about Obamacare in the same breath that they admitted they were now paying less for coverage.  They rage against "Obamacare" as though it is responsible for the global warming they deny and pretty much everything else (Melissa McCarthy as Tammy:  "Four dollars a gallon.  Thanks, Obamacare.").

It is also true that the ACA has only slowed the rise of health care costs.  Well, if Democrats had spines and Republicans had consciences, we just might be able to tackle the greed of the insurance industry.  I'll bet they could have enough profit without raping the all-too-willing government.  It might even be that regulation of the industry would result in a better product.

But we were left with the worst of capitalism, that bit that decries government involvement, unless of course, it is writing the checks.  If you look closely at your "affordable" health insurance, you will see that the government is picking up the tab for most of what continues to be a ginormous premium.  And yet you still have to pay all those cleverly named additional amounts when you actually need health care.

Yet people like me do have affordable health insurance.  For now.  Because even though all those idiotic votes to repeal in the US House, and despite states with governors with Tea Party dreams like ours, the federal government passed a law that has stood up.  Democracy, right?

But now that libertarian Koch darling, the Cato Institute (support with "the Gift of Stock") is leading the challenge to the ACA in the Supreme Court.  And the hook this time is four words in the law, which may eliminate federal exchanges in states like South Carolina, where we insist that the best way to help people without health insurance is to deny them health insurance.

I only just today learned that argument will be heard on Wednesday.  Most of us, happily insured, are totally uninformed on this fight for our very health and well-being.  I worry that while we look away, we will lose our health care security once again.  And ironically, a lot of those who are going to lose are the Obamacare haters.  Imagine that.

When 20-Week Abortions Are Banned

There are some rumors that H 3114, the bill that would ban abortion at twenty weeks, could come to a vote in the South Carolina House this week.  Debate began on it last week and was adjourned to this Wednesday, February 11.  I know I have only been tracking bills in South Carolina for a couple of years, but it seems to me that some bills just don't want to be tracked, and there are ways to keep the public from learning when and where and what happens next.  This is one of those bills.

The twenty week ban is a sneaky proposition.  Its premise, the "pain-capable" nonsense is false science; legislators, prompted by a National Right to Life model bill, bring up the same outlier research, and ignore the consensus of the medical and scientific community, that is, that pain receptors are not developed until 24 weeks at the earliest.  This is the kind of fake science that slings about emotional and suspect terms like "unborn baby" and "preborn" (which never fails to remind me of the "pre-owned" leased-car-for-sale euphemism).

This is the kind of science that is used when cigarette manufacturers try to prove cigarettes don't cause cancer, and fracking doesn't pollute the environment.  A doctor, a scientist, a "medical expert" is paraded about.  (Remember the joke about "What do they call the medical student that graduates at the bottom of the class?"  "Doctor.")  And the testimony is repeated, and becomes "fact."

And then there are the not just false, but crazy, claims that we have heard from actually elected officials, of masturbating fetuses:  "If they feel pleasure, why is it so hard to believe they feel pain?"  Yes, laugh so we don't cry at the horror of these bizarre fantasies wending their way into legislation which could destroy lives.

If this bill passes in South Carolina, what effect would it have?  In fact, for most of us, it would have no effect at all.  Because the reality is that an abortion at or after twenty weeks is extremely rare.  It occurs when there are severe complications in a wanted pregnancy.

Let me repeat that:  At twenty weeks or later, an abortion is extremely rare, and occurs when there are severe complications in a wanted pregnancy.

But the inflammatory rhetoric has resulted in most of us assuming that late-term abortions happen all the time, that they are frivolous, and that actual viable human life is snuffed out at the whim of the woman and her abortion doctor.

It was exactly this type of deception that brought us the "partial birth abortion" con job, and the subsequent federal law of 2003 which the Supreme Court upheld in 2007.  The term "partial birth" is not a medical term but a successfully inflammatory political one.  Given its success, it is not surprising that the next step on the war to ban abortion would be to save the "pain capable" twenty week fetus.

And what would happen if that bill were to pass?  For most of us, nothing.  Because the procedure is rare, it would not affect most of us.  But for the small percentage of women who suffer through the awareness that something serious is wrong with their pregnancy, this law would be a travesty and a tragedy.  It means doctors feeling the cold breath of the law watching and demanding documentation, and the possibility that they will be falsely accused of committing murder.  For the woman, it will mean adding to the crisis the fact that the government is surveilling her medical decisions.  It may mean that she is unable to make the decision to abort as soon as possible, adding days and weeks of agony to this already horrific situation.  It could mean that she is not allowed to have the abortion at all.  

In Georgia the law grudgingly allows for "medically futile" pregnancies, but not for exemptions for a woman's emotional or mental condition.  State Representative Terry England felt that there should be no exceptions:

“Life gives us many experiences,” England said in response to concerns that a woman would have to carry a fetus to term that was not expected to live. “I’ve had the experience of delivering calves, dead and alive -- delivering pigs, dead and alive. … It breaks our hearts to see those animals not make it.”

And in the US House of Representatives, Texas idiot Louis Gohmert agrees, actually telling a witness during hearings that she should have carried her pregnancy to term even though it had been determined that the fetus had no brain function.

This nightmare scenario that dim-witted legislators and the anti-abortion movement like to call life-affirming, means the possibility of carrying a fetus to term that will not be able to sustain life, or will be so severely disabled that it would require a life-until-death of pain and surgical interventions.  It would mean a family torn to shreds in emotional despair and financially devastated.

None of us begin a pregnancy assuming the worst could happen.  If it does, the last thing we need is Wendy Nanney or Lee Bright telling us what we should do about it.

So we need to shout, all of us, against this bill.  We need to call and email our legislators, over and over, and tell them why this bill is false science, and that it is not the business of our legislators to determine medical issues.  We need to fight for those who may need someday to have the freedom to choose a late-term abortion.  It is indeed a rare occurrence, but it is something that could happen to any of us.

Spread the word by email, Facebook or Twitter.  Write or call your legislators.  Write or call any legislators you know.  We people of reason really do outnumber those on the other side of this war on women's medical freedom and privacy.  Now is the time to let them know it.

Getting Slammed and Fighting Back

Here is the difference between Democrats and Republicans:  we Dems -- the ones who volunteer and vote -- are doing okay, but we know that there are others who are not.  We understand that we will all do better when we all do better.  We also empathize with those who are struggling.  We see ourselves in them.  Republicans, on the other hand, are focused on getting the most for themselves.  Capitalism, Christianity, even democracy are twisted to their own needs.

So when it comes to getting out the vote, when it comes to firing up the electorate, the republican party knows how to make it meaningful for their voters.  Even if they have to lie.

They make it about jobs, and don't mention that those jobs will underpay and offer no security.  Nikki Haley is running on all those jobs she brought into the state, but neglects to mention that our tax dollars paid for giveaways to those corporations so that they could pay less than they would elsewhere.

On the republican side, the mantra is to cut taxes.  Well, everything else is going up but our taxes, so it makes sense, doesn't it, that what we get for our tax dollars is going to be struggling schools, poor highways, inadequate medical care.  But with the millions of dollars that goes into campaigns, most voters only see the message that their candidate will provide jobs and cut government.  A simple good/bad message.

I just watched the documentary film, Koch Brothers Exposed, and although I have lately been working hard to take our state and country's downward spiral in stride, I have to admit that it brought me to tears.  The Koch brothers, having done their dirty work in attempting to segregate schools and controlling the universities and state government in North Carolina, have set their sights on South Carolina.  They now have three offices in the state, the newest one in Mount Pleasant.  They are of course, going to work to cut taxes, thereby making our government even more ineffective, and continuing the push to privatize education.

Our Supreme Court (and I use the word "our" quite loosely) has made it clear that money talks and the rest of us can just do what we are told.  Shovel money into banning women's reproductive freedom, and the Supremes are all for it.  While corporations have become people and as such have unfettered freedom of speech, as in the ability to buy candidates and elections, the rest of us have lost our own religious liberty, along with the right to the health care we are paying for, equal opportunity in education, and the right to vote.  All with the blessing of the evil Scalia and his right wing-nuts, bought and paid for by the Kochs.

More depressing even than that is that all nine justices voted to allow abusive demonstrators access to abortion clinics, as a freedom of speech issue, apparently not recognizing the irony that we the people can get nowhere near the justices themselves to engage in our own freedom of speech.

So it's been a tough time.  The greedy and powerful are able to control the uninformed and insecure.  We need to fight fire with fire.  We need more wealthy supporters who understand the cost of increased poverty, underemployment, poor education, poor health, low taxes and an unfair tax system.  We need politicians that understand that voters need to know exactly how this bad system affects them.  Sadly, those with health care have been led to believe it will cost them more if others are insured.  They need to see in black and white how much emergency care is costing them, and the jobs that come with health care expansion.  Most of us can't see how bad roads risk lives, but give them dollars and cents of how much wear and tear on their car will cost going over those potholes.  Compare the cost of increasing the prison population versus improving schools.

It saddens me that we have as a nation become so self-absorbed that we are unable to see that what affects one affects us all.  That insecure politicians can be bought so easily.  That the wealthy who now control our elections find it so easy to appeal to the lowest common denominator among us.

But the Koch brothers don't waste their time worrying about the way things should be.  They look at what we are, and they use it.  If we are made vulnerable by our fears and insecurities, then we need our progressive candidates to understand what we are afraid of and explain to us what they can do to help.