Be prepared: Supreme Court to get more extreme

 

Bill Knight column for 10-15, 16 or 17, 2020

As Amy Coney Barrett appears before the Senate this week, we’re reminded that elections matter.

Donald Trump’s 2016’s victory let him appoint three Supreme Court justices – as well as “packing the court” by filling judiciary vacancies left open when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stonewalled President Obama’s appointments.

Americans might endure the GOP hypocrisy of rushing confirmation three weeks before voting (in 2016 – eight months before that election – the Senate wouldn’t consider Obama’s nominee), and accept Barrett’s arrival. But we better plan for a Right-wing Roberts Court.

Chief Justice John Roberts already is the second-most pro-business justice (after Samuel Alito) from 1946 to 2011, according to a study by Appellate Judge Richard Posner and law professors Lee Epstein and William Landes.

Roberts’ influence has shown in cases involving forced arbitration, campaign finance, voting rights, gerrymandering/redistricting, and workers sharing costs for union representation. After the latter case, “Janus” (which started with anti-union forces in Illinois), Justice Elena Kagan said there were no reasons for overruling the issue’s precedent, established in 1977 in “Abood.” She wrote, “The majority has overruled ‘Abood’ for no exceptional or special reason. It has overruled ‘Abood’ because it wanted to.”

Advocates for reversing precedents are often “originalists” who interpret the Constitution as they claim Founders intended, letting them upend whatever they can justify doesn’t fit the colonial point of view.

If originalism prevailed in the last century, discrimination would be legal, contraceptives illegal, poll taxes would prevent the poor from voting, and workers would be prohibited from unionizing. (Originalism arguably could apply the 2nd Amendment only to muskets, or limit citizenship to white, male property owners.)

Rutgers University law professor James Gray Pope told In These Times magazine that “the big-picture point here is that throughout the whole range of issues that affect the working class, the Supreme Court is going to be in a fundamentally reactionary posture.”

AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said, “In John Roberts’s America, corporations have more rights than people. You can’t draft them. You can’t put them in jail. They have limited liability and, in many cases, don’t pay taxes. It is now easier to bust a union than form one. Too many politicians are choosing their constituents, not the other way around. Collective action and civil rights, the very foundations of a healthy democracy, are being whittled away.”

Similar decisions overturning precedents probably lie ahead if Barrett takes the open seat.

Unlike Ginsburg – a champion for the Affordable Care Act, workers’ rights, women’s rights, and the right to vote – Barrett also is an originalist.

Although Barrett is a Catholic (belonging to an unusual Catholic group, People of Praise, in which she considers herself a “handmaid” to a male hierarchy), she doesn’t have unified support from her Church.

Sister Simone Campbell, director of NETWORK lobby for Catholic social justice, said, “I know that Judge Barrett shares my faith, but her past words and actions prove that she does not hold all life to be sacred. President Trump appears to be courting the Catholic vote. As a Catholic Sister, let me be clear: Catholics will not be bought off by a predetermined vote against ‘Roe v. Wade.’ It is insulting to act as if my faith boils down to one issue. Catholics cannot support judges or politicians who blatantly ignore the breadth of Catholic Social Teaching on women’s rights, voting rights, immigrant’s rights, health care, environmental protections, and so much more.”

Registered Nurse Bonnie Castillo, director of National Nurses United, said Barrett’s “record on racial and age discrimination and immigration rights is equally troubling.”

Rebecca Dixon, director of the National Employment Law Project, added, “Judge Barrett has proven she puts the wealthy and powerful first, and [the] record shows that if confirmed, she would only further entrench the anti-worker, pro-corporation slant of this Supreme Court.”

So, as professor Pope said, “Politics are key,” conceding that “that’s an area that’s fraught right now with the gerrymandering opinion, the voter ID rulings, and Citizens United guaranteeing the right of money to skew the political process. All of those things are going to make it very difficult.”

However, he recalled the late 1800s and early 1900s (the “Lochner era,” for a case overturning New York’s law limiting a day’s work to 10 hours), when the Supreme Court frequently invalidated federal and state laws.

“Around the Lochner era, a lot of people were denied the right to vote, including not only African Americans in the South, but also poor whites in the South, and women,” Pope said. “So the democratic process was skewed then as well. Ultimately, what was crucial was mass resistance.”

We’re reminded, too, of Curtis Mayfield’s lyric: “People get ready. There’s a train comin’.”

The ‘Trump-lican’ Party muted despite outrages

 

Bill Knight column for 10-12, 13 or 14

            Silence isn’t always golden. Sometimes it’s trash.

The day the FBI and Justice Department detailed domestic terrorists’ alleged plot to kidnap or kill Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, the lack of outrage by “Trump-licans” was tragic.

“Outbreaks of political violence are a real threat,” wrote Dartmouth government professor Brendan Nyhan. “Every person of good faith in either party must speak up.”

Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox spoke up – criticizing Whitmer and her handling of pandemic safeguards, saying, “If Whitmer is looking for a threat to the jobs and safety of Michiganders, she needs to only look in the mirror.”

Such officeholders, bureaucrats and advisers need not confess complicity in a terror plan, but it would be nice, necessary and wholly reasonable to hear a full-throated expression of comfort, empathy and solidarity to Whitmer and of condemnations of violence.

But all’s quiet on the weasel front.

Surely, emperors themselves eventually realize they have no clothes, whether they’re schoolyard bullies, tin-pot dictators or authoritarian wannabes. Surely, at some point it dawns on them that they’re surrounded by cowering cowards who say what the tyrants want to hear instead of the truth. Surely, despots inevitably notice that the emphasis on feeding egos can have terrible consequences. It’s one thing to cheat at golf or marriage, but when conceit extends to a false notion of reality – from the numbers shown by a temperature thermometer or a bathroom scale, to statistics of the jobless, hungry and sick – people can suffer and die.

Most Americans who are regular Republicans aren’t extremists or racists, but Republican officials seem to be afraid of Trump’s minority “base” and even more of the threat of ridicule or abandonment by the Dear Leader.

So, they don’t dare defy the nonsense, even in the face of an embarrassing debate, his COVID infection, his taxes and finances, recorded revelations in “Rage,” false claims of voter fraud, stalling pandemic aid, disparaging soldiers and war dead while playing footsy with QAnon and white supremacists, and doing damage to the CDC, DHS, FDA, USPS, and other parts of his own administration.

True, there are a handful of incumbent exceptions, from Illinois Congressman Adam Kinzinger to Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski. But most Republicans of good faith speaking up are out of office and freer to be frank. Almost 100 “Republicans and Independents for Biden” include former Illinois Congressman Ray LaHood, plus Mickey Edwards, Jeff Flake, Jim Leach, John Warner, Bill Weld and Christine Todd Whitman.

“The Lincoln Project,” founded by GOP operatives, blasts “the craven acquiescence of congressional Republicans.” Other groups and hardy souls such as George W. Bush administration vets in “43 Alumni for Biden,” national security officials for Biden, retired military and scientists are outsiders looking in with dismay.

Other Republicans occasionally ashamed or even endorsing Joe Biden include Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and others with less to lose outside of the Washington merry-go-round: George W. Bush, John Kasich, John McCain’s widow Cindy, and Colin Powell. Powell, a former general and Secretary of State, blasted fellow Republicans, saying “They need to get a grip. This is not the way the country is supposed to run. The Constitution started with ‘we the people,’ not ‘me the President’.”

Pro-life conservative columnist Mona Charon recently wrote, “When you compare the state of the two major parties today, the Republicans are more frightening.”

The base, hovering between 35% and 40%, are loyal followers. A year ago, 62% of Trump supporters in a Monmouth University poll said there’s nothing Trump could do that would cause them to oppose him (echoing his 2016 comment, “I could shoot somebody in the middle of 5^th Avenue and not lose any voters”).

Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic detailed the most familiar excuses (we’re beyond accepting them as “explanations”). In a 14-page feature, she listed “justifications of collaborations” with the White House:

“We can use this moment to achieve great things; we can protect the country from the president; I, personally, will benefit; I must remain close to power; nothing matters (if the president doesn’t respect the Constitution, why should I?; my side might be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse; [and]  I am afraid to speak out.”

Too many Republicans still in office gave up civility and unity, principles and power for a few Supreme Court picks, a tax cut for the rich and the chance to keep their cushy jobs.

Surely, history will record what they said. Or failed to say.

Unless historians also are forced to bow and write what someone wants to hear.

It’s time for country over party. Democracy is in the balance.

Celebrate National Newspaper Week – and the press

 

Bill Knight column for 10-8, 9 or 10, 2020

 Although this week is the 80^th annual National Newspaper Week, apologies for returning to the necessity of a free press so soon after promoting the Local Journalism Sustainability Act (less than two weeks ago). Plus, it’s obviously self-serving for any journalist to tout the importance of the press – and a bit narcissistic since I’ve been writing for newspapers since a week before I turned 16 years old.

However, “America Needs Journalists” – the theme for National Newspaper Week Oct. 4 through this Saturday.

Further, another proposal on Capitol Hill seeks to help.

Why bother?

First, it was no accident that our Founders wrote Freedom of the Press into the Constitution’s Bill of Rights – the First Amendment of them all.

“Government exists to serve the people, but America needs journalists to navigate the bureaucracy and dig out needed information,” said Carol Hunter, executive editor of the Des Moines Register.

Anticipating the democratic republic that they were creating, the Founders new government’s own checks and balances must be strengthened by “the consent of the governed,” an informed people.

So newspapers hold government accountable, but much more.

Next, the nation also needs journalists to show the common ground where we all live, our communities’ mutual interests and ideals, trials and triumphs, the tales of everyday folks who do remarkable things, the news that can be heartwarming or inspiring if sometimes shocking or enraging.

The unprecedented challenge 2020 has been for the world hasn’t spared newspapers, which already had lost ads to the internet, circulation to tight household budgets and busy schedules, and now stability to the uncertainty of the coronavirus’ effects on people’s lives and the economy – a pandemic forcing essential-worker reporters to risk their health and lives to make sure readers know what’s going on.

That has meant trying to make sense of COVID-19 and the dizzying data on its victims, treatments, spread and precautions, from the somehow controversial recommendation to wear face coverings and distance ourselves to controversial actions about reopening schools and businesses despite dangers.

Newspapers were struggling before. Since 2004, some 2,000 local newspapers have shut down, about one-fourth of the country’s papers. That’s resulted in “news deserts,” places many stories don’t get told because there’s no newspaper to do so. Newspaper employment has also plummeted, about 50%, meaning fewer reporters to do the work in newsrooms that are hanging on.

Without newspapers, people in news deserts may have distant dailies, regional broadcasters or national cable and satellite services who say they serve towns, “but their content is global, national, state or skimpy,” as I’ve written. “They miss many local celebrations and small-market government, births and deaths, stores’ or streets’ openings and closings, fundraisers and service clubs and churches and school boards and so on: events that make up Americans’ lives – and futures.”

That’s often dubbed “human interest” in newsrooms, where newsworthiness also hangs on material that’s local, timely, significant, affecting someone prominent, or unusual.

Reporters have a Code of Ethics to seek the truth and report it fully, act independently, be accountable and transparent, and minimize harm, according to the Society of Professional Journalists, one of many groups to endorse the Local News Commission Act (S4772). Other supporting organizations include the National Writers Union and NewsGuild labor union, press photographers, the Online News Association, the Pulitzer Center, associations of Native American and Hispanic journalists, and alternative news media.

The Local News Commission Act (S4772)  would set up a 13-member Future of Local News Commission to “examine and report on the role of local news gathering in sustaining democracy in the United States and the factors contributing to the demise of local journalism, and to propose policies and mechanisms that could reinvigorate local news to meet the critical information needs of the people of the United States in the 21st century.”

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI), said, “Local news is foundational to our democracy, but a convergence of forces – from consolidation to social media to COVID-19 – has pushed newsrooms across America to the brink. My hope is that this commission will – in a nonpartisan, sober and thoughtful manner – come forward with recommendations to help reinvigorate local journalism across the country while preserving the independence vital to a free and robust press.”

Randy Evans, a newsman for 42 years who now leads the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, summed up the state of newspapers in this time – and this week.

“The immense challenges we all have dealt with this year clearly underscore the fact that America needs journalists,” he said.