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By Gregory Taggart, February 24, 2011 9:32 am

Two quotes from this piece of campaign literature posing as journalism should be enough.

First, the writer, mischaracterizes Citizens United:

The nonprofit group Common Cause has complained that the controversial Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision on campaign financing last year – on a narrow majority backed by Thomas and Scalia – opened the door to heightened corporate contributions from the Koch empire. (emphasis supplied)

No, Citizens United only opened the door to independent corporate expenditures on things like political ads and such.

Second, the writer betrays an unfamiliarity with the basic constitutional doctrine of separation powers when he writes,

The group’s appeal for legislation faces political as well as potential constitutional hurdles, partly because members of the Supreme Court are now the final authority on the appropriateness of their ethical behavior. Decisions to recuse, or step away from deliberations, by tradition have been left up to the individual justices at the center of any complaint, contrary to the practice on most state supreme courts. (emphasis supplied)

The Supreme Court has always been the final authority on the ethical behavior of its members–unless and until such behavior warrants impeachment. To have it otherwise, would be to allow Congress the power to meddle in the affairs of the Court for political purposes, something the law professors involved in this bit of political theater and preemptive action should admit they’re doing.

I’m just guessing here, but I’m willing to be that you can look high and low and still won’t find any of the names of these 700 busybodies on a letter of this sort decrying the actions of a liberal Justice.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 19, 2011 11:38 pm

The teachers’ union in Wisconsin–for that matter, the Democratic Party–will lose their battle because they lost the narrative very early on. From the start, the narrative has been that Governor Walker has a budget crisis on his hand, and one way to fix it is to have the teachers pitch in on the cost of their own benefits. And that’s a winning hand for Walker.

That he also wants to make changes to their collective bargaining rights has been lost in all the noise about benefits, at least until recently. To me, at least, that’s a battle the teachers could win. But they won’t because Governor Walker had them at ‘benefits.’

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By Gregory Taggart, February 17, 2011 9:22 am

This almost needs no comment. The New York Times reports on the protests in Wisconsin over Governor Walker’s move to “sharply curtail the collective bargaining rights and slash benefits for most public sector workers in the state”:

The battle in Wisconsin, which some view as a precursor to similar fights in other states, was drawing attention around the country, including from Education Secretary Arne Duncan, who said he planned to talk to Mr. Walker by telephone on Thursday. “Where we’re fighting each other, where we’re divisive, where we’re demonizing or vilifying any group, including unions, I don’t think that helps us get where we need to go as a country,” Mr. Duncan told CNN on Thursday morning.

President Obama also weighed in during an interview Wednesday with a Wisconsin TV station, “I think it’s very important for us to understand that public employees, they’re our neighbors, they’re our friends. These are folks who are teachers and they’re firefighters and they’re social workers and they’re police officers.”

But, I guess, bankers and corporate executives are not.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 15, 2011 9:41 am

The New York Times editorial board opined on Obama’s new budget today. In the following paragraph, you can get it flavor of how they think it stacks up against the one proposed by House Republicans:

The questions are whether [the Obama budget’s] tough choices are also wise choices and whether it stands a chance in a Congress in which Republicans, who now dominate the House, are obsessed with making indiscriminate short-term cuts in programs they never liked anyway. The Republican cuts would eviscerate vital government functions while not having any lasting impact on the deficit. (emphasis supplied here and below)

Pay attention to that word vital as we proceed, but first, let’s allow the Times to give Obama a hall pass:

What Mr. Obama’s budget is most definitely not is a blueprint for dealing with the real long-term problems that feed the budget deficit: rising health care costs, an aging population and a refusal by lawmakers to face the inescapable need to raise taxes at some point. Rather, it defers those critical issues, in hopes, we assume, that both the economy and the political environment will improve in the future.

That’s a nice–and a fair–assumption, one you won’t see the Times granting those nasty Republicans.

For the most part, Mr. Obama has managed to cut spending while preserving important [read vital] government duties. That approach is in stark contrast to Congressional Republicans, who are determined to cut spending deeply, no matter the consequences.

Again, Obama gets a pass. Not so the Republicans. And let’s see what important government duties Obama preserves.

A case in point: the Obama budget’s main cut — $400 billion over 10 years — is the result of a five-year freeze in nonsecurity discretionary programs, a slice of the budget that contains programs that are central to the quality of American lives, including education, environment and financial regulation.

Got that? Obama’s main cut is not a cut at all. It’s a five-year freeze for Hell’s sake!

But the cuts are not haphazard. The budget boosts education spending by 11 percent over one year and retains the current maximum level of college Pell grants — up to $5,500 a year. To offset some of the costs, the budget would eliminate Pell grants for summer school and let interest accrue during school on federal loans for graduate students, rather than starting the interest meter after graduation.

Cuts and boosts spending within spitting distance of each other. This is rich. And then another hall pass: “To offset some of the costs.” Some? Compare that with what the Times dishes out to the Republicans: “Republicans are determined not to raise any taxes . . .” And Obama is? Remember, he “offset some of the costs” of his changes in Pell grants, not by raising taxes, but by diddling with summer school and student loan interest.

The laugh track continues:

[Republicans refuse to raise taxes] even though investing spending for the future and taming the deficit are impossible without more money.(correction my doing)

Okay, having slapped Republicans up side the head about their refusal to raise taxes, the Times writes–immediately after, and I do mean immediately,

The budget would also increase transportation spending by $242 billion over 10 years. It does not specifically call for an increased gas tax to cover the new costs, though it calls on Congress to come up with new revenues to offset the new spending.

This is a truly cynical editorial about a truly cynical budget. The Republicans refuse to raise taxes, while Obama boldly goes where no man has gone before and passes the buck to Congress? Oh the humanity!

Remember that word vital? Here’s a whiff of what it means:

Republicans want to eliminate forward-looking programs like high-speed rail.

In other words, vital means boondoggle. Amtrack is doing so well, we just have to have a faster version of it.

I have to go, so let’s jump to the end:

Real deficit reduction will require grappling with rising health care costs and an aging population, which means reforms in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, as well as tax increases to bring revenues in line with obligations.

Mr. Obama’s budget does not directly address those big issues, but doing so would require a negotiating partner, and Mr. Obama, at present, does not have one among the Republican leaders in Congress. His latest budget is a good starting point for a discussion — and a budget deal — but only if Republicans are willing participants in the process.

Okay, as if to help me prove my point, the Times editorial ends the fact that Obama hasn’t proposed any tax increases either, he hasn’t addressed the big issues–either. Yet he gets a pat on the back, and the Republicans get chided for not wanting to cross the aisle and stand foursquare on his side. Quien es mas macho? Why Obama, of course.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 14, 2011 8:09 am

E.J. Dionne of The Washington Post writes,

For President Obama, the battle lines will be drawn on investments in – or, as Republicans would say, spending on – education, energy, infrastructure and innovation, thus E2I2.

The Republicans have it about right.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 13, 2011 2:21 pm

As I mention in the previous post, I wrote a number of posts about the constitutional crisis in Honduras in 2009, the U.S.’s response to it. I realized that I hadn’t followed what happened about the crises quieted down–or at least fell off my radar.

Here’s a quick update, beginning with then-President Micheletti’s July 27, 2009 letter to the Wall Street Journal, to sort of get you up to speed as to who he is and what happened in Honduras, at least according to him (and to me for that matter, since I agree with what he wrote).

The nut paragraph in that letter, for my purposes, is:

The way forward is to work with Costa Rican President Oscar Arias. He is proposing ways to ensure that Mr. Zelaya complies with Honduras’s laws and its constitution and allows the people of Honduras to elect a new president in the regularly scheduled Nov. 29 elections (or perhaps earlier, if the date is moved up as President Arias has suggested and as Honduran law allows).(emphasis supplied)

Note the date on the letter. The so-called coup took place one month earlier on June 28, 2009. So just one month latter, President Micheletti is talking about regularly scheduled elections where the people can elect a new president.

According to The Economist, that happened as scheduled, when centre-right candidate Porfirio Lobo Sosa won the election. Later reports confirmed that he won 55% of the vote. Turnout was “robust,” rivaling turnouts in U.S. elections. As The Economist wrote on December 3, 2009,

On November 29th the de facto government led by Roberto Micheletti achieved its main aim of holding a presidential election to choose Mr Zelaya’s successor. All five political parties took part, including the far-left Democratic Unification party, which reneged on a promise to withdraw if Mr Zelaya was not reinstated. Despite warnings of violent protests and a call to boycott the election by Mr Zelaya’s “resistance” movement, voting took place fairly calmly, disturbed only by one clash between police and demonstrators in San Pedro Sula, the country’s second city.

Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo, the amiable leader of the centre-right National Party, won a clear mandate with 55% of the vote—primarily because the rival Liberal Party was divided between backers of Mr Micheletti and Mr Zelaya. Turnout seems to have been around the 55% mark reached in the 2005 election, when Mr Zelaya narrowly beat Mr Lobo.

I reviewed that to write this: On December 9, 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking at the First Diplomacy Briefing Series Meeting in Washington D.C. said the following about the election:

Now, the culmination of what was a year-long electoral process occurred on November 29th when the Honduran people expressed their feelings and their commitment to a democratic future. They turned out in large numbers and they threw out, in effect, the party of both President Zelaya and the de facto leader, Mr. Micheletti. Since then, President-elect Lobo has launched a national dialogue. He’s called for the formation of a national unity government and a truth commission as set forth among the requirements in the Tegucigalpa-San Jose Accord. That is an agreement that the Hondurans themselves reached. We helped to facilitate it, but the Hondurans decided they wanted a local resolution. (emphasis supplied)

I find her choice of words–threw out, in effect–weaselly. Taking Micheletti at his word, he was pushing for elections from almost the very beginning. In fact, the elections that did occur were regularly scheduled. To me the U.S. got in the way from the very beginning. I think the Honduran people in general and the Honduran government in particular acted very much like a mature democracy. They should be proud.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 12, 2011 12:48 pm

Last August, Stephen Prothero, a religion professor at Boston University and a blogger on CNN, wrote two different posts about the Mormon reaction to a Muslim group’s efforts to build a mosque at Ground Zero. The first lamented the fact that some prominent Mormons–Mitt Romney and Harry Reid–had both spoken against the mosque. So had Glenn Beck. Prothero was particularly disturbed that Romney had done so (through a spokesperson) because he had been so impressed by Romney’s religion speech during the most recent presidential campaign and because of Romney’s experience with the opposition to the Boston Temple. (Prothero, by the way, seems to have a good grasp on Latter-day Saint history.) He writes,

As I wrote in my 2007 piece on this speech, for Romney, the moral of this history lesson was clear:

Americans today should rise above religious bigotry, not least by evaluating presidential candidates on the basis of their credentials instead of their religious tradition. After all, Romney said, “Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree.”

These were the words that came to me when Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin and other Republican leaders started to double down on the anti-Islamic rhetoric.

I thought that Romney, as a Mormon, might speak out passionately for the First Amendment. I thought he might remember how the founder of his religion, Joseph Smith Jr., was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob. I thought he might recall how the U.S. government brought down much of its coercive power against the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Apparently not. According to a statement released on August 10 by his spokesperson Eric Fehrnstrom, “Governor Romney opposes the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero. The wishes of the families of the deceased and the potential for extremists to use the mosque for global recruiting and propaganda compel rejection of this site.”

The second discussed Senator Hatch’s position, which was captured by Salt Lake City’s Fox News 13:

Prothero’s reaction to Romney’s and Hatch’s statements prompted me to think about what my stance on the proposed mosque was back then. I realized that I disagreed with Romney. My stance was then and is now similar to Hatch’s: it would be a nice gesture if the mosque’s proponents chose to build elsewhere out of respect for what happened on 9/11; however, I recognize and support their 1st Amendment rights to build where they are planning to build.

I have a long memory, a memory that extends back to the persecution of my Church in the 19th and early 20th centuries, a memory of recent times when people in Boston, Billings, Denver, and places north and south, east and west, opposed the building of a Mormon temple–always for allegedly non-religious reasons. That opposition was a predictable as the rising sun was an irony that always escaped the protestors.

I suspect that religious bigotry imbues most of the opposition to the mosque as well. I don’t think Romney is bigoted. I do think he is in a rush to the Right, however, in his pursuit of the presidency. I have defended him in the past from the flip criticism that he flip flops a lot. I’ll take a flip from anybody if it demonstrates that they’ve learned something. However, too much pandering is not a good thing. I’ll be watching him closely, as I will Hatch, now that he’s pursuing the Tea Party vote.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 10, 2011 8:58 am

Is the time ripe for a Mormon to be President, or will religion get in Mitt Romney’s or Jon Huntsman Jr.’s way? Sally Quinn asks the question in On Belief, her religious bailiwick at The Washington Post. Eight panelists, including the likes of Barry Lynn who writes,

There really is only one question that needs to be answered: can you faithfully execute the laws of the United States or is there some religious view you hold that you believe transcends that duty?

Which begs the question: Would he, or anyone else, accept the answer, “Yes, I can,” and move on? Or would that question actually be an open door through which the inquisitor would parade his even deeper-held beliefs that “there ain’t no way a Mormon President won’t do the bidding of his (or her) hierarchical superiors in Salt Lake!”

I’ll be back for further comment on this subject.

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By Gregory Taggart, February 9, 2011 2:55 pm

Veronique de Rugy, an economist at George Mason University, has a post at The Corner on bias an academia. This paragraph captures the essence:

“Anywhere in the world that social psychologists see women or minorities underrepresented by a factor of two or three, our minds jump to discrimination as the explanation,” said Dr. Haidt, who called himself a longtime liberal turned centrist. “But when we find out that conservatives are underrepresented among us by a factor of more than 100, suddenly everyone finds it quite easy to generate alternate explanations.”

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By Gregory Taggart, February 7, 2011 12:00 pm

Adam Liptak struggles to find a distinction between corporations in general and the so-called institutional media (which are usually corporations) in particular, in his piece on Citizens United and campaign finance reform. Of course, the is no distinction, or there shouldn’t be.

But that’s beside the point, the point at which the government lost the case. Liptak hints at it in his story when he writes,

Consider this telling exchange between Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and a lawyer for the Obama administration at the first of two arguments in Citizens United. The lawyer, Malcolm L. Stewart, said Congress had the power to regulate corporate speech about political candidates under the First Amendment.

“Most publishers are corporations,” Justice Alito said. “And a publisher that is a corporation could be prohibited from selling a book?”

It was a hypothetical question, but it cut to the core of the meaning of the press clause of the First Amendment. There was a lot of back and forth, and other justices jumped in. In the end, though, Mr. Stewart gave a candid answer.

“We could prohibit the publication of the book,” he said.

But Stewart was not talking about just any book with his answer. No, he was responding to a very specific question about a very specific kind of book.

I was out for a run and listening on my MP3 player to the exchange between Stewart and various Justices on this point (courtesy of the Oyez Project), and I remember saying to myself, “he [Stewart] just lost this case.” And this is where he lost it:

Justice Roberts: If it’s a 500-page book, and at the end it says, and so vote for X, the government could ban that?

Mr. Stewart: Well, if it says vote for X, it would be express advocacy and it would be covered by pre-existing Federal Election Campaign act provisions . . . we could prohibit the publication of the book using corporate treasury funds.

So, did you get that? One request that you vote for candidate X, at the end of a very long book, and zippo facto manulo, the government could ban that 500-page book published by a corporation under pre-Citizens United law, at least according to the government in the first oral argument. No wonder the Court ruled the way it did. No wonder, at least to me.

Liptak is right, however. The government backed away from that argument in reargument. Solicitor General Elena Kagan argued the case this time around, and she went nowhere near Stewart’s bold claim. But the damage was done, and in my view, the case had already been lost because, fortunately, five Justices couldn’t see their way clear to ban a 500-page book because of one pitch at the very end, a simple plea to “vote for X.”