Saturday, June 27, 2015

A timid facsimile of leadership

This article is well-intended, but it's simply false. Obama did not "find his voice" in eulogizing Rev. Pinckney; instead, as in just about every other crisis he has faced, Obama gave the impression of one who comes late to the party, makes tentative gestures in the direction of doing or saying the right thing and finally, emboldened or perhaps ashamed by the examples of those with more heartfelt conviction than he, makes a mighty effort to overcome his characteristic buttoned-up timidity. That's what we saw yesterday in Charleston: not a leader, not a prophetic voice, but a callow young man, "trying his wings" at "leading a black congregation," as he had seen done by better men than he, by launching into "Amazing Grace." Coming from the likes of AME Presiding Elder Norvell Goff, it might have been a majestic gesture; coming from callow Barry, it reminded me of nothing so much as Aldous Huxley's label "Arch-Community Songster," from "Brave New World."

Obama's problem is that he is made of lemon jello and yet trying to lead a dangerous and challenging world. He isn't really a leader and not really a grown man; he is a glib, clever lad, forever trying on various costumes and poses in front of a mirror, to see which combination will have the best effect.

The thing that came across in Charleston, as it had come across in Boston two years ago, was that he is still "trying" to be taken as a mature man, a morally commanding figure, a leader of stature. Trying. That pretty well sums him up. Because, sadly, trying is about the best Barry can do. There is something fundamentally missing from him. If you didn't see it yesterday, it was either because you wanted Rev. Pinckney and his fellow martyrs to be honored, or because, like many others, you are inclined to give Obama too much of the benefit of the doubt.

Friday, June 26, 2015

Lost in a fog


"Celebrate this decision, if you will, but do not celebrate the Constitution, for the two have nothing to do with each other." - John Roberts, reading his dissent from the bench in the matter of the Supreme Court's decision on gay marriage. Oh please. First, no one who was guilty of Roberts's craven dereliction of his duty as an impartial jurist in the Obamacare case yesterday has *any reason whatsoever* to complain about extra-constitutionality in this matter. Second, ironically, the gay marriage case was *more Constitutionally solid,* John, if you can get your head out of your black-robed backside and glimpse the light of day once more.

In the case of the Affordable Care Act, affordable care for all is, to be sure, a desirable societal goal (as even Ted Cruz implicitly admitted when he signed up for it himself), but the act *as written* limited the benefit to people purchasing exchanges created by the freakin' *states.* Roberts simply ignored that and acted as though vanilla really meant double-fudge all along.

But in the case of same-sex marriage, bizarre, exotic, and reprehensible as it may seem to some religious, there is *nothing*--as in N-O-T-H-I-N-G--in the Constitution that can be read as preferring, either implicitly or explicitly, opposite-sex over same-sex couples. Nothing, Zip. Zilch. Nada. Nothing.

There *is,* meanwhile, the "inconvenient truth" of the 14th Amendment, which *is* part of the Constitution, and which says, among other things, that no one shall be denied "equal protection of the law."

That means that unless you can establish an *intrinsic* disqualification for gays being married--as in, blind people cannot be airline pilots--then you have no Constitutional grounds to *deny* them marriage.

In short, Roberts was letting his thinking be clouded, as so many others were, with centuries of irrational prejudice and acting as if religious standards were, somehow, part of the Constitution.

Which they're not.

So sorry, John, but you got it exactly backwards.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

You're a careless lad, but you're still my son

Obamacare decision turns Roberts from conservative dream to nightmare | MSNBC

The history of Obamacare's transit through two Supreme Court challenges reminds me of a column by William F. Buckley, Jr. that I read years ago.Buckley said there was a liberal law professor at Notre Dame who used to confuse his students every year by passing out a collection of quotes criticizing decisions by liberal Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren in terms so harsh that one would have taken them for the most rabid propaganda of the far right.In fact, they were simply excerpts of dissenting opinions by Warren's associate justices. Their dismay was shared by some legal scholars, even those who shared Warren's progressive views. "Alphaeus Mason of Princeton applauded the decision in Brown v. Bd. of Ed," Buckley wrote, "but tore his hair at the legal reasoning behind it."

Twice, now, John Roberts has shown good sense and a good heart while egregiously disqualifying himself as a constitutional jurist. Sorry, folks--it's open and shut.

The Affordable Care Act needed to be saved, and the right's opposition to it was patently absurd. ACA was the spiritual child of what was originally a conservative idea, promoted by the Heritage Foundation 20 years ago. It is one of the best things that has ever happened to health care, and by deciding as he did, Roberts actually saved the GOP from impaling itself on its own perverse opposition, which would certainly have happened had ACA been gutted. The Congressional Budget Office only recently released a report projecting that if ACA were no longer in effect, the deficit would rise by $137 billion over the next decade.

But Roberts is not the President. His position, as he noted in his written decision, is to "say what the law is" and "respect the legislature." In both of those, he has spectacularly and laughably failed.

The first failure was in the first challenge, a couple of years ago, over the individual mandate. By no conceivable principle of logic or ethics can a government compel me to engage in economic activity in which I profess no interest. It may, to be sure, require me to have a license and insurance *if I wish to drive,* but it may not *compel me to buy a car in the first place.* Federal judge Fred Vinson of Florida laid out the whole history of Commerce Clause jurisprudence in his earlier decision. There really was nothing more to be said.

But Roberts still said it. He called the individual mandate a tax, something the Administration itself denied, and, thus, saved glib, clever Barry, the man who had become president of Harvard Law Review without ever having authored a single article, from his own slapdash approach to one of his own "signature" achievements.

It is important to understand this. Roberts did not function as a judge. He functioned as a sort of super-President, the President's wise and understanding dad, saving the young whippersnapper from his own sloppiness.

He did so again today. Yes, of course it is obvious that the intent of the act passed by Congress was that people would buy insurance through public exchanges, even if states demurred.

Well, then, they should have freakin' *said so,* thank you.

But once again, glib, clever Barry couldn't be bothered with anything so tiresome as to actually draft a sound law. He perhaps expected the act to be hailed for no reason but that he had been the author and, as all right-thinking people know, he's just, well, so interesting and wonderful and everything.

And so, once again, it was up to Dad Roberts to save Barry from himself.

A jurist would have written that while the intent of the law was clear and its salutary effect on public policy evident, the law *as drafted* was defective, and that it was unwise to decide legal questions based on deliberate, if well-intended, misreadings of the plain language of a sloppily worded statute. Remember, this wasn't some tortuous deliberation of the original intent of men 200-years dead, as to what they must have meant by the 2nd amendment; this was an easy issue in response to the carelessly worded text adopted only a few years ago by an immature man who takes a little too seriously the admonition of the Gospel to "be careful for nothing."

For Roberts to decide as he did showed a warm heart. For him to defend it on the grounds that he must "say what the law is" and "respect the legislature" is, under the circumstances, simply inane. Saying "what the law is" is precisely what the Roberts Court did *not* do; otherwise, the Affordable Care Act would be on its way, in redrafted form, back to face a hostile and wary Congress.

Sunday, June 21, 2015

Huckabee's copout

Huckabee: Confederate Flag Controversy Is Not a Presidential Election Issue - NBC News

During the American Revolution, South Carolinians were under-represented in the Continental Army because so many adult males had to stay at home to keep slaves in order. Before the Civil War, South Carolina forbade postmasters to let abolitionist literature pass through the mails, and abolitionists were hounded out of the state in fear of their lives. South Carolina fired the first shots of the Civil War, in the bombardment of Ft. Sumter. Forty years after the war, when Teddy Roosevelt had Booker T. Washington as his dinner guest in the White House, a South Carolina newspaper editorialized that Roosevelt had turned the White House into a "coon café" and said it would be necessary to "kill ten-thousand n____s to put them in their place once more."

In 1968, South Carolina was the site of the Orangeburg Massacre, in which police fired into a crowd of 150 blacks protesting segregation at a local bowling alley, wounding 28, mostly in the back as they ran away, and killing 3. As recently as 2012, South Carolinians cheered as Rick Perry told them in a campaign speech that "South Carolina is at war with the Federal government." In April of this year, Walter Scott, a black man, was shot to death from behind as he ran from a police officer following a traffic stop from a non-functioning brake light.

No, Mike Huckabee, the continued presence of the Confederate flag over South Carolina's state capitol is not a "little issue," as you glibly described it to Chuck Todd this morning. It symbolically flies in the face of some of the most important decisions made by our national leadership, including the Emancipation Proclamation, Brown v. Board of Ed., and the Voting Rights Act, and if you can't see that it is an essential affront to the promise of American life for all and a matter of concern for any presidential candidate, you are a fool, a moral coward, or both.

Pinckney, then and now


I have a love-hate relationship with the Sunday morning talk shows. They're too important to miss, but almost all of them feature John McCain and Donna Brazile, the one evading the obvious and the other patiently explaining why Hillary is a good candidate.

This morning's shows are a notable exception, featuring live broadcasts of the beautiful and moving worship service at historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, its first since the horrifying massacre of Wednesday night. As an atheist, I am happy to pay tribute to a group that has spent the week steadily living out some of the most powerful words in the Bible: "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Listening to the opening prayer of Emanuel's presiding elder, I was reminded of a word, "gravitas," a quality we see too little in politics or in the culture at large.

Finally, I was reminded, alas, of the egregious religious illiteracy among the Chardonnay-sipping media, as seen when Jake Tapper asked Van Jones "So what about all this willingness to forgive? Is this some AME thing?"

Ho
ly
crap

Pardon me while I take a moment to beat my head against the pavement. If Jake can't do any better than that, Brian Williams may not be the only one who needs to assume a lesser role in the news.

I visited Charleston for a weekend in '81 and attended worship services at historic St. Michael's Episcopal Church on Meeting St. I saw the grave of Revolutionary War patriot Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, one of our founding fathers. They were a noble generation but sadly tainted with the barbarity of chattel slavery. As Samuel Johnson said at the time, "How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from the drivers of negroes?" Now, more than two centuries later, Pinckney's namesake, the late pastor of Emanuel Church, has been struck down by a vestige of the very dehumanizing impulse to which our ancestors were tragically blind. How much longer will we let this pollute our society?

Saturday, June 13, 2015

To the tumbrils!

I just can't watch or listen to Hillary for long. She always comes across, to me, like a well-to-do woman whose gardener, housekeeper, cook, and chauffeur all called in sick the same day, who finds herself required to address a neighborhood group, none of whose members she knows or cares to know, since they are not members of her private club, but who is trying to make the best of a trying day before she goes home for a long soak and a massage.

Hillary Clinton Gets Ready to Make Her Pitch at 1st 'Official' Campaign Rally - ABC News