MLK: Sanitized for Their Protection

Mug shot from the Montgomery bus protest, 1956.

One of the best ways to silence a dead revolutionary is to venerate him.

It’s a story as old as Jesus. If you say “Jesus is Lord” loud enough and often enough, you can march your armies into battle behind the symbol of the cross, ignoring all that nonsense like “resist not evil” and “turn the other cheek” and “He who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” You can forget everything he said about rich men and beggars (or camels), and explain away all that stuff about selling everything and giving the money to the poor. Instead, you can claim he really meant to preach a prosperity gospel, and then practice what you preach by living in a $10 million mansion. As Mark Twain wrote in his parody Battle Hymn of the Republic: “As Christ died to make us holy, let men die to make us rich.”

In my lifetime, something similar has been happening to Martin Luther King. We celebrate his birthday and make anniversaries of noteworthy events in his life, but by their very veneration the Powers That Be have sanitized Dr. King’s memory, removing everything they find threatening.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m happy that King has his own holiday and I believe the March on Washington and the “Dream” speech King gave there totally deserve the attention their 50th anniversary got this week. Much of what has been said and written about him this week (and is written every year in January) has been excellent. But in spite of those efforts, every year the real Martin Luther King — the “dangerous Negro” feared by the FBI — recedes further and further into the misty past. In his place, we are to often offered a dumbed-down King whose message can be claimed and co-opted by everyone this side of the KKK.

The co-opting of his character. In the public mind, Martin Luther King has been reduced to one sentence:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

And the meaning of that quote has been reduced to advocating a color-blind society. Worse, it has been reduced to advocating a consciously and legally color-blind society. (If your unconscious racism causes you to believe and repeat absurd allegations about a black president or a dead black teen, no problem. If the law does not mention race, but prosecutors and juries apply the law differently to whites and blacks, no problem.)

And so, conservatives  often invoke Dr. King’s dream as an argument against color-aware policies like affirmative action — ignoring what King actually said in Why We Can’t Wait:

Whenever this issue of compensatory or preferential treatment for the Negro is raised, some of our friends recoil in horror. The Negro should be granted equality, they agree, but he should ask for nothing more. On the surface, this appears reasonable, but it is not realistic. For it is obvious that if a man enters the starting line of a race three hundred years after another man, the first would have to perform some incredible feat in order to catch up.

or in an interview with Alex Haley for Playboy:

All of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of exploitation and humiliation.

They accuse President Obama of betraying King’s dream when he appoints blacks like Eric Holder or Hispanics like Sonia Sotomayor to positions of power. Even just by talking about race Obama “divides America“. That’s the “real” race problem — that we talk so much about race. Governor Jindal equates MLK’s dream with the “melting pot” image of America and then says

we still place far too much emphasis on our “separateness,” our heritage, ethnic background, skin color, etc. We live in the age of hyphenated Americans: Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, Indian-Americans, and Native Americans, to name just a few.

Here’s an idea: How about just “Americans”? That has a nice ring to it, if you ask me. Placing undue emphasis on our “separateness” is a step backward. Bring back the melting pot.

Last Monday, Bill O’Reilly invoked Dr. King’s “content of their character” quote (and nothing else King ever said) and then proceeded to put his own views in Dr. King’s mouth, repeating against today’s black community and black leaders many of the same charges that were made against King and his followers 50 years ago: blaming racial inequality entirely on black failures, accusing black leaders of just being in it for the money (Haley raised that issue in the Playboy interview: “Many Southern whites have accused you of being among those who exploit the race problem for private gain. You are widely believed throughout the South, in fact, to have amassed a vast personal fortune in the course of your civil rights activities.”), and refusing to even recognize white racism as a problem. (O’Reilly’s objection to unions providing funding for the 50th anniversary celebration was particularly clueless, given that union support was central to the original March on Washington. Dr. King had a career-long relationship with the union movement. When he was killed in Memphis, he was in town to support a strike by local sanitation workers.)

Wednesday, talk radio’s Joe Walsh (the white ex-congressman) announced “My Own Dream for America“, which is basically that black people will finally straighten up and fly right (unlike Walsh himself, whose divorce featured an ugly legal battle over child support). It concludes:

I have a dream that one day black America will cease their dependency on the government plantation, which has enslaved them to lives of poverty, and instead depend on themselves, their families, their churches, and their communities.

So what was Martin Luther King really about? As I read him, two things:

  • the goal of a world where all people have an opportunity to make something of their lives
  • achieving that goal through nonviolent activism.

He was suspicious of capitalism, because its values are materialistic rather than humanistic.

When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

He was suspicious of a world order dependent on American economic and military power, because it continued many of the patterns of European colonialism.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions. [“Beyond Vietnam“, 1967]

His compassion extended to all oppressed peoples, not just his own race.

Our destiny is tied up with the destiny of India, and of every other nation. I started thinking about the millions of dollars we spend each day to store surplus food, and I said to myself, I know where we can store that food free of charge—in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children in Asia, in Africa, in South America, and in our own nation who go to bed hungry. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

His nonviolence was not passive. He sought to confront issues rather than avoid them.

Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word “tension.” I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

All through his career he rejected calls for patience.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” [“Letter from a Birmingham Jail“, 1963]

He warned against listening to premature claims that the goal had been reached.

A second myth that we must deal with is that of exaggerated progress. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

He rejected the idea that peaceful ends could be achieved through violent means.

There are still those who sincerely believe that the end justifies the means, no matter what the means happen to be. No matter how violent or how deceptive or anything else they are. Non-violence at its best would break with the system that argues that. Non-violence would say that the morality of the ends is implicit in the means, and that in the long-run of history destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends. [Ware Lecture, 1966]

What I don’t believe he ever said. I’m not an MLK scholar and my reading is far from complete, but I have never run across an example of Dr. King airing the dirty laundry of the black community in front of whites. So if he were to give another Dream speech today, I very much doubt he’d finger-wag about the black illegitimacy rate or denounce hip-hop culture, as white conservatives fantasize he would. I don’t know whether he would raise those topics while preaching in a black church or in private discussions among blacks, but I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t do it for a national audience.

I also have not found any quote where he says it’s OK to mistreat people if they’re not perfect, or that massive and growing inequality is OK if the underclass deserves it. When he was part of the overclass — say, as an American talking to other Americans about Vietnam or India  — he didn’t give his own group a pass and focus on the failings of Asian culture. So I’m pretty sure that a 2013 Dream speech would not tell whites to just sit back and criticize while waiting for the black community to fix itself.

Color-blindness revisited. In Dr. King’s day, segregation was a primary instrument of injustice, a way of keeping whites on top. He opposed it on those terms. But he attended the historically black Morehouse College, and I haven’t found any record of him urging his alma mater to achieve a more representational racial balance by recruiting whites. That’s only hypocrisy if you imagine that racial balance is supposed to be an end in itself and not a means to the end of justice. Morehouse had a mission that was not being served by the white universities, and the cause of justice would not have been advanced by abandoning it.

Dr. King often talked about his dreams, visions, and goals — most clearly in his final Mountaintop speech, where he said “I’ve seen the Promised Land.” But he never said that we should just sit down where we are and pretend we’re in the Promised Land now. Someday the lion will lie down with the lamb, but no shepherd should try to implement that arrangement now. In the world where we live today, race matters — just like gender matters and class matters. It would be foolish to pretend that they don’t and blind ourselves to the problems that need to be solved.

The 2013 Dream. What would Martin Luther King say in a Dream speech today? We should all be humble about putting words in his mouth that he didn’t say in his lifetime. But looking at the words he did say, I think it’s not too big a stretch to imagine that he would still be talking about the same themes. Because while we’ve fixed some of the specific injustices he campaigned against — like blacks being forced to the back of the bus — the larger issues are still the same: We live with massive inequality. The poor both here and in other countries often have few prospects for improving their lot. The overclass continues to be disproportionately white and the underclass disproportionately non-white. Systemic inequality is enforced by systemic violence and threats of violence, and more violence is unlikely to lead to justice.

So I think Dr. King would still be telling us about injustice and urging us to meet that injustice with the moral force of active nonviolence. In the short run that strategy always looks like a loser, because violent people hit you and you don’t hit back. That’s why the nonviolent activist needs a longer vision of a universe whose arc bends towards justice, and of a Promised Land worth the arduous journey.

That’s why the activist needs a dream — not to live in, but to keep striving towards.

September 2, 2013 – 8:36 am Categories: Articles | Comments (18)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

In honor of the 50th anniversary of the Dream speech, today I’ll do a longer version of the comment I usually make around MLK Day: Over the years, Martin Luther King’s image has been dumbed down beyond recognition. These days, the only thing most people know about Dr. King is the content-of-their-character quote, and everybody this side of the KKK claims to speak for him. So I’m going to use quotes from a variety of King speeches and interviews to recapture what was considered dangerous and edgy about him in his lifetime.

In a second article, I’ll begin a series looking back on the Summer of Snowden and what we’ve learned about the NSA. This week’s topic: the checks and balances in Congress and the courts aren’t working.

The weekly summary will discuss (obviously) the prospect of attacking Syria, the Miley Cyrus thing — I can’t believe I just went straight from Syria to Cyrus — and a mind-blowing article where SF author Charles Stross explores the incompatibility between the culture of the NSA and the 21st-century kids they’re going to have to hire.

September 2, 2013 – 6:55 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Nostalgia for the Future

The future ain’t what it used to be.

— attributed to Yogi Berra

This week everybody was talking about the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream Speech”

and just how much has or hasn’t changed since then.

Nobody who was alive in 1963 (I was six) can honestly say that nothing has changed. In the white working class where I grew up, white supremacy — the idea that whites are inherently superior and ought to be superior under the law — was a mainstream position. Supremacists didn’t sneak around and use code words and build camps out in the woods, they announced their ideas openly (saying “nigger” if they wanted to) and were included in respectable conversations.

So yes, things have changed. But changed a half-century worth? That’s a more dismal question. It’s like re-reading the science fiction of the era. By now we were supposed to have flying cars, Moon colonies, limitless energy, and maybe even teleporters or time machines. I like smart phones and a black president and all, but 2013 was supposed to be the effing FUTURE. Anything was supposed to be possible.

It sure doesn’t feel like anything is possible.

and the school shooting that didn’t happen

Antoinette Tuff showed that sometimes a bad guy with a gun can be stopped by a compassionate woman without one.

and the violence in Egypt and Syria

Speaking of dismal, the maps in some of my grade-school textbooks still showed Egypt and Syria as the United Arab Republic. In four years we’ll have the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War (which kept 10-year-old me glued to the TV during a sick day). Who thought we’d be here?

This week brought new reports of the Assad regime using chemical weapons. After the Bush administration’s shenanigans about Iraq’s WMDs, you always have to look for independent sources on stuff like this. So here’s what Nobel-prize-winning Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says:

Three hospitals in Syria’s Damascus governorate that are supported by the international medical humanitarian organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) have reported to MSF that they received approximately 3,600 patients displaying neurotoxic symptoms in less than three hours on the morning of Wednesday, August 21, 2013. Of those patients, 355 reportedly died.

… “MSF can neither scientifically confirm the cause of these symptoms nor establish who is responsible for the attack,” said Dr Janssens. “However, the reported symptoms of the patients, in addition to the epidemiological pattern of the events—characterised by the massive influx of patients in a short period of time, the origin of the patients, and the contamination of medical and first aid workers—strongly indicate mass exposure to a neurotoxic agent. This would constitute a violation of international humanitarian law, which absolutely prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons.”

President Obama has promised a “serious response“, and now we’re left to wonder what consequences America can inflict without doing our interests more harm than good.

In yesterday’s NYT, strategist Edward Luttwak (never a bleeding heart) claimed that victory by either the Iran-backed regime or the jihadist rebels would be bad for the United States. So:

Maintaining a stalemate should be America’s objective. And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad’s forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning.

Lovely.

As for Egypt, I recommend reading “Egypt in Crisis: Ten Observations” by University of Illinois Professor Feisal G. Mohamed. The gist: Egypt’s military is a vast institution with no foreign enemy to fight, so it’s mainly interested in extending its own power. There’s not much hope of balancing that power until the Islamists and the democrats come together in a movement that genuinely feels both Islamic and democratic. So far that’s not happening.

and what to do about Russia’s anti-gay laws

Dan Savage says boycott Russian vodka, but Villanova’s Mark Lawrence Schrad says not to. Since I never drink vodka no one can tell whether I’m boycotting or not. So I don’t find either choice very satisfying.

The bigger question is how to handle the Winter Olympics, which will start in February in the Black Sea resort of Sochi. If you are gay or just in the habit of correcting people who say incredibly ignorant things about homosexuality, it’s really not safe to go to Russia now. Legally, “propaganda of homosexualism to minors” (i.e., tweeting that gays and lesbians are people just like you and me) can get a foreigner fined, deported, or jailed for up to 15 days. And then there’s the illegal stuff. PolicyMic reports:

Against this backdrop, violent attacks on gays or “suspect gays” are becoming commonplace.

If gay athletes (or reporters or fans) aren’t safe at the Olympics, or if they’re safe only as long as they keep their mouths shut, why are we sending any people there at all?

But what’s the alternative? Given the huge logistics that surround an Olympics, moving the Games somewhere else really isn’t feasible. I also hate the idea of boycotting the Winter Olympics, since that affects mainly athletes, most of whom only get one shot at an Olympic medal during their prime.

The only satisfactory outcome I can imagine is a massive protest. Individual protests (as when Tommy Smith and John Carlos gave a black power salute from the medalists’ podium in Mexico City in 1968) would be welcome, but I hope the entire U.S. delegation plans something together. Sneak a rainbow flag into the opening ceremonies.  Attach a rainbow-flag patch to the standard uniform. Make a statement for freedom.

and that photographer in New Mexico

You may have missed this, but the religious right is going nuts (read the 3300+ comments at National Review) over a straightforward ruling the New Mexico Supreme Court made Thursday.

A New Mexico photographer refused to shoot a lesbian commitment ceremony, saying that she photographed only “traditional weddings”. This is a fairly obvious violation of New Mexico’s Human Rights Act, which states:

It is an unlawful discriminatory practice for: [skip over paragraphs A-E]

F. any person in any public accommodation to make a distinction, directly or indirectly, in offering or refusing to offer its services, facilities, accommodations or goods to any person because of race, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, spousal affiliation or physical or mental handicap

The Court’s ruling isn’t long (30 pages including a concurrence) because the law is so clear. Justice Bosson’s concurring opinion addresses the “religious freedom” issue directly:

In a constitutional form of government, personal, religious, and moral beliefs, when acted upon to the detriment of someone else’s rights, have constitutional limits. One is free to believe, think and speak as one’s conscience, or God, dictates. But when actions, even religiously inspired, conflict with other constitutionally protected rights—in Loving [i.e., Loving v Virginia, the case that established the right to interracial marriage] the right to be free from invidious racial discrimination—then there must be some accommodation. … [The photographer’s] refusal to do business with the same-sex couple in this case, no matter how religiously inspired, was an affront to the legal rights of that couple, the right granted them under New Mexico law to engage in the commercial marketplace free from discrimination.

As I have stated on this blog many times, the principle is simple: When you open your business to the public, you have to serve the whole public. You don’t get to decide who is or isn’t included in “the public”.

and Private Manning

Wednesday, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing a vast cache of secret documents through WikiLeaks, including hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. He’ll be eligible for parole in ten years.

Manning’s case (like that of Edward Snowden and Vietnam-era whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg) raises the fundamental conflict of a system that keeps so many secrets:

  • The system can’t survive if every individual makes his or her own judgments about what secrets to keep.
  • At some point, you have to make your own judgments.

It’s the nature of secrecy that a person’s pledge to keep secrets is never really an informed choice. Only after you start learning secrets do you understand what your pledge means. Sometimes you sign up for a secret-keeping position because you believe you’re fighting for the good guys, but after you start learning secrets you come to believe that you’re fighting for the bad guys. Or you sign up to keep secrets from the enemy, and end up keeping them from your own people.

Then what?

That said, I only have a limited amount of sympathy for Manning, because he could not possibly have read all the material he released or thought carefully about the consequences of releasing it — something I believe every responsible whistleblower ought to do.

Finally, I know that some people will consider this simplistic and naive, but the best solution to the whistleblower problem is to keep fewer secrets and do fewer morally objectionable things. The more nasty secrets our government has, the more likely it is that somebody on the inside will grow a conscience and tell the world.

Another twist in the Manning story was his announcement Thursday that he wants to be considered a woman and addressed as Chelsea. Manning wants to undergo hormone therapy, which is not part of the healthcare provided by military prisons.

A person’s gotta do what a person’s gotta do, but I consider this twist unfortunate, because a story that connects whistleblowers and the transgendered isn’t going to help either group. National Review has already published the predictable they’re-just-delusional article about the transgendered (and ThinkProgress responded). I’m sure somebody is already writing a trangendered-people-can’t-be-trusted-with-secrets article and a whistleblowers-are-mentally-ill article.

and what voters are telling Congress

Nothing I’ve heard in the last two weeks has changed my belief that we’re heading towards a major budget crisis, either when the new fiscal year starts in October or when we hit the debt ceiling in November. The gist of the conversation between the Republican leadership and their conservative base during the August recess — which I detail in How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation — has been the leaders’ warning that shutting down the government to stop ObamaCare is a doomed strategy, and the base responding “So?”

The Far Right really wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade, and they may get it.

and you also might be interested in …

I’ve been working on an article summarizing what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying. The story has been a bit hard to follow, since startling revelations are usually followed by the release of details that make the revealed program look a bit less startling, and then later we find out there’s a loophole in those details or another program entirely that is even worse. And so on.

Space considerations are pushing that article off to next week’s Sift. In the meantime I’ll leave you with TPM’s summary.

The scariest story I saw this week was Bloomberg’s “China Coal-Fired Economy Dying of Thirst as Mines Lack Water“.

About half of China’s rivers have dried up since 1990 and those that remain are mostly contaminated. Without enough water, coal can’t be mined, new power stations can’t run and the economy can’t grow. At least 80 percent of the nation’s coal comes from regions where the United Nations says water supplies are either “stressed” or in “absolute scarcity.”

… Severe water pollution affects 75 percent of China’s rivers and lakes and 28 percent are unsuitable even for agricultural use, according to the 2012 book “China’s Environmental Challenges,” by Judith Shapiro, director of the Masters program in Natural Resources and Sustainable Development at the School of International Service at American University in Washington.

Slate’s David Weigel coins the perfect phrase to describe right-wing talking heads’ repeated attempts to equate some black-on-white crime with Trayvon Martin’s shooting: “the search for the Bizarro Travyon“. The latest attempt fails for the same reason all the others did: The Martin story was never about white-on-black crime, it was about official indifference to black victims.

[U]ntil some white teen is killed and the killer walks for 40-odd days before being charged, the search for a Bizarro Trayvon will be fruitless.

Media Matters notes the difference between Obama-birtherism and Ted-Cruz-birtherism:

Absent from Hannity’s attack on “the left” was any specific example of a high-profile liberal or Democrat who has actually questioned Cruz’s eligibility. That differentiates Cruz birtherism from Obama birtherism, which has adherents in the House Republican caucus, was endorsed by Hannity’s Fox News colleagues, and became an absurd national spectacle in early 2011 owing to the incessant agitating of fake Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.

The two strains also differ in that no one doubts Cruz’s U.S. citizenship or his place of birth, while the animating principle of Obama birthers is that Obama is lying about where he was born and engaged in a decades-long conspiracy to falsify documents to that effect.

Finally, let’s close with something optimistic

OK, at least the Future gave us this much:

August 26, 2013 – 10:54 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (5)

How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation

The conservative base wants to see a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare. Their congressmen are trying to distract them with less dangerous crazy talk.

Congress went into its summer recess with everything up in the air. None of the major appropriation bills to fund the government in fiscal 2014 (which starts October 1) are passed yet, and the House and Senate versions of them are still far apart. Even if compromises could be reached in time, the far right wants to shut down the government until President Obama agrees to delay implementing ObamaCare. Or, if they can’t block the FY 2014 appropriations, they want Congress to default on the spending it just approved by not raising the debt limit.

Other big policy decisions are also pending: The Senate overwhelmingly passed an immigration reform bill, but the House leadership has neither brought that bill to a vote nor offered an alternative. Proposals to fix the Voting Rights Act (which the Supreme Court gutted in June) are stuck in committee.

What to do?

The sticking point in all these negotiations is the Republican caucus in the House, and in particular its Tea Party faction. It represents only about a third of the Republicans, but that’s enough to prevent Speaker Boehner from passing anything without Democratic votes. And its red-meat rhetoric is popular enough with the grass roots to threaten a primary challenge against any Republican who compromises with the Democrats over its objections. So Tea Partiers feel they are in a position to call the tune for the Republican caucus, which calls the tune for the House, which in turn should call the tune for the country in spite of a Democratic Senate and President.

That minority-rule plan is symptomatic of what’s wrong with the Republican Party in general. Republicans tell each other that the majority of the country is conservative, so the more conservative the Party gets the better it represents the People. But leaders like Boehner and Mitch McConnell know that’s not true: If Republicans close Yellowstone and delay processing Grandma’s Social Security application in a quixotic attempt to repeal the law that allows Cousin-Bob-with-diabetes to get healthcare, they’re going to lose big in 2014.

[A poll done for Republican members of Congress showed that self-described “very conservative” Republicans (9% of the electorate) support a government shutdown 63%-27%, while the next most conservative 10%, the “somewhat conservative” Republicans, oppose it 62%-31%.]

So that set up the drama of the August recess: Republican congressmen would go home and meet with their constituents — typically not a representative sample, but invited groups of Republican supporters (“We’re actually talking to the choir,” Senator Coburn admitted to a meeting promoted by the Glenn-Beck-inspired Tulsa 912 Project) — who presumably would tell them to get in line behind the far right. They, on the other hand, would be trying to talk softly while slowly backing out of the padded cell — not directly confronting their base’s delusions, but also not promising to jump off any cliffs to prove their faith in the protective angels of the hidden conservative majority. (I wrote that padded-cell metaphor before seeing the following cartoon.)

For the most part, the congressmen preserved their conservative bona fides by pandering in areas that didn’t demand an immediate on-the-record vote, like doubting Obama’s birth certificate or fantasizing about impeachment.

ObamaCare. For the most part, far-right groups like Heritage Action and FreedomWorks succeeded in delivering rooms full of people so opposed to ObamaCare that they support a government shutdown, and most of the politicians succeeded in sticking to their I-agree-with-you-but response. (Senator Coburn, for example, kicked the can down the road from October 1, saying the debt-ceiling confrontation would be a better opportunity to defund ObamaCare. He cited the danger a government shutdown would pose to the economy, while conveniently ignoring the larger threat of casting doubt on the government’s willingness to pay its debts.)

Occasionally, though, reality seeped into even the most conservative townhall meetings. In Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, and elsewhere Republicans had to face real people (middle-aged white people that they couldn’t instantly write off) with pre-existing conditions whose only shot at health insurance goes away if ObamaCare is repealed.

The disconnect here is that the provisions of ObamaCare are popular, even in states where the name “ObamaCare” is unpopular. That’s why Jim DeMint describes this fall as “the last off-ramp for us to stop Obamacare”, because after it gets implemented people will be dealing with the real thing rather than DeMint’s death-panel horror stories.

What makes facing ObamaCare’s real beneficiaries so tough for Republicans is that after four years of attempting to repeal the law, Republicans still have offered no alternative. So their basic message to the uninsured is: Rejoice in your “freedom” and pray you don’t get sick. (Their underlying problem is that ObamaCare is the Republican alternative to HillaryCare that the Heritage Foundation promoted in the 1990s and Mitt Romney signed as governor of Massachusetts in 2006. Republicans have no healthcare plan because Obama stole their old one — which they then felt they had to denounce as “socialism”.)

Immigration. Atlantic’s Molly Ball notes the dog that hasn’t barked: Opponents of immigration reform tried to pressure Congress with big rallies, but people just didn’t show up. We’ll see if that frees House Republicans to compromise with the Senate.

So far, it doesn’t sound that way. Immigration reform has to go through the House Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia, told a townhall meeting last Monday that the House should be “setting forward the right way to do things” … “even if it doesn’t go all the way through to be signed by this president”.

Impeachment. The weirdest thing to come out of the August recess was the talk about impeaching President Obama. None of Rep. Bentivolio of Michigan, Rep. Farenthold of Texas, or Senator Coburn of Oklahoma had the courage to tell their townhall questioners what they didn’t want to hear: that constitutionally President Obama can only be impeached for “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” and so far Republicans have uncovered not a shred of evidence to support such a charge.

Bentivolio said it would be a “dream come true” to submit an impeachment bill, but his good intentions get frustrated by lawyers who ask “What evidence do you have?” and by a press that would “make a laughingstock” out of anybody who tried to impeach Obama without evidence. (The press, he adds, is “the most corrupt thing in Washington”.) But for those interfering lawyers and reporters, though, he’d be all over it even without evidence.

Coburn (in response to the meeting’s last question, beginning at about the 1:04 mark in the video) does say that impeachment “is not something you take lightly”, but dodges the question of whether impeachment is appropriate now, passing the buck to the House (where impeachment proceedings would have to start). “I don’t have the legal background to know if that rises to high crimes and misdemeanor but I think they’re getting perilously close.” (The meaning of “that” and “they” is never spelled out.)

Farenthold regrets that an earlier House didn’t look into “the whole birth certificate issue” and then passes the buck to the Senate:

if we were to impeach the President tomorrow, you could probably get the votes in the House of Representatives to do it. But it would go to the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted. … I think there’s some potential damage to society that would be done with a failed attempt at impeachment.

At least when Democrats talked about impeaching President Bush, we had enough respect for the process to point to specific crimes. You define the crime first, then you collect evidence to prove it, and then you talk about impeachment. You don’t just say “I want to impeach this guy” and hope you can find evidence that he did something wrong.

Now what? During the August recess, the far-right base made it clear they want to see a last-ditch charge against ObamaCare, while polls show the American people in general don’t want a government shutdown. In general, I think the electorate wants to see more solutions and less drama, while the far-right base won’t be satisfied until it gets the apocalyptic battle it keeps fantasizing about. Nothing less will cause God’s hand to reach out of the clouds and give their Gideon-like band the victory.

I believe the stage is set for an epic conservative defeat. The only question is how much damage it will do to the country. We can only hope Tea Partiers keep identifying with Gideon, and not Samson pulling the Philistine temple down on himself.

August 26, 2013 – 8:15 am Categories: Articles | Comments (8)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

I’m back. I know I just missed one week, but it seems like I haven’t done a Sift in forever.

In an hour or so I’ll post this week’s featured article “How Republican Congressmen Spent Their Summer Vacation”, which is more-or-less a follow-up to “Chaos in Congress” from three weeks ago. The conservative base wants to see their representatives do a Charge of the Light Brigade against ObamaCare, and the politicians are (understandably) reluctant. That led to some bizarre townhall meetings, where the congressmen tried to distract the base by talking crazy about impeachment, Obama’s birth certificate, and other stuff that doesn’t lead to an immediate on-the-record vote.

I want to do a long article that summarizes what we now know about the NSA’s domestic spying, but instead I’ll link to somebody else’s summary and push my own off to next week. My word limit got taken up by more timely stories that each needed 3-5 paragraphs in the weekly summary: the “I Have a Dream” anniversary, Egypt and Syria, Russia’s anti-gay laws, Bradley/Chelsea Manning, and the New Mexico Supreme Court outraging the religious right by refusing to overlook the words “sexual orientation” in the New Mexico Human Rights Act. (It’s still up in the air whether that will break off into a second featured article.)

August 26, 2013 – 6:54 am Categories: Morning tease | Post a comment

Word and deed

No Sift next week. Next new articles: August 26.

It is in our deeds and not our words that our religion must be read.

— Thomas Jefferson

This week everybody was talking about the Washington Post

The Graham family, which has owned the paper since God-knows-when and was in charge when the Post overthrew Nixon single-handedly, sold out to Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos.

Maybe Bezos has some amazing plan to bring the Post into the 21st century, or maybe newspapers are like baseball teams used to be — toys for rich guys. But guess what? For once I agree with Ross Douthat: When the internet took off, the Post had a chance to become the national site for politics. Politico was built by ex-WaPo people, who could have built it inside WaPo, if management had more vision.

and President Obama finally addressed the NSA issue, sort of

Long story made short: If you think the NSA collecting everyone’s data is basically a good idea, but you worry about rogue agents misusing it, what Obama laid out should reassure you a little. If you think the government just shouldn’t be collecting this much information in the first place, he conceded nothing. “It’s not enough for me, as president to have confidence in these programs. The American people need to have confidence in them as well.”

and the Senate is talking about filibuster reform again

Last month a deal to approve several of President Obama’s appointees to posts in his administration avoided a showdown over the filibuster. Now the issue is the three vacancies on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, the most significant of the nation’s appellate courts.

The court currently has four judges appointed by Republican presidents and four appointed by Democrats, with the seniority of the Republican judges tilting the balance towards conservatives. The issue resembles what Senate Republicans were doing when they pledged to filibuster any appointee to head the Consumer Financial Protection Board: Traditionally, an appointment was filibustered only for objections to the particular nominee, but Republicans have decided that the D.C. court is over-staffed and intend to filibuster any nominee to the three empty seats. (No one suggested the court was over-staffed when Bush was president.)

Republicans have proposed a bill to cut the number of judges on the court from 11 to 8, and thus eliminate the vacancies. That’s a completely legitimate use of congressional power, but they don’t have the votes to pass it. So they’re using the filibuster to achieve what they can’t achieve through the democratic process.

Harry Reid is threatening to change the rules on the filibuster if the Republicans don’t back down. They yielded last month. You’d think they wouldn’t restart the confrontation if they didn’t have a different strategy this time, but who knows?

and the Republicans in Congress went home to consult their base

Last week I speculated that divisions in the Republican House caucus might make it impossible to pass the appropriation bills necessary to keep the government running into FY2014, which starts October 1. This week Republican congresspeople have been home for the August recess and talking to their constituents.

Groups like FreedomWorks are trying to rally the base around far-right strategies like shutting down the government unless Democrats agree to defund Obamacare. To an extent, that’s working, but other citizens are showing up at town hall meetings as well. This North Carolinian puts Rep. Patrick McHenry on the spot about voting to repeal a plan that will make it possible for him to get healthcare despite his pre-existing conditions — and the crowd cheers him.

Other conservative congressfolks are being reminded just out wacky their base is … and demonstrating how afraid they are to defend reality from the lunatic fringe.

In this video, Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma has to deal with a Birther who wants to talk about “Obama’s identification fraud”, i.e., he’s not really an American. Mullin can’t just say “no, ma’am” like John McCain did in 2008, because that would require backbone. So he tries to redirect the conversation onto tactics, saying “We lost that argument November 6” while making sure that his constituents know “I’m not defending this guy” and “I believe what you’re saying.” (Congressman Mullin’s people later claimed he “misspoke” in saying that he agreed with Birtherism, as if “I believe what you’re saying” were a tricky phrase he didn’t know how to use properly.)

Same guy: He’s sure he saw food stamp fraud, because a couple using them were in good shape and had nice work-out clothes. I’m not sure what Mullin thinks happens when you lose your job. Nobody re-possesses your closet, and it can take a while to get depressed enough to let yourself slide out of shape. But your income may fall into food-stamp territory anyway.

And still others are actively pushing the wackiness. Rep. Steve King told a family-values conference:

when you profess the things that we believe in, and you’re a 501(c)3 and you’re afraid of the IRS, just go ahead and defy the IRS on that.

Notice: The IRS doesn’t stop anybody from professing the things they believe in, just from financing that professing with tax-free donations. So King isn’t invoking a “higher law”, he’s invoking a higher tax code. Our text this morning is from the book of Foundations, chapter 3, beginning with the 14th verse: “And then he said unto them …”

and we’re discovering that 2014 isn’t going to be a replay of 2010

Ever since November, people of all partisan loyalties have been invoking this analogy: 2012 was like 2008 (Obama wins by inspiring a large turnout of minorities and young people), so 2014 will be like 2010 (an older, whiter electorate will be fed up with liberal over-reach and vote in a bunch of Republicans).

The 2010 replay was supposed to start with a remarkable coincidence: Just as Massachusetts needed a special Senate election to replace Ted Kennedy in 2009, it needed another one to replace John Kerry in 2013. But Gabriel Gomez couldn’t pull off another Scott Brown upset, so the Democrats held Kerry’s seat.

And the August congressional recess was beginning of the Tea Party wave in 2009, as organized chaos broke out in the townhall meetings of Democrats all over the country. This year, though, it’s the Republican townhalls that seem more chaotic. And the “liberal overreach” story of 2010 has become the “conservative obstruction” story of 2014.

That’s not to say that the Republicans won’t pick up seats in 2014; the second mid-term is typically difficult for a two-term administration. But if that happens, it will be via a different story than the Tea Party tidal wave of 2010.

Meanwhile, I’m continuing the conversation on race

with “Acting white isn’t really a racial issue“. In some settings, black students who succeed in school are accused (mainly by other black students) of “acting white”. It turns out that something similar happens among working-class white students, where it doesn’t have a racial name.

The Daily Show is also continuing the conversation on race, with mixed results.

I can’t tell if this is fake outrage or if conservatives are really this clueless, but they’re pushing the story of three black 15-year-olds beating up a 13-year-old white as proving the “hypocrisy” of the black activists who organized protests about the Trayvon Martin case. Media Matters reports:

Since Wednesday, nearly half a dozen Fox programs have dedicated airtime to questioning why civil right leaders, specifically Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, have yet to make public statements on the case. … Sean Hannity complained “the people that commented so often on the Trayvon Martin case, I haven’t heard a word out of them about this video.” His guest Michelle Malkin agreed.

As if the whole point of the Martin case was just white-on-black crime. Unlike in Martin’s shooting, in this case the authorities immediately took the crime seriously and the perpetrators have been arrested — so the system is working fine and there’s no need for public protests from Jackson and Sharpton or anyone else. MM elaborates:

In the month since the attack, no one has excused the actions of the attackers, no one has suggested the victim deserved a beating, no one has rooted through social media accounts in an attempt to blame the victim, and no one suggested that he had it coming because of his choice of clothing. Conservatives engaged in all of these actions during the 46 days between the killing of Trayvon Martin and the arrest of George Zimmerman.

and you also might be interested in …

Another example proving that you can’t solve a problem when you don’t admit it exists: Republicans deny they have a sexism problem and say the War on Women is just a liberal slander. So why shouldn’t a Republican PAC raise money with a “Slap Hillary” game? Slapping a woman to shut her up … why should that remind anybody of anything creepy?

Who really suffers from religious discrimination in the military? Humanists.

A follow-up to my July “Keeping the Con in Conservatism” post: In the first half of 2013, Michele Bachmann’s PAC spent a quarter million dollars on legal fees, and $400 supporting candidates.

You know who’s worried about global warming? Insurance companies. They’re also not too keen on insuring schools that arm their teachers.

It makes great rhetoric to say that climate change is a big socialist conspiracy or that more guns make us all safer, but when you have to put your money on the line, you end up having to deal with reality.

This is incredibly cool: Drinking water out of thin air.

and let’s end with something fun

August 12, 2013 – 1:39 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (3)

“Acting White” isn’t really a racial issue

If you want to blame a downtrodden group for their own disadvantages, here’s a handy trick: Take a broad social problem, see how it intersects with that group, and then talk about that intersection as if it were a unique problem located in that group.

Tricks like this are easier to spot in retrospect. So, for example, years ago when the gay-rights discussion was about whether public schools should allow gay teachers — already in 2004 that issue was an embarrassment to Jim DeMint and has since been removed even from far-right documents like the South Carolina Republican Platform — we used to hear a lot about gay teachers having sex with their students, as if this were some special gay problem totally unrelated to straight teachers having sex with their students. (Something similar is still going on in the Catholic priest scandal; rather than talk about the larger problem of the clergy sexual abuse that occurs in all denominations and victimizes both genders, some people want the issue to be about gay priests.)

Muslim terrorism and Islamic extremism are good present-day examples, because they’re usually discussed as if they had no similarity to Christian terrorism or extremism.

This trick is easy to fall for. I used to think that every incompetent black or female I ran into was an indictment of affirmative action, until somebody asked me: “How many incompetent white men do you know?”

Never mind.

Anyway, we’re supposedly having a national conversation on race. So far, the conservative half of that has largely been an indictment of black culture: Since racism is mythical and the ladder to success climbed by white ethnic groups — Irish, Italians, Poles — is still there, all blacks would have to do is clean up their act, get educated, and work hard. They’d all be CEOs in no time.

What supposedly stops this from happening is the unique inferiority of black culture. They take drugs, commit crimes, have illegitimate children — nobody forces them to do this stuff, Bill O’Reilly reminds us, “That’s a personal decision.”

And they’re actively hostile to education. “young black men often reject education and gravitate towards the street culture, drugs, hustling, gangs”. Bill came back to that point in a later broadcast:

Even if there were plenty of jobs, most employers are not going to hire people who can’t read well and speak proper English. Right now the unemployment rate among black males age 16 to 19, 57 percent; 57 percent. It’s 25 percent for white males that age. Overall, black unemployment, 14 percent; white unemployment, 6.6 percent. The reason, in many poor neighborhoods there’s chaos, violence and little discipline in the public schools. Kids aren’t learning.

CNN’s Don Lemon said O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough” and told his fellow blacks:

Want to break the cycle of poverty? Stop telling kids they’re acting white because they go to school or they speak proper English.

Even President Obama has hit that theme, most notably in the 2004 Democratic Convention speech that launched him onto the national stage:

children can’t achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white.

Telling kids who succeed in school that they’re “acting white” — for an educated white audience, that’s just beyond the pale. It’s a conscious rebellion against knowledge. What more proof do you need that black culture is horribly sick?

You know where else you see that phenomenon? Working class whites. In Reading Classes, Barbara Jensen writes both about her own white-working-class childhood and her adult experience as a counselor to working class white students.

She describes school as an extension of professional-class culture. Kids who grow up in the professional class live at home with the same communication patterns they’ll meet at school, while kids growing up in the working class have to learn special ways to act and talk in the classroom. (Simple example: Adults quizzing kids by asking questions they already know the answer to. It’s an obvious school thing, and professional-class parents do it all the time, beginning at a very early age. “What’s the cow say?” When parents question kids in a working-class household, it’s more like, “Who knocked that glass of water over?” So when those kids arrive at school and the teacher starts asking them questions, their instinctive reaction is that they’re being accused of something. And if you can’t see where a line of questioning is going, the safest thing is just to dummy up.)

Once working-class kids get past the basic foreignness of the school environment, they are taught that the way they speak at home is wrong. (I grew up putting an r-sound into the name of our nation’s capital — Worshington — and taking one out of the second month — Febuary. School taught me that was wrong.) Jensen has no problem with teaching Standard English, but …

How kids should be taught these skills is my concern. Is it really necessary to learn that everything a child knew before school about language is nothing more than bad English and ignorance?

Little by little, what you do at school starts to seem disloyal to your home life, because you’re being taught to look down on where you come from. It gets worse in middle school, where even professional-class kids have issues with peer pressure versus submission to authority. In the early grades, the clash was mainly between the influence of the parents and the influence of the teacher. But middle school is likely to be a larger school of mixed social classes. In addition to the teachers wanting to civilize you, you have to deal with the born-civilized professional-class kids and the teachers’ implicit why-can’t-you-be-more-like-them. Result? a culture of resistance that punishes collaborators.

Working class kids who are into academics get shunned and teased by other kids because they care about impressing their teachers. … My friends and I came to excel at rebelling — not as solitary rebels, like actor James Dean in the movie Rebel Without a Cause, but as a community of resistance to the authority of school.

This is a white author talking about white kids. She tells a sad story about quitting choir — even though she loved it — because she was too embarrassed to be up on stage with all the goody-goody professional-class kids in front of her working-class friends. (Jensen herself eventually got a Ph.D., but not until after a long strange trip that had little to do with her early schooling.)

So in short, I’m not claiming that “acting white” isn’t a problem, or that it doesn’t get in the way of black kids making a better life for themselves. I’m just saying it’s not a racial problem. It’s a thing that happens when the culture of school is alien to the culture of a neighborhood, and it happens to whites as well as blacks.

Because of their place in society, blacks are more likely to be in the path of this storm than whites, just as more blacks than whites were left behind in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit. But just as we don’t have a “black hurricane problem”, we don’t have a black resistance-to-education problem.

August 12, 2013 – 8:44 am Categories: Articles | Comments (11)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

The schedule is a little unpredictable today because I’m squeezing in a doctor’s appointment before going on vacation tomorrow. I think the Sift will also be shorter than average this week, because I’ve been dumping time into a different project.

This week’s featured article “Acting white isn’t really a racial issue” just needs a final read-through, so it should come out shortly. I’ll be using Barbara Jensen’s observations of working-class white kids to show that the “acting white” phenomenon among black kids in school (i.e., accusing successful students of being disloyal to the group) isn’t a unique flaw of black culture.

The weekly summary will come out after my doctor’s appointment, so the timing depends on how long I spend in the waiting room. (You know how unpredictable that is.) It will discuss the sale of the Washington Post, a new showdown in the Senate over the filibuster, President Obama’s NSA proposals, all the strange goings-on as Republicans meet their base during the August recess, why 2014 doesn’t look like a replay of 2010, and a few other things. I haven’t picked a lead quote or a title yet.

No Sift next week. See you on the 26th.

August 12, 2013 – 7:51 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Augury

Jurisdictions covered by the preclearance requirement continued to submit, in large numbers, proposed changes to voting laws that the Attorney General declined to ap­prove, auguring that barriers to minority voting would quickly resurface were the preclearance remedy elimi­nated.
— Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
dissenting opinion in Shelby County v. Holder
June 25, 2013

I didn’t want to be right, but sadly I am.

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg
interview with Associated Press
July 24, 2013

This week the conversation about race continued

CNN’s Don Lemon did a “No Talking Points” segment whose final bottom-of-the-screen admonitions was “Black people. Clean up your act!” In response, hip-hop activist Jay Smooth schooled him:

There are two types of advice that people usually give. There’s advice that you give to try and help someone with their problems, and then there’s advice that you give to help yourself feel better about not knowing how to help them with their problems. And the difference is all in the context.

The specifics of Lemon’s eat-your-vegetables guidance is unobjectionable, from “Pull up your pants” to “Just because you can have a baby, it doesn’t mean you should.” But in the context of a black man speaking to CNN’s mostly white audience at a time when white people are blaming black culture for Trayvon Martin’s death and refusing delivery on any talk of systemic racism, Jay Smooth is right: “His advice was f**king terrible.”

No doubt black culture could improve, just as white culture could improve. But white people are looking for ways to ignore or wash their hands of the systemic racism in the justice system. Don Lemon gave them one.

The comment thread on last week’s Sadly, the national conversation on race has to start here is worth a look.

Best thing I ran into this week: Peggy McIntosh’s TED talk “How Studying Privilege Systems Can Strengthen Compassion“. Terrible title, but an excellent message, not just about recognizing white privilege, but moving forward from there without getting trapped in liberal guilt.

And lots of people were talking about the increasing chaos in Congress

Another one of the basic, didn’t-used-to-be-controversial appropriations bills failed this week, and Congress took its summer recess with no plan for getting back on track. Increasingly it’s looking like the House might shut down the government in October, not because that’s part of somebody’s hardline negotiating strategy, but because the Republican majority is too fractured to pass anything. I flesh out that scenario in Chaos in Congress.

and the Ariel Castro sentence

The man who kidnapped three Cleveland women and kept them as sex slaves for years got life without parole plus a thousand years. Some radioactive waste doesn’t have to be held that long.

But we should be keeping tabs on voting rights

which I do this week in Voting Rights one month after Shelby.

and you also might be interested in …

This guy is likely to be the Republican candidate for Congress in my district. ObamaCare “is a law as destructive to personal and individual liberty as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.” Sometimes I think the whole point of Tea Party rhetoric is to screw discourse up so badly that there’s no chance of reasoning together about our common problems.

The issue isn’t even whether corporations have freedom of religion. It’s whether their God is bigger than your God.

Every time it starts to sound like the NSA’s spying might be adequately controlled, something else comes out.

If it seems like the Republican Party is more anti-environment than it used to be, that’s because it is. Four former Republican EPA chiefs just called for action on climate change. If any Republican leaders in Congress or potential Republican presidential candidates have signed on to their program, I haven’t heard about it.

Google’s support for anti-science Senator James Inhofe is hurting their image:

The WSJ and New York Sun worry that women want Janet Yellin to become Fed chair just because she’s a woman.

Jonathan Chait points out what ought to be obvious: Women are used to being told that men would like to appoint women to powerful positions, but can’t find any who are qualified. (Finding that elusive qualified female was why Mitt Romney needed his “binders full of women“.) But now that the obvious and most qualified person is a woman, men seem to be saying “Not so fast.” That’s the source of the conflict, not “liberal diversity police”.

Here‘s Allison Lundergan Grimes’ announcement of her Kentucky senate campaign. Tough, charming, young, female, with real Kentucky roots — I think I’d be scared if I were Mitch McConnell and had to defend my role in creating the logjam in Washington. Recent polls show a tight race, if Mitch can make it past the Tea Party in his primary.

Lauren Green’s interview with author Reza Aslan — where she seemed dumbfounded by the notion that a scholar who practices Islam might write a book about Jesus — has been touted as possibly “the single most cringe-worthy, embarrassing interview” in the history of Fox News. (But Salon points out that there’s a lot of competition for that honor.)

Even if Aslan were writing as a Muslim rather than as a scholar, a Muslim writing about Jesus is no more suspicious than a Christian writing about Moses. Muslims revere Jesus as a forerunner of Mohammad — much as Christians revere Moses, the central figure of Judaism.

To me, this is all about projection. Right-wing Christians are quick to assume that a Muslim writing about Jesus must be doing a hit piece, because they have done so many hit pieces on Mohammad since 9-11.

With all the hoopla, you’d think they were revealing the 12th Imam, not the 12th Doctor Who.

The problem with laws that allow journalists not to reveal their sources is that “journalist” has no obvious definition.

Columbia Journalism Review does a retrospective on media coverage of the IRS scandal-that-wasn’t.

That big peak on the left is all the it-looks-really-bad speculation early in the story, and that flat-lining to the right is the non-coverage as the facts came out and showed that nothing really bad actually happened. Maddowblog’s Steve Benen sums up:

It’s tempting to chalk this up to human nature — there’s a major event, and everyone pays attention, but as time passes, our attention wanes and we lose interest. It happens all the time, and it’s understandable.

I’d argue, however, that what happened with the IRS story is something slightly different. … Outlets didn’t move on when nothing happened; outlets instead made a conscious decision not to report when all kinds of things happened — things that made the story itself appear baseless. In other words, in this case, the media only cared about the allegations from Republicans, not the evidence that proved those allegations false.

Let’s end with something fun: bears pole-dancing

Those motion-sensitive cameras out in the woods are recording some amusing things.

August 5, 2013 – 1:10 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (1)

Chaos in Congress

Since the Republicans regained a majority in the House in 2010, we’ve gotten used to seeing everything come down to the last minute. Congress and the White House can’t agree on the basic bills that have to pass to keep the government running — to put Social Security checks in the mail and keep the national parks open — so again and again high-stakes negotiations between Speaker Boehner and President Obama have been necessary to craft a last-minute compromise that nobody likes. That was the story of the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequester, and so on.

So talk about another showdown when the new fiscal year starts in October may seem like same-old same-old: Everyone will posture, doomsday clocks will tick towards zero, and chaos will loom, but eventually Obama and Boehner will go into a room and come out with something that keeps the worst from happening. Both sides will rail about how unacceptable this agreement is, but ultimately majorities in Congress will accept it and life will go on.

This time might be different. Boehner will likely end up playing Chicken again, but this time it’s not clear he even has brakes or a steering wheel. It’s not his driving I question, it’s his vehicle.

Increasingly, the House Republican majority is losing the cohesion necessary to be part of the governing structure. Congressional Republicans can come together to block what President Obama wants, but they can’t come together on a program of their own. In September, Speaker Boehner will likely go into that room with no position to negotiate from and no ability to pass a compromise without relying mainly on Democratic votes — and the prospect of losing his speakership if he does.

To understand what’s happening, you need to appreciate things on two levels: the mechanics of the appropriations process (where things are starting to fall apart) and the underlying illusions in the minds of the conservative rank-and-file.

Legislative failure I: the farm bill. In the last few months we’ve seen some spectacular legislative failures in the House. First when the farm bill failed in June. The farm bill is a compromise that goes back to the 70s: Democrats get money for food stamps and Republicans get money for farm subsidies. Poor people going hungry and small farmers losing their land are two images that raise a lot of public sympathy, so for decades neither party has wanted to scuttle the deal.

Until June. The Senate passed a traditional compromise farm bill (with some moderate cuts on both sides) 66-27. But the House bill included $20 billion in cuts to Food Stamps over ten years — too much for Democrats but not enough for the most conservative Republicans. So it lost 234-195. Subsequently, the House passed a farm-subsidies-only bill and is drafting a separate bill with $40 billion in Food Stamp cuts. The usual practice would be for a joint House/Senate conference committee to iron out differences in their respective bills, but so far the House is refusing to appoint its conferees.

At the moment, nobody sees a clear path to a bill that can be passed by both houses and signed by the president before all authority for food stamps and farm subsidies vanishes on October 1.

Legislative failure II: T/HUD. This week both houses went home for the summer recess after failing even to vote on the appropriations bill that funds the Departments of Transportation and Housing and Urban Development.

T/HUD is another one of those bipartisan bills that — after some tussle and a few close votes on amendments — usually passes by wide margins, because it includes some of the most visible, most popular spending the government does. It rebuilds bridges, widens highways, and opens new parks.

The Senate could have passed a bill had one come to a vote, but Mitch McConnell led yet another filibuster. In the House, the T/HUD bill was pulled from the calendar when the leadership realized they couldn’t pass it.

Why? Because the House Republican version of T/HUD slashes a lot of popular local programs, and not even Republicans are prepared to face the voters having cut stuff their districts want and need. So why put those cuts in the bill to begin with? Well, that’s where the story gets interesting. TPM’s Brian Beutler explains:

In normal times, the House and Senate would each pass a budget, the differences between those budgets would be resolved, and appropriators in both chambers would have binding limits both on how much money to spend, and on which large executive agencies to spend it.

But this year the House passed the Ryan budget and the Senate passed something much closer to what we’ve been doing. Senate Republicans have blocked the Senate from appointing conferees to work out the differences.

OK, so what? Well, a budget is just a list of numbers; it doesn’t specify exactly what does and doesn’t get paid for. (It’s like when a husband and wife agree to reduce their annual food budget, but leave for later whether they’re going to cut back on steak or quiche.) The nitty-gritty happens in the appropriations process, in bills like T/HUD and the farm bill.

Because the budget process failed, the House is proceeding with appropriations under the Ryan budget. This is the first time anybody has tried to spell out Ryan’s cuts. Beutler narrates:

But they can’t do it. It turns out that when you draft bills enumerating all the specific cuts required to comply with the budget’s parameters, they don’t come anywhere close to having enough political support to pass. Even in the GOP House. Slash community development block grants by 50 percent, and you don’t just lose the Democrats, you lose a lot of Republicans who care about their districts. Combine that with nihilist defectors who won’t vote for any appropriations unless they force the President to sign an Obamacare repeal bill at a bonfire ceremony on the House floor, and suddenly you’re nowhere near 218 [votes in the House, i.e., a majority].

That’s not just a problem with T/HUD. It’s a problem for all the appropriations bills that need to pass by October 1. The Ryan budget never worked, except as a promised land that the evil Obama and nasty Senate Democrats kept Republicans from reaching. But now they’ve blundered into a position where they have to produce photos of their promised land.

And their voters are not going to understand why they can’t do it.

ObamaCare and Immigration. If it’s that hard to keep funding popular programs that specifically help your district, what about controversial stuff like ObamaCare and immigration reform?

There’s no ticking clock on immigration reform, so needless to say the House hasn’t gone anywhere with the bill that passed the Senate with 68 votes. Instead of one bill that embraces compromises, Eric Cantor told Chris Wallace:

We will have a vote on a series of bills at some point, Chris. It will deal with a variety of issues.

In other words, the farm bill is the model. The House will divide the Senate bill up, pass the parts that please conservatives and not pass the parts that please liberals. The bills they pass will all die in the Senate, where they need some Democratic votes.

But at least that won’t shut the government down, it will just kick the can to a future Congress. On ObamaCare, the Tea Party folks in Congress are pushing an Alamo-like stand, where Republicans will shut down the government until Democrats agree to defund implementation. Karl Rove and Tom Coburn think this is madness, but it’s a crowd-pleaser if you’re only worried about winning a Republican primary.

Political fantasy meets reality. Poll after poll shows the same thing: Ask Americans if they want the government to spend less, and they say yes. Ask them specifically whether the government should spend less on the things the government spends almost all its money on — healthcare, Social Security, defense, homeland security, roads, schools, air traffic control, food safety, disease control, disaster relief, … — and they say no.

The difference is fantasy spending: Bridges to Nowhere, foreign aid to countries that hate us, welfare fraud, and a bunch of other “government waste” that serves no legitimate purpose and could be slashed to zero without hurting anybody. Ask people — especially conservatives — how much of the federal budget is spent on such stuff, and you’ll hear ridiculous answers like half or more, rather than the actual drop-in-a-huge-bucket.

So the ideal political position to run on (if your opponent will let you get away with it) is that you’re going to make vast unspecified budget cuts that won’t actually hurt anybody. It’s nonsense, but it’s nonsense people will believe — until you have to make good on the details.

Conservative politicians and media personalities have been feeding this fantasy in the rank-and-file for decades, and now they can’t control it. Republicans know that it is death to go into a primary battle with a Tea Party challenger and try to make conservative voters deal with reality. But now the leaders themselves have to deal with reality as legislators, and their primary voters are watching.

What to do?

August 5, 2013 – 10:34 am Categories: Articles | Comments (9)

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