Tuesday, March 27, 2012

A Republican War on Women?


This editorial was originally published on PolicyMic (March 22, 2012) and can be found here: http://www.policymic.com/articles/5832/a-republican-war-on-women
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Is it fair to claim that the Republican Party is waging a "war on women?"
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Let's look at the facts. Although the phrase in question only regained its political fashionability within the last few months, the sad truth is that the Republican Party's hostility to women's rights traces back much longer than that. The days when Senator Margaret Chase Smith electrified Congress with her eloquence and sharp logic subsided long ago; in their place is the party whose much-heralded "Reagan Revolution" was ushered in by a former California governor who proudly made good on his 1980 presidential campaign promise to quash the Equal Rights Amendment.
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That spirit is still evident today. With four examples from 2012 alone, one can see it:
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- Rush Limbaugh's reference to Sandra Fluke, and by implication any woman who supports federal guarantees of insurance coverage for female contraception, as being "a slut" and "a prostitute" for supposedly wanting other people to pay for her sex (Limbaugh initially refused to apologize but changed his tune when advertisers began to pull out of his program).
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- The passage of a Texas law requiring women to undergo an ultrasound before receiving an abortion, one accompanied by tentative counterparts in Virginia and Pennsylvania.
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- The proposal in Wisconsin of a particularly misogynistic law that would brand single mothers as child abusers for not being married, one put forward by a legislator who later admitted that he opposed divorce for any reason, even arguing that women in abusive relationships should just remember what they used to love about their husbands and "re-find those reasons and get back to why they got married in the first place."
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- The fact that the field of Republican presidential candidates includes: a man who wants to eliminate funding for Title X programs that would fund Planned Parenthood (sans abortion procedures) and help poor women receive everything from cancer screenings and pap smears to birth control and wellness checkups, a man who has based a large part of his condemnation of Obama's contraception insurance mandate on the grounds that "[sex] is supposed to be within marriage" and birth control is "a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be," a man who voted against the Family and Medical Leave Act, and a man who says victims of sexual harassment "can't escape some responsibility for the problem" by not just quitting their jobs.
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Facts such as these dominate the public image of the Republican Party today, and they can't be scrubbed out simply because they're justified by sympathetic female cultural reactionaries, be they commentators like Phyllis Schlafly and Ann Coulter or politicians like Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann. On the one hand, it is quite hyperbolic to classify all of this as a literal "war on women," since that term more appropriately applies to the extreme atrocities facing the unfortunate female residents of nations like Afghanistan, Iran, and the Congo, even though it's worth noting that America - unlike nations such as Great Britain, Israel, and Germany - has never had a female head of state. At the same time, the hyperbole is one that Republicans have brought upon themselves. By opposing policies that will allow women full control over their own bodies, sexual choices, marital statuses, and workplace rights, they deny them the ability to fully control their own lives.
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This makes me pine for the days of feminism. Not the militant caricature that was given a deliberately pejorative connotation by the likes of Rush Limbaugh (who, among other things, coined the phrase "feminazis"), but the feminism that simply insists that people shouldn't be allowed to discriminate against others because of biological differences (in this case related to gender) or attempt to impose their personal cultural views regarding sex on those who don't share them. That brand of feminism is very much needed today. As Cheris Kramarae and Paula Treichler put it best, "feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings."

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Health Care Reform and the Anti-Injunction Act

This editorial was originally posted on PolicyMic.com on March 14, 2012. It can be found here: http://www.policymic.com/articles/5408/the-supreme-court-s-decision-on-the-affordable-care-act-could-be-impacted-by-the-anti-injunction-act
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As the Supreme Court prepares to start its hearings on President Barack Obama's health care reform legislation (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, or PPACA), it makes sense that conservatives and libertarians are eager for the case to proceed as quickly as possible. After all, any ruling issued before November 2012 will constitute some manner of victory for their cause: A complete overturning of the bill will be celebrated as a vindication of the anti-PPACA position and a humiliation for Obama, a complete upholding of it can be used to freshly galvanize the right-wing base against the president (especially given the failure of party frontrunners Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum to accomplish that task), and a ruling rejecting the individual mandate while maintaining the rest of the measure would force Obama into a fight with Congress over an alternative to the mandate (of which there are at least nine), one that could be used to paint him in an unflattering light at the height of the election season.
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Just as a wealth of potential benefits await opponents of PPACA if the Supreme Court issues a ruling within the next few months, virtually none can be gained through additional delay. Indeed, worse than none — after January 1, 2014, provisions of PPACA will be implemented that will directly benefit large sections of the general public (the subsidization of insurance premiums for single adults and individuals with income up to 400% of the poverty line, the ban on insurance companies discriminating based on pre-existing medical conditions, the expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all individuals with income up to 133% of the poverty line, the establishment of health insurance exchanges), thereby significantly weakening the movement to eliminate the bill.
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In the end, though, none of this should matter to any conservative or libertarian deserving of those titles. If their oft-proclaimed disdain for judicial activism has roots in anything other than partisan rhetoric, they should want all hearings on the matter to be postponed until at least 2015.
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To understand why, one must look back to the days when Andrew Johnson inhabited the White House. According to the Anti-Injunction Act of 1867, courts are prohibited from striking down tax laws before they take effect, with their power strictly limited to handling cases brought to them by plaintiffs who sue the government after paying the tax in question. This directly pertains to the individual mandate, a penalty contained in the Tax Code against individuals who have the financial means to afford insurance but choose not to acquire it (this is to protect patients from having their premiums raised by people who wait until they become sick to obtain coverage). Because the legal opposition to PPACA has predominantly focused on the individual mandate, any postponement of a ruling on that individual measure would need to be accompanied by a delay in the entire case, one that would have to remain in effect until at least 2015 (the individual mandate would come into effect in 2014, making 2015 the earliest year in which a plaintiff could file suit).
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Inevitably, many of PPACA's opponents are seeking loopholes in this legal barrier. One common claim is that because the text of the health bill itself never refers to the individual mandate as a "tax" but instead uses the term "penalty," the Anti-Injunction Act doesn't apply to it. This, of course, ignores that the mandate is not only contained in the Tax Code but is collected by the Internal Revenue Service. The other major argument, as summed up by Paul Clement (an attorney representing the states challenging PPACA), is that "the challenge here is to the mandate, and not the penalty that enforces it." That logic is even more absurd, since the mandate isn't operative without the penalty; indeed, it can't effectively be a "mandate" without the enforcement mechanism of a penalty in place to implement it.
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The hard truth is that the individual mandate is a tax (semantics-based protests to the contrary notwithstanding), and as such falls under the aegis of the same law that has encompassed comparable bills for nearly a century-and-a-half. For the Supreme Court to make an exception in the case of PPACA would be a classic case of judicial activism as defined by Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law, i.e., "The practice in the judiciary of protecting or expanding individual rights through decisions that depart from established precedent or are independent of or in opposition to supposed constitutional or legislative intent."
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The good news in all of this is that the Supreme Court has already hired a special lawyer to argue in favor of applying the Anti-Injunction Act to PPACA, which he will begin to do on March 26th. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean that legal precedent will actually be upheld by the judges, at least not if we have a recurrence of the judicial hyperpartisanship that has reared its ugly head in other recent Supreme Court rulings (Bush v. Gore and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commissioncome to mind). What's more, even if the Supreme Court ultimately is convinced to enforce the Anti-Injunction Act (Chief Justice John Roberts is rumored to be especially likely to be swayed by it), one will still need to be concerned about the reaction within the conservative and libertarian communities. If the hysteria that tarnished the right-wing's response to the campaign to pass PPACA is any indication — from the accusation that it was a "Nazi" bill to the hyperbolic myths about things like "death panels" — there could be quite an ugly backlash.
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Then again, maybe they'll be too distracted by the presidential election to notice or really care that the PPACA hearing was delayed. Or maybe they'll be so focused on another anti-Obama bugaboo that they won't have the energy to expend on this issue.
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Or maybe, just maybe, they'll remember what they ostensibly believe as conservatives.

Thursday, March 8, 2012

The Founding Fathers and Progressivism



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If there is one point on which far too many conservatives and libertarians agree, it is that there is something deeply un-American about economic progressivism. It can be found in Ron Paul's references to his liberal opponents not understanding the Constitution or Michele Bachmann's insinuations about "anti-Americans" on the left, and it manifests itself more directly in the jeremiads of Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.
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It's easy to see why this line of thinking has so much appeal for economic right-wingers. As a talking point, its effectiveness is hard to surpass; by linking their own ideas to those of America's major leaders and juxtaposing them with the allegedly antithetical beliefs of their opponents, they make it possible to brand those who disagree with them as being at best uninformed and at worst agents of a radical or even downright sinister un-American agenda. Of course, such polemics are only justifiable if they sync up with the facts. A brief overivew of American history quickly reveals, however, the truth is much more complicated than any set of sweeping assumptions.
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We can start with the Constitution itself. Although often cited as the bulwark in the laissez-fairest's defense of limiting federal involvement in the economy, one of the primary impetuses behind the calling of the Constitutional Convention was the need for central economic authority. Under the initial governmental pact known as the Articles of Confederation, Congress lacked the power to lay or collect taxes, found that requisitions asked of the states were almost always ignored, and couldn't even impose uniform tariff policies throughout the nation. Most significantly, the federal government lacked the instruments with which to effectively confront economic crises that were national in scope, such as the post-war conflict between debtors and creditors which, as James Madison later wrote, "contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Constitution and prepared the mind for a general reform" than any other issue.
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The Constitution was thus viewed as an instrument which would solve these problems by granting more power to the central national state. Newly enumerated powers included the ability to pass commercial regulations, "coin money" and "regulate the value thereof," impose taxes, and even regulate how states could punish citizens who had gone bankrupt, then considered to be one of America's most pressing humanitarian issues. While Founding Fathers like Madison wanted even more powers expressly delegated to the federal government (such as being able to establish universities, promote the arts and sciences, secure payment of the public debt, etc.), they didn't push to have them to be listed because, as Madison explained nearly a half-century later, "the rejection or not adopting of particular propositions" was never intended to imply that those powers were thereby excluded from the federal aegis (given the nuances of parliamentary protocol, different enumerations were rejected for any number of reasons). "In expounding the Constitution and deducing the intention of its framers," he explained, "it should never be forgotten that the great object of the Convention was to provide, by a new Constitution, a remedy for the defects of the existing one."
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In short, the Founding Fathers did not want Americans to so fear losses to their liberty that they avoided implementing policies needed to meet national exigencies, economic or otherwise. From Madison reminding his readers to avoid "a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom, or for names" to Alexander Hamilton scoffing at the notion of people avoiding a given measure "from a remote possibility of its being abused," they believed that state authority should endeavor to avoid extremes - be it the tyranny of King George III or the chaos of the Articles of Confederation -- and instead opt for a middle-ground, with federal authority being usually limited so as to maximize personal freedom but still increased whenever pragmatism called for it. While these arguments did not prevent the Constitution from being fiercely maligned by its opponents (the Antifederalists), the arguments of its supporters (the Federalists) ultimately prevailed, with each of the 13 states eventually deciding to join the union structured around the increased federal powers called for in that document.
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Subsequent presidents then interpreted those powers as they deemed appropriate. George Washington chartered the First National Bank, created the federal post office, and enforced the government's right to levy unpopular taxes by quashing the Whiskey Rebellion. Thomas Jefferson, despite espousing a non-interventionist approach to economic questions, saw no inconsistency in championing generous federal subsidies for public school education, the promotion of the arts and sciences, and job-creating transportation infrastructure. Abraham Lincoln formed the Department of Agriculture, passed both the first income tax and the first progressive income tax, and used federal money to build the transcontinental railroad and create land-grant colleges (the forebears of today's public universities). Theodore Roosevelt passed laws regulating food and drugs for cleanliness and safety, broke up corporate trusts, and advocated social insurance, minimum-wage laws, pro-union legislation, and eight hour workdays.
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While most of these measures are taken for granted by Americans today, they constituted major expansions of state power into areas of the economy that had previously been entirely private at the time they were proposed. More important, they weren't backed by presidents who are currently viewed as controversial by the bulk of the right-wing (such as Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, or Barack Obama). Indeed, to see how firmly Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt are etched into the rock of America's national identity, one doesn't need to look any further than Mount Rushmore.
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It's important to note that I'm not trying to invert the fallacy made by economic consevatives to liberals' advantage - i.e., my goal is not to argue that America's most important leaders would have definitely favored the progressive economic policies detested by the right-wing today, be it health care reform and New Deal-esque stimulus packages or measures protecting labor organizing rights and welfare policies aiding the poor and disadvantaged. For one thing, the voluminous quantity of writing produced by the Founding Fathers makes it very easy for supporters of both laissez-faire and economic interventionism to find material supporting their respective philosophies (the views of Madison and Hamilton on the general welfare clause being one prime example). In addition, progressives should welcome the debate sparked when conservatives claim that too much government regulation inhibits economic growth, that having the government provide certain goods and services stifles creativity and hinders efficiency, that welfare programs to assist the poor and unemployed disincentivizes individual initiative, or that progressive stimulus programs are too expensive to be fiscally safe. While liberals may disagree with these arguments, there is nothing intellectually dishonest about their use by the right-wing in political debate, and if we are confident in the correctness of our position (which we should be), there is no reason to object when we are expected to rebut them.
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That said, if conservatives are confident in the merits of their positions, they should not feel the need to fight liberals with calumnies. While socialists want all economic power centered in the state and radical libertarians want virtually none to exist there, the vast majority of Americans are sensible enough to realize that there is a happy medium between those two dangerous extremes, and are conflicted primarily on ascertaining where that medium rests. When conservatives attempt to win them over not by appealing to fact, but by wrongly claiming – either directly or by implication – that their opponents are somehow "un-American," they engage in the strategy of winning hearts by cheating instead of earning minds through honest persuasion.
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it best: "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
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For more reading, feel free to check out the sources I used, including: "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution" by Bernard Bailyn, "The Great Challenge: The Myth of Laissez-Faire in the Early Republic" by Frank Bourgin, "Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse" by Richard John, "The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington" by E. A. J. Johnson, "The Presidency of Abraham Lincoln" by Philip Shaw Paludan, and "The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt" by Lewis L. Gould. I also encourage you to look at primary sources, including "Notes on the Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787" by James Madison, "The Federalist Papers" by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, and "The New Nationalism" by Theodore Roosevelt.

Sunday, March 4, 2012

Liberals and Mitt Romney's Mormonism


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The following editorial was first printed on PolicyMic.com on March 4, 2012. It can be found here: http://www.policymic.com/articles/4950/mitt-romney-s-mormonism-should-not-be-fodder-for-liberals-in-election-2012/featured_writer
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Thanks to his recent victories in the Michigan and Arizona primaries, Mitt Romney once again has emerged as the strongest contender for the Republican presidential nomination. As such, I think it is appropriate to draw attention to the unique dilemma he will pose to liberals in the event that he is the ultimate victor in Tampa.
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Up until now, the non-Protestants who have overcome barriers of religious exclusivity through their presidential nominations have all been liberal Democrats, including Al Smith in 1928 (the first Catholic presidential nominee), John F. Kennedy in 1960 (the first Catholic to actually win the presidency), and Michael Dukakis in 1988 (the first Eastern Orthodox presidential nominee). As such, the challenge for liberals in 2012 will be making sure that we stand firm in our opposition to religious prejudice when the target is Romney, a conservative Republican, instead of one of our own.
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The signs so far are not auspicious. Of the 22% of Americans who say they would not vote for a Mormon presidential candidate, self-described liberals outnumber conservatives within that group by three to two (27% to 18%). Their animus seems to stem from the Mormon Church's right-wing political activism on issues like gay marriage and women's rights, a sentiment best summed up in a recent New York Times editorial by author Jane Barnes, who cited it when claiming that the Mormon Church "does not respect the separation of church and state" and that "individual Mormons have obeyed like sheep."
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While I agree with Barnes that religious institutions like the Mormon Church should not have as much political pull as they currently possess, and further share her disgust with the homophobia and misogyny underlying the support for Proposition 8 and opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, it is disingenuous to single out Romney's coreligionists for their actions here while not pointing out the comparable activism of dozens of other religious groups (most notably those on the Christian Right). In the end, a politician's faith should only be a disqualifier for higher office if he or she has shown a tendency to be unusually subservient to his or her religious institutions when performing the inherently secular duties of public office. Although no evidence exists that this would be the case for Mitt Romney as an individual (at least no more than it would for candidates like Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum), detractors like Barnes assume that because he is a Mormon, he will be abnormally deferential to his faith. The strong argument can be made about religious beliefs playing too large a role in general in our political life must not be abused to discriminate against one religious group.
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This doesn't mean that liberals won't also need to fight anti-Mormon assaults from conservatives. Right-wing prejudice against Romney first became evident during his presidential run in 2008, when Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals admitted that "most evangelicals still regard Mormonism as a cult," a view echoed by Texas Governor Rick Perry's pastor late last year. Such views still clearly hold weight now, as indicated by Romney's consistently poor showing in the primaries among voters who describe the religious beliefs of the candidates as being "very important" to them. A Public Religion Institute Poll even found that 49% of evangelical voters refuse to acknowledge that Mormonism is a Christian denomination. While Romney's numbers no doubt be even lower among this group were he not widely viewed as the pragmatic alternative to Newt Gingrich and Santorum, the fact that he is still struggling among individuals who place a high premium on religion is indicative of the larger problem.
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There are plenty of excellent reasons to oppose Mitt Romney - his plutocratic economic agenda comes foremost to mind, followed closely by his long history of ideological vacillation - and liberals will be remiss in our duty to the American people if we don't guarantee his defeat as a result of them. At the same time, we will be equally remiss in our obligation to our own values if we allow our cause to be marred by the stain of religious bigotry, either by allowing it within our own ranks or refusing to condemn it in our adversaries.
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History will be watching us.