Various bits: About radical right tactics; Etc.

An opinion piece by Naomi Oreskes in Scientific American comments on social security (SS). For context, Oreskes is hated by the radical right and big corporations. She is a science history professor at Harvard and an outspoken myth buster and lies attacker. Among other targets, she publicly attacks radical right climate science myths and the public relations (propaganda) lies and deceit campaigns that pro-pollution giants like Exxon-Mobil spew onto the public. Oreskes writes about why the radical right hates the SS program:

False ‘Facts’ about Science and Social Security Share Origins

Fake claims that Social Security is broken and that climate action isn’t urgent all come from flawed free-market ideology

Whether they work on climate change, evolution, vaccine safety, or any of a host of other issues, scientists frequently face resistance from people offering “alternative facts.” How did we come to live in a world where so many people feel vaguely supported opinions are just as valid as evidence-based scientific research—where people can't tell the difference between opinion and fact?

Part of the answer involves the long-standing efforts of the tobacco industry to deny evidence about tobacco's harms and of the fossil-fuel industry to confound understanding about climate change. These campaigns have undermined confidence in the idea that large amounts of scientific evidence produce a more accurate view of the world than do a few dissenting thoughts.

But there's another source for these doubts: the attack of conservative politicians on the U.S. Social Security program, which gives financial security to senior citizens. Republicans in Congress have recently threatened drastic cuts to Social Security and even privatization. Their ostensible reason is the need to balance the federal budget. “The numbers can't work” without big cuts to Social Security, former Republican finance committee aide Chris Campbell has declared. In fact, Social Security isn't a drain on the federal budget; it pays for itself through a dedicated payroll tax.

Why do conservatives keep attacking a successful program that pays for itself? Because of its success. Social Security is “big government” that works. Its accomplishments refute the conservative refrain that federal programs are costly failures and that the government should just leave things to the free market.

Some people like Oreskes claim that SS pays for itself (citing the US government itself), while others say it does not. Regardless, one can think that if congress had not sabotaged SS by plundering it, the program would be closer to paying for itself than it is now. But that's not why I posted this.

I posted this to point out that I am not alone in stridently arguing that the radical right Republican Party virulently hates successful government, especially domestic spending safety net programs. That hate leads the GOP in congress and the White House to sabotage success so they can howl that government never works. Then they argue that the programs they broke need to be eliminated and replaced by the always better free markets and private sector actors. 

As usual, keep your eyes on the intended flow of power by attacking domestic spending. Power flows away from government and the protections that affords to citizens. That power flows to corporations, and private sector interests who are then free to exercise that new power over citizens.

That is why I call the radical right Republican Party, radical right Christian nationalism and radical brass knuckles capitalism authoritarian or fascist. More power and wealth for elites and special interests and less democracy and civil liberties for average citizens is what all three stand for.  

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Meanwhile, at the Westminster dog show:

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Christofascism in Texas update: A WaPo opinion opines:

.... Republicans in the Texas legislature [are] advancing a bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in the state.

Texas is growing more purple with each passing year, which is exactly why the Republican-dominated legislature is reasserting the right’s political and cultural power with ever more radically conservative laws. Part of that effort is a series of bills meant to impose not just religion but Christianity into public schools.

One bill would allow schools to mandate “a period of prayer and Bible reading on each school day.” Another says school personnel must be allowed to “engage in religious speech or prayer while on duty.” Yet another would allow schools to replace school counselors with “chaplains” — no training or certification required. The centerpiece is the bill requiring the posting of the Ten Commandments, which has already passed the state Senate.

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A slew of increasingly agitated articles about the impending debt default are appearing. It looks like a lot of folks are getting scared. An article The Hill published today captures some of the growing anxiety: 

Financial markets brace for default as Biden, Republicans dig in on debt limit

The partisan standoff over the debt limit, which hardened over the weekend when 43 Senate Republicans said they would not support a clean debt-limit increase, sets the stage for severe turbulence in the financial markets, experts warn.

The yield on Treasury bonds maturing next month spiked last week, signaling that investors are already preparing for the possibility that President Biden and Republican leaders in Congress won’t reach a deal before the Treasury Department runs out of money next month.

Hm. Severe turbulence. That doesn't sound good. ☔ 

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Al Jazeera opines on the state of American democracy:

Republicans are pushing American democracy to its breaking point

They are working within the boundaries of the democratic system in order to tear it down

In this state [Tennessee] and elsewhere around the country, Republicans have been pressure-testing the strength and limits of democracy, seeing where they can violate and erode the rules and norms of democracy in order to gain and hold office and push through conservative laws and policies.

The ACLU says since 2021, 10 states have enacted anti-critical race theory laws that attack “our First Amendment rights to read, learn, and discuss vital topics in schools”, with over two dozen additional anti-CRT laws proposed in 2022 alone.  

In addition to suppressing vital civil rights, Republican governors and state legislators are also actively engaged in efforts to undermine the power of voters, efforts that Brennan Center fellow Zachary Roth calls “legislative anti-democracy”. These moves have included heightened efforts at gerrymandering; reconfiguring the way Electoral College votes are allocated to favor Republican candidates; making direct democracy, such as ballot initiatives, more difficult to achieve; and using state laws to negate or undermine more liberal local municipalities.

Even Al Jazeera doesn't get it, even when it writes about it. What radical right Republican elites are doing isn't conservative or conservatism. It is radical right authoritarianism. Plutocratic-autocratic fascism and Christofascism in my opinion.

By continuing to call radical right authoritarianism conservative, the stunningly clueless media normalizes what cannot be normalized in a democracy. It can be normalized in a tyranny or theocracy, but not a democracy. The Republican Party is normalizing tyranny and the stupid media abets it.

About the federal debt time bomb: Reframing the issue

The NYT published an opinion by well-known constitutional scholar, Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Tribe. The opinion opines:

Why I Changed My Mind on the Debt Limit

Over the years, Congress has raised the debt ceiling scores of times, most recently two years ago, when it set the cap at $31.4 trillion. We hit that amount on Jan. 19 and are being told that the “extraordinary measures” Treasury has available to get around it are about to run out. When that happens, all hell will break loose.

The question isn’t whether the president can tear up the debt limit statute to ensure that the Treasury Department can continue paying bills submitted by veterans’ hospitals or military contractors or even pension funds that purchased government bonds.

The question isn’t whether the president can in effect become a one-person Supreme Court, striking down laws passed by Congress.

The right question is whether Congress — after passing the spending bills that created these debts in the first place — can invoke an arbitrary dollar limit to force the president and his administration to do its bidding.

There is only one right answer to that question, and it is no.

And there is only one person with the power to give Congress that answer: the president of the United States. As a practical matter, what that means is this: Mr. Biden must tell Congress in no uncertain terms — and as soon as possible, before it’s too late to avert a financial crisis — that the United States will pay all its bills as they come due, even if the Treasury Department must borrow more than Congress has said it can. 

The president should remind Congress and the nation, “I’m bound by my oath to preserve and protect the Constitution to prevent the country from defaulting on its debts for the first time in our entire history.” Above all, the president should say with clarity, “My duty faithfully to execute the laws extends to all the spending laws Congress has enacted, laws that bind whoever sits in this office — laws that Congress enacted without worrying about the statute capping the amount we can borrow.”

That analysis feels right to me. Why? Because the 14th A., Sec. 4 reads in relevant part as follows: The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. Clearly, Congress does not have the power to force the US into default.

Unless the Republicans have subverted the Constitution, and maybe they have, the Constitution stands above the laws that Congress passes. In other words, Congress can pass laws that are unconstitutional and the Supreme Court is supposed to fix that. But here, Congress passed spending laws that are not being challenged as unconstitutional by Republicans. Instead the radical right authoritarians say they are willing to ignore spending laws and allow a default in clear violation of the 14th A., Sec. 4. 

Q: Does Tribe get the analysis right here, or is there some sneaky trick or flaw in the logic and/or language of the Constitution?  

Moral rot watch: Christian nationalist elites

A NYT opinion by David French opines: 

Tucker Carlson’s Dark and Malign 

Influence Over the Christian Right

On April 25, the far-right network Newsmax hosted a fascinating and revealing conversation about Tucker Carlson with Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, one of America’s leading Christian conservative advocacy organizations. Perkins scorned Fox News’s decision to fire Carlson, and — incredibly — also attacked Fox’s decision to fire Bill O’Reilly. These terminations (along with the departures of Glenn Beck and Megyn Kelly) were deemed evidence that Fox was turning its back on its conservative viewers, including its Christian conservative viewers.

What was missing from the conversation? Any mention of the profound moral failings that cost O’Reilly his job, including at least six settlements — five for sexual harassment and one for verbal abuse — totaling approximately $45 million. Or any mention of Carlson’s own serious problems, including his serial dishonesty, his vile racism and his gross personal insult directed against a senior Fox executive. It’s a curious position for a Christian to take.

Similarly curious is the belief of other Christians, such as the popular evangelical “prophet” Lance Wallnau, that Carlson was a “casualty of war” with the left, and that his firing was a serious setback for Christian Republicans. To Wallnau, an author and a self-described “futurist,” Carlson was a “secular prophet,” somebody “used by God, more powerful than a lot of preachers.”

Other prominent Christian members of the American right applauded Carlson’s “courage” or declared — after The Times reported that Carlson condemned a group of Trump supporters for not fighting like “white men” after “jumping” an Antifa member — that Carlson did “nothing wrong.” Rod Dreher, editor-at-large at The American Conservative, said, “I hope Tucker Carlson runs for president,” and a “Tucker-DeSantis ticket would be the Generation X Saves The World team.”

I’m going to pause now and confess that I was once naïve. I was especially naïve about human nature. As a much younger Christian, I’d read stories of unholy violence and hatred unleashed in Jesus’ name in religious conflicts of even the recent past and think, “Thank God that’s over.” I felt comfortable in my Christian conservatism. My conservatism reflected my best effort to discern the policies that would contribute to justice and human flourishing, while my Christianity hovered over everything, hopefully (though not always, I must confess) infusing my public engagement with humility and kindness.

After all, isn’t “love your enemies” a core Christian command? The fruit of the spirit (the markers of God’s presence in our lives) are “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control,” not Republicanism, conservatism and capitalism.

But the temptations — including the will to power and the quest for vengeance — that plagued the Christians of the past still plague the Christians of today. These temptations can plague people of any faith.

Within conservative circles it has always been surprisingly difficult to tie a decline in Christian political virtue to the rise of Donald Trump. What seems obvious from a distance (wait a minute, didn’t Christians used to place a premium on the importance of character in politicians, especially during Bill Clinton’s scandals?) was less obvious up close. In countless personal conversations with Christians who are staunch Republicans, I heard some variation on the same plaintive question, “What do you want us to do? Hand an election to Hillary Clinton? Or to Joe Biden?”

This is just another garden variety warning by Germaine that something is seriously, gravely wrong with (i) American democracy and politics generally, and (ii) the American secular and Christian radical right. 

For Christians who ignore the undeniable moral rot of the leaders they support and want to follow, there is almost zero chance of them ever voting for any Democrat for president. That is how poisoned those minds are. For Christians with that mindset, it just does not matter who the Dems run for president. They will be hated, vilified, slandered and despised in self-righteous, God-sanctioned outrage.

What is Biden's new policy on asylum?

 Anticipating a potential surge of migrants at the southern border, the Biden administration on Feb. 21, 2023, announced a crackdown on those seeking asylum after unlawfully entering the U.S.

This week the policy is set to go into effect. The following article appeared both in The Conversation and Government Executive in late February and early March respectively. It was written by Karen Musalo an expert on refugee law at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, to explain what the new rule entails, what its impact will be and why it is so controversial. At the bottom of the page I have provided links to more supportive articles on the policy, both from the Council of Foreign Relations.

What is the new policy?

The Biden administration’s new rule – which is set to come into force on May 11 – will bar from asylum all non-Mexican migrants who arrive at the southern U.S. border without having first sought and been denied asylum in at least one of the countries they passed through on their journey.

The only migrants exempted from this rule are those who use a U.S. government app, CBP One, to make an appointment to apply for asylum at an official port of entry. All others will be subject to a presumption of ineligibility unless they can demonstrate “exceptionally compelling circumstances,” such as a medical emergency – which they will have to prove during a rapid screening process in a border holding cell.

The policy – which immigrant rights advocates, congressional leaders and faith groups are calling an “asylum ban” or “transit ban” – is almost identical to one implemented by the Trump administration in 2019. The Trump-era rule was later struck down by the courts as unlawful.

Why is the new rule being proposed now?

The Biden administration is concerned that the expiration of a pandemic-era rule will lead to greater numbers of immigrants at the southern border.

In March 2020, the Trump administration totally closed the border to asylum seekers in a policy referred to as Title 42. It justified the closure as necessary to protect public health during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, these health concerns were just a pretext; it has been well documented that high-level officials in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were opposed to the policy and acceded only under intense White House pressure.

Turning away all asylum seekers in this way was totally unprecedented, and inconsistent with U.S. domestic and international legal obligations.

Biden campaigned on promises to restore a humane asylum system. But on assuming the presidency he continued Title 42 and even expanded it to include individuals from additional countries.

Immigration rights advocates brought successful legal challenges to terminate the policy, while attorneys general of Republican-led states sued to keep it in place. Finally, in January 2023, the Biden administration announced that on May 11 it would end the coronavirus health emergency, which had provided the legal authority for the border closure.

This means Title 42 also comes to an end on May 11. Unwilling to restore access to asylum as had existed for 40 years before former President Donald Trump’s border closure, the Biden administration proposed the new rule.

Is the policy legal?

In 2019, the Trump administration proposed a rule very similar to that put forth by Biden, prohibiting asylum for migrants who did not first apply in countries of transit. The courts struck down the policy for violating the 1980 Refugee Act, which guarantees the right of all migrants who reach the United States to apply for asylum.

A bipartisan Congress passed the Refugee Act to bring the U.S. into compliance with its international obligations under the U.N.‘s 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol, which prohibit returning refugees to any country where their lives or freedom would be threatened.

In striking down the Trump-era rule, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals pointed out that the Refugee Act is very specific about the circumstances under which the government can deny asylum for failure to apply in a transit country. Under the act’s “safe third country” provision, that can happen only if the transit country is safe and has both a robust asylum system and a formal treaty with the United States agreeing to safe third-country status. The court found the Trump administration lacked all three conditions for imposing such a ban.

The Biden rule is somewhat different from Trump’s. It does not apply to individuals who schedule an asylum appointment at ports of entry through the CBP One app.

But this does not make the policy lawful. The Refugee Act expressly permits asylum seekers to access protection anywhere along the border – not just at ports of entry. And it does not require appointments to be made in advance.

In addition, CBP One has been plagued with significant technical problems, preventing many from even making appointments, and has raised serious equity and privacy concerns.

And more importantly, there is no getting around the fact that most countries of transit neither are safe for migrants nor have functioning asylum systems.

Asylum seekers arriving at the U.S. southern border pass through Mexico, which is notoriously dangerous for migrants, and countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, which are similarly unsafe and do not have anything approaching functioning asylum systems.

Costa Rica, the one transit country in the region with an admirable human rights record and an established asylum system, is currently receiving 10 times the number of asylum seekers as the United States on a per capita basis, and its system is completely overwhelmed. To expect Costa Rica to do more, and take in the refugees the U.S. turns away, is not reasonable or fair.

What will be the policy’s impact?

This rule will deny thousands of migrants fleeing persecution their right to seek asylum at the United States’ southern border. They will be returned to Mexico, where human rights organizations have documented high levels of violence and exploitation of migrants, or deported to their home countries.

Beyond the individual human impact, the implementation of this rule will send the wrong signal to other countries that have – like the United States – ratified international refugee treaties and passed laws committing to protect those fleeing persecution.

The message is that flouting legal obligations is acceptable, as is the outsourcing of refugee protection to smaller countries with far less resources. The exodus of refugees from Ukraine and U.S. efforts to encourage European countries to accept those fleeing the conflict underscore the importance of encouraging nations to take in refugees. Leading by bad example will only undermine that principle.

Karen Musalo, Professor of International Law, University of California College of the Law, San Francisco

 [I am leaving 2 links to more supportive takes on this policy from the Council of Foreign Affairs: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/can-bidens-new-asylum-policy-help-solve-migrant-crisis  and https://www.cfr.org/article/bidens-new-southern-border-plan-might-just-work ]

What are your thoughts?