Is the Democratic Party finally waking up?

The Washington Post writes:

President Biden took the stage at an Independence Day barbecue just a few hours after the latest horrific shooting to upend an American city — but at his first opportunity to address the nation in person about the Highland Park killings, he did so only obliquely.

“You all heard what happened today,” Biden said. “Things will get better still, but not without more hard work together. .... We’ve got a lot more work to do. We’ve got to get this under control.”

In contrast, J.B. Pritzker, Illinois’ Democratic governor, delivered a fiery response that took direct aim at those blocking gun control legislation. “If you are angry today, I’m here to tell you to be angry,” he said, seething while Biden was consoling. “I’m furious. I’m furious that yet more innocent lives were taken by gun violence.”

In the view of many distraught Democrats, the country is facing a full-blown crisis on a range of fronts, and Biden seems unable or unwilling to respond with appropriate force. Democracy is under direct attack, they say, as Republicans change election rules and the Supreme Court rapidly rewrites American law. Shootings are routine, abortion rights have ended and Democrats could suffer big losses in the next election.

Biden’s response is often a mix of scolding Republicans, urging Americans to vote Democratic and voicing broad optimism about the country. For some Democrats, that risks a dangerous failure to meet the moment.

“There is a leadership vacuum right now, and he’s not filling it,” said Adam Jentleson, a Democratic consultant and former top adviser to then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid of Nevada. “I sympathize with the argument that there’s very little they can do legislatively. But in moments of crisis, the president is called upon to be a leader. And when people are feeling scared and angry and outraged, they look to him for that, and they’re not getting much.”  

But as the Democratic rank-and-file’s thirst for a more combative attitude becomes increasingly evident, other party leaders are beginning to showcase an alternative tone, one that goes far more sharply at Republican attitudes and tactics. Pritzker mocked the notion that “you have a constitutional right to an assault weapon with a high-capacity magazine” — something Biden has done previously — and California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been displaying a notably pugnacious spirit.  

On July Fourth, Newsom took the unusual step of airing an ad in Florida, .... 
“Freedom? It’s under attack in your state,” Newsom said in the ad, addressing Florida residents and citing book bans, voting restrictions and laws on classroom instruction. “I urge all of you living in Florida to join the fight. Or join us in California — where we still believe in freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom to choose, freedom from hate and the freedom to love. Don’t let them take your freedom.”  

Biden has, if anything, been criticized at times for going too far in his tone, his aides note, as when he compared modern-day Republicans to 1960s-era segregationists, incurring the wrath of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and others, including some in his own party.

In case anyone missed the point, Ian Calderon, the Democratic former majority leader of the California State Assembly, tweeted, “Governor @GavinNewsom is the only Dem that seems to understand that democrats everywhere want their leaders to push back with a strong message and to stop letting the GOP control the narrative. Republicans are loud and it’s time for Democrats to get louder.”  

Biden has dismissed other ideas by saying they would be struck down in court or would never pass Congress. His critics say he should be pushing on all fronts, not second-guessing actions before attempting them.

“What the president and the Democratic Party needs to come to terms with is that this is not just a crisis of Roe, this is a crisis of our democracy,” Ocasio-Cortez said recently NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “This is a crisis of legitimacy, and President Biden must address that.”

Clearly, some Democratic Party elites are aware of the danger the GOP poses to democracy, truth and civil liberties. Biden and his team defend what Biden does, but from what I can tell, his messaging is weak. Republicans, not the Democrats, control the narratives, which are mostly lies and outrageous slanders. 

Biden's supporters citing Republican pushback for calling Republicans 1960s era segregationists is lame. The allegation is more true than false. McConnell expressing outrage does not change inconvenient truth into a lie. Most modern Republican elites are a lot like 1960s era segregationists, whether they know it or believe it or not. Maybe most of the rank and file is too. Republicans now openly support elimination of existing civil liberties, including freedom from racial segregation. Defense of civil liberties was the point of the Newsome ad in Florida.

Going forward, it appears that Biden will stay in character. He apparently believes that what he is doing now is the best way to deal with rising fascism in the Republican Party, assuming he sees any fascist threat, which he may not. It is not clear that he has major concerns about rising laissez-faire capitalism, which is also a deadly serious threat to democracy, truth and civil liberties. Biden is a neoliberal and pro-corporation. He appears to have a blind spot when it comes to the power and intent of major corporations to take our democracy down, whether they know it or believe it or not.[1]

Footnote: 

1. This point needs to be made over and over and over: When corporations are deregulated, power always or almost always flows from government and its ability to defend the public interest, civil liberties and the environment. Power flows back to the corporations, which operate mostly without much or any social conscience. For the most part, profit is the only moral value of major concern. All of that is sacred laissez-faire capitalist dogma. 

“Social responsibility is a fundamentally subversive doctrine" in a free society, and have said that in such a society, "there is one and only one social responsibility of business–to use it resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”  -- Economist Milton Friedman, The Ethics of Competition and Other Essays, 1969

“Like the raging, blind ideologue he was, Milty-poo conveniently ignored the gigantically inconvenient fact that major corporations and sectors of commerce buy politicians with campaign contributions, a/k/a, free speech. Corporations literally write the rules of the game for the purchased politicians to insert into federal laws. The corporation’s rules of the game legalized corruption, deception and fraud. The rules of the game are rigged to serve special corporate interests at the expense of the public interest, including the environment. Wealth influences policy, not public opinion or the will of the people.”  -- Germaine Descant, Dissident Politics, July 6, 2022 

Adventures in dark free speech: AM radio poison

The New York Times writes:

On Conservative Radio, Misleading Message Is Clear: ‘Democrats Cheat’

Election fraud claims from 2020 are widespread on talk radio, contributing to the belief that the midterm results cannot be trusted.

November’s midterm elections are still months away, but to many conservative commentators, the fix is already in. Democrats have cheated before, they say, and they will cheat again.

Never mind that the claims are false. [False is an unreasonably deferential way to say a lie.]

In Lafayette, La., Carol Ross, host of “The Ross Report,” questioned how Democrats could win a presidential election again after a tumultuous few years in power. “They’re going to have to cheat again,” she said. “You know that. There will be rampant cheating.”

In Greenville, S.C., Charlie James, a host on 106.3 WORD, read from a blog post arguing that “the Democrats are going to lose a majority during the midterm elections unless they’re able to cheat in a massive wide-scale way.”

And on WJFN in Virginia, Stephen K. Bannon, the erstwhile adviser to former President Donald J. Trump who was indicted for refusing to comply with subpoenas issued by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, summed it up this way: “If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.”

Mentions of “Democrats cheating” and similar ideas were raised more than 5,000 times on syndicated radio shows and local broadcasts this year, according to an analysis of data from Critical Mention, a media monitoring service. Similar ideas were mentioned a few hundred times on television shows and podcasts tracked by Critical Mention during the same period.

Radio remains perhaps the most influential conduit for right-wing thought, despite the rise of podcasts and social media. Tens of millions of people nationwide, especially older Americans and blue-collar workers, listen to it regularly. Misinformation experts warn that talk radio channels, many of which air political commentary 24 hours a day, receive far too little scrutiny compared with other mass media. Talk radio is also uniquely difficult to analyze and harder to moderate, because the on-air musings from hosts usually disappear over the airwaves in an instant.

Well, there we have it, the gigantic fascist Republican lie: If Democrats don’t cheat, they don’t win.

Guess Bannon is saying that we have to vote for the Green Party. No, wait. The Republican Party. 

Yeah, there we go, we have to vote for the Republicans because they do not cheat. Right?[1]

Qs: Is there a left wing dark free speech propaganda & lies equivalent to the radical right's propaganda & lies Leviathan? If so, what is it, MSNBC, Free Speech TV and/or CNN and/or other stuff? What other stuff?

Footnote: 

1. Remember the ex-president's phone call to the Georgia Secretary of State to tell him to “find” (fabricate) 11,780 votes so he could win? Aw crud, Republicans do cheat. 

Nuclear legal war: Lochner-era laissez-faire capitalism is on the horizon

The fascist Republican Party war on American democracy and civil liberties is going full-blown nuclear. The 1800s are probably coming to us again. The New York Times writes:

Did the Supreme Court Open the Door to Reviving One of Its Worst Decisions?

Lochner v. New York, a 1905 decision on labor law, is imprinted on today’s law students as an example of bad jurisprudence. But those old days could be returning.

In striking down a law that prevented bakery employees from working more than 10 hours a day and 60 hours a week, the court, under the 14th Amendment, enshrined a constitutional right to “freedom of contract” — that is, the freedom of people to form contracts without the government’s involvement. The decision set the stage for what became known as the “Lochner era” of laissez-faire capitalism.

That era lasted until the Great Depression and the New Deal in the 1930s. In its heyday, the frequently-cited Lochner was arguably the most important business case the court had ever decided, severely curtailing the government’s ability to regulate business and the economy.

Today, Lochner is imprinted on the mind of nearly every law student as an example of a bad decision. While Lochner was never expressly overruled, it, along with the segregation-era decisions of Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson, was practically cast aside by subsequent rulings.

Now, in the wake of the court’s momentous rulings overturning Roe v. Wade in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and restricting the reach of administrative agencies in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency, the foundation has been laid for, if not an outright resurrection of Lochner, at least a serious reappraisal.

Such a notion may seem far-fetched. After all, Lochner is cited eight times in the various Dobbs opinions — each time as an example of the kind of decision that should be reversed or ignored because it substituted the court’s judgment for that of a duly elected legislature.

But, with settled law suddenly seeming anything but, it’s important to consider what might be coming.

Laurence Tribe, a Harvard Law School professor and a liberal constitutional scholar, said that, based on the logic of Dobbs, “there’s no principled way to hold back the tide that would return us to the law of the late 1800s on matters of privacy, reproduction, sexual intimacy and L.G.B.T.Q. equality.” Although Lochner itself is probably “too radioactive” for this court to embrace outright, the court’s overall hostility to government regulation of business and its celebration of individual freedom are clearly in the ascendant. Professor Tribe warned that the effect could be to “return our jurisprudence to a preindustrial, agrarian world. It’s all but unthinkable.” The consequences, he added, could be “horrendous.”

With six conservative justices, the court seems receptive to a renewed deference to the moribund notion of freedom of contract, a goal that some libertarian and conservative lawyers and scholars have long cherished.

The dominance on the court of “originalism,” the doctrine that interprets the constitution and its amendments as they would have been understood at the time they were written, also bodes well for the principles of Lochner. As David Bernstein, a law professor at George Mason University, contends in his 2012 book, “Rehabilitating Lochner,” proponents of a freedom of contract were “originalists, trying to adhere to what they saw as the constitutional underpinnings of the 14th Amendment’s framers.”

The case for Lochner is plainly embedded in the Dobbs decision. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said that rights not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution had to be “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” and “implicit in the concept of ordered liberty.” Unlike a right to abortion, freedom of contract is widely believed to meet that definition. [what is deeply rooted is in the beholder's eye; the “deeply rooted” concept is not mentioned in the Constitution]

Since the Declaration of Independence was adopted 246 years ago, the freedom to work and to make contracts has been seen as part of the “inalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” The founders drew on the work of the English philosopher John Locke, who identified “life, liberty and property” as inalienable rights and considered ownership of the self a form of property. The 14th Amendment echoes Locke’s language: “nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

In fact, the notion that citizens had a basic right to enter into contracts, especially regarding their trade or employment, was so pervasive by the time the 14th Amendment was ratified in 1868 that Lochner barely discussed it. The opinion simply asserted that those bakery workers in New York had a right to make a contract as “part of the liberty of the individual protected by the 14th Amendment.”

The right to enter into contracts, even in Lochner, was not all-encompassing. The legitimate exercise of the state’s police powers trumped a right of contract. People couldn’t enter into illegal arrangements, and the state was free to protect the health and safety of workers. Lochner explicitly upheld regulations protecting miners, whose work was inherently unsafe. But the court found nothing inherently dangerous about baking.

Still, many subsequent government regulations that are now taken for granted infringed on this freedom of contract. In 1923, for instance, the court struck down a minimum wage. (Libertarians have long argued that a minimum wage is both bad economic policy and an infringement on individual liberty, especially harmful to those on the lowest rung of the economic ladder.) In the post-Lochner era, that decision was reversed.

Lochner was understandably anathema to organized labor. While its logic would have protected the rights of workers to enter into collective bargaining agreements among themselves, it would never have countenanced efforts by government to favor unions or to require workers to pay union dues whether or not they joined a union.

Still, to argue that Lochner provided the judicial underpinnings for an era of social Darwinism, as many of its critics have contended, is grossly unfair, according to Mr. Bernstein, the George Mason professor. “Lochner isn’t nearly as bad as people say,” said Mr. Bernstein, a self-described libertarian. [George Mason University is a key source of authoritarian and radical right laissez-faire capitalist legal thinking and dogma]

He pointed out that, in protecting individual liberty, Lochner wasn’t inherently conservative or pro-business. [That is not true - it was radical right and staunchly pro-business] For example, its logic would have protected Black workers from laws that tried to exclude them from labor markets or that tried to subject them to inferior conditions. It also might have been invoked to support gay marriage, in that marriage is a contract that confers significant benefits on those who enter into it.

Randy Barnett, a law professor at Georgetown University, has argued that while Lochner did have problems its fault was “not the protection it afforded liberty of contract.”

That said, there’s widespread skepticism that even this Supreme Court’s conservative justices, with the possible exception of Clarence Thomas, will go so far as to revive Lochner, even if they find a way to embrace much of its logic. [radical right judges can say they reject Lochner, but embrace and empower its reasoning and pro-business impacts]

“I don’t see five votes to revive Lochner — and maybe not even two,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School and the author of the influential “America’s Unwritten Constitution.” He added, “For the court to say you can’t have minimum wage laws and maximum hours, I’m not seeing it.”

Still, he entertained the question. That’s because, he conceded, “we’re living through a judicial earthquake,” when anything might be possible — even a return to opinions long since cast aside.

“This is an originalist earthquake, not a libertarian earthquake,” Professor Amar said. “This court is clearly hostile to anything not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution.”

For context, the Constitution does not explicitly mention very much at all. It talks about requiring a few things like a military, courts, patent office, post office and what is in the Amendments like the Bill of Rights and the Civil War Amendments. There's not much else in it. By an originalist standard, America would not be a representative democracy. It would be some form of autocracy.

What the radical right means by individual freedom;

 It's probably not what you think

There is no question about what the radical right Republican Supreme Court wants to do to us. They want to screw us while calling it defending freedom. In laissez-faire capitalist (LFC) dogma, freedom to individuals means no government interference in what businesses can do to labor. 

The LFC lie is sold to us as no limits on personal freedom. That intentionally lies by omission about a gigantic inconvenient fact. Most individuals usually have little or no power when up against a company. The company dictates terms of work and pay. The worker takes it or leaves it. That is the LFC's vision of freedom for individuals. Laws to protect child labor did not arise until 1938 with the Fair Labor Standards Act. That was when the New Deal started fighting against the toxic iron grip that LFC held on government and individuals. 

The liberal origins of originalism:

It transformed into fascist doctrine

Note professor Amar’s comment that what we are seeing is originalism coming from the radical right Supreme Court. According to a recent NPR interview with Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, originalism started with the pro-New Deal Supreme Court justice Hugo Black. Black saw the toxic power that the Lochner decision had exerted on individuals and government. He invented originalism as a liberal means to limit LFC power. He argued that the Constitution did not mention a corporate power to contract, and thus was not intended by the people who wrote the Constitution and its Amendments. 

Years later in the 1970s, Antonin Scalia realized that originalism could be used to advance a radical right Christian nationalist and LFC agenda. By ignoring social changes, originalism could take away the discretion that judges had to decide cases in light of changing social and technological circumstances. Out of those changes came liberties that the radical right wanted to obliterate. The radical right needed to freeze time and social change. The radicals wanted time frozen at least to the 1868 Civil War Amendments. They understood that originalism was the dogma they could twist into an authority to freeze time at least to the 1800s. 

Scalia then helped to popularize originalist dogma among far right legal thinkers. Over time, the radical right came to see the awesome power that originalism had to crush modern civil liberties, including voting rights, marriage rights, reproductive rights, privacy protections, anti-discrimination laws, and worker and consumer protection laws.

The Republican party’s fascist politics 

and propaganda smokescreen

There is nothing in the Constitution to prevent the current radical Republican Supreme Court from fully re-empowering Lochner. At the same time, they will forcefully deny they are doing that. That probably is their intent and what they are going to at least try to do. They are smart enough politicians to know how to re-engineer America and its society to satisfy LFC and Christian nationalist agendas. Those agendas mostly amount to getting and using vast wealth and power to serve themselves. While the court does its 1800s social re-engineering project, the Republicans will falsely claim they stand for personal liberty and what the Constitution really means.  

 

The American people are already subjected to a gigantic smokescreen about where the Republican Party intends to take this country and what it intends to do to what is left of our democracy. It isn’t what the GOP says it is. It is the opposite. Power and wealth will flow from government and the people to elite capitalists and Christian fundamentalists. 

Anti-abortion zealots call for murder charges against women who get an abortion

The New York Times writes:

Abortion “abolitionists” are the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement. They’re looking to gain followers after the decision to overturn Roe, unsettling mainstream anti-abortion groups.

Hours after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last week, a man with a wiry, squared-off beard and a metal cross around his neck celebrated with his team at a Brazilian steakhouse. He pulled out his phone to livestream to his followers.

“We have delivered a huge blow to the enemy and to this industry,” the man, Jeff Durbin, said. But, he explained, “our work has just really begun.”

“Even the states that have trigger laws,” which ban abortion at conception without exceptions for rape or incest, did not go far enough, Mr. Durbin, a pastor in the greater Phoenix area, said. “They do not believe that the woman should ever be punished.”

Resistance to “the question of whether or not people who murder their children in the wombs are guilty,” he said, “is going to have to be something we have to overcome, because women are still going to be killing their children in the womb.”

Even as those in the anti-abortion movement celebrate their nation-changing Supreme Court victory, there are divisions over where to go next. The most extreme, like Mr. Durbin, want to pursue what they call “abortion abolition,” a move to criminalize abortion from conception as homicide, and hold women who have the procedure responsible — a position that in some states could make those women eligible for the death penalty. That position is at odds with the anti-abortion mainstream, which opposes criminalizing women and focuses on prosecuting providers.

I recall that at one time, not that long ago, the outer edge of Republican Party ideology became the mainstream. Ruthless laissez-faire capitalists and enraged, vengeful Christian nationalists took over the party. Then the party elected the ex-president, and he mainstreamed a lot more of what used to be fringe crackpottery, corruption, lies and cruelty.

So when the NYT refers to abortion abolitionists as the outer edge of the anti-abortion movement, just remember, they can become the mainstream. They are not very far outside the GOP mainstream. The Republican Party already is radical far right and fascist. So why not charge women with murder and execute them for getting an abortion? The logic is simple.

Maybe the Republican war chant for the 2022 and 2024 elections will go from LOCK HER UP!! LOCK HER UP!! to KILL HER DEAD!! KILL HER DEAD!!

Codifying Roe v. Wade is an illusion

CNN writes about the likely futility of codifying Roe v. Wade, assuming the Democrats could do that. They cannot because of the filibuster. CNN writes:

Constitutionally, however, there is a problem with thinking that federal legislation will resolve this issue and keep abortion from returning to the Supreme Court. Even if Congress passes a law codifying Roe v. Wade, that does not mean that the brazen precedent-busting Dobbs Supreme Court will not have five votes to strike down the new law.

That is the problem with those who say that the court is simply returning this issue to the people. If Congress tries to pass a law, either way, that law will likely land right back in the justices' lap. The Supreme Court retains the power to reverse the people's will as expressed in the actions of Congress. That is what the power of judicial review means. To quote the most famous case in constitutional law, Marbury v. Madison, it is for the courts to "say what the law is."

Drafters of any federal Roe protection must not be starry-eyed. First off, people should stop using the term "codifying Roe." The phrase is misleading. Codifying in this case means to enact a statutory right, which is possible, but the term "Roe" refers to a Supreme Court ruling and Congress has no power to reverse a particular Supreme Court ruling and reinstate a precedent that has been overturned.  

In 2000, when Congress tried to overrule Miranda v. Arizona, for example, the court said "no" in a case called Dickerson v. United States: "Congress may not legislatively supersede our decisions interpreting and applying the Constitution." Three years earlier, they said the same thing in City of Boerne v. Flores: "Congress does not enforce a right by changing what the right is. . . [Congress] has no power to determine what constitutes a constitutional violation." In short, the moment a Roe codification is signed by the President, it will be challenged as unconstitutional, and we could be right back where we started -- in the Supreme Court.

That exemplifies the enormous power the Supreme Court has. Congress can codify or make a law as it wishes. But if the Supreme Court says the codification or law is unconstitutional, that is the end of it. 

It is surprising that this point has not been made loud and clear by the mainstream media. Or, surprising that I missed it. The current fascist Republican Supreme Court is just not going to allow any codification of Roe to stand. 

The Christian nationalist attack on truth, secular teaching and church-state separation

The Washington Post writes:

New civics training for Florida public school teachers comes with a dose of Christian dogma, some teachers say, and they worry that it also sanitizes history and promotes inaccuracies.

Included in the training is the statement that it is a “misconception” that “the Founders desired strict separation of church and state.”

Other materials included fragments of statements that were “cherry-picked” to present a more conservative view of American history, some attendees said. In a possible effort to inoculate some Founding Fathers against contemporary political complaints, some slides in a presentation pointed out that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson repudiated slavery; unsaid is that both men held enslaved people and helped worked toward a Constitution that enshrined the practice.

“My takeaway from the training is that civics education in the state of Florida right now is geared toward pushing some particular points of view,” said Broward County teacher Richard Judd, who attended the three-day training. “The thesis they ran with is that there is no real separation of church and state.”

The First Amendment prevents the government from “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” which scholars widely interpret to require a separation of church and state.

Non-republican scholars interpret the Establishment Clause as requiring a separation of church and state, but Christian nationalists (CNs) do not. Those fascists see no basis for any separation. In essence, CNs believe either that, 

(1) the Establishment Clause has no meaning and no legal vitality, or arguably more likely, 

(2) the Establishment Clause empowers Christianity in government, but disempowers other religions and non-believers in government. 

The latter interpretation is more aligned with core CN dogma, which holds Christianity above all other beliefs and ideologies, religious or not. 

In other fascism news, the ex-president is giving off smoke signals that he plans to run for president again in 2024: "Republicans are bracing for Donald J. Trump to announce an unusually early bid for the White House, a move designed in part to shield the former president from a stream of damaging revelations emerging from investigations into his attempts to cling to power after losing the 2020 election."

It's coming baaack!