For The Greanville Post—
Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
Remember the old Fram oil filter TV ad, “Pay me now, or pay me later?” That is if you bought a new Fram oil filter from the mechanic holding it up for you to see for $4.00 (that’s how long ago that ad appeared[!]), you would not be paying the mechanic a rather larger bill later for the repairs your engine would need due to driving around with dirty oil. Continue reading »
By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH
A man for the middle ages: The 1300s would have been more to Santorum’s taste, but, alas, modernity intruded.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum is steadily climbing the GOP polls (even though his standing versus President Obama is dismal). He may even win in Michigan, one of the several home states of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney. (Whatever happened to “Willard?” But that’s another story). At any rate, having done “Ask” columns on Newt and the other Rick (Perry, remember him?) I believe that the Senator has risen far enough in the polls that he deserves one for himself. So here goes.
1. You frequently talk about your grandfather, a coal miner. I’m wondering why you never talk about the union he most likely belonged to, the United Mine Workers. Its President when it was at the height of its powers in the 1930s and 40s, when your grandfather was presumably working, was John L. Lewis, one of the most militant non-Communist labor leaders in US history. Or is the possible reason that you don’t talk about your grandfather’s union is that he belonged to the Communist-led Progressive Mine Workers? Continue reading »
By Steven Jonas, Senior Editor
Oct. 11, 2011
In The New York Times “Sunday Review” of Sept. 25, 2011, Michael Kazin, a co-editor of Dissent magazine, published an article entitled “Whatever Happened to the American Left?” It is drawn from a new book of his entitled American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation. In the article (full disclosure: I have not read the book, only the review that appeared in The Times Sunday Book Review on Sept. 18) Mr. Kazin attributed the aforementioned decline to a number of factors. They included: unlike the (relatively) powerful left of the 1930s, the modern left, unlike the modern Right, has not been germinating for very long; in the 1970s they started leaving traditional “left” issues such as “class justice” for such things as rights for minorities and women; the failed promises of the Democratic Party, post pre-Viet Nam Lyndon Johnson; dependence on “politicians;” and “not reconnecting with ordinary Americans.” So, you see, the “decline of the US left” is all the left’s fault.
<<< IMAGE: The legendary Big Bill Haywood, head of the I.W.W., was one of the earliest combative union leaders in the US. His kind has not been seen for almost 100 years, but the sorry state of American trade unions is not so much a product of their own flaws, as the inevitable result of an all-out never-ending assault on workers by private capital using all the forces and tools of the state, which they naturally control. Continue reading »
It is true that the Democratic Leadership Council itself has recently met its demise, but that doesn’t mean that its policies have lost their total sway over this administration. As one wag put it, the DLC doesn’t need to live on independently anymore; it has just moved into the White House.
STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH FOR BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
18 February 2011 | [print_link]
Following the initial Federal Period and then until less than ten years before the first Civil War there were two major political parties in the United States: the Democratic Party and the Whig Party. While it was a national party, the base of the Democratic Party lay in the slave states of the South and its policies generally reflected the interests of the Slave Power. As the matter of the further expansion of slavery into the Western Territories became more acute, a major split began to develop in the opposition party, the Whigs. Northern Whigs were generally opposed, not to slavery so much but to its further Westward expansion. The Southern Whigs tended to favor, or at least tolerate, both the institution and its expansion. And so, as the two wings gradually drifted apart in the early 1850s, a new party was formed, the Republican Party. As a national force the Whig Party disappeared quickly. Its “Free Soil” Northern elements formed the base of the new party, while its pro-slavery (at one level or another) elements moved over to the Democrats.
The nascent Republican Party presented as an amalgam of interests. Central was the prevention the further expansion of the institution of slavery westward, for a variety of reasons. Some northern Democrats also joined it for they too were concerned with preventing the westward expansion of slavery. Anti-slavery elements of the nativist American Party, which ran the former Whig President Millard Fillmore for President in 1856, after Fillmore’s disastrous defeat also gravitated to the Republicans. Related to nativism was the Temperance Movement, originally aimed at the Germans (beer) and the Irish (whiskey). Some of them were drawn to the Republicans because of their position on the principle of slavery.
The abolitionists actually came to the Republican Party fairly late because abolition of slavery in the states in which it existed, ensconced as it was in the Constitution, was not part of the Republican platform and did not become so until well into the first Civil War. In fact in the late 1850s it was the was the radical abolitionists, led by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who were advocating secession – of at least the New England states, if not more. But seeing the conflict over the issue coming to a head in the election of 1860, many abolitionists fell in with the Republicans too. Lincoln in fact was able to win election in that year, in a four-way race, with just 40% of the popular vote, only because of the disparate coalition which was united around one theme: opposition to the dominance of national policy on the matter of the westward expansion of slavery by the Slave Power.
And so, what do we face now? The dominance of national policy, not just on one issue but all of the major ones, by the modern equivalent of the Slave Power, which is the Corporate Power. The Slave Power was dominated by a tiny oligarchy of very wealthy men, the slave owners. Among other things, they wanted to continue the westward expansion of slavery both to increase their profits and to increase their political dominance of the national government and national policy. The Corporate Power is similarly a (relatively) tiny oligarchy of very wealthy men (and now, women) who want to maintain the domination of national policy that they have put together over the past 35 years, under Republican and Democratic presidents alike, in order to maintain and expand both their profits and their wealth.
Jonas asks the big question: Can we muster enough political gumption and intelligence to piece together a progressive version of the utterly corrupt Democratic Party?
The major elements of that policy are well-known: the continuation and where possible the expansion of American imperialism around the world; the major exportation of American capital, seeking higher profits abroad; the furtherance of the dependence of the US economy on highly profitable fossil fuels, with the concomitant necessity of the maintenance of foreign military bases to, among other things, protect the oil supply and its routes of transport to the US; the ever-shrinking rates of taxation, primarily benefitting the ruling oligarchy; the continuing attack on the US labor movement; supporting the ever-increasing attacks on personal liberty in such matters as the religious belief as to when life begins and the civil rights of homosexuals so as to make sure that the Religious Right stays firmly with their party; and so on and so forth.
The response to this agenda on the part of the Democratic Party has been increasingly limp. It was clear from the beginning of the campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2008 that Barack Obama was part of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council’s own coalition (see my column of late 2007, http://tpjmagazine.us/jonas172). However, his rhetoric during the campaign did fool some of us for a time before the election into thinking that once in office he would behave differently (and I include myself in that group). Obviously he hasn’t. It is true that the Democratic Leadership Council itself has recently met its demise, but that doesn’t mean that its policies have lost their total sway over this administration. As one wag put it, the DLC doesn’t need to live on independently anymore; it has just moved into the White House.
And so, using the excuse of the losses in the 2010 election, which his total lack of leadership and forthright opposition to GOP policies certainly contributed to, Pres. Obama has continued to attempt to reach “compromise” with the GOP. That the Congressional leadership of the latter doesn’t seem to be interested in much else than assuring his loss in the 2012 Presidential election (Senate Minority Leader, but controller of the Senate through the use of the filibuster, Mitch McConnell) and the repeal of his signature piece of legislation, the “health care reform” act (really the Health Insurance subsidy act — Speaker of the House John Boehner) doesn’t seem to have reached his consciousness. But what is reaching the consciousness of an increasing number of rank-and-file US citizens is what GOP/DLC/Obama policy is leading us toward.
That future includes: the continuing export of US capital and with it US jobs (Obama appoints the biggest job exporter of all-time, former GE CEO Jeff Immelt, as his “jobs czar”); the destruction of the only three income redistribution programs left, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid; the further concentration of both wealth and income in the hands of a smaller and smaller segment of the population; continuing war for the benefit of the military-industrial complex and US imperialism with its drain not only on the US treasury but also the ability of the US to positively influence the actions of other countries; the perpetuation, indeed the acceleration, of global warming and climate change and the ongoing mass extinctions that accompany it; the increasingly likely full destruction of the trade union movement in the US (see what is going on right now in Wisconsin with the assault on the public employee unions); the ever-burgeoning Federal deficit and national debt because of the abandonment of rational tax policy, that leads to the further dominance of Federal spending by the military and debt service; the maintenance of a Permanent Army of the Unemployed, created so neatly by the recent excesses of Finance Capitalism and the resulting “Great Recession;” and so on and so forth.
Desperately needed now, if Constitutional Democracy, as defined by the Preamble to that great document (see my Commentary of almost a year ago, “The Preamblers” http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/185) and the Bill of Rights, is to be maintained, indeed restored in the United States, and if a Second Civil War is to be prevented, is a new party. I am not talking here about a traditional US “third party” which could make a lot of us feel good but which would go nowhere politically. What we need is for the Democratic Party to split. We need the formation of the Progressive Democratic Party. Its platform would be fairly obvious and I need not detail it here. But what I will deal with here, briefly, is what it would need in order to be effective.
A Progressive Democratic Party with a chance of winning elections, and in 2012 in a three-way battle the possibility of even winning the Presidency, needs three things. It needs a significant cadre of elected officials at the Federal, state and local levels to split from Obama and the Corporate Power Democrats and join it, people like John Conyers, Al Franken, Sherrod Brown, and Peter Shumlin (the new, pro-single payer, Governor of Vermont). It needs very significant amount of money from National Interest Capitalists (URL: http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/214) like George Soros and his new group. It needs strong support from at least part of what’s left of the US trade union movement (which would obviously not include that sector of it that is trying to make nice with the US Chamber of Commerce); and it needs dynamic leadership and potential Presidential candidates, like Alan Grayson (yes, Abraham Lincoln was also a one-term Congressman defeated for re-election, in his case because he had opposed the Mexican War), Howard Dean, and Dennis Kucinich.
A TALL ORDER? Yes indeed. But the Republican Party is driving the nation to bankruptcy, both fiscally and in terms of policy. They are also beginning to sanction the use of deadly force to settle political differences: a committee of the Republican-controlled legislature of South Dakota recently voted out a bill which would make murder of abortion providers legal (The Progress Report, Feb. 15, 2011). If it becomes law, who’s next? Non-closeted gays in public office, for example? (Going after closeted gays in public office would significantly reduce the numbers of GOPs public office holders, so one could not have that done across the board.) Providers of contraceptives? And with the targeting of progressives for “dirty tricks” by three private security companies, possibly in the employ of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (The Progress Report, Feb. 14, 2011, the Chamber denies it), following up on the proposed South Dakota law, do unofficial death squads taking off from where the dirty tricksters finished up come next? See Rep. Giffords. Then there was the obscure liberal Tides Foundation in San Francisco that was singled out by Glen Beck and was on the hit list of a man who was fortunately pulled over for minor a traffic violation (and then engaged in a gun battle with police) before he could get there (http://www.marinatimes.com/aug10/news_presidiotides.html). Think that I’m hallucinating about a Second Civil War? Think again. The other side is increasingly turning to thoughts of violence to achieve its political aims. We desperately need a new national party in order to deal with all of these issues. So let’s “Whig it” for the new Progressive Democratic Party, now!
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This is Dr. Jonas’ Commentary No. 168
STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash/Truthout (http://www.buzzflash.com, http://www.truth-out.org/), Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine (http://tpjmagazine.us/); a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad (http://dandelionsalad.wordpress.com/); a Senior Columnist for The Greanville Post (http://www.greanvillepost.com/); a Contributor to The Planetary Movement (http://www.planetarymovement.org/); a Contributor to Op-Ed News.com (http://www.opednews.com/), and a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter.
STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH | [print_link]
And so, the “small government” folks are now firmly entrenched in the House of Representatives. As they were in the last Congress, through the filibuster rule they will never be too far from the levers of power in the Senate either. But boy, since the last election they have become more vocal than ever. First and foremost they tell us that the “American people” demand “small government” and told us so in the last election. Well, they hardly ever tell us precisely what it is they mean by “small government” other than “cutting taxes” (especially for the wealthy), “down-sizing” government functions (of the type they don’t like), and de-regulation (of many corporate activities for which of course they don’t supply specifics). Indeed, not too specific all around.
Further there is this “the American people demand” stuff. Well, about 42% of eligibles voted in the last election and the GOP numbers amounted to somewhere around 22% of the eligibles. But those are numbers no one seems to bring up. Of course with a media that characterized the GOP win in 1994 as “the Gingrich landslide” when 37% of the eligibles voted and the GOP got slightly more than half of them, what do you expect, except that would it be too much to expect that a Democrat or two would do so? Well, I guess so. And so we are subjected to the “the American people demand small government” bombardment, which also includes the claim that “the American people want repeal of the health care reform” when poll after poll shows that they do not.
But let’s get back to this “small government” stuff, first raised when Reagan claimed that “government is the problem, not the solution.” Of course, Reagan wasn’t the only one. I remember cringing in my seat when in his first State of the Union Address, Bill Clinton, Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council before he became President of the United States, said “the era of big government is over.” Of course when the GOP/Tea-Party/Paulite (as in Ron and Rand, not Saint) uses/re-uses and over-uses the phrase, they are referring only to a certain particular set of Federal government functions, not just any or all of them.
These include: taxation (without bothering to tell us taxation for what), regulation of such things as financial markets (which most Tea-Partiers just don’t seem to be able to get, so they are just viscerally against it when you-know-who is for it) and the environment (which right-wingers are against until something happens to THEM, like a railroad tank-car spill or a ground pollution event or a BP blow-out disaster that could have been prevented if there had been regulation); of course health insurance reform (which they have been convinced by the Sean Hannitys and Mark Levins of their world means a “government takeover of health care” when the whole operating system remains in private hands just as it is now, except for those chunks which are now in public hands, like the VA health system from which one can be sure a goodly number of Tea Partiers get their health care), and just about anything that might help the “undeserving poor” (especially if they are not white), however that term might be defined. It is absolutely fascinating that the new GOP/Tea Party Senator from Utah, Mike Lee, has actually called for the repeal of national child labor legislation. One wonders just how that would help solve the unemployment problem for so many of the nation’s adults, but that’s another matter.
So, “government,” yuck. Let’s just get rid of it and go back to “abiding by the Constitution.” Of course these folks seem to forget that the Constitution is a document that sets up a national government and gives it a whole bunch of functions to achieve the purposes set out in the Preamble (http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/185) with a whole bunch of powers spelled out in Articles I and II. But hey, why should they confuse themselves with facts. But then, is the debate really about “big government vs. small government?” Isn’t it more about what the proper functions of government are without referring to its size? After all, protestations and the wishful thinking of a few lefties to the contrary notwithstanding, polls show that the majority of Tea Partiers are GOPers. Ron and Rand are GOPers, and the former has voted with his party in Congress on most issues other than the last President’s foreign war-making. The GOPers in the Congress and those voters who identify themselves with that party, not with the Tea Party, are certainly GOPers. And they all say that their common interest, at least with this President in office, is “small government.” A nice, sort of libertarian thought, no? Well, no.
These folks are not for “small government” across the board. They are only for “small government” when it comes to certain kinds of issues, like the ones reviewed briefly above. But boy, these folks are for Big Government, VERY Big Government, in a bunch of other arenas, all of which just happen to deal with personal belief and personal behavior. Let’s see now, what might they be? Well abortion rights, for one. They want to criminalize choice in that matter. But actually that issue goes way beyond abortion, per se. Rather it goes to the matter of one’s religious belief as to when life begins. Forget about abortion, per se. They want to criminalize any belief other than that which holds that life begins at the moment of conception (http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/182). That sounds like pretty big government to me.
Then there’s the matter of gay marriage. The 14th Amendment to the Constitution that they profess to hold so dear (except of course for the part of the 14th that provides citizenship to anyone born in the United States) guarantees equal protection of the law “to any person within [the] jurisdiction” of each State. It happens that each state has a set of civil laws that applies to the institution of marriage. Yet these “small government” folks want to deny access to that civil law to same-sex couples wishing to marry. They would thus deny them that guaranteed “equal protection of the laws,” just because the GOP/Tea Party/Christian Rightists’ religious beliefs say “no” to gay marriage. Pretty big government there, wouldn’t you say? Again, they would place one set of religious beliefs above all others. Oh yes, let us note here, that one of the three (so far) members of the Senate “Tea Party” caucus, Jim DeMint, in both of his Senate campaigns called for banning gay teachers from the classroom. DADT for teachers, Jim?
Then there is the right to die, a pretty personal matter wouldn’t you say? Attorney General Ashcroft, you know, the one who put a drape over the bare breasts of the statue of Lady Justice in the lobby of the Department of Justice, went out of his way to try to interfere with the democratically adopted law concerning that matter in Oregon. And then there was the likely 2012 GOP Presidential nominee, JEB Bush, and the Schiavo case. These “small government” folks would deny terminally ill people the right, under very carefully controlled conditions, to obtain medical assistance to end their lives at a time of their own choosing or that of their closest family member.
Then there is the use of recreational mood-altering drugs (RMADs) and drug-carriers. Certain ones, like the two major killers, tobacco products and ethyl alcohol, are “OK.” They are subject to taxation and certain civil limitations on place and time of use, and of course criminal prosecution for otherwise criminal acts committed under the influence of alcohol. Other RMADs, like marijuana, cocaine, and heroin, are subject to blanket prohibition of both sale and use, totally limiting personal choice of exactly which RMAD’s to use or not, at the risk of criminal prosecution. Sounds like pretty big government once again, no?
These folks are thus very much for big government in a whole bunch of arenas. But they all have to do with personal beliefs, especially religious ones, and behaviors even when they directly harm no one else. They are for “small government” when it comes to dealing with economic issues and VERY BIG NATIONAL PROBLEMS like the crumbling infrastructure, the failing educational system, and the future supply of energy. The favorite right-winger of certain lefties (because he happened to be against the Iraq War), Ron Paul, gets caught up in this contradiction right from the git-go. It happens that this physician is as against abortion rights as anyone else on his side of the aisle in Congress. And his son Rand is a leader of the Association of Physicians and Surgeons, a tiny (3000 members out of 800,000 US physicians) but well-funded and very vocal group, which has opposed just about every liberal-progressive advances in medicine and health care since they originally organized to oppose Medicare right along with Ronald Reagan. And oh yes, they too would criminalize abortion.
This all is, of course, dictated by the Corporate Power that the GOP/Tea Party represents, without happening to let the nation as a whole in on that fact. Our side would be well-advised to indeed begin to do just that.
Author’s Note: This Commentary is number 164 in my BuzzFlash series. It is based in part on my BF Commentary No. 139 of April. 14, 2010 entitled “Big Government, Small Government: It’s All a Matter of Taste.”
STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for Truthout/BuzzFlash (http://www.truth-out.org/, http://www.buzzflash.com), Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville Post (http://www.greanvillepost.com/; a Contributor to Op-Ed News.com (http://www.opednews.com/), a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; and a Contributor to The Planetary Movement.
SELECT COMMENTS
Stephen Scott Crockett 12:46 am
The proper role of government on an issue by issue basis should be the discussion along with whose interests our government serves. The “size of government” discussion is really fuzzy logic intentionally designed to obscure the more important issues.
Government run by and for the vast majority of Americans should be our goal especially on economic, military and foreign policy issues. Republicans only serve the super wealthy and corporate power.
godblessfdr on Mon, 01/24/2011 – 10:51am.
I totally agree. Republicans-tea baggers are against government when it hurts the rich and corporations but not when it hurts the common man which they consider to be peasants who need controlling. This is the essence of Republicanism control the common man so the elite can steamroll them, too bad the average American is too dull to see this.
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CROSSPOST:
Published on BuzzFlash/Truthout on Sun, 01/23/2011 – 1:31pm.
Senior Editor STEVE JONAS bumped into this item. Says Jonas:
An excellent letter to NYT. Fascinating how the GWBush acolyte McKinnon can rebrand himself as a so-called “middle-of-the-roader.” As Jim Hightower (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jim_hightower.html) has said (quoting an old political slogan), the middle of the road is for nothing except yellow stripes and dead armadillos. He has also said that politics is not about right vs. left but top vs. bottom. —SJ
•••
From: michael carmichael
Date: 12/19/2010 12:19 PM
Subject: Letter to the Editor Submission
Dear NYT,
Frank Rich is dead right to call attention to the theater of the politically absurd psychodrama of the “No Labels” launch last week.
No Labels is just one more failed invasion of the mindset of the Democratic Party by Republican hucksters brandishing Reaganite dogma.
In fact, No Labels is nothing less than another feeble attempt to rebrand the long-running campaign to Reaganize the Democratic Party by members of the Reaganite rump of ‘centrist’ Democrats also known as the Democratic Leadership Council.
For more than twenty years, Al From, Stanley Greenberg, Evan Bayh, Jeremy Rosner, James Carville, Harold Ford and Mark Penn, whose wife is now exerting herself strenuously to raise funds for No Labels, have campaigned to Reaganize the Democratic Party.
While their campaign has ultimately proven futile, there is now a long laundry list of discarded labels in their thoroughly pathetic effort: New Democrats; Reagan Democrats; Triangulation; the Third Way; Centrism and the Blue Dog Caucus — all thrown on the smoldering pyre of dead and defeated propaganda devices.
Mark McKinnon (left), a Republican apparatchik with gaudy campaign decorations for his service under the command of George W. Bush and John McCain has limited appeal these days to anybody anywhere near the center of the political spectrum. [But he's still ubiquitous on television and other venues.—Eds]
The sad cast of characters McKinnon paraded before the eager press corps proves the point, including Senator GIllebrand, whose conscientious centrism is becoming as embarrassingly undistinguished as that of the sainted No Labels icon — Joe Lieberman, whose Democratic epaulets were ripped off his shoulders by the intelligent voters of Connecticut.
Like its own less than clever brand, No Labels will swiftly swirl away into the mists of history leaving its victims none the wiser at the failure of their attempt to bridge the partisan divide.
Yours Sincerely,
Michael Carmichael
Chapel Hill, NC 27514
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BONUS FACTS
Who the hell is Mark McKinnon and why does he matter?
Here’s Rory O’Connor’s take on the man:
But who is Mark McKinnon — and why does his unusual stance matter so much? For starters, because as the chief media adviser and strategist for the Bush-Cheney campaigns, he arguably deserves more credit (or blame, depending on your politics!) than any other individual for George Bush being in the White House. Anyone who can get George Bush elected President of the United States twice (and Governor of Texas before that) is a danger to Democrats everywhere, and the fact that McKinnon will withdraw his services from McCain in the event of an Obama nomination should be music to the ears of anyone who wants to see an end to our long national nightmare—aka the Bush Administration and its possible successors.
I first met McKinnon in 2004, while covering the presidential media campaigns for the television industry journal Broadcasting &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp; Cable. He returned my first call immediately — unlike his inept Democratic counterparts, who failed to return fourteen calls and then hung up when I finally got through. After telling me to check in with presidential counselor Dan Bartlett (who also promptly returned the call) McKinnon then invited me to spend a day at the Bush/Cheney campaign offices in suburban Virginia.
Upon arrival, I asked McKinnon what his media plan for the campaign against John Kerry would be. To my surprise, instead of dodging, filibustering or ignoring the question, he answered in a forthright manner. “We plan to spend sixty million dollars in the next ninety days defining John Kerry before he can define himself,” McKinnon told me.
“How are you going to define him?” I shot back.
“As a flip-flopping liberal who’s wrong on defense,” McKinnon replied.
I then watched in amazement over the next three months as he proceeded to do exactly that. Within weeks of our conversation, ordinary people all over the country suddenly began saying that they had doubts about Kerry – particularly, they parroted, because he seemed like such a “flip-flopper.” The mainstream media lapdogs soon followed suit.
Kerry never recovered from the preemptive assault on his authenticity, which was later reinforced by images of windsurfing and clips of him saying, “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.” Game, set and match to the Republican side.
So who then is Mark McKinnon? And why is the man who first elected George W. Bush, and later rescued John McCain from the land of the politically dead and then took him to the brink of the nomination, saying he won’t help McCain in November if Obama is the Democratic candidate? The high-school dropout, onetime staff songwriter for Kris Kristofferson, formerly Democratic political operative who once denounced Karl Rove and friend of such liberal heavyweights as onetime Clinton advisers Paul Begala and James Carville seems an unlikely choice as President Bush’s or candidate McCain’s campaign media director. But politics is first and foremost about winning — and McKinnon’s candidates win.
“It all started with Hank the Hallucination,” McKinnon recalls. “Hank and Paul Begala are the reasons I got into politics.” Hank, an illustrated comic strip character in the Daily Texan, the student newspaper McKinnon edited, ran with his backing against Begala in a 1982 contest for student government president at the University of Texas in Austin — and won. “I was a bit of an anarchist in those days,” McKinnon recalls.
Hank was the first in a long series of winning candidates that McKinnon has backed. “I was a volunteer for Lloyd Doggett in my first real campaign in 1983,” he says. “Carville was the campaign manager, and Begala was in the upper echelon. He brought me out of the basement.”
McKinnon continued to work in winning Texas Democratic campaigns after that, helping to elect Ann Richards as governor in 1990 and Bob Lanier as mayor of Houston in 1991, among others. But by 1996, as he explained in a Texas Monthly essay called “The Spin Doctor is Out,” he had burned out on partisan politics and “last-minute attack and response ads.” Instead he planned to concentrate on corporate clients and public affairs, such as a successful 1997 effort to preserve affirmative action.
Then he fell in love, and everything changed. As he famously told a reporter, McKinnon saw Bush at a party and had the feeling that a man has “when he’s at a party with his wife and sees a beautiful woman across the room.”
The object of his newfound affection was George W. Bush, then governor of Texas. “It is unusual” for a conservative Republican politician and a liberal Democrat media maven to hook up, McKinnon admits. “The nexus was [Democratic] Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock, who was my mentor.” McKinnon and Bush became jogging partners and fast friends. Soon Bush began courting McKinnon professionally as well.
“Even as Governor, President Bush was famously skeptical about political consultants,” McKinnon says. “And at the time, all the typical Republican hired guns were circling. Hiring me was certainly a counter-intuitive move. I think he liked the idea that I wasn’t looking to work in politics anymore.”
In the end, McKinnon says, he decided to work for Bush “out of respect, loyalty and friendship — which as you know are qualities that are very important to the Bush culture.” Those feelings were reciprocated by Bush, who put McKinnon in charge of two of the most well financed media operations in history.
The strategies McKinnon employed in the past decade may seem awfully negative for a man who says, “Negativity drove me out of politics in the mid-Nineties.” (After all, McKinnon was the architect of the ads that trashed John McCain in South Carolina and beyond in 2000, ensuring a Bush nomination.) But McKinnon says it isn’t so.
“It’s not negative to define John Kerry. We’re not doing attack ads, we’re doing strong contrast ads,” he told me four year ago. “That’s legitimate, not negative. We aren’t saying Kerry is ‘Weak on Defense,’ we’re saying he’s ‘Wrong on Defense.’ There’s a big difference.”
As I wrote at the time, “The war of words matters a lot, and while McKinnon concedes that the Bush campaign is busy testing them in focus groups, he offers no details. Still, it’s clear he is attempting to position the president as a ’steady’ leader and Kerry as a ‘flip-flopper’ who changes positions often for political expediency. If the words work, they will be repeated over and over as part of that ‘coordinated blitz’ aimed at defining Kerry as ‘indecisive and lacking conviction.’”
Despite the fierce hatred he has engendered in some of his former friends, McKinnon generally remains an approachable and affable figure. Even Begala – who eventually did become student body president by winning a runoff between the “two top humans” after Hank the Hallucination was gunned down — extols him. “I love him!” Begala told me. “He’s a wonderful, terrific guy.”
Even though he went over to the Dark Side?
“It’s a free country. Sure, he was way to the left of me in college, and now he’s way to the right,” Begala responded. “But hey — James Carville goes home every night and goes to bed with Mary Matalin… Mark has changed his life, but I don’t believe he had a conservative epiphany.
“I believe him when he says this is based on a deep and personal love of George Bush. But this is not a race for student government president,” Begala concluded. “Still, if Bush is ruining the country, I say let’s attack the organ grinder and not the monkey.”
“I haven’t taken as many shots as I thought I would,” McKinnon conceded at the time. “Probably because Begala blessed me.”
Would he describe himself as a Republican?
“Let’s just say I’m a man of evolution,” he responded with a grin.
His many critics now contend that, far from “evolving,” McKinnon is just an opportunistic turncoat, a lustful chameleon, a bizarre sellout… and worse. In any event, now it’s time for another hallucinatory campaign, and McKinnon is once again in the thick of it.
Just ask John McCain—or Barack Obama, for that matter!
__________
RORY O’CONNOR blogs at http://http://www.roryoconnor.org/
BY STEVEN JONAS | [print_link]
While President, Ronald Reagan did the following:
So far at least, the "un-friendliest" interview has been with NBC's Matt Lauer (which in fact wasn't all that unfriendly but did push Bush a bit here and there, as on the use of torture. To my knowledge, Lauer did neglect to mention that the use of torture violates international treaty obligations and thus is unconstitutional under Article VI.) The rest of the list of interviewers is dominated by the likes of Limbaugh and Hannity, the Heritage Foundation's "A Team." At least part of the latter interview took place in an SUV (nice symbolism there, huh?) with Bush driving and doing most of the talking as well. (Well at least he wasn't texting while driving.) You know, the message is, he's just "regular folks" (even though he attended both Yale and Harvard). Yes there is indeed the "aw shucks" thing.
The image being presented is of a sunny, happy, regular fellow, who made no serious mistakes himself. Any mistakes that did occur were the fault of his staff, who repeatedly "blindsided" him.By Steven Jonas | Crossposted at http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/206
In modern times it was used by the Nazis to promote their ideology once Hitler’s dictatorship had been established. Indeed, despite the fact that the head of the Sturmabteilung, the SA, the most prominent pre-1933 Nazi armed force, Ernst Roehm (left), was himself homosexual and Hermann Goering was a cross-dresser, the Nazis went after the gays as their identity group of choice for demonization before they went after the Jews full force.
But the use of homophobia as a direct political weapon, designed to help win elections for a given political party, can be seen to be an invention of the modern US Republican Party. Consider this from The 15% Solution (pp. 148-49):“‘AIDS will do more to direct America (sic) back to the cost of violating traditional values, and to make America (sic) aware of the danger of certain behavior than anything we’ve seen. For us, it’s a great rallying cry (emphasis added).’ “
Homophobia is embedded in the US culture. Indeed the US is the most homophobic country on the planet other than those of the Muslim world. And so, there is the GOP to exploit it. In 2004, Karl Rove (left), running a candidate who was getting less and less popular in many quarters, even though he faced a remarkably weak opponent in John Kerry, made a special point of getting an anti-gay marriage of one kind or another onto the ballot in 11 states. He knew that such an initiative would draw to the polls potential GOP-voters who might otherwise stay at home. And it worked. Its use has continued hot and heavy.
It is interesting to note that while the Mormons rail against homosexuality and politicize the issue as well, they seem to have no problem with a behavior that many find to be morally reprehensible and is in fact illegal, even in Utah: bigamy (in that state and just across the border in certain rural areas of others like Colorado, politely known as polygamy). There has been a recent flap over the matter due to a reality show that centers on it. ”However,” Frank Lovece tells us in Newsday of Oct. 7, 2010, “Scott Troxel, spokesman for the state attorney general’s office, told the Daily Herald of Provo, Utah, ‘It has been our office’s position not to pursue cases of bigamy between consenting adults.’ ” Funny, but the super-sanctimonious Mormon Senator from Utah, Orrin Hatch, surely didn’t take the “if it’s between consenting adults, especially when it’s not illegal, it’s OK” position in the matter of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky.
FOR MOST OF ITS EXISTENCE since the end of Reconstruction following the election of 1876, the Republican Party has been the party of reaction in the United States. In fact, the only reason that Rutherford B. Hayes, the GOP candidate in that disputed election, won was that he agreed to end Reconstruction, essentially turning over the Southern states to the former slaveholders and the Ku Klux Klan. There was one bright exception to this rule, Theodore Roosevelt. There were two other exceptions, although not on the scale of the great reformer (and imperialist too). One was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who, at the end of World War II did not know to which party he belonged. In fact, Harry S. Truman tried to recruit him to be the Democratic nominee in 1952. “Ike” chose the Republicans and defeated Robert Taft for the nomination. PHOTO (Left) Teddy Roosevelt, despite his naked imperialist drive, was an exception to the disgraceful streak in the Grand Old Party.
· Steven Jonas, MD, MPH [print_link]
As Wikipedia summarizes it: ” The fight for the 1952 Republican nomination was largely between General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who became the candidate of the party’s liberal eastern establishment, and Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio, the longtime leader of the GOP’s conservative wing. . . . The moderates tended to be interventionists who felt that America needed to fight the Cold War overseas and resist Soviet aggression in Europe and Asia; they were also willing to accept most aspects of the social welfare state created by the New Deal in the 1930s. . . . [Yes indeed, those were the days.] The conservative Republicans led by Senator Taft were based in the Midwest and parts of the South [sound familiar?]. The conservatives wanted to abolish many of the New Deal welfare programs [sound familiar?]; in foreign policy they were often non-interventionists, who believed that America should avoid alliances with foreign powers [Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul, far to the Right on just about every other issue, being the last of that sort of Republican].”
Eisenhower (right) of course won, and made no efforts to go after the central elements of the New Deal. In fact, he supported high marginal tax rates on the wealthy which partly fueled the greatest growth that the US economy has ever had. He also created one of the largest public works programs the US has had, the Interstate Highway System. Eisenhower also famously warned of the military-industrial complex, and not-so-famously warned of a “small group of Texas oilmen” who, if they took over would do great harm to the country and also said in no uncertain terms that the atomic bomb should never have been used on Japan. Then came that bundle of contradictions, Richard Nixon. He was an avatar of Joseph McCarthy, a virulent anti-communist abroad (who nevertheless opened the door to China) as well as an expander of the war on Viet Nam. But he was also the promoter of massive environmental protection and, if it hadn’t been for Watergate would have ushered in a true National Health Insurance program in his second term.
But the Taftites never gave up. They did manage to nominate Barry Goldwater in 1964 and in the 1970′s began the “clean-out” of the (relatively) liberal wing of their party, beginning with the last major “big-government” voice in it, Nelson Rockefeller. And so, Ronald Reagan initiated the historical stream of GOP-led right-wing reaction which we now see in front of us, every day. But why did this happen and why has the Party been moving inexorably rightward since the Reaganite takeover? Why are they now a party that runs on racism, homophobia, religious bigotry (on the matter, for example of religious belief in when life begins), creationism, sexual repression (abstinence only) etc.? Don’t they have real policies concerning the economy (other than cut taxes, cut taxes, cut taxes and deregulate), the health care system and education?
Yes, of course they do have real policies on the latter subjects. The problem for them is that they can hardly run on them. The GOP represents major sectors of the US economy: the extractive industries, the military industrial complex, the prison-industrial complex, corporate agriculture, the “health” insurance and pharmaceutical industries, and so on. But they could and can hardly run on a platform of “let the oil and coal companies do whatever they want to,” “we want the rich to get richer, donchaknow,” “we want to export as much American capital overseas where it can make larger profits than it can here, so we really want to de-industrialize our country,” “we don’t care about the health of the American people but we do care about the profits of the health care industry,” “we would like to have permanent war if we can get it,” “we want to convert the US economy from industrial capitalism to finance capitalism,” and so forth. PHOTO: Robert Taft (above, left) led the reactionary wing of the GOP, which has always been its core ideology.
If any reader thinks that I am exaggerating here, just look at the record of the Bush years, for that’s what they were doing, with the help along the way from the Democrats of the Democratic Leadership Council, lead by Bill Clinton. As far as their being the Party of No in the Congress, they cannot say that they are simply making sure that Limbaugh’s famous four word pre-inauguration wish, “I hope he fails,” comes true, by blocking or significantly watering down every Obama initiative that might have made his Presidency a successful one.
And so, the Rightward Imperative. If you cannot run on what you are really about and win, you’ve got to run on something else. For years, “anti-communism” was the old stand-by. They still try to use it, of course, but with no Soviet Union and with China both decidedly a mixture of socialist forms and an increasingly private and state capitalist economy as well as our largest creditor, that one can get them only just so far. So they have to rally their people with something else, and indeed as is well known, they have a whole bunch of something elses, as in the list two paragraphs ago (to say nothing of guns and God). But I use the term “Imperative” in the title of this column. Is the continually rightward movement really imperative for them? Well yes it is, for the list of what their real policies are, in the preceding paragraph.
Bill Clinton, a skilfull opportunist, accelerated the Democratic Party drift toward the right, making it little better than GOP lite.
They have to attract voters and they have become past masters of mastering the use of the “gut” issues that their potential voters will respond to. But to keep them focused and to keep them coming, they have now resorted to their wholly owned subsidiary, the “Tea Parties” and ideas that were only a while ago considered just not “main-stream.” Like the Tea Party poster girl Sharron Angle proposing to abolish Social Security and the “libertarian” Rand Paul proclaiming that the federal government should actually not do much of anything except ban abortion and gay marriage. Since they cannot possibly put their real interests front and center, and since the emotional/appeal-to-prejudice ones that they use do have a certain half-life (other than racism, which will never go out of style, and they know it), they keep having to reach further out there, to the Right.
And so it goes, with the GOP Congressional leadership now proposing to “hold hearings” on the Fourteenth Amendment and some of them proposing repeal of it.
Well doing that would make all of those undocumented aliens’ kids non-citizens and would also remove the constitutional basis for upholding the right of same-sex marriage. There of course could never be a two-thirds vote in both Houses of Congress for repeal, nor would three-quarters of the states ratify such a move. But it does make wonderful politics for the GOP. (Funny, but they haven’t proposed having hearings on the “probable cause” provision of the Fourth Amendment and the Arizona “show me your papers” law nor on Article Six, which incorporates all treaties of the United States, like the UN Convention Against Torture into the supreme law of the land. But no one has ever accused the contemporary GOP of consistency or total sincerity rather than total hypocrisy). In a sentence, they are trapped in the Rightward Imperative, because they don’t have anything else they can win with.
What is the answer to this? Well, for one thing a Democratic Party that would go on the attack, using, at least in part, these arguments. Of course, the Obama/Emmanuel/Reid/DLC wing of the Party never will. How about Congressmen Grayson and Weiner and Senator Feingold? Well, hey you never know. Right now, we can only hope.
• Crossposted with BuzzFlash http://blog.buzzflash.com/jonas/200
STEVEN JONAS, MD, MPH is a Professor of Preventive Medicine at Stony Brook University (NY) and author/co-author/editor of 30 books. In addition to being a columnist for BuzzFlash, Dr. Jonas is also Managing Editor and a Contributing Author for TPJmagazine; a Featured Writer for Dandelion Salad; a Senior Columnist for The Greanville POST; a Contributor to TheHarderStuff newsletter; a Contributor to The Planetary Movement; and a Contributing Columnist for the Project for the Old American Century, POAC.
This is the sixth installment of a project that is likely to extend over a two-year-period from January, 2010. It is the serialization of a book entitled The 15% Solution: A Political History of American Fascism, 2001-2022 . Under the pseudonym Jonathan Westminster, it is purportedly published in the year 2048 on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the Re-United States. It was actually published in 1996 by the Thomas Jefferson Press, located in Port Jefferson, NY. The copyright is held by the Press. Herein you will find Chapter 5.
Note that in it, a firmly right-wing court decides that the Executive and Legislative branches, with their control firmly in the hands of the successor to the old Republican Party with no indication that that state of affairs will ever change, decides to remove themselves from any review of the actions of the other two branches.
We now face a right-wing Court, in which the next Justice, Elena Kagan (Photo, right), will likely be the next Whizzer White, giving the Right a 6-3 majority. This Court is also firmly saying to the present Right, “oh you can do just about anything you want to, and we will do whatever we can to cement your power indefinitely.” The Scalia Court (and it is the Scalia Court, whoever the Chief Justice is) is just like the “Steps” Court in the book.
Crossposted with http://blog.buzzflash.com/contributors/3312 [print_link] Sat. 06/26/2010
Chapter Five
2003: Anderson v. Board of Education
Summary of the Decision (Supreme Court Bulletin)
“Supreme Court Has No Constitutional Review Authority”
Anderson v. Board of Education, Certiorari to United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
No. 101-11. Argued October 31, 2002―Decided May 13, 2003.
Petitioner, a parent acting on behalf of her minor child, brought a civil action against the Board of Education of the state of New Jersey seeking to prevent it from enforcing a law passed during the 2001 session of the State Legislature mandating voluntary prayer in the public schools of that state. Both the trial and appeals courts in the state of New Jersey found for the respondent. Petitioner appealed to the Supreme Court. Without arguing the merits, respondent filed a brief claiming that under 28 U.S.C., Chap. 81, para. 1260, generally known as the “Helms Amendment,” the U.S. Supreme Court did not have jurisdiction in this case.
Held: Under the cited section of the U.S. Code, the Supreme Court has no jurisdiction to review appeals of state school prayer statutes. Further, there can be found in the Constitution of the United States no grant of authority to the Supreme Court to review the action of any other branch of the Federal Government or any branch of any state government for its “constitutionality.”
(a) Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution defines the authority of the Federal judicial power: “The judicial power shall extend to all cases, in law and equity, arising under this constitution, the laws of the United States, and treaties made, or which shall be made under their authority; to all cases affecting ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls; to all cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction; to controversies to which the United States shall be a party; to controversies between two or more states.”
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Author’s Note: The “Helms Amendment,” offered in Congress a number of times from the early 1980s onwards by Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC) (Cox) and his ideological successors, was finally passed by the 107th Congress in 2001. The language was unchanged from that version offered by Senator Helms in 1991 as S. 77: “Sec. . (a) This section may be cited as the ‘Voluntary School Prayer Act’. (b) (1) Chapter 81 of title 28, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new section: #1260. Appellate jurisdiction: limitations ‘(a) Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 1253, 1254, and 1257 of this chapter and in accordance with section 2 of Article III of the Constitution, the Supreme Court shall not have jurisdiction to review, by appeal, writ of certiorari, or otherwise, any case arising out of any State statute, ordinance, rule, regulation, practice, or any part thereof, or arising out of any act interpreting, applying, enforcing, or effecting any State statute (and etc.) which relates to voluntary prayer, Bible reading, or religious meetings in public schools or public buildings . . .’”
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(b) It is clear that the plain language of this article supports the holding of the Court. Under the Doctrine of Original Intent, by which the Constitution should always be interpreted, it is clear that the Constitution means only what it says, not what any individual judge or group of judges collectively think that it ought to say or would like it to say. It thus becomes clear that the series of decisions handed down by Chief Justice John Marshall and his colleagues in the first quarter of the 19th century which established the theory of Supreme Court “judicial review” for “constitutionality” were based on faulty legal reasoning.
(c) In the first of these cases, Marbury v. Madison, the Court invalidated an “Act of Congress giving the Court jurisdiction to hear original applications for writs of mandamus, because in such cases the Constitution limits the Supreme Court to appellate jurisdiction” (Cox). While that opinion may be valid, nowhere does the Constitution give the Court the power to apply it with the force of law. Rather, as in Great Britain, the legislative branch, through the will of the majority, is the only appropriate judge of the “constitutionality” of its own acts. In his written opinion, the Chief Justice stated that if “the courts lacked the power to give sting to constitutional safeguards . . . , the Legislative and Executive Branches might too often override the Constitution” (Cox). That may well be true. But if the Founding Fathers had wanted to give the Federal judiciary that “protective” function, they would have clearly written it into the Constitution. Chief Justice Marshall was reading into the Constitution words that he wanted to see ― but were not there.
(d) In Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, Justice Joseph Story expanded the Supreme Court’s review powers to include decisions made by the State courts (Cox). Like Chief Justice Marshall, Justice Story was reading into Article 3, Section 2 of the Constitution what he wanted to see there. In Cohens v. Virginia Chief Justice Marshall affirmed Justice Story’s conclusion in Martin, using the same faulty reasoning. (Cox)
(e) Finally, in McCulloch v. Maryland, Chief Justice Marshall not only reaffirmed the Court’s review authority, unstated in the Constitution, but found in it other “implied powers,” giving the Congress authority to undertake actions not otherwise specified by the Constitution (in this case renewing the charter of the United States Bank which it had originally established in 1791). (Cox).
(f) After extensive review of the opinions and reasoning in the decisions made in the aforementioned cases, careful review of the language of the Constitution itself, and a consideration of the available evidence on Original Intent, the Court was able to find no basis for the conclusions on “implied powers” Chief Justice Marshall and his colleagues drew in those decisions referable to the authority of either the Supreme Court or the Congress. Thus, the Court held, the precedents established by those cases and all their successors down through the years were based on faulty reasoning and a reading of the Constitution not in accord with the Doctrine of Original Intent. Thus those faulty precedents must be abandoned. Since the specifics of Marbury, Martin, Cohens, and McCulloch had long since become moot, the Court chose not to reverse those decisions. However, it did reverse the holdings made in those cases that the Supreme Court had any power to review the actions of the Federal Executive and Legislative branches or any State courts for their “constitutionality.”
11 F. 11th 111, Affirmed. Chief Justice Steps delivered the opinion of the Court; seven justices joining, one dissenting.
Author’s Commentary
Anderson v. United States was the most significant decision handed down by the Supreme Court in the old United States since Marbury v. Madison referred to in the decision summary reproduced above. In that case, Chief Justice John Marshall had established the power of the Supreme Court to review actions of the two other branches of the Federal government. As correctly noted by Chief Justice Steps that power is nowhere clearly granted to it by the Constitution itself. Nevertheless, Marshall said, if the Supreme Court found such actions to be unconstitutional, they were null and void. His reasoning went as follows (Cox):
“The Constitution is either a superior paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts, is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act contrary to the Constitution is not law; if the latter part be true, then written constitutions are absurd attempts, on the part of the people, to limit a power in its own nature illimitable.”
Marshall, of course, held that the “former alternative” was true, its truth found in the fact of the Constitution itself. He then drew the defensible conclusion that the body given the power to adjudicate disputes arising under the Constitution, and Article 3 Section 2 surely did that, indeed had the power to review the actions of the other two governmental branches for their constitutionality. That authority was extended to the appellate review of state court decisions having constitutional implications under the defensible conclusion that by ratifying the Constitution in the first place, the states had ceded to the United States that appellate jurisdiction, which is clearly contained in Article 3 Section 2 (see the decision in Cohens).
Once the Court under Marshall’s leadership had made those judgments, the full American power structure quickly came to agree with him. The Jeffersonians did make several modest attempts to undermine the independence and authority of the Supreme Court, but failed and ultimately gave up. From that time onwards, American jurisprudence came to be firmly established in the legal structure that Chief Justice Marshall had constructed on the Constitution’s base, as he interpreted it.
One very important principle set forth by Marshall, and subsequently accepted by all parties to American government down to the Transition Era, was that the Constitution was a document that meant more than it explicitly said, that was open to interpretation, and held within itself “implications.” And by implication that meant the Constitution was a document that could grow and change with changing times and circumstances, that it was indeed designed to grow and change with changing times and circumstances.
During the Transition Era there came to be propounded what the Supreme Court Bulletin’s summary of Anderson refers to as the “Doctrine of Original Intent.” One of its early protagonists was one Edwin Meese, the most prominent of President Ronald Reagan’s several Attorneys General, later President of Right-Wing Reaction’s Transition Era coordinating body, the highly secretive Council for National Policy. A former local prosecutor with no background in Constitutional law, a lawyer who once was supposed to have said that if the police arrested someone that was evidence enough he or she was guilty, Meese held that if it wasn’t in the Constitution, in clear language, it didn’t exist. (Meese later became the head of the National Council on Policy, the highly secretive coordinating body for a wide range of Reactionary Republican and Christian Rightist organizations during the run-up to fascism.)
A more cerebral proponent of the Doctrine was one Robert Bork. He had two principal claims to fame. One was that as the third-ranking Justice Department official in 1973, on the orders of President Richard M. Nixon he fired a supposedly independent prosecutor during the scandal that eventually came to be known by the name “Watergate” and that eventually led to Nixon’s resignation as President. (Bork’s two superiors at the time both resigned rather than carry out an order which indeed was later found to be unlawful.)
The other was that he was the most celebrated failed Supreme Court nominee in the history of the old U.S. And his nomination failed precisely because he held to Constitutional theories that were completely at odds with those held by almost everyone else at the time considered to be an authority on the matter. But his time eventually came. The Court did adopt the theory he espoused so eloquently in so many legal papers and articles.
Summarizing the theory, Bork held that (1993):
“. . . principles not originally understood to be in the Constitution [have no constitutional validity]. Where the Constitution is silent, [a Supreme Court] Justice has no [legislative review] authority. To act against legislation without authority is to engage in civil disobedience from the bench and to perpetrate limited coups d’etat that overthrow the American form of government.”
By implication, of course, Bork was attacking Marshall, because what he found in the Constitution was certainly not originally understood to be there (assuming that “originally” in this context means “when the Constitution was written”). And by so doing, Bork was in the front of a movement to deny 200 years of American jurisprudence. His, in essence, was the thinking behind Anderson.
It is interesting that Bork’s theory of Original Intent would appear to have much in common with the theory of “Biblical Innerantism” that was all the rage among the Religious Right during the Transition Era and provided a major piece of the foundation of the thinking that lead to American Fascism. But that’s another story, one we will get to later.
A spirited attack on the theory of Original Intent had been offered a few years before Bork wrote the article cited above by Judge Irving R. Kaufman, a Federal Circuit Court of Appeals judge (1987):
“I regard reliance on original intent to be a largely specious mode of interpretation. I often find it instructive to consult the Framers when I am called upon to interpret the Constitution, but it is the beginning of my inquiry, not the end. For not only is the quest for ‘intent’ fraught with obstacles of a practical nature―notably that the Framers plainly never foresaw most of the problems that bedevil the courts today–it may also be more undemocratic than competing methods of construing the Constitution.
“If the search for ‘intent’ sums up the constitutional enterprise, then current generations are bound not merely by general language but by specific conceptions frozen in time by men long dead. . . .
“The open-textured nature of most of the vital clauses of the Constitution signifies that the drafters expected future generations to adapt the language to modern circumstances, not conduct judicial autopsies into the minds of the Framers. When the Founding Fathers talked about due process, equal protection and freedom of speech and religion, they were embracing general principles, not specific solutions [emphasis added].”
Kaufman here is of course defending the expansive approach to Constitutional interpretation that led to the broadening of protections for individual rights that so enraged Right-Wing Reactionaries in the latter half of the 20th century and lead eventually to Anderson.
It is ironic that in his younger days Kaufman was the judge who presided over the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, accused of being atomic weapons spies, convicted, and eventually executed. Many people around the world thought the trial and the subsequent failed appeals process were possibly rigged and certainly major miscarriages of justice. Both Ethel and Julius were political progressives and he was an active member of the Communist Party. Ethel was almost certainly not a spy, and if Julius was, he was apparently engaged only in stealing industrial, not atomic weapons, secrets.
The trial and execution of the Rosenbergs, it was revealed later, featured unprecedented collusion between the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Federal Department of Justice, and the Courts, including both Judge Kaufman and the Supreme Court (Meeropol; Schneir and Schneir; Wexley). But it was a major feature of the so-called “McCarthy Period” (1945-60). During that time of so-called “anti-Communist hysteria,” individual rights for many left-wing Americans were harshly suppressed. Punishment, most often in the form of political and judicial harassment and loss of employment, not imprisonment or death, was meted out simply for having, holding to, and expressing unpopular ideas, not for engaging in any even faintly illegal activity.
As an echo in a way of McCarthyism, in Anderson a group of Right-Wing Reactionary justices overturned the whole U.S. legal tradition from the time of the founding and organization of the Republic because they didn’t like the outcomes that tradition had produced. With the Court out of the way, by its own hand no less, Right-Wing Reaction had succeeded in emasculating the powers of one of the three protectors of American constitutional democracy, the Courts, the media, and the Congress, on which it had set its sights during the Transition Era (see Appendix III). Thus Anderson significantly accelerated the development of fascism in the old U.S. But who ever said that the Court was not always truly a political institution (Rodell)?
A Parthenon Pomeroy Diary Entry, May 15, 2003
We did it, we did it. We’ve finally got the Supreme Court out of our hair. And those old fogeys handled the comb themselves. The people are going to rule now. Wow! 15 years of hard work to change that damned Court. We’re going to save our country, our freedom, our American way of life. I can’t believe it. But I’d better believe it. I do believe it. This is going to fix things up all right. Jobs for everyone. Cut taxes to the bone. And we can get the coons out of the schools, get sex out of the schools, get those faggots out of the schools, get prayer back in, where it belongs. Yowy kazowy. This is what we need to get America back to where it ought to be, to what it can be, to what it always was and always will be. Thanks, God, and thanks Pat, too.
References:
Bork, R., “The Senate’s Power Grab,” New York Times, June 23, 1993.
Cox, A., The Court and the Constitution, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1987, pp. 58, 59, 63, 66, 75, 342, 360.
Kaufman, I.R., “No Way to Interpret the Constitution,” New York Times, Jan. 2, 1987.
Meeropol, R., “Critique with Mort Mecloskey,” WUSB-FM, 90.1, Stony Brook, NY, October 30, 1995.
Rodell, F., Nine Men: A Political History of the Supreme Court from 1790 to 1955, New York: Random House, 1955.
Schneir, W. and Schneir, M., Invitation to an Inquest, New York: Doubleday, 1965.
Supreme Court Bulletin (Windham, NH), “Supreme Court Has No Constitutional Review Authority,” Vol. 24, No. 8, June 2003, p. 3.
Wexley, J., The Judgement of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, New York: Cameron and Kahn, 1955.
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The trade paperback version of the original edition of The 15% Solution is available on BuzzFlash.com. Both the trade paperback and hardcover versions of the original edition can also be found on Amazon.com and on BarnesandNoble.com . The 2004 print-on-demand re-issue of the book from Xlibris can be found as well on Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com . You will find a “Sub-Home Page” for the serialization at the lower right-hand corner of the Home Page of www.TPJmagazine.us . It contains such items as the Disclaimer, cast of characters, author’s bio., cover copy, and several (favorable) reviews. Also it will have a full archive of all the chapters as they are published over time. Besides The Greanville Post, the serialization is appearing as well on www.BuzzFlash.com , Dandelion Salad and TheHarderStuff newsletter .