Sarah Palin: The GOP Salutes and Obeys Yet Again

The Republican message - "Never mind what we've been saying for months about foreign policy experience. Sarah Palin is a great choice!" - is a bad omen for the future of America if McCain wins the election. It will mean four more years of those in charge willfully putting the interests of a party leader over the interests of the country.

On September 11, a dangerously incompetent president sat and stared at a children's book for seven long minutes while our nation was under attack. He then spent the rest of the day in hiding, while Dick Cheney made the decisions that needed to be made and the rest of us sat in disbelief and horror, waiting for our president to rally us.

And Republicans went on TV and wrote their columns saying "Thank God George Bush is in the White House and not Al Gore." Even though their political leader had proven himself manifestly unprepared for the job, they put his interests over the interests of the country. They attacked anyone who pointed out that the emperor had no clothes.

What we saw in those days and weeks after 9/11 became standard operating procedure throughout the Bush presidency. For the past eight years, the Republican Party has one time after another placed loyalty to their political leader over loyalty to the Constitution and the rule of law. When their leader claimed the right to ignore laws even as he signed them, they saluted and obeyed. When their leader claimed the right to torture prisoners using the same tactics we learned from our enemies, they saluted and obeyed. When their leader claimed he could toss you in a dungeon for the rest of your life with no trial and no lawyer, they saluted and obeyed. They received the party talking points, then obediently spouted the party line.

In Sarah Palin, we now have the real possibility of an even more dangerously unqualified person than George Bush leading our nation. And the Republicans who spent months calling Barack Obama dangerously unqualified are now crowing about John McCain's new running mate.

Salute and obey. It may be McCain instead of Bush putting our nation at risk, but it's the same dangerous Republican Party.

The events of the past two days have made it all the more clear why our nation desperately needs to remove the Republican Party from power.

Can a President Pardon Himself?

Can a president pardon himself?

Since George W. Bush took power through an assault on the Constitution and the rule of law in 2000, it was no surprise that his time in office would be marked by a constant war against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Some time after the 2008 election and before his last minutes in office, President Bush will no doubt issue pardons to make sure that he and his collaborators do not have to serve jail time for their numerous violations of the law.

And, either explicitly or by reference, those pardons will cover the president himself. Perhaps he will issue a pardon in which he specifically names himself. More likely, he will pardon anyone who issued or followed executive branch orders to do [fill in the blank with the criminal act]. Either way, he’ll cover himself.

That begs the question: Can the president pardon himself? I believe that will be the major constitutional question facing the country after Constitution Restoration Day next January 20.

The Constitution seems to give the president pretty much limitless authority to pardon anybody of any federal crime: The entirety of the constitutional text on pardons is that the president “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.”

Certainly, nothing in the text specifically limits his authority to pardon himself.

But that can’t be the end of the analysis. Our entire democratic system of government is based on the rule of law. If the president can regularly pardon himself of any crime, even before criminal charges are made, then he has been placed above the law. If nothing else, the U.S. Constitution enshrines the concept of the rule of law. It surely cannot allow for a president wholly unbound by law.

And to the extent that a pardon is done to cover up the crimes that he and his collaborators committed, is the pardon itself a crime?

As the next president is still settling into this new office, these will be the constitutional questions he and the nation that elected him will face.

The Bush presidency will come full circle: born attacking the rule of law, it will end the same way.

McCain Declares War on Gay Parents

Echoing the hackneyed “states’ rights” mantra that has so often been trotted out to defend the indefensible, Sen. McCain today declared war on tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of families across the nation. After he expressed an unequivocal blanket opposition to adoption by same-sex couples, his campaign today issued a “correction.” He assured lesbian and gay Americans that he does not currently plan to strip them of their rights to become adoptive parents, nor does he currently plan to keep children from being adopted by loving parents.

No, he will leave that to the states.

In communities in every part of the nation, more and more Americans are realizing that their lesbian and gay family members, friends, and neighbors are not some frightening “other” that must be kept out of mainstream society.

Unfortunately, rather than appealing to the majority of Americans who are increasingly turning their back on discrimination, John McCain has decided to appeal to the extreme right-wing dead-enders who are fighting to keep society closed to those they dislike.

McCain’s supporters call him brave. Would he dare walk into a room filled with children and teenagers with their same-sex parents and tell them to their face that their families are second-rate?

I’m not holding my breath.

Hypocrisy on the Courts: The Exxon Decision

Today's Exxon decision at the Supreme Court - with Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Kennedy joining Souter's majority opinion - gives liberals a chance to show that the Right doesn’t believe their own propaganda about the Courts. All that matters for them is who wins and who loses: Gays lose. Women wanting abortions lose. Religious minorities lose. But Big Oil wins.

When the people, through the legislature, take away women’s reproductive rights or the rights of gay and lesbian Americans, the Right wants courts to stay out of it. “Let the people decide!" they demand. "We don’t want activist judges legislating from the bench! These are questions left to the legislature!”

But when the people, through a jury, punish large corporations for their outrageous and dangerous conduct, wise judges must step in and impose limits on these out-of-control juries. Let the judges decide! If the legislature declines to rein in punitive damages awards, then it is up to the courts to do it.

And, although there are many ways the Court could do this -- by fixed dollar amount, by percentage of the defendant’s net worth, by any number of ratios to the compensatory damages -- it’s up to the Supreme Court to decide what approach to take: a ratio. And it’s apparently also up to the Court to determine the exact limit to impose: a 1 : 1 ratio.

Assuming John McCain does not express disagreement with today’s opinion, I’d love to ask him to define “legislating from the bench” and why this case isn’t the perfect example of what he routinely and vociferously condemns. Why does he want courts to step in to protect the mightiest of corporate behemoths, but to stay out when individual rights are at stake?

John Roberts Apologizes

I wrote to CNN reporter John Roberts a few minutes after he made his comment about people with AIDS on the network's morning news show on December 12. He replied very quickly:

Thanks very much for your email this morning. First, let me assure you that I certainly did not intend to convey what you suggest I did in that ‘tease’ to commercial. It was a hastily written script, and I readily admit the choice of words could have been better.

I have nothing but the utmost compassion for victims of this horrible disease, and personally, I see no demarcation of pre/post Ryan White. As the medical correspondent for CBS in the 90s, I did innumerable reports on the fight against HIV/AIDS, a period during which, thankfully, enormous strides were made in treatment.

Please accept my assurance that nothing pejorative was meant in our tease to commercial – one of the hazards of live television – but your note is a sharp reminder to me to be more vigilant in the future.

Thanks again for writing,

John Roberts

American Morning

CNN

Although the words "I'm sorry" or "I apologize" don't appear here, I still count this as an apology.

I've never worked in live television, and I imagine it's not easy. Cliches like "putting a human face on ..." come easily to the tongue, and people say them without necessarily thinking through the implications of what they're actually saying.

As far as I know, John Roberts does not have a history of either insensitivity or animus toward gay people or toward people with AIDS. So I take him at his word that this was a careless slip that betrays no hostility.

Now if only the subject of Roberts' news story - Mike Huckabee - could show a little humanity himself. His reaction to the revelation of his '92 quarantine comments is to express a willingness to meet with Ryan White's mother.

A critical component of the desire to quarantine AIDS patients back in the '80s and early '90s was animus toward gay people. Toss in the fear of disease, and you had a volatile mix.

Unlike John Roberts, Mike Huckabee has a long history of hostility toward recognizing the basic human rights of gay and lesbian Americans. This history extends to the present day.

Huckabee's attitude toward gay people does not seem to have advanced much since the dark days of the 1980s.

CNN Anchor Dehumanizes Gays

Leading in to commercial at 7:10 am on Dec 12, 2007, John Roberts said that Mike Huckabee was willing to meet the mother of Ryan White, the boy "who put a human face on the [AIDS] crisis."

Roberts's characterization of those who died before Ryan White is breathtaking in its callousness. Because most who died before White were gay men, they were not human? Did they deserve what they got?

Ryan White didn't put a "human face" on the crisis; he put a *non-gay* face on the crisis. In the America of that era, that's what was needed to get most people to pay attention to this horrible disease and its victims. Because most with AIDS were gay, Ronald Reagan would not even say the word "AIDS" and he refused to see the AIDS Quilt when it was on the National Mall.

Most of the country has moved on since then. I guess John Roberts has not.

Has CNN? We shall see by how it responds.

Fiction from Ron Brownstein & David Broder

Ron Brownstein has been peddling an interesting piece of nonsense lately: He claims that just as the Republican Party has shifted substantially to the right over the past two decades, so, too, has the Democratic Party shifted substantially to the left.

Brownstein’s latest book is entitled The Second Civil War: How Extreme Partisanship Has Paralyzed Washington and Polarized America. He got a plug on the NewsHour on November 21 and in David Broder’s column the next day. Broder summarizes Brownstein’s thesis:

Where each party used to have an ideological mixture, each is now more clearly defined in opposition to the other. The result is a Republican Party that is far more universally (and stridently) conservative; and a Democratic Party whose center of gravity has moved equally far to the left.

No one doubts that the GOP has moved far rightward over the past two to three decades.

But the idea that the Democratic Party has moved equally far to the left is ludicrous.

A generation ago, the Democratic Party vigorously opposed President Reagan’s across-the-board tax cuts. At the time, the top federal income tax rate was 70%. Today, it’s half that, and Democrats are sqeamish about raising the rates to the upper 30s.

A generation ago, the Democratic Party promoted the idea of comparable worth. Because jobs traditionally done by women generally paid less than jobs traditionally done by men, simply outlawing sex discrimination in the workplace was not sufficient. The solution was pay equity based on factors such as how much education, training, and experience particular jobs need. When was the last time you heard Democrats arguing for such a repudiation of the free market?

A generation ago, the Democratic Party was committed to enactment of the Equal Rights Amendment. Today, the ERA is something that shows up on a party platform but is not high on the list of Democratic priorities.

A generation ago, Democrats defended a system of broadcast regulation where the FCC pored over station program logs and carefully analyzed local news coverage to determine whether it served (what the FCC felt was) the public interest. Under Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, this extensive regulatory structure was jettisoned. Nowhere do you hear the Democratic Party calling for a return to those days.

And little more than a decade ago, the liberals in the Democratic Party unsuccessfully fought against the “welfare reform” plan promoted by President Clinton and Congressional Republicans. When was the last time you heard the Democratic Party call for a repeal of that mid-1990s law?

Would the Democratic Party of the 1970s-1980s have confirmed the nomination of an attorney general who refuses to state whether waterboarding is torture, or whether the president is bound by law? Would the Democratic Party that demanded impeachment hearings for Richard Nixon even recognize the party that refuses to even consider impeachment of President Bush for far worse offenses against the United States Constitution?

And the new rising stars in the Democratic Party - the ones whose victories in 2006 allowed the party to recapture both houses of Congress - are conservatives like Jim Webb, Bob Casey, and Heath Shuler.

Yes, the Democratic Party has moved a great deal over the past couple of decades, but it has been a move substantially to the right.

Not surprisngly, Republicans and their supporters are taking Brownstein’s thesis and running with it. It gives a patina of scholarship to their frequent accusation that Democrats are extremists.

It is the obligation of honest people to counter this nonsense forcefully whenever and wherever we hear it being spread.