Grab Grab Grab (What I Just Gave You)

You can always count on Tea Party types to make arguments in defense of the U.S. Constitution that fundamentally misunderstand the U.S. Constitution.

Here's the latest from Fox News spokes idiot Sarah P, as quoted in Salon. Her beef is with "power grabs" by the federal government.

What we're seeing today is the inevitable result of national leaders who have forgotten the fundamental wisdom of the Tenth Amendment [which provides for America's federalist system]. Just as Mr. Jefferson warned us, as soon as we as a country disregarded the fact that the federal government's powers are limited, and that we as states and individuals hold the balance of the power, the floodgates were opened to the torrent of federal power grabs we're seeing today. Take the federal income tax, for example. We tend to think there are two constants in life: death and taxes. But America hasn't always had an income tax. The first federal income tax on individuals was imposed in 1861 to help pay for the Civil War. But the tax was never meant to be permanent, and Congress repealed it ten years after it was enacted. It wasn't until 1913 that the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified and the individual federal income tax that we know today was created.

What is most dangerous about these power grabs is that they're usually done in the name of a good cause--insuring the uninsured, for example--and have a big wad of cash attached to them.

Hilarious, as usual. She's right on some things. Of course we haven't always had an income tax. And the original tax she cites was not permanent. But once you make an amendment to the constitution, that's pretty much meant to be permanent. (18th Amendment, we didn't mean you.) And that's what we did.

What's dumb about this, on first glance, is a typical case of 10th Amendment confusion, which is sadly prevalent in the TP. Here's what the 10th says.

"The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."

Okay. And the 16th Amendment was...in the constitution. The constitution can't be unconstitutional, lady. Oy.

But the dumbest thing about Mrs. P's complaint is that any time the constitution is amended -- and I'd love to know, as I would with most of her pronouncements, whether she doesn't know this or she's just conveniently ignoring it -- it has to be ratified by 75% of the states. In other words, a constitutional amendment cannot, by definition, be a federal power grab. At least 38 of our 50 states have to say yes for it to take effect. And 42 of the then-48 states said cool to the 16th Amendment. (Three rejected it and three more never took it up.) Assuming that Florida, Pennsylvania and Virginia's silence on the matter equalled consent, that's 93% approval from the states from whom power was being "grabbed". Nice.

This nitwit continues to say dumb shit on a regular basis. And our media continue to quote her dumb shit. Please stop. Or at least have the common decency to say, "Hey, that is some dumb shit right there. And here's why." It isn't all that difficult. What are you people going to do when you come up against an actual skilled sophist (like, say, Karl Rove)?

Supremely Undemocratic

I was going to post something on the unbelievably damaging Supreme Court decision on corporate money in politics. Then I read this bit from Erwin Chemerinsky of UC Irvine's law school in the LA Times. He's got it covered and he saved me some typing.

Some of the more important points (although this is really a no-brainer for anyone who's been paying attention):

[T]he conservative justices have demonstrated that decades of conservative criticism of judicial activism was nonsense. Conservative justices are happy to be activists when it serves their ideological agenda.

...

To conservatives...the phrase "judicial activism" has come to mean any decision with a liberal outcome.

...

For decades, conservatives have argued that judicial restraint requires that courts protect rights only if they are stated in the text of the Constitution or were clearly intended by the document's framers. This, for example, is the core of the conservative attack on Roe vs. Wade. But there is not the slightest shred of evidence that the framers of the 1st Amendment meant to protect the rights of corporations to spend money in election campaigns. The conservatives were glad to abandon the "original meaning" when it served their purposes.

The conservative majority, which in recent years has dramatically limited free speech in other areas -- such as for government employees and for students -- was willing to expand the free speech of corporations. There is no way to see this other than as the conservative justices using judicial review to advance the traditional
conservative ideological agenda.

Almost 10 years ago, in Bush vs. Gore, the five conservative justices for the first time decided a presidential election. One would have thought that decision would have laid to rest the notion that judicial activism is a tool of liberal judges and revealed that the real judicial activism today is from the right. Perhaps Thursday's decision will finally reveal the truth.

Let's all say it together, people. "Judicial activism" is complete bullshit.

I will add two other notes that Chemerinsky doesn't go into, although I understand why nobody's talking about the second one.

1. Roberts, Scalia and Co. have also touted judicial restraint as meaning narrow rulings on the case at hand and not broad, sweeping, legislating-from-the-bench type decisions. They used this to justify claiming that Bush v. Gore could not even be used as precedent, which is laughable for obvious reasons. And yet, they could have made a narrow ruling on the case at hand, which was whether a certain group could play a Hillary-bashing movie on TV right before an election. Instead, the court opened it up to let in corporations who weren't even making a claim and gave them rights that they didn't need and shouldn't have. Judicial activism of the highest order.

2. The group Citizens United, the original claimant in the case, was originally called, get this, Citizens United Not Timid. Ha! Clever. Like the logo? Just in case you didn't get it. You can understand why there's no reference to this on their current website. The old URL doesn't even redirect. But I can't imagine why Keith Olbermann, at least, isn't bringing it up.

The Six Best Words I've Read in the Past Week

This is William Kristol's last column.

Oh, if only. He'll be spewing crap like this somewhere else really soon. But at least he won't be defiling the Times with it anymore.

Times readers howled with fury when they announced that this Bush-apologist lightweight hack was given a forum in the Paper of Record. Conservatives screamed that Times readers were so blinded by Bush hatred and their own suffocating liberalism that they couldn't abide an alternate viewpoint.

I can abide an alternate viewpoint just fine. What I can't abide is someone who so clearly spews bullshit, someone who so obviously is not a thinker but a propagandist, someone who has been so demonstrably wrong about so much for so long and still claims to have been right about everything. And gets paid for it to boot, as if he's some kind of expert.

I rarely agree with George Will, but I read him because he's intelligent and attempts to make a rational, honest case for his positions. He does his homework and knows what he's talking about. And he's not afraid to say when something a Republican does is not exactly conservative. Or honest, for that matter. He makes me think. You'll never hear Bill Kristol doing anything but carrying water for the Bushies and their ideological minions.

I almost never actually read Kristol's columns. Why? Not because I was afraid I might learn something, but because no matter the topic I already knew what he was going to say. And it wasn't going to be said artfully, either. All I'd get out of it was anger, or annoyance at best. He never once disappointed me in that regard. Get out the cookie cutter. It's time for Bill's latest column. You've read one, you've read 'em all.

Could the Times not find one intellectual conservative in this country to fill a few hundred words a week? Is it really that difficult? Or is the answer to that question the real problem with conservatism right now?

Good riddance, you stupid lying shitbag. You will not be missed.

Blind Love, American Style

Joel Stein, occasionally funny, occasionally annoying, very occasionally enlightening, has one of the latter in today's LA Times.

This is something that's always bugged me about a certain brand of conservative. The "love" that they have seems arbitrary and tribal. It's uninterested in improvement. What we have is perfect and to hell with anyone who says otherwise. That's not love, it's infatuation. And laziness.

One of my favorite responses from conservatives whenever I dare to criticize anything our best-nation-in-the-history-of-the-universe does is to compare us to Saddam Hussein. "At least we don't have someone like Saddam Hussein here!" Excuse me for daring to point this out, but when you speak with such hyperbole about a country's greatness don't you think the bar should be set a little higher than one of the worst leaders on the planet? Listen, conservatives. Pointing out that we are better than a stinking corrupt dictatorship is not exactly a ringing endorsement. "Best" is the not the same as "not quite as bad as the worst".

"Jimmy, why did you knock over that liquor store?"

"At least I'm not Bobby. He killed the liquor store manager."

"Oh, Jimmy, you're the best boy on earth!"