Any President Could End Judicial Review With a Single Sentence

Krystal Ball explains judicial review

by Thomas Neuburger

"The weird thing about judicial 'originalism' is that the explicit principle of judicial review is nowhere to be found in the Constitution."
—Ryan Cooper, "Democrats have a better option than court packing"

The Supreme Court has no mechanism to enforce a power it was never given. A single sentence could end their having it.
—Yours truly

It's refreshing to finally read someone other than Thom Hartmann (and myself, thanks to Mr. Hartmann) agree that Marbury v. Madison, the 1803 Supreme Court decision in which the Supreme Court unilaterally gave itself the power to overturn Congress, was wrongly decided.

Read the last part of that sentence again. First: The Constitution did not give the Supreme Court power to overturn Congress. The Court was designed simply to be the highest rung in the ladder of courts of appeal. The right to overturn Congress was given to the Court by the Court.

Then consider: What would happen if it was wrongly decided? "Law" that was decided by the Court would be overturned — both Roe v. Wade and Citizens United — but more, a two-and-a-half-century-long practice of the Court overturning laws, would be overturned. The supreme importance (sorry) of the Court in our lives would be overturned.

We'd no longer be slaves to nine justices and their decisions; we'd be slaves to our laws instead, for good or ill, as the Founders deliberately intended.

In many ways, the practice of "judicial review" by the Court is the most undemocratic element of a system that contains many undemocratic elements, from the Electoral College to the Senate itself. That undemocratic element ... would end.

The Fight to Replace RBG

Now consider the fight over the successor to Ruth Bader Ginsberg, the justice who recently passed away. Why is this battle so consequential? Only because the Court and its power is consequential.

But what if it wasn't? What if the Court, stripped of the power to overturn Congress, was simply a higher court of appeals?

If that were the case, the escalating war between pathological Republicans and status quo-serving Democrats for control of the Court would be made entirely moot. We'd see no more headlines like the ominous "Ginsberg's passing brings political chaos". Who would fight to the death to control the Court if the Court had so much less power?

"Rule by the bench" would largely disappear from American lives, and in the main our lives would be better. Yes, a "constitutional right of privacy" may not have been discovered (Griswold v. Connecticut) if judicial review had never existed, though Griswold leans heavily on the Fourteenth Amendment, but also, corporate personhood (Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific) and the free speech rights of money (Buckley v. Valeo, Citizens United) would both have died prior to conception.

In short, without judicial review, we'd have to rule ourselves via our laws and our lawmaking process. Perhaps that would increase the percentage of people voting.

Does the Court Control the President?

But let's look at a simple specific case. What if Congress expands Medicare and the Court says No, that isn't constitutional? Does the President have to do what the Supreme Court orders? The short answer, frankly, is no. Would that not solve our "Supreme Court problem" in an instant, with no muss or fuss whatever?

It's hard to say that more simply, but I'll try. What if the president, instead of obeying the Court, just listened and moved on? The extraordinary power of the Court over American life would simply and instantly end. No further action needed.

The Origins of Judicial Review

Here's Ryan Cooper to explore this in more detail:

[T]here has been comparatively little attention to the simplest and easiest way to get around potentially tyrannical right-wing justices: just ignore them. The president and Congress do not actually have to obey the Supreme Court.

The weird thing about judicial "originalism" is that the explicit principle of judicial review is nowhere to be found in the Constitution. All of that document's stipulations on how the courts are to be constructed are contained in one single sentence in Article III: "The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish." 

Note that judicial review, a right "discovered" in 1803, was itself an act of partisan political manipulation:

Actual judicial review was a product of a cynical power grab from Chief Justice John Marshall, who simply asserted out of nothing in Marbury vs. Madison that the court could overturn legislation — but did it in a way to benefit incoming president Thomas Jefferson politically, so as to neutralize his objection to the principle.

So the Court gave itself this power to benefit Jefferson in a dispute with Madison, and did it in a way that made Jefferson less likely to object.

The following describes well and succinctly the obvious political background to the case. It's roots are in the conflict over appointments between an outgoing, lame duck administration, and an incoming administration of the opposite political party:

In the weeks after the Federalist president John Adams lost his bid for reelection to Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson in 1800, the Federalist Congress increased the number of circuit courts. Adams placed Federalist judges in these new positions. However, several of these 'Midnight' appointments were not delivered before Jefferson took office, and Jefferson promptly stopped their delivery as President. William Marbury was one of the justices who was expecting an appointment that had been withheld. Marbury filed a petition with the Supreme Court, asking it to issue a writ of mandamus that would require Secretary of State James Madison to deliver the appointments. The Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, denied the request, citing part of the Judiciary Act of 1789 as unconstitutional.

Justice Marshall and the rest of the Court split the baby, gave Marbury the right to his commission, but said it couldn't be granted because one part of the law that granted it conflicted with one part of the Constitution. From the same source:

Though Marbury was entitled to his commission, the Court was unable to grant it because Section 13 of the Judiciary Act of 1789 conflicted with Article III Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution and was therefore null and void.

So here we are, two and a half centuries later, ruled by a Court that's almost always far more conservative that the nation it rules.

Jefferson himself, by the way, hated judicial review. He called it the "despotism of an oligarchy ... Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more so."

Ending Judicial Review With a Single Sentence

The solution is simple — the president can just ignore the Court, which has no constitutional mechanism to enforce a power it was never given:

As Matt Bruenig argues at the People's Policy Project, it would be quite easy in practical terms to get rid of judicial review: "All the president has to do is assert that Supreme Court rulings about constitutionality are merely advisory and non-binding, that Marbury (1803) was wrongly decided, and that the constitutional document says absolutely nothing about the Supreme Court having this power." So, for instance, if Congress were to pass some law expanding Medicare, and the reactionaries on the court say it's unconstitutional because Cthulhu fhtagn, the president would say "no, I am trusting Congress on this one, and I will continue to operate the program as instructed."

"No, I'm trusting Congress on this one, and I'll continue to operate the program as Congress instructed."

Presto-chango, no more judicial review. Gone forever. No more ideological battles over Supreme Court seats. No more retaliatory court-packing schemes and appointments. All gone forever, gone in a single stroke.

The good news is, this is all a president would actually have to do. The the only downside is, some president would actually have to do it.
    

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

by Noah

It is often said that if you want to know where a child got their stupidity from just have a look at the parents. It's the old "apple doesn't fall far from the tree" adage. That adage is certainly true when it comes to the apple of the president's eye, Ivanka Trump. Sorry Eric, Donnie Jr. and Junior Psycho Baron, but your dad really does love your sister more. Maybe it's 'cause she's considered "the smart one" compared to whatever single digit IQs each of you have or maybe it's for other oft-speculated reasons but, even if she is the smart one, please don't ever let her drive a car or operate any power tools. Hell, I'd hate to even watch her try to navigate an automatic doorway.

Apparently, Ivanka is not even up to the low bar that her daddy has set when it comes to the twitter machine. That much was evidenced a few days ago when she launched the tweet that serves as tonight's meme into the twittersphere. On the surface, Ivanka's little tweet might seem effective if the sender and the receiver are both simpletons, but, if Ivanka had even a tiny amount of intellect, she would have researched the context of the Thomas Jefferson quote she used. She doesn't and she didn't so it backfired on her bigly. Sad.

Ivanka thought she'd both score points with daddy and give his followers an easy defense talking point, but, as they say, context is everything. The context is this: It turns out that when Thomas Jefferson was complaining to his daughter Martha about his political enemies, it was all about his multiple assignations with his slaves and the children he had fathered with them. So you see, Ivanka, here's another adage: People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. That's not to say that your cretinous dad has any kids we don't know about, yet, but, well, we know he'd love to have some slaves. Oh wait, he does. Lindsey Graham is one. Then there's the newbie Matt "Flor-i-duh Man" Gaetz, and, of course, the whole republican side of the aisle in both the House and the $enate.

Ivanka's mindless tweet evoked some great responses. Here are a few of them. The first comes from the husband of Kellyanne Conway:

• George Conway (gtconway3rd) - Inventing facts? Have you met your father?
• Ryan Knight (@Proud Resister) - "When the speech condemns a free press, you are hearing the words of a tyrant." - Thomas Jefferson Your father is a tyrant.
• Rachel Joy Larris (@RachelLarris) - It's interesting Ivanka picked this example because the thing Jefferson's enemies were accusing him of, fathering a child with a slave was absolutely something he did. 6 times as a matter of fact. Jefferson being called out for something he actually did.
• John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) - You're delusional. Our founding fathers would have put your daddy in the stockades three years ago.

Devin Nunes Still Needs A Hug-- And Not The Kind Of Anaconda Hug That Devin Nunes' Mom Wants To Give Him

For some reason I could never understand, no one on Twitter ever pointed out that Devin Nunes is a hermaphrodite. OK let that go by. But we really do need to ask ourselves if Nunes is a shameless partisan hack-- someone who abuses power and the legal process to injure his political opponents, who plays fast and loose with the truth to advance partisan goals, and who’s prone to conspiratorial thinking on the flimsiest of grounds. That either is or isn't the case. Please-- a yes or no answer!

I couldn't resist a quickie post about Nunes on Tuesday after his attorney lamented about how "he endured an orchestrated defamation campaign... that no human being should ever have to bear and suffer in their whole life." God, it sounds almost like someone made him work for wages that couldn't sustain a family or like someone took away his family's healthcare. Poor Devin! The terrible mocking must end-- or else! His ridiculous lawsuit is, as Matt Ford put it in the New Republic, a masterpiece of Republican Grievance. Nunes has done the impossible and surpassed even the short-fingered vulgarian in hypersensitivity, even claiming that the defendants in his absurd lawsuit are "part of a grand conspiracy to cripple his political career." The GOP has no issues with broad appeal... so now they're depending on this kind of crap to entice the aggrieved among us to vote for them.

Who’s leading this dastardly plot? Nunes doesn’t quite say. Maybe it’s the Democratic Party, he suggests. Or unnamed liberal donors. Or even hostile foreign adversaries. Whoever these hostile actors are, they’re not only causing him grievous harm; they’re contributing to “the corruption of American democracy and society.”

What the lawsuit really demonstrates, though, is the stunning vindictiveness of a powerful elected official who would use the legal system to punish his critics. If the lawsuit was intended to vindicate Nunes and his reputation, it has achieved precisely the opposite.

Nunes rose to national fame over the last two years as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, a perch he used to undermine the Russia investigation and defend Trump. In the complaint, he depicts himself as an honorable public servant who’s been wrongly maligned by his powerful opponents-- only one of whom, longtime Republican political operative Liz Mair, is explicitly named. The others are unknown to him: the Twitter users responsible for anonymous parody accounts such as “Devin Nunes’ Mom,” “Devin Nunes’ Cow,” “Fire Devin Nunes,” and “Devin Nunes’ Grapes.”

Nunes obliquely implies that Mair is in cahoots with these accounts’ owners, but offers no proof to support the theory. Either way, like a high school teacher hit from behind with a spitball, he’s determined to find out who’s responsible. “The identity of those behind the Twitter accounts is a matter of great public concern,” Nunes told the court. “Whether the accounts are controlled by wealthy Democrats, the Democratic National Committee, an opposition research firm, such as Fusion GPS, the ‘Russians,’ the ‘Chinese,’ or some other foreign government or non-governmental organization, the corruption of American democracy and society by intentional falsehoods, fraud and defamation must stop.”

What horrible things did these accounts say about Nunes to warrant the judiciary’s intervention? The account named “Devin Nunes’ Mom” receives the most attention in the complaint. Its owner frequently posted caustic remarks about him and his actions toward the Russia investigation. One tweet said that Nunes was unfit to run the House Intelligence Committee, while another joked that he was “voted ‘Most Likely to Commit Treason’ in high school.” Some tweets are indistinguishable from legitimate political criticism. Others are more puerile, implying that Nunes wanted to commit sexual acts with Trump and other top Republicans.

“In her endless barrage of tweets, Devin Nunes’ Mom maliciously attacked every aspect of Nunes’ character, honesty, integrity, ethics and fitness to perform his duties as a United States Congressman,” Nunes wrote in the complaint. Twitter apparently suspended the account this month for impersonating a real person, but not before he “suffered substantial insult, humiliation, embarrassment, pain, mental suffering and damage to his reputation as a result of the unprecedented personal and professional attacks on his character.”

Why did these tweets wound Nunes so deeply? The accounts’ jibes resemble much of the political commentary on Twitter—including the president’s. Nunes’s real grievance appears to be with Twitter itself. “Twitter represents that it enforces its Terms and Rules equally and that it does not discriminate against conservatives who wish to use its ‘public square,’” he told the court. “This is not true. This is a lie. Twitter actively censors and shadow-bans conservatives, such as Plaintiff, thereby eliminating his voice while amplifying the voices of his Democratic detractors.”

Twitter has denied that it uses shadow banning-- making a user’s posts visible to themselves but invisible to others-- but that hasn’t stopped Republican lawmakers, including Trump, from making the claim as part of a broader narrative that Silicon Valley is censoring conservative voices.

Nunes’s claim for damages also doesn’t hold up. He says that Twitter bears legal responsibility for any defamatory posts made on its platform. In reality, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act generally shields websites from civil liability related to third-party content on their platforms. Nunes himself should be pretty familiar with this: As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown pointed out, he and his colleagues have been working to change Section 230 for this exact reason.

Nunes adopts a patriotic mien when it comes to the broader free speech issues at stake. “Access to Twitter is essential for meaningful participation in modern-day American Democracy,” he told the court. “A candidate without Twitter is a losing candidate. The ability to use Twitter is a vital part of modern citizenship. A presence on Twitter is essential for an individual to run for office or engage in any level of political organizing in modern America. This is because Twitter is not merely a website: it is the modern town square.”

This paean to civic speech might be more convincing if Nunes didn’t ask the court to force Twitter to “reveal the names and contact information” behind four of the pseudonymous accounts. What’s more, he also wants the court to “permanently enjoin and order Twitter” to suspend Mair and the other accounts. Twitter is a vital part of modern American citizenship, Nunes says, and he wants the government to strip people of access to it for being mean to him.

But Americans have every right to mock and insult their elected officials. During the election of 1796, the first contested presidential race in the nation’s history, Alexander Hamilton wrote a pseudonymous pamphlet that accused Thomas Jefferson of having an affair with an enslaved woman he owned. (The allegation later turned out to be true.) Jefferson’s supporters jeered at John Adams as “His Rotundity” and called him a hermaphrodite, while Adams’s camp accused Jefferson of supporting prostitution and incest. Adams later arrested one of Jefferson’s pamphleteers during the election of 1800 and tried to prosecute him under the Alien and Sedition Acts. The American tradition of salacious and spurious political attacks is alive and well in the Trump era.



The New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a Supreme Court case from 1964, set a formidable threshold for defamation claims by public figures like Nunes. The justices cited a “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” even if it includes “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.” The tweets against Nunes appear to fall well within those bounds. But Nunes ignores that landmark ruling (perhaps because, like Justice Clarence Thomas, he would like to see Sullivan overturned). Instead, he cites a smattering of other cases to defend his “fundamental constitutional interest and entitlement to the uninterrupted enjoyment of his reputation.” One of his longest citations isn’t from law, but a passage from Shakespeare’s Othello in which Iago bemoans that “he that filches from me my good name Robs me of that which not enriches him, And makes me poor indeed.”

So why embark on what appears to be a doomed legal endeavor? Perhaps Nunes genuinely believes he’s the victim of a conspiracy theory by Democrats and America’s foreign adversaries. If there’s evidence to support this, Nunes doesn’t offer it. “The full scope of the conspiracy, including the names of all participants and the level of involvement of donors and members of the Democratic Party, is unknown at this time and will be the subject of discovery in this action,” he noted in the complaint. In other words, Nunes wants to go on a fishing expedition to satiate his political grievances, and he wants the courts to light the way.

Or maybe Nunes is trying to use the legal system to get revenge on his political opponents. Defending oneself against litigation is onerous even for those with the financial means to fight back. (Mair urged her Twitter followers on Monday night to donate to her legal defense fund.) The rich have always wielded the American legal system as a cudgel against critics, as Peter Thiel did in financing the Hulk Hogan lawsuit that ultimately killed Gawker. That a member of Congress would attempt to do so is deeply disturbing.

Nunes’s largely anonymous Twitter critics cast him as a shameless partisan hack-- someone who abuses power and the legal process to injure his political opponents, who plays fast and loose with the truth to advance partisan goals, and who’s prone to conspiratorial thinking on the flimsiest of grounds. They say he lacks the temperament and honor to serve on the House Intelligence Committee and safeguard the nation’s secrets. His lawsuit only proves them right.

The headline in the most widely read newspaper in Nunes' district, the Fresno Bee, was By suing Twitter and parody account @DevinCow, Nunes makes himself a laughingstock. Reporter Marek Warszawski wrote that "unless the Tulare Republican plans to undo the Constitution, his lawsuit will never get out of the barn" and reminded readers that Nunes had been a co-sponsor of a piece of legislation by Tom Rice (R-SC) in 2017 called the "Discouraging Frivolous Lawsuits Act."

Nunes’ antics would be tolerable, at least somewhat, if he were good at his job. Which is to serve the people of his district, not act as President Trump’s mole. Unfortunately, after eight terms on Capitol Hill, his list of legislative accomplishments looks up to an earthworm.

Little wonder Nunes hasn’t held a public forum around these parts since 2010. (And, no, those chummy radio appearances and speeches at Republican fundraisers don’t count.) He doesn’t care to engage anyone, besides those in lockstep with him, on air quality, water, immigration, nothing.

Despite the doltishness of the conspiracy theories he propagates, Nunes is no dummy. He knows what he’s doing is legally bogus. The only reason to file it is for attention it gets him.

Since Democrats took control of the House, Nunes’ national status has shrunk. This lawsuit, and those he threatens to file, is nothing but a politician grasping at paper straws to stay relevant.

Nunes will use the headlines and Fox News appearances to raise even more money among like-minded Republicans. Thanks to his staunch defense of Trump, our congressman raised $12.6 million (and spent $11.5) on his re-election campaign.

Now the coffers need replenishing, so why not pull a stunt that will only ingratiate him with right-wing hearts and minds? Especially those with deep pockets to go with their persecution complexes.

And, by the way, the very small and numerically insignificant Nunes' Cow twitter account (about 1,200 followers before Nunes filed his frivolous suit), is about to overtake has now overtaken Nunes' own Twitter account in terms of followers. Nunes has 397,000 followers as of this writing, and Devin Nunes' Cow now has a rapidly expanding 574,000 followers. As you can see, on Tuesday after the brouhaha had already begun, the Cow account had barely 70,000 followers. Thanks to Nunes' whining, the Cow account can reach almost 500 hundred times as many people as it used to-- sharing everything Nunes' wishes no one was thinking about or talking about. Still no declared candidates against him... yet.

Trump's Proposal Was Radical-- AOC And Elizabeth Warren Are Reformers

I wish that crazy Trump would just settle down and go spend his days playing golf again so AOC could get Congress working on a sensible agenda. You know who's work I'm really enjoying? Eric Levitz at New York Magazine. Once a poetry lecturer at Johns Hopkins, this guy has been writing excellent essays on the nexus of where politics meets the world of finance. And this pinned tweet is pretty awesome too, don't you think?

His latest, AOC Thinks Concentrated Wealth Is Incompatible With Democracy. So Did Our Founders, shows he still has a poetic heart. He's become a reliable defender of Alexandria Ocasio every time the forces of the extreme right mass against her and her program. When Hannity spewed out his creed about how "general economic equality is not a precondition for the American dream, but rather, an insurmountable obstacle to it," as a way of trying to rouse his viewers against Ocasio's tax ideas, Levitz noted that "after popularizing the idea of a 70 percent top marginal tax rate earlier this month, the freshman congresswoman recently suggested that the mere existence of billionaires was both immoral, and a threat to American democracy."

What Ocasio said (in an interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on Martin Luther King Day) was that she doesn't "think that a system that allows billionaires to exist when there are parts of Alabama where people are still getting ringworm because they don’t have access to public health is wrong.” The day day Ocasio approvingly quoted an op-ed by the economists Gabriel Zucman and Emmanuel Saez, which argued that the purpose of high taxes on the wealthy wasn’t merely to generate revenue, but rather, to safeguard "democracy against oligarchy." Recall, these are the two who have been advising Elizabeth Warren on the matter of her wealth tax proposal.

Hannity’s not buying it. The Fox News host informed his audience Wednesday that Ocasio-Cortez had “called the American dream immoral,” and that she wants to “empower the government to confiscate” said dream. “Better hide your nice things,” Hannity advised his audience (whom he ostensibly believes to be composed primarily of billionaires), “because here come the excess police.”

Hannity and his attorney

Hannity was hardly alone in deriding AOC’s antipathy for billionaires as fundamentally un-American. But in reality, there’s nothing foreign or communistic about the idea that concentrated wealth is incompatible with democracy, or all-too compatible with mass poverty. Republicans might call such notions radical. But many of our republic’s founders would have called them common sense.

Compare AOC’s first argument-- that the simultaneous existence of billionaires and poverty is immoral, and thus justifies steeply progressive taxation-- with Thomas Jefferson’s reflections in 1785. During a visit to the French countryside, Jefferson found himself scandalized by “the condition of the labouring poor.” In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson wrote that the extremity of European inequality was not only morally suspect, but economically inefficient. Aristocrats had grown so wealthy, they were happy to leave their lands uncultivated, even as masses of idle workers were eager to improve it. Thus, these proto-billionaires undermined both the peasants’ ability to transcend mere subsistence, and their society’s capacity to develop economically:

[T]he solitude of my walk led me into a train of reflections on that unequal division of property which occasions the numberless instances of wretchedness which I had observed in this country and is to be observed all over Europe. The property of this country is absolutely concentered in a very few hands…I asked myself what could be the reason that so many should be permitted to beg who are willing to work, in a country where there is a very considerable proportion of uncultivated lands? These lands are kept idle mostly for the aske of game. It should seem then that it must be because of the enormous wealth of the proprietors which places them above attention to the increase of their revenues by permitting these lands to be laboured.

Here is how Jefferson proposes to address the obscene coexistence of concentrated wealth and underemployed workers:

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right…It is too soon yet in our country to say that every man who cannot find employment but who can find uncultivated land, shall be at liberty to cultivate it, paying a moderate rent. But it is not too soon to provide by every possible means that as few as possible shall be without a little portion of land. The small landholders are the most precious part of a state. [Emphasis Levitz's.]

If Ocasio-Cortez’s views are un-American, then surely these words from our third president’s are, as well.

...[AOC is] channeling one deeply rooted strain of American thought on economic morality. And while that strain might have been marginal among the leaders of the American Revolution, it was pervasive among its foot soldiers (there’s a reason the leading propagandist of the war effort, Thomas Paine, was one of the earliest champions of an American welfare state).

Regardless, Ocasio-Cortez’s second argument against the existence of billionaires-- that concentrated wealth is incompatible with genuine democracy-- was something close to conventional wisdom among the founders (including those who opposed democracy).

America’s first political theorists took these truths to be self-evident: that a person could not exercise political liberty if he did not possess a modicum of economic autonomy, and that disparities in wealth inevitably produced disparities of political power.

The notion that political freedom has a material basis did not originate with Karl Marx and the creed of Communism; it was a core idea of the 17th-century British political theorist James Harrington, and his formulation of classical republicanism. A man who does not own the means of his own reproduction can never exercise political freedom, Harrington argued, because “the man that cannot live upon his own must be servant.” Likewise, the man of immense wealth-- whose fortune consigns great masses of men to servitude-- is inevitably a kind of tyrant. After all, “where there is inequality of estates, there must be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be no commonwealth.”

These premises deeply informed the American founders’ conception of republican liberty. The Jeffersonian ideal of a yeoman’s republic derived from the conviction that only independent landowners were politically free-- and only a (very) rough equality in the distribution of land could preserve such freedom. Even a consummate elitist like Alexander Hamilton couldn’t help but echo Harringtonian thinking, writing in the Federalist Papers, “A power over man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”

...Thus, Ocasio-Cortez’s belief in the moral necessity of mass democracy (and women’s suffrage, and the abolition of slavery) would have struck many a Founding Father as radical. But her insistence that true democracy is incompatible with America’s present distribution of property-- in which the richest 0.1 percent of Americans command as much wealth as the poorest 90 percent-- would have struck Jefferson & Co. as tautological. And a large body of political science research suggests that their shared intuition is correct.

All of which is to say: If the right to self-government is an inextricable component of the American dream, then it isn’t AOC who regards that dream as immoral-- it’s Sean Hannity, and every other multimillionaire who believes that legislators should not invent “many devices for subdividing property.”

Yesterday Stephanie Kelton reminded me that Warren's wealth tax proposal went from the 2% she proposed for wealth over $50 million to 3% on wealth over a billion dollars. Trump's proposal called for real confiscation-- 14.25%. AOC and Warren are just sensible reformers. Kelton was on NPR's Marketplace Thursday. She told Kai Ryssdal that "If you control your own currency and you have bills that are coming due, it means you can always afford to pay the bills on time. You can never go broke, you can never be forced into bankruptcy. You're nothing like a household. Ryssdal tried explaining what he took away from his talk with her and what MMT is all about.

Because the government controls how many dollars are out in the economy, Kelton and MMT said Congress and the president shouldn’t worry about balancing the money coming in through taxes with the money going out to fund government programs.

For those of you screaming “Inflation! Inflation! Inflaaation!” at the idea of the government creating fresh money every time it needs to pay the bills, calm down. The MMT economists know about Weimar, Germany, too. If Congress stops worrying about balancing the budget, Kelton said the government could spend too much money into the economy with ambitious programs and end up causing inflation.

That’s where tax policy comes in. Kelton said taxes can act as a “release valve” for inflation.

To wrap your brain around this concept, picture a bathroom sink. Think of the government and its ability to create more money whenever it needs to as the faucet and that bucket area of the sink where the water goes as the economy.

The government controls how much money, or water, is flowing into the economy. It spends money into the economy by building interstates or paying farm subsidies or funding programs.

“And so as those dollars reach the economy, they begin to fill up that bucket, and what you want to do is be very mindful about how full that bucket is getting or you're going to get an inflation problem,” Kelton said.

Inflation is where the sink overflows. If that happens, Kelton said there are two ways to fix it: “You can slow the flow of dollars coming into that bucket. That means the government then has to start slowing it's rate of spending, or you can open up the drain and let some of those dollars out of the economy. And that's what we do when we collect taxes.”

Let's back up for a second and think how this stuff works. Chairman Jay Powell and the gang at the Federal Reserve are the people thinking about the economy's big picture and keeping that water level right.

The Fed uses monetary policy-- interest rates-- to keep that sink we were talking about from getting too empty or too full. The MMT folks want Congress to be doing that using fiscal policy-- government spending and taxing decisions.

Randall Wray, a senior scholar at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College and one of the developers of MMT, said he thinks the Fed should stop focusing on inflation.

“If you ask what I think ideal monetary policy would be, what the Fed really should do is stabilize interest rates at a low level," he said.

The catch, of course, with telling the Fed to just keep interest rates low and controlling inflation with fiscal policy is the political reality in Washington.

“The making of fiscal policy, it’s never neat and tidy. It’s not efficient,” said Sarah Binder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a political science professor at George Washington University. “The political constraints on members makes it harder to use fiscal policy and to use tax policy,” she said.

Running the federal government the way the MMT economists would if they were in charge would require Democrats and Republicans to change the way they think about fiscal policy and monetary policy.

Midnight Meme Of The Day!

-by Noah

Dear America (even you, Republikooks),

Do the points in this meme sound harrowingly familiar? Do they make you think of anyone in particular?

You can put a name to fascism in America now. Donald J. Trump has made fascism synonymous with his own name. We can't say that one of his former wives, Ivana, didn't warn us when she mentioned his bedtime reading of Hitler books. Have you had enough yet?

I don't need to go through each item on the list. They all describe the current republican form of dream government. I'll just point out one of Trump's most recent expressions of Republican fascist desires, a controlled media. You know how they always bitch about the so-called "liberal media." A couple of days ago, Herr Trump had this to say on the topic:

It's frankly disgusting that the press is able to write whatever it wants to write. People should look into it.

Trump then threatened to take NBC off the air by revoking NBC's license to broadcast. Too bad it doesn't work that way, moron! The networks are corporations. I thought you didn't like regulations for corporations. Obviously, you appointed an FCC head without you knowing the first thing about the FCC, but what else is new? You know nothing about the Constitution either.

By the way, Mr. Orange Fascist Lunatic, someone did look into the idea of a free press. His name was Thomas Jefferson. Like all presidents, he often got irked by the media, but he had a much more mature and sane response. Here's something he had to say about it. It seems very apropos right now.

...were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the later.

So, Señor Trumpanzee, it's obvious that Jefferson was a bigger man than you will ever be. You are being, as Bill Maher would say, a whiney little bitch. To that I might add a big Fuck You and I would remind you that Constitution Avenue is lined with many lamp posts.

21 Kids and a Scientist Sue to Force Obama to Fight Climate Change

Climate Change: The Next Generation from BillMoyers.com on Vimeo. Kelsey Juliana, an 18-year-old activist, is fighting climate change in the courts and walking across the country to spread the word on global warming.

by Gaius Publius

(Implicit in the headline, of course, is that it will take a lawsuit to force him. As James Hansen's written testimony makes clear, that implication is correct.)

I've been meaning to write this piece for a while, and my hesitation stems from the fact that it's actually at least a magazine-length article, if I do it any justice. Here are the main pieces, and I urge you to explore them, assuming the longer article won't be written today, or this week.

Those pieces:

     ▪ According to Thomas Jefferson (and many others), in principle the earth belongs to the living, not the dead. One of the outflows from that idea is that the dead should not write rules that constrain the living from exercising their own will. Another idea is that the dead should not "eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead."

     "Usufruct" is a Latin name for a specific kind of limited legal right with respect to property. To hold a property "in usufruct" means the right to (a) enjoy the use (usus) of a property (like, say, the earth and its atmosphere, or a plot of land) without destroying it; and (b) derive profits (fructus) from the property, again, without destroying it. (The right to destroy a property is, rightly, named abusus.) Jefferson in his letter to Madison holds in principle that "lands" are held by one generation for the next in "usufruct" — for non-destructive use and profit — and for that use only. If this were not the case and the land (the earth) instead destroyed, the next generation would inherit a useless thing, and a thing would remain forever the property of the dead.

     ▪ Climate change, in a very real sense, is destroying the property held in common by all humans — our earth and its ability to sustain civilized (non-hunger-gatherer) human life. If climate change is not stopped or reversed, when this generation of Kochs and Tillersons and, yes, Obamas, passes from the earth, and the generation that inherits it looks around, they will see that their elders have not only eaten its fruits — they've eaten the earth itself. That they've abused the earth for their own enjoyment only, then died and given a dead thing to the living.

     ▪ The principle that the government holds the country and its common resources "in public trust" is established in law.

     ▪ From these principles flows one more way to use force against this generation's "climate criminals" — and I'm using the term in a very real sense, considered in light of the ideas above. That way is the force of law, in particular, the law that constrains the government to protect what it holds, including the air, the atmosphere, "in public trust."

     ▪ There have been a number of lawsuits in U.S. courts attempting to force the government to reverse the destruction of the atmosphere by CO2 emissions. As the article below details, they have had some success at the state level. There's now a federal case, and it's being brought by 21 children on behalf of their generation — and climate scientist James Hansen, the grandfather of one of the children.

I hope you can see how this piece, if it were to explore each bullet-point above, would become a lengthy article indeed. For example, I'm not done with the idea of launching a very real "climate criminals" project. But for now, the news.

21 Kids and a Climate Scientist Sue to Force Obama to Fight Climate Change

I'd like to focus on the federal lawsuit, though much could be written about the various state suits as well. Here's John Light writing at Bill Moyers' site:

21 Kids and a Climate Scientist Are Suing to Force Obama to Fight Climate Change

When the young people working with Our Children’s Trust talk about their lawsuits to compel governments to act on climate change, they like to use a quote attributed to Mahatma Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

This month, it looks like these young activists have made it to step three: On Nov. 12, three fossil fuel lobby groups asked a judge to let them join the federal case as co-defendants against the 21 children (and a climate scientist) who are suing [pdf; this is the lawsuit document itself] the Obama administration and federal regulatory agencies to take serious, science-based action on climate change.

The case is the culmination of a series of lawsuits brought by various groups of young people in all 50 states since 2011. Their argument is that the federal government is infringing on the constitutional rights of America’s youth and future generations by continuing to allow fossil fuel extraction and consumption. These activities cause climate change by damaging the atmosphere, and the atmosphere is a public trust, they say, that should be protected for future generations. Ultimately, they argue that this type of pollution discriminates against young people, because young people will suffer the impact of climate change far more than today’s policymakers.

Light then details the success of similar suits, including one in Washington State and another in the Netherlands. Though I won't quote those sections, each of them is interesting. About the federal suit he writes (my emphasis):

In August, Our Children’s Trust took its case to the federal level with 21 young Americans and renowned climatologist James Hansen as plaintiffs. (Hansen’s 17-year-old granddaughter Sophie is one of the plaintiffs, and in the case he plays both the role of her guardian and “guardian” to as-yet-unborn generations.) Last Tuesday, the Obama administration filed a motion to dismiss the youths’ suit, arguing that the plaintiffs don’t have the right to bring the lawsuit in the first place, and that even if they did, the court doesn’t have authority to create climate policy. The judge may or may not choose to dismiss; if the case goes to trial, it will be this winter.

Note that the defendant is the Obama administration, and that the administration is contesting the suit. That is, the Obama administration is upholding its right to allow the fossil fuel companies to destroy the land it holds "in trust" for the children and grandchildren of those in current control, including ... itself.

Shorter lawsuit: "You can't destroy the world we will live in when you're dead." Shorter Obama: "Yes, we can, and we'll fight your attempt to stop us."

Exxon's Friends Are Asking to Join Obama As Co-Defendants

That's no joke. As you read above, the fossil fuel companies, through their entirely-controlled trade associations, have asked to join Obama and his administration as co-defendants. As well they should, in my view. Light again (my emphasis):

But for the plaintiffs [the children and Hansen], the big development this month was the request by three of Washington’s most powerful trade groups — each representing major players in the fossil fuel industry, including ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Koch Industries and BP America — asking the judge to let them join the Obama administration in the suit as co-defendants. That means the American Petroleum Institute (API), the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) would make their case side-by-side with the Obama administration, using their own lawyers — including Roger Martella, the former General Counsel of George W. Bush’s EPA — to argue against the youths and Hansen.

“It’s fairly common for trade associations to move to participate in lawsuits that could affect their interest,” says Michael B. Gerrard, a professor at Columbia Law School and the director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Why would they do that? I think for several reasons. First, as Gerrard notes: “I think it shows that they’re not utterly certain it will be dismissed.”Second, they can throw their high-priced lawyers into the case. And finally ... well, perps of a feather flock together. As well they should.

Documents for Your Perusal

I think this could turn into a big deal, and yet fly way under most radars, including most (but not all) radars at MSNBC and PBS. (Obviously it hasn't flown under Bill Moyers' radar at PBS, and it may well make the news at the climate-excellent All In With Chris Hayes.)

If you'd like to read some of the source material, the data I'll be analyzing for later presentation, here are some links:

• The lawsuit itself:
  http://ourchildrenstrust.org/sites/default/files/15.08.12YouthComplaintAgainstUS.pdf
   
• James Hansen's written testimony (a fascinating document):
  http://csas.ei.columbia.edu/2015/08/12/youth-versus-obama-dr-hansens-testimony-against-the-government/
   
• Thomas Jefferson's Letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789:
  http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents/thomas-jefferson/letters-of-thomas-jefferson/jefl81.php

There are others, but these make a great place to start, as well as good reads in themselves, especially the Hansen testimony.

"If a man eat up the usufruct of the lands, then the lands would belong to the dead"

I want to quote some of that Jefferson letter (excerpts partly gathered from here; my emphasis):

I set out on this ground which I suppose to be self evident, "that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living;" that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by an individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, and reverts to the society....

[T]he child, the legatee or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, and to which they are subject. Then no man can by natural right oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, and then the lands would belong to the dead, and not to the living, which would be reverse of our principle. What is true of every member of the society individually, is true of them all collectively, since the rights of the whole can be no more than the sum of the rights of individuals.

What Jefferson says about a generation destroying the use of a land by charging it with a debt that the next generation can never repay (something that France did to Haiti, by the way, when France was driven outand Haitian slaves freed), is equally true of any "debt" that destroys the use of a property held by one generation in trust for the next. We're going to follow this case closely. I hope you will follow it with us.

"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you..."

GP

Guest Post By Oren Jacobson-- Would Thomas Jefferson Recognize American Democracy Today?

Looks like we lost Oren Jacobson as a candidate against Lipinski, at least for the this cycle, but we've gained a sharp and dedicated new correspondent from Chicagoland. Last week he shared his reflections after Obama's speech in Charleston. This evening his topic is reflections on the Declaration of Indpendence as it has evolved and continues to evolve. His targets are the evils of systemic partisan gerrymandering and the predponderant influence of Big Money on out electoral system and their impact on American electoral democracy.

American (r)Evolution
by Oren Jacobson

Each year on the Fourth of July, I read the Declaration of Independence aloud in its entirety. With every reading I am struck by something different as if I must avail myself through life experiences of the lessons and messages contained in that parchment. This year, as political candidates launch campaigns which draw into question the way we allow the system to operate, I found myself pondering how our Founders might view the breakdown of our democratic institutions.

Despite our temptation to cast our Founding Fathers as an intellectually homogenous and unified group, they were far from it. Division, personal animus, and disagreement ran rampant. They did agree, though, on two key points. First, that power could be used to suppress the rights and freedoms of the people. Second, that the people had not only the right, but the obligation, to address what ails them.

For our Founding Fathers, the dangerous power that threatened them was tyranny. The symptoms of tyranny, however, can exist without a tyrant. Power need not be centralized to be abused at the expense of the people. We face a much different threat to our national well being than our Founders did. The dangerous combination of politicians who can pick their own voters and unfettered money in politics funnels power to the few over the many.

In 1992 there were 103 Congressional districts whose vote was close enough to the presidential outcome to be considered a swing district. This meant that 76% of our Congress was determined before the election even happened. In 2012 that number dwindled down to just 35 swing seats. 92% of the nation’s Congressional DNA was determined before a single vote was cast.

Some of this is the natural selection process of people living alongside like minded people. For example there are many states that are clearly Republican or Democratic states. Most of it, however, is a result of a political process called Gerrymandering. This process essentially allows elected politicians to draw favorable districts and thus preserve their power.

In 2012 Democratic candidates for the House of Representatives earned 1.4 million more votes than Republicans. However, this “victory” for Democrats left them with a 33 seat disadvantage in the House. The GOP had control of about 54% of the body despite having fewer people vote for them and their platform.

The problem with Gerrymandering isn’t simply that one party can artificially maintain power by taking advantage of a loophole in our system, though. It’s the incentive structure it creates for elected leaders. If I don’t have to worry about a challenge from the other party then all I have to do is keep my base happy. Therefore, my only threat, is from a primary. How do I prevent a primary challenge? I don’t take positions, or cast votes, that give the other side what they want. Compromising with the other party compromises my career. We’re taught that all successful relationships are built on trust and compromise. The result of this systemic flaw removes both.

Gerrymandering is just one major crack in the foundation of this country. The other is the influence of money in politics. In 2012 roughly 55,000 people provided the maximum contribution to a candidate according to OpenSecrets.org, a website that tracks all campaign contributions. That represents about .0002% of the population. Nearly 40% of all campaign money that year came from around 125 people, or .0000004% of the population.

Are we so willfully blind as to believe that elected officials will be just as responsive to the will of the people as they are to the will of the people who fund them?

What our founders wanted to do was to protect us from runaway power. They could never imagine a system that allowed those in control to draw boundaries that nearly ensured they would remain so. These were men who believed that campaigning was beneath them. That their election should be based on their merit and service so they would hardly be comfortable with the idea of non-stop campaigns funded primarily by the nobility of twenty-first century America. These men, I believe, would redress these grievances.

Unlike our forefathers, though, such redress need not be claimed by the barrel of the gun. We don’t need another American Revolution, but it seems clear that an American Evolution is necessary and overdue. We need not abolish our form of government to ensure that the power and purpose of democracy is protected, but we must heed the advice of these great men and alter it.

Redistricting reform that ensures non-partisan boundaries is the first common sense step we can take. Some states have already made strides in this regard. The Supreme Court just upheld a measure in Arizona that yielded an independent redistricting committee, taking the politics out of the structure of the electoral process. Adoption of similar solutions nationwide would do much to preserve the integrity of democratic representation in our country.

As it stands incumbents will win at better than a 90% rate and our elected officials will spend at least 40% of their time fundraising to protect their power. The question our elected officials should be asking themselves is whether they should follow the will of the people on an issue, or lead them. Instead they currently ask themselves how to ensure they have enough funding for the next election. Let’s make that a moot point.

Our national GDP is north of $16 trillion annually. With as little as 1/10th of one percent of that money we could fund all federal elections in the next cycle. Federally funded elections, in which each candidate had exactly the same amount of funding, would eliminate, or at least greatly reduce, the influence of money in politics. Overturning the Citizens United decision by constitutional amendment would also go far to that end.

Our Founders gave us the power to change the way our system operates, and called on us to do so in the ever present words of the Declaration. That we have ceded it willingly, or passively, is a fact for which we must hold ourselves to account. We have the government we deserve because we have the government we accept. So did our Founding Fathers. Until they decided they would no longer accept it. How long will we continue to accept ours?

"That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

– Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence

Nuttier than Steve Stockman? We bring you a real Texan, Dwayne Stovall

No, it's not the canine who's challenging Texas Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican primary, it's his master. Dwayne apparently isn't a big fan of "Beltway turtle" Mitch McConnell.

by Ken

Howie passed along this clip, and what can I say? It's Texas, friends.

If you're two-term Sen. John Cornyn, and you've spent your political career trying to be the kind of right-wing crackpot every Lone Star redneck crackpot can be proud of, the reality is that if you're up for reelection in 2014, the thing you have to watch out for is someone from the new generation of crackpots slithering around at you from the Even Farther Right. The senator has responded by trying to run on the coattails of his junior colleague, Sen. Rafael "Ted" Cruz. And luckily for the senator, nobody terribly scary has turned up, and according to Wikipedia the field is looking something like this:

• Curt Cleaver, hotel industry consultant and candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012
• Ken Cope, aerospace executive and retired Army Lieutenant Colonel
• John Cornyn, incumbent U.S. Senator
• Chris Mapp, businessman
• Reid Reasor, Tea Party member
• Steve Stockman, U.S. Representative
• Dwayne Stovall, bridge construction contractor
• Linda Vega, attorney and immigration activist

And would you believe that the most "serious" candidate is our old friend Steve Stockman, a man who has to be on anyone's short list for the Wackiest Member of Congress. (See Howie's February 2013 post "Texas Congressman Steve Stockman -- Domestic Terrorist?," and my post from the month before, "What's frightening, says Dana Milbank, is that the wacky Steve Stockman of the '90s 'no longer sounds like an outlier"'.")

Naturally our Steve is hoping to rally Teabagger support, seen as the new key to unseating merely "far right" Republican incumbents. Unfortunately for Steve, he's having trouble with his image as Mr. Conservative, partly because of rumblings about "ethical lapses."

Into the breach steps . . . Dwayne Stovall, who last week won the endorsement of a statewide Teabagger group called Grassroots America-We the People. Dwayne says he was waiting for a suitably "Jeffersonian" candidate to enter the race, and when it didn't happen, he had to take the plunge himself.

I'll bet ol' Tom Jefferson, wherever he is, couldn't be more proud.

#

Are The Rightists Smarter... Or Just More Motivated?

It's how the Bourbons saw themselves; it's how conservatives always see themselves, especially the plutocratic ones

Right after Obama was reelected, the Republican-controlled state government of North Carolina kicked an ALEC-initiated plan into high gear-- disenfranchising, to whatever extent they could, two of Obama's biggest constituencies, students and African-Americans. They've been spectacularly successful, just as other states controlled by right-wing governors and legislatures-- think Ohio, Wisconsin, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and, basically, the whole Old Confederacy-- have also been able to enact ALEC-based initiatives to diminish democracy, a form of government always hated and feared by the political right.

Why have they been so successful, even as the Democrats won the presidency, expanded their hold on the Senate under the worst set of circumstances and even won back a handful of House seats, despite the systemic incompetence of the DCCC? Are the Republicans smarter then the Democrats? Thinking ahead and winning control of so many state legislatures on the eve of a national redistricting year says more about the Democrats being stupid than the Republicans being smart, but I think there's more to it. Money is a huge motivator and, for the Republicans, a widely and wildly embraced one. Democrats-- at least the real ones, not the "New" ones-- would rather embrace idealism. But does idealism move them the way the bottom line moves Republican and, more to the point, those who finance the Republicans? I'm afraid not.

Investigative journalist and author Lee Fang, closes his new book, The Machine, with this quote from from Thomas Jefferson from a letter Jefferson wrote to George Washington while the former was in France. Jefferson, Fang asserts, feared for this era.

As he spent time in France, admiring a country filled with rich traditions and seemingly forward-looking cultural attitudes, he noted that a powerful elite could harness all political power in even themost tranquil of nations. In a letter to George Washington, Jefferson wrote: “Though the day may be at some distance, beyond the reach of our lives perhaps, yet it will certainly come, when a single fiber left of this institution will produce an hereditary aristocracy, which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”

The Day of the Kochs... the day when North Carolina's democracy could be purchased by fascist-leaning oligarch Art Pope and when one of America's two parties-- and half the other one-- could be bought outright by the special interest corporations and the wealthy families that control them. Fang began the final chapter with abother quote, this one from Bill Moyers and Berbard Weisberger:

Like the Bourbon kings of France, the lords of unrestrained, amoral capitalism never forgot anything.They learned from their defeat how to organize new strategies and messages, furnish the money to back them, and recapture control of the nation’s life.

I'm afraid the Obama years were one big wasted opportunity for progressives. Obama was the wrong guy at the wrong time. He was never going to fight effectively for the kind of progressive agenda he never really believed in in the first place. His two terms have been a dead zone in American history, which is a real tragedy, given the potential for social and economic progress-- completely squandered other than for gays-- following the catastrophic finale to Bush's 8 years of unrestrained greed and avarice. And it would have been some fight-- even if Obama was willing to give it a shot... and not one he was guaranteed to win.

Many conservatives clamor loudly for more state power. Congressman Tom Price, the former Republican Study Committee chairman and a former ALEC member before going to Congress, declared, “Our Founding Fathers understood the danger of amassing broad powers in the federal government at the expense of individual liberty.” The influence of groups like ALEC and SPN, decentralization can be a backdoor attempt to make broad, industrywide regulations more difficult to enforce. An example would be the Republican alternative idea for health reform: allowing insurance plans to be purchased across state lines. This health policy would replicate the failures of credit card deregulation, which allows companies to flee to states with the fewest consumer regulations. Employer-based health insurance policies could shift at any moment to plans in states where policyholders have limited coverage options or could be dropped for any reason.

Despite the bluster about individual and states’ rights, these policies are always about corporate profits first. Indeed, ALEC proposals-- like the ALEC-drafted Independent External Review for Health Benefits Plans Act-- have sought to strip the right of patients even to file a lawsuit against an insurance company.

...Control of state governments has allowed conservatives to advance far right policies, even with President Obama in the White House... [T]he state-based conservative infrastructure fought proxy battles against reforms at the national level, and the network of state groups has grown significantly since Obama’s election. But the chance for state-level fronts to really show their worth came only two years after Obama’s election. When Republicans swept the 2010 midterm elections, they won unprecedented gains. By 2011, with GOP leadership in state capitals across the country, conservatives were ready to declare war. In ten states where Republicans made gains in 2010, restrictive voting laws were passed the following year.

While the right has sought to chip away at worker protections as part of a broader antilabor agenda, their primary motivation has been to defund and weaken Democrats for future elections. Ed Gillespie, the Republican strategist coordinating a $40 million fund to help elect more Republican state legislators in 2010, saw state government as the path forward. First, he reasoned that because of the 2010 census, control of state legislatures would be critical in terms of the redistricting process that happens every ten years. “This will be the last election before redistricting, and there are 18 state chambers that could go either way and affect between 25 and 32 U.S. House seats,” Gillespie told the National Review before the election. Haley Barber, the chairman of the Republican Governors Association, was just as candid, displaying the goal of redistricting prominently on the website for his group. With control of enough state chambers, Republicans hoped to gerrymander their way into power for at least ten years.

Gloating shortly after the midterm election, Karl Rove spoke to an audience of Marcellus Shale gas-drillers (commonly known as the “fracking” industry) in Pittsburgh. In classic Rove fashion, he emphasized the partisan ramifications of the election as just a new policy landscape. Republicans had swept state legislative offices across the country, meaning the GOP could now gerrymander themselves into a power for the next decade. “He who controls the pen draws the line,” Rove said, “and he who draws the line decides the outcome of most contests.”

Self-serving petty partisans like Steve Israel and Debbie Wasserman Schultz can handle Reince Priebus and whomever Boehner appoints to head the NRCC-- they're on the same low tactical level-- but you can't expect someone like Israel or Wasserman Schultz to go up a long-term thinker. Neither is even modestly equipped.

The second reason national GOP strategists focused on gaining state-level control was to defund labor unions, thus weakening the Democratic Party. Controlling state government would provide an opportunity for Republicans to decertify and break public employee unions-- one of the largest contributors to Democrats in elections. The American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees spent $12.4 million in federal elections in 2010, making it one of the top pro-Democratic spenders in the country outside the party committees. Taking out AFSCME and unions like the Service Employees International union would deprive Democrats of some of their greatest allies during elections.

To test the waters, Resurgent Republic, a polling nonprofit Gillespie had founded with Rove in 2009 to provide constant messaging advice for the conservative movement, began producing surveys about attitudes related to public employees. The polling found that direct attacks on public employees, like teachers, as overpaid, could be effective with voters. The analysis found that the public viewed teachers’ unions with “disdain.” Resurgent Republic circulated a memo claiming that an assault on public employees could “galvanize citizens” against “the new federal bureaucrat elite-- paid for by struggling private sector families.” Portraying public employees as leeches fed by taxpayer dollars could be a “tipping point” in the war on the labor movement, Gillespie and Rove argued.

...The critics of public-employee pay, particularly that of public teachers, exaggerated their claims. Several Republicans and right-wing commentators claimed teachers in [Wisconsin] made “double” the average of private sector employees, or that the average teacher is paid over $100,000. In reality, the average teacher salary in Wisconsin is about $51,264, according to PolitiFact, the nonpartisan fact-checking website.

The sustained focus on teacher and other public servant salaries obscured the true drivers of Wisconsin’s budget deficit. The budget gap could have been filled by simply closing an Internet sales tax loophole, getting rid of a special interest property tax exemption, and forcing Wisconsin corporations to pay their share of state corporate income taxes (many Wisconsin corporations, like many American companies, set up offshore accounts to avoid paying taxes). Rather than taking a pragmatic approach to ending the deficit, Walker’s budget included tens of millions in additional tax cuts. Moreover, ending collective bargaining rights alone does nothing to affect the budget. Wisconsin public employee unions voluntarily offered full concessions on pay and benefits. The Walker administration demand to end collective bargaining was only an effort to weaken progressive institutions, not fix the budget... The manufactured ou

...The net result is a second term that consists of fighting to retain the few achievements from the first, endless political squabbling over minor issues, and, ultimately, stalemate on the big issues that grip society, from climate change to America’s disappearing middle class. Republicans failed to deliver Mitt Romney to the presidency, but the conservative machine has largely triumphed in preventing the wave of progressive reform that seemed quite possible at the end of the Bush presidency or any permanent realignment toward liberalism.

One must marvel at the right, at least with the same respect given to an early venture capitalist whose savvy investment reaped an incredible return. Wealthy patrons and big business plowed money into stopping what seemed like an inevitable wave of progressive reforms, and were ultimately successful in many ways. Of course, it wasn’t just financial advantage. Smart decisions were made to duplicate and build upon the few tactical advantages built by Democrats over the years and to block progressive legislative items writ large. The resources of ideological billionaires teamed with the near-limitless corporate treasuries of Fortune 500 companies (and their K Street lobbyists) swallowed and defeated much of President Obama’s hopeful plans for America.