This item by J.P. Green was originally published on December 16, 2011.
One of the conclusions you get from Jedediah Purdy’s Democracy post “The Roberts Court v. America” is that the Democrats were too hasty in confirming the current CJ and the other conservative justices.
Subtitled “How the Roberts Supreme Court is using the First Amendment to craft a radical, free-market jurisprudence,” Purdy paints a disturbing portrait of a court majority dedicated to gratifying wealthy elites at the expense of working people. Most Dems were generally aware of this, but Purdy’s report should heighten concern about the future of economic progress in America under a High Court dedicated to de-regulation. As Purdy summarizes the philosophy of the current High Court:

In the last few years, the Supreme Court and lower federal courts have shown a new hostility toward laws that regulate the economy and try to limit the effects of economic power. They have declared a series of laws unconstitutional, most famously limits on corporate campaign spending (the Supreme Court) and a key part of Congress’s 2010 health-care reform act (among others the 11th Circuit Court in Atlanta; the Supreme Court will decide the issue in the coming year)… and struck down other state laws that try to constrain the effect of wealth on elections. These decisions don’t just trim around the edges of regulation: They go to the heart of whether government can act to balance out private economic power in an era of growing economic inequality and insecurity. These decisions chime with some of the more troubling themes of the time. They fit well with the economics-minded idea that most of life is best seen as a marketplace, and with the right-wing mistrust of government that has metastasized into Tea Party contempt and anger.
Liberals have denounced many of these decisions, but they have not yet spelled out the larger pattern. What’s missing from the criticism is a picture of what these cases add up to: an identity for the Roberts Court as the judicial voice of the idea that nearly everything works best on market logic, that economic models of behavior capture most of what matters, and political, civic, and moral distinctions mostly amount to obscurantism and special pleading.

The author believes the current court is headed in the direction of the “Lochner era,” named for an emblematic case which in which the Supreme Court of 1905 launched an era of some 200 decisions bashing worker rights and undermining economic fairness to benefit the already-wealthy, laying the foundation for unfettered corporate abuse. “The new cases have different doctrinal logic, and the economy has changed vastly, but the bottom lines are eerily alike: giving constitutional protection to unequal economic power in the name of personal liberty.”
Purdy sketches the ideological underpinnings of the Roberts Court:

The Supreme Court’s several-pronged attack on the regulation of spending, selling, and buying reinforces one of the most persistent and pernicious intellectual mistakes of the time…the idea that markets are natural phenomena, arising from their own organic principles and free human action, while politics and lawmaking are artificial interferences with this natural activity. In fact, as sophisticated economists, lawyers, and others have always understood, markets are the products of law, which defines and enforces the ownership and exchanges that set the market in motion. A laissez-faire market arises from one kind of law, a more social-democratic market from another. There are things to say for and against both kinds of markets, and any real-life economy has complex blends of both elements–for instance, minimum-wage laws, bans on racial discrimination and prostitution, speed and weight limits for long-haul truckers, and so forth are all straightforward limits on laissez-faire market freedom. It is obscurantist to suggest that some version of the laissez-faire market is a natural baseline, and anything that departs from it needs special justification…

Of recent decisions by the Roberts majority, Purdy adds,

That is the spirit of the new cases. Taken to their limit, they would set aside the intellectual and political gains of decades of struggle in the twentieth century: the New Deal recognition that the country must take responsibility for shaping its own economy, and the decision to remove the old American romance with economic libertarianism from constitutional judging…The new jurisprudence shares some special features with the old–in particular, a meshing of constitutional principle with economic libertarianism that calls into question the authority of democratic government to shape markets and, above all, check economic power.

Regarding the upcoming deliberations on HCR, Purdy writes, “The most extreme scenario would begin with invalidating the 2010 Affordable Care Act, but, win or lose, the mere fact that there is a viable constitutional argument against the law is a sign of how far the new economic libertarianism has gone.” Regarding elections and spending, he writes “It is in this market-fixated climate that courts can declare that spending is speech, advertisement is argument, and the transfer of marketing data is a core concern of the First Amendment.”
President Obama was able to get Justices Sotomayor and Kagan confirmed. But now the Senate Republicans are about blocking all Obama court appointments. If the Republicans win, Dems should put Republican court nominees, and particularly their economic philosophy, through more intense scrutiny. One more free market ideologue on the court, and reforms like the minimum wage, health and safety regulation and all remaining elements of the social and economic safety net will all be endangered, if not shredded.
Of course, the term “Robert’s Court” somewhat disses the four liberal/moderate court justices, who may be in the majority on occasion. There is also an argument that one more reactionary Supreme Court Justice won’t make such a big difference. But a 6-3 High Court would prolong the rule of the ‘free’ market purists, potentially for decades longer than the current 5-4 conservative majority.
Progressives have been fairly vigilant in monitoring the records of Court nominees with respect to their views on abortion, gun control, Gay marriage, prayer in school and all of the social issues. But it’s clear that Dems have been too lax in giving conservative court nominees a free ride on their economic philosophies, which are proving hugely consequential to America’s future.
There’s lots more in Purdy’s article that Dems should read to better understand what’s at stake in the November elections. But if political moderates needed just one good reason to vote Democratic in 2012, Purdy’s got it.

This item by James Vega was originally published on December 5, 2011.
It’s impossible to open a magazine or newspaper these days without running across a fawning, completely credulous article that breathlessly describes a new breed of non-Democratic “moderates” and “centrists” who are said to be sprouting like mushrooms across the country.
These new moderates and centrists are profoundly different from the moderate and centrist political strategists of the Clinton era who sought to prod the Democratic Party toward the “center” in order to win the votes of political independents. Progressives strongly disagreed with these “New Democrats” on many issues but the vast majority of the Clinton era moderates and centrists (with the utterly dishonorable exception of the reptilian Dick Morris and a handful of other political chameleons) were at the time and have subsequently remained firmly and unequivocally committed to working within the Democratic Party.
The new breed of moderates and centrists, in very dramatic contrast, are described as being completely disillusioned with the Democratic Party as well as the GOP and currently wandering about in the political wilderness in search of a new third party or some innovative new technological platform that will allow them to create a political formation far beyond the snares of both Republican and Democratic orthodoxy.
In principle, it is possible to imagine a set of voters who might be attracted to such an alternative. There certainly are many moderate Republicans who feel deeply estranged from the current Republican Party and who yearn for “old fashioned” Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller, George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole but who, at the same time, simply cannot imagine actually voting for a Democrat. On the Democratic side, even though Obama is in many ways the most centrist Dem in recent memory, he is still sufficiently liberal to make some of the more conservative Democratic voters vainly wish for an alternative that is less liberal and more “traditional values” oriented than the modern Democratic Party.
But there’s a massive, unavoidable problem with the idea that the current self-appointed leaders of this potential voting bloc genuinely reflect the views of most “middle of the road/neither Democrat nor Republican” voters. A central pillar of any honest moderate or centrist perspective today must necessarily be the recognition that — while a moderate voter may feel deeply estranged from both political parties – it is also simply impossible for him or her to ignore the fact that the Republicans are vastly more intransigent, rigid and uncompromising in their positions than are the Democrats.
A genuine moderate or centrist is, by the very definition of the two terms, someone who wants to see sincere efforts at compromise coming from both sides of the partisan divide rather than the total capitulation of one side or the other. Yet only a person who is completely – and I mean completely — immersed in the conservative and Republican world-view can seriously believe and assert that the Republicans have actually been just as flexible and willing to compromise as have the Dems.
E.J. Dionne says it well:

Some of my middle-of-the-road columnist friends keep ascribing our difficulties to structural problems in our politics. A few call for a centrist third party. But the problem we face isn’t about structures or the party system. It’s about ideology — specifically a right-wing ideology that has temporarily taken over the Republican Party and needs to be defeated before we can have a reasonable debate between moderate conservatives and moderate progressives about our country’s future.

He continues:

If moderates really want to move the conversation to the center, they should devote their energies to confronting those who are blocking the way. And at this moment, the obstruction is coming from a radicalized right.

In fact, opinion polls show that there are indeed many sincere moderates and centrists who do accept this basic reality. Progressive Democrats may disagree with this group on many subjects, but can nonetheless still grant that they are essentially honest and sincere.
On the other hand, however, a good number of the self-proclaimed leaders and theoreticians of this new centrist “movement” belong to three quite different and substantially less admirable groups. A quick rundown includes three distinct subcategories:

• “Tokyo Rose” Dems who gleefully bash all things Democratic on Fox News
• Faux-sanctimonious “both sides are equally to blame” hypocrites
• Double-talking “have it both ways” verbal gymnasts

Let’s look at them in turn.

Read more…

This item by Andrew Levison was originally published on November 17, 2011.
In the coming days the Occupy Wall Street movement faces an extremely complex and difficult series of decisions about its strategy and tactics. It cannot simply repeat the initial tactic of occupying public spaces that it has employed up to now but it has not yet developed any clear alternative strategy for the future.
In debating their next steps the protesters – and the massive numbers of Americans who support them – will turn again and again to the history and example of the civil rights movement for guidance. Martin Luther King’s closest advisors including Jessie Jackson and Andrew Young have noted the clear historical parallels that exist between the two protest movements and both activists and observers will urgently seek to find lessons in the struggles of the past.
The discussion, however, will be hindered by the profoundly oversimplified vision that many people today have of how the victories of the civil rights movement were actually achieved. Most Americans have little more than a series of impressionistic images of the civil rights movement – police dogs and fire hoses unleashed against the demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, dramatic marches attacked by police in Selma, Alabama in 1965 and, across the south, sit-ins and freedom rides that rocked the region in the early years of the decade. In this vision, dramatic confrontations with the authorities appear to have been, in effect, the movement’s entire “strategy.”
But, in fact, behind every major campaign of the civil rights movement there was actually a very organized and coherent three-pronged strategy. To seriously seek guidance for the present in the struggles of the past, it is absolutely indispensible to understand the basic socio-political strategy that the movement employed.
The civil rights movement’s three-pronged strategy combined:

(1) Civil disobedience
(2) Grass-roots organizing and voter registration
(3) Boycotts and economic withdrawal

In every single major campaign of the civil rights movement – Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma — these three elements of the overall strategy were employed in a coherent, mutually supporting and reinforcing way. In contrast, no part of this coordinated approach was ever successful in isolation.
Seen in this light, there are indeed reasonable comparisons between the civil rights movement and the initial phase of Occupy Wall Street. OWS represents a modern application of civil disobedience, the first component of the civil rights movement’s three-pronged strategy. The essence of civil disobedience (also called “nonviolent direct action”) is the use of dramatic protests that disrupt normal activities and usually violate the law. They are designed to call attention to the existence of injustice and win public sympathy through the demonstrators willingness to risk danger and injury and to go to jail for their cause.

Read more…

This item by J.P. Green was originally published on November 11, 2011.
In his National Journal post, “A Model for Obama?,” Ronald Brownstein sorts out the political leanings of white workers in Ohio, in light of a Hart Research/AFL-CIO survey of voters conducted 11/6-8 and the vote on issue 2, which repealed the ban on collective bargaining for Ohio public workers. Brownstein explains:

As impressive as the depth of the win was its breadth…the survey, released Wednesday afternoon, offers the best picture available of the coalition that overturned Kasich’s prized legislation:
–The repeal campaign won broad support. Fully 86 percent of union members voted to repeal, but so did 52 percent of non-union voters. A solid majority of every age group voted to repeal. Not only did 92 percent of liberals vote to repeal but so did a preponderant 70 percent of moderates. (Conservatives supported maintaining the law by almost two-to-one). Nearly three-fifths of independents voted for repeal, along with over nine-in-ten Democrats. Almost three-fifths of whites, as well as a big majority of minorities, voted to repeal.
–The repeal vote reached well into the groups that powered the Republican surge in 2010. A 54 percent majority of whites older than 60 voted to repeal, according to figures from the survey provided by Hart Research’s Guy Molyneux. So did a 61 percent majority of whites without a college education. Even a 55 percent majority of non-college whites who do not belong to a union voted to repeal. All of those are groups that have not voted much in recent years for anything favored by Democrats. Even 30 percent of self-identified Republicans and one-fourth of voters who backed Kasich in 2010 voted to repeal.
The success of the repeal vote among the overlapping groups of senior and blue-collar whites – each of which, nationally, gave 63 percent of their votes to Republican House candidates in 2010, according to exit polls – might be the most striking result in the poll. For Democrats who want a class conscious message from Obama in 2012, it’s evidence that these prodigal Democratic voters can still be reached with an edgy on-your-side appeal.

The white house should learn the important lesson from the vote and the poll, argues Molyneux:

The idea that you can get Democratic voters, not just young and African-American voters, but working class voters energized and excited about fighting for their economic interests is a lesson I hope the White House will take on this…What killed Kasich was the sense that he was looking out either for the rich and powerful or his own party’s political interests. Either way he was not focused on helping average working families in Ohio. And I think that’s what Obama needs to set up about his opponent – motives and concern and in whose interest they are going to govern.

In his New York Times op-ed “How Obama Can Win Ohio,” John Russo, co-director of the Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University, offers this encouraging assessment:

According to CNN exit polls from the last few elections, union household voters remain a strong presence in Ohio, even after more than three decades of de-industrialization. Twenty-eight percent of Ohio voters come from union households, compared with 23 percent nationally. In 2008, they underperformed for Obama, who won 56 percent of their votes in Ohio versus 59 percent from union households across the country. No similar data exists for the 2010 midterm election, but many labor leaders admit that Kasich beat the Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, in part because voters from community groups and union households either voted Republican or stayed home (essentially giving half a vote to Kasich).
If union households in Ohio lost their enthusiasm for Democratic candidates in recent years, Kasich’s actions, together with the national Republicans’ just-say-no politics and kill-Medicare initiatives (like the Paul Ryan budget), have made the Democrats look a lot better than they did in 2010.
It all comes down to math. In 2008, 2,933,388 Ohioans voted (or 51.5%) for Obama, 258,897 more than McCain won. If union households maintain their proportion of the electorate, and if just 1 percent more of them vote for Democrats, they can add 15,700 votes to the Democratic vote and subtract the same number from the Republicans – a swing of more than 31,000 votes. If Ohio’s union household voters increase their support for Democrats by 3 percent – that is, if they match the national average for union household voters – they would generate 47,100 additional votes for Obama, a swing of 94,200 votes. That alone could give the president Ohio’s electoral votes.
But because of Senate Bill 5, we might reasonably expect an even larger shift. A recent Quinnipiac poll suggests that the anger generated by the anti-union bill and the organizing fostered by the effort to overturn it has 70 percent of union household voters planning to support Obama and the Democrats in 2012. That translates into an increase of 219,829 votes for Obama, a swing of almost 440,000 votes. Put differently, a mobilized Ohio labor movement with 742,000 members, including many teachers, police officers, and firefighters who have often voted Republican, will be more likely to vote for Democrats in 2012.

Russo believes that Obama must press the case for “a positive economic vision and a program for economic change” and the President’s jobs legislation and Obama’s recent initiatives on mortgages and student loans should help.
Writing in The Daily Beast, Michael Tomasky adds in his post, “Ohio Vote Shows Obama Winning Back the Rust Belt“:

…The larger context in which this vote took place is important, too. And that context is Operation Wall Street, income inequality, Republicans in Congress killing the jobs bill piece by piece, Obama finally getting some blood flowing through those veins again instead of water. People have started to care about class issues, and it’s pretty clear what they think: The Republican Party isn’t representing them (unless they happen to live in a household with an income of at least $368,000 a year). In the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 76 percent agreed that “the current economic structure of the country is out of balance and favors a small proportion of the rich over the rest of the country.”
What this means for next year is twofold. First, it suggests that Davids Plouffe and Axelrod should work the Rust Belt. Plouffe in particular has been signaling a strategy that would put more emphasis on Virginia and Colorado and North Carolina (where the convention is being held) at the expense of states like Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But the way Democrats and majorities of independents are acting in those Rust Belt states now, they’re looking more like states Obama can hold. You may have seen the Ohio poll in which, despite his low approval rating, Obama beats all the Republicans handily–Mitt Romney by nine points, 50 to 41, and the others by double digits.

Tomasky believes the Ohio vote debunks the conventional wisdom that Dems can win either the base or the center, but not both. As Tomasky says, “…What the Ohio result shows is a way to unite liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents, behind one message that both want to hear. That hasn’t happened much in recent American history. The White House had best be alert to it.”
In the wake of the Ohio vote it’s now clear that the GOP made a huge blunder in declaring class war on unionized workers, providing Dems with a powerful weapon. As Molyneux puts it, “…If the class-conscious Ohio repeal campaign genuinely offers Obama a roadmap to remaining competitive with more older and blue-collar whites, he can keep graying Rust Belt states like Ohio and Wisconsin in play – and reduce his need to repeat his 2008 breakthroughs in the diverse and fast growing new swing states across the Sun Belt.”