Today’s 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Ricci v. DeStefano is going to get cited, distorted and taken out of context massively in the next few weeks, so it’s probably a good idea to make an effort to actually understand it.
As you may know, the case involved a promotion test for firefighers in New Haven, Connecticut in which all the white and one Hispanic) applicants scored better than all the African-Americans. The city tossed out the tests figuring that promotions based on it would fall prey to the “disparate impact” standard for employment discrimination suits under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. White firefighters sued on both statutory and constitutional grounds, lost at the trial court level on a motion for summary judgment, which was upheld by Judge Sotomayor’s Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supremes narrowly reversed this decision on statutory but not constitutional grounds, with the usual conservative coalition of Kennedy, Roberts, Alito, Scalia and Thompson in the majority, with the usual Kennedy opinion.
Here’s how Tom Goldstein of SCOTUSblog characterizes Kennedy’ s treatment of the Second Circuit’s ruling:

I am struck by the extent to which the majority opinion largely treats the court of appeals’ ruling as a non-event. To the contrary, Justice Kennedy almost seemingly goes out of his way not to criticize the decision below, notwithstanding that the Supreme Court takes a dramatically different view of the legal question. The Court indicates that the state of the law before today’s ruling was “a difficult inquiry,” and that its “holding today clarifies how Title VII applies.” It rejects the plaintiffs’ outright attack on the Second Circuit’s decision as “overly simplistic and too restrictive.”

That figures, since Sotomayor and company were applying limited case precedents in a very plausible way–plausible, indeed to the four Supreme Court dissenters from today’s decision, including the Justice Sotomayor has been appointed to replace, David Souter. So it’s no big deal in terms of Sotomayor’s confirmation, right?
Well, you’d think so, but that’s certainly not how conservative activists are going to play it. Michelle Malkin’s headline tells you exactly how they will play it: “Racism rejected: SCOTUS reverses Sotomayor in firefighters case .”
As it happens, new data from ABC/Washington Post on the Sotomayor nomination came out just yesterday, showing solid majority support for her confirmation. You better believe that the groups already determined to mine the confirmation fight for fun and profit will use a cartoon version of today’s decision to try to turn things around.

Maybe it’s the years I spent working on federal-state relations, but it’s still amazing to me how little attention is paid in Washington to the involvement of states and localities in implementing big national policies–or the impact of federal decisions on state and local operations, services and finances. That’s particularly maddening right now, when you have states on the brink of fiscal insolvency, and policy areas–particularly health care and environmental protection–where the states already play such an integral role.
Harold Pollack of the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration feels likewise, so we collaborated on an article that’s in the New York Times’ Economix blog this morning. We were especially motivated by the general ignorance of intergovernmental relations exhibited in Congress and the media during the economic stimulus debate, and also by the implications of the fiscal disaster underway in California.
Our prescription was largely to start paying attention:

Americans don’t need another gauzy ideological debate over federalism and states’ rights. But we do need to pay greater attention to realities of federalism when setting national policy.
Thus, federal budget debates should expand to include the national budget, the sum total of spending, taxes and policies that implement and finance national governance. At a minimum, the Office of Management and Budget and the Congressional Budget Office should routinely scrutinize the financial impact of proposed federal policies on every level of government.
We should also scrutinize the division of roles and resources across different levels of government. The road maps of 1933 (when the first New Deal was put in place) or 1965 (when Medicare and Medicaid were signed into law) may no longer apply. Some tasks, such as long-term care, are now so costly that they require greater federal resources. Others, like regional planning, require greater state and local authority.
The likely bailout of California provides unwelcome opportunities to realign these competing roles. It provides a timely reminder: Americans live in towns, cities, counties, and states, not just the United States of America.

The “national budget” is something I’ve been occasionally talking about for, oh, at least a quarter century. But it’s not like the system has gotten any better the in interim, so there’s no time like the present to try again.

Okay, just one more unavoidable reference to Mark Sanford unless he makes some real news by resigning as governor or getting impeached. In his poignant press conference on Wednesday, he made a cryptic reference to “working through” his infidelity issues on “C Street” in Washington.
This was quickly deciphered by Dan Gilgoff of US News and others as a reference to the Capitol Hill townhouse owned by a shadowy fundamentalist group variously called “The Family” and “The Fellowship,” which sponsors the National Prayer Breakfast and a variety of other religious events and services aimed at elite political and business leaders. Turns out that the other would-be-presidential-candidate-with-an-adultery-scandal, Sen. John Ensign, lives at “C Street” when he’s in DC, whose proprietors knew about and tried to help him manage his problem, as Manuel Roig-Franzia explains in today’s Washington Post:

The house pulsed with backstage intrigue, in the days and months before the Sanford and Ensign scandals — dubbed “two lightning strikes” by a high-ranking congressional source. First, at least one resident learned of both the Sanford and Ensign affairs and tried to talk each politician into ending his philandering, a source close to the congressman said. Then the house drama escalated. It was then that Doug Hampton, the husband of Ensign’s mistress, endured an emotional meeting with Sen. Tom Coburn, who lives there, according to the source. The topic was forgiveness.
“He was trying to be a peacemaker,” the source said of Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma.

“Peacemaker” is one term for it; “damage controller” is another.
These incidents cast some unwelcome light on “The Family,” a secretive group (sort of an evangelical version of the conservative Catholic elite group Opus Dei, though much less focused on conversions) whose vast array of activities were exposed last year in a sensational book by Jeff Sharlet. By sheer coincidence, I’ve just started reading Sharlet’s book, and it’s pretty disturbing to me on both religious and political grounds.
That intrepid chronicler of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner of The American Prospect, summarized Sharlet’s take on “The Family” last year in an article that also offered an interview with the author:

The Family exposes the inner workings of an elite and secretive association of politicos (The Family boasts a bipartisan but mostly Republican roster of members, including Sens. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, and Mark Pryer, an Arkansas Democrat) and business executives (such as the CEOs of Continental Oil and the defense contractor Raytheon) who have exploited their uber-masculine, uber-capitalist version of Christianity to serve political and profit-making goals, from union-busting here at home to imperialist adventures abroad.

But I’m not sure even Sharlet knew that The Family’s services included counseling and public-relations-damage-control for governors and senators caught up in adulterous affairs. I guess when you are trying to impose what you think to be the Will of God from the top down, you spare no expense or trouble in managing your investments.

As a follow-on to Michael Cohen’s post late yesterday, it’s worth noting that those who put a lot of emphasis on recent polling showing a surge of concern about budget deficits need to address some problems with such polling. At TNR, Linda Hirshman draws attention to an interesting new analysis from Pew that obtains notably different results from other recent polls on the importance of deficits to the public, by asking much more straightforward questions:

Instead of offering the public an elaborate scenario in which they were asked to probe their innermost feelings and choose a position that accords with their “point of view” about what should worry the government more, as NBC did, Pew asked: “If you were setting the priorities for the government these days, would you set a higher priority on ‘spending more to help the economy recover’ or ‘reducing the budget deficit'” (rotating the choices). Forty-eight percent of those questioned put a higher priority on spending more to help the economy recover, while 46 percent chose reducing the deficit.

Spending and deficits have long been an area where the precise wording of poll questions can produce widely varying results, as James Vega demonstrated in a May post on Resurgent Republic’s message polling. And this has been particularly true of polling about such abstractions as “stimulating the economy,” which isn’t nearly as popular as specific categories of public investment or spending such as health care or education.
These are all factors for Democrats to seriously consider before urging a major pullback on the Obama domestic agenda on grounds that the public wants deficit reduction first.

I said in my very last post that I was done talking about you-know-who and his trip to you-know-where, and I’ll try to stick to that. You’d think conservatives would want to let it go, as well. But not Rush Limbaugh, who in an act of chutzpah that is remarkable even for him, is blaming you-know-what on Barack Obama. Here via Christopher Orr is a snippet:

My first thought was he said, ‘To hell with this. The Democrats are destroying the country. We can’t do anything to stop it. I gave everything I had to stop it here in South Carolina.’ … Folks, there are a lot of people looking at life and saying, ‘screw it.’ They’re saying, ‘screw it.’ Before Obama takes away their money, before Obama takes away their house, or the economy takes away their house, there are people who are saying, “To hell with all this…. I’m just going to try to enjoy it as much as I can.’

Thus spake one of the few identifiable leaders of the Republican Party. I hope that this is a broad hint that Limbaugh himself is about to say “screw it” and move his own tired act offshore or off the air.
Go Galt, Rush!

Don’t know about you, readers, but I’m ready to quickly forget about Mark Sanford for a good long while and leave him to whatever reckoning he faces with his family and the people of South Carolina. I’d just as soon not see elaborate exposure of his personal emails, or minute-by-minute scrutiny of how he spent his time on state-paid trade missions to Argentina.
But there are a couple of residual points on the general subject of media coverage of politics that do need to be addressed for future reference.
1) Is the vast attention being paid to the Sanford Saga a flashing warning sign about media or public obsession with the sex lives of politicians, and/or about the spread of a “celebrity gossip” culture into politics?
2) Does the exposure of Sanford show that politicians no longer have any expectation of privacy?
These are questions that we have been hearing at least since the “Monkey Business” scandal derailed Gary Hart’s 1988 presidential campaign, and they are both quite legitimate. But if you think about it even briefly, the Sanford Saga doesn’t really fit the troubling template of a salacious public and its media hounds devouring someone’s private life.
First of all, the Sanford story was big-time national news long before it had anything to do with sex. Sure, there was private speculation that something a bit out of line with Sanford’s self-proclaimed “family values” convictions might be going on, and for all I know, some of the Republican politicians in South Carolina who made a big issue of Sanford’s disappearance had reason to think that ol’ debbil Lust was lurking in the background. But for most of us, and in virtually all the public discussion of Sanford’s vanishing act, sex didn’t enter the picture until the governor raised it himself in yesterday’s press conference. Maybe it’s troubling that the explanation Sanford’s staff originally put out–that he chose to spend Father’s Day weekend wandering alone on the Appalachian Trail with no means of communication with the outside world–seemed strange enough to make it a “story” (though again, if his Lieutenant Governor, a fellow Republican if not exactly a friend, hadn’t gone on national television to complain about it, I don’t know how big a “story” it would have been). But this isn’t about any national sex mania.
Second of all, there are certain steps any public official needs to take to maintain an “expectation of privacy.” The very first is to ensure that one’s private life does not interfere with the performance of public duties. I have a very hard time believing that Mark Sanford could not have maintained a communications link with his office without disclosing where he was and what he was doing with whom. I am sure he had been issued what is sometimes jokingly called an “Armageddon Pager” that is used to alert a public official–especially a chief executive–of an emergency. He must have decided to leave it at home; otherwise, his staff would have been able to credibly say: “We don’t know where he is, but we know how to reach him if the need arises.” That would have cut off the whole “who’s in charge?” line of inquiry at the knees. To put it another way, the expectation of privacy for governors (or for that matter, presidents) does not include being unavailable to do your job–not for an hour, much less for five or six days. That’s just part of the job description, and it’s nothing new.
Maybe psychologists can explain why Mark Sanford pursued a course of action almost perfectly designed to draw attention to the behavior he was supposedly trying so hard to hide–or why, in the midst of an illicit affair, or a Friendship With Privileges, or whatever it was, he worked so hard to make himself a national political figure and a putative presidential candidate (sort of a slow-motion equivalent of Gary Hart’s “go ahead and follow me” taunt to reporters asking if he ever fooled around).
But in writing a couple of posts on the Sanford Saga, I can honestly say I don’t feel like I’ve been part of some panting media pack chasing the latest sex story, or violating the governor’s privacy. I personally wish it had turned out that he was just an anti-social or stressed-out man who asked his family for the Father’s Day gift of some peaceful time alone. But he chose to paint the big bullseye on his back, and make it bigger by a career-long habit of moralizing about other people’s behavior (not to mention trying to deny women and gays/lesbians any privacy rights). So let’s forget about the man with a clean conscience.

I was about to sit down and write about the sudden denouement of the bizarre Mark Sanford saga, when Matt Yglesias gave me a welcome excuse to deal with a very different question involving South Carolina. Here’s Matt’s question:

I find myself continually compelled to think about the political situation in late 1860 through the ahistorical lens of today’s political controversies. After all, if Barack Obama with a popular majority and 59 Democratic Senators can’t get a climate change bill through the Senate, then what kind of anti-slavery legislative agenda would Abraham Lincoln have been able to drive through congress had the South not seceded? The Republicans were committed to excluding slavery from the territories, but perhaps slave state Senators could have just dealt with this through ceaseless filibustering. It was only the withdrawal of the Confederate members from Congress that gave the GOP the majorities it needed to pass its agenda.
Right?

Well, not exactly, in my admittedly non-expert but reasonably informed opinion.
What panicked many southerners most about Lincoln’s election wasn’t so much anything he’d promised to do, or was capable of doing, on slavery in the short term. The real disaster was the successful emergence of a sectional northern party that was hostile to slavery and the South’s interests (as white southerners saw them), and the final collapse of the Second Party System in which southern Whigs and Democrats were able to largely neutralize or at least contain anti-slavery sentiment in both parties. Southerners knew they’d always be outgunned in a purely sectional party alignment. Moreover, since the Planter Interests were largely Old Whigs who were more pro-union than most southern Democrats, the death of the Whigs vitiated resistance to the ever-present secession idea at a crucial juncture. Even so, secession was a dicey proposition. In Georgia, for example, only apocalyptic storms on the day of the vote for delegates to a secession convention decided the result (future Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, once a warm friend of Lincoln’s in the Whig Caucus in Congress, was the leader of those fighting immediate secession).
It’s also important to remember that it was not at all clear initially that the federal government would oppose secession militarily–and it indeed didn’t until South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter.
Could the South have defended slavery and their other regional interests successfully without secession, as Matt suggests? That’s hard to say, since “defending slavery” didn’t, from the point of view of the protagonists of the time, just depend on defeating or stalling anti-slavery measures in Congress, but on proactively opening up territories to slavery, for both economic and political reasons. One of the factors in northern sentiment that helped create the Republican Party was the belief that the federal government was and would ever be controlled by the “Slave Power,” through the South’s leverage over both parties. The Republican victory in 1860 definitely meant that Power would never be the same, even if Lincoln had done nothing on the policy front.
Matt might be hinting that the self-destructive Obama-hatred and extremism of today’s Republicans is “folly,” insofar as they are finding it relatively easy to thwart or compromise him in Congress on key issues like climate change. That could well be true. But like secession ultras in 1860, today’s conservative activists don’t seem that interested in tactical victories. They feel robbed of a mandate for fundamental changes in public policies, from outlawing abortion to decimating “entitlements,” that once seemed tantalizingly close. And even if they only believe half of their own rhetoric, they also think a moderately successful Obama administration would be disastrous to their cause. Like those who fought Lincoln in 1860, many of those who fight Obama today do not believe time is on their side.

Want to know why some of us political junkies get so obsessed with getting hold of “crosstabs” for polls that break down responses by various demographic categories? Look no further than the latest ABC/Washington Post poll, which showed a fairly polarized electorate (if leaning pretty heavily in the President’s direction) in terms of approval or disapproval of the President’s job performance.
But with the crosstabs, which were released yesterday, we can identify some dogs that really don’t bark in explaining support or lack of support for Obama.
Most notable are the close similarities of approval/disapproval ratios for voters in households earning more than $50,000 (62/32) and those earning less (67-30), and for voters with (64/33) and without (65/30) college educations. In case you think race or ethnicity distorts those numbers, the ratio for whites earning more than $50,000 is 60/35, and for whites earning less than $50,000 is 61/37. Whites with college education split 63/35, while whites without college–normally a bad demographic category for Democrats–favor Obama 59/37.
Other findings that might surprise you: white voters positively assess Obama’s job performance by 60/36; men by 61/35; southerners by 59/35; and white southerners by 49/46.
Meanwhile, one of the largest gaps other than party ID and ideology is between white evangelical Protestants (38/56) and white non-evangelical Protestants (61/33). White Catholics (58/38) are a lot closer to their mainline brethren than to the evangelicals with whom elements of the Catholic hierarchy have aligned themselves on cultural issues, illustrating my argument that intra-communal political disagreements have now trumped the old Catholic-Protestant divisions on politics.
So next time you hear the talking heads on television yammering about some top-line poll finding–and they do it nearly every day–toss a beer can at the screen and say: “What about the crosstabs?”