Initial reaction in Washington to reports that Justice David Souter will retire next month has been interesting: what a pain in the butt for an overstressed Obama administration! Indeed, says the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, the court opening “could well sidetrack other legislative priorities of the administration.”
Well, sure, choosing a Supreme Court nominee and managing her or his confirmation campaign is, to use George W. Bush’s favorite phrase, “hard work.” Just like any president, Obama will have to deal with expectations of a female, or a Latino, or a “progressive” or “centrist” Justice, and with the peculiar personal investment some of his own friends may develop over the prospect of a lifetime appointment to every lawyer’s dream job.
But I strongly suspect that the Souter retirement will create far fewer problems for Obama than for his opponents, and particularly for the increasingly marginalized Cultural Right, which will likely make any confirmation fight its own Tea Party Moment.
From a rational point of view, of course, the Souter retirement probably won’t change the shape of the Court in any major way: a veteran “liberal” will be replaced by a younger “liberal,” and conservatives don’t have the votes in the Senate to do anything about it.
The Supreme Court, however, is not a rational subject for the Cultural Right, where it assumes vast, mythic proportions as the top tier of a federal judiciary blamed for all sorts of destructive havoc, most notably the legalization of abortion.
To understand how your average right-to-life activist looks at this, remember that this was supposed to be the moment, had the right candidate won the 2008 elections, when the long-awaited fifth vote on the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and end the “holocaust” of legalized abortion, finally became an imminent prospect.
And to understand how the very mention of David Souter inflames right-wing culture warriors, remember that the reversal of Roe was supposed to happen in 1992, when the Court instead, by a 5-4 margin, reaffirmed the constitutional right to a abortion in the Casey decision, with Bush 41 appointee Souter, the famous “stealth liberal,” shocking many by siding with the pro-choice plurality. The Souter experience has weighed on conservative legal activists ever since, and was a key factor in the successful right-wing revolt against Bush 43’s effort to appoint Harriet Miers–not a known quality on the abortion issue–to the Court in 2005.
In the days just ahead, memorials to Souter’s service on the Court will be an embittering factor for those who view him as an especially insidious enabler of mass baby-killing: a Republican who disguised views that would have denied him confirmation.
And to the many organizations of the Cultural Right–in the midst of a long losing streak, treated with contempt by many Republicans, and recently taking a back seat even among “movement conservatives” to crypto-libertarian outrage about federal spending and taxes–the prospects of a Supreme Court confirmation fight over the successor to the hated Souter will be absolute catnip, and an unequalled opportunity to raise money and boost membership and morale.
Their immediate objective will be to force Senate Republicans to commit to a filibuster of any objectionable nominee. The Senate GOP has already threatened to filibuster lower-level Obama judicial appointees if he doesn’t respect their traditional veto powers over judges in their own states, making a mockery of Bush-era conservative arguments that such filibusters are unconstitutional. It’s a relatively small step to organize a filibuster against a “divisive” Obama Supreme Court nominee. And such a campaign would nicely serve as a litmus test to separate the sheep from the goats in the GOP, and to demonstrate the continuing power of the Cultural Right.
The opening skirmish, of course, will come in the form of demands from all sorts of directions that Obama appoint a “noncontroversial” Justice, which from the point of view of the Right would mean someone who disagrees with the president’s own well-honed constitutional views.
Once Obama announces a choice, however, the gloves will come off, and years of cultural conservative frustration over the Court will come flowing out, with no cohesive Republican Party or conservative movement to channel and control it. It could get very, very noisy, and very, very ugly, very very fast, particularly if Obama appoints, as he undoubtedly could, an “out” lesbian to the Court.
Maybe this is a premature prediction, but I’d bet the Cultural Right is about to undertake its version of the Tea Parties this summer and fall. And given the configuration of forces in the Senate and the country, the likely victim will not be Barack Obama or his Court nominee, but a Republican Party whose coalition is becoming unglued in every sense of the word.

Sam Roberts has a New York Times report on a new Pew Research Center analysis of November election voting data. The Pew Research Center analysis adds some interesting detail to what was known about the historic election. First, the African American vote and turnout:

The longstanding gap between blacks and whites in voter participation evaporated in the presidential election last year…Black, Hispanic and Asian voters made up nearly a quarter of the electorate, setting a record….for the first time, black women turned out at a higher rate than any other racial, ethnic and gender group.
Despite widespread predictions of record voter turnout last November, the overall rate was virtually the same as in 2004. But the composition of the electorate changed. The turnout among eligible whites declined slightly, by 1.1 percent, but rose by 4.9 percent among blacks…In 2004, the gap between white and black turnout rates was nearly seven percentage points. It was less than one percentage point four years later.

But it isn’t just the Black vote that turned the election;

…The number of eligible Hispanic voters has soared by more than 21 percent since 2004, a reflection of population gains and growing numbers of Hispanics who are citizens. Their share of eligible voters increased to 9.5 percent, from 8.2 percent four years earlier. In 2008, for the first time, the share of white non-Hispanic eligible voters fell below 75 percent.

And the current electorate looks like this:

The Pew analysis found that whites constituted 76.3 percent of the record 131 million Americans who voted last November. Blacks accounted for 12.1 percent, Hispanic voters for 7.4 percent and Asians for 2.5 percent. Together, black, Hispanic and Asian voters made up 22 percent of the voters, compared with about 12 percent in 1988.

All of which is close in keeping with the arguments advanced by TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira and John Judis in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” and in a more recent book edited by Teixeira, “Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics“. Some may argue that the ’08 election was an exception because of the uniqueness of the Obama phenomenon, leading to a sort of ‘chicken and egg’ argument. But even after conceding his effect on increasing turnout among people of color, Obama didn’t create the demographic trends that made his election possible.
In a recent interview with Teixeira posted at the Center for American Progress web pages, he had more to say about demographic change that benefits Democrats:

There are a variety of ways in which America has changed demographically and geographically in the last 20 years that have sent things in a more progressive direction. One of the biggest changes is the decline of the white working class, which is the most conservative element of the population, really. According to exit poll data, the percent of white working class voters is down 15 points in the last 20 years, whereas minority voters who lean pretty heavily progressive are up 11 points, and white collar graduates who have been shifting progressive rapidly in the last couple of decades, they’re up four points. So that’s a big change. Other changes that are important are the professionals, which is a growing occupational group, have shifted pretty heavily toward progressives. Single women, another growing group that has shifted toward progressives, and of course there’s this burgeoning millennial generation, which is adding about 4 million people to the eligible voter pool every year. These are people born after 1978. They’re very heavily progressive, as we saw in the last election. They voted 66 to 32 for Barack Obama. So those are just some of the changes that, in a demographic sense, are making the country much more progressive.

Teixeira explains that it’s not all about demographics, because much of the electorate is to a great extent tiring of the GOP’s insistence that the ‘free market’ is the panacea for all America’s problems. Teixeira cites a growing belief among the electorate that government can help address some social and economic problems. But he holds that demographic trends will continue to favor Democrats:

if we look at these demographic trends and how they’re unfolding, you don’t see very much that actually strengthens the conservatives’ case or the conservatives’ prospects. Pretty much all the demographic trends are going to continue moving in progressive directions for the next 20 years. Just as one obvious example, we’re going to become an increasingly diverse society over time. By the year 2023, the majority of children will be minorities, people under eighteen. By the year 2042, we’ll be a majority minority nation… We’re going to see continuing increases in the proportion of single women; we’re going to see even the millennial generation, as I mentioned earlier, adding about 4 million eligible voters to the voter pool every year until the year 2018. So I think if you put these things together…the potential is there for a durable and pretty strong progressive majority looking pretty far out into the future.

If President Obama and the Democratic majority of congress can secure needed reforms that produce significant progress for Americans of all races — admittedly a big “if” — the demographic trends that are in motion should insure growing majorities of American voters supporting Democratic candidates in the years ahead.

The recent much-discussed report on “Rightwing Extremism” by the Department of Homeland Security has raised a very important issue of definition: What precisely is right-wing “political extremism” and how does it differ from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism”?
For most Americans, the most critical — and in fact the defining — characteristic of “political extremism” – whether left or right – is the approval of violence as a means to achieve political goals. Opinions on issues, no matter how “extreme” or irrational they may be do not by themselves necessarily make a person a dangerous “extremist.” Whether opinions are crackpot (e.g. abolish all paper money) or repulsive (e.g. non-whites should be treated as sub-humans), extreme political opinions are not in and of themselves incitements to or justifications for violence.
But there is actually one very clear and unambiguous way to define a genuinely “extremist” political ideology — it is any ideology that justifies or incites violence.
Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.
In recent decades we have unfortunately become accustomed to political opponents being defined as “enemies” rather than fellow Americans, but the notion was profoundly shocking when Richard Nixon first used the term in his famous “enemies list.” It marked a tremendous change from generally collegial attitudes of Senators and members of Congress, where a certain basic level of civility was almost always maintained, even among the most bitter political opponents. Unlike many other countries, until the Nixon era American politicians generally saw “politics” as the job of achieving rational compromises among democratically elected representatives and not as the task of crushing, purging or liquidating political enemies, as was often the case in totalitarian countries.
Watergate and the election of Jimmy Carter temporarily derailed the trend toward defining politics as warfare, but the notion got a powerful “second wind” in the 1980’s – which came from two main sources.
The first was the culture and doctrines of counter-insurgency and covert operations that blossomed in the Reagan era. In combating insurgent movements, U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine carefully studied Leninist organizations and frequently imitated their strategy and tactics in order to dismantle them. The basic philosophy was frequently to “fight fire with fire” using any available tactics, including even blatantly undemocratic and morally indefensible ones.
During the Reagan years, there was a massive expansion of extremely secret counter-insurgency programs – primarily in Central America and Afghanistan – that were conducted outside the formal structure of traditional civilian-military control. Among the people involved in these programs, an ethos of loyalty developed to the secret military/intelligence hierarchy that was conducting these operations rather than to the formal elected government.
The hero and symbol of this trend was Oliver North. By showing up in his military uniform at congressional hearings called to investigate his role in the illegal funding of counterinsurgencies in Central America and Afghanistan (although he was actually a political appointee of the Reagan white house at the time and not on active military duty) North dramatically embodied the view that his primary loyalty was to the covert military/intelligence command running the secret operations around the world and not to the majority of Congress that had specifically prohibited the actions he had coordinated. He became a symbol of a perspective that viewed the majority of Congress (that had voted against funding the Nicaraguan “contras”) as an internal “enemy” just as the Nicaraguan Sandinistas were an external enemy.
By the early 1990’s this general point of view had become deeply entrenched among many right-wing conservatives. As conservative talk radio shows grew in popularity, many hosts like Rush Limbaugh repeated and refined this militarized and combative version of conservative ideology.
These views became even more extreme after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the conservative view, Liberals quickly replaced communism as the principal “enemies” of America. Conservative leader Grover Norquist expressed the view quite clearly when talking to a former college classmate. He said: “For 40 years we fought a two-front war against the Soviet Union and statism in the U.S. Now we can turn all our time and energy into crushing you. With the Soviet Union it was just business. With you, it’s personal.”

Read more…

Reports from oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court indicate that the Supremes may be on the brink of striking down Section 5 of the Voting Right Act, the congressional authorization for requiring Justice Department “preclearance” of districting schemes in most southern states and a few other scattered jurisdictions to ensure they do not dilute minority voting strength. The main source of this speculation was a line of questioning by Justice Anthony Kennedy, (typically the swing vote in close decisions) expressing hostility towards Congress’ alleged failure to adequately review recent voting data in deciding which jurisdictions are subject to Section 5.
Kennedy was definitely the swing vote in a recent decision prohibiting courts from requiring “majority-influence” districts on VRA grounds, which was not particularly good news for Democrats, who have been the victim of “packing” and “bleaching” practices in the past that concentrated minority voters in a small number of districts.
As with the earlier decision, the current review of Section 5 is significant due to its timing: just prior to the decennial reapportionment and redistricting process for both congressional and state legislative seats. If Section 5 were struck down, it could obviously be revisited by a Democratic Congress, and even if preclearance is no longer required, individuals can challenge districting maps on VRA grounds via a separate section of the Act.
Still, it would be nice to go into the redistricting season with a civil-rights-friendly and Democratic Justice Department exercising a full range of powers; the last two occurred under Republican presidents. In the end, the big battle affecting redistricting will be over control of state legislative chambers and governorships, which is another reason why the 2010 elections could be momentuous.

Using data from CQ’s Greg Giroux and from Swing State Project, I’ve taken a quick look at House and Senate Democrats who voted for and against the final budget resolution, and how their states and districts voted in the 2008 presidential election. And the real story is how many Democrats from tough territory actually voted with the president.
47 House Democrats represent districts carried by John McCain in a bad Republican year. They voted 34-13 for the Obama-backed budget. 13 Democratic senators represent states carried by McCain; they voted for the budget 10-3.
Of the four House Democrats voting against the budget who represent districts carried by Obama, three (Barrow of GA, Foster of IL, and Nye of VA) are from seats recently won by Republicans, and the fourth is Dennis Kucinich. Only two Senate Democrats from states won by Obama voted against the budget: Arlen Specter, who switched parties the day of the vote, and Evan Bayh, from a state that narrowly went Democratic for the first time in 44 years (true also, of course, for Virginia senators Warner and Webb, who voted for the budget).
Looking at the Democratic groupings often suspected of disloyalty is interesting, too. The Blue Dog Coalition in the House voted for the budget by a 41-6 margin. And in the Senate, the 15 Democrats whose names have most often been associated with the “moderate working group” led by Evan Bayh split 13-2 in favor of the budget.
All in all, not that bad a day for party unity.

My last post talked about Jim DeMint’s strange and dialectical “win by losing” credo. His way of “thinking” was nicely summed up in the Washington Post today by former Reagan and Bush 41 staffer Ed Rogers:

Notice to Republicans: Arlen Specter changing parties is good for the Democrats and President Obama and bad for us. If you think otherwise, put down the Ann Coulter book and go get some fresh air. There’s always a delusional element within the GOP that thinks if we lose badly enough the Democrats will gain so much power they will implement all their crazy plans, the people will revolt and purest Republicans will then be swept back into power. Even if this were true, it doesn’t take into account the damage done while our opponents are in control.

I guess it would be too much to expect for Rogers to also note the damage that could be done if conservatives insist on lashing the true-believer party base into a permanent counter-revolutionary hate frenzy. But at least he didn’t blame the whole situation on Barack Obama’s failure to be “bipartisan.”
As a son of the Deep South, I am intimately familiar with the cultural phenomenon of believing in victory-through-defeat and the glamor of “noble” failure, a spiritual disease that inflicted many of the white folks of my region for more than a century. Maybe it’s no coincidence that Jim DeMint comes from the state whose fever swamps first fed that affliction. I’d love to see the voters of the Palmetto State (my own native state), refute that suspicion before too very long.

We have to be careful about making too many generalizations about Obama’s election. After all, McCain did hoist his sails in the perfect Democratic storm, which hit ferociously on the final lap, no less. For a change, we Dems got every conceivable break. But Obama tacked into the storm with awe-inspiring confidence and calmness. In this context, Gary Kamiya’s article, “Obama and Race: Silence is Golden” just up at Salon.com is instructive. Kamiya’s larger point is that Obama’s non-racial strategy provides not only a template for getting African Americans elected in predominantly white constituencies; in so doing, he may also have transformed race relations in America. As Kamiya notes,

Barack Obama’s 100-day-old presidency has already had a remarkably positive effect on race relations in America. When asked, “Are race relations in the U.S. generally good or generally bad?” 66 percent of Americans answered that they were good, with just 22 percent saying they were bad. Asked the same question last July, 53 percent said race relations were good, 37 percent bad. The number of black respondents who said race relations were good doubled since the earlier NYT/CBS poll.

Kamiya adds,

It’s not surprising that having a black president has caused Americans to take a sunnier view of race relations. For blacks especially, the ascension of a black man to the highest office in the land is cause for enormous and justifiable racial pride, the kind of deep personal validation that history rarely offers. The fact that millions of whites voted for Obama has obviously made blacks feel more hopeful about white racial attitudes.

The feeling that a corner has been turned is so strong now, that opponents of renewing the Voting Rights Act preclearance provisions are using it to bolster their arguments. African Americans are rightly suspicious of the argument — one election does not prove that racial injustice has been eliminated at the polls.
Still, Obama’s election and presidency have turned our racial dialogue upside down, as Kamiya argues:

We are a country used to talking endlessly about race but not doing anything about it. Obama is doing exactly the opposite. He is not talking about race, but that very fact, combined with his high popularity, has advanced racial harmony more than any utterance could do…But Obama’s silence about race, and the positive consequences of that silence, could also be the harbingers of a subtle but fundamental movement away from America’s dominant approach to race, one based on the idea that “we have to take race into account in order to get beyond it.”

I tend to agree with Kamiya to a point. But I found Attorney-General Holder’s remark about America being “a nation of cowards” for not talking more about race strangely out of synch with President Obama’s grand strategy, which is a version of T.R.’s ‘speak softly and carry a big stick” strategy. Leverage the powers of the presidency to advance racial justice, but without a lot of clamor.
Something about the feeling Obama’s presidency conveys is reminiscent of the brief period in the early sixties, just before the Beatles hit the U.S.A., when African Americans and millions of white kids were spending their dough to purchase the same music — that would be the Motown sound. Only now the shared currency is pride in a young, dynamic President, who happens to be Black.
As for the new era Kamiya hopes for, we may be disappointed if race relations revert to past patterns. But President Obama’s example will almost certainly inspire more young African Americans to run for elective office using his template. Many will win, is my guess.

You do have to say this for SC Sen. Jim DeMint: he represents the unmediated subconsciousness of contemporary conservatives, coming right out and saying things that others more discreetly probably just think.
That’s certainly true of his rather novel explanation for the decline of Republican fortunes in the northeast, highlighted by the Specter defection. Here’s DeMint via CNN’s Political Ticker:

Appearing on CNN Tuesday, DeMint, a hero of the conservative grassroots, denied that his party has tilted too far to the right.
“I don’t think many Americans are going to agree that the Republican party has become too conservative,” he said. “If you look at our record of spending, our record on every issue, the problem I think we have is Americans no longer believe that we believe what we say we do.”
DeMint says he isn’t worried. He denied that the GOP has become a southern party, attributing Republican losses in the northeast to some northern voters who have left the region and moved south hoping to avoid labor unions and “forced unionization.” He said Americans will eventually come back into the Republican fold because of growing alarm about the size of government and President Obama’s fiscal policies.

Let’s get this straight: southern Republicans haven’t conquered the GOP; GOP voters have just moved South, and eventually, those poor union slaves they left behind will wake up and vote Republican as well, so long as the party doesn’t do anything right now to directly appeal to their current benighted views.
DeMint is carrying dialectical reasoning to levels that would have impressed Karl Marx. Losing is winning, and winning means making no conscious effort to win.
Aside from that interesting perspective, which applauds the shrinkage of the GOP as necessary to its ultimate victory, DeMint’s geographical analysis of partisan fortunes is a fascinating variation on the ancient conservative conviction that economic growth depends on a “business climate” with no unions, low wages, low taxes on high earners and capital, and little or no regulation. According not only to DeMint but to most Republicans and (unfortunately) a fair number of Democrats in the South, keeping the Union Devil down or even out has attracted untold numbers of jobs and highly productive people from the socialist northeast and midwest.
If that hoary moonlight-and-magnolias theory of economic development were true, of course, then Mississippi would be the economic dynamo of the whole world, and DeMint’s own South Carolina wouldn’t be perpetually trailing most of the country in key economic and social indicators. (Despite its Eden-like business climate, SC’s unemployment rate according to the latest statistics is third worst in the nation, at 11.4%, rather notably higher than that of union-bossed and Democratic-governed PA at 7.8%).
But turning to the political side of DeMint’s argument, it’s highly reminiscent of the 1990s theory (dubbed the “Valhalla Syndrome” by California-based urbanologist Joel Kotkin) that prosperous white folks fleeing California’s crime, taxes and people of color were turning the Rocky Mountain States bright red even as California itself turned blue. Turns out the second half of that trajectory has panned out as predicted, but not the first, as major Democratic gains in the Rockies became one of the huge political stories of recent years.
So recent history doesn’t exactly reinforce DeMint’s theory that people in the northeast, somehow prevented from escaping the economic prisons of their anti-business homelands, and looking south with yearning eyes, will at some point start voting Republican, hoping to turn desperately poor states like Maryland, New Jersey and Connecticut (ranked first, second and third in median household income) into mirror images of South Carolina (ranked 41st) or Mississippi (ranked 50th).
People do undoubtedly move or stay south for all sorts of reasons, ranging from climate and recreational opportunities to the culture, food, and sociability of the population. But for good government by the likes of DeMint or his colleague SC Gov. Mark “Herbert Hoover” Sanford? Probably not so much.

The reactions from Republicans to Arlen Specter’s defection yesterday are in some respects more interesting than the event itself.
Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME) lost no time repairing to the op-ed pages of the New York Times to accuse conservatives of driving off Specter and deliberately shrinking the party’s Big Tent with cultural-issues litmus tests.
Snowe was obviously warning her Republican affiliation shouldn’t be taken for granted, either.
RNC Chairman Micheal Steele, in a not unprecedented case, seemed to be of two minds (as noted by Jason Zengerle), first expressing unhappiness over Specter’s move, but then dismissing him and his “left-wing voting record.”
In a spin that I am quite sure we will hear more of in the next few days, Patrick Ruffini of NextRight heaved a sigh of relief that having lost one Senate vote, Republicans may now, finally, lay down the burden of responsibility they’ve so patriotically shouldered up until now:

Today the mandate was cemented. The Democrats now have full control over Washington, D.C. They can now break the filibuster. And any failure to do so is not the result of GOP “obstruction” but of self-beclowning Democratic overreach of the sort they couldn’t possibly hope to get away with if any semblance of a balance of power existed.
The Democrats are now fully responsible for what happens in Washington. And though it is necessary that the GOP go above and beyond to demonstrate their eventual fitness to govern, their first responsibility right now as the loyal opposition is to hold the majority in check. And that will entail a lot of “no” votes — and persistent explanation of why the “no” votes will lead to better outcomes for ordinary Americans.

(BTW, Patrick, you need to get word to Norm Coleman that he’s gumming up your scenario for the GOP by refusing to concede he lost the 2008 election. There certainly ain’t no “full control” of the Senate by Democrats so long as Coleman’s lawyers keep Al Franken from assuming his seat.)
In a similar vein, Michael G. Franc at National Review‘s The Corner chortles happily that Specter’s defection will suddenly cast a giant spotlight on moderate Democrats whose perfidious support for socialism will now be exposed.
But I’ve found these examples of “constructive” thinking only after some research. By and large, and overwhelmingly, the conservative “base ‘n’ blogosphere” reaction has been one of absolute joy at getting rid of this RINO. The list of 50 trackbacks to Michelle Malkin’s “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” post about Specter speaks volumes, with titles like “PA RINO Specter Goes Home to Dems” and “Good Riddance, and Take Your Friends from Maine With You.”
All in all, the hopes and fears of many Republicans seem to have been nicely summed up in a remarks on the Senate floor last week by the increasingly rabid Jim DeMint of SC:

I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.

Looks like he could get his wish sooner rather than later.

As the chattering classes meditate over the defection of Sen. Arlen Spector (R, now D-PA), it seems as good a time as any to dust off an article I wrote for Blueprint magazine in 2001, when Jim Jeffords switched parties, that looked back to the astonishingly robust condition of moderate Republicanism, especially in the U.S. Senate, in the mid-1970s. This may be of interest to younger readers who may be under the impression that this now-virtually-extinct political species was wiped out the day Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination in 1964.
If you do read this piece, please don’t be offended by my suggestion that John McCain had come to represent the “centrist” impulse in the GOP. That was actually true back then, before McCain subsequently rediscovered his “Reagan Republican” roots and repudiated much of what he was saying and doing from 1999-2003.