Category: General

Hillary Clinton, Public and Private (selections from the unredacted transcript)

Sawyer: Let’s talk about your family’s income after the two of you left the White House. Your husband has been paid more than $100 million to give speeches, and you’ve received two multimillion dollar book advances, as well as being paid $200,000 per speech. Does this seem . . . I’m searching for the right word here . . .

Clinton: Wrong?

Sawyer: Well not wrong, exactly, and of course certainly not illegal, but some might say it’s unseemly for public officials to profit from their time in office in this way.

Clinton: No, I’m pretty much going to go with wrong. It’s wrong, first, because it’s completely obscene that we have an economic system in which some people “earn” one thousand or ten thousand times as much income as other people. Second, while this would be wrong under any circumstances, it’s especially wrong because the people who earn $12,000 per year are usually doing something that has obvious social value, like taking care of children, or cooking food, or cleaning things that need cleaning, while the people making $12,000,000 or $120,000,000,000 per year are usually doing things like speculating in the financial markets, or giving banal speeches to people who speculate in financial markets — two activities that have no apparent social value whatsoever.

Or, to choose another example at random, perhaps they’re doing interviews like this one, in which a celebrity journalist who is paid $12,000,000 per year asks a celebrity politician questions written by someone else about the celebrity politician’s basically fake “book” — also written by someone else, needless to say.

Sawyer: This all sounds very radical, and not appropriate for a network audience. Why do you take the money if you feel this way?

Clinton: I don’t know — why do you take the money? Oh wait, I think I know the answer to my own question: because it’s there! But “because it’s there” doesn’t mean that it’s right that it’s there. It shouldn’t be “there” in the first place. Or if it’s going to be there, 70% or 80% of it should go to the government, just like back when the American Communist Party managed to get Dwight Eisenhower elected president.

Sawyer: Doesn’t saying things like this open you to charges of hypocrisy?

Clinton: Diane, we’re both part of the same hypocrisy.

The Supreme Court, Democracy, And Political Change I

Always up for a piece noting the Supreme Court’s largely negative history, I was disappointed by Rob Hunter’s piece in a couple respects. I’ll leave the question of political strategy and what progressives should do about judicial review to another post. Here, I want to focus on the need to analyses of judicial review to take into account how the practice actually works.

One problem with the argument is reveled early, with the old “attribute an bad argument to an entire group of people”:

Liberals lambasted Roberts for arguing in bad faith, but in reality they share his vision. In the liberal political imagination, the Supreme Court is an institution that must vindicate principles rather than practice politics. As the philosopher Richard Rorty once acknowledged, liberals “turn to the judiciary as the only political institution for which we can still feel something like awe. This awe … is respect for the ability of decent men and women to sit down around tables, argue things out, and arrive at a reasonable consensus.”

Unless a simple-minded caricatures of Ronald Dworkin and arguments made by Richard Rorty that Rorty himself has repudiated define “the liberal imagination,” the point isn’t really worth engaging with. Most actually existing liberals in 2014 believe in some form of legal realism, and the liberals who regard the Supreme Court with “awe” are similarly thin on the ground.

On the more specific claims, as is often the case the discussion of Dred Scott reveals some flawed ways of thinking about the Supreme Court as well as more implicit attacks of strawman:

Before the Civil War, the Court largely refrained from invalidating congressional legislation on constitutional grounds. The only important such episode was Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford. Taney wrote that Congress could not forbid the extension of slavery into the territories, and added infamously that constitutional protections applied only to whites. Dred Scott foreshadowed the most obvious and frequent future use of judicial review: protecting constitutional boundaries against the incursions of democratic politics.

Dred Scott was not undone through another decision, but through victory over the seceding states. America’s bourgeois revolution — the mob­ilization and death of hundreds of thousands of soldiers, along with the emergence of a federal government with truly national prerogatives and powers — was what ended slavery, rather than the deliberations of nine old men in robes. The federal government’s victory in the Civil War was memorialized by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, which established the primacy of a national conception of citizenship over the semi-feudal patchwork of citizenship rights of the antebellum republic.

A few points:

• It’s not clear to me who Hunter is arguing with here.  On the narrow point, nobody thinks the Supreme Court was an ally in the abolitionist crusade.  On the more general point the example seems to be addressing, nobody thinks the Supreme Court is the only way of advancing major political change and very few people think it’s the best way.
• As I’ve argued before, while it’s used this way across the ideological spectrum Dred Scott is a particularly bad example of the Supreme Court “protecting constitutional boundaries against the incursions of democratic politics.”  The law “struck down” by Dred Scott had already been repealed. The Democratic leadership in Congress had urged the Supreme Court to decide the case exactly as is did for years.  The Doughface-in-Chief praised the decision before it was even officially released.  Dred Scott wasn’t problematic because it usurped the preferences of elected officials; it was problematic because is embodied the preferences of elected Jacksonian officials, which were terrible.  This isn’t a problem that could be solved by eliminating judicial review.
• Dred Scott, despite its prominence as a symbol, is also notable for its lack of substantive impact on national policy both coming and going.  In 1857, its holdings were irrelevant because congressional majorities and the president opposed citizenship for people of color and opposed general bans on slavery in the territories.  In 1862, it was irrelevant because congressional majorities and/or the president supported citizenship rights for some free blacks and supported bans on slavery in the territories, and ignored Dred Scott while instituting them.  (The fact that so many people vastly overrate the importance of Dred Scott, however, is hard to square with assertions that people approach the Supreme Court with uncritical reverence.)

I’m also puzzled by some of the argument about Reconstruction:

But the ink had barely dried on the Fourteenth before the Supreme Court busied itself with effacing its Privileges or Immunities Clause, which empowered the federal government to protect individual citizens from abuses by state governments. (Contemporary examples of such abuses include welfare “reform,” union-busting, and all-out assaults on public education.) In the Slaughterhouse Cases, five justices narrowly construed the Privileges or Immunities Clause to prevent its extension into state politics — a warning that the federal judiciary could serve as a redoubt for conservative resistance to the project of building a national, centralized, and egalitarian state.

First of all, while the 14th Amendment analysis (although not the judgement) of the Slaughterhouse Cases was certainly wrong, whether the p&i clause can be plausibly read as preventing various bad economic policies passed by state legislatures is, at best, highly contestable.  It’s also, in this context, incoherent — I thought we didn’t want the Supreme Court “protecting constitutional boundaries against the incursions of democratic politics”?  (The Civil Rights Cases would have been a much better example here.)

It is an important truth that the Supreme Court has sometimes been a resort for forces opposed to a strong national state.  But, again, it’s important to remember the Supreme Court generally reflects the views of the dominant coalition.  The Supreme Court’s retreat from civil rights protections during Reconstruction mirrored that of the Republican Party in general.  Consider Section 2 of the 14th Amendment.  It requires Congress to reduce the representation of states that disenfranchise adult males for reasons other than criminal activity; it’s not stated as an option but as a responsibility.   What happened is that states engaged in plenty of disenfranchisement and Congress did nothing.  This is more representative; the Supreme Court was a very minor factor in the reemergence of Jim Crow.

There is good reason to be skeptical of judicial review, but too many such critiques vastly overrate its effects.  I’ll return to what this means in the follow-up post.

Awful Democrat of the Day

In a tradition Albany Democrats have long been in the process of perfecting, Virginia State Senator Phillip Puckett thinks that substantial number of Virginians should be denied care through the Medicaid expansion because he wants less electorally-accountable taxpayer-funded sinecures for himself and his daughter. I don’t know whether this is legal bribery, but it’s certainly ethically and morally odious.

…let me put it this way: it’s pretty amazing when in a dispute among venal Democrats Terry McAullife is the unambiguous good guy.

SEK’s Game of Thrones recap, Season 4, Episode 9: “The Watchers on the Wall”

In all seriousness:

Meh.

Podcast for last week’s episode — which was decidedly not meh – will go up later today.

When Pledging Your Virginity to Your Dad Isn’t Creepy or Weird

Ha ha ha! I’m just kidding–it’s always creepy and weird. And, I’m sorry, but these dads are creepy perverts.

TOTALLY NOT AWKWARD AND GROSS!

I mean, let’s just put our gross, creepy, pervert cards on the table. (BTW, if you’re in a gift-giving mood, please do not get the Gross, Creepy Pervert Dad set of cards for me; I already have them. THANKS, TONY PERKINS.)

Justice in the Badger State

At least for the time being:

This afternoon U.S. District Court Judge Barbara Crab overturned Wisconsin’s ban on marriages by gay and lesbian couples. The ban, which was approved by voters in 2006, is now opposed by the majority of Wisconsin voters. A recent Marquette University Law School poll found 55 percent of registered voters statewide now favor allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry, while 37 percent oppose it and 6 percent say they do not know.