Sunday, October 5, 2014

Sunday Reading

First Monday in October — This year’s Supreme Court term could decide the marriage equality question.  Adam Liptak in the New York Times:

The Supreme Court on Monday returns to work to face a rich and varied docket, including cases on First Amendment rights in the digital age, religious freedom behind bars and the status of Jerusalem.

Those cases are colorful and consequential, but there are much bigger ones on the horizon.

“I’m more excited about the next 12 months at the Supreme Court than about any Supreme Court term in its modern history,” said Thomas C. Goldstein, who argues frequently before the court and is the publisher of Scotusblog.

In the coming weeks, the justices will most likely agree to decide whether there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, a question they ducked in 2013. They will also soon consider whether to hear a fresh and potent challenge to the Affordable Care Act, which barely survived its last encounter with the court in 2012.

The terms that concluded with those rulings riveted the nation. Now the two issues may return to the court — together.

“This term could become the ‘déjà vu all over again’ term of the century,” said Pratik A. Shah, a Supreme Court specialist with Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. is entering his 10th term, and it is one that could define the legacy of the court he leads. Should the court establish a right to same-sex marriage, it would draw comparisons to the famously liberal court led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, said David A. Strauss, a law professor at the University of Chicago.

“It is only a slight overstatement to say that the Roberts court will be to the rights of gays and lesbians what the Warren court was to the rights of African Americans,” Professor Strauss said.

Petitions seeking review of decisions in the marriage and health care cases have already been filed. They may be joined in short order by ones on abortion and affirmative action.

“The prospect that every major social issue will collide before the justices may be historic,” Mr. Goldstein said.

The Unlucky Seven — G.O.P. governors who may get the heave-ho next month.  John Nichols in The Nation:

The headlines immediately following the “Republican Wave” election of 2010 focused on Congress, where Democrats lost control of the House. But attention quickly shifted to the states, where a new class of Republican governors, often working with allied legislative majorities, began implementing agendas far more extreme than those of their compatriots in gridlocked Washington.

That extremism has made many of these Republican Wave governors vulnerable in 2014—so vulnerable that billionaire campaign donors and business interests are scrambling to save them. Recent revelations of secret meetings organized by the Koch brothers and secret donations to groups like the Republican Governors Public Policy Committee confirm the connections—and the sense of urgency. But even a massive spending spree may not keep these governors in office.

That’s because what’s good for campaign donors has not been good for GOP-led states, many of which trail the national average in job creation. In some states, such as Kansas, economic stagnation is so severe that moderate Republicans are endorsing Democratic gubernatorial nominees who promise to stop catering to out-of-state special interests and to focus on education and jobs.

The failure of the GOP austerity agenda stands in stark contrast to the success of states where Democratic governors have invested in infrastructure, services and schools. California’s Jerry Brown and Minnesota’s Mark Dayton, both of whom replaced Republican governors four years ago, are well ahead in the polls. While some Democratic governors are in tight races, perennially embattled Illinois Governor Pat Quinn edged ahead of Republican Bruce Rauner in a mid-September Chicago Tribune survey, at least in part because of a campaign warning that Rauner would impose on Illinois the right-wing policies that are widely seen as having slowed growth in neighboring Wisconsin.

Wisconsin’s Scott Walker began his tenure in 2011 by attacking public employees and their unions and securing a budget that slashed spending on education and public services. He advanced laws restricting access to women’s reproductive health services, establishing harsh voter-ID requirements, undermining environmental protections, and generally rubber-stamping the agenda of corporate-funded groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). Walker made big news, but his extremism was hardly unique. Michigan’s Rick Snyder used “emergency manager” laws to dismantle democracy in Detroit and other cities and signed an anti-labor “right to work” law in the home state of the United Auto Workers. Maine’s Paul LePage told the NAACP to “kiss my butt,” hired corporate lobbyists to help him rewrite regulations, and intervened so aggressively against unemployed workers that the US Labor Department had to step in. Pennsylvania’s Tom Corbett hit all the wrong marks by appointing cronies to key positions, making statements that offended women and Latinos, attacking unions, and scrapping the state’s school funding formula in a move that led to devastating cuts.

Corbett’s misdeeds are so well known that he’s trailing as far as twenty points behind Democrat Tom Wolf, a businessman running as an ardent advocate for public education, a supporter of unions and a champion of manufacturing. Walker, Snyder and LePage are all locked in what the RealClearPolitics “Poll of Polls” ranks as toss-up races, as are Republican Wave governors Rick Scott of Florida, Nathan Deal of Georgia and Sam Brownback of Kansas.

History from Hendrik Van Loon — Charlie Pierce harks back to a storyteller of yore.

In his recent documentary about the Roosevelt family, Ken Burns alluded to a gentleman named Hendrik Van Loon. (At one point, Burns put up the front page of a newspaper with Van Loon’s byline.) The name alone was enough to get our house a’stir. (It is now my third-favorite name in American political history behind Elihu Root and Thurlow Weed.) So, the family Internet sleuth worked dark magic and we discovered that Van Loon was quite the character. Journalist. Author. Early and prolific anti-Nazi. Friend and confidante of FDR. And winner of the very first Newbery Medal (in 1922) for The Story Of Mankind, a young people’s book that delivered exactly what its title said it would deliver. The book was massive, and it sold massively. It was made into a movie starring Ronald Colman and the Marx Brothers, and Van Loon’s family added chapters to the original all the way up into the 1990’s. Van Loon went on to write other formidable doorstops for young folks including The Story Of The Bible and Tolerance. Van Loon did not condescend to the young reader’s allegedly short attention span, as we discovered as the books began arriving at our house this past week. Hendrik Van Loon’s readers were readers for the 15th round, they were.

It turns out that Van Loon is a remarkably discursive, and utterly eccentric, stylist, following his peculiar muse to fascinating and unmapped literary acreages. He has a positive gift for off-the-wall historical comparisons and, occasionally, he appears to be having his readers on. These characteristics, of course, made him an instant favorite at this shebeen, so much so that we have decided to give him his own space in the hopes of introducing his distinctive prose stylings to another generation which, we hope, will imitate them so as to confound their English teachers, baffle the gang at the Educational Testing Service, and raise holy hell with education “reformers” everywhere.

Our debut offering comes from The Story Of The Bible, in which Hendrik points out to his readers that, as far as Tacitus was concerned, the religious fervor of the devotees of a certain itinerant preacher in distant Judea was something of a sideshow, given the major events of the day. Van Loon writes:

The Christ in question had probably been a preacher in some obscure little synagogue in Galilee or Judaea. Of course, there was more than a probablilty that Nero had been too severe. On the other hand, it was better not to be too lenient in such matters. And there the question rested, as far as Tacitus was concerned. He never mentioned the offending sect again. His interest was entirely academic and such as we might take in the trouble between the Canadian Mounted Police and those strange Russian sects which inhabit the western portion of that vast empire of forests and grain fields.

Today’s Assignment: Why Jesus Christ Is Like The Mounties. Discuss.

Doonesbury — Welcome home.

One bark on “Sunday Reading

  1. A very happy belated birthday to you. I keep meaning to wander over here, but… shiny thing.

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