Extort to end any law

This evening I listened to New York Times columnist Tom Friedman's visit the NPR show On Point and his thoughts on the gov't shutdown. His primary call is to Obama -- don't give into the GOP. Our democracy is at stake. The Prez. was reelected on the Affordable Care Act, the Supremes confirmed it. It is a settled issue. If Obama gives in then nothing is ever settled. Any disgruntled faction can use the recurring debt ceiling issue to extort to end any law they don't like. And that would be the end of democracy.

Friedman gave three things that got us into this situation.

* Gerrymandering. It has been around for a long time (about as long as America has been voting). Now there is such a difference in degree that it has become a change in kind. Friedman joked that gerrymandering can now be done so precisely that Mrs. Smith can be put in one district and Mr. Smith put in another. Safe GOP representatives are never challenged from the center.

* Money. We are flooded with corporate money. An example is the two Democrats in Colorado who recently lost their seats over a gun violence bill. An amazing amount of money ($400,000?) was brought to bear on one issue, and a state issue at that.

* Media. There are separate conservative and progressive news circles. One person no longer has to convince the other side of the rightness of his argument.

We can only get out of it the long hard way. We, the people, must elect representatives that do what we want. To do that will take several elections.

I listened to the show because the topic was announced as I was coming home. I stayed at the college this evening for a special program.

I teach at Marygrove College. It was founded by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary -- yup, Catholic nuns. Actually, they have a history of being quite progressive. The college's big program now is a master's degree in social justice. I mentioned a year ago that they have offered a class in the Social Work department on the special considerations when providing services to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people.

Today when I walked into the library (which I don't do every week) the big display case across from the main desk had the banner "LGBT Scholarship" and inside were many books and a few videos on our issues. Several of them had a scholarly outlook. I think that's pretty cool for a Catholic institution.

The evening program was hosted by the college (for free!) and put on by the Michigan Coalition for Human Rights. They sponsored the speaker, Bill Goodman, who is a civil rights attorney. Even though he said he hasn't dealt with voting rights cases, his talk was about the current state of voting rights.

Goodman gave us a bit of history on voting rights. In the aftermath of the Civil War, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments were passed. As soon as Union soldiers left the South (1877, I think) Jim Crow laws were instituted and blacks lost the right to vote. There was no serious challenges until the Civil Rights protests of the early 1960s, which produced the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

There were three big Supreme Court cases which brought us to the current situation. The court likes to portray itself as cautious, only deciding as narrowly as possible. These are three cases where they decided quite broadly, having profound effects on the country.

Bush v. Gore in 2000. The Supremes said there is a strong tradition of the federal gov't not interfering in state elections. But they were going to make an exception in this case. The court said this case could not be used as precedent in any other case (and for a long time it wasn't). Even so, it gave us 8 years of Bush II, a big push to the right, and a few extremely conservative Supreme Court justices.

Citizens United. This is the case that declared corporations are people and allowed to spend money freely in political campaigns. This was the first case to reference Bush v. Gore.

Shelby County v. Holder, this year. This is the one that gutted part of the Voting Rights Act. That part was the preclearance clause. Certain states had to have changes to their voting laws approved by the Department of Justice. It used to be the Attorney General (or the head of the voting rights division) decided if a law could take effect. Now he has to convince a judge that a law is bad and do so after the law has already gone into effect and perhaps had an effect on an election.

One thing this ruling did was to contradict Bush v. Gore. It went back to the sacred principle that the feds shouldn't interfere in how a state runs elections (even though the Voting Rights Act allows the feds to do exactly that). It also declared that because of equal sovereignty, all states should be treated the same by the feds. But the ruling did not acknowledge a few things:

* Demographics -- the percent of white voters is shrinking.

* The Supremes said we don't need minority voter protection because there are lots of minority elected officials. But they were elected because the Voting Rights Act was in force.

* Congress reenacted the VRA in 2006. As part of that they held hearings which showed discriminatory voting laws, meaning the act is still needed. The Supremes ignored that evidence.

* Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in her dissent, noted there is now a second generation of ways to disenfranchise voters that were not available when the act took effect, such as voter ID laws and precise gerrymandering. So, back to that equal sovereignty thing -- all states should now be subject to preclearance.

Bill Goodman concluded by saying we have rights in our country. He listed several of them that appear to be under attack: right to no unreasonable search and seizure (just heard a report that this right doesn't extend to computer files stored in the cloud); right of speech, protest, and assembly; right to our choice of religion (including none); a right to be free from discrimination; a right to free and fair elections. If we lose any of them we're in deep trouble.

The local head of Michigan Coalition for Human Rights joined Goodman at the podium for questions. He teaches at Wayne State University and deals with lots of youth. He feels a lot of today's youth are misinformed and distracted, precisely the state in which the big corporations wan them to be. What little news they get is tainted by corporate bias. A few youth in the audience objected. They are annoyed at the current state of things and want to make changes. A problem one of them (who lives in Detroit) sees is that many youth are "unconscious" -- they have been oppressed for so long they see it as normal.