Justice Kennedy sided with the liberal justices this time, and DOMA is done. So is California’s Prop 8. This was a good day for marriage equality.
Justice Ginsburg Is Pissed
Voting Rights Act Gutted
This may be the most destructive SCOTUS since Justice Taney et al. decided Dred Scott. First Citizens United; now this.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively struck down the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by a 5-to-4 vote, ruling that Congress had not provided adequate justification for subjecting nine states, mostly in the South, to federal oversight.
“In 1965, the states could be divided into two groups: those with a recent history of voting tests and low voter registration and turnout, and those without those characteristics,†Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority. “Congress based its coverage formula on that distinction. Today the nation is no longer divided along those lines, yet the Voting Rights Act continues to treat it as if it were.â€
Does Justice Roberts live on the moon? Has Justice Roberts even visited this country?
I linked it in the last post, but a lot of what Chris Hayes says here applies to the SCOTUS and this decision — the nature of the South; the sort of people who rise to prominent positions.
Ends and Odds
A Trial Begins
Today attorneys made opening statements in the George Zimmerman trial. CNN says the defense attorney began with a knock knock joke.
Following Guy’s statement, defense attorney Don West came forward to woo the jury. As he began, he told a knock-knock joke. But it failed to win a laugh. “Knock knock. Who’s there? George Zimmerman. George Zimmerman who? Good, you’re on the jury,” he said.
Yeah, I’m sure that made an impression.
I mostly want to call your attention to “The Quote That Should End the Trayvon Trial.” John Richardson writes,
George Zimmerman is going to be found guilty. All the evidence you need — all the evidence the cops needed — is right there in the interrogation they did with him three days after the shooting. The only thing more shocking than what Zimmerman says in the clip, which was released on the internet one year ago, is how little it has impressed the bloviating jerks who dominate the coverage of this trial.
Richardson provides a partial transcript of the tape with his own comments. What comes across is that (a) Zimmerman wasn’t taking the crime all that seriously; and (b) the cops clearly knew Zimmerman’s account didn’t add up, but they let him go, anyway.
Republicans for a Wasteful, Bloated Government Spending Program
I had heard that the Senate was about to vote on the immigration reform bill, but I’m watching C-Span, and Sen. Jeff Sessions (Neanderthal-Alabama) is speaking against cloture. So I don’t know what’s going on with that. Word is that the bill will pass reasonably easily in the Senate but most likely will die in the House.
Senate Republicans are getting on board because the bill includes $4.5 billion in new border-security technology spending, a provision that Sen. Patrick Leahy calls “a Christmas wish list for Halliburton.†Well, it’s not like we need money for anything else.
Greg Sargent says the bill could pass in the House, but only if speaker Boehner allows it to come to a vote, knowing that more Dems than Republicans will vote for it.
Monkey House
The Republican-dominated House is looking more ridiculous than ever, if that’s even possible. The latest debacle is the defeat of a farm bill that included deep cuts to food stamps. Most House Dems voted against it, and so did 62 House Republicans. The Dems objected because it cut food stamps too much. The Republicans, however, appeared to think it didn’t cut food stamps enough.
Anyhoo, having failed to move its extremist wing to pass something that might actually, you know, become law, the leadership of the House Republicans blamed Democrats.
The leadership of the House GOP — which, last time I checked, controls the Lower Chamber – is blaming Democrats for failing to deliver enough votes to make passage possible. A spokesman for Eric Cantor claimed it shows Dems “are not able to govern.â€
The Republicans, and noted soprano-singing House Speaker John Boehner, who last saw his balls in October of 2010, have decided that the blame really lies in a reluctance by Democrats to be properly complicit in making poor children hungry enough to pull themselves up by their bootstraps rather than eating them.
Then the Republican leadership blames Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for only bringing 24 Democratic “aye†votes to the table. Jesus. We’re not sure that Nancy Pelosi got 24 votes from the Republican Party on all major bills combined in the years 2009 and 2010. Also, there’s a reason that most Democrats didn’t vote for this farm bill, and that’s because they hate it, because it assaults the social safety net. But yeah, anyway, sure, this is Nancy Pelosi’s fault, boo, she’s evil and wears a lot of makeup, boo.
Newell also writes,
Now then, what’s the problem? Oh right, it’s the House of Representatives, which is terrible at everything, and offers no indication of being any other way until at least 2023. Let’s give some credit: They’re adept at passing go-nowhere bills to repeal Obamacare or ban abortion or tattoo the words “Under God†to every baby’s forehead. Great work there from the House Republican Party. On issues that might appeal to an even slightly broader cross-section of the country, though, they’ve got nothing. You know this. You’ve seen the same routine in nearly every important vote since 2009. Remember that time the government considered arbitrarily defaulting on the public debt and destroying the global economy forever? That was a head-scratcher for the House; took some real “working out†before they concluded it would best be averted, for now.
It always works out the same way, at the 11th hour. A Senate-originated compromise, after much pouting, is taken up by the House after several defeats of their own insane legislation. Maybe a tweak or two is offered. The House passes it. Conservatives serve up uncreative epithets for John Boehner for exercising the only decent option available to him. The next big piece of legislation comes up. And, at least as of yesterday’s farm bill flop, they begin this same fatal cycle of time wasting again.
This pretty much means that the only way real legislation can be passed in the House is with a substantial number of Dem votes, because the Clown Caucus won’t pass anything that resembles actual governance.
Charles Pierce explains the implications for an immigration reform bill:
Mind you, Boehner couldn’t whip enough votes out of his caucus to pass this mess, which included enough hometown pork to bring Dan Rostenkowski back from the dead. Keep that in mind when you consider that he is the guy who’s supposed to get a reasonable immigration bill through this monkeyhouse. I keep hearing that they want the “Gang of 8” proposal to get 70 votes in the Senate. This, allegedly, will “put pressure” on the House to pass a decent immigration reform bill. This is completely absurd. Pressure from whom? Boehner? Marco Rubio, who got booed in front of the Capitol yesterday? One half of the national legislature is utterly in the hands of the inmates of Bedlam. What possible reason is there to believe that anything will get done? Hell, Steve King is even nuttier on immigration than he is on poor kids.
Josh Marshall agrees, saying in effect that Boehner’s only real choice is to give the House a relatively “moderate” (by Washington standards) immigration bill that Dems will vote for, and then get out of the way. No bill will be approved by the House extremists that would be acceptable to anyone else.
See also Elise Foley, “Farm Bill Failure Shows John Boehner’s Tight Spot on Immigration.”
Update: Details on what happened — in short, the House Republican Crazies loaded the bill up with amendments to make it toxic to Dems, and then complained the Dems “sandbagged” them by not voting for the bill — see Roll Call and Politico.
The Patriarchy Whines Back
Yesterday much of the leftie blogosphere came down on James Taranto for dismissing efforts to curb sexual assault in the military as a “war on men†and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.†I mentioned this at the end of this post. Now Taranto whines that the feminazis are picking on him.
Taranto had expressed approval of a clemency granted to an officer who was convicted of aggravated sexual assault. Today he writes,
Our argument infuriated feminists, yielding hundreds of tweets and perhaps a dozen posts on various leftist websites. Particularly noteworthy was a tweet from @Invisible_War, which promotes a documentary described as “a groundbreaking investigation into the epidemic of rape in the US military.” The tweet read: “Appalling: @WSJ’s @jamestaranto thinks we’re criminalizing male sexuality by prosecuting military rape.”
That is an utter falsehood. Our column discussed sexual assault but made no specific mention of rape, a distinct and more serious offense under military law. Herrera was not accused of rape.
It was aggravated sexual assault, which sounds a whole lot like rape to me. If military law doesn’t consider aggravated sexual assault to be that big a deal, then there’s a problem with military law.
Taranto also complains that some of the comments made about him were “abusive.” Seriously. Saying unkind things about him on the Twitter is “abusive.” But aggravated sexual assault is just boys being boys.
I feel an urge to demonstrate to Taranto what “abusive” means. But he’s not worth the effort, frankly.
Update: It gets worse. See Digby and also Think Progress —
Taranto followed up his op-ed with an appearance on Wall Street Journal’s video channel, where he argued that “female sexual freedom†is responsible for a “war on men,†and that war is embodied in allegations of sexual assault. During that interview, he also said that a woman alleging assault and a man denying it “differed… on whether she consented.†Taranto also cast doubt on the report because someone present “didn’t even hear this going on.â€
“What does female sexual freedom mean?†Taranto added, “It means, for this woman, that she had the freedom to get drunk and get in the back seat of a car with this guy.â€
I feel like declaring war on James Taranto. This monster needs to be out of a job.
Twilight of the Patriarchy
It’s behind a subscription firewall, but there’s a lovely essay by Richard Rodriguez in the current issue of Harper’s. He nails down the real connection between heterosexual and homosexual marriage.
Divorce rates in the United States and Europe suggest that women are not happy with the relationships they have with men, and vice versa. And whatever that unhappiness is, I really don’t think gay people are the cause. On the other hand, whatever is wrong with heterosexual marriage does have some implication for homosexuals.
The majority of American women are living without spouses. My optimism regarding that tabulation is that a majority of boys in America will grow up assuming that women are strong. My worry is that as so many men absent themselves from the lives of the children they father, boys and girls will grow up without a sense of the tenderness of men.
The prospect of a generation of American children being raised by women in homes without fathers is challenging for religious institutions whose central conception of deity is father, whose central conception of church is family, whose only conception of family is heterosexual. A woman who can do without a husband can do without any patriarchal authority. The oblique remedy some religious institutions propose for the breakdown of heterosexual relationships is a legal objection to homosexual marriages by defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
IMO it’s all about the patriarchy. It’s why so many (mostly white male) politicians are obsessed with shutting down Planned Parenthood and criminalizing abortion. It’s behind Erick Erickson’s recent rant.
The War on Women Continues
As near as I can tell from vaguely worded news stories, the bill passed by the House yesterday would ban abortions after 20 weeks’ gestation, or 22 weeks from the last menstrual period. The bill has no chance of being passed in the Senate, and even if it did, the President would veto it. But the bill tells us a lot about Republicans’ inability to respect women.
For example, originally the House Judiciary Committee rejected exemptions for rape and incest. A rape exemption eventually was added, but only if the rape was reported to police within 48 hours after it happened. Otherwise, they say, women will just lie and say they were raped when they weren’t really. Those gestating women can’t be trusted.
Oh, and women hardly ever get pregnant from rape, anyway.
BTW, when the rape exemption was added, one of the bill’s sponsors took his name off the bill. Paul C. Broun (R-Ga.) said he was “extremely disappointed that House Republican leadership chose to include language to subject some unborn children to needless pain and suffering.â€
According to one article, minors who are incest victims also are required to have reported the incest before they can get an exemption, which would pretty much mean incest victims can’t get an exemption, even if they’re 12 years old. There is a “life of the mother” exemption, but I don’t know what criteria have to be met for a dying woman to qualify.
I haven’t seen any mention of exemptions for when the fetus is severely malformed and probably won’t live anyway. Some kinds of birth defects usually are only detected around the 20th week of gestation.
(Some background the news stories all leave out: Roe v. Wade guidelines allows states to ban elective abortions after 23 weeks gestation (or 25 weeks from the last menstrual period), because that’s the generally accepted threshold of viability for a human fetus. I understand a handful of babies have been born a little earlier and survived, but medical science has no record of an infant surviving after only 20 weeks of gestation. Also, according to Alan Guttmacher, in the U.S. only 1.5 percent of abortions occur after 20 weeks gestation. Also, too, in the U.S. nobody is keeping a comprehensive record of why abortions are performed, so there is no way to know how many of that 1.5 percent are rape and incest victims.)
Elsewhere — Get this —
The Wall Street Journal‘s James Taranto dismissed the epidemic of sexual assault in the military, claiming that efforts to address the growing problem contributed to a “war on men” and an “effort to criminalize male sexuality.”
That’s right, folks. Assaulting women is just standard male sexuality. See also “Five Easy Steps for Becoming a Rape Apologist.”
Republicans apparently think that abortions restrictions will help them in the 2016 2014 midterms. I don’t see how. See also “GOP has learned absolutely nothing from 2012.”