Debating Federalism: Conservative False History and Hypocrisy vs. Progressive Collaborative Federalism

From Progressive States Network

Conservative state leaders have promoted legislation in states across the country claiming that the health care reform law is an unconstitutional overreach of federal power.  While just a handful of the bills were enacted (and most were roundly rejected in states where they were introduced), these attacks on the federal health law are the most prominent example of increasing right-wing legislative agitation declaring various federal laws and actions a violation of the constitution.

Right-Wing "States Rights" Bills:  Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Tennessee and Wyoming have declared that federal firearm regulations don't apply to weapons manufactured in those states.  Utah has rejected not only the federal health care reform bill, but declared federal lands subject to state eminent domain and asserted the "inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution."  Alabama, Alaska and Wyoming have joined Utah in passing resolutions generally denouncing the supposed violations of their state sovereignty.  And right-wing legislators have introduced bills to institute a "constitutional tender" requiring a gold standard for money in their states, declaring federal cap-and-trade proposals unconstitutional, making it a state crime for federal agents to arrest anyone in a state without permission from a county sheriff, and more generally nullifying claims by the federal government to regulate most interstate commerce.

Challenging the Right-Wing Constitutional Narrative: The challenge for progressives from this "states rights" movement is not that any of these laws are likely to survive in court, but that conservatives too often get away with claiming to stand for constitutional values without significant challenge from progressives.  The reality is that the right wing has no credibility in promoting their states' rights arguments and should be challenged more directly.  As this Dispatch will outline, their arguments fail on multiple grounds.

• First, conservative constitutional history is dead wrong.  The progressive vision of collaborative federalism between federal and state governments clearly reflects the "original intent" of the Constitution's creators  - including those who promoted the Constitutional Amendments enacted throughout our history.

• Second, conservative leaders are constitutional hypocrites, talking about "states rights" even as they support federal laws that restrict state authority in order to protect corporate special interests.

• Finally, unlike conservatives, progressives practice real respect for state authority by promoting and supporting state innovation and flexibility, a far more compelling practice of federalism than the rigid and false constitutional doctrine promoted by the right wing.

Progressive legislative leaders need to clearly engage the public and promote our story of a Constitution that was meant to promote a vigorous federal power in promoting equal rights and the general welfare, even as federal leaders should respect and strengthen the capacity of states to take action beyond minimum standards set by the federal government.

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Cheney's Push for Deregulation Led to BP Disaster

 

If it was supervised, if it was overseen, if it was regulated by the federal government, Cheney with his marvellous bureaucratic talent moved in and essentially replaced the people who were in the positions that were central to this regulation, this oversight, with people who were either lobbyists for the industry being regulated or executives from that industry.
Bio

Lawrence Wilkerson is a retired United States Army soldier and former chief of staff to United States Secretary of State Colin Powell. Wilkerson is an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary where he teaches courses on US national security. He also instructs a senior seminar in the Honors Department at the George Washington University entitled "National Security Decision Making."

Efforts to Limit the Flow of Spill News

By JEREMY W. PETERS
New York Times
Published: June 9, 2010

When the operators of Southern Seaplane in Belle Chasse, La., called the local Coast Guard-Federal Aviation Administration command center for permission to fly over restricted airspace in Gulf of Mexico, they made what they thought was a simple and routine request.

A pilot wanted to take a photographer from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans to snap photographs of the oil slicks blackening the water. The response from a BP contractor who answered the phone late last month at the command center was swift and absolute: Permission denied.

“We were questioned extensively. Who was on the aircraft? Who did they work for?” recalled Rhonda Panepinto, who owns Southern Seaplane with her husband, Lyle. “The minute we mentioned media, the answer was: ‘Not allowed.’ ”

Journalists struggling to document the impact of the oil rig explosion have repeatedly found themselves turned away from public areas affected by the spill, and not only by BP and its contractors, but by local law enforcement, the Coast Guard and government officials.

To some critics of the response effort by BP and the government, instances of news media being kept at bay are just another example of a broader problem of officials’ filtering what images of the spill the public sees.

Scientists, too, have complained about the trickle of information that has emerged from BP and government sources. Three weeks passed, for instance, from the time the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20 and the first images of oil gushing from an underwater pipe were released by BP.

“I think they’ve been trying to limit access,” said Representative Edward J. Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who fought BP to release more video from the underwater rovers that have been filming the oil-spewing pipe. “It is a company that was not used to transparency. It was not used to having public scrutiny of what it did.”

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Boehner: Government--i.e. Taxpayers--Should Help Pay For Oil Spill

By Brian Beutler
Talking Points Memo |
June 10, 2010, 11:19AM

Congressional Democrats and the White House are toying with different ways to force BP to cover the costs of damages from the Gulf oil spill. But they face stiff opposition from industry...and it seems leading Republicans. In response to a question from TPMDC, House Minority Leader John Boehner said he believes taxpayers should help pick up the tab for the clean up.

"I think the people responsible in the oil spill--BP and the federal government--should take full responsibility for what's happening there," Boehner said at his weekly press conference this morning.

Boehner's statement followed comments last Friday by US Chamber of Commerce CEO Tom Donohue who said he opposes efforts to stick BP, a member of the Chamber, with the bill. "It is generally not the practice of this country to change the laws after the game," he said. "Everybody is going to contribute to this clean up. We are all going to have to do it. We are going to have to get the money from the government and from the companies and we will figure out a way to do that."

So today I asked Boehner, "Do you agree with Tom Donohue of the Chamber that the government and taxpayers should pitch in to clean up the oil spill?" The shorter answer is yes.

The Chamber is extremely influential in Republican politics, so on that level it's not particularly surprising that Boehner has Donohue's back on this one. But the politics of asking the federal government (i.e. taxpayers) to help cover the multi-billion dollar cleanup and rescue efforts are deadly. Look for Democrats to jump all over this one.

Late update: Boehner spokesman Michael Steel emails to say "Boehner made a general statement about who is responsible for the spill, and the federal government oversight was clearly lacking, but he has said repeatedly that BP is responsible for the cost of the cleanup."

Robbed of jobs by the deficit cultists

By Dean Baker
guardian.co.uk   
 Monday 7 June 2010 18.00 BST

The latest US jobs report shows how feeble this recovery is. Yet those managing the economy are set on a low-employment path

Friday's US jobs report caught most economic analysts by surprise. After touting the strength of the recovery for months, they had to come to grips with the fact that the economy just is not creating very many jobs.

If the temporary jobs generated by the census are pulled out of the count, the economy created just 20,000 jobs in May. The average rate of growth of non-census jobs over the last three months has been just 130,000 a month, only slightly faster than the growth of the workforce. At this rate of job growth, it will take decades, not years, to get back to normal levels of unemployment. It's time that we stop the happy talk about recovery and get serious about the country's economic problems.

Once again, the reason for this downturn is very simple, even if most of the country's top economists were (and are) unable to see it. We saw an $8tn housing bubble and a somewhat smaller bubble in non-residential real estate collapse. This bubble had been driving the economy prior to the recession.

The bubbles directly generated close to $500bn in annual demand by stimulating construction. The housing wealth created by the bubble indirectly spurred another $500bn in demand by lifting consumption. With the destruction of this wealth consumption has now been drastically curtailed. The question is not one of consumer sentiments. Consumers are not spending for the same reason that homeless people don't spend: they lack the money.

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Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic Policy and Research. Follow his blog Beat the Press.

The Supreme Court: Keeping Politics Safe for the Rich

EDITORIAL
New York Times
Keeping Politics Safe for the Rich
Published: June 8, 2010

In a burst of judicial activism, the Supreme Court on Tuesday upended the gubernatorial race in Arizona, cutting off matching funds to candidates participating in the state’s public campaign finance system.

Suddenly, three candidates, including Gov. Jan Brewer, can no longer receive public funds they had counted on to run against a free-spending wealthy opponent.

The court’s reckless order muscling into the race was terse and did not say whether there were any dissents, though it is hard to imagine there were not. An opinion explaining its reasoning will have to wait until the next term, assuming it takes the case, but by that time the state’s general election will be over and its model campaign finance system substantially demolished.

It seems likely that the Roberts court will use this case to continue its destruction of the laws and systems set up in recent decades to reduce the influence of big money in politics. By the time it is finished, millionaires and corporations will have regained an enormous voice in American politics, at the expense of candidates who have to raise money the old-fashioned way and, ultimately, at the expense of voters.

Arizona’s clean elections program was established by the state’s voters in 1998 after a series of scandals provided clear illustrations of money’s corrupting influence. In particular, the program was prompted by the AzScam scandal of 1991, in which many state legislators were recorded accepting contributions and bribes in exchange for approval of gambling legislation.

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Unemployment Benefits Are More Important Than Deficit Reduction, Say 3/4 Of Voters

By Arthur Delaney
arthur@huffingtonpost.com |

Huffington Post
First Posted: 06- 7-10 04:38 PM   |   Updated: 06- 7-10 04:38 PM

Three-quarters of registered voters think Congress should forget about the deficit and preserve extended unemployment benefits and health insurance subsidies for laid-off workers, according to a new poll commissioned by the National Employment Law Project.

Citing deficit concerns, Democrats in both chambers of Congress have said it's time to start thinking about how to wrap up the extended unemployment benefits put in place to fight the recession. But 74 percent of people surveyed said they agreed with the statement that "it is too early to start cutting back benefits and health coverage for workers who lost their jobs."

"We cannot let a handful of misguided deficit hawks pull the plug on benefits that are precisely the kind of stimulus needed for economic recovery and deficit reduction," said NELP director Christine Owens in a statement. "Given the choice, the vast majority of the American people would provide unemployed workers and their communities the benefits they continue to need -- Congress should be listening to them."

Sixty-seven percent said they either "strongly favored" or "somewhat favored" continuing federal unemployment benefits. The poll did not mention the fact that federally-funded extensions, in combination with the initial 26 weeks of state benefits, give the unemployed up to 99 weeks in some states. (There is no proposal on the Hill to help the "99ers" -- the hundreds of thousands of people who've been through all available benefits and still haven't found work.)

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BORN ILLEGAL: Rep. Russell Pearce Plans New Assault To Deny Rights to Children of Illegal Immigrants

Arizona Capitol Times

By Luige del Puerto - luige.delpuerto@azcapitoltimes.com
June 4, 2010 at 10:25 am

Arizona’s new immigration law has yet to take effect, but Sen. Russell Pearce has already moved on to the next step in his quest to rid Arizona of illegal immigrants: deny birth certificates to children born in the U.S. to non-citizen parents.

But that’s not all. Pearce said he also wants to require students who are here illegally to pay tuition to attend public schools.

RELATED: Pearce seeks to deny citizenship to children of illegals
RELATED: Another immigration plan: charge tuition for illegal students

The proposals, which Pearce said he plans to introduce as legislation next year, are part of a coordinated strategy by Pearce and groups such as the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to remove all incentives for illegal immigrants to live in the U.S.

“My issue is protecting the taxpayers. You can’t come here illegally and not be a legal resident and expect the taxpayers to pick up your tab,” Pearce said.

Critics, though, said revoking citizenship to people born in the U.S. would undermine the principles on which the nation was founded and redefine citizenship for far more people than Pearce may be envisioning. It may even create a set of people who lack citizenship of any country.

Requiring children to prove citizenship to attend public school, they said, would create a permanent lower class of uneducated residents who would be unable to sustain themselves or contribute to their communities.

“Why penalize the child?” asked Sen. Amanda Aguirre, a Democrat from Yuma. “Why do we want to create this type of society where a certain group of children — we want them to grow up without education?”

Within the last decade, Arizona has passed laws to deny public benefits to illegal immigrants, penalize business owners who hire undocumented workers and arrest people who cannot prove they are U.S. citizens.

But Pearce’s most recent ideas go far beyond establishing stricter enforcement of immigration laws and may signal the next steps for Pearce and immigration hawks across the nation: redefining citizenship and targeting the children of illegal immigrants.

“What is markedly different is that Russell Pearce, up to this point in time, has been bootstrapping federal law to justify his state laws,” immigration attorney Matthew White said. “This is a drastic approach that’s saying ‘I am now going to interpret the 14th Amendment. I am now the federal law and you are going to listen to me.’”

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If you look at facts, border is more secure than ever | Separating common sense, hysteria

by Janet Napolitano 
Special for the Republic
Jun. 4, 2010 12:00 AM

Arizona has endured more than its share of challenges stemming from our southwestern border. I know this from personal experience, having worked directly on border issues since 1993 - as U.S. attorney, as Arizona governor and attorney general, and now as U.S. secretary of Homeland Security.

I share the frustration that Arizona and other border communities feel, from the cartel-related violence in Mexico to the tragic murder of Robert Krentz in Cochise County. These events make clear that we still have significant work ahead of us. But the notion that we have somehow ignored the border is simply false.


The people of Arizona need to know that our border - the U.S.-Mexican border - has been one of my key priorities as secretary.

Over the past year and a half, this administration has pursued a new border-security strategy with an unprecedented sense of urgency. And despite the unfortunate misperceptions that continue to make their way into the public debate, the reality is we've actually achieved significant progress securing the border.

You might not get this impression from those looking to score political points by saying the border is spinning out of control. But the numbers tell the accurate story - and they're going in the right direction.

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Brewing Discrimination: AZ Gov Meets Obama

By Faiz Shakir, Amanda Terkel, Matt Corley, Benjamin Armbruster, Zaid ilani and Alex Seitz-Waid
The Progress Report
June 4, 2010

Since Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) signed SB-1070, the nation's harshest anti-immigration measure, into law, the White House has made clear that it disapproves of the measure. At a press conference after meeting with Mexican President Felipe Calderón, President Obama said that he was concerned the new law would be "applied in a discriminatory fashion." For weeks, conservatives have taken up Brewer's crusade for a face-to-face conversation with Obama. Although Justice Department officials had been in touch with Arizona officials to voice their concerns over the law, Brewer bristled when the White House initially said that the President's schedule couldn't accommodate a personal sit-down. Yesterday, however, Brewer finally received her Oval Office meeting. The White House said the discussion was "good," and Brewer said it was "very, very cordial," underscoring the fact that the two came to very little agreement on immigration reform and the encounter didn't appear to change the relationship. Indeed, immediately after the meeting, Brewer continued to throw around misinformation about the law and conservatives continued to complain that Obama wasn't doing enough to reach out to their side.


DISTRACTIONS FROM REFORM: In a press conference after her White House visit, a reporter asked Brewer whether Obama "understands what's in your law." Brewer replied, "You know, he's a well-learned man and a lawyer. If he has read the law, I'm sure he understands the law." In response to a follow-up question about whether she believes "he's read the law," Brewer simply gave a smug smile and went to the next question. For weeks, conservatives have been trying to distract from the real problems with the law by insisting that the people who are criticizing it haven't read it. Brewer even created an ad featuring a singing frog puppet lamenting how not enough people have actually read the law, echoing a hollow GOP refrain during the health care debate to "read the bill." Brewer and other conservatives used the high-profile meeting as a stage for their continuing political theater. Fox News basically pretended the meeting didn't happen. Fox News host Megyn Kelly continued to gripe that Brewer "had to shame" Obama into seeing her. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee went after Obama for originally saying that he couldn't "squeeze" Brewer in, even though he hosted Sir Paul McCartney at the White House this week.  

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Margarita Madness/LD 26/$26 June 13

MIT study shows bonuses don't work when cognitive skills involved.

Posted by madfloridian in Political Videos
democraticunderground.com
Sun May 30th 2010, 01:09 PM  

In fact the (MIT) study shows that as long as the task involved only mechanical skills, bonuses worked as expected.

But once the task called for even rudimentary cognitive skills, a "larger reward led to poorer performance."

This study was not done about education, so I am just pointing out that it could so easily apply at this time when our new Secretary of Education is all about merit pay and bonuses. In fact he is so much into the merit stuff that he is for allowing private corporations to pay the teachers who can perform in the dog and pony atmosphere. 

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