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By Robert Reich
Former U.S. Secretary of Labor, Professor at Berkeley

The decision is a major defeat for the White House. The so-called “individual mandate” is a cornerstone of the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s 2010 health care reform law, scheduled to go into effect in 2014.

The whole idea of the law is to pool heath risks. Only if everyone buys insurance can insurers afford to cover people with preexisting conditions, or pay the costs of catastrophic diseases.

The issue is now headed for the Supreme Court (another appellate court has upheld the law’s constitutionality) where the prognosis isn’t good. The Court’s Republican-appointed majority has not exactly distinguished itself by its progressive views. (more…)

Jonathan Tasini

By Jonathan Tasini
Union Leader/Organizer, Author, Strategist

It is has been pointed out by others that when the Republicans chose to organize the reading of the Constitution on the House floor, they conveniently left out parts they didn’t like. But, they have intellectual — and I use “intellectual” loosely — support for this from Justice Scalia and his wing of convenient Constitutionalists who choose to find things in the document they so revere — like rights of Corporations.

The point I am making is not a new one. But it rises today thanks to a fabulous blog post by Linda Greenhouse whose regular legal commentary and coverage for The New York Times of the Supreme Court was a pearl and is missed now that she has moved on. But, she is a blogger there and she writes today on Problems of Democracy. Let me build up to the critical part, from my vantage point, with her first example of the convenient way in which Scalia views the Constitution:

My own beef is not that the members of Congress chose not to acknowledge inconvenient parts of the document as written, but that their show of reverence for the written text obscured much of what really matters in our constitutional culture…

There is nothing inherently liberal, progressive or even ideological one way or another about acknowledging that the Constitution we have today is the multilayered product of original understanding mediated over time by perceived need. Nor is Justice Scalia himself, his protestations aside, immune from this reality. One of his opinions from the Supreme Court’s last term is my favorite recent example of how even this most original of all originalists sometimes bends toward the practical in his constitutional interpretation.[emphasis added] (more…)

Mike Lux

By Mike Lux
Author, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be”

As I wrote a few weeks back, when I sat down to write my book The Progressive Revolution on the history of the American political debate, I knew that the themes that animated our current political debate would be the same as in the past.

What I underestimated was that we would start to re-fight some of the exact same issues that have been fairly settled for the last 50 years or even longer. It is a sign of how radical conservatives in the last couple of years have become that they are raising issues that have seemed settled for so many decades. Republican nominees and elected officials for major offices have, over the last few months, made open arguments for:

-the privatization or outright phasing out of Social Security and Medicare

-the repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act

-the secession of states from the union

-the nullification of laws passed by the Congress and signed by the President

-the repeal of the 17th amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1914, allowing people to vote directly for their Senator rather than have them appointed by the state legislature

Now comes the most radically extreme proposal yet: Senate Majority Leader McConnell and other Republicans are now calling for amending or even outright repeal of the 14th amendment to the Constitution. To understand how profoundly reactionary this proposal is, let me refer to my book:

The 14th Amendment was passed at the height of the Radical Republican frustration at Johnson’s alliance with Southern conservatives on Reconstruction. Section 1 asserted that the federal government, not the states, decided who US citizens were and gave that citizenship to all those born in the United States or naturalized by the federal government. The states were prohibited from denying those citizens their civil rights and “the equal protection of the law.” It was the first time the Constitution created a definition of national citizenship as opposed to just leaving it to the states. Section 2 stated that any state denying the right to vote to any of its (male) citizens was to proportionally lose seats in Congress and the Electoral College. Sections 3 and 4 denied Southerners who had held federal office before the war and then served the rebel cause the right to run for federal office again, and ensured that the debts that the Confederacy had incurred would never be paid by either federal or state governments. The 14th Amendment was designed by progressives to be a long term stake in the heart of states’ rights and slave power by asserting that the federal government, not the states, had the right to guarantee American citizens their civil and political rights under the law. It literally extended the Bill of Rights to all American citizens, no matter what state they lived in, and gave the federal government the power to enforce those rights. (more…)

David Sirota

By David Sirota
Author of “The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt”

History’s great American parables teach that if anything unified our founders, it was a deep antipathy to dictatorship. As bourgeois revolutionaries from Boston to Philadelphia courageously split with the British crown in 1776, they created three equal branches of government to prevent, in the words of James Madison, “a tyrannical concentration of all the powers” in a president’s hands.

For two centuries since, civics books, Hollywood biopics and party convention speeches have constructed a mythology insisting that this democratic commitment to checks and balances makes our country a beacon of freedom – the “shining city on a hill” overlooking a despotic world below. We are told that democracy’s tumult – its messy debates, legislative sausage-making and electoral friction – is the best way to guarantee that public policy represents public will, therefore making us a strong and durable nation.

If that is true, then every patriot should be concerned about the intensifying efforts to supplant democracy with something far more authoritarian. Call it American czarism.

That term should be as impossibly oxymoronic as crash landings and deafening silence, considering our Constitution’s desire to create a “government of laws and not of men,” as John Adams said. But politics is filled with paradoxes from Reagan Democrats to Obama Republicans, and czars – i.e., policymakers granted extralegal, cross-agency powers – have become increasingly prevalent in our government over the past century.

After the Great Flood of 1927, for instance, President Calvin Coolidge named Herbert Hoover the federal government czar overseeing relief efforts, and Hoover subsequently appointed “dictators” (he actually used that term) to help coordinate the response.

During the power consolidations of the New Deal in the 1930s, a Time magazine story headlined “Dictator or Democrat” reported on the “suspicions of those throughout the nation who have an uneasy feeling that Roosevelt, under cover of the emergency, is trying ‘to slip something over’ on democracy.” In the 1940s and 1950s, parks commissioner Robert Moses – famously known as “the power broker” – amassed so much personal authority that he was able to almost single-handedly redesign New York City. And lately, presidents have given us poverty, energy, drug, health and even Iraq war czars.

Until now, this slow lurch toward czarism has primarily reflected the ancient, almost innate human desire for power and paternalistic leadership. The current president reminded us that executives see all-powerful “deciders” when they look in the mirror. And Americans – sans kings to rally around – have been elevating commanders in chief to superhero status well before Barack Obama’s Marvel comic-book debut and George Bush’s flight-suited “Top Gun” impression in 2003.

In recent years, this culture of “presidentialism,” as Vanderbilt Professor Dana Nelson calls it, has justified the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretaps and a radical theory of the “unitary executive” that aims to provide a jurisprudential rationale for total White House supremacy over all government. But only in the past three months has American czarism metastasized from a troubling slow-growth tumor to a potentially deadly cancer.

In October, Congress relinquished its most basic oversight powers and gave Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson sole authority to dole out billions of bailout dollars to Wall Street. At the same time, it did nothing when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke used fiats to commit “$5 trillion worth of new money, loan guarantees and loosened lending requirements,” according to Politico – all while he refused to tell the public who is receiving the largesse.

And the Washington Post has reported that lawmakers may appoint a “car czar” who “would essentially control the purse strings” of an auto industry bailout and “could force Detroit’s Big Three automakers into bankruptcy” if he or she didn’t like their behavior.

Put bluntly, the unprecedented usurpation of spending power by the executive branch and the Federal Reserve is systematically undermining our democracy’s most sacrosanct principle – the one that is supposed to ensure “the legislative department alone has access to the pockets of the people,” as Madison said. And this new czarism is so strident because it reflects both executive power lust and the 21st century economy.

Today, keystrokes and mouse-clicks instantly whisk trillions of dollars across the planet, and many of those keystrokes and mouse-clicks are uninhibited by the grindingly slow processes of democracy.

Saudi princes don’t have to publish announcements in a federal register before moving cash from sovereign wealth funds into foreign investments. China’s rulers aren’t obligated to obtain legislative approval when buying or dumping U.S. Treasury bills; and transnational corporations will not wait for public hearings before shuttering offices, eliminating jobs and cutting off credit.

Our nation is integrally connected to this fast-moving globalized economy, and American czarism effectively posits that in order to compete, we must anoint strongmen as saviors, prioritize speed instead of sobriety and emulate dictatorship instead of democracy.

Indeed, the Economist magazine’s prediction that the “economic crisis may increase the attractiveness of the Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism” is coming true right here at home, as we seem ever more intent on replicating – rather than resisting – that model.

This, as much as personal hubris, explains why Paulson and Bernanke sought unprecedented latitude in spending trillions – they want to be able to move as fast as their autocratic counterparts in other countries, and believe congressional oversight will slow them down.

It explains why UC Berkeley economist Laura Tyson says we need an auto czar who will “take a number of approaches to this problem that are already known, that have been discussed endlessly, and force it through” – because to economists, a czar quickly “forcing it through” is more important than any consideration for democratic deliberation.

And it explains why when Obama aides this week demanded complete control over the second half of the Wall Street bailout funds, House Financial Services Committee chairman Rep. Barney Frank, D- Mass., shirked his oversight duties and said he’s “willing to accept their word” that they will spend the money responsibly. In a czarism, that’s what legislators do: “accept the word” of the czar.

In sum, it explains why the age-old struggle between capitalism and democracy is once again defining our politics – and why capitalism is now winning.

That triumph may be terrific for the czars and great for their industry suitors, but as the founders would likely agree, it is a Pyrrhic victory for America.

Bob Cesca

 

By Bob Cesca

Author of One Nation Under Fear

“I find I’m so excited, I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head. I think it’s the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain.” — Ellis Boyd ‘Red’ Redding, The Shawshank Redemption

Earlier this year, HBO premiered their brilliant mini-series John Adams, based upon David McCullough’s epic biography of our second president — the founding father who Thomas Jefferson referred to as “a colossus of liberty.”

And as the scenes of the last 24 hours have rolled by, I can’t stop thinking about a poignant scene from third act of episode six: “Unnecessary War.”

The scene follows President and Mrs. Adams as they arrive at the still-under-construction executive mansion in Washington only to discover, to their visible disgust, that African slaves — both men and women — were being tasked with the construction of what would later become known as the White House.

We follow the Adamses, who were vocal opponents of slavery, as they walk below the familiar triangular peak of the north portico and through the front doors — the first presidential couple to occupy that historic building. As they step through the mud in what appears to be silent horror, they’re taken aback by numerous slaves toiling all around. Painting and plastering the walls. Sweeping the floors. Moving furniture.

“The negroes will see to your trunks,” a white foreman offers to “help” with the presidential luggage, and then barks at a slave, “Here! You boy!”

The scene culminates with Abigail Adams, played by Laura Linney, shouting with indignation, “Half-fed slaves building our nation’s capital?!”

Not only was this scene a powerful cinematic illustration of the contradictions and ironies of America’s founding liberties, but it also sets the stage for an event you and I will be fortunate enough to witness just 76 days from right now.

Today, President Bush, of all people, described the forthcoming Inauguration Day and, perhaps inadvertently, presented the ultimate historical bookend to that scene from John Adams when he remarked, “It will be a stirring sight to watch President Obama, his wife, Michelle, and their beautiful girls step through the doors of the White House.”

Indeed it will, sir. After eight years of awfulness, George W. Bush actually managed to say something that touched me in a way that didn’t precipitate, you know, me breaking something. Damm you, Mr. President, you magnificent bastard.

To arrive at this moment has required a too-long and too-painful journey. For African Americans, yes. But also for the maturation of the ideals championed by John Adams and his generation of founding patriots. For a nation that professes to spread freedom and yet continues to deny it to some of its own people. For those of us who have hungered for some kind of redemption to help wash away the original sins lurking between the lines of our Constitution.

President-elect Obama hasn’t and probably can’t absolve those sins, and no single event or person can be expected to accomplish such a task. The southern and Appalachian white vote was evidence of the continued existence of those deep prejudices, and certain Gollum-ish elements of the Republican Party have proved this year that the Southern Strategy is very much alive.

But this new president has set for us an unique example — he’s become a national role-model and a guide, leading a record number of us towards the realization that it doesn’t have to be “that way.” It doesn’t have to be us versus them anymore. The multi-racial, multi-cultural coalition that President-elect Obama achieved in this election — his truly American coalition — has succeeded in further marginalizing the ridiculous and archaic fear-mongers and fire-eaters who feed upon the exploitation of our original, founding sins.

In terms of race, in terms of history, politics and American life we’ve crossed over to a better place and a more hopeful time. Not simply because of one man, but because we were prescient enough to have recognized ourselves and the true nature of America reflected in that one man. From there, we set about the task of freeing ourselves from the darkness of this decade and the skulking shadows that have for too long haunted us. In this respect, all of us — all races — are a little more free at last.

After all these years, we’ve finally arrived at moment when America feels like it’s supposed to feel.

This January 20th, all of America will be stepping through those doors with President and Mrs. Obama as the dark ride of the last eight years reaches its long-overdue conclusion — a conclusion more joyful and overwhelming than I think any of us fully anticipated prior to 11 p.m. eastern time Tuesday night — when we pushed beyond a crucial threshold on our way to a more perfect union. And now, as the pictures roll in from celebrations here and around the world…”I find I’m so excited I can barely sit still or hold a thought in my head.”

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Cesca’s One Nation Under Fear, with a foreword by Arianna Huffington of Huffington Post is available on Amazon. For more by Bob Cesca, see BobCesca.com! Go!