SCOTUS caps Prop 200: Toldya

So in a 7-2 decision the US Supreme Court has ruled that the requirement to show documentation of citizenship to register to vote, installed here a few years ago with Prop 200, is an unconstitutional infringement on federal law and invalid. This is no surprise.

This is exactly what I and many other commentators predicted during the campaign and the period of widespread confusion and angst among voters in the ensuing years. It was as obviously illegal then as now.

Can we hope that the now so-fashionable spending hawks on the right will rise up in anger over the waste of literally millions of public dollars pushing the legislation through, retooling the elections bureaucracy to follow it, and defending it in court against obstructed and justifiably pissed-off voters?

Now that the law has been clarified by what everyone agrees is a conservative-leaning Court, can we hope that the armchair lawyers who proclaim themselves Constitutionalists will power up the criticism machine against the tenthers, birthers and haters of brown people who pushed through this predictably unworkable law?

Let's say I doubt it.

We knew it would be shot down in court, and we said so at the time. We knew it with Arpaio's immigrant sweeps, and with the show-me your-papers provisions of SB1070. We were right, though it takes years for the process to cancel what fear-driven voters did in hours. We knew that the volunteer border militias would wind up killing innocent people in spectacularly awful ways. Shawna Forde and JT Ready proved the point for us.

We knew that Al Gore won more votes in 2000. We knew that the neocons would leverage 9-11 in favor of the military-industrial complex. We knew Afghanistan would be a disaster. We knew Iraq was wrong from the beginning. We knew that the Patriot Act would wind up creating a surveillance/security state, and even its most ardent supporters would come to hate it. We knew the War on Terror would create more enemies than it would ever kill.

We were right, they were wrong. We know we'll never get any credit from the other side for this foresight, and why should we? Every one was as easy to predict as the sun coming up in the morning.

We know that single-payer, non-profit health care is the only sensible and sustainable system. We know that the genetic engineering of food is causing more suffering than it could ever relieve. We know that allowing 1% of the people to own 90% of the wealth is bad for us all. We know that allowing the germ of race distrust to bloom into hate hurts us all. We know that more guns create more violence. We know that human-caused climate change threatens our very existence as a species.

We're right, they're wrong. It's not ideological, it's not elitist, it's just a matter of correct or not correct.
Fact.

When can we get past the debate between the stupid idea and the not-stupid idea, and move on to debating whether doing the smart thing this way or that way is smarter? If the US were a person, we'd be stuck in the third grade, and our college exams are coming very soon.

You're surprised? Really?

Building on yesterday's release of the secret extension of authorization for the NSA to vacuum up metadata on Verizon calls, today the headlines are afire with indignation over further revelations of the NSA's Prism program (© 2007 GW Bush & Co.) and its years of doing the same with pretty much every email, phone call and online search in the country.

If I recall correctly, this is exactly what we on the loony left were jumping up and down about years ago when all the Very Sensible People were constructing logical card houses to explain why the draconian USA Patriot Act was necessary to national security. I dunno about you, but since that became what passes for "law" in this country, I've taken it for granted that privacy in electronic communication is a thing of the quaint and rapidly receding past. C'mon people, try to pay attention!

Update, Saturday: The unnamed editor concurs.

Muggs: Radical Bipartisans Stage a Coup

Pop Rocket, June 2013


We have a small group of subversives and traitors in the Arizona Senate working to undermine American values and turn this country into a socialist dependency state. At least that's what their most vocal opponents are saying about them. The funny thing is that the subversives and their opponents wear the same party lapel pins.
     I've written before about the conflict going on for years now within the Republican Party in this state. In May that conflict erupted into open war on the floor of the Senate as the body came to its vote on the (re-)expansion of our Medicaid system (AHCCCS) to include Arizonans making up to 133% of the income level the federal government defines as the poverty line. A very reluctant Governor Jan Brewer brought the measure to the Legislature not because she cares all that much about the thousands of working poor that would be able to access basic health care with state support, nor the many health-care workers who would be employed in that care, but rather because of the large pile of federal matching dollars that would come with it. For her the choice was stark: do the expansion and bring a couple of billion clams into the state, or don't, and spend half a billion out of the general fund. Every year. Not passing it would have been just stupid.
     If you've been paying any attention you likely know that the Senate passed an amended version of the governor's proposal as SB1492 on May 16, and as of this writing the bill is facing a gory flaying in the House. What you may not know is who made it happen and how, and why this vote was an important sign of positive change in our Legislature.
     To get this vitally important bill passed, five Republicans crossed the aisle to vote with the Democrats: Bob Worsley, Michelle Reagan, Adam Driggs, John McComish and our own Steve Pierce. Driggs is the majority whip, McComish the majority leader, and Pierce the immediate past president, illustrating that the fracture in the majority cuts through to the very top.
     I trace the history of this vote back to the zenith of Tea-Party power and the brief tenure of Russell Pearce as Senate prez. The utter craziness of those sessions led to Pearce's recall and unprecedented defeat by his own voters in a special election, but while that occupied the headlines, influential non-crazy Republicans realized it was time to take their party back.
     They replaced Pearce as president with Prescott rancher/developer Steve Pierce, whom veteran legislator and political consultant Stan Barnes called "the adult in the room." With clear disdain for the over-the-top talk and pointless theatrics so beloved of the Tea Partiers, Pierce got the Senate back to work and kept it out of the headlines. The right wing knocked him to the back bench in the following session, replacing him with the reliably extreme Andy Biggs, but Pierce wasn't finished.
     As early as mid-March this year Pierce and his small group of like-minded senators began exercising muscle by siding with the united Democrats in the sort of bipartisan coalition voting that hasn't been seen in Phoenix in a very long time. Ahead of the Medicaid vote, just as a demonstration and warning, they even went so far as to defeat a perfectly good bill that everyone wanted passed, then they brought it back and passed it. At about that point Biggs' rhetoric clearly showed less confidence he could block the Medicaid expansion, even resignation to its passage. It was a classic palace coup, and while Biggs still occupies the chair, he no longer wields the power.
     Regular readers know that I don't share much with Senator Pierce in terms of policy positions, but over the years I've gained some confidence in his practicality and personal integrity. He doesn't say much, but he means what he says, and when he described his vote in an op-ed in The Arizona Republic as "not an act of courage, but simply what we were elected to do," I didn't read any false modesty.
     That's not to say that there won't be consequences. The battle is far from over, and we can be confident that the rightward forces will at least try to knock all five of the radical bipartisans out in the 2014 primaries. But it seems to me that the Tea Party star is fading and Republican voters are almost as sick of the crazies and the gridlock as the rest of us, preferring the party would focus on solving real problems over beating up on Republicans who won't walk the crazy talk.
     It's about time. For too many years sensible Republicans have been honoring Ronald Reagan's eleventh commandment ("Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican") and watching their party slide into chaos and defeat as simpletons and hate-mongers have had their day. I've seen the wincing on their faces as they groped for excuses to explain the sorry behavior of their wayward brethren, even as the nutbars were throwing them under the Big Bus of Righteousness for their trouble. Former senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole recently said that the party should put up a "closed for repairs" sign for the coming year and try to figure out a positive agenda. I hope that those among our state Republicans still attached to reality will take that advice, find their spines and continue the work that Steve Pierce began here.

Update, June 6: In the past week Speaker Tobin has indicated that he does not have the votes to block the Medicaid expansion in the House. The House Appropriations Committee may still strip the Medicaid language from the budget bill, but if that happens supporters will very probably restore it through floor amendment and pass it anyway.

Note: This is my final column for Pop Rocket. I think that while the deep pockets of Western Newspapers will likely keep it afloat out of proportion to its real value, the paper's relentless mediocrity makes it an ultimately pointless waste of time and effort for me.

Political oppression or standard procedure?

Update, May 21: With a few more days' information, I find out that the whole story was hogwash from the start. Crooks and Liars has the whole thing laid out with citations, just go there. Bottom line: It was an attempt at triage in an overworked office, involving no unusual inquiries, and directed at groups of all political persuasions equally. The inquiries were not "extra thorough," rather the IRS followed procedure on these and allowed other organizations to sail through. Three organizations were denied status, all of them from the progressive end of the spectrum. It's a big fat pile of steaming BS. What's amazing is that almost all media are bought into the Republican narrative on this and are missing the bones of the story.

Original post: 
When the IRS "admitted" that it profiled Tea-Party groups for special scrutiny last year, it touched off a media brushfire and charges of politically motivated retribution. As always, there's more to the story than the headlines can provide.

For starters, let's say you're a tax inspector and you see, in an election year, a bumper crop of brand-new 501(c)4 organizations popping up with missions specifically related to tax resistance. Then you notice that many, perhaps nearly all, of them are raising and spending money to influence election results. The (c)4 code allows political activity, but it may not legally be the primary activity of the organization. Might you think that there could be widespread violation of the rules in the category?

When even a player as cagey as Karl Rove was unable to prevent conflict with the law in operating his (c)4, I'd expect that more than a few of these groups really didn't know what they were doing legally.

So now, Ms/Mr IRS Inspector, you have to decide whether your job is to enforce the law or to back away from a high potential for violations because enforcement might make things sticky for the administration, leaving an ugly precedent for the future. I'm pretty sure I know where I'd be on that question, regardless of the specific politics.

You may think that the Obama administration is as ethically challenged as Nixon's, but you don't need nefarious intent to see how this action could come about. Occam's Razor says keep it simple.

But there's more, and I haven't seen this noted anywhere in the press. My mom worked as an accountant for decades, and recalls that it was standard IRS practice as early as the '80s to select categories of businesses and organizations for special scrutiny in a given year. This makes sense from the standpoint of efficient management of limited resources. It doesn't mean audits for all, but it did look at common practices in an industry or category.

So for a very long time the IRS has used organizational profiling to look for common violations as standard practice. The Tea Partiers made a big, broad push in 2012 with new organizations, and so hit the IRS radar. Are you surprised?

The thing to look for is how many TP groups were actually audited. From that you can gauge whether there was any real pain involved. My bet is it'll be a very small number, if it comes out at all.

Update, Friday: Since I wrote this more details have come out about what the IRS was doing, particularly that it was being  "extra thorough" about applications for (c)3 and (c)4 status, auditing before the fact, as it were, and substantially delaying the applications with demands for information, a pretty classic bureaucratic tactic. The President has acted quickly to roll a head that appears to have been actually responsible from the outset. It's also come out that in the weeks before the suspect behavior began, the IRS was under extreme rhetorical attack from the newly minted Tea Party groups, including having one nutbar fly his plane into the Austin IRS building one week before.

Williams: How many fetuses can dance on the head of a pin?

The Courier's current bearer of the torch for reactionary anti-thought on the editorial page, retired cop Buz Williams, pulls another index card from his box of right-wing talking points and compares fetuses to slaves, building on this an argument that they deserve legal protection as full citizens.

The magical thinking begins in the first sentence, where Buz disregards the blood, sacrifice and hard work of our forebears to ascribe the rise of this nation to magical intervention, fairly warning that the column will not be about logical thought.

So why even read it, let alone respond? It's not as if the people like Buz, who've bought deeply into this circular mind-trap, will ever be convinced otherwise. But I have to believe that there are far more people who are not so committed and would like to see a path to resolving this persistent open wound in American political discourse.

After spending half the column on an embarrassing logical failure to equate the enslavement of black people with sensible family planning, he builds his argument on the idea that a fetus has human DNA, and so must be a citizen. Logical reduction leads to giving my fingernail parings the vote. But it's interesting that even in his bleary attempt to be expansive in his definition of what is legally human, he chooses an arbitrary, science-based limit, which is fertilization.

Digging a little further into this line of thought shows that any choice like this is equally arbitrary. In reality the reproductive process is a smooth continuum in which a woman and a child slowly diverge, starting while she is still a fetus and her eggs are developing with her. It's only our perceptual decisions that make a child separate at any point.

For the time being we are guided by millennia of tradition in recognizing the new human upon its successful birth, as seen in our Constitution, which assigns citizenship rights based on being "born." But we have to admit that this is as arbitrary as any other choice.

We are in a time of transition for women from essentially zero control over conception to, at some point in the relatively near future, complete control. Once a woman can and does consciously determine whether she will conceive, the barbarity of abortion will recede into history. But in the meantime we have to make a choice in law about how to deal with the conflict inherent in an unwanted or unhealthy pregnancy.

That choice is well established and I have little fear that the magical thinkers will do anything but harm their cause by insisting that fetal rights have priority over the mother's.

But I have a suggestion for the transition period. I would happily support a law reassigning the arbitrary choice of when a person begins to exist from the state to the mother. In other words, if you believe that your fetus should be recognized as a citizen, you can make that choice and accept the associated responsibilities and risks. Not fathers, because they risk much less, only mothers, and only their specific fetus, not someone else's. Birth becomes the outside limit at which the state takes over.

Accepting this compromise would give the religionists the beginning of the legal structure they want and show their commitment to a solution.

They won't, of course, because their objection to abortion and contraception has never been about the rights of the child. It has always been about paternalist control over the woman. It's not that they want  new rights for fetuses, rather they want fewer rights for women. As long as this is the basis for the conflict, it will not end, and sensible people will continue to resist it.

Comments in trouble again

I note that over the recent past something has changed in how the Courier editors are dealing with online comments.

Updates are infrequent, down to what appears to be about twice a day.  This substantially reduces the capacity for dialogue, and probably frustrates many commenters, seen in the higher frequency of repeat comments.

I can't know much about the sort of comment editing I note below, but it has been out of sight for a long time, and its return is worrying. Maybe it was one weekend substitute that really didn't know the drill. We'll see.

Editorial: Editor takes the bait

In today's column the unnamed Courier editor looks at the Legislature's latest attack on the Clean Elections system, and follows its seductive billboards into what amounts to a roadside clip joint.

Even after the editor acknowledges that the proposed initiative sets up a cynical and false conflict between funding for elections and funding for education, at the end of the piece he falls right in line with it. This is of course because the paper has never favored our system of public funding for election candidates anyway.

Along the way I find it telling that the editor believes our legislative representatives only work during "much of their winter and spring." This shows that he doesn't follow the real action any better than the public at large.

Legislative sniping and court reversals have already robbed the Clean Elections system of much of its power to assist regular, not-rich people in running for state offices. There may be better ways to accomplish this noble goal, but regardless of how you feel about the system, you have to be able to see that setting it up in a false priority comparison with school kids is unfair, particularly since the same people who are calling for diverting Clean Elections funds to the schools have been entirely responsible for defunding those schools over the past five years.

Make no mistake, this initiative will not be about improving the schools, rather it's about starving political competitors, exactly as the editor lays out.

The best way to fund the schools is to go ahead and fund the damn schools. Cynically using a self-inflicted crisis in education to kill off a program that well-heeled Republicans have always hated is despicable, and voters should reject it out of hand.