Is the Supreme Court Plotting to Scramble Elections?

The nation was in the grip of fear from the killings in Colorado Springs and San Bernardino, so there was little notice in early December of the hearing by the Supreme Court that could result in a blockbuster decision. In a case brought by two Texans, the justices were asked, shouldn’t election districts be sized according to the number of eligible voters each contains rather than its total population? They’re called “election districts” so what is the relevance of counting people — children, for example — who can’t vote. The plaintiffs claim that the total population method gives disproportionate strength to urban areas?

The media hurried on to other matters without much of an explanation, but it deserves to be understood, because if the Supreme Court agrees with the two, named Sue Evenwel and Edward Pfenninger, the changeover will be hugely disruptive. Here’s why:

The census of every ten years counts every person regardless of immigration status and even makes a special effort to find those here illegally. Using the census, all the nation’s 435 electoral districts are supposed to be drawn so as to contain, as close as feasible, the same number of people as all the rest. [2]

Our cities are presumed to contain a greater percentage of ineligible voters than suburbs and rural areas — more non-citizen immigrants, legal and illegal, particularly Latinos, who are disproportionately not citizens; more felons out of prison but who are denied the vote, depending on the state; and more children even because of differing ethnic birthrates. [1]

If everyone is counted in the process of divvying up districts, that means urban areas are awarded more districts than they would if those ineligible to vote were not counted. As there are only 435 to go around, rural areas wind up with less districts.

The case has arisen not because the two plaintiffs are simply concerned citizens who believe they have found a flaw in our democracy. They are backed by the Project on Fair Representation, a conservative group that has been active in cases concerning race and voting. Their interest is to shift voting power from urban areas which tend to vote Democratic, to outlying and rural areas where voters are Republican.

anything went

It came as a surprise to find that the requirement for electoral districts to have equal populations was not decreed until just 50 years ago in the Supreme Court case Reynolds v. Sims in 1964. Before then, huge disparities in resident counts between districts was the norm, usually greatly favoring country over city as cities grew. Examples presented in that case were Connecticut, where one House district had 191 people, another 81,000; New Hampshire, where each of two districts had a representative in the lower house, but one district had three people and the other 3,244. [5]

Reynolds v. Sims is where the equal protection amendment became the basis for the Court settling on the “one person, one vote” mantra originated, and presumably why the Texans are steering the justices back to that amendment. A Wall Street Journal editorial provides another case, Lockport v. Citizens for Community Action, in which the Justices wrote in 1977 that “[I]n voting for their legislators, all citizens have an equal interest in representative democracy” and “the concept of equal protection therefore requires that their votes be given equal weight”. The Journal urges the justices of today to “have the courage of their convictions” of their counterparts back then, “or are they going to implicitly overturn Reynolds because it’s too politically inconvenient?”. [3]

turmoil

Inconvenient puts it mildly. If the Court dutifully follows the Journal, think of the chaos. If the changeover is mandated by the Court any sooner than the 2020 census, the counts for all electoral districts will need to be redone, even for rural districts where the ineligible count might be slight, because the population count for the state will change, as will the equalzing count for all districts.

But the census does not count eligible voters. The closest it comes is to estimate the illegal immigrant population. So where will the needed counts come from? The Journal editorial is content with elections based on estimates, and the plaintiffs have proposed sampling only 2.5% of American households and extrapolating from there to come up with eligible-voter counts. The New York Times says such guesswork “would be impossible to put in place with anything like the confidence provided by the census”.[4]

But so as to examine the fallout, let’s say recounts are somehow doable. With those ineligible to vote removed, cities counts would shrink and they would qualify for less districts. If that seems an exaggerated assumption, you can bet the litigants have done the math to make sure of that else they would not have brought the suit.

States heavy with big cities — such as California and New York — and illegals — such as Florida, Arizona and Texas — could conceivably lose House seats, and this being a zero-sum game with a fixed number of 435 seats nationwide, states with more home-grown populations and less immigrants, which are states that tend to vote Republican, would gain those seats. That is the objective of the suit.

the argument

Evenwel contends her vote is diluted by a third compared to a voter in the city of Brownsville, Texas, and that the duo are therefore deprived of equal protection under the 14th Amendment. [3] It’s a peculiar argument because the Brownsville citizen’s vote does not have any extra power. The better argument is that Brownsville is awarded too many districts because its ineligible voters are counted, but presumably the two plaintiffs had to somehow make a case that they’ve personally been damaged and have not been equally protected.

But the very next clause of the 14th Amendment reads:

Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State.

Justice Elena Kagan wondered how the Constitution could require a population criterion in one clause and prohibit it in another. The ” whole number of persons in each State ” stipulation would seem to obliterate the tenuous claim of unequal protection.

So the question becomes, why did the justices vote to take on a case where its argument is so clearly refuted in the Constitution? Are the right-leaning justices simply attracted to the idea and are inclined to scramble election laws to their liking?

Justice Stephen Breyer, as paraphrased by Marcia Coyle of The National Law Journal, observed that the issue

“raises the fundamental question of, what kind of democracy do we want? Do we want a democracy in which everyone who is here is represented, or do we want a democracy in which only those who have the right to participate in the democratic process through the vote are represented?”

Supreme Court Might Erase Race from Affirmative Action

Told by the Supreme Court in 2013 to review and tighten its admissions policies of racial preferences, the University of Texas took no action, and accordingly was hauled back before the justices in early December. In a succession of cases the Court has forbade using quotas for admitting minority groups and has allowed using race narrowly and only as one of the criteria to arrive at the diversity needed for students to be exposed to and learn from others unlike themselves.

matchmaking

This time, however, the justices seemed skeptical of whether giving preferential treatment to an applicant just because he or she is black or indigenous-American — the principal application of affirmative action — is a good idea. That has evidently come about because the “mismatch theory” in education has made inroads to the debate. It holds that the deeper the gap between a school’s admission standards and the allowances made for race or some disadvantage in accepting students, the greater the likelihood the student will do poorly, become discouraged, and be harmed by failure. The student would do better by attending a lesser institution with academic requirements more attuned to his or her preparedness.

When Justice Scalia ventured into this terrain with, “There are those who contend that it does not benefit African-Americans to get them into the University of Texas where they do not do well, as opposed to having them go to a less-advanced school — a slower-track school where they do well”, it was defensible because in deciding cases a justice must be free to posit challenges to what is being argued without caring a damn for “political correctness”. But Scalia being Scalia, he immediately tossed professionalism aside by continuing with, “I don’t think it stands to reason that it’s a good thing for the University of Texas to admit as many blacks as possible”. Scalia n the first person stepped in to take the place of “those who contend”, revealing his premeditated bias going in.

There are also those who contend the opposite, such as in one of the amicus briefs from the “dozens of education organizations”, military officers and major corporations in support of UT, the University of Texas. It said, “minority students who benefit from affirmative action get higher grades at the institutions they attend, leave school at lower rates than others, and are generally more satisfied in higher education”.

If that seems overly rosy, there is a different advantage to taking the tougher road in the more demanding college — the reputation for that accomplishment and the caché of that school’s name on one’s resumé that a graduate can carry through life compared to graduating from a lesser university. The justices should know that — three of them went to Princeton, one to Harvard and all to Yale or Harvard for their law degerees.

reluctance?

Justice Kennedy seemed to yearn for more data about UT’s experience, possibly feeling put upon to have to be the one who will solely decide this case, given that the right and left wings are show signs of being settled in their views. (Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “What unique perspective does a minority student bring to a physics class?”). There is speculation that the protests at colleges might persuade Kennedy that the diversity sought by affirmative action has only resulted in pitched battles between warring camps on campuses. Much of the demonstrations are by blacks attempting to suppress free speech and who make demands of their universities such as insisting that courses in black history be mandatory for all students. It’s human nature that the justices may be looking at these goings on — reflecting on how many of those students have their tuitions paid for by need-blind policies, yet are witless of the opportunity granted them — and saying to themselves about affirmative action, “what’s the point, why bother”?

The universities, anxious to lure students that come bearing generous government loans, abet the divisiveness by accommodating every group’s wishes, setting up “safe” spaces where “affinity groups” can meet, with the result that students cluster among those with shared backgrounds and lock onto views that are impervious to the awakening of different knowledge and clashing opinions that diversity was supposed to deliver. Student bodies may be diverse but they do not blend. “A given college may be a heterogeneous archipelago. But most of its students spend the bulk of their time on one of many homogeneous islands”, as Frank Bruni of The New York Times
aptly described it.

class-based policy

The shift away from race as a permissible criterion is toward giving a leg up to those in lower socioeconomic strata as the alternative. UT policies have the effect of doing that to some degree. By state law, the university must take the top 10% of those who apply from Texas high schools, which fills about 75% of the available slots. (It is in the remaining 25% of admissions that race factors as a qualifier and is being challenged by the Court.) The 10% method sweeps in African-Americans from high schools in black neighborhoods, often satisfying both socioeconomic and racial goals. But in sharp rebuke, Justice Ginsburg made the point that for the top-10 program to work, to produce a good socioeconomic mix, means it must be

“driven by one thing only, and that thing is race; it’s totally dependent upon having racially segregated neighborhoods, racially segregated schools, and it operates as a disincentive for a minority student to step out of that segregated community and attempt to get an integrated education”

because that student has a better chance of making the top 10% by staying in the worst schools.

How well would socioeconomic selecting do in pulling requisite numbers of ethnic minorities into college as a by-product? Sigal Alon, an Israeli at Tel Aviv University, using U.S. data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study, says, not well.

“Class-based programs could enlarge the socioeconomic and geographic diversity at the 115 institutions I examined. Yet, as in Israel, the student bodies of elite American colleges would be substantially less racially and ethnically diverse than they are now.”

perseverance

The case was brought by Abigail Fisher, who failed to gain admittance to the University of Texas in 2008 but went on the graduate from the University of Louisiana. Ms Fisher, who is white, claims like others before her (e.g., University of California v. Bakke, 1978) that she was unfairly discriminated against, that she lost a place at UT that was given to someone less deserving. Like the “one man, one vote” hearing in our other Supreme Court article, this case, too, is based on denial of equal protection under the 14th Amendment, and behind it is the same group as that case, the Project on Fair Representation. In other words, this is a conservative movement to scale back affirmative action or eliminate it altogether.

Which does prompt the question of whether affirmative action will ever end; that is, will it ever no longer be needed? It’s a policy that treats the symptoms, not the illness. It steps in at the end of the educational process rather than prescribing preventative medicine at the beginning. There is the growing movement of charter schools that end run the teachers’ unions and have the freedom to eliminate the bad teachers and reward the good. There are the repairs just made to No Child Left Behind to cut back on the excess testing that had gotten in the way of learning. But the economic imbalance of poverty zones and terrible inner city schools remains. They go on producing kids with below-grade educations, all but a few unable to pursue higher education and only those few having a miraculous spark of ambition able to break through. But scarred by a dozen years of deficient preparation, they can do so only with the need of affirmative help, and no end to that is in sight.

Terror on the Homefront: It’s Only the Beginning

Immediately after the attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, in which three people were killed and nine wounded with a semi-automatic rifle,
out came the pleas from the conservative wing for Congress to pass mental health reform as the cure.

Five days later 14 died and 21 were injured in San Bernardino, California, when a radicalized Islamist couple sprayed a community center with two .223-caliber
assault rifles and two 9-millimeter semi-automatic pistols. Mental health reform was not the ready answer this time, so the cause shifted to President Obama not doing enough to keep America safe.

When Obama and others on the left brought up the failure to pass gun control laws, they were accused of politicizing a tragic event. A Wall Street Journal editorial called it “intellectual poverty” to bring up the gun issue. In the same sentence a call for “shaking up federal mental-health policy” that “GOP leaders should move on” was somehow not politicizing.

Claims that the Colorado killer was influenced by the campaign against Planned Parenthood was denounced as phony “rhetoric” by those on the right. That the shooter was heard by a senior law enforcement official to say “no more baby parts” somehow was unrelated to the hidden camera videos on the Internet where we heard a Planned Parenthood factotum talk about shippping fetal tissue.

mayhem

Two months ago, a man with a history of mental illness gunned down nine people at Umpqua Community College. In August, a former employee with a grievance shot and killed, on the air, a reporter and a cameraman at a Virginia television station and used a cell phone strapped to his Glock 19 to make a video of their deaths for YouTube. In July, another man with a record of mental problems killed two and wounded nine in a Lafayette, Louisiana, movie theater. In June, a 21-year-old used a loophole in the federal background-check system to acquire the weapons he used to kill nine parishioners in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.

What all the killings have in common is guns. Without them, the mentally ill, the racist, the Islamic terrorist, would be in something of a quandary trying to figure out how to go about killing people en masse, and might well forego the attempt if there were no semi- or fully-automatic weapons to make killing so easy. Guns are the great enabler. That is incontrovertible.

Making mental health the remedy, as did House Speaker Paul Ryan after the Colorado shooting, is doing the business of the National Rifle Association because that is the NRA’s standard deflection away from guns whenever there is an “incident”. That fanciful solution would have us embark on what would be a long, slowly progressing program at best, in the hope that everyone’s psychosis will be cured or that we will at least identify and head off mass killers, which of course is as likely as most Utopian schemes.

The other NRA solution is more guns. Its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre,
declared after the school shootings in Newtown, Connecticut, that killed 20 children and six educators in 2012, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” That notion lives on. As authorities probed for the facts of the killings in the San Bernardino community center, Fox News’ way right malcontent Andrea Tantaros quoted a doctor saying, “‘Those 14 didn’t have a chance’, and I thought, you know what, they could have had a chance … if they would have been armed.” Obama’s incredulous reaction was to say, there is “a gun for roughly every man, woman and child in America. So how can [anyone] with a straight face make the argument that more guns will make us safer?”

firearm chat

Four days after San Bernardino, the President gave a rare address to the nation from the Oval Office. Part of it outlined a U.S. strategy that continues to avoid sending troops:

“We should not be drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria. That’s what groups like ISIL want…They also know that if we occupy foreign lands, they can maintain insurgencies for years, killing thousands of our troops, draining our resources, and using our presence to draw new recruits… The strategy that we are using now — airstrikes, Special Forces, and working with local forces who are fighting to regain control of their own country — that is how we’ll achieve a more sustainable victory. And it won’t require us sending a new generation of Americans overseas to fight and die for another decade on foreign soil.”

The commentariat’s critique was, once again, that there is no strategy, that nothing has changed, as if the San Bernardino slaughter should have changed everything at the other end of the world. We are not aggressive enough against ISIS say 68% in a CNN/ORC poll. A majority now wants American troops to return to Iraq.

A columnist for The Washington Times named Charlie Hurt noted the next day that it was the Pearl Harbor anniversary and brought up Roosevelt’s speech that called December 7th, 1941, “a date which will live infamy”. “There was no comparison at all”, wrote Hurt about Obama’s talk.

Indeed there wasn’t, and that this simpleton sought to draw a parallel showed his abysmal ignorance of history and offered an example of the right wing’s twisting everything against Obama. Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress the day after the Japanese had killed 2,400 Americans and sunk or damaged half the United States navy. San Bernardino was no Pearl Harbor.

Republicans had a new message to parrot. Pete Snyder trotted out the Roosevelt comparison on Fox News’s “Happening Now”, his credential being a failed candidate for Virginia’s lieutenant governorship. And that night there was Michael Mukasey, saying the same on the PBS NewsHour:

“If FDR had gone before Congress and given the kind of speech that President Obama delivered last night, and told the American people that the folks who attacked us at Pearl Harbor were not representative of the peaceful Shinto religion and that we must be very careful not to discriminate…he would have been hooted off the podium”.

Like Donald Trump proposing that Muslims be banned from entering the United States, Mukasey, a former attorney general of the United States under George W. Bush, was as good as saying that Obama should have come out against all Muslims.

losing our religion

Fed up with politicians and their ritualistic piety — “Praying for the victims, their families & the San Bernardino first responders,” tweeted Jeb Bush, “Praying” said Mike Huckabee, “My thoughts & prayers go out to those impacted”, wrote John Kasich — the New York Daily News ran one of its nothing held back front pages, which upset Peggy Noonan at The Wall Street Journal. “It is hard to pray, much harder than it is to punch out a series of tweets”, she wrote. She thought Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy “sent out what struck me as the most manipulative message of recent political history”:

“Your ‘thoughts’ should be about steps to take to stop this carnage. Your ‘prayers’ should be for forgiveness if you do nothing—again.”

Noonan hadn’t yet heard what Trump was about to say. But she did redeem herself in her column with the second thought that

“What actually is irritating about politicians saying they’re sending thoughts and prayers is the suspicion you sometimes have that they’re not, actually, thinking or praying. Maybe someone could ask Jeb Bush if he really prayed.”

That suspicion of hypocrisy squares with what happened in the Senate the very day after the California assault. Every one of her Republicans except Mark Kirk of Illinois voted against legislation to prevent people on the FBI’s consolidated terrorist watch list from purchasing guns or explosives. A bill expanding background checks to gun buyers at gun shows and online also failed. All four senators running for president slipped back into Washington to vote against these measures. All four would-be presidents thus show themselves to be afraid of the NRA. As for policy, “Those same people who we don’t allow to fly can go into a store in the United States and buy a firearm”, says an exasperated Obama.

It’s true. The Government Accountability Office and The Washington Post’s Wonkblog reported that more than 2,000 on the watch list of terrorism suspects did in fact buy guns in this country between 2004 and 2014. Democrats who have repeatedly tried to close that loophole have been defeated by the NRA and its captive Republicans who view desperate Syrian refugees as the ones to be feared.

demagoguing

“If you can’t name your enemy, you’ll never defeat your enemy, and the enemy is radical Islam”, says Rand Paul. “What the President should do is clearly define what we are fighting. President Obama refuses to say the words ‘radical Islamic terrorism'”. Jeb Bush in a television campaign ad says, “Here’s the truth you will not hear from our president, we are at war with radical Islamic terrorism”. Donald Trump in D.C. suggesting there may be a link between events in San Bernardino and his failure to say “radical Islamic terrorism”. Believe it.

The candidates probably got the three-little-words trope from Fox News, where it has been repeated continuously for months. One would think from this fetish that if Obama were only to say those words, the radical Islamist movement would collapse. In fact it shows how ill-equipped these candidates are to deal with the world. What what the President says is listened to around the world. Obama therefore chooses his words carefully in the sure knowledge that words that imply we are at war with all of Islam’s 1.6 billion adherents around that world is not a good idea.

obama agonistes

Whereas George W. Bush supposedly kept America safe, will we now begin to hear that President Obama hasn’t, that San Bernardino somehow proves that we are now more vulnerable than before? The instrument of that vulnerability, however, will primarily continue to be guns — pistols and assault rifles that can carry high-capacity magazines or can be modified to do so where illegal, as was the case in San Bernardino.

So what is Obama’s record? Following Newtown, Obama implored Congress to pass at least a law requiring background checks for all gun purchases. When the Senate flagged in that effort after a few months, he brought together relatives and friends of victims of gun violence in the East Room of the White House and said, “Shame on us if we’ve forgotten. I haven’t forgotten those kids. Shame on us if we’ve forgotten.”

A strong bill actually received a majority of votes in the Senate but not enough to overcome a Republican filibuster. The NRA was at work relentlessly, with its threat to give low ratings to senators from states heavy with single-issue gun voters or to swamp their next re-election campaign with negative television ads. The bill got only a single Republican vote — once again Illinois’ Mark Kirk. It would have stood no chance against the Republican majority in the House in any event, where the NRA and lobbyists for gun manufacturers held sway.

Thus did the Congress go completely against the American public which showed itself in favor of background checks in percentages never seen in polls: 87% in one, 92% in another.

Obama is still trying:

We also need to make it harder for people to buy powerful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino. I know there are some who reject any gun safety measures. But the fact is that our intelligence and law enforcement agencies — no matter how effective they are — cannot identify every would-be mass shooter, whether that individual is motivated by ISIL or some other hateful ideology. What we can do — and must do — is make it harder for them to kill.

Republicans objected to his bringing up the subject as politicizing, “a cynical gesture exploiting another mass murder” in The Wall Street Journal‘s view.

gunning it

The American public response is the opposite. The FBI was deluged with having to background check the 185,345 who bought guns on this year’s Black Friday – and that was before San Bernardino. It tops the record set after the Newtown massacre. Fox News reporter William Jeunesse says that a record 21 million guns, double the number in the year the President was elected, will be sold this year, “fueled by Obama”. That’s how the folks at Fox assign cause instead of attributing the gun mania to the conspiracy paranoids who have always thought — fueled by NRA advertising campaigns — that Obama is coming for their guns. Seven years on in his presidency nothing of the sort has happened and the United States continues to have the most relaxed gun laws in the developed world. In fact, laws have gone in the opposite direction, too. States allowing Americans to openly carry firearms now number 34, almost twice the number of 10 years ago.

now what?

That ISIS hailed the San Bernardino pair as “supporters” says that they were probably operating on their own, and for them to have been so effective without direct help and training by ISIS tells us that we have more to fear from so-called “lone wolves” that we thought. “Every instinct of this Administration, starting with the President, has been to minimize the terror risk on U.S. soil”, says a Journal editorial. We can think of no instance to support that statement. (When has Obama or the administration ever said, “nothing to worry about”?) That confused editorial says that the ability of the San Bernardino pair to stockpile weapons while leading “seemingly average lives” indicates that “the U.S. may have a larger problem of homegrown terrorism than the government has wanted to admit”. Really? The government has known about sleeper cells all along but kept them secret? “President Obama’s failure to respond forcefully enough”, it goes on. Against what? The unknown?

Once again, that enormous metadata of telephone calls produced no advance awareness of the radicalized couple, which says that what’s needed is a meta expansion of human intelligence by law enforcement and intelligence services. But Tom Joscelyn, senior editor of the Long War Journal, says “I think our law enforcement and intelligence officials are undermanned right now”. The 9/11 Review Commission, which follows up on the recommendations of the original commission, concluded that the budget crisis that led to sequestration cutbacks have resulted in a hiring freeze at the FBI and other intelligence agencies which has “severly hindered” intelligence-gathering efforts. (One is left wondering just what those hundreds of thousands in the Department of Homeland Security do.)

But we’re sure to hear Congress members blame the administration for security failures rather than acknowledge the consequences of its own budget austerity. After all, if these cells are inspired by ISIS, it must be Obama’s fault for pulling all of our troops out of Iraq so that ISIS could rise. That lie is advanced reflexively by seemingly everyone on the right, as we documented in this piece last year.

So that’s where we are, hurling blame about in a society that calls any attempt to block the dangerous from getting guns or blocks every attempt to get rid of the most dangerous guns an attack on our “second Amendment constitutional rights”, the clause about a militia having been unconstitutionally crossed out. Nothing will be done. Nothing will change. Those on the watch list just got the word, if they already didn’t know, that Congress has again allowed them to buy any gun and load it with however many rounds of ammo they choose. With the next shooting we will again ask why can’t something be done, and do nothing again, so we had better realize that mass killings will continue to be an ever more frequent feature of daily life in the America that we have created.

The Home of the Brave Trembles in Fear

It has become routine for America to disgrace itself. Having always been a scold of other nations’ human rights abuses, in the panic after the 9/11 attacks we immediately cast aside the values we preach to others by rounding up over a thousand American Muslims for months of detention without cause. We set up secret black sites outside the country to which we “renditioned” captives for torture. We set up an out of Canada Welcomes Syrians : Dec.14: Newly-elected Prime Minister Justin Trudeau greeted refugees with “You are home” and might as well have been scolding America when he said, “Tonight, they step off the plane as refugees. But they walk out of this terminal as permanent residents of Canada, with social insurance numbers, with health cards, and with an opportunity to become full Canadians.”
    

country site for the indefinite detention without trial of “enemy combatants” at Guantánamo. And now, with Europe overwhelmed with refugees and some countries accepting hundreds of thousands, America’s Republican leaders hope to slam the door, defying President Obama’s intent to place a mere 10,000 Syrian refugees throughout our country, a minuscule number just 1% of what tiny Lebanon has accepted.

To keep them out, the House passed a bill that would place new hurdles in the path of admitting the refugees; state governors — over two dozen, all but one a Republican — vowed to refuse to accept the Syrians; and all Republican candidates for the presidency announced their opposition to admitting them. The three Democratic candidates would allow entry.

That terrorists could pose as refugees and slip into the country is the nominal fear. The actual driver is the spinelessness of politicians who fear that if that happens, and American deaths result, they will be held responsible and voted from office. They are in accord with the 53% of Americans who oppose the admittance of Syrian refugees, which says that Americans reliably fail in practice to follow what they believe they stand for.

ryan’s go-along leadership

The bill passed by the House was shepherded by newly elected House Speaker Paul Ryan. “Our nation has always been welcoming. But we
cannot allow terrorists to take advantage of our compassion”. So we will abandon this spurious compassion, nowhere in evidence, because “the prudent, the responsible thing” is to pause the refugee program “to verify that terrorists are not trying to infiltrate the refugee program”. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has an alternative simpler than admitting refugees. Instead “what we need is a strategy obviously to give the refugees an opportunity to stay in their own country”.

And so, voting 289 to 137, with close to 50 Democrats in support, the House passed a bill that would require the heads of the F.B.I., Homeland Security and national intelligence to attest that each applicant for refugee status from Syria and Iraq poses no threat. Already in place is a rigorous process of background checks first by the U.N. and then multiple U.S. agencies that takes two years. Calling upon three parts of the executive branch to do their own vetting and making individuals responsible is clearly aimed at tying the process in knots so as to shut out the refugees altogether.

Mr. Obama emphasizes that refugees are already subjected to “the most rigorous vetting process that we have for anybody who is admitted”. Lavinia Limon, president of the U.S. Committee for Refugees and Immigrants, affirms that “refugees are the most thoroughly vetted people to enter this country”. Nevertheless, our Congress seems incapable of reasoning that, given the length of time a refugee applicant must wait before gaining entry to the U.S., the refugee path is the least sensible way to infiltrate the country. A terrorist could instead simply fly in on a tourist or student visa and go right to work. “That somehow [refugees] pose a more significant threat than all the tourists who pour into the United States every single day just doesn’t jibe with reality,” Obama said.

home rule

Over two dozen governors — only one a Democrat — intend to set their own rules. They vow they will disallow refugee placement in their states. “I write to inform you that the State of Texas will not accept any refugees from Syria”, said Governor Greg Abbott of Texas to the President, and Texas has now gone to federal court to keep Syrian refugees out of the state. Governor Mike Pence of Indiana turned away a Syrian family and when apprised that he had no authority to do so said he would instruct state agencies to refuse assist the refugees. (The family was relocated to Connecticut; the ACLU has filed suit.)

Washington’s Democratic governor, Jay Inslee, reminds us that the United States has always been a refuge for the storm-tossed and warns that now “the American character is being tested”.

Apart from the hostility and indifference to people in need, are these two dozen governors really unaware that they cannot deny freedom of movement between the 50 states, that they cannot shut out people from their state?

They are mostly the same governors who have lobbied for years to preventing the closing of Guantánamo and the transfer of detainees to their states. Why they are so fearful is baffling, as if they expect the captives will somehow break out of their prisons to wreak havoc. Congressional Republicans have done the governors’ bidding by keeping laws in place to thwart Obama’s original campaign pledge to close Guantánamo. In reaction to his recently announced intention to close the base anyway, Congress has just passed a military funding bill with provisions tacked on that make it still more difficult to shut down Guantanamo. The bill bans bringing detainees to the United States altogether, even for prosecution, and even bans transfer to other countries.

showing true colors

The conduct of the Republican candidates for the presidency has been uniformly reprehensible, going well beyond simply recommending a pause or a “timeout”.

“The fact is that we need for appropriate vetting”, said Chris Christie, indicative of several of the candidates hurriedly making statements in the wake of the Paris bombings before informing themselves of the stringent refugee vetting process already in place.

Ben Carson chose an offensive stand-in for Syrians saying we must protect our children from “a rabid dog running around your neighborhood” but that “doesn’t mean that you hate all dogs by any stretch of the imagination”. He wrote House Speaker Paul Ryan urging legislation to cut off funding for settling Syrian refugees.

Bobby Jindal, who has since dropped out of the race, issued an executive order seeking to prevent Syrian refugees from being resettled in his state of Louisiana. John Kasich said he
will write to President Obama asking him to stop resettling Syrians in his Ohio and thinks there should be a new government agency to broadcast Judeo-Christian values around the world.

Ted Cruz called it “absolute lunacy” to resettle Syrians in this country. “Who in their right mind would want to bring over tens of thousands of Syrian refugees, when we cannot determine…who is and who isn’t a terrorist?”, he asks. Marco Rubio concurs. He would be “open” to accepting refugees “if there was a way to ensure they were not being infiltrated by terrorists”, a requirement of perfect safety not found elsewhere in the affairs of man.

Cruz expressed astonishment that only 3% of the Syrians who have so far gained entry to the U.S. are Christians. Cruz and Jeb Bush think we should only admit Christian Syrians. “We do not have religious tests for our compassion”, Obama reminded them.

Donald Trump said, “I’m putting people on notice that are coming here from Syria as part of this mass migration, that if I win, they’re going back“, contending that Islamic State militants could be hiding among them. A total of 2,290 Syrian refugees have arrived in the United States over the three years of the Syrian civil war. No terrorists have yet emerged. Former ambassador to Syria Ryan Crocker knows “how highly Syrians value hard work and education”. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed he says, “They’re precisely the people I’d want living next door to me and attending my children’s schools.” Moreover, State Department data says 67% of those referred to the U.S. by the U.N. have been children under the age of 12 and women.

That scares Christie. “I don’t think that orphans under 5 should be admitted to the United States at this point”.

As president, Trump would consider creating a government database to track Muslims in the U.S. Does he perhaps think they should be made to wear yellow armbands embroidered with the star and crescent?

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that has been coming out of here during the course of the debate”, was Obama’s remonstrance. “Many of these refugees are the victims of terrorism themselves. That’s what they are fleeing”.

And that’s the senseless contradiction. To assure the safety of their constituents, politicians are determined to shut out people fleeing from the horrors of a country filled with death and bombed to rubble who themselves want only to find safety. But that does not register with the best and brightest we send to Washington.

safe space

In a Wall Street Journal symposium, Marco Rubio says, “You cannot accurately do a background check on 10,000 people”. True enough. Nor be sure you will never have an auto accident, or fall off a ladder. Guaranteed safety is not available in life. An obsessive quest to make America safe and hermetically sealed by shutting out refugees from fear there might be a needle in the haystack seems to have become the zeitgeist, witness the parallel at universities where students insist that their institutions be cocoons shielding them from the unpleasantness of the world without. South Carolina Republican Trey Gowdy summed up a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee that quizzed government officials on safety with, “I haven’t heard a single one of you say there’s no risk”. The new demand is for a country so safe as to be risk-free.

That’s impossible, of course. There are risks. That’s the chance we have to take. For this of all countries to refuse its part in the massive refugee crisis in order to tuck in safe and sound in our homes while others suffer is shameful. The upshot of excluding the 10,000, and the tens of thousands more that this country should bring in, amounts to massive collective punishment of those in desperate straits out of fear for what some one or two of them might do.

Obama tweeted, “Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values”. We have been down this road before, to our eternal shame, as when in the 1930s we turned away 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany, sending the ship, the “St. Louis”, back to Europe where an untold number would meet their death. (Polls were 2-to-1 against accepting them). We then interned somewhere between 110,000 and 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry out of fear some would spy for Tokyo. Those now in government from new generations who no longer learn history are making the same mistake.

Isn’t it odd that we celebrate the extraordinary bravery of the “greatest generation”, those hundreds of thousands of Americans who died facing the terrible odds of flying the next mission or attacking the next pillbox, yet half of us seem to have become cowards, unrepentant to casting aside what America has always stood for and turn away “the wretched refuse of your teeming shore”, choosing instead to become huddled masses yearning to be safe.

Dec 12 2015 | Posted in Zeitgeist | Read More »

Climate More Crucial Than ISIS? Fox News Ridicules

It is not news that supposedly “fair and balanced” Fox News has an agenda. Its loyal viewers will take offense at our saying that, but those who typically get all their news from this one source, where there is a lack of opposing views to bring up a little contrast, tend not to see that agenda.

So it’s occasionally useful to demonstrate that the various Fox News readers and opinion purveyors are stage-managed from on high. When in a given day they all say the same thing, it is not a coincidence, and that is made all the more apparent by how often it happens.

Case in point: Obama in Paris at the climate summit. Fox News policy is to ridicule the notion that climate change is a problem and question whether it even exists. So on the first day of the conference, the word came down from on high to go after Obama for spending time on climate change when there are terrorists abroad in the world and for treating climate as the larger problem. Below we offer that one day’s example of how Fox orchestrates the news with everyone on the team following conductor Roger Ailes, the head of the Fox News branch of the Rupert Murdoch empire:

Happening Now, a late morning and early afternoon news program. Guest is Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall Street Journal.

Anchor John Scott, quoting Obama:

“He said, ‘It’s hard to come up with a bigger problem than climate change’, when people are being slaughtered, heads are cut off and so forth. I wonder if the average person out there sees that as the burning issue of the day.”

Baker:

“Yeah. It lacks urgency. There’s no question … the problem of Islamic terrorism is a much, much more serious and urgent and pressing problem.”

Before continuing, our view is that there is always something more pressing, but action to forestall climate change has already been postponed past the point where many are persuaded that we are too late. ISIS is a scourge that must be destroyed, but it is temporal. Just as movements come and go and nations rise and fall and the world moves on, so too will ISIS be defeated or will collapse. Ridding the world of the barbarians will cost time and lives, but ISIS is not permanent.

But climate change is — at least for many human lifetimes to come. So of course climate warming is the far greater threat. Unless deniers can prove it is the hoax they claim, the defensive assumption has to be that it could permanently affect the entire planet with potentially disastrous consequences. But the folks at Fox seem incapable of thinking beyond today, and they want us to go along, near-sighted, fixed on the present, averting our eyes from the future. To continue:

Outnumbered airs at midday. Four women, some permanent, some rotating, play host to a male guest, always right-leaning. Program regular Sandra Smith:

“Speaking just a few miles from the site of the November 13th terrorist attack in the French capital, the President suggesting that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. Listen.”

President Obama:

“The global threat of climate change could define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other.”

Smith:

“Well, that lit up the Republican campaign trail where candidates slammed the President.”

Clips are shown of Carly Fiorina saying, “Sadly Hillary Clinton and President Obama are both delusional”, followed by Chris Christie saying “For the president to be over there” (at a climate change conference, need we mention) “talking about climate change quite frankly is insulting”, and Donald Trump on Instagram, “While the world is in turmoil and falling apart in so many different ways, especially with ISIS, our president is worried about global warming. What a ridiculous situation”.

Guest panelist Rachel Campos-Duffy, who as a television personality originally from the MTV reality series ‘The Real World’ qualifies as a climate expert for Fox, gives us her view:

If you are a died-in-the-wool community organizer collectivist, this is the #1 problem, and make no mistake, this whole conference is not about science. It is about big government, giving more power to the U.N. It’s about decreasing free enterprise. That’s what this is about”.

The Five, a late afternoon gabfest co-hosted by Eric Boling and Greg Gutfeld. Boling opened with:

“According to President Obama, we’ve got ISIS contained, terror isn’t the world’s biggest threat, it’s climate change, so let’s battle the weather with all our might. Our commander-in-chief talking today about a very dangerous enemy we need to slay. Well, the future of the planet is at stake, Mr. President. It’s threatened by jihadism, not the weather.”

For co-host Gutfeld, the climate issue is even the cause of terrorism. See if you can make sense of the following:
Gutfeld:

We should throw it right back at them. Climate hysteria actually causes terror. For example, activism is fueling a war against coal…There are a billion people on this planet who are not on the electrical grid. They are living in poverty burning impure fuels. That makes them vulnerable to the desperate move into cities where they aren’t wanted, i.e., they end up becoming fodder for terror machines. By preventing these people from getting cheap fuel, you’re actually making them vulnerable to terror, so in a sense it is his climate conference, it is his climate hysteria, that is leading to terrorism…Obsessing over climate change during the time of ISIS is like shaving your legs while you’re on the Hindenburg”.

Yes, he did say that. The program then showed the President speaking earlier that day at the Paris Climate Conference.
Obama:

“This summer, I saw the effects of climate change firsthand in our northernmost state, Alaska, where the sea is already swallowing villages and eroding shorelines; where permafrost thaws and the tundra burns; where glaciers are melting at a pace unprecedented in modern times. And it was a preview of one possible future — a glimpse of our children’s fate if the climate keeps changing faster than our efforts to address it. Submerged countries. Abandoned cities. Fields that no longer grow. Political disruptions that trigger new conflict, and even more floods of desperate peoples seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own”.

Boling:

“Sorry Mr. President, arctic ice is not actually melting, it’s actually growing, and by the way, how are all those warmers going to explain the 19-year pause in temperatures?”

Spreading falsehoods comes naturally to Boling, as he does as well on his Saturday morning show, “Cashin’ In”, but that apparently plays to what Fox viewers want to think. First, Obama was not speaking of Arctic ice, he was talking about Alaska — its glaciers and melting permafrost. But as for Arctic ice, in 2014 it had receded to its 6th ost reduced extent in the satellite record. Perhaps Boling’s idea of growing is that its extent wasn’t as bad as the 5th lowest.

As for “the 19-year pause in temperatures”? Boling was careful to trim two sentences from what the President said leading into the above quote:
Obama:

“14 of the 15 warmest years on record have occurred since the year 2000 and 2015 is on pace to be the warmest year of all”.

We can add as well that 2014 had set the record. Temperature rises have not “paused”.

The Kelly File: She said that because the President characterized the climate summit as an act of defiance just two weeks after the terrorist attacks, Obama’s comments have led to questions about his priorities. She shows a clip in which the President’s deputy national security adviser was pressed by a reporter to rank the greater threat, terrorism or climate change.

Rhodes:

“They’re both critically important and we have to do both at the same time, and they pose different threats. Obviously, there is an immediate threat from terrorism that has to be dealt with to protect the American people. I think over the long term clearly we see the potential for climate change to pose severe risk to the entire world. I’m not going to rank them because they’re different.”

The camera returned to a look of condescension on the face of Pete Hegseth, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran and CEO of Concerned Veterans for America which for Megyn Kelly equips him to speak about climate change.

Kelly:

“He doesn’t wasn’t to rank them, Pete”

Pete speaks about Obama rather than Rhodes. Hegseth:

“He’s declined to rank because he knows when it comes off his lips how absurd it sounds. He’s already ranked them…Climate change is the perfect enemy for President Obama. There’s no face, there’s no moral distinction, whether it’s hot, it’s cold, you’re always fighting. No bullets involved and the solution is automatically more big government, big international schemes…They know how absurd it sounds but they’re ideologically on the left committed to climate change. “

Kelly:

“He can’t rank them. Really? He can’t put the importance of defeating ISIS above climate change? The American public is squarely opposed to them on this. Terror is #1 in terms of importance to the American people [24%] and climate change [in a squeaky voice and gesturing] is way down here [3%]”.

Ah, yes, those spot-on Americans 42% of whom don’t believe in evolution and think God created humans in their present form.

Hannity is Sean Hannity’s program that airs at 10pm weekdays. He opened by talking to guest and presidency candidate Mike Huckabee about Obama’s “head-turning remarks”, referring to this:

Obama:

“I’ve come here personally as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the second largest emitter to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it”

Hannity:

“It’s almost like an obsession this president has with apologizing for the country. When you heard his remarks today, and how out of context they were in terms of the progress we have made in spite of him, what was your reaction?

Huckabee:

You know, Sean, I sometimes wonder, what country did he grow up in? Because the one I grew up in seems like such a different place. When he said that we have contributed to this problem, I think, what problem?

Huckabee then launched into a strangely irrelevant philippic about the jobs mining for coal and drilling for oil and gas have brought about in the U.S. and how much America has contributed to the world. This he evidently meant as justification for our 5% of global population having for decades produced 25% of the carbon pollution.

Mission accomplished after a good day’s work of bending the viewers’ heads around to the Fox News preferred take on the world.