No really. Citizens United is just like Brown vs Board of Education because it went back to the first constitutional principles which were, evidently, that slaves and corporations should be equal under the law. Or something. I can't believe you people don't see that."[Marshall] was right on Brown v. Board of Education. It's akin in my view to the Citizen's United case. The court sat down and we went back to first principles--What does the Constitution say? Everybody should be equal protection of the laws," Sessions told me after a Senate vote last night.
"Is it treating people equally to say you can go to this school because of the color of your skin and you can't?" Sessions asked rhetorically. "We've now honestly concluded and fairly concluded that it violates the equal protection clause."
How is that like Citizens United? "I think this Court, when they said 'Wait a minute! If you're talking about a precedent that says the government can deny the right to publish pamphlets, then we've got get rid of this one outlier case Austin -- 100 years of precedent -- and go back to what the Constitution [says].' I don't think that's activism."
The House and Senate are reconvening the conference committee to drop the language that offended Scott Brown. CNBC has the likely compromise:
The conferees will propose ending the Treasury Department’s authority to require banks to accept additional TARP funds. While this authority would sunset over time rather than end immediately, budget rules say that this would result in a savings of something like $10 billion to $11 billion.
Additional FDIC premiums also are being considered to bring in $3.5 billion, bringing the total closer to the $19 billion the lawmakers sought to raise with the bank tax. Republicans are expected to accept this deal. The biggest banks would be subject to the higher FDIC fees, but not hedge funds, since they are not part of the FDIC system. On the other hand, smaller banks — exempted from the fee under the current bill — that operate under the FDIC system would likely find themselves footing the bill.
So rather than a bank tax, which Scott Brown worried would take capital out of the banking system, we're going to drop part of the TARP program that was ... putting capital into the banking system. And rather than making big banks and big hedge funds foot the bill, FDIC fees will be hiked so that small banks have to pay in but hedge funds don't.
Think Progress: Kyl Denies That The Roberts Supreme Court Is On The Side Of ‘Big Business’: It’s A ‘Fradulent Claim’
Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, appeared on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show yesterday to discuss Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. Kyl complained that during the hearing, Democrats attempted to paint the Supreme Court led by Chief Justice John Roberts as “coming down on the side of big business“:
HH: With Chief Justice Roberts, was any review of those documents held by a — for example, the senior minority member of the Judiciary Committee?
JK: No. No, not to my knowledge, no.
HH: How did the first day go?
JK: Pretty much as expected. Republicans raised appropriate questions. It was respectful. She noted that all of her meetings with Senators have been courteous. Democrats primarily not only applauded her for having a wonderful background and being a great person, but also took the opportunity to slam what they call the Roberts Court and its activism in coming down on the side of big business repeatedly at the expense of the little guy. All a fraudulent claim, but that’s what they’re arguing.
Of course, the Senate Democrats’ arguments were far from “fraudulent.” The Roberts court has been one of the most pro-corporate in history. A recent study from the Constitutional Accountability Center documented how the court “has a decidedly probusiness tilt.” Demonstrating this bent, the court last week strengthened corporations’ power to force their customers and employees into biased, privatized courts whenever a dispute arises between them.
And, the court’s far-right voting bloc famously upended precedent to defend corporations’ supposed right to spend unlimited sums on elections in Citizens United. Today, in a piece on Roberts’ dramatic impact on the court, the New York Times said that decision “showed great solicitude to the interests of corporations.”
digby: Family Values
According to Sharon Angle, God wants fathers to rape their daughters. Or at least he wants daughters to bear their fathers' children. That's what they call family values in her neck of the woods:
MANDERS: Is there any reason at all for an abortion?
ANGLE: Not in my book.
MANDERS: So, in other words, rape and incest would not be something?
ANGLE: You know, I’m a Christian, and I believe that God has a plan and a purpose for each one of our lives and that he can intercede in all kinds of situations and we need to have a little faith in many things.
The truth is that she is being more consistent than most allegedly "pro-life" people. If you genuinely think that abortion is murder then you can't justify "killing" the blastocyst or fetus just because of the way it was conceived.
On the other hand, Angle seems to see conception by rape and incest as something God purposefully directed and so the results of which are something the birthing vessel must embrace. That's a very disturbing point of view no matter where you come out on the issue.
Harry Reid, on the other hand, must be thanking the Good Lord every night for "interceding" and providing him with Sharon Angle as an opponent. He must feel that God definitely intends for him to win re-election.
Marshall: "I Was Speaking Broadly"
In her interview tonight with Jon Ralston, Sharron Angle did her best to walk back her suggestion that people may need to resort to "second amendment remedies" against Obama's tyranny and the need to "take out Harry Reid."
Boehner fails politics 101
Rachel Maddow lists the political missteps by House Minority Leader John Boehner in a single interview with the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
JedL (DK): Dave Weigel's new TV gig
Dave Weigel is still in the market for his main job -- reporting on the conservative movement -- but when it comes to television, he's now signed with MSNBC as a contributor.
Keith Olbermann announced Weigel's new gig yesterday on Countdown during a segment on Weigel's interview with teabagger congressional candidate Rick Barber about Barber's new ad. from accusing President Obama of enslaving American citizens. As Weigel explains, people like Barber -- fringey though they may be -- actually believe it's reasonable to equate taxation with the institution of slavery.
Savvy folks at his old place of employment will miss Weigel, but the fools on that ship there will continue to be oblivious to the value he brings to our political discourse.
I'm not sure I could name a single policy question on which David Frum has seriously changed his mind in the last few years. He's still in favor of the Bush concept of the war on terror, he's still a neocon in foreign policy, he wants the right to prosper, he likes small government and individual liberty and balanced budgets. He voted for McCain. He has not had the Iraq epiphany I have had, along with a re-think of America's global reach. He has not been as radical a critic of the Christianist forces within "conservatism" as I have; and he's no real libertarian. But he is not allowed to be a part of the conservative hive of blogads, cutting him off from some of the financial support that could actually stimulate a debate on the right (if the right-wing blogosphere were in any way interested in a debate about anything).
Yes, David has questioned the rigidly closed minds and abstract extremism of the Tea Party tendency. He is appalled that any serious political movement could actually regard Sarah Palin as a potential president. And he has criticized the GOP tactics of total obstructionism - because he thinks it will enable liberalism. That's it, so far as I can see. A career of thinking and writing on the right, a time in the Bush White House, the man who wrote one of the more embarrassing hagiographies of Bush, is no longer a conservative. Because he will not obey the dictates of the fringe crackpots, he is to be punished. Go read John Hawkins' post defending the purge mentality, exposing the core truth of what I wrote the other day:
For the current right, "liberal" simply means "the other side." Since their side is defined in almost suffocatingly orthodox terms, any critic of any aspect of today's Palinite conservatism is a "liberal."
And they punish the dissenters not just by criticism, but by organized financial pressure. I told you it would get worse before it gets better.
Frum responds to John Hawkins:
Hawkins does not argue that these statements are false – that e.g. Glenn Beck is not a crank. His point is that regardless of truth, these criticisms should not occur. Or anyway, that no conservative should engage in them. Our job is to fall into line and not notice that Beck is in fact a crank or that Palin is not well-informed or that the Tea Party has saddled the Republicans with awful and probably doomed candidates like Sharron Angle and Rand Paul.
Hawkins’ attitude here reminds me of an ancient definition of a political party: “It doesn’t matter what damn lie we tell, so long as we all tell the same damn lie.”
Alex Pareene outs an LA Times political blogger as a former member of the Bush communications team - a fact not disclosed by the paper:
nearly everything Malcolm and Orr write is critical of the Obama administration, disdainful of Democrats, and supportive of Republicans. They print poll results that are good for Republicans, but not ones that look like good news for Democrats.
There's nothing wrong with the Times hiring conservatives to blog for them. If the Times wants a conservative blog, they can go ahead and launch a conservative blog. The point is to actually identify it as such. Right now the Times seems to be catering their online product specifically for Drudge and the right-wing blogosphere while pretending it's still objective in the traditional old newspaper sense of the word. ... (Of course, if it was ever revealed that either Malcolm or Orr had ever said anything mean about Matt Drudge in private, I'm sure they'd both be looking for work by the end of the week.)
DougJ: Balloon Juice » Blog Archive » So wrong but so right
If I could turn this Michael Gerson idiocy into a post category I would:
The Grown-Up Party, in my experience, is more like a seminar at the Aspen Institute—presentation by David Broder, responses from E.J. Dionne Jr. and David Brooks—on the electoral implications of the energy debate.
Supporting torture is fine, as long as it’s done politely at the Aspen Institute. But FSM forbid anyone should make a joke about Matt Drudge in a private email.
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