Beyond Outrage: Expanded Edition by Reich Robert B

Author:Reich, Robert B. [Reich, Robert B.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345804495
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

Through a sequence of presidential appointments, regressives have also gained a slim majority on the Supreme Court. Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, along with Samuel Alito, John Roberts, and, all too often, Anthony Kennedy, claim to be conservative jurists. But they have proven to be judicial activists bent on overturning seventy-five years of jurisprudence by resurrecting states’ rights, treating the Second Amendment as if America still relied on local militias, narrowing the commerce clause, and, as I said earlier, calling corporations “people.”

In 2010, Thomas and Scalia swung the Court in the direction of the right-wing group Citizens United, plaintiffs in the case that struck down federal laws limiting corporate campaign contributions. Before the decision, Thomas and Scalia had participated in a political retreat hosted by the billionaire financiers Charles and David Koch, driving forces behind loosening restrictions on big money in politics. Years before, when Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court, Citizens United had spent $100,000 to support his nomination.

Given his connections with Citizens United and with the Koch brothers, Thomas should have recused himself from the Citizens United decision in order to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. He has also failed to disclose financial information about his wife’s employment. Virginia Thomas is the founder of Liberty Central, a Tea Party organization now receiving unlimited corporate contributions due to Citizens United. Among the things she has lobbied for are the repeal of what she terms the “unconstitutional” health-care legislation.

Scalia isn’t much better. In December 2011 he met in a closed-door session with Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus, a group formed in large part to fight for the repeal of health-care reform. Can you imagine the firestorm if Justice Sonia Sotomayor met in secret with the Congressional Progressive Caucus?

I’m not so naive as to believe that Supreme Court justices don’t have political views and values. But if the Court is perceived by the public to be politically partisan, it loses the public’s confidence. That confidence, as described by Justice Stephen Breyer in his impassioned dissent in Bush v. Gore (a case like Citizens United that could be understood only in partisan political terms), “is a public treasure. It has been built slowly over many years” and is a “vitally necessary ingredient of any successful effort to protect basic liberty and, indeed, the rule of law itself.” When Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia go to political strategy sessions with Republican partisans, they jeopardize everything the Supreme Court stands for.

Regressives have no new ideas for dealing with any challenge of the twenty-first century. Which of the 2012 GOP presidential aspirants do you think delivered the following words at the most recent Conservative Political Action Conference?

We have seen tax-and-tax, spend-and-spend reach a fantastic total greater than in all the previous … years of our Republic.… Behind this plush curtain of tax and spend, three sinister spooks or ghosts are mixing poison for the American people. They are the shades of Mussolini, with his bureaucratic fascism; of Karl Marx, and his socialism; and of Lord Keynes, with his perpetual government spending, deficits, and inflation.

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