Shelby County vs Holder 2

In Shelby County vs Holder 1, I said that I think that the central question here is this:  Does the danger of systemic voter suppression currently warrant the continued disparate treatment of some states and units?

Are the units that now have to obtain preclearance in order to change their voter access laws still in need of the added scrutiny that preclearance provides?  Consider the evidence in the 2006 United States Commission on Civil Rights, which reported that in "the 10 years prior to the review, the overall objection rate (to preclearance requests) was so low as to be practically negligible, at less than 0.1 percent.^[15] "

That does not seem like a frequency large enough tojustify the government placing a substantial impediment on those states and units.  So I would say no.  That does not justify treating states differently.

Does this mean that I think it was wrong to have imposed Title 5 in the first place?  No.  It was probably appropriate then.

Shelby County v. Holder - part 1

The 1965 Civil Rights Act was a major milestone in the modern effort to establish voting rights in the US.  It essentially ended the systemwide voter discrimination laws that existed in the South (and elsewhere, but less frequently) at the time.  It was the law that President Lyndon Johnson said would lose the South for the Democratic Party for a generation.  Perhaps he was too optimistic.  The South has already been Republican for more than 1 generation.  Some would say the change is because the Republicans joined the South in its the racism.  Others would say that once the Democratic party was no longer willing and able to aid and abet the South in its maintainance of white supremacy, it still took a generation or so for the region to come into the modern age.

In order to ensure that new maneuvers would not conjured up to deprive certain citizens of the right to vote, Title 5 of the 1965 Civil Rights Act provided that certain states, counties or other subdivisions could not change their voting laws without preclearance by the Attorney General or the DC District Court.   The states which suffered this disability were those who had a record of denying voting rights to certain citizens.
While it was mainly the states of the old confederacy at the beginning, some of them have been removed and some other states and political units have been added.  However, it is still mainly in the South that preclearance is required.

 It is an important principle that the federal government treat each state equally.  It is also an important principle that no state be allowed to deprive its citizens of the right to vote.   Title Five's preclearance requirement for change leaned heavily toward the second priciple because it was the one that was most at risk at that time and the states were abusing their rights by making discriminatory voting laws.  That is (presumably) why it was deemed Constitutionally acceptable.

In 2006 Congress reauthorized Title 5 as it had several times before.  In the case, Shelby County v. Holder, currently before the Supreme Court the county claims that Congress exceeded its authority by doing that.

I think that the central question here is this:  Does the danger of systemic voter suppression currently warrant the continued disparate treatment of some states and units?

It should be noted that if Title 5 is excluded, it does not mean that units would be allowed to discriminate.  It would shift the burden of proof from the unit to those who claim that discrimination has occurred.  That is, it would be the same as in other states.

Whether these preclearance units have had a change of attitude or whether they are now lurking in the shadows waiting for a chance to deprive someone of voting rights is a question to which I will give my answer later.  However I will say now that perhaps evidence of what they are now doing should play a role in deciding the answer with respect to Title 5 of the Civil Rights Act.   According to Wikipedia:  In 2006, the United States Commission on Civil Rights reviewed the Justice Department Preclearance record and found that the percentage of DOJ objections to submitted changes has declined markedly throughout the 40-year period of the Act: from 5.5 percent in the first period to 1.2 percent in the second, and to 0.6 percent in the third. Over the 10 years prior to the review, the overall objection rate was so low as to be practically negligible, at less than 0.1 percent.^[15] The Commission's two Democratic members dissented from the report, charging that the Commission had "abandon[ed] the field of battle."^[16]

Tax medicare as income

To the receiver of Medicare it is insurance (very good insurance I might add).  That insurance has a value which can be calculated in a simple way (or complicated if one wanted to).  The government gives me that insurance like it gives me SS.  In the case of SS the govt computes how much I paid for it and  calculates the rest as income.  We should do the same for Medicare.  (I would do the same for any insurance paid for by an employer.  But that is another question.)

It is simple "fairness".  If you work you pay taxes on the income.  If you win the lottery you pay taxes on the winnings.  If the government gives you healthcare insurance, then you should pay taxes on it.

Notice that it is elegantly simple and also progressive.  This income would be taxed at the taxpayer's highest marginal rate.  Someone with enough income to pay at a higher rate would pay more.  I would pay (considerably) more.  However,  the poor (including a lot of our mothers) could add the value of their healthcare onto their income and still not be owing any income tax.

The proceeds should be placed in the Medicare Trust Fund.  It would go a long way to solving medicare's  long term problems and be quite progressive without the onerous label of "means testing" medicare.

If you have not heard about this proposal, that is because it would hit the biggest sacred cow in the American tax universe:  THE MIDDLE CLASS.

The reason both sides offer pixie dust solutions is that they want the public to believe that they are the ones who can solve the money problem WITHOUT hitting the middle class.  I do not believe it.

Of course the rich should pay more per person than anyone else,  they do so now, and they would pay even more with this proposal.  But you can't get it all from them.  The tax  loopholes uh "opportunities" that are owned by the middle class are huge:  untaxed healthcare, mortgage interest deductions, child deductions, and charitable contributions.  These are called tax expenditures and they are defended vigorously by all of the middle class's agents in Washington i.e. the politicians.

Of course, this is not a complete solution to the fiscal problem.  But it would be a significant step.
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American Football

Two things about American football.

Personal perspective declaration:  I never played anything except backyard football and I was very bad at that.  But I am a fair weather fan of the Dallas Cowboys.

1.  There have been a number of stories in the news the last few years about how football head damage usually results, not from one jarring hit, but from the accumulation of little hits and little concussions over the years.  As this becomes more and more well known I would expect a long term decline in the sport among the very young where it is most dangerous.  Whether that will move up the ladder and lead to a long term decline in the sport I, of course, don't know.  I would speculate that it might, if long term means in a century or so.
I think that that would not be inappropriate. Because of an attitude that prevails in the NFL and elsewhere which is well represented by a story I once heard (perhaps apocryphal) of a defensive back (A player who tries to keep the pass receivers from catching the ball and stopping them if they do catch it.) who told a reporter that his objective was to "hit the receivers in the middle of their back so hard that when the next pass came in they would think more about the coming hit that the spiraling football."  That is not a sport, that is Rollerball.

2.  The NCAA imposed an appropriately harsh sentence on Penn State.  However, there is one part of it that I think may be ill advised.
 "The NCAA also erased 14 years of victories..."  


a.    What does that mean?  
Do the teams that lost now get declared to have been the victors?


b.    This would seem much more appropriate if the crimes had been related to "the winning of games" such as recruiting violations.  But they were not.


c.  Also, this rewriting of history sounds more than a little bit Orwellian.

Maxine Waters

It has been suggested to me that one the quotes on July 7, 2012 about peace and justice was an unfair characterization of MC Waters.  The quotes were:

July 7  “Peace and justice are two sides of the same coin.” Dwight D. Eisenhower
July 7  “No justice, no peace!”   A slogan attributed to Maxine Waters D of CA, a Congressional leader, which she used to incite the Rodney King riots in LA.

Upon reflection, perhaps I should have replaced the word "slogan" with the word "theme".
I do not remember the source.  But a short search revealed the following article from WSJ.  If you read it keep in mind that many of her comments were made in a very public venue while the riots were still going on.  That is the basis for the use of the word incitement.

'Riot Is the Voice of the Unheard'

Tea-party foe Maxine Waters once made excuses for real political violence.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303411604575168041790910582.html#articleTabs%3Darticle

I will not further characterize MC Waters beyond noting that (according to the story above) in the middle of the riots which included widespread looting she told the Washington Post that: "We have a moral responsibility to share the resources of this country."

How Can the Center Be Found—and Will it Hold?

            Yellowarmadillos is dedicated to the proposition that a political center can be found and that such a center can bring great social and economic benefits (not the least of which is that we can avoid disaster) to our society, nation, and perhaps even, by implication, to the rest of the world. 

            This note is an attempt to test that proposition. A famous Roman thinker (probably Cicero) once said that virtus stat in medio (“virtue is found in the middle”)--with the dead armadillos I presume.  Is this true?  Many of us, and not just me and the founder of this blog, would like it to be.  It seems so sensible that virtue should not be found on the extreme ends of any spectrum, philosophical or political.  Further, shouldn’t virtue be more or less equivalent with truth or even Truth of the ultimate sort that religions and religious seekers pursue? I may be stepping on a host of philosophic toes by equating these two, but I will beg your indulgence to continue in this existential vein. Besides, unless we are followers of Machiavelli, we wouldn’t want to equate virtue with dishonesty or untruth, would we?

            Yet history might give us reason to wonder about the possibility and value of being a centrist—and some of the statements made recently on this blog also muddy the waters surrounding political centrism. Perhaps we need to ask some questions. Is my center the same as yours?  Is there an essential place to stand in the center or does it the center shift with time, issues, and personalities?  Most Americans, for example, would agree that Martin Luther King pursued justice and truth? Was he a centrist?  What would a centrist do in Nazi Germany, especially after 1938?  Are there some situations where truth is not to be found in the middle?

            To say this—to question the value of centrism—is to locate ourselves in the mainstream of Western thought.  It was Aristotle who said that a thing cannot both be and not be at the same time.  His thinking was, generally speaking, of the “either-or” variety and this is has remained the primary way of approaching problems in Western history. Indeed, it helps explain the Scientific Revolution of the 16^th and 17^th centuries, the 18^th century Enlightenment (which stressed rationality over emotion and “superstition”), and the Industrial Revolution.  Eastern thinking in India and Chinese are more given to “both-and” ways of coming at truth, a path that has earned them much credit for their spiritual insights, but left them at the mercy of Europe and the United States in science and technology—until recently at least.

            Perhaps it is because of the limitations we now see in Western thinking and ways of living, in the damage our lifestyles have done to the planet, our arrogant assumptions that we deserve far more than our share of planetary resources, that makes some of us see the value of a return to the center, both in a political and socio-economic as well as in a spiritual sense?

            When I was young, we had a teeter-totter and quickly learned that it was impossible to keep the board horizontal unless we had equal weights on each end. Maybe we can learn something about the political center from this device.  Can we find the center without having some weight on each side, that is, some folks on each side who want there to be a center?  Do we have that today in this country?  If not, what should we do? It is almost as if, instead of the pendulum (to now mix metaphors) that travels from one side to the other and then back, we have two pendulums, each coming from a different direction and destined to clash in the middle. Surely that wouldn’t be a good thing, or would it? After the destruction, we might go back to a single swinging pendulum?

However, we are not living in a mechanical world in which teeter-totters can be built to balance, but in an unbalanced human one in which neither virtue nor truth can always be found in the middle.  It might be there on occasion, but only if there are forces that seek balance. And at times, that balance, that truth, may be found somewhere else—on one side or the other, even (and likely) in the midst of error. As a friend once said: “You can find the best things in the strangest places.”

Seneca: "Piso's justice"

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In De Ira (On Anger), Book I, Chapter XVIII, Seneca tells of Gnaeus Piso, a Roman governor and lawmaker, when he was angry, ordering the execution of a soldier who had returned from a leave of absence without his comrade, on the ground that if the man did not produce his companion, he had presumably killed the latter. As the condemned man was presenting his neck to the executioner's sword, there suddenly appeared the very comrade who was supposedly murdered. The centurion overseeing the execution halted the proceedings and led the condemned man back to Piso, expecting a reprieve.
But Piso mounted the tribunal in a rage, and ordered the three soldiers to be executed. He ordered the death of the man who was to have been executed, because the sentence had already been passed; he also ordered the death of the centurion who was in charge of the original execution, for failing to perform his duty; and finally, he ordered the death of the man who had been supposed to have been murdered, because he had been the cause of death of two innocent men.
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gay marriage

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Congratulations to New York on legalizing gay marriage.

This has been a very hard issue for me and I have had to come a long way on it over the past 30 years.

I have finally come so far as to be willing to support a court decision based on equal protection of the laws.

However, I am very glad that it is being done legislatively which is much firmer evidence of acceptance.
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A prediction

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The Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote ordered California to release 32,000 or 38,000 or 46,000 or some other number of prisoners because California is not providing enough facilities for them.

The whole thing is a problem. If the state doesn't deal with it then the Court must, although I'm not sure I agree with how far they went. The US has the highest incarceration rates (or one of them) in the world. A lot of them are victimless drug crimes. (Incidentally doing drugs was not illegal during the administrations of Washington, Jefferson, Jackson and Lincoln.)These things need to be reviewed.

Seriously, the prediction is: One of these released prisoners will commit some grim crime and, in next year's campaign, someone will point out who appointed those justices.

Semi-seriously: There is a citation in the story of one toilet serving 54 prisoners. This would mean that each prisoner would have access for less than 20 minutes per 16 hour day. I wonder what the constitutional limits are in this case. Fifty four people to one toilet is apparently too many. Probably 5 would be within bounds. What number would this court majority calculate to be the maximum permissible prisoners per potty?

Executive order on torture

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I was chastized for the content of the May 8 post. I believe that the feeling was that our current president was going to go strictly by the book, as he promised.

As my chairman used to say, "Maturity is a slow process."

It is all there in Obama's Executive Order abolishing torture (its not too long).

Torture is forbidden. You can see for yourself.

Be careful to note section 5 wherein is created the Special Task Force on Interrogations and Transfer Policies Issues to consider whether the Army Field Manual is sufficient in all cases.

The Special Task Force made a report can be seen at the DOJ website here.
Notice in particular under
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interrogations:
After extensively consulting with representatives of the Armed Forces, the relevant agencies in the Intelligence Community, and some of the nation’s most experienced and skilled interrogators, the Task Force concluded that the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies. These conclusions rested on the Task Force’s unanimous assessment, including that of the Intelligence Community, that the practices and techniques identified by the Army Field Manual or currently used by law enforcement provide adequate and effective means of conducting interrogations.

The Task Force concluded, however, that the United States could improve its ability to interrogate the most dangerous terrorists by forming a specialized interrogation group, or High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG), that would bring together the most effective and experienced interrogators and support personnel from across the Intelligence Community, the Department of Defense and law enforcement. The creation of the HIG would build upon a proposal developed by the Intelligence Science Board.
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Changes in attitude

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The rate of change in America's attitude toward same sex marriage is truly phenomenal.
See this article from the NYT.

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black history thoughts

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No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
Frederick Douglass

You can only hold a man down in a ditch if you get into the ditch with him.
Booker T. Washington

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King Jr.
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