Controlling Our Bodies Requires Saving American Democracy

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Most people don’t realize that Roe v. Wade was the brainchild of two Nixon appointees, Justice Harry Blackmun and Chief Justice Warren Burger – the so-called Minnesota twins because they had grown up together in Minnesota. Blackmun had been counsel to the Mayo Clinic and he and Burger had corresponded about abortion rights well before Roe v. Wade came to the Court. So they were ready and waiting for it.

As a moral issue Roe was about people’s rights to control their own bodies. It has never seemed a close moral case to me. But the legal implications of litigation are often much more complex than the moral issues. Roe was controversial from the beginning even among liberal law professors. I particularly remember an article by John Hart Ely criticizing the legal foundations of Roe. And Gerald Rosenberg famously argued in The Hollow Hope that women would have had a more secure right to abort without Roe. I’m in print, in an article with my friend David Schultz, disagreeing with Rosenberg.

But I want to make a different point than the ones that Ely, Rosenberg, or David and I made, that it is important to understand the price we have paid for the freedom we believe in and what that means for the future.

When Roe was decided, the Court was mopping up some of the civil rights cases in the midst of a backlash. Many of us remember the White Citizens Councils and racist violence. But most of the country was appalled. The racists had no chance of taking over the country. They had no claim to the moral high ground, and even its opponents understood that. Segregation, lynching, denials of voting rights were basically indefensible.

But Roe was a bugle call to many religious groups. The racist and religious groups reached different people despite some overlap. Church groups had a religious fervor and an organizational engine that the racists could not achieve by themselves. Karl Rove and others put many of them together. In doing so, they created a movement that threatens the core of American self-government.

Racism clearly underlies a great deal of what is happening now in the country and a large part of support for Mr. Trump. But the religious fervor of church groups built a separate movement around gender and sexual issues before some of the religious groups merged with the racists. The combination is lethal.

By nationalizing the social, gender and sexual issues on top of the Civil Rights revolution, the Court made a large group of Americans willing to attack American democracy. It was once possible, though unfair and expensive, for people who believed in the freedom to control their own bodies to rely on the law in states like New York and Massachusetts even though they’d be wise to stay out of Mississippi, Alabama, Texas and other states that had tried to destroy the country in the Civil War. But now, freedom-loving people cannot be sure of freedom anywhere in the country when American popular government is under attack by racists who recognize no rights but their own. What was a religious movement aimed at a moral issue is now fueling an attack on democracy itself.

Let’s be clear – no dictatorship, no government based on aiming weapons at its own people, supports women’s rights, privacy rights or sexual rights. In other words, with their sights trained on popular government, everything is at risk, all the freedoms we care about. The price of protecting everyone’s control of their own bodies is that we all have to fight for democracy with everything at our disposal.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on April 26, 2022.

Anthony Kennedy And The Future Of The SCOTUS

Welcome to Iran. Iran has a Guardian Council of men in long robes. We have a Guardian Court of nine judges in black robes. Both decide who rules. The Guardian Council of Iran decides who is allowed to run. The Guardian Court decides which party wins by blessing the vote rigging that favors Republicans – by blessing gerrymandering after the Republicans rewrote voting districts to favor themselves; by blessing registration requirements that Republicans erected to block anyone likely to vote Democratic from getting or staying registered and from voting; and by removing the protections of the Voting Rights Act against discriminatory devices in the former Confederate states and wherever discrimination had been the rule.

The Guardian Court competes with Iran’s Guardian Council for political control by limiting what labor unions can spend[1] and by overruling limits on political spending by corporations.[2] It tilts the whole electoral environment toward the rich and powerful and against workers and consumers.

The U.S. Guardian Court is nearly as effective as the Iran Guardian Council, even without Russian help. And the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy will make it worse. He was the only conservative who understood that vote rigging is inconsistent with a democratic constitution and sometimes acted on that understanding. With a less principled replacement, the current court will present an even bigger barrier to protecting American democracy.

This isn’t about law and all about partisanship. It’s not, in Roberts famous example, like an umpire calling balls and strikes. It’s an umpire in one ball club’s pay, corrupt even as courts across the globe are gaining the confidence to insist on clean elections. To put it another way, the U.S. court system is being corrupted by the rewards of capitalism.

Still more is at stake. Roe v. Wade,[3] protecting a right to abortion, is at stake in the changes in the membership of the Court along with a panoply of labor, consumer, environmental and civil rights protections.

Discouraged? This is the worst time to be discouraged. We can take the country back. But first we must win two elections, the 2018 legislative election and the 2020 presidential election.

Winning the 2018 legislative elections on both the state and national levels can reduce the damage. Fairer state legislatures can insist on fairer elections. Congress has the power to regulate national elections to block states from using unfair rules. And it can block Trump’s plan to abuse the census to further turn the Republican minority of voters into national dominance.

Along the way, winning in 2018 can prevent any more bad nominations to our court system. It can block the Administration’s abuse of everyone from workers to women to immigrants.

Winning in 2020 will make all that easier and it will make it possible to get the Court back. Yes I said we can get the Court back; we can end the rule by the US Guardian Council that masquerades as a Court.

The Constitution does not specify the number of justices on the Supreme Court. That is set by law.[4] The number of justices has been set as low as five and as high as ten.[5] Although a controversial proposition, it has been argued that the number can be changed by the simple process of nomination and confirmation.[6] Either way, it is not set in stone.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt proposed to increase the number when the Court was blocking his efforts to deal with the Depression. In the event, the Court backed down without any change in the number. But the point is that it can be done and should be.

This is a time to get fired up by the efforts of the capitalists, corporations and wrong-wing religious groups to use the courts to take our country away from us. We can take it back. We must and will take it back.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, July 3, 2018.

[1] Janus v. AFSCME, Council 31, 2018 U.S. LEXIS 4028 (2018).

[2] Citizens United v. FEC, 558 U.S. 310 (2010).

[3] Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).

[4] 28 USC § 1.

[5] Act of Feb. 13, 1801, § 3, 2 Stat. 89; Act of March 3, 1863, ch. 100, 12 Stat. 794.

[6] Peter Nicolas, “Nine, Of Course”: A Dialogue On Congressional Power To Set By Statute The Number Of Justices On The Supreme Court, 2 NYU J.L. & Liberty 86 (2006).

From Chaos to Monopoly – the End of Net-Neutrality

Those of us warning that American democracy is threatened have still been stunned by how fast. Political polarization elsewhere has led democracies to collapse. Polarization here has largely been the unintended consequence of a legal transformation. But the cure may be even worse.

Over the past half-century, legal changes fractured the media by helping cable television  and available broadcast channels expand. Before fake news became an industry, the fractured media promised us a more democratic marketplace of ideas. But it made us a fractured audience, no longer watching or hearing the same news.

Court decisions eliminated liability for innocent misstatements that defamed people. The fairness doctrine once required all broadcasters to provide balanced coverage of controversial issues of public import. It was dismantled in the 70s. Now TV and radio are much more one-sided. A new statute and court decisions gave internet providers immunity even for fake news. The internet rapidly became both the intended source of valuable views and information, and the unintended bastion of garbage, leaving readers, viewers and listeners much less well-informed about the competing arguments over public issues.

Meanwhile, courts and state legislatures put presidential primary elections firmly in control of the nominating system.  Primaries often drive candidates to the extremes to capture majorities of their own parties, not toward the center to capture independent voters. Instead of balancing each other, therefore, the media and nominating systems increasingly radicalized each other since the 1970s.

President Theodore Roosevelt once said “the military tent, where all sleep side-by-side, will rank next to the public school among the great agents of democratization.” The draft ended in the 70s, a casualty of our disagreement about the war in Vietnam. The public schools have been hollowed out by charter schools and re-segregated with the help of suburbanization, zoning and Supreme Court decisions after Rehnquist took its helm in 1986. So neither schools nor the draft bring us together as they once did.

Federal agencies were at the heart of segregating the suburbs before and even after Brown v. Board, deepening polarization in the process. Financial institutions only compounded the damage with their sub-prime loans.

In this polarized, divided, segregated era, the Court in Washington decided the nation’s most contentious issues of race, police behavior, school prayer, abortion, equal rights for women and people with differing sexual orientations.  These were mighty battles over justice with enormous consequences. Mildred and Richard Loving could marry and live as a devoted couple near their relatives in Virginia despite their difference in racial origin.  Similar opportunities opened for women, African-Americans and members of the LGBTQ community. Some went free who would have been hanged for crimes they did not commit.

But the Court’s decisions sharpened the polarization among us. Where now can we hold a “national conversation”? In a fractured media? In a primary system designed to favor extremists? In the military tent? Or walking our kids to school? We have, unintentionally, torn the fabric of our community. Still we could rewrite some of the rules that aggravated our polarization.

But on Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission wants to eliminate net-neutrality and give a few large corporations control over what we see and hear. I’m concerned by which friends of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai would get control over our news sources. We’re going from chaos to monopoly. With Trump leading the charge against the most careful and professional news sources, it feels like we are headed to autocracy and bye-bye democracy.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, December 12, 2017.

Suckers for Trump

Let me begin by reminding you of Trump’s claims,[1] and end with some questions.

“I’m totally pro-choice” he declared and then took it back: “I’m pro-life” and told MSNBC that “there has to be some form of punishment” for a woman who has an abortion, later modified that only the doctor should be responsible. Plus he supported Planned Parenthood, and defunding them.

Remember the poor woman in Providence whose house was taken under eminent domain? “Eminent domain is wonderful” he told Fox News, and within a month told another outlet, “I don’t like eminent domain.”

He told CNN “I’m an environmentalist,” but tweeted “Global warming is a total, and very expensive, hoax!”

He once “support[ed] the ban on assault weapons and … a slightly longer waiting period to purchase a gun.” but “I don’t support it anymore.” Now he says he’s “the strongest person running in favor of the Second Amendment.”

In 2000 he said “We must have universal health care” but his campaign website read “It is not enough to simply repeal this terrible legislation,” and says he’d substitute “free market principles” on health care.

On taxes, in 2015 he described his tax plan as “a big tax reduction, including for the upper income.” On May 5 he told CNBC “I am not necessarily a huge fan of” cutting taxes for billionaires.

It’s not clear who Trump likes as people. First he refused to denounce the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalists supporting him. Under fire he reversed course but many white supremacists, including David Duke, continue to support Trump. He’s blown hot and cold on refugees: “on a humanitarian basis, he said, “you have to” take in Syrian refugees. But now he wouldn’t. “I love Hispanics!” he tweeted on Cinco de Mayo, pictured with a taco bowl. Except of course that he wants to build a wall and send them all back to Mexico.

Donald thinks military policy is a cinch, “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles. … I think I know most of it anyway.” He waffles on whether he would trust the Russians or not. He liked NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which unites Europe and the U.S. militarily. “I see NATO as a good thing” he said recently but six days later decided “NATO is obsolete.”

The Middle East befuddles him. He supported invading Iraq. and crowed that “It looks like a tremendous success” but four days after that said, “The war’s a mess.”

He supported fighting in Libya: “Qadhafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around, we have soldiers, all over the Middle East, and we’re not bringing ‘em in to stop this horrible carnage. … We should go in, we should stop this guy, which would be very easy and very quick.” But he said later, “I never discussed that subject.… We would be so much better off if Qadhafi were in charge right now.”

What are we supposed to make of Trump’s contradictions and about-faces? Does the adjective he uses endlessly to describe Hillary fit Trump better? Does he know what he’s talking about? I’m more interested in how we decide what he’s for? He’s inviting people to buy their own dreams. Whatever you’re for, he wants you to think he is too. Selling people their own dreams is a great sales tactic. It’s natural to believe others think like us. But if we guess wrong, who wants to be Donald’s sucker?

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, May 31, 2016.

[1] Clips collected on http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/05/donald-trump-2016-contradictions-213869;  Michael P. Lynch, Truth, “Politics and the Power of Contradiction,” New York Times, May 8, 2016, at SR2, available as Michael P. Lynch, Trump, Truth, and the Power of Contradiction, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/opinion/sunday/trump-truth-and-the-power-of-contradiction.html?_r=0; “A Trump Sampler: His Changing Views,” New York Times, May 8, 2016, on page SR2, available at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/08/sunday-review/a-trump-sampler-his-changing-views.html.

The Earth will have its Revenge

One of the major drivers of global warming is the greenhouse gases we emit by burning fossil fuels. Another major driver of global warming and one of the ways in which we are making our earth unsustainable for human life is the population explosion. When I was young the earth’s population was around 3 billion. It has more than doubled. When we talk about the growth of population, the crucial issue is about the time it would take to double. Population can double in as little as a generation. We are on the way to an earth with 12 billion people and counting. The devastation that is causing and will cause is incalculable and will make the earth inhospitable in short order, contributing to the overuse of water, the over fishing of the oceans, the deforestation of the jungles, the overuse of carbon based fuels even while we try to flush them out of the atmosphere and every other form of damage to the earth we depend on.

That makes population policy a tremendously important issue worldwide. Years ago we used to talk about ZPG, zero population growth. The idea had been talked about for centuries but a best-selling book, The Population Bomb, written by Stanford Professor Paul Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich, helped make it a movement in 1968. Just a few years later, the movement was hijacked by the national battle over abortion. But population growth did not suddenly become unimportant. It remains at the root of the unsustainability of the world we inhabit.

We have a choice, we can curb the growth of population voluntarily, or an angry earth will do it to us, reducing our children and grandchildren to refugees, beggars, and marauders and leaving them to die of thirst and starvation or gasping for oxygen, if they are not killed by armed bands looking for the scraps of the earth.

Naysayers like to point out that Malthus’ prediction of worldwide starvation has not yet come true. But the evidence that Malthus’ prediction is coming true is all around us. Lands once fertile are becoming deserts. Trees once crucial to a sustainable atmosphere are being chopped down at alarming rates in the southern hemisphere with worldwide consequences. Fish stocks have been shrinking and even more important, the coral reefs that are at the base of the oceanic food chain are dying. May Malthus rest in peace, but we are seeing what he feared. Human beings have never been good at listening to prophets. Those of us living now can’t claim we were not warned. We can only claim that too many people scoffed as they scoffed at the prophets of old. The earth will have its revenge.

I do not want to treat abortion as part of this problem because it raises so many separate issues and debates. But I do want to treat almost every other method of birth control as very much part of the issue. Whatever your faith, we have an obligation to life, to treat our world with the respect it deserves. Religious proclamations about populating the earth made thousands of years ago have been accomplished, and must now be subordinated to religious and secular claims about life, about treating each other as required by the Golden Rule, about protecting the soil and the air and the water that give us all life. There is no escape from that injunction. Or the earth will have its revenge. Make sure the people you elect start protecting us from world-wide disaster.

— This commentary was broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, March 15, 2016.