Blog Archive: June, 2007

Justice Roberts, "restricting the ability of public school districts to use race to determine which schools students can attend," wrote for the plurality of Scalia, Thomas, and Alito that, "Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin."

If I were a high school teacher and young Johnny Roberts wrote this on an exam on civil rights history, I would give him an "F." The idea that the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court could cough up such a ludicrous hairball is evidence of a nation gone mad with amnesia. Or, if you prefer, a conservative intellectual class that knows the history full well, and has simply let itself lie.

Do educated people really need this explained to them? It wasn't merely "before Brown" that "schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on their color of their skin." It was long, long after the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka - for the next seventeen years at least. more »

Every Friday in our Weekend Watchdog feature, we post suggested questions for scheduled Sunday guests. You can add your own questions in the comment thread. We'll also include contact information for the shows, so we can let them know what their viewers want asked.

And on Sunday at 4 PM ET, tune in to Air America Radio's "Seder on Sundays" program, where I'll offer the Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up.

For Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn. (ABC's This Week): Unlike Senate conservatives in your party, you have not voted to obstruct key reforms for items such as renewable energy, lower drug prices and easier unionization. Are you concerned that your party's political fortunes will suffer if your colleagues continue blocking popular legislation?

(UPDATE: Looks like ABC had a schedule change and Specter will not be on. But we can ask a similar question to another This Week guest, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.: You campaigned on your ability to "work across partisan lines to get things done." Yet, the conservative minority has consistently obstructed key reforms for items such as renewable energy, lower drug prices and easier unionization. Are you going to continue to try to accommodate the minority, or will you seek to galvanize the public by forcefully standing up to those who obstruct?)

(Sign our petition calling on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to challenge conservative obstruction by "bring[ing] essential reforms to the Senate floor, and KEEP them there until this minority yields, or takes deserved heat for obstructing progress.") more »

In my update on energy legislation in the House, I neglected to mention that included in the energy package is funding for training in high-skill, clean energy jobs.

That's a similar initiative to what already cleared the Senate, making it very likely to be part of the final legislation.

For more background, check out this post from Apollo Alliance board member Van Jones at Gristmill, who describes the effort as a "smart, far-sighted effort to fight pollution and poverty at the same time."

Americans elected a new Congress to get things done. But the conservative minority has chosen a strategy of obstruction in the Senate. They have used the threat of a filibuster to delay or block virtually every major initiative. Bills with majority support—raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security—get blocked because they can’t garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster.

In its first 40 hours, the new majority of the House of Representatives kept their promise to voters and passed legislation—increasing the minimum wage for the first time in a decade, empowering Medicare to negotiate lower prices on drugs, cutting interest rates on student loans in half, revoking big oil subsidies and using the money to invest in renewable energy—that provided a down payment for a new direction for this country.

These bills are overwhelmingly popular, and are simply common sense reforms. Yet every one of them—and many more—got held up in the U.S. Senate.

Conservatives boast about the “success” of their strategy in discrediting the new majority. As Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott, R-Miss., put it, “the strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it’s working for us.”

How is it working? It’s dragging the reputation of the Congress down to the level of the failed president. Conservatives lie in the road of progress and then complain that nothing is moving.

This values partisan posturing over reforms vital to the country. It must be challenged.

It’s time to take the gloves off.

The first step is to expose the obstruction to the American people. Let’s urge Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to force a real filibuster. Keep the bills on the floor and force vote after vote, exposing the obstructionists. We’ll organize in states across the country to insure that their constituents know exactly who is standing in the way of progress.

Campaign for America’s Future is creating a petition to Reid, urging him to expose the obstructionists. Please join the petition. Let’s insure that Americans are clear on who is pushing for change and who is standing in the way.

Robert Borosage is co-director of Campaign for America's Future.

Read a full report on the how the people's agenda is being filibustered in the Senate and a chart of how senators voted on key issues.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and several House committee chairman held a press conference earlier today to announce their initial energy independence package.

Depending on how things play out, it could make the Senate energy bill stronger, or it could make it weaker. more »

How to deal with a noxious but prominent commentator like Ann Coulter? Confront her bigoted remarks and outright falsehoods? Or ignore her in hopes of dimming her spotlight?

It would seem to be a lose-lose proposition.

Getting a rise out of her political opponents is her job, so challenging her on the merits only helps her sell books, which keeps her on TV.

But unless you buy out Rupert Murdoch and control your own media empire, dimming her spotlight is seemingly impossible, no matter how tightly you shut your eyes and close your ears. more »

When the mess of an immigration compromise collapsed earlier this month in the Senate, I wrote:

One can only hope Congress' leaders finally absorb the lesson.

The conservative minority will aim to obstruct legislation no matter how hard you try to accommodate them -- short of full-blown capitulation (see Supplemental, Iraq).

Instead of more mushy compromises that impress no one (but the punditocracy) and go nowhere, it's time for bold, principled proposals that have the potential to spark strong public support, and face down the failed conservative minority.

Otherwise, by futilely trying to make nice with obstructionist conservatives, their failure will become yours too.

They didn't listen, instead trying to accommodate the conservative minority even more.

And the bill has now failed a second time, only attracting 46 votes as liberal and conservative senators killed the bill for markedly different reasons. more »

I suppose this is part of our ongoing "yes, you read that headline correctly" series here at the Big Con. Read ongoing coverage here.

In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a "whites only" shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn't sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn't care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree....

When I wrote earlier this year on The Big Con about research institutes at universities who are actually outposts for industry interests, I thought I'd found quite a score when I discovered one at so distinguished a university as Tufts. More distinguished universities than that wouldn't dare so prostitute themselves, right?

Now I've just learned about the Harvard Electricity Policy Group - find a list of its eminently disinterested funders here - and their "thirty-one reports supporting energy deregulation in California. HEPG research director William Hogan explicitly advised the state to adopt the 'Enron model.'"

A smelly bit of railroading going on on the Padilla trial.