Sarah Palin calls for impeachment

Former Governor Sarah Palin has called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama. It's a crazy call. Yes, if you asked me whether Pres. Obama has done things worthy of impeachment, I would have to say “yes.” But any impeachment can only remove a President if it can get 67 votes in the Senate. And in a Democratic Senate, with only 45 Republicans, does anyone think 22 Democrats will vote to remove Pres. Obama? It just won't happen. The only way to proceed is through the courts, getting Obama's violations of the Constitution and laws reversed by the judicial system, and possibly, with actions like the Boehner lawsuit, invalidating other unconstiutional acts. And of course refusing to pass any legislation that Obama proposes unless it makes some concessions to the views of others than extreme liberals, so nothing gets done to further destroy our economy in the 2½ years remaining of the Obama presidency, until January, 2017, when (hopefully) Chris Christie or another Republican moves into the White House.

The case for Boehner's suit

Ron Christie has written a post entitled Why Boehner’s Lawsuit Against Obama Could Work in The Daily Beast, which is a good summary of the case for John Boehner's suit. It bears repeating:

The Speaker’s suit is not some political stunt, and could actually be successful.

Since Speaker John Boehner announced his intention late last month to sue President Obama for overstepping his legal authority, his supporters have frequently noted how few executive orders he’s actually handed down. To date, Obama has only issued 182, while the predecessor he likes to blame for everything issued 291.

But the real issue, of course, is not the number of executive orders issued during one’s presidency but rather their legality. And it’s here that Boehner and company have a real, substantive case against the president.

Obama has issued at least 32 legislative fixes to the Affordable Care Act, softened laws against illegal immigration, and stripped the work requirement from President Clinton’s welfare reform—all with the stroke of his pen. In 2012, perhaps emboldened by the apparent inability of Congress to stop him, Obama declared the United States Senate to be in recess in order to install three nominees on the National Labor Relations Board.

The Supreme Court recently curbed Obama’s ability to circumvent Congress, and now Boehner is readying a lawsuit to do the same. On June 26, 2014, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Obama had violated the Constitution by naming those three nominees to the NLRB.

On the same day the Supreme Court invalidated Obama’s recess appointments, he doubled down on his vision of executive authority by flippantly dismissing Boehner’s lawsuit. “So sue me,” the president told reporters when asked about the suit. Fortunately, Boehner has elected to ignore this display of petulance and continue with his landmark attempt to sue the president.

While Obama and his cheerleaders in the media sneer at the notion of executive overreach, noted constitutional scholar and George Washington Law School Professor Jonathan Turley believes Boehner’s suit could prevail. “I think there is a case against the president for exceeding his authority…I happen to agree with the president on many of his priorities and policies, but as I testified in Congress, I think that he has crossed the constitutional line,” Turley told MSNBC the day Boehner announced his suit.

“When the president went to Congress and said he would go it alone, it obviously raises a concern,” Turley added. “There’s no license for going it alone in our system, and what he’s done is very problematic. He has shifted $454 million of the ACA from appropriated purpose to another purpose. He’s told agencies not to enforce some laws, like immigration laws. He has effectively rewritten laws through the active interpretation that I find very problematic. While I happen to agree with him, I voted for him, I think this is a problem.”

This from a supporter of President Obama, yet!

While Professor Turley has identified a serious constitutional problem, David Rivkin and Professor Elizabeth Price Foley, the legal masterminds behind the suit, say they believe that the lawsuit has precedent.

They point to a pivotal case brought by five Colorado legislators who sought the ability to challenge a state constitutional amendment in federal court. The case, Kerr v. Hickenlooper, was brought before the 10^th Circuit Court of Appeals this year and decided in favor of the legislators and their ability to challenge the legality of the executive branch. This, Rivkin and Foley argue, should worry Obama supporters who scoff at Boehner’s impending legal challenge.

Rivkin and Foley also point to Raines v. Byrd, a 1977 Supreme Court decision. In that ruling, the justices held that a prior case before the high court

namely Coleman v. Miller,

… “stood for the proposition that legislators whose votes would have been sufficient to defeat…a specific legislative act have standing to sue if that legislative action goes into effect (or does not go into effect), on the ground that their votes have been completely nullified.”

This, although Raines v. Byrd found that the legislators in that specific case did not have standing.

Memo to White House Counsel’s Office: Boehner and his colleagues in the House can easily argue that the president’s unilateral rewrite of sections of the Affordable Care Act has essentially nullified the votes cast in the House of Representatives to pass the bill.

“Professor Foley and I believe that, consistent with the existing case law, the House of Representatives would be able to gain standing to challenge a number of President Obama’s unconstitutional suspensions of law, which have nullified the House of Representatives’ legislative authority, thereby inflicting institutional injury on it,” Rivkin told The Daily Beast on Tuesday.

He continued: “A lawsuit challenging anyone of these actions by the President and that meets the other three elements of our four-part test — explicit legislative authorization, no private plaintiff available and no proportionate political ‘self-help’ available — would have an excellent chance of success.”

Of course, nobody can tell how the Supreme Court will rule. But I would hope that the Court will see things as Rivkin and Foley have. And Coleman v. Miller, decided by the Supreme Court in the past and interpreted in Raines v. Byrd, seems to make it a reasonable hope.

Boehner will soon submit a resolution to the House of Representatives stating that the president has failed to faithfully execute the law. The Speaker contends that Congress — and by extension the American people — have been harmed by Obama’s unilateral decision to rewrite, ignore or modify laws as he sees fit. And if Obama can act lawlessly and bypass Congress now, the precedent has been set for a Republican president to do the same in future years.

Boehner’s lawsuit is no mere political stunt. Rivkin and Foley have provided a strong legal framework for Boehner to succeed in his lawsuit on the merits. And it will be interesting to see if Obama realizes this and offers a legal defense for unilateral actions, or remains stubbornly dismissive of Boehner and his efforts.

I could not have said it better myself, so I simply repost it.

The right to free contraception?

The opponents of the Supreme Court's decision in the Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores case seem to think that there is this tremendous need for women to have totally free access to contraception. Apparently contraception is so important to women's health that no woman should be forced to pay even a small amount (since I have seen a statement that the contraceptives in question are available for as low as $9 a month!) I cannot see why contraception is more important than anti-hypertensives, anti-diabetic drugs, etc. Nobody seems to think those need be provided free.

If the regulation in question required all drugs to be provided free, and Hobby Lobby were simply asking for exclusion of the four methods of contraception to which they object, this might be more rightly a question of women's rights vs. religious freedom, but it is not. The Obama administration has somehow declared that women's rights include the right to free contraception, and if men do not have the right to free Viagra, it seems if anything that the administration is being discriminatory. But apparently it is all right to discriminate against men, as it is not to discriminate against women.

Boehner's lawsuit

It is interesting to see that Democrats are going out of their way to paint Speaker John Boehner's lawsuit against President Obama as frivolous and even “nutty.” They point to the large number of executive orders that were issued by Republican presidents; Paul Begala, who used the “nutty” term, even points to Speaker Boehner's acquiescence in President George W. Bush's executive orders and holds them out as evidence that Boehner is a hypocrite, objecting to executive orders only if a Democratic president issues them.

But there are executive orders and executive orders. The point is that nobody, not even John Boehner, is challenging a President's right to issue executive orders. If a President issues an order that is in accordance with the President's Constitutional powers and Congress-passed legislation, this is just fine. It is when he issues executive orders which contravene legislation which the Congress has passed and a President has signed into law, then he has violated his Constitutional duty to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” (Art. II, Sec. 3, clause 5 of the Constitution)

Some might argue that the House of Representatives should instead resort to the impeachmment power which the Constitution grants to the House. The problem is that all of us know that no Democrat, and there are 55 of them, in the Senate will vote for conviction. Sixty-seven Senatorial votes are needed, and even if all Republicans vote to convict, there are only forty-five. We have seen, in the case of Bill Clinton, that the impeachment power is quite toothless. Politics trumps the Constitution in the impeachment proceedings. Bill Clinton lied before a Grand Jury, and could not be convicted. So John Boehner needs to go a different route. But how the courts will rule is uncertain. This technique has not, to my knowledge, been tried before. And even if a court finds for Boehner, will President Obama defy it? I suspect he will. But all we can do is wait and see how this plays out.

Obama's feud with Congressional Republicans

A column by Peter Berkowitz is a great answer to those “stop suing and start legislating” columns that I’ve been seeing recently, and so it is useful to quote it.

Sometimes a speech is just a speech. And sometimes it furnishes a window on a politician’s temperament and provides clarifying insight into how he understands political opponents, his office, and fellow citizens.

In a prepared statement delivered last Monday in the Rose Garden, a frustrated President Obama belittled House Republicans for blocking efforts to reform U.S. immigration policies, promised aggressive executive action in the face of congressional inaction and, in vowing to accomplish the nation’s business, casually assumed the people’s trust.

His apparent aim was to show that he is in charge and relevant. Yet far from serving to reassure an anxious public that the country was in capable hands, the president’s Rose Garden remarks showcased the very qualities of mind and character that have done so much to cast doubt on his ability to keep the rousing promise that he made in 2008: to bring the country together by finding pragmatic solutions to the problems that beset the nation.

The president’s formal statement on immigration reform illustrated his penchant for reducing conservative opposition to his policies to the selfish quest for partisan political advantage. Conservatives, in his account, are engaged in nothing but “obstruction” — not only to his preferred reforms but to all reform. Portraying House Republicans as implacable foes who have placed stymieing him ahead of helping the nation, the president ruled out any possibility that viewpoints other than his own can be sincerely held.

Actually, it seems that most “progressives” seem to think that no viewpoints other than their own can be sincerely held. It's not just Pres. Obama; if you look at Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's recent Supreme Court dissents, it seems she believes the same thing.

Obama also patted himself on the back for exercising restraint in having “held off on pressuring” presumably reasonable GOP leaders “for a long time to give Speaker Boehner the space he needed to get his fellow Republicans on board.”

But the Republican leadership has failed, according to the president, because they’re cowards. He managed to condemn all Republicans — the reasonable and unreasonable ones — by declaring that reasonable Republicans “have proven again and again that they're unwilling to stand up to the Tea Party in order to do what's best for the country.”

Of course the president is a spectator by choice to the drama taking place within Congress. Other options are available to him. He might have, for example, reached out to Tea Party-affiliated Republicans by inviting them to the White House one by one, or in small groups, for face-to-face conversations in which, in the search for common ground, he could press his case and they theirs.

In the Rose Garden, Obama indicated why he considers such an option out of the question: Opponents of the Senate immigration bill, he believes, have no legitimate argument while the legislation he champions is, in his eyes, constructive beyond any reasonable doubt.

But is that true?

Critics affiliated with the Tea Party contend that last year’s Senate bill — passed with Republican support and embraced by the president — neglects border security and therefore won’t really do anything to stem the flow of illegal immigration. They also say that the legislation cedes extensive authority to unelected and unaccountable officials; unfairly awards lawbreakers while disadvantaging immigrants who follow lawful procedures; is unwieldy and all but impossible to understand; will prove much more costly than the price tag affixed to it; and grants amnesty without making adequate provision for providing the education that millions of new citizens will need to exercise their rights responsibly.

Some of these arguments may be overstated or on balance wrong. None, though, as the president determinedly suggests, are simply unreasonable.

In addition, the president’s Rose Garden statement displays a disdain for the separation of powers. To show his determination to act on behalf of the public despite Congress’s unwillingness or inability to pass comprehensive legislation, the former University of Chicago professor of constitutional law declared that he takes “executive action only when we have a serious problem, a serious issue, and Congress chooses to do nothing.”

But the Constitution does not vest the president with the power to take executive action just because of congressional inaction, no matter how strongly he disapproves. The Constitution certainly does not vest him with the power to rewrite old laws or write new ones, and that’s true regardless of how urgently he believes the nation needs them.

Nor does the Constitution leave the president powerless in the present circumstances. It gives him extraordinary means — vastly greater than those of any other citizen — to converse with members of Congress, to cajole and twist arms, and to find ways to work with the nation’s lawmakers — particularly skeptical Republicans — to take action that both sides can see as better than the status quo. However, this vital power, the power of persuasion that comes with occupying the White House, is one the president has truculently refused to exercise.

When he burst on the scene as a national candidate, Barack Obama inflated expectations to impossible heights, promising a fundamental transformation of America. To the extent that he swallowed his own rhetoric whole, it’s understandable that he would be frustrated at having his every initiative second-guessed or opposed by a determined minority party. But succumbing to frustration in the face of robust dissent is unbecoming of the chief executive of a liberal democracy.

The president was correct to declare in the Rose Garden that this is no time for demagoguery. And he is right that with a surge of unaccompanied children on our border we confront “an actual humanitarian crisis.” But by insisting that this “only underscores the need to drop the politics,” Obama continues to play politics. For him to demand, moreover, that now we have only one choice, which is to “fix our immigration system once and for all,” is an example of the very demagoguery he decries.

The president does have another choice. It involves an approach that is authentically liberal and democratic. In the present circumstances, instead of railing against conservatives it would be the better part of wisdom for him to announce his determination to enlist lawmakers — particularly those who have stood against him — in the fashioning of incremental reform that specifically addresses the present crisis.

The president might begin with a speech. If he wants the speech to succeed, though, he will need to do some soul-searching — and possibly consult speechwriters outside the White House cocoon — and craft it based on a revised and more reasonable understanding of his political opponents, his office, and the quality of his leadership over the last 5½ years.

But he will not do so. He seriously believes that his is the only way to see things. It is clear that he has about as much likelihood of doing this as he does of resigning the Presidency.

Telling Boehner to pass laws

Yet another person has written a post saying: “Dear Speaker Boehner: Do your job instead.” That was the actual title of a post by Sally Kohn of CNN. Of course, she is described as a “progressive activist, columnist and television commentator.” And so as far as she is concerned, President Obama is just doing his job. She does not see him as violating law after law passed by Congress and the Constitution he was sworn to “preserve, protect, and defend.” She has no problem with his executive orders, which she points out were fewer in number than those of “Theodore Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan, and President George W. Bush.” What she does not point out was that their executive orders were in conformity with law and the Constitution. They never issued orders directing that laws duly passed by Congress — such as our immigration laws and even the “Obamacare” law that he considers his pride and joy — not be fully enforced.

And what is most amazing is her directive to John Boehner to “pass laws to help rather than jeering from the sidelines and rooting for America to fail so you can blame it on President Obama.” John Boehner would like to “pass laws to help,” but he knows that anything his House passes will be shot down by the Senate.

Let us give an example. Kohn refers to a jobs bill that did pass the House. She of course derides it by saying,

You assert that you have passed jobs bills that President Obama and the Democratic Senate are ignoring, but frankly the word “jobs” as you use it there is questionable. Your “jobs” bills include legislation to repeal Obamacare, through which 20 million Americans now have health insurance, cut food stamps for poor Americans and reduce government regulations on fracking.

Meanwhile, President Obama proposed an actual jobs bill that would have created construction jobs to modernize our deteriorating roads and airports, provided tax credits for employers that hired returning veterans, extended unemployment benefits, which also spurs spending, and cut payroll taxes for 98% of American businesses. But that jobs bill was killed by Republican opposition in Congress.

Which approach would have actually created jobs? Clearly, Kohn thinks the second. But repealing Obamacare, in fact, would create millions of jobs, simply because employers are not now hiring people due to the onerous burden that Obamacare places on them. Reducing government regulations of fracking would create jobs in the petroleum industry. And on the other hand, extending unemployment benefits encourages people who might look for work not to. Boehner's bill would have created jobs; Obama's would not. All I can say is, Sally Kohn, you don't know what you're talking about.

Kohn wants Boehner to pass bills, but not bills that would actually help the country; she wants Boehner to pass bills like Obamacare — which she has the gall to describe as a good thing! — to hasten the president's destruction of our economy. But then, what can you expect of a “progressive activist, columnist and television commentator”?

The biggest threat to sanity in the GOP

The poll that I cited yesterday certainly had some good news. But one thing is troubling. And I do not mean the fact that Rand Paul was first; he has some hard-core supporters, mostly former supporters of his father, but they will never number enough to take the nomination. (I like some of the ideas that are subsumed by the term “libertarianism,” but the Pauls' isolationism and anti-Israel sentiments turn me off; the elder Paul also brought his libertarianism to the point of near-anarchy, though the younger seems to be rather more reasonable.)

No, I have no fear that Rand Paul will be the nominee. He will do as well as Ron Paul did in 2012, at best. What I consider the biggest threat to sanity is that apparently the Santorum/Perry/Huckabee Religious Right has settled on its candidate: Mike Huckabee, who finished in a tie for second, equal to Chris Christie's position. If there is anything that could get me to vote for a non-Republican in 2016, it would be the nomination of Huckabee (or another one of the Religious Right, but he is the leader among those). I don't mean I would vote for a Democrat such as Hillary Clinton — my vote would go to some third-party candidate. But unless the people favoring Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, etc. (who are all meritorious candidates, to be sure) coalesce behind Chris Christie, Huckabee could be nominated. And that would be a disaster.

Christie's recovery

Shortly after the tempest in a teapot that some people have termed “Bridgegate,” Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey's standing in the polls took a nosedive. The attempts to discredit him because of the actions of some overzealous underlings was taking its toll in the views of too many people. But it is clear that as people realize that the true test of what kind of President Christie will be is what he is doing as Governor of his state (and his conduct as head of the Republican Governors' Association), they are coming back into his camp. A recent poll shows Rand Paul leading with 11%, consistent with other polls that have been taken in the past couple of months, but Christie is tied for second, only one point behind. True, it's a logjam: seven candidates have at least 8% in the poll! But the fact that Christie is only one point off the lead is a sign that he's making a recovery; a month ago, another poll showed Rand Paul at 14% with Christie in a tie for sixth, at 8%, six points behind Paul.

It is clear that as people come to their senses and make their decisions based on what really matters, Chris Christie's merit will carry the day.

Is this the stupidest editorial running?

A newspaper in San Antonio, Texas, the Express-News, just ran an editorial stating:

House Speaker John Boehner is reportedly preparing legislation allowing the House to sue the president over his use of executive actions.

The president, his supporters say, has used these only because Congress has failed to act on, well, just about anything of substance. There is some evidence that the real name of the game is denying the president any victory. Pure political brinkmanship, in other words.

Separation of powers is a weighty topic that should be considered when events warrant — on NSA spying, for instance, or going to war without explicit congressional approval. We have doubts that the president's executive actions in question rise to that level.

Boehner is likely pursuing this legislation with some confidence, given the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling last week that slapped the president down for use of recess appointments.

Presidents from both parties have done recess appointments. Legislators have tried to prevent these by conducting pro-forma sessions in which essentially no business is conducted.

A unanimous high court said these pro-forma sessions can't be considered recesses and that the president acted unconstitutionally. It ignored the abuse of power the pro-forma sessions represent.

Abuse of power? Apparently the Express-News believes that a president should have untrammelled right to do anything he wants, and that it is an abuse of power for the Senate to use its Constitutional power to take an equal part in the appointments process; the constitutional phrase is “advice and consent.”

What should tie all these issues together for the public is whether the president, in the face of congressional inaction, has the authority to act on his own on various issues. On nominations, on immigration and on EPA regulations, for instance.

But there's a cure that Boehner avoids. Congress could govern.

Unilaterally? The Express-News does not seem to understand that the House of Representatives and Senate are controlled by opposite parties, that anything the House passes will be turned down by a Democratic Senate, and that even if the GOP retakes the Senate in this November's elections, President Obama still has a veto power.

This lawsuit would attempt in the courts what the parties should settle at the ballot box — by winning the Senate and the White House, for instance — or by engaging in the give-and-take that real governing demands.

Harry Reid has shown that he is unwilling to “engag[e] in the give-and-take that real governing demands.” The House has passed legislation to mitigate the disaster that is Obamacare. Sen. Reid will not let it come up for a vote where it could be amended to produce some sort of compromise.

There are constitutional limits to both executive and legislative authority. But at its core, the argument for the public is really whether separation of powers means that one branch gets to infect another with its purposeful, partisan inaction.

The question prompts another: Where does the line start to sue Congress for its refusal to govern?

It is not that Congress refuses to govern. It is that anything one house of Congress might pass will be killed by the other. And it is also that we have a President who cannot see the error of his ways, and therefore would veto any legislation that might actually improve things.

Independence Day

Today is our country's 238^th birthday. We can celebrate the fact that it has lasted so long. But it's not a truly happy birthday, with our country suffering abroad and at home because of the blunders, if not outright sabotage, of a president who does not have this country's best interests at heart. But we will survive the presidency of Barack Obama. We have survived a British invasion that burned our capital (and made the White House white in a move to cover the burn marks). We have survived a serious civil war that threatened to split the country in two. We have survived two World Wars that ended the existence of numerous other countries (while creating a number of new ones). And Obama's presidency is nothing compared to these.

I look forward to January 20, 2017, when Barack Obama will leave the White House. As prone as he has been to disregard the Constitution, I do not think he will blatantly disregard that part of it. While I hope that the next tenant will be Chris Christie, Scott Walker, or Jeb Bush, even Hillary Clinton would be an improvement. (This doesn't mean to be praise of her; it just means I believe she would be better, because of greater pragmatism and my belief that she would more faithfully abide by the Constitution than the current incumbent!) But meanwhile, we will have two more Independence Days with Obama in the White House. Let us hope that the American people have the strength to get through these days!

And others agree!

Back on December 12, 2010, I posted a message entitled “My own rating of Presidents.” I thought at that time that the worst one we'd had within my lifetime was Bill Clinton. I subsequently revised my opinion, and on May 17, 2012 I posted a message here entitled “Obama: the worst of all Presidents? Perhaps not, but it's close!” At that time I thought perhaps that Jimmy Carter beat out Pres. Obama for the title of “worst in my lifetime,” both being much worse than Clinton. My opinion continued that way, and even as late as October 30, 2012, in a post entitled “Probably the best reason to support Romney,” I made the comment that “[o]nly Jimmy Carter, of those presidents whose terms of office have been within my lifetime, has been worse, I believe.” I subsequently changed my point of view. In the past year or so, Obama has beaten out Carter for “worst,” based on the fact that Carter at least tried to follow the Constitution, while Obama seems to feel that the Constitution doesn't apply to him.

The latest news is that a lot of Americans agree with me. A poll conducted by Quinnipiac University has found that 33% of the respondents ranked Obama as the worst since World War II — which is really the same time frame as my “worst in my lifetime,” since I was not quite three years old when WWII ended. This was a larger number than chose any other President. Now It is also true that George W. Bush and Richard Nixon, neither of whom I would call particularly bad, also ranked up there in this poll, but Obama was #1. And 40% now say that Bush was a better president than Obama has been so far — though an almost equal number say the reverse. An even bigger number, 45%, say we would be better off if Mitt Romney were president, and that exceeds the number who disagree by seven percentage points.

Larry Hogan for Governor of Maryland

Recently, toward the end of the two-month hiatus in my postings, there was a primary in Maryland. And one consequence of my being a Republican, a distinct minority in this state, is that while the Democrats had many, many contests from Governor down to County Council, I saw one single contest on my ballot: for Governor. For every other partisan position, there were either no candidates at all or exactly as many candidates as positions to fill, so every candidate was running unopposed. (There were contests for Board of Education and one judicial contest, but I never vote in the former and I had no knowledge of the candidates in the latter.)

For Governor, my choice became clear not long after I began investigating my options: first of all, two of the four candidates, Ron George and Charles Lollar, were hardly serious candidates, though I did get one piece of literature from George and none (until one arrived after Primary Day) from Larry Hogan, who was a serious candidate, and in fact the favored one. The real choice was between Hogan and David Craig.

Interestingly, one of the things that convinced me to vote for Hogan was Craig's campaign literature — in fact most of what convinced me to vote for Hogan was what his opponents, Craig and George, and their blogging supporters, said. One piece of Craig's literature began by proclaiming that he had a 100% rating from Right to Life and a high rating from the National Rifle Association — meaning that on both issues he was opposed to my own positions. However, I certainly have no problem voting for pro-gun, “pro-life” Republicans if they don't make these their chief issues, as I understand that I don't agree with any candidate on everything. But in Craig's case, he made these two the cornerstones of his campaign, and immediately lost me.

Other things that Craig, George, or their blogger supporters said turned me off as well, and turned me to a strong Hogan supporter. Hogan was Appointments Secretary in Governor Bob Ehrlich's administration, and he was criticized for daring to put (gasp!) Democrats in some appointed positions. Well, this being a Democratic-majority state, any Republican Governor is going to accomplish nothing if he refuses to accommodate some of the Democrats' wishes. Giving them a role in his administration was a good thing, as long as he generally pushed a Republican program, which he did.

Well, it seems that most Republicans agreed with me (well, not most, but certainly more than there were Craig, George, or Lollar supporters individually), so Larry Hogan is the nominee, and has my support even more strongly for November than in the primary, though in this Democratic state, I realize he is definitely an underdog against Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown, the Democratic nominee. Brown won the Democratic primary even more decisively than Hogan did the Republican primary, receiving as many votes as his two significant opponents, Doug Gansler and Heather Mizeur, combined. Of course, Brown has going for him some of the same things that Barack Obama did in getting the Presidency: both are offspring of black fathers and white mothers, raised in white (or at least not black) neighborhoods, who became identified as black when they set up their political bases in black areas. I do have to say, however, that Anthony Brown is better-qualified to be Governor than was Obama to be president in 2008; eight years as Lieutenant Governor probably gave him some ideas of how a Governor can do his job.

My gripe with Brown does not concern his competence, however. He has been Martin O'Malley's Lieutenant Governor, and his entire campaign so far has made it clear that he intends to continue O'Malley's policies, which are in my mind mistaken. For example, one of O'Malley's first moves on becoming Governor was to raise the State sales tax 20%. He has pushed through things like a State version of the DREAM Act; although one of those things he pushed (legalizing gay marriage) I support, most of them are moves in the wrong direction. We need to change, and Hogan is the only candidate who even wants to change things. Thus Larry Hogan is my candidate for Governor.

I'm back! And the recent Supreme Court decisions

It's been a two-month hiatus in my posts — I have been grappling with some medical issues and decided to devote my efforts elsewhere. My condition has not gotten better, but the news I heard today is encouraging enough that I can resume a few other activities that I have put aside.

I am very happy over three decisions that the Supreme Court announced in the past few days. National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning is an amazing sight. Even the two Justices that President Obama appointed, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, agreed that he had gone beyond the bounds of the Constitution. This decision was 9-0, unanimous! Even beyond the rebuke to President Obama, this is a noteworthy decision, because it defines the “recess appointment” power, which had never been treated in any Supreme Court case. The decision did not go as far as some conservatives wanted — they wanted it to restrict the power to filling vacancies that actually happened when the Senate was not in session — but the Court's ruling that when the Senate says it is in session, and is able to conduct business according to its own rules, the President cannot declare them to be in recess and make appointments speaks volumes.

The other two decisions were not unanimous, but 5-4, with all the Republican-appointed Justices in the majority and the Democratic-appointed ones in dissent. Jeffrey Toobin of CNN is right when he says:

Elections have consequences.

That's the message of Monday's rulings from the Supreme Court -- and, indeed, all decisions by nine justices whose ideologies reflect, with considerable precision, the views of the presidents who appointed them. Both the Hobby Lobby case -- which concerned the intersection of women's rights, religious freedom, and Obamacare -- and the Harris case, about the future of labor unions, were 5-4 decisions.

Five Republican appointees for the owners of Hobby Lobby (and against the unions). Four Democratic appointees for the Obama administration (and for the unions). Notably, too, three of those four Democratic appointees are women. (Of 112 people who have served on the Supreme Court, four have been women.)

As in so many cases before the justices, the legal issues in these cases were as much political as legal. Indeed, just like politicians, the justices try to frame the questions before them in as politically appealing ways as they can.

In Hobby Lobby, the issue was whether a privately held company, whose owners have strong religious convictions against abortion, can refuse to pay for certain forms of birth control which they regard as immoral. “The owners of many closely held corporations could not in good conscience provide such coverage,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority, and to force them to do so would violate federal law.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, for the dissenters, framed the issue in an entirely different way. She and her colleagues saw Hobby Lobby as asking for -- and receiving -- a license from the court to discriminate against women. What, she asked, about companies that have religious objections to treating African-Americans equally -- or gay people? And, she asks, “how does the Court divine which religious beliefs are worthy of accommodation, and which are not?”

The same kind of conflict undergirds the union case. In that case, home care workers who are covered by a union contract demanded the freedom to refuse to pay dues -- which the conservative majority granted them. Is this, as Alito (again) held, simply a matter of preserving the freedom of speech rights of these employees? Or is it, as the dissenters, led by Justice Elena Kagan, said, a vehicle to starve unions of the dollars they need to survive -- and negotiate precisely these kinds of contracts?

…

But no one should be misled. When it comes to the most fundamental issues before the court, the most important factor is not the legal arguments but the identity of the judges -- and the presidents who appointed them. Republicans vote one way, Democrats another. It's true in Congress, and it's true on the other side of First Street as well -- in the marble temple of the United States Supreme Court.

Now I think Toobin favors the Democratic position. But I am very glad, based on these two decisions, to say that I am a Republican. The Hobby Lobby decision, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., was a blow for religious freedom, and while I would not, in my own religion, see anything wrong with providing contraceptive drugs, the fact that the owners of Hobby Lobby had strong religious beliefs that precluded this must be honored. Another day, it might be anti-circumcision laws, for example, which had been favored by many people in some parts of California. So I want to honor everyone's religous freedom rights, and this decision was a step in this direction. It said that you do not give up your religious freedom by forming a corporation, and one thing Toobin does not mention is that this decision also highlights the anti-corporate attitudes in the Democratic Party.

The other case is about another issue dear to my heart: labor unions' inordinate power. While I wish the Court had gone further and reversed its earlier Abood v. Detroit Board of Education decision, in Harris v. Quinn the Court did rein in the power to collect dues from people who choose not to join. If Justice Kagan thinks it is “a vehicle to starve unions of the dollars they need to survive,” who else besides a labor union has the right to demand “the dollars they need to survive” of people who do not believe they are being served in any way by them?

Donald Sterling

The owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team, Donald Sterling, has been banned for life by the National Basketball Association. It rather amazes me that, of all things, the owner of a basketball team would express such racist thoughts as Sterling is recorded as saying. After all, professional basketball players are overwhelmingly African-American (A site I spotted says they are over ¾ of the players in the league.) Even if an owner may secretly harbor such thoughts, given that he is earning his profits from the efforts of African-Americans should have inspired his silence.

But then again, I suppose he has already earned enough money that he felt he needed no more. It's still a stupid thing to do.

Intolerance?

Suppose we had someone who proclaimed, “God didn't intend the races to mix. That's why He put them on different continents” — an argument which I remember having been used to justify segregation half a century ago, and at least one Website is proclaiming the same as a justification for opposing interracial marriage even today. And suppose such a person were to use this belief as a basis for refusing to provide a professional service to an interracial couple. A photographer would refuse to photograph their wedding ceremony, or a baker would refuse to provide a cake, or a florist to provide the floral decorations. Such a person would rightly be described as racist, and despite their pleas that they are simply obeying God's laws, their business would be shut down for violation of antidiscrimination laws.

Thankfully, such people are rare today, despite my finding the Website I linked to. But we see the same arguments — God's laws being superior to man's — being used by anti-gay bigots who want to be able to withhold their professional services from same-sex marriages. They have even gotten some State legislatures to consider, and even pass, legislation which would legitimize their bigotry (the Governor of Arizona recently vetoed such an act!) under the name of religious freedom. And these bigots have the nerve to claim that people who want to condemn them for trying to obey their religiosly-motivated beliefs are being “intolerant”!

Discrimination is discrimination, even if religiously motivated. And to use religion as a reason to refuse to do business with someone because of who they are is contemptible.

The real issue in the Brendan Eich story

In the discussion over the resignation of former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, a lot of issues have come up, some of them legitimate in my eyes and some not.

A column in The New Yorker's site entitled “How Mozilla Lost Its C. E. O.,” by James Surowiecki has a good summary of the story:

When Brendan Eich stepped down as the C.E.O. of Mozilla, on Thursday, after a mere two weeks on the job, it was perhaps the least surprising C.E.O. departure ever. Eich was one of the co-founders of Mozilla — which makes open-source software, including the Firefox browser — and is a brilliant software engineer who had been the company’s chief technology officer. But Eich was also well known for his opposition to gay marriage: in 2008, he donated a thousand dollars to support Proposition 8, the California ballot measure that sought to ban same-sex marriage. The initial revelation of that donation, back in 2012, led to a welter of criticism that eventually died down. But, by elevating Eich to C.E.O., the Mozilla board brought his past to the forefront once again. While Eich attempted to defuse the problem with conciliatory blog posts and interviews about diversity and inclusiveness, he didn’t actually say that his views on gay marriage had changed. That, inevitably, provoked a uprising within the Mozilla community: a public petition was circulated demanding that he step down, the dating site OkCupid recommended that its customers stop using Firefox, and some Mozilla employees (though far from all of them) called for his resignation.

People are arguing that it is “not the liberal thing” to make someone leave a position because of his position on a political issue (especially a position with which a majority of Americans — or at least of Californians, as evinced by the result of the referendum vote — agreed!) and even some strong gay-rights advocates signed the post linked to here, which says in part:

The gay rights struggle is about freedom and equality for all. The best and most free society is one that allows the largest number to live true to their core beliefs and identities. It is a society that allows its members to speak their minds and shape their own aspirations.

The natural consequence of true liberty is diversity. Unless a society can figure out a way to reach perfect agreement, conflicting views will be inevitable. Any effort to impose conformity, through government or any other means, by punishing the misguided for believing incorrectly will impoverish society intellectually and oppress it politically.

The test of our commitment to liberal principles is not our eagerness to hear ideas we share, but our willingness to consider seriously those we oppose.

But I agree more with the column by Forbes columnist Richard Levick, entitled “Brendan Eich Is a ‘Person’ — and So Is Mozilla,” which basically points out that this is not a case of Eich's First Amendment right to free speech; Mozilla is a private corporation, with the right to take any action it feels is in its corporate interest. As Levick says,

Mozilla’s brand could only have been further threatened by protracting the discussion. … Open-mindedness may be the cultural hallmark of Silicon Valley, but it does not extend to those perceived (correctly or not) as opposed to open-mindedness itself. Why should it?

…I have the right to disparage anyone, but I’ll be in for a surprise if I expect people to still respect me afterward. And it sure wouldn’t be too good for business!

It has been mentioned by Levick and others that at the time of the Prop. 8 referendum, the basic principle that marriage is a heterosexual thing was endorsed by none other than Barack Obama, but Levick does not mention that Obama has officially reversed himself on that issue, while Eich did not (and conceivably could have saved his job if he had made a sufficiently contrite renunciation of his earlier position). Instead Levick, in the place where I put one of the ellipses in the earlier quote, has:

There is no small irony in the fact that you can reverse positions on this critical “social” issue and become President of the United States, but not the CEO of a company — at least not this company where the CEO’s stance was perilously at odds with the values of its stakeholders.

He misses something there: Eich never took that step of renouncing his earlier stance (see the New Yorker quote above); he appealed, instead, to a sort of “Look at how I'm behaving on LGBT issues now” attitude. And that was simply not enough.

Just as I, as an individual, have the right to boycott Chick-Fil-A (not because of its stance on gay marriage, which is bad enough, but because the Cathy family, which owns the company, chooses to enforce the Christian Sabbath on its franchisees, requiring them to close on Sunday whether they want to or not!) certainly OKCupid has the right to favor a boycott of Mozilla. And in fact it was a pretty toothless boycott — they merely suggested people download a different browser; they did not make their site inaccessible to Firefox users! All they really did was suggest that people boycott Firefox. This is certainly within their freedom of speech rights!

Perhaps the only thing that perhaps should have been done differently is for Brendan Eich to have renounced his earlier views — if he is really now a supporter of equal rights for same-sex couples. This would have saved his job. And if he still maintains his earlier position, then it was good that he was forced out. This position is obviously anathema to enough Mozilla employees and customers that it is bad for Mozilla to keep him as CEO. Levick's remark that “…I have the right to disparage anyone, but I’ll be in for a surprise if I expect people to still respect me afterward. And it sure wouldn’t be too good for business!” still applies.

It keeps looking better for the GOP

More and more, polls make it likely that, when the elections are over this November, the Republicans will enlarge their majority in the House of Representatives and take over the Senate. This is a good thing. Even though President Obama will still be able to veto any legislation (including Obamacare repeal) he will not be able to make any moves that require Congressional approval, or fill vacancies that require Senate confirmation, unless he can somehow make concessions to the GOP. He seems pathologically unable to do the latter, so we can look forward to two years of gridlock. But that's better than two years of Obama getting his way!

What will happen in Ukraine?

Already we have seen the Crimea detach itself from Ukraine, ultimately to join Russia — where it belonged until 1954, when Nikita Khrushchev transferred it to the Ukrainian SSR (of course, Khrushchev was himself a Ukrainian, which might have had something to do with it). Other parts of Eastern Ukraine want to do the same thing, and many of the people in the area are ethnically Russian, not Ukrainian, so it can be justified on self-determination grounds. The Ukrainian government is trying to hold onto these areas, and succeeding in some places. But should they?

There's been an agreement between Russia and Ukraine that, in theory, leaves those areas in Ukraine. But nobody seems to believe that Vladimir Putin will really hold off his attempts to take at least some of these territories for Russia. And I think, as I've said earlier, it really makes sense to divide Ukraine and give to Russia the areas where the culture is Russian, not Ukrainian. Let's face it, this leaves a more homogeneous Ukraine, which can be more European, as the majority of its citizens want, without offending the Russian-speaking minority, which should be free to join Russia if they want.

But will Ukraine, and the world, allow this? I wish they would, but I have no confidence that they will.

Both sides are doing it

There are now conservative sites like The Washington Times, who put out an editorial with the title “For left, it’s tolerance and diversity for me, but not for thee,” attacking the lberal press for a double standard. And there are liberal sites like Mark Stern's blog on Slate, that accuse conservatives of the same thing. Really, though, they are both cases of the pot calling the kettle black.

Liberals like Mark Stern like to accuse conservatives of refusing to allow companies like Mozilla their freedom of association — the right to get rid of someone who they find to be against their values — while those same conservatives insist that the Boy Scouts should have the same right they deny to Mozilla. And conservatives like the Washington Times point to the Hobby Lobby case, where liberals want to deny a company the right to exercise its owners' values, while those same liberals cheer Mozilla's doing the same thing.

I think we should be consistent. If Hobby Lobby can run itself according to its owners' values — and I think they should — so can Mozilla. But how this relates to the Boy Scouts is somewhat different. The Boy Scouts are not a company whose shareholders oppose gay rights. They are a membership organization. I can't really equate the Scouts' desire to purge themselves of gays to Mozilla's wanting to avoid having a homophobe as the face of the company.

A boycott that worked

OKCupid is an online dating site. It is firmly committed to the idea of equality of gay couples and has facilitated gay as well as straight matches. Brendan Eich was an officer at Mozilla, the company that produces the Firefox browser, and in 2008 donated $1000 to the campaign to take away marriage rights from gay couples in California (Proposition 8, which passed in a referendum, but has since been overturned by judicial action). Recently Eich was promoted to CEO at Mozilla, and OKCupid chose to act — by telling Firefox users who connected to their site about this and suggesting that they switch to another browser. If this is not the first case that a Website has recommended to users that they change browsers because of the social policies of the browser maker's CEO, I would be surprised.

And it worked. Eich resigned as CEO. Mozilla officers indicated that the company supports equality. It looks as though at least in this case, the boycott accomplished its purpose.