Heartache With Hard Work

Poison Cup – M. Ward

I just finished Gretchen Ritter’s The Constitution As Social Design, which attempts to connect our Constitutional processes to our conceptions of civic membership, often in very interesting ways. I can’t 100% recommend the book, since I think it often struggles to successfully walk the line between historical detail and political theory. She ends by calling for a sort of publicly-minded civic membership that feels unduly optimistic and thinly developed. For a book that has exhaustively detailed the ways that theoretical gains have been twisted by their social contexts, the affirmation of this Arendtian public feels much too easy.

That said, the historical details are wonderful in their own right. Of those, I found her discussion of the Civil Rights Act to be particularly compelling. I knew vaguely that the inclusion of gender in Title VII – the most important part of the CRA, which protects against employment discrimination – reflected some of the larger tensions between race and gender at the time. However, I was not aware of just how interesting the story actually is.

The amendment to include sex provisions was introduced by Howard Smith, a Democrat from Virginia. Smith was a strong segregationist who had spent most of late-1963 attempting to bottle the CRA up in Committee. With the Kennedy assassination and LBJ’s effort to make this bill the key part of honoring JFK’s legacy, Smith couldn’t hold back the tide anymore. However, he didn’t give up the fight. Thinking that he could drive a wedge into the pro-CRA coalition, he offered the one-word amendment to add ‘sex’ as a covered category under Title VII. The idea was that the more radical supporters of the bill would also want this sex amendment, but many Northern moderates would see it as a direct threat. In particular, the notion of encouraging female employment seemed to endanger unions, who were the key base for many Northern Democrats. It was therefore meant as a kind of poison pill.

Of course, the tide of support for the bill ending up overwhelming that effect. And sex-protections ended up enshrined in law, much to the surprise of virtually everyone.

However, this story is incomplete. While Smith certainly was attempting to derail the bill, his segregationist goals do not seem to be his only motives. Surprisingly, he was actually a strong supporter of women’s rights. The amendment, therefore, seems to have been an attempt to kill the bill AND a way to improve the bill if it did pass.

In the current political climate, an alliance between intense racism and feminism seems almost impossible to imagine, but it seems to have been sustainable in the early 60s. The CRA, sans amendment, would have given black men a serious workplace advantage over white women. Given that, you can see how even those without particular feminist impulses might still support the amendment as a limited backstop for white supremacy.

Genius And The Thieves – Eluvium

Harold Maass at The Week asks: Is Obama trying to stack the courts with liberals?

If by ‘stack’ you mean ‘nominate judges to fill vacancies’ – then yes.  Yes he is.

The nefarious plot here is that he’s planning to nominate three judges at once for the DC Circuit Appeals Court.  Of course, this is a function of the ‘all filibusters all the time’ strategy of the Republicans–which has left some of those seats empty for years.  It’s not like he plotted in 2008 to wait until his second term to fill a bunch of seats simultaneously.

Then again, what if he did? We are, after all, talking about the political genius who apparently let US citizens die in a terrorist attack in order to help his presidential campaign.  Also, Vince Foster.

Bad News – Eels

Okay, so the threshold for what makes a scandal really seems to be falling. Only one of these things strikes me as a legitimate ‘scandal,’ and even there it’s a pretty minor variant. It’s particularly telling to me that a number of folks have started referring to the whole collection of things as ‘Obamagate.’ What this suggests to me is that the true scandal for them is the simple fact of Obama’s presidency. He himself is the scandal, and they’re just happy to find any specific content to layer on top of that which can compel a larger story.

– The most extreme non-scandal of the bunch: Benghazi. There has never been any here here, and the newest ‘revelations’ don’t change that. It is a tragedy, and there is even something useful about poking into the post-attack fights about precisely how to understand what happened. But that’s just standard national security evaluation. If this is a scandal, then every presidential administration in history has faced literally hundreds of scandals.

– The press stuff. I have to admit that I find journalists to be, as a class, pretty obnoxious. This is never more true than when they go nuts about something that wouldn’t trouble them in the slightest if it were happening to someone else. I understand that everyone sees things differently when they impose personal (rather than social) costs. So it’s understandable, but it doesn’t make it any less contemptible.

In this case, the entire argument for additional protection to journalists in leak stories is that the Fourth Estate provides a great deal of social good. We don’t think they deserve special First Amendment protections just because they’re swell people; it’s because their contributions to society are particularly important. Which means that it is perfectly legitimate to balance other competing social values against such freedoms. All of which is to say: I grow incredibly frustrated by journalist attitudes which treat their freedoms as moral absolutes while regarding similar freedoms for other groups as merely instrumental.

In these particular cases, it is particularly important to remember that (as far as I have seen) no laws were broken, or even really bent. You may well DISAGREE with the existing state of the law, and that is totally fine. But let’s be clear about what this is. There isn’t really a ‘scandal’ here; there is a debate about what the law ought to be and a debate about whether the executive ought to exercise more discretion than they are legally obliged to do.

My basic position: I’m in favor of some executive flexibility to make judgments on this sort of stuff. While it does seem like in these cases they may have been overly enthusiastic about prosecuting the case—and ought to suffer some blowback on these issues—I’m not convinced anything seriously terrible happened here. If this sort of thing becomes far more standard, and we can begin to see real evidence of a ‘chilling effect’ on journalistic pursuit of significant stories, I think the political pushback would grow significantly. And I would absolutely join the chorus.

But we are not there right now, and honestly I don’t think we’re all that close either.

– The IRS. Okay, this is a real scandal although it’s one where the optics strike me as far more important than the actual content. The harm in question wasn’t really all that big, and it does seem to have been shut down before it could really go much of anywhere. That said, the governmental bureaucracy in general and the IRS in particular need to operate as fairly and independently as possible so when they fail to do so, it really does matter.

I’ll be pretty shocked if this ends up mattering in any kind of serious policy way for the long term. But there’s no denying it will be pretty good fodder for the anti-tax folks for many a year.

– Sexual assault in the military. And here we have a genuine scandal with absolutely horrifying consequences for those affected. 26,000 sexual assaults per year, with not nearly enough done to police them. And now several officers tasked with combating these attacks have themselves been arrested for sexual assault. That’s a problem for some pretty obvious reasons. Except: it doesn’t seem to be included on any of the lists recounting the series of scandals. I wonder why that is.

Drugs And Kittens I’ll Drink To That – Mighty Mighty Bosstones

Today is National Drug Take-Back Day.  The idea is that you can dispose of your expired or unused prescription drugs in a safe manner.

Let’s compare that idea to gun buybacks.  Famously, because of the ‘gun show’ loophole, the private sale of guns is basically unrestricted.  This was made extremely evident at a gun buyback a couple months ago, when a guy simply stood outside and offered to out-bid the government.

If the same fellow wanted to do this today at a drug take-back event, he wouldn’t be allowed to do it.  Why? Because selling prescription drugs for non-medical use is illegal.  After all, someone might get HURT.

Crazy world, huh?

On a related note: here’s a nice thinkpiece from John Cassidy at The New Yorker: What If the Tsarnaevs Had Been the ‘Boston Shooters’?