Steve Benen wrote an excellent article yesterday on the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder ruling (which effectively struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act), In Need of a Constitutional Rationale. You see, the majority did something that is highly unusual, but telling I think: they provided no constitutional rationale for their ruling. Normally, the Court will say something like, “This is unconstitutional because it infringes on the Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.” But there is nothing at all in Shelby.

Benen contacted David Gans of the Constitutional Accountability Center to get his take on the matter. Gans agreed. He said that Roberts claimed that the Voting Rights Act provision was inconsistent with the “letter and spirit of the Constitution.” But what that means is a mystery. Gans continued:

But that hardly matters, right? Roberts is just calling the balls and strikes here. I could better accept these clear acts of judicial activism if it weren’t for the smug certainty of conservatives that it is only liberals who legislate from the bench. I fully accept that when the Court was in liberal hands, this went on. But it was nothing like this. Of course, since Bush v. Gore, no one could reasonably believe that conservatives on the Court were interpreting law so much as simply justifying how they wanted the world to function. Stare decisis, my ass.

And lest we think this is all an academic matter, Benen wrote this morning, It Is Open Season on Voting Rights Right Now In America. It didn’t take long either. In fact, it didn’t take any time at all. Republicans throughout the south were like amped up race horse in a starting gate, just waiting for the Supreme Court to give them the go ahead. “Just yesterday, Republican state lawmakers in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Texas all moved forward, with great enthusiasm, on new election measures intended to make it harder for traditional Democratic voters to participate in their own democracy.”

But the Defense of Marriage Act was (barely) struck down, so liberals rool, right?

Afterword

Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito continues to act like a middle school boy who hasn’t learned how to deal with all those changes going on in his body.

I have stopped myself all day from writing about the Voting Rights Act case. I will write about it in the morning. But I wanted to briefly explain how much this bothers me. It isn’t like it is a surprise; it is what I was expecting. But it seems more and more that the Supreme Court majority is nothing but a bunch of political hacks. The moderate minority act like traditional judges, but the other five act like they spend more time listening to Rush Limbaugh than reading law books.

The Supreme Court is, understandably, a microcosm of our larger political system. It has extremists on the right. It has moderates. And it has just one liberal: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And Ginsburg will very likely be the next to retire and will be replaced with… a moderate! The conservatives on the court would not be a problem if there were liberals on the court to counter them. But instead, what we get are extremists on one side and the others who are just acting like judges. I suspect that the non-conservatives must be confused how the conservatives even consider themselves judges.

On tonight’s All In, Chris Hayes argued that John Roberts had put the Republicans in a bad position because they would now get pressure to do something about the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. But I don’t think that’s true at all. This is perfect for them. Up until now, they had two choices: they could change to be more appealing; or they could stop minorities from voting. They were never going to do the former. And they won’t lift a finger to stop the latter. Sometimes liberals are so silly. Do they not see the same conservative movement that I do? Conservatives do not feel shame or guilt; they just feel the rush of power. And the game is on.

There are things that Democrats can do. We can spread out all over the nation getting IDs to all the people who need them. That will cost a lot of money, but it can be done. The problem is that voter-ID laws are just the beginning of what conservatives have in store. And their plan is to so warp the voting process that it will be a couple of generations and tens of millions of unnecessary deaths before it gets sorted out. If it ever does.

The United States is a dying empire. Maybe this is all for the best. Let the mother fucker burn.

On this day in 1709, the Italian composer Francesco Araja was born. We don’t know exactly when he died. And by that, I mean that all we know is that he was alive in 1762. And we know he was dead in 1771. But other than that, we really can’t say. The problem is that although he was born in Italy, he spent most of his life composing in Russia for Empress Anne Ioanovna and later Empress Elizaveta Petrovna. He has the distinction of composing the first Russian language opera. But as a result, he wasn’t such a big deal in Italy. He went to Russia for the coronation of Tsar Peter III. But Peter was assassinated almost immediately (he served just over 6 months). After that, he retired in Bologna, where apparently no one noticed when he died.

He is most known for his operas. Here is a bit from one of his operas for the Russian Imperial Court, Tsefal i Prokris:

The great playwright (and much else) George Abbott was born in 1887. He had a career that spanned 9 decades because he lived to be 107 years old. And director Sidney Lumet was born in 1924.

Actor June Lockhart is 88 today. Most people remember her from Lost in Space, but she had quite a wide ranging career. And she was a real honey. Civil rights activist and the first black student at Ole Miss, James Meredith is 80 today. Carly Simon is 68. The “Dy-no-mite!” Jimmie Walker is 66. And comedian and Andrea crush Ricky Gervais is 52.

The day, however, belongs to the great writer and social critic George Orwell who was born on this day in 1903. Conservatives really want to claim him as their own because he was such a keen critic of the totalitarian governments of the twentieth century. But the truth is that all of us on the left hated those governments. And we learned from the experience. The conservative movement seems only to have learned that Nazism was bad because it hated the Jews. As for the rest of us, we may be older and wiser but we maintain our ideals—just as Orwell did.

Happy birthday George Orwell!

I have long argued against the idea that we must pay successful people excessive amounts of money because they would otherwise just sit on their duffs and produce nothing. There are many things wrong with this way of thinking. The main thing is that the argument can only be made by non-creative people. When Steve Jobs started Apple, he didn’t do it to great rich. He may have had dreams of being rich, but I’m sure at the time he would have been more than happy with a successful small company. That is the dream of every creative person: to do what you love and make a living at it.

But my main argument has always been that there are a whole lot more creative people than is generally understood. For every J. K. Rowling, there are literally thousands of others with comparable abilities. I’m sure that Rowling would admit that herself. She combined talent with the most limited resource there is: luck. And the same thing goes for Steven Spielberg.

I’ve mentioned these three creative people, because these are the three that Gregory Mankiw highlights to justify inequality in his paper, Defending the 1 Percent. According to him, if we didn’t have ridiculous levels of inequality, we wouldn’t have smartphones, fantasy books, and blockbuster movies. As I’ve argued for a very long time, Einstein’s contributions to our knowledge of the universe are arguably the greatest ever. Yet it is madness to think that if Einstein hadn’t ever been born that we would still be scratching our heads about the photoelectric effect.

Earlier this month, Matt Steinglass of The Economist took Mankiw to task for this very reason. He wrote:

Everyone knows the adage, “Build a better mousetrap, and the world will beat a path to your door.” But it isn’t true. People have invented literally thousands of better mousetraps and no one cared. The standard mousetrap is good enough for the job. So we can’t even say that without Steve Jobs we wouldn’t have better MP3 players; without J. K. Rowling we wouldn’t have better fantasy books; without Steven Spielberg we wouldn’t have better summer blockbusters.

The take home of all this is not that we shouldn’t incentivize creative success. It is just that there are limits to it. Steven Spielberg is worth about $3 billion. Does anyone really think that he would be less creative if he only had $1 billion? What’s more, I think that he would have worked harder his whole career if he had had just $3 million. But that’s a discussion for another time.

I don’t have a lot to say here—it largely speaks for itself. The gang on last night’s The Last Word discussed Edward Snowden in the most dismissive way. Joy Reid seems to think that if the United States just asks for anyone in China, the Chinese government has to hand him over. There is no subtlety of the law; no details; no due process. When America commands, other countries are contractually obligated to jump to attention. And then Richard Wolffe claimed that Snowden was “stupid” because he just realized that in jail, “He would not have access to a computer.” Except that people in jail often do have access to computers, although Snowden probably wouldn’t have been one of those people.

And remember: these are the supposed liberals! This is what is so fucked up about our country. Instead of dealing with the information that Snowden has revealed, everyone is focused on destroying the messenger. Who Snowden is and what his motivations are do not mean anything in understanding the content of these leaks. There have been too many comparisons between Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg. But the truth is that if Ellsberg had leaked those documents in the current political climate, the media would be all over him. This is a shameful sight.

In general, I like Lawrence O’Donnell and Joy Reid and Richard Wolffe. But they all have a lot of Villager baggage. And this is all of them at their very worst:

The purpose of classifying documents is to protect the country. Or at least that’s the idea. In fact, according to the Senate Select Committee to Study Government Operation, something classified as “top secret” is supposed to mean that disclosure “reasonably could be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security.” But that isn’t what is really going on. For example, none of the Snowden revelations meet this criterion. I think that documents get classified for the same reason video stores ask for your Social Security number: you never know.

The Brennan Center for Justice released a paper two years ago that has great significance today, Reducing Overclassification Through Accountability (pdf). The authors note two important reasons why overclassification of documents is a bad thing. First, it limits inter-agency sharing of data, which can actually make us less safe. Second, we supposedly live in a democracy, and all of this classification stops robust debate about what our government is and should be doing.

A good example of this second problem is a memo from an Atomic Energy Commission official in 1947 that stated that information about the effects of radiation on humans should be kept secret otherwise it might have an “adverse effect on public opinion or result in legal suits”! What is particularly interesting about this is that I’m sure this is the actual justification of keeping these spying programs secret. The reason isn’t that it will cause terrorists to start using Pretty Good Privacy. The reason is that if the public knows about such programs, there could be an “adverse effect on public opinion.”

I’m convinced that most documents are kept secret for the silliest of reasons. Humans like to have secrets. If there were a way to make it so that those who classify documents would lose all knowledge of and access to those documents, I’m sure there would be less classification. But instead, classifying documents just makes those on the inside feel more special and powerful. Here is an example of one such document:

But as I said, this kind of thing is just silly. There is little to worry about if the Navy wants to pretend that publicly available information about shark attacks is really secret. The problem comes from the documents that are classified primarily as a way to avoid accountability. Here is a good example of that kind of thing:

This takes us back to my article, Problem with Unenforced Laws. Those of us who are worried about privacy do not do so because we care about the rights of terrorists. The fact is that if allowed, the government will destroy the very core of our democracy. And the classification system is not primarily used to keep our country safe from those who would harm it. It is used to keep the government safe as it attempts to harm the country. And that just won’t do.

I just saw this bumper sticker in the parking lot of Trader Joe’s. As you probably know, I have major problems with the “What Do You Think of Obama Now?” bumper stickers. This one is even worse. It goes right to heart of what it means to be the loyal opposition. The conservative movement has long been the disloyal opposition. This is what allows them to think it is right and fitting to block every Obama initiative, not because they disagree with it, but because it comes from Obama. It is also what allowed Obama to endure over four years of claims that he was not a legitimate president because he wasn’t born in the United States. We didn’t hear such hysterics from Democrats about Bush who was actually illegitimate (but only in the sense that he didn’t get the most votes in the country or the state of Florida).

What is the bumper sticker saying? It claims that Obama is a liar. I’m sure that is technically true. But is it more true of him than any other president? I certainly don’t see that. In fact, one of my complaints about Obama is that he is too straightforward. He is not wily. He thinks that the best way to negotiate is to come right out with your best offer. Deceptiveness is just not what is wrong with our current president.

And what exactly is Obama lying about? At first, I thought the sticker was a reference to all the recent real and pretend scandals. But that isn’t it at all. Seth Colter Walls reported seeing such a sign at a McCain rally back in October 2008. And it not only dates back further, it is an evolution of “Bush bin Lyin'” signs as far back as 2004. However, those signs were never popular because, they make no sense. At least “Obama bin Lyin'” scans.

What is most ridiculous, of course, is that Obama killed Osama bin Laden. But I’m sure the point is always just to characterize Obama as the worst enemy of our country. (As though bin Laden was ever even that!) This is not limited to the right. We on the left do it too. But there is a difference. As stupid as “Bush bin Lyin'” is (and it was normally “Bush Bin Lyin” which makes the joke even harder to understand), at least it went along with the narrative that Bush lied us into war. There were no “Bush bin Lyin'” signs even as early as 2003. So the etymology was: (1) Bush lied; (2) “Bush lied” signs. With Obama it is just: (1) “Obama lied” signs. What did Obama lie about? Oh, take your pick! He’s Emmanuel Goldstein: evil, dirty, dishonest. They’ll fill in the details as necessary.

I find these kinds of attacks on Obama most frustrating. There are very real problems with Obama. But with very few exceptions (e.g. Josh Barro, Ramesh Ponnuru), the only people who are acting as the loyal opposition are those of us on the left. What we now have is a political system with one traditional party: the Democrats. And then we have one reactionary party: the Republicans who don’t so much stand for anything but against whatever the Democrats do. That’s not a stable system. And it is particularly bad for the Democratic Party. If we continue this way, we will end up with two parties who only believe that they ought to be in power.

Afterword

My general belief is that we have reached this state because of the Democrats. By co-opting more and more Republican positions, the Democrats have pushed the Republicans to the extreme right where they are stuck. But we will leave that for another day. The fact remains that the Democrats do still stand for something: what the Republicans used to stand for. The Republicans don’t really stand for anything. I think even they realize what a disaster it would be if they got their way at this point: the conservative alternative to conservative policy? Ouch!