On Thursday, I wrote, Jobs Report Good News for Senate Elections. As if reading my mind, Jonathan Bernstein responded, Sunny Jobs Report Won’t Save Democrats. His argument is that if things go very badly for Obama in Ukraine, Iraq, and elsewhere, or the economy tanks, it will be very bad for the Democrats. But if none of these things happen it will not help the Democrats all that much. Fair enough, but I think he’s being too simplistic about it regardless.

Looking at the Senate, the very fact that the control of this chamber is pretty much a toss up is an indication that the lack bad international news and a rapidly improving economy are having an effect on the election. The Democrats are way overexposed. They ought to be looking at being decimated with only 43 seats come January. Instead, the most likely result will be that will have 48 or 49 seats.

But let’s look at the unemployment numbers for this year and the previous two mid-term elections. In 2006, the unemployment rate was going down by 0.03% per month. The 2010 number was 0.04%. And the number thus far this year is 0.12%. So while the economy was improving when Bush and Obama saw their parties lose big, it was not improving at a fast enough rate to stand out in an off-year election.

If the current trend continues with the employment, the rate could 5.5% by the time of the election. I’m not saying that would have a huge effect, only that it would have some positive effect. And even Bernstein accepts my overall argument. He wrote “there’s more downside risk than upside opportunity.” Well, yeah. We all know that. But Mark Begich might win in Alaska without any help at all from the economy. Mary Landrieu only needs a little help in Louisiana. No one is suggesting that if the economy adds 400,000 jobs each of the next four months that Matt Silverstein will be the new Senator from Oklahoma and the Senate will have a Democratic super-majority.

But Bernstein is right to note the downside risks. Things could go very poorly over the next few months. The Republicans in Congress have almost unlimited powers to harm the economy, but I think at this time they are likely to stay quiet, figuring they will sail into power if they do nothing. And I don’t see Obama doing anything too terrible in international affairs. The good economic news really is good news for the Democrats. But it’s not time to start partying.

It’s Independence Day! Hooray! It’s the day we got independence from England. Well, it’s the day we declared independence from England. Well, it was the day that the document was ratified. It isn’t even clear whether the official document was ready to be signed for another two weeks. And then it seems to have been mostly signed in August. Although there were a number of people who were there to ratify it who never signed it at all. And at that point, it had been almost a year and a half since the war had started. And the declaration really didn’t mean much of anything in the context of the war, although it did give the English Tories a good laugh about the rich white folk calling for liberty while they held millions of Africans in slavery.

So we have another holiday of dubious importance. And we can add to this an even larger dose of American jingoism than we usually get. Despite appearances, I’m not anti-American. I love my country as I love my mother. And that means I don’t pretend that either are anything that they are not. There is a great deal to like about America. But there is a great deal to be embarrassed about. Our bombing campaign, including the two atomic bombs, against Japanese civilians was shameful. I don’t especially blame our support of despots throughout the world, but our rhetoric about liberty makes such behavior shameful. Our recent torture program that our government hasn’t even been willing to admit to is disgusting. It is still “enhanced interrogation” rather than torture. That’s like calling murder “enhanced spiritual processing.” And, of course, I don’t know how anyone can’t refrain from taking down their flags today after seeing the smiling Americans in this picture:

I could go on and on and on. Countries don’t become dominant empires without being evil. The problem the government had with the Abu Ghraib pictures was not that these things were going on. The problem was the American people saw them. It didn’t really matter that the rest of the world saw them; they already knew in a general sense. But as usual, the government made a show of punishing a couple of low level people and sweeping the rest under the carpet. “This isn’t who we are!”

And indeed, that’s true. We are much, much worse. But that’s not to say that many of us do not try to do better. After all, that’s why atrocities like Abu Ghraib and the My Lai Massacre have to be kept from the people. Most people (not just Americans) are decent. Of course, those in power claim they do what they do for the good of the people. This is rarely true. What they do, they do for the good of their rich and powerful friends—and for themselves.

The Declaration of Independence was not a general document. It didn’t apply to women or blacks or poor whites. Most of the rich white men who signed it didn’t want to get rid of aristocracy; they wanted to get rid of English aristocracy. Men like John Adams explicitly wanted an American aristocracy. Because, you know, whoever is rich right now are the people who should be in charge forever.

But do you know who the Declaration of Independence really didn’t apply to? The native peoples. Before Europeans came, there were many millions of natives in what is now America. But by 1800, there were only 600,000. And by 1890, there were only 250,000. Not all of that was due to an intentional genocide, but quite a lot of it was. In 2000, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) released a formal appology. It’s quite a document, because it is so not like what I hear from conservatives (and sadly many liberals as well) that wronged minority groups should just, “Get over it!” The BIA noted, “And while the BIA employees of today did not commit these wrongs, we acknowledge that the institution we serve did. We accept this inheritance, this legacy of racism and inhumanity. And by accepting this legacy, we accept also the moral responsibility of putting things right.”

Here is a small bit of that document:

Perhaps surprisingly, this makes me proud. I don’t expect anyone or any country to be perfect. But the first step to improving our behavior is to admit our wrongs. I so wish that we could outlaw the chant, “We’re number one!” For one thing, in many bad ways, we are number one. I would replace that chant with something that many of us would embrace, “We’re trying to be better!” Because all the proclamations of how great we are only arrest us in our efforts to improve.

If freedom is what Independence Day is really all about, then we should see the Declaration of Independence as a deeply flawed beginning of a very long road we have traveled and must continue to travel. We have very far to go.

See Also: Previous Independence Day Articles

2013: Four Independence Days
2012: Happy 4th: American Imperialism
2011: I Felt Like a Gringo

In the long run, John Roberts is going to go down as one of the worst chief justices of the Supreme Court. I don’t say that because I disagree with the rulings of the court. That’s a given, even when the court isn’t so skewed. The problem for Roberts’ legacy is that the Court is getting totally out of control. It no longer seems like a deliberative body and seems more like just another legislature where the Republicans and the Democrats battle it out.

This was especially clear to me yesterday when I read, Supreme Court OKs Another Religious Birth Control Exemption. I’ll give you the details in a moment, but the short version is this: on Monday, the Court said one thing and then on Thursday, they reversed themselves. This is not surprising, of course. As I wrote on Monday, the conservatives on the Court seem to have thrown out the whole idea of consistency. Just as with Bush v Gore before, this week the Court carved out a special exception for one particular belief of a particular kind of Christian. We know that they will not apply this logic generally because it would mean the end of law in the United States.

You may remember some time back that the Obama administration came up with a birth control compromise for religious-oriented nonprofits. The idea was that the groups would not pay for birth control but the insurance companies would provide it at their cost. The truth of the matter is that there is no cost because generally, birth control pays for itself. Pregnancies and babies are very expensive. Well, in Monday’s decision, the majority praised this compromise. So why is it on Thursday that the very same majority gave Wheaton College a temporary exemption from the contraceptive mandate?

Here’s how it is supposed to work: if a group felt that they might endanger their seat in heaven by providing birth control to their employees, they needed to file a form saying, “Hell no, we hate hoes!” But Wheaton College didn’t even do that. They just went to court and asked for an exception and they got it. Actually, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals said no. And the Supreme Court overruled it. It will undoubtedly be heard as a case next year.

There are two issues here. First, the Court majority is saying that the harm done to individuals until the case is fully resolved (for example, death) is nothing compared to the hurt feelings of institutions like Wheaton College. It also signals that the conservatives are planning to find that the religious exception doesn’t just apply to closely held companies who are absolutely, positively certain that they know exactly what God wants. (Note: one of the things that Wheaton knows God doesn’t want is Catholics, since in 2004 they fired a philosophy professor who converted to Catholicism.)

Second, it is now clear that the majority’s argument in Burwell v Hobby Lobby where they praised the administration’s compromise was just to allow them political cover. It was meant to make them seem reasonable. The fact is that at least four of the justices are nothing but ideologues who are determined to put their particular brand of Christianity in a state of quasi-official religion.

Of course, as is typical of the conservative bullies on the court, the order was not signed. So Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagan put out a 16-page signed dissent. Sotomayor wrote, “I have deep respect for religious faith, for the important and selfless work performed by religious organizations and for the values of pluralism. But the Court’s grant of an injunction in this case allows Wheaton’s beliefs about the effect of its actions to trump the democratic interest in allowing the Government to enforce the law.” She also noted “those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word. Not so today.”

Indeed they can’t. And that’s why I think Roberts will be vilified in the future. And he’s very clearly aware of what’s going on at the court. That’s why he found in favor of Obamacare in the first place. But when the issue is his Christian faith (He’s actually a Catholic; maybe he should have thought about that when siding with the anti-Catholic bigotry that defines Wheaton College.) he can’t seem to stop himself. It’s like religion disrupts his thinking ability.

I’m generally fairly tolerant of religion. But I’m getting to the point of siding with Christopher Hitchens in the subtitle of God Is Not Great: religion does poison everything.

Timothy Egan is a columnist for The New York Times and he is usually pretty good. But today, he wrote one of the stupidest or most disingenuous columns I’ve read in a long time, Declaration of Independents. It is about the growing number of so called independents. And it bemoans that fact that they have no one to vote for. The partisans have their parties, but who speaks for the independents? I have such a desire to slap Timothy Egan, you cannot even imagine.

As we all know, voters who refuse to claim a political party are almost all partisans. And they are not, as is usually claimed, people in between the parties. In my experience, when someone claims to be “independent,” chances are that it means that they think the Republican Party is too liberal. And it works the other way too: some liberals claim to be independent because they find the Democratic Party too conservative. But they are more likely to call themselves “socialist” or something similar. Conservatives really don’t have anything to call themselves other than “fascist,” and while that term may apply, few people want to associate with the word.

Egan’s biggest problem is that he treats “independents” as though they are some monolithic group. They aren’t. He even notes that the recent trend has been for self identified independents to come from the Republican Party. Based upon the recent news that is reported in his own paper, does he really think these are people leaving the party because it is too conservative and that it doesn’t get anything done? Sure: there are some. But my perception of this group is not that they are open to voting for more moderate politicians. Rather, it is that they are simply embarrassed to associate with the Republican Party. In the privacy of the ballot box, they vote as they wouldn’t in public.

To make matters worse, Egan then sums up what his mythical independent voters believe in:

Oh, I see: so the independents believe in exactly what the Democrats believe in. The real question is, if you asked these independents which party they would pick if they had to, you’d see that, yes, the independents skew slightly Democratic. The problem with them as a group, is that exactly the ones who are in the center of the political spectrum are the ones who are least likely to vote.

I don’t really know what Egan thinks he is doing in his article. It would be nice to have more choices in terms of people to vote for. But the truth is that the Democratic Party is a big tent. The only two “independents” in Congress both caucus with the Democrats. Perhaps Egan has forgotten his Shakespeare:

If what the “independents” want is what the Democrats have to offer, why would calling them independents matter? Bernie Sanders is an independent, but calls himself a socialist. I just think of him a good solid liberal Democrat. I don’t care what he calls himself or how he shows up on the Senate roll call. And I can’t for the life of me figure out why an otherwise smart guy like Egan would care.

See Also:

South Will Fall Again (with Obamacare)
Potato Famine

As regular readers know, I am not an optimist. Most probably think me cynical and pessimistic. I don’t see myself that way. I just react to reality as I find it. And sometimes, I’m really optimistic. After the first presidential debate in 2012, all my liberal friends were bummed out. So was I. But then the October Jobs Report came out and it was great! So I became downright cheery because, “It’s the economy, stupid!” But most of my friends did not see it that way. But they were wrong and I was right. I don’t mean to gloat. I just mean to point out that when I’m optimistic, you should probably pay attention.

Like most liberals, I am concerned about the Democrats losing the Senate in November. For a long time, I’ve estimated that that this has about a 50% chance of happening. Indeed, that is more or less where The Upshot has been predicting for months. But the one thing that will really improve the Democrats’ chances is if the economy continues to improve. And I’ve been pretty bullish on this. It’s really very simple. The economy is under-performing. There is a lot of unused capacity and I just don’t see a reason why things would reverse now.

But in case you didn’t know it, it is not the first Friday of the month. But tomorrow is a federal holiday, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has come out with its June Jobs Report. And it is a humdinger! The economy added 288,000 new jobs. And the BLS revised the last two months’ employment figures up by a total of 29,000. That actually puts April creating 304,000 jobs. You can always find things in the jobs report to complain about, but overall, it is a really good report.

If you want to get into the details and even find some things to feel bad about, Matt Yglesias at Vox, put together an excellent run down of what various people are saying about various parts of the report, Economy Adds 288,000 New Jobs, Unemployment Rate Falls. You might have noticed that I didn’t mention the unemployment rate. That’s because it is meaningless. In particular, the economy still hasn’t turned the corner in the eyes of Americans. More people are leaving the job market than are finding jobs. But it looks like this will not be true for much longer.

The reason this makes me feel better about the Senate is that as the economy improves, so will people’s opinion of President Obama. And so when they go to the polls, they will be more likely to think, “You know, the Democrats are doing a good job; now is not the time to switch horses.” Even more important, feeling good about Obama will make more Democrats decide to actually go to the trouble of voting. And it won’t take much for the Democrats to hold onto the Senate.

It is still too soon to tell. But if July adds 300,000 jobs and August does the same, people are going to notice. That alone will probably reverse the dominance of people leaving the job market. And that means people will be feeling better about the state of things. Of course, even if the Republicans do retake the Senate, it won’t mean much. They are almost certain to lose it again in 2016. But having a Democratic Senate would generally be helpful to Obama in his last two years—especially regarding the appointment of judges. If the Republicans take the Senate, they will probably not allow anyone to be confirmed. That would be bad, but not catastrophic.

So it would be best if the Democrats held onto the Senate. And today’s Jobs Report bodes well for that.

In a short blog post, The Great Disinvestment, Paul Krugman noted, “[I]t’s absurd that the federal gasoline tax has been flat in nominal terms since 1993, which means that in real terms it has fallen 40 percent.” That really struck me because it so highlights the results of the Republican Party’s absolute insistence on never raising taxes. There is nothing principled about this stance; it is just irresponsible.

In The Wrecking Crew, Thomas Frank argued that conservatives are not just naturally bad at governing. He claimed that they intentionally ruin the effectiveness of government and rack up large debts so that when the Democratic Party is in power, it will have to spend most of its time and resources fixing the damage. I do not accept this thesis. It is too Machiavellian, and frankly, I don’t think that they are cunning enough for such a project.

But I wrote about the book before, Why Are Republicans the Wrecking Crew? In it, I discussed how it doesn’t actually matter. The result is the same. The Republicans rule both incompetently and recklessly. When the Democrats come into office, they do feel that they must clean up the mess. That’s a fundamental problem because Democrats do want the government to work. But it isn’t as though the Republicans don’t want the government to work. It is just that they get carried away by their rhetoric.

Let’s look at the federal budget from 2011, but it always looks about like this:

Most of that is stuff that Republicans want to keep, or at very least, know that they would cease to be a viable political party is they touched. So all their posturing is nothing more than their attempts to harm Democratic constituencies while rewarding their own. This was clearly on display with the most recent farm bill. The Republicans actually wanted to give farmers—who are mostly large corporations—more money while they gutted the food stamp program. One of the reasons that we even have a food stamp program is because price supports (welfare for farmers) makes food more expensive (a tax on people who eat). So it was seen as only fair that the government help out the poor since they were paying more for food than they should.

As for the gas tax, well, Republicans don’t care about paying for things. Actually, the obsession with “pay fors” is one of the maladies of the Democratic Party. Republicans only think we should pay for things when the Democrats are in power. Meanwhile, over the last two decades, the gas tax is roughly half what it was two decades ago. This is while we should (1) be encouraging people to drive less with higher taxes, and (2) have more money to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

This is why we can’t have nice things bridges that don’t fall down.

Afterword

The gas tax is not the only way we pay for bridges and roads. But the fact that we can’t raise taxes—even to keep up with inflation—is indicative of why the United States is literally falling apart.

I always thought that Cosmopolitan was just a silly fashion magazine. But I’ll admit, I have never so much as looked inside an issue. Then today, Digby linked to an article by Jill Filipovic, Hobby Lobby Supporters Insist Decision Isn’t Sexist, Tell Women to Close Their Legs. It’s one of the best things I’ve read yet in the aftermath of Burwell v Hobby Lobby. (See my discussion: SCOTUS Says Not All Religions Are Equal.)

Primarily, the article is about the reaction of people on the right to women who had the audacity to be angry or disappointed with the decision in the case. It includes some real gems from Twitter. Filipovic made the infinitely reasonable observation, “Really glad the same #prolife folks who oppose abortion rights are making it harder for women to prevent unintended pregnancy.” AmericaWoman responded, “@JillFilipovic be accountable for your own blood I’ll keep your legs closed.” (I know, it doesn’t exactly make sense, but you get the idea.) There was a whole lot of discussion about keeping legs closed and using aspirin tablets. In fact, #CloseYourLegs was very big for a while.

Of course, when it was a man writing, the tweets normally used the word “whore.” The unalterably vile and stupid Patrick Dollard tweeted, “MSNBC Whore Irin Carmon: Hobby Lobby Ruling Is Nothing But An ‘All-Out Assault’ On Contraceptives.” Ssgt. Richard Davis tweeted, “IF YOU WANT TO BE A WHORE & SLEEP W/ EVERY MAN YOU FIND PAY FOR YOUR OWN BIRTH CONTROL. 10 BUCKS AT WALGREENS. SO GO BE WHORE’S.” And Tim Gradous was a total winner, seemingly believing that God is dead or has changed his mind, “Two Aspirin between knees is 100% effective, God knew. If you can’t pay don’t Play…” Note also how Mr Gradous seems to think that pregnancy is solely the concern of the woman.

What’s especially terrible about all of this is that I figure that these are just conservatives without enough control of the ids. The five men on the Court who made up the majority probably think these same things. They just know better than to communicate their thoughts in such a raw form. I don’t say this lightly. We know that the brain works that way. With all due respect to Stephen Colbert’s satire, we do pretty much decide with our “guts” and then use our higher brain functions to justify those primal “thoughts.” As smart as he may be, I think the fact that 24 was once Antonin Scalia’s favorite television show demonstrates that there is more gut than brain on the court. If the five conservatives on the court had been women, at least some of them would have dissented and the case would have been struck down. There is no doubt of that.

Jill Filipovic also noted what I think is going to be the lasting legacy of this decision:

In the long run, I think that Burwell v Hobby Lobby will turn into one of those historical embarrassments for the Supreme Court like Dred Scott v Sandford and Plessy v Ferguson. It’s like the Court has opened a wound in the law that conservatives will claw away at. And I would go further than Ginsburg. At least there is a Biblical case to be made for segregation. There is no biblical case to be made against birth control. And, in fact, until the mid-1970s, protestants didn’t have a problem with abortion, much less birth control.

The only really important thing I learned from the racist Ayn Rand was how totalitarian regimes oppress their people. They don’t rigorously enforce all kinds of laws. They just have all kinds of laws laying around that they apply to anyone who becomes a problem. Well, going forward, the Supreme Court has set up a similar situation. Companies (I’m sure the “closely held” part will go away soon enough—especially if we get any more conservatives on the court.) will have all kinds of religious rights—as long as those religious rights go along with what the conservatives on the court believe.

The point that Filpovic makes is that this case isn’t about religious freedom at all. It is about conservatives who have never made peace with the slipping power of patriarchy. Of course, it’s interesting that the same conservatives who want women to stay at home with a Duggar-style family are not so interested as to allow union rights and minimum wage laws that might make a single-earner household possible. The overall conservative agenda isn’t just to keep women down. The whole thing is about keeping everyone but the power elites down. One thing that many people seem to forget is that birth control doesn’t just free women; if anything, it frees men more. And the power elite don’t like the poorer classes to have freedom. Corporations are people because they are owned by the rich. A zygote’s rights trump those of the host mother because she’s poor.

This is modern America.

Earlier today, Paul Krugman wrote a very interesting article, Trick or Tweak. It’s basically about the new Republican policy book Room to Grow, although it isn’t mentioned by name. As he noted, “More specifically, the ‘reform conservatives’ seem mainly to be offering supposedly new ideas for the sake of being seen to offer new ideas.” To me, this gets to the fundamental problem with the current Republican Party. It isn’t that they don’t have “new ideas.” In general, the issue is not new ideas. It is rare to have new ideas in politics. The problem with the Republican Party is that in terms of its politics, it has ossified. They have become the party of “all or nothing.” They are unwilling to compromise.

Krugman rightly notes that the two parties are pretty much the same as they ever were, “Liberals want a strong social safety net, financed with relatively high taxes, especially on high incomes.” Meanwhile, “Conservatives want much less of a safety net, and much lower taxes on the affluent.” The problem is that conservatives have become delusional. When Reagan came into power, he offered up the belief that by shoveling money to the rich, it would make everyone better off. And to people not paying attention, that seemed to work. The economy did well under him. But we know that this had nothing to do with these policies and everything to do with the Federal Reserve.

But even if you gave the Reagan tax cut credit for the economic recovery of the 1980s, the recovery was not terribly robust, especially after the deep recession the country was coming out of. The economy did not grow as fast as it did under Johnson before him. And it did not grow as fast as it did under Clinton after him. And then there is the issue that I discussed in, Reagan’s Legacy: Tax Cuts for Rich, Tax Hikes for the Rest. So not only did we get only a modest economic boom under Reagan, the middle class actually ended up paying more in taxes. Krugman was right when he noted specifically that conservatives want lower taxes on the affluent. That’s all they care about; note that they had no problem with the payroll tax holiday ending.

What really drives the Republicans, however, is not any false lessons they learned from Reagan. What drives them is the false lesson they learned from Bush the Elder. The lesson is that you can never raise taxes. Actually, if there is a lesson that should have been learned from Bush, it is this: don’t make ostentatious political promises you don’t know you can keep. (In fact, at the time, some of Bush’s economic advisers tried to get the “read my lips” promise removed from his speech.) But what Republicans have learned is not about winning general elections; it’s about winning primaries.

I think where we are today is the natural result of that false lesson about never raising taxes. Because being committed to never raising taxes means that the government will never have enough money. During good economic times, the Republicans insist upon lowering taxes because it is wrong for the government to take more money than it needs (eg 2001 tax cut). And then they insist upon lowering taxes when the economy is bad because we need stimulus (eg 2003 tax cut). This ultimately leads to Grover Norquist’s idea to “shrink [the government] down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.”

Of course, the truth is that Republicans don’t want to drown the government in the bathtub. Neither does Norquist. The Republicans firmly believe in taking money away from the poorer classes and using it to enrich the already rich. Bush’s prescription drug benefit was partly about giving a benefit to older people who tend to vote Republican. But mostly, it was a huge giveaway to the drug companies. His War on Terror was as much about giving money to military contractors as anything else. And his attempt to privatize Social Security was about rewarding Wall Street.

What I’m saying is that the Republican Party itself is not an honest broker. The Democrats really do want to do what they say. That’s not to say they are perfect or anything. But they wanted healthcare reform and they were even willing to use the Republicans’ own plan to get it. Not only would the opposite not be true. When the Democrats did that, the Republicans abandoned their own plan. Remember: not a single congressional Republican voted for the ACA. So the only time you can get any idea of what the Republicans really want to do is when they are in power. And for that, you have to look at the years 2003-2007

So let’s go back to how Krugman described them, “Conservatives want much less of a safety net, and much lower taxes on the affluent.” They don’t want to destroy the government; they just want to destroy the parts of it that help the poorer classes. The Tea Party makes bold stands and sounds downright libertarian. But once Republicans are back in power, they will do what they always do: run up deficits that the Democrats will later sacrifice their own agenda to manage; and funnel money to their key constituents. And once out of power, Republicans will go back to the same hysterics about out of control spending.

Leave aside the fact that the ideas in Room to Grow are extremely weak tea. The fact remains that the book and the entire conservative “reform” movement does nothing but provide political cover for the Republican Party. It allows David Brooks to say, “[T]he most coherent and compelling policy agenda the American right has produced this century.” It is just apologia. Regardless, we don’t need “new” ideas; we need good ideas, and we already have a lot of those. It’s just that they don’t come from the Republicans.