I am constantly amazed at how naive mainstream, even insightful political writers are. This morning, Jonathan Chait made a big deal of the fact that Eric Cantor said “we’ll see about additional taxes” after being asked if he would consider taxes if Obama showed he was “serious” about the budget deficit. Of course, even Chait notes that Cantor immediately went back on his statement. But somehow, for Chait, Cantor’s statement seems to be telling, as though Cantor is really willing to accept new taxes and that his “no taxes” pledge is just a bargaining stance.

Bull Pucky!

What Cantor said was no kind of gaff. Republicans are forever claiming that they will raise taxes under the right circumstances. It is just that the Democrats are never “serious” enough for them to consider raising taxes. Even the White House has fallen for this. Remember their recent charm offensive where Obama was meeting with Republicans and showing them, “We really will fuck the poor and middle classes if you’ll just give us a few pennies from the rich.” The point that the White House and commenters like Chait don’t seem to get is that Republicans are always reasonable in the theoretical case of the Democrats offering them something that they know the Democrats will never offer them.

Of course, they make mistakes. Remember the unnamed Republican legislator who Ezra Klein introduced us to? He didn’t know that Obama had offered Social Security cuts. As I reported at the time:

Of course, Klein responded to this with another moderate’s Hallelujah Chorus, “See the Republicans aren’t intransigent; they’re just ignorant!” But they aren’t. Well, they are ignorant. But it doesn’t matter, because they are by definition intransigent. I’m sure that unnamed Republican legislator has since come up with other requirements before he can say of Obama, “That’s serious!”

The Democrats move more and more to the right, but this only causes the Republicans to move more and more to the right so that the two parties are no closer together. How long can this go on before otherwise smart political observers like Chait and Klein see that there really isn’t a reasonable party hidden inside the modern Republicans? Maybe after they control the White House and Congress, they will become a bit more reasonable. But for now, we need to stop reading the tea leaves. The Republicans are against any proposal by the Democrats because it is a proposal by the Democrats. The one thing that works against this is actual leverage. I would have thought that everyone would understand that by now.

I just came upon an interesting article from last June by Jonathan Zasloff in The Reality-Based Community. It is about Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent in Miller v. Alabama. That was the case where the court found that it was unconstitutional to provide mandatory life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders. Alito wrote, “Nothing in the Constitution supports this arrogation of legislative authority.” In other words, Alito is saying the courts don’t have the constitutional right to usurp the authority of the legislature. Zasloff notes that this is interesting, because Alito didn’t think this when it came to Obamacare.

Alito was so angry about the court’s ruling that he read his dissent from the bench. This is typical of what I find so bothersome about conservatives generally, but especially on the bench. Samuel Alito here is making the case that the law is very clear. It goes right along with John Roberts’ statement that he just “calls balls and strikes.” But somehow, the clarity of the law vanishes the moment they have an opportunity to score a partisan blow. This predates Alito, of course. Just go back to Bush v. Gore, where the conservatives who hated the equal protection clause and interpreted it very narrowly suddenly found that it was very big when it came to the protection of George W. Bush. But even there, they had to add a statement that even though they had ruled for the equal protection of Bush, the ruling could not be used as precedent when it came to the equal rights for anyone else in the future.

When it came to mandatory minimums for juvenile offenders, Alito couldn’t find anything in the Constitution that would allow the Supreme Court to interfere. But when it came to Obamacare, Alito didn’t even think about such limits to its power. Here’s Zasloff:

The point is that Alito, like most conservative judges, takes the law very seriously. Until he doesn’t. As Zasloff says, “Cutting 30 million people off of health insurance, however, is just a day at the office.”

Remember Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm? She’s the Deer Sign Lady. I try to check in on her from time to time to see what she’s ranting about. It is always a real eye-opener. Most of us living in the real world are not aware of much that is going on in Right Wing Nutjob World. But all you have to do is read a Wilhelm column and you’ll learn what is Big News in that alternate reality.

Voter Fraud

On 13 March, Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm offered us, America’s Vote. She starts by proposing the reasonable, but simple minded idea of making election days national holidays. But she’s against allowing multiple days to vote. Why? “We appear to have no problem with jobs, plans and all that is life when it comes to December 25.” Or rather: she has no reason. She just thinks it is wrong to give people “four to fifty days” to vote. But that’s okay, because she thinks that making elections a national holiday will solve all our problems, because, you know, no one works on national holidays.

But extended voting days (or lack thereof) is not really what her article is about. There have been a few cases of people accidentally voting twice by voting absentee and in person. In general, these were just mistakes made by confused people. But there is one case where a woman may have done it on purpose. Of course, the reason we’re hearing about these things is that this is a form of voter fraud that is always caught. In other words: it isn’t a problem. But this stuff is getting a huge amount of attention on right wing websites and Fox News. And Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm, who seems to only get her news from Fox, certainly got this story from them.

Grand Statements, No Facts

As usual with her articles, she makes grand statements that are not only undocumented, they are untrue. Consider:

There is absolutely no evidence that voter fraud is getting worse—in fact, it looks like just the opposite. The Constitution did not resolve the injustice of white-male-only voting; the Constitution had to be amended to resolve this injustice—and in the case of African Americans, the Constitutional change did not actually allow them to vote in many places for a century. But note the underlying argument here: if one person votes who shouldn’t, then the entire system has been tarnished. When a rightful voter is denied, that doesn’t tarnish the system at all.

The more I read Wilhelm, the more I think she is just a bigot. Here she is again (1) using right wing sources without quoting them; (2) stating things as fact that are not true; and (3) showing intense fear for “the other”:

Scary black people: check! Scary Latinos: check! College kids: check! Nuns?! Oh, bqhatevwr! (Note: if you search for “nuns voter fraud” you will, of course, find the right wing blogosphere buzzing about a case!)

Gay Rights

On 17 March, Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm again delighted us with, Government, Get Out of America’s Way! I thought it was going to be more Tea Party pseudo-free market babbling. How wrong I was! I think. It actually isn’t at all clear what she is talking about. But I’ll give you my best guess. If I’m right, it is by far the most stunning piece of writing we have seen from Avon Patch Savant.

How will we ever trust Rob Portman again? He has voted consistently against gay rights and now he says he’s for marriage equality. The government should just stay out of the way of the people “to be as good as he or she works and aspires to be.” Allowing same sex marriage is the government getting in the way by (!) changing the way that the government has traditionally gotten in the way.

To sum up:

Can’t you just feel the Tea Party passion: something is wrong and although Wilhelm doesn’t know what it is, she feels very strongly that something ought to be done about it. This is prima facie evidence of why the Tea Party has been such a useful tool for the rich. Situation: they are angry about the rich being bailed out with TARP. Resolution: they push the government to lower the taxes of the rich.

Gun Rights

On 21 March, Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm applied her usual white and black moral reasoning to an issue that gets far too much serious and careful discussion, Americas 2nd Amendment Must Never Be Compromised—Ever! (That’s right: a grammar error in the headline.) This was especially fun because gun rights is an issue that I have very complex thoughts about. And those thoughts do not fit into any simple box: I side with conservatives on some things and I’m far more extreme than liberals on other things. Avon Patch Savant, of course, makes everything very simple:

1. Something must be done to stop bad guys from harming good people.
2. Lucky we have police who are always right.
3. Sometimes police are not around to kill the bad guys.
4. We must have guns so we can kill the bad guys.

She again goes back to her deer sign point: “‘No gun’ signage is on most schools, malls, banks. Criminals do not seem to read as guns continue to be part of crime.” Now, I understand that as with the deer sign article, she is trying to be cute. But her entire argument is that “bad guys” have guns; all will be well if “good people” are armed so that they can kill the “bad guys.” This goes right long with what seems to be Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm’s guiding philosophy of life: everything is simple. She does not allow that maybe people can’t be neatly categorized as good and bad. Or that a “good guy” with a gun might get mad over something small and end up killing another “good guy.”

Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm Is Typical of the Tea Party

All of her writing reminds me of a 2011 paper from the American Sociological Association that looked at the beliefs of those in the Tea Party movement. The researchers found that Tea Partiers shared four cultural and political dispositions:

Wilhelm demostrates three of these tendencies in the articles here. She doesn’t exhibit libertarianism. But I question just how seriously the Tea Partiers are about libertarianism generally—especially given the way the study defines it. They may well associate these kinds of limits with schools and might answer very differently if a Republican were in the White House. Regardless, Kathleen O’Brien Wilhelm comes off like a frightened child who wants a grown-up to protect her. And what frightens her: just the modern world with all those people coming into it. Of course, the problem is not that Wilhelm is the way she is; it is that there are tens of millions of people just like her. The more I read her, the less I find her amusing. Now she makes me despair for our society.

Regular readers know where I stand on libertarianism. I understand its appeal, but it is a silly philosophy and does not hold up to even a cursory examination. And nothing is quite so silly as the professional libertarian. Enter William P. Ruger and Jason Sorens of the Mercatus Center and their idiotic (I do not use that word lightly!) “freedom rankings” of the 50 United States.

These guys have put together a list of things that make us free and then tabulated them to see which states are the most free and which states are the least free. Can you say “setting up a model so it provides the outcome you want”? I sure can! Before we look at their criteria, let’s look at their results. The freest states in the union? North Dakota, South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma where the wind comes sweeping down the plains. The least free states in the union? New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.

Wow! Blue states are unfree and red states are free! How do you suppose that happened? And this brings up one of my biggest complaints about libertarians: when you push them for details, they always end up with conservative policies because they are conservatives, they just don’t like the moniker. Let’s look at one notable missing element to their list of policies: reproductive rights. They aren’t on the list at all, because the authors claim that you can’t distinguish between the rights of the mother and the rights of the fetus. But Matt Yglesias notes an interesting inconsistency: after a fetus has been born, they have no rights at all. At birth, suddenly all the rights are with the parents. That’s not very libertarian, that’s more, oh, what do you call it, social conservatism.

The rankings get even more nutty when you look at the criterion. For example, people are more free if they can get less education. Apparently, they would be most free if 5-year-olds could just decide they don’t want to go to school at all. Oh, I’m sorry; not 5-year-olds; they don’t have any rights after they are born; their parents decide. So the most free place in terms of education is Afghanistan where religious fanatics can decide that girls don’t need an education.

There are three broad categories of freedom: fiscal, regulatory, and personal. In other words, freedom for these bozos is heavily tilted toward what businesses can do. Fiscal is the largest single category and it includes: Tax Burden (28.6%), Government Employment (2.8%), Government Spending (1.9%), Government Debt (1.2%), and Fiscal Decentralization (0.9%). You can forget everything but “tax burden,” even though the rest make precious little sense. It is all about taxes. But as usual with conservatives, there is no sense in which the programs that the taxes pay for increase freedom. Are we more free because of public roads, libraries, a judicial system? I think so. But for the liberty boys, paying taxes just reduces freedom. That alone delegitimizes their their rankings, but I will move on.

Regulatory is probably the most perverse category. It includes: Freedom from Tort Abuse (11.5%), Property Right Protection (7.6%), Health Insurance Freedom (5.4%), Labor Market Freedom (3.8%), Occupational Licensing Freedom (1.7%), Miscellaneous Regulatory Freedom (1.3%), and Cable and Telecom Freedom (0.8%). Pretty great, huh? Freedom from tort abuse. Tort abuse is, in case you don’t know, what companies who are getting sue call any lawsuit. Again: there’s no plus side: reducing individuals’ ability to sue has no down side. I’m sure you can figure out what “property rights protection” is. But what about “health insurance freedom”? That’s the freedom of businesses to not provide health insurance to their employees.

“Labor market freedom” is “right to work” legislation. As I’ve written before, Right-to-Work Limits Employer Freedom. Libertarians always claim that people ought to be able to make any contracts they like. But the moment those contracts give power to workers, libertarians pretend like contracts are a bad thing. This is a great example of how libertarians are not pro-liberty and not pro-individual; they are pro-business, and when it comes to it, pro-big-business over small business. In other words, they’re just conservatives. Moving on.

The Personal category includes: Victimless Crime Freedom (9.8%), Gun Control Freedom (6.6%), Tobacco Freedom (4.1%), Alcohol Freedom (2.8%), Marriage Freedom (2.1%), Marijuana and Salvia Freedom (2.1%), Gambling Freedom (2.0%), Education Policy (1.9%), Civil Liberties (0.6%), Travel Freedom (0.5%), Asset Forfeiture Freedom (0.1%), and Campaign Finance Freedom (0.02%). I don’t have a problem with “victimless crime freedom” although I would think that ought to be even more important. Paying someone to have sex with you can result in you being put in a cage for a long time. Unlike the “freedom” to pay less in taxes, this is a real issue of freedom. But I’m glad they highlight it. (Note, however, that being able to sue is a bigger threat to freedom than victimless crime laws.)

“Gun control freedom,” of course, is the usual 2nd Amendment loon complaint: any restriction on my ability to build an army is tyranny! Again, no thought is giving to the other side: the freedom not to be murdered by a nutjob or angry family member. And then there is “alcohol freedom.” This is the freedom not to pay alcohol taxes. And it is more important to the liberty boys than the government disallowing same sex couples to marry.

By far the biggest problem with these rankings is that they don’t provide any freedom value from government programs. This is ridiculous. A libertarian could make the argument that the decrease in freedom from taxes is greater than the increase in freedom from, say, Social Security. But they absolutely cannot make the argument that Social Security adds no freedom. As a result of this, these rankings are worse than meaningless. All they demonstrate are the prejudices of the men who put this “study” together.

Afterword

As a former scientist myself, I think the presentation of their data is poor. If I had done it, I would certainly have provided a table that showed the actual numbers. Also, there is no way to reproduce these results. I don’t suppose this too much matters, because this isn’t actual research. It is just a couple of libertarian idiots throwing out some slapdash notions of freedom and judging states based upon them. Anyone who wanted to do this work seriously would just start over; there is nothing in the work done here that is worth saving.

The high point of yesterday’s hearings was when Elena Kagan read the Congressional justification of the Defense of Marriage Act. “Congress decided to reflect and honor of collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.” Ouch! But Paul Clement was quick on his feet and noted that, yes, it does say that, but that the court really shouldn’t look at that statement because it was just what some minority of congress members thought. Is that true?

Let me put this in three different ways. Of course not! Of course not! Of course not! Is Clement fucking kidding me? All these kinds of anti-gay laws are enacted because those enacting them hate gays. It is as simple as that. And it was repugnant listening to his song and dance about how DOMA was just meant to clarify the law. Look: there are two ways to clarify the law: accept same sex marriage or reject it. DOMA not only rejected it on the state level (red states don’t have to recognize the satanic blue state same sex marriage laws), it rejected it on the federal level. All together now: because they hated gays!

One thing that I most hate about conservatives is how they are never held accountable for their vile policy positions. Jonathan Chait wrote about that this morning, Next Stage for Gay Rights: Conservative Amnesia. His anger in the article is that conservatives are already trying to rewrite their positions on gay rights, even before they’ve changed their positions on gay rights. Rob Portman does not a movement make.

But as the hearing yesterday shows: rewriting is not valid. Republicans have been horrible on issues related to gay rights. As I pointed out yesterday, it’s all about their Christian Intolerance. Of course, much the same thing can be said of Democrats. But all the liberalization of views toward gay rights that we’ve seen over the past decade or so? That’s almost entirely Democrats. Republicans (especially politicians) are not much more evolved on the subject than they were before.

Jonathan Chait wrote a brilliant article last year about how conservatives were trying to rewrite their history of racism, The Conservative Fantasy History of Civil Rights. It is interesting how they’ve attempted to do this. They just pretend that the second half of the twentieth century never happened. Yep: the Democratic Party was very racist in the 19th century! The Republicans ended slavery! Therefore: Democrats are racists today and Republicans are the defenders of minority rights!

E. J. Graff wrote a really good article over at The American Prospect that gets right to the heart of what is going on, Falling Through the Looking Glass. She notes that we are looking at two worlds at once: the past with all its hatred of gays and the future where no one (outside the religious extremists) will care. But here’s the thing: she sees these things in the same people. Because the people against gay rights will no longer admit (in polite company anyway) that they hate the gays. In fact, most of the time, they’re just looking out for them!

Twenty years from now, all politicians will be in favor of gay rights. It won’t be a partisan issue. Even the people who voted for DOMA will claim they were always for gay rights. It is just that they wanted to clarify what marriage meant! But I’m not inclined to let them get away with it. We will never go back. Allowing bigots to save face does not have to be part of the deal.

Matt Yglesias posted something this morning about research by Linda Bilmes that shows that the total cost of of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars is up to $6 trillion and that we haven’t even paid for most of it yet. That’s not exactly news: five years ago, Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz wrote The Three Trillion Dollar War about the Iraq War alone. But it got me think about these wars in a slightly different way: what are the opportunity and other hidden costs of these wars?

I don’t think that either of these wars made us safer. Let’s look back on 9/11 itself. Osama bin Laden’s main excuse for going to war with the United States was our military bases in Saudi Arabia. Guess what? Bin Laden won! In 2003, we dismantled our bases and removed all of our troops. That’s something to think about for the frat boys dancing in the streets over bin Laden’s death: a little backwater terrorist group got the United States to make a major policy change.

After 9/11, the only bright spot I could imagine was that all of the worldwide goodwill that we received could have been used to finally force a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine problem. I really think there would have been enough pressure to get that done. Of course, we didn’t even try. And despite what all of the supposed defenders of Israel claim, this conflict makes Israel less safe because it provides a bright example to those who wish to claim that Israel is invalid. I believe if we had solved that problem we would have sent the entire region on a new (and better) trajectory.

So there’s that. I can’t even imagine how many trillions of dollars that would have been worth. But instead of working to make the Middle East better, we did all we could to make it worse. Now our Secretary of State has to fly to Iraq to try to convince them maybe they shouldn’t help Iran ship weapons to the Syrian government. And somehow, I think that we could have avoiding killing bin Laden for ten years without ever going to war in Afghanistan.

So 12 years on, what do we have. Lots of money wasted. Lots of lives wasted. Lots of goodwill trampled into the mud as though it meant nothing to us. But most of all: lost opportunities. Gone forever. And what did we get in return? A bunch of testosterone cases got to feel like real men. For a while.

Bill O’Reilly, mouthpiece of the Great White Male, recently came out, not from the closet silly, but almost pretty much in favor of gay marriage. Apparently he’s okay with civil unions and really doesn’t care either way. I don’t know how old his kids are, so he might end up pulling a Portman someday. According to Politco, O’Reilly said the following:

What’s next, Rush Limbaugh saying he supports women’s rights? I know that’s a pipe dream. He’s more likely to suffer an on-air aneurism (which could happen and would be truly inspirational).

As Debra Milke continues to rot in prison, the Arizona “justice” system continues to try to avoid admitting to their wrongdoing. I’ve previously written about Milke’s outrageous conviction for murder 22 years ago as well as the current efforts of the Arizona Attorney General to appeal the Ninth Circuit Court’s decision to overturn the verdict. But I can’t get enough of this case. I check every day. Naively, I continue to hope that there will be a quick resolution to this and that this poor woman will at long last be set free. I don’t think I will lose interest until she finally is released.

There have been two interesting articles about Milke in the last week or so. Over at OpEd News Barry Graham wrote, U.S. Media Helped Keep Debra Milke on Death Row for 20 Years. He learned about the case 13 years ago and tried to get some of his editors interested in the story. None were. To some extent you can understand this. Even now, after the conviction has been overturned, Milke’s story is entirely “dog bites man.” Unfortunately, what has happened to her is only too common. What makes it exceptional at this point is that she may at long last get some modicum of justice.

In Graham’s article, he fills in a couple of details about the case:

I knew that Saldate didn’t record the interview; if he had, we wouldn’t be here today. But the fact that his supervisor specifically told him to record it and he didn’t is almost unbelievable. It seems certain that his history of lying on the stand had something to do with that request. But even the recording mightn’t have been necessary if he hadn’t decided to do the interrogation alone. Everything I’ve learned about Saldate makes him seem like a very unreliable, even actively dishonest guy. But I wonder: why did the police force retain such an officer on the force? And didn’t his superiors have a duty to call all these problems to the attention of the court—especially when they learned that Saldate was the entire case against Milke?

Over at Above the Law, David Lat reported on the circus environment surrounding Milke’s trial. He reprinted an article from the time that appeared in the Arizona Republic by Brent Whiting. This is taken from the Debra Milke website:

I can’t even imagine. It is totally inappropriate, but even more: it is heartless. Judge Hendrix was about to sentence Milke to death but she turned her courtroom into a concert venue because “she wanted to hear him” and that it was “intended to relieve stress”? This story convinces me that Graham was right when he wrote that the judge was “hostile.” I might add incompetent.

Meanwhile, the wait continues.

Afterword

I found a great overview of the case up to 2009, Debbie Milke Was Convicted of Murdering Her Own Child, Now She May Win Her Freedom (or, At Least, a New Trial). Check it out if you are interested at all in this case.

I don’t know how much you’ve read about yesterday’s hearing on the Prop. 8 gay rights case. I’m trying not to read much, because it just infuriates me. But with the little that I’ve read, one thing really stands out to me: Antonin Scalia’s very un-judicial temperament. Time and again, he seemed to be leading Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Prop. 8, around by the nose. Here is a particularly telling moment:

Mr. Cooper, let me—let me give you one—one concrete thing. I don’t know why you don’t mention some concrete things. If you redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, you must—you must permit adoption by same-sex couples, and there’s—there’s considerable disagreement among—among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a—in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not. Some States do not—do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason… I don’t think we know the answer to that. Do you know the answer to that, whether it—whether it harms or helps the child?

Basically, Scalia is saying that the Prop. 8 proponents should be saying that same-sex marriage is really bad because we don’t know if same-sex couples adopting children is bad or not. First, of course, Scalia is wrong that there is disagreement among sociologists about this matter: same-sex couples are just as good as opposite-sex couples. But just as we saw in the Obamacare hearings, Scalia seems to get all of his information from listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio.

Apart from this, I don’t see any other justices trying to lead the attorneys along, “I think you forgot to mention…” And this isn’t the only occurrence of this. At least two other times, Scalia attempted to bail out Cooper when he was crumbling under the questioning of another judge. It was very disturbing.

None of this comes as a surprise, of course. As I wrote yesterday, Scalia always manages to twist the law to go along with his own prejudices that ossified a few decades ago. This is in keeping with a short interview that Francis Wilkinson did with Yale Constitutional Law Professor Jack Balkin. He is an expert on “originalism,” the judicial philosophy that Scalia claims to follow that says that laws only mean what people thought they meant when they were enacted. Although Balkin goes out of his way (much too far, if you ask me) to be fair to all of the originalist thinkers, he is blunt in his appraisal of the Associate Justice:

In fact, he goes on to say that originalism doesn’t really constrain constitutional argument. This is, of course, what I’ve long thought: originalism is just a convenient way to justify the conservative outcomes that most of its proponents seek.[1] But at least Thomas applies it with a bit of rigor. Scalia, like the conservative hack he is, abandons it when it interferes the least bit with what he wants to “prove.”

Antonin Scalia has gotten through most of his career with a combination of brilliance along with his reputation as a colorful character. I think this is coming to an end. His brilliance is somewhat faded and it is increasingly clear that it was never used for anything but partisan parlor tricks. Meanwhile, his “color” is more and more just the angry ravings of an old man the culture is leaving behind. Even in his own lifetime, I think he will likely see his reputation disintegrate.

Afterword

After writing this article, I came upon the following clip from Politics Nation with Al Sharpton. At the 3:00 mark, Sharpton presents a number of clips that show that right wing talkers were saying exactly the same things that Scalia was saying on the bench. In each case, the Scalia statements were after they became right wing talking point. How is it that this guy is taken as anything other than a conservative hack?

[1] Originalism is primarily a conservative doctrine, but there is increasing liberal use of it. I gather that they think a little deeper about it. Balkin provides a contrast of sorts. He says, “A conservative like Scalia might argue that the Fifth Amendment and the 14th Amendment weren’t designed to say anything about marriage.” This is to say he’s talking about very concrete things: they weren’t thinking about marriage so they didn’t mean for the law to apply to same-sex marriage. But then he says, “A liberal originalist might argue that the purpose of the 14th Amendment was to guarantee equal basic rights.” In other words, the liberal would look at what the general purpose was.

I know I’m biased, but the conservative take on this is ridiculous. It reminds me of Monty Python’s The Life of Brian where the crowd gets in an argument about Jesus’ statement, “Blessed are the cheese makers.” If Congress made a law in the 18th century that gave worker rights to those in the farm and manufacturing industries, the conservative would claim the law does not apply to computer programmers because the writers didn’t know what computers were. But the liberal would note that farming and manufacturing were the only industries at that time and thus the law was meant to apply to all workers. The conservative reading of the law is either stupid or designed to limit individual rights as much as possible. Take you pick: it all means the same thing.