Is Sen. Jeff Sessions a Communist?

by Joel Wendland

In the debate now in motion over Judge Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the Supreme Court, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions just said something that makes me think he switched parties – and not to the Democrats.

In discussing Sotomayor's record, which he is using as a foundation for voting against her, Sessions said that he disagreed with one decision Sotomayor made in joining with others on the federal court she sits on regarding eminent domain. Eminent domain is a legal principle that gives government entities like a city or a county or the federal government the power to take over ownership of private property for various reasons and usually with compensation. Not controversial.

But Sen. Sessions stated that he disagrees with Sotomayor (despite the fact that her opinion was shared by various other members of the panel she is on) on this issue. Sessions said that he believes that "private property can only be taken over for public purposes."

Talk about an easy settlement of the property questions.

BTW, Sotomayor has more federal judicial experience than does any member of the Supreme Court since Reagan at the time of their appointment, including the right-wing extremists Roberts and Alito whom Sessions never ever considered to be less than qualified. It never occurred to him. Wise white men just don't bother him as much as wise Latinas.

Obama and the Supreme Court

by Norman Markowitz

Justice David Souter is retiring from the Supreme Court and President Obama will soon be choosing a replacement. There is extensive speculation in the media over who his choice will be and reports that the Republican Right is"gearing up" to fight whoever the nominee will be.

The second point can be dispensed with quickly. The Republican right doesn't have the votes in the Senate to block any Obama appointee to the court barring some scandals that would discredit that nominee.

As for the first point, what is most important is that President Obama choose a militant progressive in the tradition of Louis Brandeis, Hugo Black, William O Douglas, and Thurgood Marshall, someone with the intelligence and strength to actively fight against the Supreme Court's present right-wing majority, which will not in itself be changed, since Justice Souter, considered a conservative Republican when George Bush I nominated him to the court, angered the Republican Right by voting with non right-wing Justices on many important issues over the years, including the crucial December 2000 5-4 vote in which five center-right Republicans on the court ended the Florida recount and in effect appointed George W. Bush president of the United States.

It took Franklin Roosevelt five years to get a Supreme Court appointment and the Supreme Court's vetoes of major New Deal legislation and expected veto of social security, unemployment insurance, and the National Labor Relations Act led to the most momentous court reorganization struggle in U.S. history in 1937, a struggle that FDR lost in terms of expanding the number of Justices but eventually won in terms of pressuring centrist conservatives to join progressives in not vetoing New Deal legislation and beginning, in 1938 the appointment of progressives who over time produced the post WWII Supreme Courts which expanded Civil Rights and Civil Liberties protections while sustaining progressive labor and social welfare legislation.

Richard Nixon as President began the assault on a "liberalized judiciary" forty years ago and Ronald Reagan and George Bush I greatly expanded that assault in order to produce our present business friendly people hostile federal judiciary. In his eight years in the White House, Bill Clinton moderated but did not change that judicial balance of forces. Clinton's appointments were usually business friendly centrists or what I and others call weak "process liberals," those much more interested in formal processes than in justice, seeing themselves as "non-ideological" professionals as against Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and the very slick right-wing Chief Justice, Roberts, for whom right-wing ideology has usually been front and center in their decisions and have determined the character of their decisions. At times they were amenable to compromise, especially once Justice Sandra Day O'Connor served as a swing vote on the court, but since her retirement they have rarely compromised.It is interesting to note that most of the decisions seriously challenging the Republican Right in recent years have come from the oldest appointee to the court, John Paul Stevens, an Illinois Republican whom Gerald Ford appointed over thirty years ago. Breyer, very much of a "non ideological" centrist, and Ginsberg, more of a traditional liberal but not a strong one, have certainly not staked out a serious principled opposition to the Roberts court rightwing majority, although they, along with Souter and Stevens, have usually voted against it.

President Obama should follow in the footsteps of Franklin Roosevelt, not Bill Clinton, in this first Supreme Court appointment. He should look for a candidate who will reflect his commitment to "change we can believe in" just as Franklin Roosevelt looked in early appointments to Hugo Black, William O Douglas, Felix Frankfurter and others whom he knew would support New Deal regulatory and social legislation. Unfortunately, Stevens is in all probability the next Justice to retire and that will not change the present 5-4 balance of forces. But Scalia has been on the court for a generation and Thomas for nearly two decades. Obama will, assuming that he wins a second term, be in the position to craft a progressive Supreme Court majority and change by his appointments the federal judiciary as Franklin Roosevelt did. Now is the time for him to begin and for us to call upon him to begin and to support him in that endeavor.

Supreme Court Republicans Strike Again

by Norman Markowitz

The Supreme Court voted 6-3 to uphold an Indiana law requiring photo indemnification for voter identification. Civil Rights groups and even the Democratic party challenged the law on the more than reasonable ground that low income people, minority people, and senior citizens are far less likely to have such identification, which is usually connected to drivers licenses and thus find themselves in situations where they might be in the long run disenfranchised, even though they should be legally entitled to vote.

Today there are seven Republicans on the Court, including two, John Paul Stevens and David Souter, who usually vote against "The Four Horseman of Reaction" (a phrase used widely in the 1930s against four rightwing justices who were out to veto the labor and social legislation of the New Deal, which today applies to Roberts, Scalia, Alito, and Thomas). But Stevens joined and the more conservative Kennedy joined with the Four Horsemen to in effect make it harder for working people to vote, just as Sandra Day O'Connor, who had often opposed what were then the "Three Horseman of Reaction (Scalia, Thomas, and Rehnquist) joined with Kennedy to in effect end the recount in Florida and go against both the facts and what many considered case law on recounts and appoint George W. Bush president of the United States.

This is an ugly politically partisan, and dangerous decision, one that shows how the present court is ready to undermine basic civil rights. Stevens comment that the "law should not be disregarded because partisan interests may have provided one motivation for the votes of individual legislators" particularly struck me. The laws disenfranchising Southern Blacks, establishing poll taxes and other discriminatory restrictions on voting, were the result of "partisan interests" seeking to insure that people who were likely to vote against them would be deprived of the right to vote. The Supreme Court for generations upheld such laws. Partisan interests were also the basis for discriminatory districting in state elections which a progressive Supreme Court challenged in the 1960s.

Justice Stevens used some examples from the Tweed ring in New York in the 1860s to deal with voter fraud. But he would have been on firmer ground if he mentioned the terroristic violence used by KKK groups to keep former slaves from voting during Reconstruction. He might also have dealt with the fact that the absence of the secret ballot made voter intimidation very widespread in the late 19th century and the political machines, both big ones in cities and smaller ones around country courthouses, have used "selective" counting of votes to insure victories.

Today, new voting machine touch screen technologies make potential fraud much greater than before. Today, the Republican Party in the 2000 and particularly 2004 election hired "consulting firms" to purge from the registration lists voters from groups that are expected to vote against them for any reason that they can find.

In democracies, the aim is to make voting as simple as possible and protect the right to vote. The Supreme Court decision today, representing the "partisan interests of individual Judges" struck a blow against political democracy today.

Real "Political Correctness"

For many years now the right-wing in the U.S. has used the term "politically correct" to caricature those who try to remove racist, sexist, militarist and other like minded forms of speech from popular usage. The right has also applied the term to those who criticize racist, sexist, militarist and allied policies. The underlying assumption that the right seeks to develop is that such language and such policies are "normal" and acceptable and really represent what people think, even many of the people who are are critics.

The term "politically correct" has an interesting history. "New Left" radicals of the Abbie Hoffman variety, whose politics were closer to anarchism than to Marxism, used the term among themselves to make fun of "old left" or Communist activists who in debates sought to find the "correct position" (in terms of theory and practice to inform policy) which, when one stops to think about it, is what any political group that is not either sectarian or opportunist should be doing.

The "new lefties" used the term to make fun of what they considered to be "old left" dogmatism. The right has used its version of "political correctness" to caricature those who oppose both its policies and those who reject the "good old days" when racist politicians used the N word routinely in Congress, racist, sexist (including crudely homophobic) stereotyping and humor permeated mass media, and those who criticized nuclear radiation and/or proliferation, along with the Korean and later Vietnam Wars, were condemned as either Soviet agents, "Communist dupes," or "tenderminded" vaguely effeminate individuals who had no knowledge of the real world.

But the right has been in power at the national level for most of the period since Ronald Reagan became president and broke sharply in his policies with previous Republican administrations in regard union busting, undermining existing civil rights legislation, and rejection of detente in the cold war, so the concept of "political correctness" as it is used today has nothing to do with real politics in the U.S. Like most positions associated with the right-wing, should be turned inside out if one is to get to the truth.

I mean that when the right argues that "socialized medicine" for example doesn't work and has been a failure through the world, the easily verifiable truth is that it has been an enormous success through the developed world when compared to the U.S. system. When the right contends that tax cuts and deregulation create enormous productive "economic growth," the record shows that such policies produce stagnation in real wages and a decline in productive investments as against speculation, which makes the "growth" largely parasitic, "creating" cheap labor jobs at home and abroad and greatly increasing the real income gap between the wealthy and the general population.

When the right contends that there is no"reliable" scientific information to support an imminent danger from global warming and other man made environmental problems, the scientific evidence that there is both a huge and immediate global environmental crisis is overwhelming

When the right-wing says that the invasion of Iraq was undertaken because of Hussein's relationship to Al Qaeda and his secret development of "weapons of mass destructive, (even they prefer to forget about these statements today) no one should be surprised by the fact (as most of the world pretty much knew in 2003) that Hussein's government had no relationship except one of mutual hostility with Al Qaeda and that the UN inspections that had been going on for years in Iraq were solid evidence that his regime had no weapons of "mass destruction."

Similarly, when the right uses the term "politically correct" to mock opponents of the death penalty and proponents of gun control, it is important to understand that both tgun control policies and the elimination of the death penalty is today the norm in most of the developed world and one result is significantly lower crime rates and much lower violent crime and homicide rates.

Given the power of the right and its control of media (which by the way it constantly berates as "liberal" in order to detract attention from its control) we can't so easily get rid of the term "political correctness," which thanks to the power of U.S. media is now used internationally. But we can perhaps turn the term around and apply it to real politics, showing that "political correctness" in language and policy as defined in the United States in recent years by the right should be used to expose the distortions of reality that the right perpetrates.

Let's start with organized labor, which media largely makes invisible in the U.S. It is "politically correct" to call anti-union shop laws under section 14B of the Taft-Hartley law as "right to work" laws (a pleasant turn) or anti-"closed shop" laws (again something that is positive). Non union workers who are brought in to break strikes and then take the jobs of the striking workers are called "permanent replacement workers" under real political correctness. Now I am not saying that the term "scab" used for more than a century by the labor movement is objective, but "permanent replacement worker" is a very positive term for those who are rewarded for breaking strikes and busting unions.

Labor leaders are still in mass media widely referred to as "union bosses" especially when strikes are going on and corporate leaders, who unlike labor leaders have not been elected by members but by various boards that they often control, are called CEO's (chief executive officers) or merely executives or by their rank in the company. This is real political correctness as applied to class relations.

When workers lose jobs, the politically correct term today is "downsizing," not layoffs, because that is too unpleasant (not that downsizing is so effective, now that the general population associates it with hard times).

Let's look at civil rights. Real political correctness, as practiced by the right, calls affirmative action policies "reverse racism," which the Supreme Court has recently endorsed when it used the 1954 Brown decision to violate school board integration plans. Without planning and policy implementation to redress long-standing social injustices, the injustices will continue in fact in some form even if they have been removed in law, so affirmative action complements rather than contradicts both the spirit and letter of Civil Rights legislation.

After the defeat of Nazi Germany, for example, simply eliminating the Hitlerite race laws that had been used to murder millions and persecute many millions more, was not a solution. The survivors and others victims couldn't simply be left to fend for themselves in a society where the many of the individuals and certainly the non Nazi public and private institutions which had carried out the policies of the fascist state were still in tact, just as the individuals and institutions which sustained Southern de jure segregation were in tact in the U.S. after the 1960s, not to mention the individuals and institutions who practiced de facto racism through the country.

At the time in postwar Germany , by the way, (although I understand that this analogy is by no means very broad and some may disagree with it) many former Nazis, who now defined themselves as "anti-Communist conservatives," contended that while the previous policies of anti-Semitism had not been right and and led to bad things, the present postwar policies of "philosemitism" (portraying Jews as innocent victims of persecution who deserved reparations and other compensations for their suffering) represented the other extreme and was also wrong. Now that Hitler was gone, Germans, particularly the millions who had been active Nazis, could both forget and deny the past and become good "free world" cold warriors.

Where African Americans and other minorities are concerned, the right-wingers who mock criticisms of racist speech and policies in the U.S. today as "political correctness" are essentially saying what those postwar Germans were, albeit in a very different context and, unfortunately, with much more influence in the media. We are neither racists nor anti-racists, and now that segregation is over, we can deny and forget about it, except of course to criticize those who continue to fight racism as advocates of a "double standard" when it comes to minorities (which former Nazis and other German rightists accused "philo-Semites" of having when it came to Jewish people).

There are many other examples of real political correctness (calling the Bush administration's modern day version of the Alien and Sedition Acts the "Patriot Act" calling torture "rendition" and other things, and of course the CIA's classic phrase for killing people, "termination with extreme prejudice"). And these are real political correctness because they are language used to define in a distorted way real political policies by agencies of government with real political power

At a time when the right uses a wildly propagandistic distortion of language to caricature its critics, and then projects in the Freudian sense through the term political correctness what it is doing onto its critics, it is time that the left begin to actively expose the distortions and outright lies that permeate mass media, identify their origins and political purposes, and move to the offensive in the battle of ideas which inform politics.

Norman Markowitz