Rep. Diane Black: The Possibilities of a “Governing Party”

This week on “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory asked guests their thoughts on a Republican-controlled Senate. Rep. Diane Black (R-TN) responded in “The Hill” by  pointing out the work House Republicans have accomplished, often in bipartisan fashion, compared to the Democratic-controlled Senate.

“On a recent edition of Meet the Press, host David Gregory asked his guest whether Republicans have given voters a reason to vote for them in the fall. He asked whether Republicans have demonstrated that they should control both Chambers of Congress and be “a governing party.”

“When it comes to addressing the most pressing issues facing the American people, the Republican-led House of Representatives has led the charge.

“For instance, while President Obama has recently boasted of a ‘booming’ economy under his watch, Americans continue to feel great anxiety. In fact, 6 in 10 Americans say they are dissatisfied with the state of the economy and 7 in 10 believe our country is headed in the wrong direction.

“Unlike President Obama, House Republicans have not lost touch with these very real economic concerns. That is why we have acted to pass dozens of sensible and bipartisan measures to help our economy grow and help Americans get back to work. In fact, there are currently 43 House passed jobs bills – most of which enjoy bipartisan support — sitting in the Democrat-led Senate just waiting for Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to schedule a vote.

“These include measures that would create jobs, lower energy prices for hard working Americans, and give relief to the predominantly female and lower income workers hurt by Obamacare, among other measures.

“Our national debt is now over $17.6 trillion – that’s over $55,000 for each American man, woman and child. Yet Obama and Democrats in Washington refuse to get serious about our nation’s fiscal outlook. This year, Obama once again submitted a budget plan over a month late that failed to ever balance even though it called for massive tax increases on the American people. Senate Democrats fared even worse by failing to even introduce a budget plan, let alone pass one with a simple majority vote as required by law.

“On the contrary, I was proud to help once again advance a responsible budget plan with Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and my colleagues on the House Budget Committee. The plan we introduced would bring our books to balance without needlessly harming our economy with painful tax increases like the ones Obama called for. House Republicans responsibly passed this budget plan this past April.

“Most recently, and to answer David Gregory’s question on Meet the Press, only one party in Washington has acted to address the influx of tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children who have illegally crossed our southern border. While the Democrat-led Senate recessed for the summer without passing legislation to address this humanitarian crisis, the Republican controlled House of Representatives stayed in Washington and worked until a supplemental border appropriations bill was passed.

“This contrast has been consistent throughout the year, as House Republicans have worked to pass seven different bipartisan appropriations bills to fund government operations for the next year while Senate Democrats have passed none. This behavior by Senate Democrats is not how a governing majority should behave and virtually guarantees unnecessary brinksmanship when lawmakers return to work in September with just weeks before the current appropriations lapse.

“The only party in Washington that is working to govern is the Republican Party, but unfortunately we only control one chamber of one branch of government.”

Read Rep. Black’s column in its entirety at The Hill.

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Men in Black

How dare President Obama brush back the Supreme Court like that?

Has this former constitutional law instructor no respect for our venerable system of checks and balances?

Nah. And why should he?

This court, cosseted behind white marble pillars, out of reach of TV, accountable to no one once they give the last word, is well on its way to becoming one of the most divisive in modern American history.

It has squandered even the semi-illusion that it is the unbiased, honest guardian of the Constitution. It is run by hacks dressed up in black robes.

All the fancy diplomas of the conservative majority cannot disguise the fact that its reasoning on the most important decisions affecting Americans seems shaped more by a political handbook than a legal brief.

President Obama never should have waded into the health care thicket back when the economy was teetering. He should have listened to David Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and not Michelle.

His failure from the start to sell his plan or even explain it is bizarre and self-destructive. And certainly he needs a more persuasive solicitor general.

Still, it was stunning to hear Antonin Scalia talking like a Senate whip during oral arguments last week on the constitutionality of the health care law. He mused on how hard it would be to get 60 votes to repeal parts of the act, explaining why the court may just throw out the whole thing. And, sounding like a campaign’s oppo-research guy, he batted around politically charged terms like “Cornhusker Kickback,” referring to a sweetheart deal that isn’t even in the law.

If he’s so brilliant, why is he drawing a risible parallel between buying health care and buying broccoli?

The justices want to be above it all, beyond reproach or criticism. But why should they be?

In 2000, the Republican majority put aside its professed disdain of judicial activism and helped to purloin the election for W., who went on to heedlessly invade Iraq and callously ignore Katrina.

As Anthony Lewis wrote in The Times back then, “Deciding a case of this magnitude with such disregard for reason invites people to treat the court’s aura of reason as an illusion.”

The 2010 House takeover by Republicans and the G.O.P. presidential primary have shown what a fiasco the Citizens United decision is, with self-interested sugar daddies and wealthy cronies overwhelming the democratic process.

On Monday, the court astoundingly ruled — 5 Republican appointees to 4 Democratic appointees — to give police carte blanche on strip-searches, even for minor offenses such as driving without a license or violating a leash law. Justice Stephen Breyer’s warning that wholesale strip-searches were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” fell on deaf ears. So much for the conservatives’ obsession with “liberty.”

The Supreme Court mirrors the setup on Fox News: There are liberals who make arguments, but they are weak foils, relegated to the background and trying to get in a few words before the commercials.

Just as in the Senate’s shameful Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas hearings, the liberals on the court focus on process and the conservatives focus on results. John Roberts Jr.’s benign beige facade is deceiving; he’s a crimson partisan, simply more cloaked than the ideologically rigid and often venomous Scalia.

Just as Scalia voted to bypass that little thing called democracy and crown W. president, so he expressed ennui at the idea that, even if parts of the health care law are struck down, some provisions could be saved: “You really want us to go through these 2,700 pages?” he asked, adding: “Is this not totally unrealistic?”

Inexplicably mute 20 years after he lied his way onto the court, Clarence Thomas didn’t ask a single question during oral arguments for one of the biggest cases in the court’s history.

When the Supreme Court building across from the Capitol opened in 1935, the architect, Cass Gilbert, played up the pomp, wanting to reflect the court’s role as the national ideal of justice.

With conservatives on that court trying to block F.D.R., and with Roosevelt prepared to pack the court, the New Yorker columnist Howard Brubaker noted that the new citadel had “fine big windows to throw the New Deal out of.”

Now conservative justices may throw Obama’s hard-won law out of those fine big windows. They’ve already been playing Twister, turning precedents into pretzels to achieve their political objective. In 2005, Scalia was endorsing a broad interpretation of the commerce clause and the necessary and proper clause, the clauses now coming under scrutiny from the majority, including the swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy. (Could the dream of expanded health care die at the hands of a Kennedy?)

Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and the insufferable Samuel Alito were nurtured in the conservative Federalist Society, which asserts that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”

But it isn’t conservative to overturn a major law passed by Congress in the middle of an election. The majority’s political motives are as naked as a strip-search.

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Black Dem faces tough race for Miss. governor (AP)

By EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press Emily Wagster Pettus, Associated Press – Wed Aug 24, 8:05 pm ET

JACKSON, Miss. – After making history this week as the first black candidate to win a major-party nomination for Mississippi governor, Democrat Johnny DuPree now faces the tough reality of trying to win a general election against a better-known, better-funded GOP candidate in a strongly Republican state.

DuPree, the mayor of Mississippi's third-largest city, Hattiesburg, said he's not daunted because he has usually been outspent in campaigns. He said he plans to continue running a race-neutral campaign focused on jobs and education.

"We're in the race to try to make a difference for the citizens of Mississippi," the 57-year-old DuPree said after winning the Democratic primary runoff Tuesday night. "Our first priority is not the (campaign) finances."

An expert on black political participation said Wednesday that DuPree has little chance of defeating the Republican nominee, Lt. Gov. Phil Bryant, in the Nov. 8 general election.

"My guess is if the odds-makers were putting odds on this, it would probably be something like 100-to1," said David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Washington-based Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. "Mississippi isn't ready to elect a black candidate to major statewide office."

Bositis, who has spent more than two decades researching voting trends, said Mississippi is one of several Deep South states that has developed re-segregated electoral patterns, "with the Republican Party being the white people's party and pretty much just African-Americans being the Democratic Party."

Mississippi's current governor, Republican Haley Barbour, is limited to two terms and couldn't seek re-election this year.

Republicans have held the Mississippi Governor's Mansion four of the past five terms, and the state has voted Republican in every presidential race since 1980.

With a population that's 37 percent black, Mississippi now has more black elected officials than any state in the nation, according to the joint center.

However, Mississippi hasn't had a black statewide official since Reconstruction. Decades ago, black citizens faced threats, violence and poll taxes for trying to exercise their right to vote. The political structure started to change and black voter participation began to increase after the federal civil rights and voting rights acts became law in the mid-1960s.

Marvin King, a political science professor at the University of Mississippi, said DuPree's win this week is significant.

"Even in Mississippi, you can have a statewide candidate who is black, who won a nomination, who earned his way to the top of a ticket," King said Wednesday.

Bryant, the one-term lieutenant governor, said that when he called DuPree to congratulate him Tuesday night, he noted the significance of a black candidate winning a major-party nomination for governor.

"I told him, there are children all across this state that look to him as an example now," Bryant, 56, of Brandon, said Wednesday. "I think it's a very historic moment. Now, we disagree on some issues and we'll have a debate about that."

Aaron Barksdale, a Mississippi voter who describes himself as a Libertarian, posted Wednesday night on DuPree's campaign page on Facebook: "Just remember: A vote BECAUSE he is Black is just as RACIST as voting AGAINST him because he's Black."

DuPree campaign manager Sam Hall posted a response that said "voting for or against someone because of their skin color is a ridiculous way to pick a candidate. That's why the only time we talk about race in this campaign is when the media asks about it or someone brings it up like this."

DuPree leads a city that is roughly half black, half white. He does not dwell on race as an issue in the governor's election, although he has acknowledged in interviews that it's a concern for some voters. He said the color he likes to discuss is green, as in money generated from job creation.

DuPree defeated Bill Luckett, a white Clarksdale attorney and developer, in the runoff.

Luckett immediately endorsed DuPree, saying the mayor has shown a desire to help all people in the state.

Independent Will Oatis of Silver Creek is also running for governor. Rival factions of the Reform Party want to put a candidate in the race.

Barksdale, 31, of Ocean Springs, told The Associated Press in a phone interview that he posted the Facebook comment because he got tired of people treating him as if he's racist because he didn't vote for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008, when Obama was elected the first black U.S. president.

"I have nothing against Johnny DuPree. He did a lot of good for Hattiesburg," Barksdale said. "But in 2008, it was the largest black voter turnout in history and it was all because Obama was there."

Barksdale said he voted for one of the Republicans who lost to Bryant in the Aug. 2 primary, and he doesn't yet know which candidate he'll support in November.

Two other high-profile black politicians ran for Mississippi governor as independents in the 1970s. Charles Evers, brother of slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, ran in 1971. State Sen. Henry Kirksey ran in 1975. Neither had to go through a primary.

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