As they entered and exited weekly party luncheons Tuesday afternoon, I and other reporters asked many GOP senators if they consider a centerpiece of the law, which was battered by conservative justices during Supreme Court oral arguments last week, should be upheld. Every one of them dodged the questions, some more artfully than others.
“Uh,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), before a long, awkward pause, “I haven’t even thought about it.” He laughed and said, “I’ll leave that to the courts. I’m having a hard enough time being a senator, much less a Supreme Court justice.”
I asked the same question to Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), who, like Graham, voted to renew the law in 2006. “The Voting Rights Act?” he asked. Yes, I said. Should it be upheld? “Oh, I don’t know,” Inhofe replied. “I’ll let someone else answer that.”
Inhofe held a press conference during oral arguments on Obamacare, trying to lobby the Court. He also joined a brief stating that the law was unconstitutional.
“I haven’t — I’m worried about other things,” said Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), nodding his head as he entered an elevator.
Here’s McCain opining on the health care law during one of his thousands of television appearances:
And I believe that it violates the commerce clause of the constitution of the United States. And I cannot believe that in any way you could view it as being constitutional.
I asked Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA), who was exiting a conference meeting and walking into the same senators-only elevator, if the law should be upheld. “Uh, I’m not…” he said. As the elevator door closed, he shrugged his shoulders.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN), a former leadership member who also voted to reauthorize the Voting Rights Act in 2006, similarly declined to answer.
“No, I am not going to try to be a Supreme Court [justice] and senator at the same time,” he told reporters. Is it constitutional? “That’s the question before the Supreme Court.”
Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO), the vice chairman of the GOP conference, also wouldn’t answer.
“I think you asked me that already,” he said. I told him I had not. “Oh. I’m not following that court case. I’m interested in the topic. I used to be the chief election official for our state, but we weren’t under the Voting Rights Act and I haven’t been following the case.”
“Twenty-six states have challenged this law and a number of federal judges have already deemed the individual mandate unconstitutional. I hope the Supreme Court will come to the same conclusion.”
This guy hasn’t seen it or even thought about it. He knows NOTHING about any “voting rights act”
Sen. John Boozman (R-AR) said he hasn’t looked at or thought about the case.
“Somebody asked me about that earlier, and to be honest, I just haven’t looked at kinda what’s going on there,” he said. “Well again, like I said, I haven’t thought about it or looked at it.” Blunt and Boozman were members of the House in 2006 and voted for reauthorization.
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH) declined to provide a straight answer, but she got closer to addressing the substance than other GOP senators, saying laws should be reviewed “as times change” — a central argument that opponents of Section 5 advanced in court.
Harry Reid wrote this in 2006, after conservatives voted to re-authorize the Act, and former President Bush held a signing ceremony surrounded by civil rights leaders:
REPUBLICANS HOPE TO USE COURTS TO KILL VITAL LEGISLATION
Reid was right, of course.
I think it’s fascinating how the conservative position on voting rights is a political liability for elected, national Republicans. It’s delicious to think about how Justice Scalia’s attempts to protect Senators from accountability for their beliefs could backfire, politically.
Hill Dweller
The wingnuts also want to prevent Democrats from putting their judges on the courts.
Earlier today Senate Republicans filibustered Caitlin Halligan’s nomination to the US Court of Appeals(DC Circuit) for the second time, because she, while Solicitor General of NY, argued a gun case the NRA didn’t like.
Big R
Truth: there is no correct answer on the VRA for Republican officeholders anymore. If they say, “we have made great strides, but the task is not complete” (which happens to have the benefit of being true), they risk getting Teabagged. If they go full Tea on it, the low-information moderates they rely on to win reelection (and much more importantly, the Village) will recoil and turn on them.
Yutsano
Well yeah. What else do they have Scalia and Alito for?
Chris
Holy shit, reporters asking questions! Asking REPUBLICANS questions!
PeakVT
That was a very uncivil statement by Reid. He should step down immediately.
themann1086
@PeakVT: I seem to remember there being a freak-out at the time, but I could be confusing it with some other freak-out. The Village tutted Reid for that statement, I assume?
Quaker in a Basement
Hilarious?
I think we have different understandings of the meaning of that word.
Omnes Omnibus
Kay, per the Senators’ oath of office, aren’t they expected to uphold the Constitution? As a result, one must assume that they would only vote for a law that they believed to be Constitutional. Right?
amk
But keep your hands off my sekind amindment rights, jack.
Roger Moore
@Hill Dweller:
FTFY.
TriassicSands
Voting rights? We don’t need no steenking voting rights. In fact, now that I think about it, we don’t need not steenking voting. After all, in a Scalitobertocracy only corporations, the true human beings would vote, although some allowance might be made for the super-rich, since they have so much to protect and so much to lose.
I’m beginning to think we might need some kind of national voting rights act. The only problem is the Modern Republican Party, if it would ever allow such a thing to pass, would also have a say in writing the bill, which would certainly ensure that it would be utterly worthless.
@Yutsano:
As for what Scalia and Alito are for, I thought that was obvious — they are the pope’s personal representatives on the court, assuring that any case that comes before the court is considered in the light of its effect on the Catholic Church and its medieval teachings. Since the Church is even older than the Constitution, and not merely inspired by the Baby J, but created by him, Scalia and Alito consider it to trump the Constitution when Catholic dogma clashes with the Bill of Rights.
NOTE: it is a well-known fact that Jesus converted to Catholicism while on the cross. I first learned of this fact from my childhood next-door neighbor, Johnny Parliament, who at the age of six or seven was a Biblical scholar of some renown.
jibeaux
I don’t even understand — at all — what Scalia is talking about. You have a law that has become reauthorized several times, with increasing numbers of votes, over time. This is supposed to mean it’s unconstitutional? It can mean either it’s popular or it’s not exactly popular but it would be too politically toxic to vote against so people vote for it, but it cannot, in and of itself, mean that it is unconstitutional. And this is supposedly supported by some principle of Israeli law which is a) FOREIGN LAW and b) also makes no sense. If someone is unanimously condemned to death that’s supposed to support their innocence? What if they’re unanimously condemned to death because the person killed a bunch of people, confessed, went to prison, broke out of prison, and killed a bunch more people, and confessed? As a legal principle, it’s just weird as all hell.
Paul in KY
@TriassicSands: Your friend was named after a brand of cigarettes?! I guess that is a true conservative nickname.
I would have gone with ‘Chesterfield’.
Forum Transmitted Disease
Eight Senators, blowhards all, suddenly without an opinion on a piece of legislation that’s up before the Supreme Court?
Statistically impossible.
raven
@Paul in KY: No, he was named after a band.
burnspbesq
@TriassicSands:
You thought wrong. That’s not obvious, it’s absurd. Lay off the brown acid.
RosiesDad
Yes, and Republicans also hope to use the filibuster to kill the Courts.
jayjaybear
“GOVERN?! My god, man! I’m a Republican!”
burnspbesq
@jibeaux:
Do the words “result oriented” ring any bells?
? Martin
@jibeaux:
His argument is that Senators are victims of raging bands of black voters that will punish them for voting against their special privileges, even if the legislation is unconstitutional.
So, old white men are (as usual) the real victims in all of this.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
Telling? Yes.
Hilarious? Maybe not so much, per se.
Someone needs to chase these mofos around with a camera, asking this very same question. It would be a high-tech pantsing.
Gian
@burnspbesq:
Scalia loves the death penalty. Pope and the Church don’t . US bishops love Republicans and scalia does too
kc
Well, Justice Scalia did say that legislators would be too chickenshit to tinker with the Voting Rights Act. That’s why, he, Scalia, has to fix it for them, see.
Smedley the Uncertain
@burnspbesq: Do elaborate…
Omnes Omnibus
@Smedley the Uncertain: It means just what you think it means. Picking the result you want and then looking for reasoning to support it.
Ben Cisco
@raven: This is why I come here.
SenyorDave
Whenever I think about anything nasty, degogatory, etc. that has been said about national Republican politicians, I realize it is way too tame. I could never of imagined taht either of the two parties would go off the rails as far as the GOP has gone.
They are treasonous bastards. All of them. They have deliberately and knowingly tried to paralyze the running of the country. I believe people like McCain, Inhofe, Toomey are no better than common traitors. If we had a responsible media they would be pointing out how dangerous the Republicans have become, but fukwads like Jake Tapper are too busy discussing how Obama is mean to John Boehner.
StringOnAStick
@SenyorDave: This, in spades.
burnspbesq
@Omnes Omnibus:
What’s unique about Scalia is that he doesn’t even try to hide it any more. Signing on to the dissent’s Commerce Clause analysis in NFIB v. Sibelius, in the face of his concurrence in Raich, was an amazing act of intellectual dishonesty, and his comments at oral argument in Shelby County even go beyond that. If he ever gave a shit about legal principles, it’s clear that those days are long gone.
Roger Moore
@jibeaux:
I think you misunderstand what “unconstitutional” means when a Conservative uses it. They don’t have to use the actual text of the Constitution to know its meaning any more than they need to read the Bible to know God’s will. Those things mean what the wingnuts think they mean, even when that meaning is inconsistent (ETA: or at odds with the plain meaning of the text). IOW, “unconstitutional” means “stuff the wingnuts don’t like”, even if those same wingnuts voted for it yesterday.
Kay
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t care what conservative Senators “believe” about the constitutionality, really.
I just think it’s absolutely fair game to use this against them, politically, in response to their cowardly retreat to hide behind Justice Scalia:
They must think they’re politically vulnerable on it. Good.
Quaker in a Basement
@Paul in KY: How about “Johnny Kool”? That would be, well, cool!
burnspbesq
ETA: I almost halfway hope that al-Bahlul gets to the Supreme Court before Scalia croaks. It could be amusing (albeit horrifying) to see what sort of mental gymnastics he would apply to conclude that it’s OK to try someone in front of a military commission for an act that wasn’t considered a war crime at the time the act was done. Even the wingnuts on the D.C. Circuit wouldn’t fall for that one, but it appears that there are no feats of judicial legerdemain that are beyond the magical powers of Tony the Fat.
Background on al-Bahlul here.
lawfareblog.com/2013/03/doj-seeks-rehearing-en-banc-in-bahlul-seeks-to-overturn-hamdan-ii/
Yutsano
@burnspbesq: The Constitution says just what Scalia says it means. No more and no less. And you proles can just suck it up and enjoy it.
Comrade Dread
Well, come on, we can’t tell people that our Originalism means that we believe only white, male, property owners (preferably with enough money to give our campaigns a large check) should be able to vote. The blah people and the illegals would turn out in droves to vote us out.
Jay in Oregon
@Kay:
Exactly! Those assholes have fucked-up opinions about every goddamn thing under the sun (Benghazi Benghazi OMG WON’T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF BENGHAZI!) but all of a sudden they don’t have opinions on the Voting Rights Act?
Dems should be running ads in those districts asking why these Senators are afraid to show their support for such a crucial piece of American law.
jibeaux
@? Martin: You still have to cite what’s unconstitutional about it. The voters would likely punish you if you eliminated the mortgage interest deduction or some other popular perk, it just doesn’t mean in and of itself that there’s a legal problem with it. Obviously I understand results oriented. Obviously I understand political, and I understand puppet of the Republican party. I understand that I will not agree with the constitutional argument, the same way I didn’t agree with the commerce clause argument on the ACA — but I understood the argument. This argument I don’t even understand on a basic level.
Chris
@SenyorDave:
I think the conservative view of treason is that since this is their country, in the literal sense of being their property, it’s a contradiction in terms to say that they could ever betray it. You can’t betray what you own, after all. So when a conservative does harm to the country, it’s like when you or me punch a malfunctioning computer out of frustration – maybe silly or unhelpful, but hardly a crime, since it’s our computer. On the other hand, for liberals to do anything at all to the country – for example, get elected to run it – is like a total stranger walking off with said computer, or just sitting down at it uninvited and starting to mess with it. Who do they think they are, messing with someone else’s property?
@Roger Moore:
This too. The comparison to fundies’ relationship with the Bible is especially well taken (no surprise that there’s so much overlap between “Biblical literalists” and “Constitutional originalists.”)
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
This is off the topic, but I wondered if anybody could help me out here. Somebody I know on Facebook posted this thing I’m putting in below, and whether or not it’s true… Well, even if it is true, it doesn’t smell right to me, something’s off about it somehow. I don’t know enough about economics to understand what’s off about it, but something seems to be. It’s like a Krauthammer column: You can’t put your finger on any one thing that’s obviously wrong abouot it, but it just doesn’t seem to add up, somehow. Anyway, here it is:
burnspbesq
@jibeaux:
I respectfully submit that you should find your inability to understand that argument reassuring. There is nothing there to “understand,” in any meaningful sense of the term. It’s gibberish that has nothing to do with any known method of constitutional interpretation.
It’s a tale told by an idiot. Alas, this particular idiot still gets to vote on the outcome of the case, so it doesn’t signify nothing.
jibeaux
@jibeaux: It could also be that he’s just purely grandstanding, and not even trying to make a constitutional argument. He’s buttressing whatever constitutional argument they come up with. But that almost seems worse. It’d be like talking about how much you like and personally agree with the legislation in oral argument. No one cares.
? Martin
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): Yeah, that’s complete bullshit. Here’s why:
1) School isn’t named
2) Instructor isn’t named
3) Course isn’t even named
4) No interviews with students
5) No paper submitted about this experiment
6) This experiment has been run countless times in courses graded on a curve – the grades go up (undeservingly so, usually), not down.
7) Nobody in academia has heard of this
Seriously, if this had happened, word would have spread fairly quickly and we’d know 1-4.
The Ancient Randonneur
It is very important to point out the mendacity of Senator Ayotte. Prior to being elected to the Senate she was the New Hampshire Attorney General. NH has several communities covered under Section 5 of the VRA. Those communities had literacy tests still on the books in 1968 that triggered the coverage. You would think the former AG would be quite familiar with, and well versed on the VRA. But, hey, why answer a question that might get you in trouble with a constituency that is increasinngly Democratic?
Omnes Omnibus
@burnspbesq: @Kay: No argument from me with either of your points.
Paul in KY
@raven: I saw them once back in 1974. That was a wild show. Isaac Hayes played too.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): Another one of those BS things. Did you try snopes? Like you are ever going to find a whole class of pro-socialism students here in the US, and how would a teacher who failed an entire class for something like this would manage to stay out of the news? I think the response is [citation needed].
Left Coast Tom
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): The problems with the whole thing start with the assertion that Obama is socialist, up at the top. They cascade from there.
Paul in KY
@Quaker in a Basement: Would have been better, I agree. I thought Chesterfield was made by same people who made Parliments. Got have brand loyalty, man.
Chris
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
It’s the old argument that a strong welfare net will encourage laziness which in turn will sink the economy.
If it were true, the Scandinavian nations, which have probably the most extensive safety nets in the entire world, would be somewhere in the vicinity of North Korea right now. They’re not. Instead, they’re actually doing better than their stingier cousins in the rest of the West. (As Krugman’s fond of pointing out, Iceland’s recovered from the crisis far better than the idiots who actually followed the high priests of austerity).
The fact that the person quoted on Facebook could get a bunch of students in a controlled environment to conduct an experiment that proves his point (assuming it’s even a true story) means nothing when the real world experiments don’t line up with what he says it means. When theory says one thing and reality another, you go with reality. That’s what they’ve always told Marxist-Leninist intellectuals who quoted theory to say that their beliefs would totally lead to a workers’ paradise in spite of the real life disasters in Russia, China et al, and you know what? They’re right. Only it doesn’t just apply to Marxist-Leninists. That commendable principle applies to all bullshit, not just the kinds they don’t like.
Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.)
@? Martin:
Yeah, that’s why I thought it wasn’t true. It’s one of those “my cousin’s best friend’s college roommate’s sister in law said…” things, but that isn’t what I meant. I was asking more about the principle of the thing, why the tha didn’t seem to make sense. Somehow, it seems like even if this had happened, the lesson wouldn’t apply to a whole national economy, but I can’t tell why it wouldn’t.
? Martin
@Omnes Omnibus: To my highly tuned legal mind (IOW, I don’t know shit), Scalia’s mention of the ‘broccoli mandate’ in the ACA case was all the evidence anyone needed that he’s just become a political shill. There were any number of actual, realistic arguments that could have been raised at that point, but instead he felt it necessary to give a shout-out to the folks at WND. Even an ‘asparagus mandate’ would have given him some level of plausible deniability, but nope – he went all in on Glenn Beck’s talking points.
Wag
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Um, because its made up tea party BS unless you can provide a link to the college with the name of the Professor?
Litlebritdifrnt
Kos just tweeted a link to this post so stand by for incoming.
Paul in KY
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): He is describing Maoist Communism, not Soc – cial- (insert ending here).
Plus I bet he’s lying his ass off about him doing that or a class agreeing to that. I was a studier & I (although a dirty, hippy, commie) would never agree to that. Too competative.
Amir Khalid
@burnspbesq:
I did a double take when I saw the name of the case you were referring to. Bahlul is an insult in Malay, roughly equivalent to “moron”.
Supernumerary Charioteer
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
The story is wrong because it’s making a strawman argument – no neoliberals and centrists are and most left-liberals aren’t making the argument that everybody’s income has to be the same. If the story was completely reflective of the political argument being made, the professor would be implementing a plan where the top students would give up a few points off the top of their grade to give to the bottom students in order to keep them from failing.
You may want to point out that, in the world that this story’s supposed to be reflecting, ‘failing’ becomes ‘starving’.
danielx
And why not? With that hypocritical sonofabitch Fat Tony Scalia sitting on the Supreme Court and a lot of Federalist Society assholes sitting in lower jurisdictions, they’re doing pretty well at getting through the judicial system what voters would never approve in a century.
This would be the same Scalia who believes the exclusionary rule is unnecessary, per Hudson v. Michigan, because of “new police professionalism”….
General Stuck
@Litlebritdifrnt:
When that would happen several years ago, you could just forget it for an hour of so, even loading the front page. I think we have better hamsters running this bucket of bolts since then, but we will see.
dmsilev
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
It’s bullshit from paragraph one. The only people who refer to ‘Obama’s soc ialsim’ are right-wing lunatics who don’t actually know what the word means and think instead that it’s a generic descriptor for politics that they don’t like.
Secondly, and secondarily, the odds that a professor has never ever failed a single student are rather poor.
PPOG Penguin
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): This has been circulating for years in various forms [citation needed]. Previously the professor was just providing an object lesson about socialism in general. That Obamacare has suddenly appeared in it just shows that it’s a parable rather than a true story, to be adapted to whatever argument the user wants to make at the time.
I keep meaning to make up a counter-parable about a class where one student gets an A because he pays someone else to do his assignments for him, and another student fails because he’s so busy doing two jobs to pay his way that he doesn’t have time to study, and so on. Unlike the conservative parable, though, I bet I could find real world examples for mine.
Comrade Dread
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
I would say for starters that anyone who thinks Obama is a socialist wouldn’t know a socialist if said socialists lined them up against a wall and had them shot. Politically speaking, there are no American politicians seriously advocating that the government seize and control the means of production. The government is attempting to alleviate some of the negative externalities of capitalism while maintaining the economic system that caused them.
Secondly, top earned income tax rates were 90% and above for quite some time and guess what? Somehow wealthy people continued to work hard to earn more money anyway.
It makes the rather stupid assumption that the only reason why someone is poor and needy is because they are lazy. Poverty isn’t a simple cause-effect concept. People go into and out of poverty for a variety of reasons, including job loss, illness, and a general recession. Most want to go back to work and attain some level of comfort. (Yes, some will be happy to sit back and collect a check, but they are a small group in comparison to the rest.)
It is not a question of multiplying wealth, as it is a question of putting some of the money where it will do the most good for the largest number of people. Trickle-down economics is like geocentricism, it’s an article of faith, based on nothing. Look at the data on income inequality and wages as a share of GDP vs. corporate profits. Voodoo economics has failed and concentrating wealth has done nothing for the nation save transform the government into a corporate bagman.
SatanicPanic
@Chris: There’s the real point. If I have a predermined outcome that I can easily affect, what reason would anyone have to trust my results?
“Oh, looks like the students are doing well… POP QUIZ! What have I got in my pocket? Don’t know? Too bad, you all fail!”
? Martin
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
Well, it assumes an unbelievably simplistic model of human motivation, but it also reveals a lot about conservatives. I usually debunk one of these on the phone with my mom every week or two – she falls for every one of them.
The story only works if you accept rationalism by fiat – that nobody works hard except to get paid (or a grade). That’s just not true, even with 18 year old college students. Many of them recognize that they are paying for that education and they want their money’s worth – so they work hard. Many also recognize that knowledge is often cumulative, so failing to learn Econ 101 might hurt you when you take Econ 102. Even in the very narrow and artificial microcosm of a college course you don’t get the kinds of behaviors described in the story. When you expand it to a nation, well… This is a pretty good place to do a boundary value analysis.
If people only work hard in response to compensation (as is being asserted) then how did human economies ever develop? What happened before the development of currency? What happened after currency but before the advent of corporations and formal employer/employee relationships? How did collective societies ever develop? How did infrastructure ever get built? How did democracies ever form? And how did these social structures survive even to this day. Christian churches are (as presented) the very illustration of a collective society – everyone has an equal ability to earn their way into heaven, everyone is equal in the eyes of the lord, the religious order are expected to accept their calling without material gain, and members of the community are expected to contribute in kind to help the collective. How on earth did such an institution arise and survive for 2 millenia if it is the very antithesis of the theory asserted at the outset?
It’s projection. The people that write these stories and believe these stories all subscribe to the same IGMFU religion. They may not in practice due to social pressures and whatnot – and I don’t mean to cast them all as sociopaths (particularly my mom who is a very kind person), but deep down they believe it – or at least wish the world was that simplistic. It would be nice if every human being was a perfect little algorithm that you could plug in the right inputs and it’d churn out the most societally beneficial outputs, but free will destroys that outright. At best we can nudge and encourage and in key places punish.
Another category might be the same as the closeted homophobes – the people that find their own homosexuality as a personal failing, but if only there had been draconian laws that might have sent them down a different path… So you may get some people voting out of their own interests because they believe that if only land owners got a vote, maybe that would have motivated them to go to school and get a better job…
rikyrah
this is who these muthafuckas are.
plain and simple.
Gian
@dmsilev:
I thought right wing nuts hated professor types. The rest sounds like a bill Bennett children’s fiction story … i bet
Lolis
The vote suppression tactics of the GOP, more than anything, make me think they are all sociopaths. They really are willing to do anything to gain and keep power.
Supernumerary Charioteer
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.): Other parts that are wrong: The idea that ‘if our Galtian Supermen aren’t allowed to individually make more than the gross national product of The Gambia, then they’ll withhold their productivity and the entire economy will sink into the waves’. Human pleasure and accomplishment are based off of relative baselines – if your rival is making $1 million, you’ll want to make $2 million, but if he’s making $100 million, you’ll want to make $200 million. When we had tax-based caps on income and a strong suspicion of managers who tried to pose themselves as supermen (you know, 1945-1979), said managers were still wealthy men who did hard work and built our economy, but who didn’t have a financial incentive to attempt to strip every last scrap of profit out of any system they could get their hands on.
Comparing grades to incomes cheapens incomes by lowering the discrepancy – instead of a low grade being 10 and a high grade 100, the low grade would be 10 and the high grade 10,000.
SFAW
@SatanicPanic:
That prof will have to watch out for the student(s) wot answers “What has it gots in its pocketses?”
Chris
@Gian:
They simultaneously hate intellectuals and feel an insecure need to demonstrate that they’re better than the intellectuals at their own game, because let’s face it, no one likes to be thought of as stupid. Scholarship tends to debunk rather than confirm their worldview, which is why they’ve built up such a reservoir of “I never liked you ANYWAY!” resentment for it, but they still jump at the opportunity to promote any scholar who agrees with them.
(They have a similar insecure, love-hate relationship with pop culture).
SFAW
@SenyorDave:
One definition of “treason” is “giving aid and comfort to the enemy.” Since, to the Rethugs and assorted wingnuts, Lie-berals are The Real Enemy of Real ‘Muricans and Real ‘Murica, it would only be Treason if the Rethugs gave aid and comfort to Lie-berals.
Since a large part of wingnut raison d’etre is to PISS OFF LIE-BERALS, Rethugs are, by definition, anti-treason, and thus the only True Patriots. Vulvarines!
Ipso facto, QED, IOKIYAR, and LS/MFT.
Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937
Well, Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)since you believe laws should be reviewed “as times change”, why don’t you do your job and review it. Why do you think its necessary for courts to legislate from the bench?
SFAW
@Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937:
Got it in one note, Johnny!
Roger Moore
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
The thing about that is that it has all the hallmarks of an urban legend. It’s a morality tale gussied up with just enough details so a credulous person could confuse it with actual events, but not enough that it could be disproved. It has lots of details about how the class did on which test and how they responded, but carefully avoids any information that could possibly be used to fact-check it. There’s no name for the professor or the college where he teaches, and no detail about which school year or term this supposedly happened.
I’ll bet that if you check somewhere like Snopes, this same basic story has been turning up for ages but with minor changes to which politician’s theories have been refuted.
AA+ Bonds
There is little creepier than when a bunch of people carry out a serious deliberative agreement to pretend that they haven’t thought about something much at all.
gene108
@Jay in Oregon:
The people, who are going to vote Republican don’t like the VRA because it lets the wrong people vote.
There maybe a subset of independents, who may be turned off by screwing around with voting laws and making it harder for people to vote, but I’m inclined to believe Republicans have to really screw up harder than just messing with voter access to drive these people towards becoming reliable Democratic votes, i.e. something on the scale of the Bush, Jr.’s Iraq War would be needed.
ericblair
@Supernumerary Charioteer:
The other big problem is that the basic frame is stupid and teabaggerish. They’re equating grade in the course, which is a measure of personal achievement, with wealth or income, which isn’t, for a bunch of reasons that everyone’s aware of. So they’re making worthiness and skill equate to how much money you have, which equates to your status in life/the class.
Teabagger economics is fundamentally moral outrage: money is respect and status and personal worthiness, so how dare the undeserving steal it from their betters. It’s got zip to do with optimal resource allocation.
Mnemosyne
@Zapruder F. Mashtots, D.D.S. (Mumphrey, et al.):
In addition to other people’s comments about the story, isn’t it obvious even within the story that the professor was arbitrarily marking people’s papers down just to make his asshole point? Otherwise, I see no rational reason why the class would go from a collective “B” to a collective “F” in such a short time.
It’s awfully easy to “teach” that lesson when you’re the guy with his thumb on the scales who can decide on his own what grade to give out.
Randy P
@Roger Moore:
Yep.
Here’s the Snopes link.
Original version didn’t say “Obama”.
fuckwit
That, is a fine, fine, Billmon-quality post, right there.
I love posts that do research like that, and keep important facts from falling into the memory hole.
Thank you for this.