Long New York Times article about the Roberts Court’s tendency to decide cases however the Chamber of Commerce wants them decided:
“The court is looking for reliable voices to confirm its decisions, and I’d like to think it’s looking to the chamber because it tells a straight story, and we try not to be shrill or ideological,” Ms. Conrad said. “The chamber has earned a reputation for being a credible voice of business.”
Doug Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, drew a different conclusion, saying the numbers proved that the Roberts court increasingly sided with corporate interests. He also said the study documented “a sharp ideological divide that did not exist before 2005.” In the last 11 terms of the Rehnquist court, the five more conservative justices voted for the chamber’s position 61 percent of the time, while the four more liberal justices voted for it 48 percent of the time.
In the first five terms of the Roberts court, the corresponding bloc of five more conservative justices voted for the chamber’s position 74 percent of the time, and the four more liberal justices 43 percent of the time.
It’s an interesting political future the United States faces. I still think we’ll probably avoid devolving into Franco-style dictatorship, that today’s political coalition of the ignorant and incontinent will largely die off and not be replaced over the next 15 years or so, and that things will settle back into the pre-Nixon paradigm of Democrats mostly running things nationally. But it will take a long, long time to turn the courts around. Mass media (though not the Times!) will also likely function more or less overtly as corporate propaganda loss leaders, even more than it does today.
We’re headed to a future where the two things that Republicans have bitched about most — media and the courts — will be their greatest allies.
jwb
Why are you exempting the Times! And why are you exempting the Times with exclamation marks! ! !
DougJ
@jwb:
Because they wrote this article about the Roberts court.
El Cid
__
Such a government would be more unstable, easier to mobilize against, and potentially threatening in a number of ways to corporate interests. (There’s always the potential that the tyrant can suddenly take command of one corporation or concentrated wealth interest without much challenge).
Except when facing some hypothetical and nonexistent (here) soshullist or laborist challenge to the governing system or an imminent electoral victory with serious likely effects, the most powerful and super-rich prefer electoral republics to ungainly and overly centralized tyrannies.
Plus, it doesn’t seem particularly necessary in order for the most powerful and most wealthy to get their desires fulfilled quite constantly over time.
Doesn’t mean that something much more tyrannical won’t happen, as I think there’s a not-overwhelming but serious potential for a wide-scale and dangerous populist far-right movement with much more reach than today’s TeaTards as the situation gets more and more desperate for so many Americans. In my view it would be really unlikely for there to be any powerful liberal or labor reformist organizations to channel rebellious dissent in such a direction. If anything, it would likely get very ugly, and with a much more overt nationalist and racist and Christianist character. TeaTards on meth.
Phil Perspective
@DougJ: So what? And Faux Noise has Shep Smith. That doesn’t excuse their evil just because they have one sorta sane person.
Dustin
“We’re headed to a future where the two things that Republicans have bitched about most—media and the courts—will be their greatest allies.”
And yet, to nobody’s surprise, I can just about guarantee they’ll still be bitching about them.
BruceFromOhio
Attack the strengths, and if you can’t twist something to suit your needs, break it so no one else can use it.
This is Rovian politics writ large, and we get to live with the results until forever. Citizens United may have been the final nail, with the exception of overturning Roe.
beltane
We will not see a Franco style dictatorship here, that’s so 20th century anyway, but we will certainly see something like a Berlusconi-style dictatorship of the clowns, with corruption so overt that only the mentally disabled will be able to avoid complete and total cynicism.
El Cid
@beltane: Hopefully we’ll at least get the completely open sex and hooker activities of the President to make it more entertaining.
BruceFromOhio
@El Cid: If anything, it would likely get very ugly, and with a much more overt nationalist and racist and Christianist character. TeaTards on meth.
You’ll know it’s started in earnest when people are getting shot on a daily basis, and every media outlet reports it except Fox. Otherwise, seems like we’re already there.
NobodySpecial
Well, yeah, they spent the better part of thirty years and multiple billions of dollars to make it so. The ironic part is, like the machines of a long-dead civilization, they’ll be there for quite a bit after the people they were built to serve have passed from the scene, and a lot of them are too goddamned old to ever see the fruits of all that money and time they spent.
El Cid
@BruceFromOhio: There are a lot more stages of building “in earnest” before any shooting would start, and it doesn’t really take shooting for much more power and intimidation to take place.
agrippa
Those people are on the Court to do what they are doing.
agrippa
Those people are on the Court to do what they are doing.
West of the Cascades
I wouldn’t be too concerned about a long time to turn the courts around – sure, the Supreme Court right now is leaning more to the right (using the Times’s measure, about 20% more conservative, if the conservative justices moved from voting 61% with the Chamber of Commerce to 74%), but in the broader judiciary the increased number of judges appointed by Republicans may not have such a political impact. Some judges evidently are ideologues (the D. Va. judge who ruled part of the health care reform act unconstitutional), but you also have Republican-appointed judges who are more careful and follow the law (like Vaughn Walker, in San Fransisco, who ruled California’s Prop 8 unconstitutional).
Also, life is fickle – Scalia (74) and Kennedy (74) are old, Thomas is fat, Obama may be president for six more years, and the Democratic Party may continue to control the Senate during that time.
MikeJ
@BruceFromOhio: They have no interest in overturning Roe. Keeps the yokels worked up and turning out.
beltane
@El Cid: No kidding. If we are going to be governed by corrupt assholes, let them at least provide us with a good show. Our plutocrats are too puritanical to comprehend the whole bread and circuses thing. And our left, such as it is, is too sedentary and complacent to participate in the type of street riots that are the implicit underpinning of direct democracy. We gather for hands-off, irony laced, Rallies for Sanity, they say “Screw sanity, let’s throw things.”
El Cid
Another helpful bit of legislation passed by the pre-TeaTard Congress, one long advocated by grassroots media and progressive and left activists.
Not exactly a decision with gigantic impact, but decent nonetheless.
And one with an odd set of leadership for it in the Senate.
Pancake
I absolutely love the sheer insanity and hyperbole embodied in the various “thoughts” embedded in this deliriously mad paragraph. It could have only been crafted by someone so deranged and unmoored from reality that they should probably be institutionalized for their own well being, as well as for the safety of those who live near them. An utterly delightful masterpiece of the purest distillation of written insanity that one is likely to encounter on the web.
jwb
@DougJ: I wouldn’t exempt the Times from this particular charge, even if they are the best of the lot. I read the Times regularly, and I don’t think the country would be a better place if the Times went out of business the way it would if, say, WaPo or Fox News no longer existed. But, depending on the issue, the Times is fully capable of taking corporatist propaganda line. In fact, I think they probably take it more often than not.
BruceFromOhio
@El Cid: Agreed, and I was being a bit facetious, as I think we have already fucking ARRIVED. But I also believe that the overt act of individual violence is a conservative badge to be earned, whether its dragging a black man to death behind a pickup truck, shooting a doctor coming out of church, or stepping on a protestors’ head. All the gun freaks who emptied the shelves of ammunition when the scary black mooslim from Kenya got elected are just aching, waiting. Throw in some Teatard meth, and its only a matter of time and opportunity.
matoko_chan
the smart money is on a military junta.
Citizen_X
@Pancake: In other words, you got nothing. Right, cupcake?
Joey Maloney
@Pancake:
Coming from you, that’s just about the highest praise imaginable. Like having Leonardo da Vinci praise your flip-book doodles.
sparky
@beltane: you and El Cid are onto it, thinks me. i mean who wouldn’t want a better future and
an end to rabid militarisoooh shiny!@El Cid: agreed, again (sigh), but it seems to me that an oligarchy that only approves of certain candidates who then become autocrats for a term of years isn’t really a republic. got any suggestions for a new descriptor?
sparky
@matoko_chan: maybe, though by that logic it could also be an uprising of librarians.
now THAT would be an interesting insurrection.
Chyron HR
@Pancake:
Says the guy who thinks Santa is bringing him an armored bulldozer for Christmas.
Cacti
John Roberts is the Melville Fuller of the 21st century.
Tony J
@Pancake:
I absolutely love the sheer insanity and hyperbole embodied in the various “thoughts” embedded in this deliriously mad paragraph.
I agree. How is anyone supposed to read that paragraph without dismissing the writer as a hyperbolic nut?
matoko_chan
@beltane:
no we wont.
it will be a military junta if anything.
RESPECT DAH TROOPS!
did you see my interation t’other nite with bnut and stuckinred?
the military in america is sacrosanct, no criticism allowed evah.
if it happens it will be a putsch.
Tony J
I know, I know, don’t feed the trolls. But it’s cold over here in Frozen Britain, and low hanging fruit are low hanging fruit.
matoko_chan
@sparky: librarians are not sacred.
Chris Grrr
“The court is looking for reliable voices to confirm its decisions” !?
Is this fatuous arrogance, or some arcane level of checks-and-balances (or maybe chutes and ladders)…?
patrick II
Now being their greatest allies is notan accident. The reason republicans bitched about courts and media was to change them so that they in turn would change the rules the political game is played by. The courts and media were targeted, the bitching worked and it is no accident every time a corporation goes to the supreme court it wins or that Citizens’ United decision may change who controls this country for a long time. The aggregation of media monopolies under the FCC is no accident either. The courts, money, and media change the rules the political game is played by.
Yes, us older ones will die off, but will we not be replaced over the next 15 years? I have watched the members of my own generation change while being battered a constant onslaught of lies and misinformation and I hope the next generation has more fortitude, or brains, or whatever than mine. But as I watched that onslaught of lies and misinformation from all of of the electronic media, save for three hours on msnbc and one hour on the comedy channel, and I see young people don’t like unions, that they think social security will never be there for them, that both partys are just as bad (a great meme victory) and that they won’t be able to get a fair shake in the courts, I wonder how dispirited and fearful and filled with lies they will have become with the accumulation of years of and if they will have to be able to overcome it.
I think the races and the various sexual shades will be more comfortable over time. But in matters of money, I see things only getting worse as the next generation is trained to obey by an onslaught of republican tropes, no unions to pool their strength, or ability to affect an elected government controlled by political money, and a judicial system less capable of redress.
Sour and pessimistic I seem to be.
Xoebe
The thought occurred to me the other day that the conventional media are more pro-business and less – well, less anything else, including liberal, progressive, insightful or meaningful – as advertising markets and revenues continue to shrink.
Judas Escargot
@matoko_chan:
Not likely: Juntas tend to happen in countries with a unified military. We have multiple services under largely separate leaderships.
Part of the USAF officer corps may have been captured by the evangelicals (what with the Family Research Council right across the street from the academy), but not the enlisted men. And somehow I just don’t see the Navy (which has the bulk of the deployed nukes BTW), Marines or most of the Army opening fire on US citizens.
Oliver
Hey, Tony J, you still banging those teen age boys over in London? You always were the cat’s meow when it came to kinky shit!
kay
@Pancake:
But back to the question.
Any comments? Any thoughts on why the conservative super-star, Justice Roberts, sides with business interests over individual citizens again and again and again? So much so that this propensity has drawn study and a lot of critical commentary? Can you explain that for us in the context of “conservatism” and “judicial activism”?
In other words, people are starting to notice. It’s now broadened out of legal circles and into major media. It’s mainstream. People are asking.
Calling balls and strikes, Pancake? Is that what he’s doing?
Yutsano
@kay: I was gonna phrase it simpler, but I r not a lawyerly type like you. :)
kay
@Yutsano:
I’m no Supreme Court expert, but I don’t think that statement is great for conservative judges, generally :)
It’s a little…crass
Bruce Webb
This article shows exactly why the Individual Mandate is safe despite antics of various wingnut judges at the District Level.
Big Insurance loves the Individual Mandate and the rest of Corporate America and hence the Chamber will grow to love it. On a pure dollar basis most medium sized to semi-large companies will be better off dumping their employee plans and paying the fee for sending their employees off to the Exchange. And because of the Mandate will suffer no real competitive disadvantage in doing so.
There is a weird assumption that a knee jerk Conservative Majority on the Supremes means they will equally be on their knees to the Tea Party. Not so, properly considered Citizens United was the biggest Fuck You possible to Tea Baggers, its practical effect is to make individual citizens and even voluntary associations of ‘fredom luvin Muricans’ secondary citizens to major corporations. Who are run by New Yorkers. Who might be Jews. Or furriners. Or furriner Jews like that Soros guy.
Scalia might vote against the Mandate, because he is kind of a crank and besides loves to give out ‘fuk-ya’s to liberals. But the rest of the majority will follow the dollar. Which in this case means upholding the Individual Mandate.
Suzan
I hate to sound shrill but when I saw this article in the times yesterday I offered up another loud Fuck You to Nader and his voters in Florida circa 2000.
It has been bugging me more as I watch the resurgence of the: “I’m principled and you’re not” crowd as it seeks to destroy Obama. Kamikaze politics is not an effective long term strategy.
Fuck Nader is the new Fuck Nixon.
DougJ
@jwb:
The Times isn’t perfect, but their problem is that they have to kiss up to rich readers. I don’t think the Sulzberger family uses it to advance its own corporate propaganda.
El Cid
@sparky:
Mexico’s PRI party ruled the nation for 70 years via manipulated and faked and corrupted elections, but was treated as a democracy by the US, with of course the meaningless ritual reports by the State Department urging the government to improve this or that about their elections, etc. In 1988 they nearly unquestionably lost to liberal-left Cauhtemoc Cardenas, but did all the traditional election-stealing tricks to deny it.
This system, stopped only by the 2000 election of former Coca Cola CEO Vicente Fox, was often called the “perfect dictatorship.”
Not a close enough model for the US, though you never know.
From 1958 until Chavez’ election in 1998, the Venezuelan elected government was formed under an agreement by the major political parties (AD and COPEI) called the Pact of Punto Fijo which was basically a power sharing arrangement between the two parties, excluding any more left and labor parties from power and basically creating an alternating ruling party.
Colombia was the same, and an even more direct agreement to let Conservatives and Liberals, but not others, alternate. Also starting in 1958. Arguably Colombia’s case was clearer due to the aim to avoid an extended military dictatorship carried out through the military dictatorship’s favored party, especially after the junta itself threw out the military leader Rojas Pinilla.
Singapore calls its one-party system “guided democracy”, but the system is seen by its people and outsiders as working well enough to not merit much challenge.
A lot of African countries did and/or do much better off having a single party system due to a lot of factors, including the limited penetration of democratic (elected) institutions and governments into society, and also the inevitability that multiparty systems quickly become based in ethnic divisions either bluntly or under the guise of political tendencies.
In the US, this sort of agreement is unnecessary since the electoral system and the form of government will always — simply mathematically speaking — trend toward 2 and only 2 major parties who tended to be quite similar to each other in overall policy goals. (In many ways, they still are, but the Republicans really do have a bunch of extreme far right politicians and leaders and policies.) Also, there simply is no left or labor organizations with seriously large national membership, much less a party system, to make any foreseeable serious challenge anyway.
I can’t call it the perfect dictatorship, or guided democracy (there’s not any guidance, anyway, and certainly no results that most seem happy with), and it’s not a Punto Fijo or one party system.
It wasn’t extremely far off the mark to look at certain policy aspects and say the US has one political party with two business party wings. However this is kind of an empty statement as however it applies to some things, the things it doesn’t apply to are the wildest, most dangerous parts.
Trouble is, on both the parts where there are overall policy agreements and even more extremely so in areas where they don’t, one of the parties is completely over the edge in terms of being willing to destroy the country, or at least significant sectors of the population, for the most rapacious of immediate goals.
The first might actually do some good or perhaps do slower and future-aimed damage, depending on which Democrats let this happen and which ones are listening the closest to the big money types and the warhawk consensus; the latter is happy to blow up whatever they can right now so that they and their friends can collect the insurance money.
JC
I said something similar to DougJ, but far less pithy, of course. Still, I’ll re-say it.
Elite authoritarian corporatism is ascendant, and has been for 30 years. That corporatism doesn’t much care about the working man, the lower class, or middle class. And the money in growing markets will be the next growth opportunity, so the U.S. can afford to be neglected.
First time the Democrats had the three – Presidency, House, Senate – and yet, was barely a shallow speed bump to the elite corporatocracy.
I’m also thinking Italian style democracy. Italians seem relatively happy to continue to enable Berceloni and cronies, and the U.S. population seems similarly disengaged. Especially with media crying ‘liberal!’, or some other pejorative, whenver the corporatocracy is threatened.
Even something like DADT – doesn’t really interfere with the corporatacracy. Does it interfere with making money for them? No?
Fine then, let gays serve in the military, let gays marry. What’s the big deal?
So, it is allowed through.
Social progress will continue, until it threatens the corporatocracy. then it will be a awful moral evil that has to be stopped.
Petorado
Funny how “strict constructionist” Roberts is the guy who turned the Constitution from one man, one vote (well initially it was one male property owner, one vote) to becoming one dollar, one vote. The framers of the Constitution would puke at the thought that corporations=people and money=speech.
THE
@matoko_chan:
I have two theories about it:
1. The commander in question is just trying to prove to his superiors what a totally rule-following, totally trustworthy member of the team he is.
If it ain’t properly declassified, we ain’t reading it.
This is the Air Force and we obey orders.
i.e. He is angling for a promotion.
2. They are investigating if there is a hacking network within their organization, and they are using the spread of tagged stories through the network as a means of tracking it.
If people download the stories from legitimate sources it contaminates the data.
Ordering people not to download the legal sources makes it easier for investigators to identify the hacker network.