An end, once and for all.
Starting next week, I’ll be trying something new and different with The Daily Sausage. Last night’s Writer’s Workshop provided me into some valuable insight on what people are looking for, and I’m going to do my best to deliver.
“Of course the Supreme Court is political” – Ezra Klein (Wonkblog)
Our national media likes to throw around the phrase “Constitutional crisis” every time Congress and the President have a disagreement. A real Constitutional crisis would be the codification of the Supreme Court as a political legislative body, where the rule of law is subject to the political whims of five justices that are appointed, not elected, to lifetime terms.
To give you an idea of what this means, lets look at the core composition of the conservative wing of the Supreme Court: Justices Scalia, Alito, and Thomas, and Chief Justice Roberts. Scalia is 76, Alito is 62, Thomas is 63, and Roberts is 57. The average lifespan for a man in the United States is around 78 years old. All of these men have access to the best healthcare available, so let’s push that up to 85.
Assuming for a second each of them served until their deaths at age 85, Scalia would serve another 9 years, Alito another 23 years, Thomas another 22 years, and Roberts another 28 years. 28 years is seven Presidential terms, four and two thirds Senate terms, and fourteen House terms.
If the Supreme Court is going to make itself a political body, then it cannot be allowed to exist in it’s current form. Political figures capable of fundamentally altering the course of our nation, even more so than the President or Congress, cannot be allowed to serve 25+ years without being elected by someone. And no, election-by-proxy (the people elect Congress and the President, they appoint Justices) doesn’t cut it.
Were the Supreme Court were subject to elections and the whims of politics, would Bush Vs. Gore have turned out any differently? What about Citizens United? How would it influence cases upcoming cases on the PPACA, Arizona immigration law, etc.? Perhaps, perhaps not, but the fate of a nation cannot be left in the hands of five people that nobody voted for.
“Darrell Issa and House Republicans’ Permanent Witch Hunt” – Michael Hirsh (The Atlantic)
I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding around this particular issue. It’s not that anyone is opposed to the investigation; I’m no fan of Eric Holder and Fast & Furious was an awful, awful idea (like the vast majority of ideas to come out of the Bush II White House), and whoever at the DOJ decided to keep it rolling should absolutely be fired.
However, that’s not what these hearings are about. They’re the latest in a long line of Republican fear-mongering. At a fundamental level, many conservatives believe any non-conservative government is illegitimate. That if a Democrat wins, it’s because they engaged in wide-scale voter fraud or some other such nefarious tactic. It’s why the GOP is obsessed with purging the voter rolls in places like Florida and Georgia, where African Americans and Hispanics could potentially alter the electoral landscape against them.
Consequently, every time there’s a Democrat in the White House and the GOP controls the House, we get stuff like this. And endless river of muck and slime designed to force the White House into a defensive posture, waste taxpayer time and money, and make government as ineffective as possible.
Circling back to the hearings, it’s apparent that Issa wants to find some way to link the whole chain together: he wants to find a way to connect a bad DOJ program to Eric Holder, from Eric Holder to Obama, and then use it to impeach the President. The GOP has been talking about it for four years. There were people that wanted to impeach him before he even took office.
So, lacking the evidence to be able to begin impeachment proceedings, Issa’s doing the next best thing and holding a member of Obama’s cabinet in contempt for not releasing documents he can’t legally release, that may or may not have anything to do with what Issa is asking.
It’s no wonder Congress has the lowest approval ratings of any body of government.
“Is Grover Norquist’s Steel Grip on the GOP finally slipping?” – Brian Beutler (TPM)
The fact that anyone takes Grover Norquist seriously is one of the great failings of our nation. This is a guy who decided, in high school, that taxes were bad and he was going to start a pledge to force lawmakers to never raise taxes, which became a de facto blood oath among the GOP. The reason this became such an article of orthodoxy is that he got lucky once in that a Republican that defied him (George H.W. Bush) happened to run into a supremely talented politician in Bill Clinton and lost, and he’s been banging that drum ever since.
Let’s be honest: no one likes paying taxes. We all want to pay as little taxes as possible. But without taxes, all the things that we as a country depend on the government; Federal, state, local, etc. to provide don’t happen. Without taxes, we don’t build roads, schools, or hospitals. Without taxes, we don’t field a military capable of defending us. Without taxes, we have no police or firefighters. And so on, and so forth.
There is a happy medium in there. There is a point where what we ask of the government is equal to what we pay in taxes. It’s called a balanced budget. But for that to happen, taxes have to be flexible. In good times, you raise taxes to pay off debt, and in bad times you cut them to put more money in people’s pockets. The wealthiest should pay the most because they have the most to give, and the poorest should pay the least because they have the least to give.
Rigid dogma is a path to failure. The banishment of Grover Norquist from our national dialogue would be a tremendous step forward for us as a nation.
“Drug Enforcement agent won’t admit that crack is worse than marijuana” – Annie-Rose Strasser (ThinkProgress)
Whether you use drugs or not, it’s impossible to be a reasonable person without acknowledging the inherent hypocrisy in our policies toward drugs; specifically, marijuana.
If you asked a hundred people on the street to put crack, meth, heroin, and pot in order from most to least harmful, I’d be willing to bet all the money in my pockets against all the money in your pockets that pot would come in dead last 100 out of 100 times. The fact that the head of the DEA, Michele Leonhart, can’t seem to grasp this concept, or is to terrified of the consequences of acknowledging it, it’s a tremendous failure on our part as a nation.
What’s even worse is when Representative Jared Polis (D-CO) asks her “I’m asking you a very straightforward question. Is heroin worse for someone’s health than marijuana?” and Leonhard replies “All the illegal drugs are bad.”
The head of the Drug Enforcement Agency said, in essence, “Drugs are bad, mmmkay?”.
Moreover, it underlines the fundamental problem with the way we treat drugs in this country. Illegal drugs are bad, legal drugs are good. Illegal drugs are bad which is why they are illegal, and legal drugs are good which is why they’re legal. Our national drug policy is supported by the kind of circular logic that Aristotle would have shamed us all for blindly following. It doesn’t matter that legal drugs like alcohol, tobacco, and prescription medication kill more people than all the illegal drugs combined; illegal drugs are bad, legal drugs are good.
I’m not saying we should rush out and legalize meth and PCP and jenkem; there are actual reasons why some drugs like heroin and cocaine are illegal, by which I mean they’re backed by science and logic and reason. But I have yet to hear a good reason why drugs like pot or psilocybin mushrooms are.
