Some Much-Needed Context About the 1994 Crime Bill

Yes, that is a picture of me welcoming then-Attorney General Janet Reno - along with Congressman Bruce Vento and Police Chief William Finney - to a visit at the nonprofit where I worked. Just a couple of years prior to this event, I had gotten a job as the executive director of the agency whose mission was focused on juvenile crime prevention. That put me on the front lines of what was going on at the community level with an issue that was demanding a lot of attention in the early 1990's.

I'm sure that every urban center has its own stories that capture the zeitgeist of those years. The one I remember is about a Cambodian gang that entered a convenience store and brutally murdered everyone on the premises. One veteran police officer told me that in all his years as a cop he'd never seen anything as gruesome as that crime scene.

It was in that context that AG Reno visited us as part of her travels around the country to highlight local community-policing projects. Our Police Chief was at the forefront of those efforts and the agency I worked for had just entered into a unique collaboration with the department to partner with police officers on their domestic calls for service (the largest category of police response) to provide mental health and social services. Our contention was that this partnership modeled what community-policing could mean in those situations.

The visit came just before passage of the 1994 Crime Bill that is under so much scrutiny right now. While my experience was local and pretty personal, Mark Klaiman has provided the bigger picture in an article titled: The Current Crime Debate Isn't Doing Hillary Justice. Here's his summary of what was going on at the time:

1994 was the fifth consecutive year in which the FBI counted more than 23,000 murders: an all-time high. Then, as now, about half of the victims were African-American. As it turned out, that was the peak. Today’s murder rate (and total violent-crime rate) is just about half of its 1994 level...

No one knew then that we’d seen the worst. All we knew is that the number of murders had more than doubled, that the total number of violent crimes had increased six-fold in the previous thirty years, that no reversal of trend seemed to be in sight, and that the street-level arms race financed by the crack trade had expanded the age range of killers and their victims down into adolescence. If you weren’t seriously worried about crime in 1994, you just weren’t paying attention.

As Klaiman says, "From our perspective now, making crime a primary political issue looks a little bit nuts." But I can tell you from personal experience that there was not a politician around back then who wasn't making this issue a priority - Republican or Democrat. Some of the loudest voices demanding action were those of African American leaders. The question was, "what do we do about it?"

In his article, Klaiman does an excellent job of covering the good, the bad and the ugly of the actual federal legislation that grew out of that scenario - including the fact that the Violence Against Women's Act and the assault weapons ban were part of the package. He notes that the 100,000 new police officers came with a catch (something the Bush administration later ignored):

The thing the President and his advisers really seemed to believe in was carrying out his campaign pledge to put “100,000 new cops on the beat” by providing federal money to hire local police officers. But given the apparent uselessness of just adding more resources to a system that didn’t know what it was doing, the Administration added a twist: to get the money, departments had to commit - at least on paper - to implement “community policing” to move departments away from the demonstrated futility of the random-preventive-patrol-plus-rapid-response-to-calls-for-service model that had dominated the “reform” style of policing since the 1920s.

From my own experience, that is the provision that had the most impact on our city - and was the reason for AG Reno's visit.

There is more I could say about this excellent article. But in order to be informed, you really should go read the whole thing. When it comes to the "bad" or "ugly" portions of the bill, I will simply note that former President Bill Clinton has openly addressed the mistakes he made. We have not, as yet, heard anything from Bernie Sanders about his decision to vote for the bill.

The Emasculation of Jeb Bush

If you had any doubts that the Republican presidential race has come down to a contest of machismo, this tweet by the guy who is currently in 5th place among the 6 candidates should remove them.

America. pic.twitter.com/TeduJkwQF3

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) February 16, 2016

Here is how Paul Blumenthal responded.

"It is quite unmistakable that all weapons and tools are used as symbols for the male organ" -- Freud https://t.co/sNQU18EzEU

— Paul Blumenthal (@PaulBlu) February 16, 2016

Jeet Heer sums it up perfectly.

It’s hard to interpret this tweet as anything other than a response to the constant emasculation that Bush has suffered at the hands of Donald Trump. The real estate mogul has spent months cutting Bush down with insults that suggested the former Florida governor was less than a man.

Jeb Bush should know that he has no chance of out-performing the ultimate bully in Donald Trump on this one. But it says something about both he and Republican base voters that he thinks he should try.

What is fueling this primary right now is the desire to "win" against any opponent to white conservative patriarchal dominance. Any candidate who assumes that people immigrate to this country out of an "act of love" for their families is going to lose that contest...no matter what weapon they chose to represent them.

While that is the contest currently underway on the Republican side, this fall the rest of us will start to weigh in. The question then becomes whether or not we want to take this country back to that kind of retrograde thinking.

Barack Obama on the John Roberts Nomination

In the summer of 2005, President George W. Bush nominated John Roberts to the Supreme Court after Sandra Day O'Connor retired. When William Rehnquist died that fall, he nominated him to be the next Chief Justice.

At the time, Barack Obama was serving his first year as the junior Senator from Illinois. He voted against the confirmation of Roberts. You can read his speech explaining that position here. Roberts was confirmed by a vote of 78-22, with 20 of 42 Democrats voting in favor. Shortly thereafter, then-Senator Obama wrote an article at Daily Kos. It was partially about that vote. But more importantly, it was a response to some progressive activists who were pretty viscously attacking Democratic Senators who voted to confirm the nominee.

Over the years there have been several things that Barack Obama wrote or said in a speech/interview that have done a good job of capturing his worldview and/or approach to politics. This article stands out among those. At a time when Supreme Court nominations are back in the news and the Democratic Party is in the midst of deciding who will be the next presidential nominee, his words back than are particularly poignant and instructive.

Obama begins by suggesting that the American people aren't as ideologically partisan as Democratic activists often assume.

It's this non-ideological lens through which much of the country viewed Judge Roberts' confirmation hearings. A majority of folks, including a number of Democrats and Independents, don't think that John Roberts is an ideologue bent on overturning every vestige of civil rights and civil liberties protections in our possession. Instead, they have good reason to believe he is a conservative judge who is (like it or not) within the mainstream of American jurisprudence, a judge appointed by a conservative president who could have done much worse (and probably, I fear, may do worse with the next nominee). While they hope Roberts doesn't swing the court too sharply to the right, a majority of Americans think that the President should probably get the benefit of the doubt on a clearly qualified nominee.

I'll leave it to you to decide whether or not Roberts has actually lived up to that description. But Obama was absolutely right about Bush's next appointment (Samuel Alito) being far more ideological. The last bolded sentence is something Republicans should keep in mind today.

Obama then mentions why neither he nor the Democrats in the Senate mounted a filibuster against John Roberts (notice how quaint that all seems 11 years later).

...a fight that would have effectively signaled an unwillingness on the part of Democrats to confirm any Bush nominee, an unwillingness which I believe would have set a dangerous precedent for future administrations -- blocking Roberts was not a realistic option.

He then launches in to his concerns about the reaction to Democrats who voted "yes" to this nomination.

In such circumstances, attacks on Pat Leahy, Russ Feingold and the other Democrats who, after careful consideration, voted for Roberts make no sense. Russ Feingold, the only Democrat to vote not only against war in Iraq but also against the Patriot Act, doesn't become complicit in the erosion of civil liberties simply because he chooses to abide by a deeply held and legitimate view that a President, having won a popular election, is entitled to some benefit of the doubt when it comes to judicial appointments. Like it or not, that view has pretty strong support in the Constitution's design.

It is that belief of Feingold's that is under assault by the Republicans today.

Obama continues with words that also apply to some of the arguments in the Democratic presidential primary today.

...to the degree that we brook no dissent within the Democratic Party, and demand fealty to the one, "true" progressive vision for the country, we risk the very thoughtfulness and openness to new ideas that are required to move this country forward. When we lash out at those who share our fundamental values because they have not met the criteria of every single item on our progressive "checklist," then we are essentially preventing them from thinking in new ways about problems. We are tying them up in a straightjacket and forcing them into a conversation only with the converted.

The reason that straightjacket is a problem is because the job of progressives is more difficult than that of conservatives.

After all, it's easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it's harder to craft a foreign policy that's tough and smart. It's easy to dismantle government safety nets; it's harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It's easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it's harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion. But that's our job. And I firmly believe that whenever we exaggerate or demonize, or oversimplify or overstate our case, we lose. Whenever we dumb down the political debate, we lose. A polarized electorate that is turned off of politics, and easily dismisses both parties because of the nasty, dishonest tone of the debate, works perfectly well for those who seek to chip away at the very idea of government because, in the end, a cynical electorate is a selfish electorate.

It is the last half of that paragraph that I return to often as a synopsis of Barack Obama's analysis of what is wrong with our politics today. Here is his alternative:

Our goal should be to stick to our guns on those core values that make this country great, show a spirit of flexibility and sustained attention that can achieve those goals, and try to create the sort of serious, adult, consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will.

Obama titled this article "Tone, Truth, and the Democratic Party." He ends by saying that this doesn't mean that we unilaterally disarm in the face of Republican attacks, but that tone and truth matter.

In fact, I would argue that the most powerful voices of change in the country, from Lincoln to King, have been those who can speak with the utmost conviction about the great issues of the day without ever belittling those who opposed them, and without denying the limits of their own perspectives.

Whether or not you agree with this analysis, I think it is clear that it summarizes the approach to the man who has been our President for the last seven years. That he wrote it more than a year before he made the decision to run for that office tells us that anyone who assumed we were electing a firebrand ideologue back in 2008 simply wasn't paying attention. It is true that his speeches were often inspiring and he ignited the passions of hope for change. But all along he has been clear that he is open to new ideas (no matter where they come from), that we have a difficult job ahead of us, and that the way to build a lasting majority for progressive ideals is to develop a "consensus around our problems that can admit Democrats, Republicans and Independents of good will." That is why tone and truth matter.

Why Can't Hillary Clinton Be More Inspiring?

As a young girl, I aspired to be Della Street in the 1950's TV series "Perry Mason." What's instructive about that is that it never occurred to me that I could be Perry Mason himself. That says a lot about what I was taught about the roles available to women while I was growing up. Of course that changed when I got older.

A few years ago I was in a women's book group that read and discussed Betty Friedan's classic work, The Feminine Mystique. All of the women in the group were in their 50's and 60's. We'd all had professional careers in a variety of sectors. What we recognized is that Friedan's book helped explain our mothers to us, but had very little to say in terms of the lives we'd led.

That's when I had an awareness that might seem odd at such a late stage. I realized that I had been part of the first generation of women who had forged a new path. Women of my mother's generation didn't have choices available to them. Being a wife, mother and homemaker was to be their primary focus in life. And growing up, that's what I assumed myself. Along the way things changed. I can't point to exactly when or how...it just happened. And to be honest, I never really thought about it that much. I had simply made the choices I'd wanted to make about what to do with my life. That kept me more than occupied for 35 years or so without a lot of time to reflect on what it meant. That is the gift that feminism gave to me.

I thought about that when I read the piece I am about to quote. Coming from The Onion, there are simply times when irony says it best.

Citing her lackluster support among young voters, campaign consultants to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential frontrunner who has served as both a U.S. senator and secretary of state, reportedly instructed the candidate this week to be more inspiring. “Right now, voters are looking for a candidate who stands for real societal change, someone who can stir something inside them,” said media advisor Jim Margolis, urging the woman—who overcame entrenched societal biases to build a successful legal career, became the first female senator elected in the state of New York, oversaw the Department of State during a period of widespread international tumult, and, if elected, would be the first female president in American history—to appear more uplifting to voters. “Many young people have completely lost faith in the political process, and they want to believe that true progress is actually possible. They want someone who embodies progressive ideals.” Margolis added that Clinton was too much a part of the establishment she spent decades breaking down barriers to enter.

From the Perspective of Current Supreme Court Justices

In analyzing the various strategies of the coming battle over a Supreme Court nominee, most of the focus has been on how it will be handled by the President and Republicans in the Senate. Similarly, outcomes have been discussed in terms of how they will affect the 2016 election. Those are all important to consider. But it is also interesting to think about how this might affect the current members of the Supreme Court and what, if any, role they might play.

Any case that is currently pending before the court, as well as any that are considered while there is a vacancy, will now be decided by eight members who have traditionally divided 4/4 on many issues. When/if that happens going forward, the lower court's ruling stands. Some people have been looking at the possible scenarios that poses for cases that affect public unions, affirmative action, redistricting, abortion, immigration and Obama's Clean Power Plan. Based on previous court rulings, that poses good news on some of these issues (i.e., climate change) and bad news on others (i.e., immigration).

But what I found most interesting is how Ian Millhiser talked about the kind of chaos that might ensue without definitive rulings from the Supreme Court. For example, here is how he describes that with respect to the court challenge on President Obama's executive orders on immigration.

In a highly unusual order, a federal district judge issued a nationwide halt to the policy and refused to stay that decision. A conservative panel of the conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit upheld those decisions by the district judge. Thus, if the Court splits 4-4 in the Texas case, the Fifth Circuit’s order will stand.

Where things get complicated is if the Justice Department successfully obtains an order from a different circuit upholding the program, or if an immigrant who hopes to benefit from the program obtains a similar order. The Fifth Circuit is among the most conservative courts in the country, and it is unlikely that every circuit will follow its lead. In that case, there will be competing court orders holding the policies both legal and illegal, and no possibility of Supreme Court review. It is not immediately clear what happens in such a case.

That is just one example. Millhiser goes on to discuss similar outcomes in other cases.

This will put tremendous pressure on the current justices to avoid the prospects of 4/4 splits on these decisions. And no one will feel that pressure more than Chief Justice John Roberts - who has shown a great deal of concern for the reputation of the Court over which he presides.

It will also be interesting to watch whether or not the Chief Justice will eventually weigh in if the Senate refuses to consider a nominee over the next year (and possibly beyond). While his standing among the most conservative members of the Republican Party is pretty low after the Obamacare decision, I doubt he'll stay silent if this goes on too long.

As I wrote previously, the increasing polarization we're seeing in our body politic is now likely to threaten the very functioning of the Supreme Court. I doubt that the current Justices - no matter their ideology - are going to be willing to sit idly by and allow that to happen.

An Increasingly Polarized SC Nomination Process

The immediate reaction among Republicans to block any nominee President Obama puts forward to fill the current vacancy on the Supreme Court has a lot of people looking at historical precedents. I appreciated Paul Waldman's look at the more recent history of Senate votes for current Supreme Court nominees.

Antonin Scalia (1986): 98-0
Anthony Kennedy (1987): 97-0
Clarence Thomas (1991): 52-48
Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1993): 96-3
Stephen Breyer (1994): 87-9
John Roberts (2005): 78-22, 20 of 42 Democrats in favor
Samuel Alito (2005): 58-42, 4 of 45 Democrats in favor
Sonia Sotomayor (2009): 68-31, 9 of 40 Republicans in favor
Elena Kagan (2010): 63-37, 5 of 40 Republicans in favor

Here is Waldman's conclusion:

Clarence Thomas’ confirmation was a unique case, with credible allegations of sexual harassment. But him aside, what we see is that through the Clinton administration, justices got near-unanimous votes. Then things changed starting with the George W. Bush administration. While Democrats did their best to find some dirt on John Roberts and Samuel Alito and Republicans did the same to Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, none of it amounted to much of anything. Yet in all those cases, most of the opposition party voted against the nominee.

It's pretty enlightening to see that in our recent past, Justices as disparate as Scalia and Ginsberg received almost complete consensus votes in the Senate. That indicates that the increasing polarization we've seen in more recent cases has more to do with a change in the Senate confirmation process than it does with the ideological leanings of the nominees.

There is no escaping the fact that Democrats have contributed to that polarization. I suspect that the injection of the Supreme Court in Bush v Gore 2000 played a role in that. After all, when the Court rejects all precedent and decides to weigh in on selecting our next president, the stakes go up immensely.

But part of what we are seeing now is that the divide we have been watching develop in our politics is not simply a legislative and presidential issue at this point. The Supreme Court is firmly entrenched in the polarization as well. We can bemoan that reality all we want, but it is a fact. We'll see it play out in this nomination process in a way that is historically unprecedented. What we will be witnessing is the alteration of one of our three branches of government in much the same way that the ubiquitous use of the filibuster has changed the Senate.

It's hard to avoid the feeling that we are heading towards a breaking point in this country as the polarization stretches the functioning of our government in every arena. A slow walk-back from that reality doesn't seem very likely. Could a non-functioning Supreme Court finally be the last straw? I'm not so sure. But we might soon find out.

What is Missing from the Democratic Debate on Foreign Policy

During the last Democratic debate in Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders brought up an issue he has mentioned before in the context of Hillary Clinton's vote on George Bush's Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Iraq.

Now I think an area in kind of a vague way, or not so vague, where Secretary Clinton and I disagree is the area of regime change. Look, the truth is that a powerful nation like the United States, certainly working with our allies, we can overthrow dictators all over the world.

He went on to talk about the U.S. military intervention in Libya, noting that the overthrow of Gaddafi resulted in chaos in that country. But then he made an interesting historical reference.

But this is nothing new. This has gone on 50 or 60 years where the United States has been involved in overthrowing governments. Mossadegh back in 1953. Nobody knows who Mossadegh was, democratically-elected prime minister of Iran. He was overthrown by British and American interests because he threatened oil interests of the British. And as a result of that, the shah of Iran came in, terrible dictator. The result of that, you had the Iranian Revolution coming in, and that is where we are today. Unintended consequences.

In the context of the Republican Party's commitment to military adventurism in the Middle East, a reference to the disastrous results of our involvement in the 1953 Iranian coup is always welcome. But what I found startling was that Sanders equated the history of our government's involvement in those kinds of interventions and the situations in Libya and Syria. In Iran, as well as all over Central and South America, the United States was a mostly silent partner in propping up or installing dictators whenever the people of a country rose up in support of democracy. That is the exact opposite of what happened in Libya and Syria.

In past debates, Clinton has used the opportunity to clarify that the United States joined NATO in the military intervention in Libya - not necessarily to overthrow Gaddafi - but because he was broadcasting his intention to slaughter the rebels in Benghazi. That is actually the opposite of the kind of regime change in which this country engaged in the past.

It also seems as if Sanders has completely forgotten the role that Clinton played as Secretary of State during the Arab Spring uprising in Egypt.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton warned on Sunday that removing President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt too hastily could threaten the country’s transition to democracy.

Her remarks were the Obama administration’s most explicit sign yet of its growing emphasis on averting instability in Egypt, even at the expense of the key demand from the Egyptian protest movement: Mr. Mubarak’s immediate removal.

As the saying goes, I'm old enough to remember that most of the progressive community was in an uproar at this move on the part of Clinton and the Obama administration. And yet, there she was doing exactly what Sanders is talking about...avoiding involvement in regime change because it destabilizes the situation and leads to unintended consequences.

I am the first one to applaud the fact that, with the end of the Cold War, this country seems to have finally stopped meddling in the affairs of other countries as a way to thwart the will of the people. But we need to think about what - if anything - our role should be when those people rise up against dictators and are threatened with the genocide of Gaddafi and/or the brutality of Assad's civil war.