The Tea Party is turning the Constitution’s most fundamental protections into a refuge for scoundrels and billionaires.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/Vince Clements
November 30, 2013
|
Once again, the First Amendment has become the latest refuge for
America’s scoundrels and oligarchs: Republicans who only want to follow
rules they like are declaring that their speech and religious freedoms
are being violated unless they get their way.
This fraudulent flag-waving is unfolding in two high-profile fights. The first is the latest front in the ongoing
war on Obamacare, where the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would
hear two suits brought by Christian business owners who don’t want to include birth control in employee health plans.
The second is the GOP’s
effort to
block anti-corruption campaign finance laws. The GOP is screaming
censorship after Obama’s Treasury Department proposed new rules that
might deter political operators like Karl Rove from using non-profit
charities as front groups for attacks on specific candidates—which goes
beyond promoting issues.
In both instances, the scoundrels
contend that the First Amendment lets them do what they want, and any
contrary view—such as new laws or regulations from the Obama
administration—is an affront to their fundamental freedom to do as they
please.
The Obamacare challenge came out of dozens of suits filed
soon after the Affordable Care Act became law. The Christian Right
objected to including birth control options in health plans. The
administration’s response was to issue rules noting that the minimum
coverage standards for businesses, which included a full range of
reproductive care, differed from houses of worship—which were given more
latitude on including birth control.
However, the Christian-owned businesses whose challenges are coming to the Supreme Court argue that corporations
share the
same religious rights as citizens under the First Amendment. This is
the latest effort by the Right to treat corporations as people with a
complete complement of constitutional rights.
In the Supreme Court’s controversial
Citizens United ruling
in 2010, the Republican-appointed majority expanded the political
speech rights of corporations, allowing them to spend money in certain
political campaigns as if they were voters—which they’re not. This
latest claim of corporate religious freedom could be even more
significant, Lyle Denniston, who has covered the Supreme Court for a
half-century recently noted.
“The Court is now poised to decide
whether corporations also have a First Amendment right to exercise the
freedom of religion, which can be thought of as another form of
expression—that is, voicing or acting out one’s personal beliefs,” he
wrote. “It
may be too early to say so, but a decision by the justices recognizing
such a corporate right may make the controversy over the
Citizens United ruling pale by comparison.”
On Saturday, the
Wall Street Journal editorial page
attacked the
administration—which created an exception for houses of worship,
religious schools, hospitals and charities. In its typical fashion of
blurring details to buttress its view, it said, “The radical implication
of the White House argument is that the Constitution doesn’t apply to
commercial activity.” Their view is the radical one. Of course, the
Constitution protects commerce, such as in contracts. But the Bill of
Rights primarily protects individual rights.
The people who want
to impose their religious beliefs regardless of cost or consequence are
complaining not just that their freedom is threatened, but that
corporate religious
freedom exists, and must be elevated over the rights of people working
for them. That’s radical. They conveniently forget that under Obamacare
or any health plan, people can decide to take advantage of a medical
procedure or not. These unruly Christian soldiers want to do away with
that private choice from their employees, and have the audacity to argue
their businesses are being deprived of religious liberty under the
First Amendment.
Some legal blogs even go further in noting the hypocrisy and double standards at play. At Balkinization, Joey Fisher
writes that
large employers have been “enlisted… as one part of an overall federal
project of health insurance provision.” He noted that they even get
subsidies to extend coverage to their low-paid or oldest employees,
because some of those will end up in state-run Medicaid polls or be
covered by Medicare. Their role is facilitating access to insurance, not
“to hand out drugs.”
The religious liberty protests are not the
only twisted view waving a fake First Amendment flag. The other newly
prominent example concerns a legal loophole that flourished after the
Supreme Court’s
Citizen United ruling: political operators
creating and using non-profits as fronts for anonymous, large-scale
attacks on political candidates.
Karl Rove was the first to go
big with this strategy, because under tax law, non-profits do not have to disclose their donors. The Koch brothers soon
followed, as did the Democrats. The Center for Responsive Politics
found that
at least $240 million was spent this way in 2012, mostly on negative
television ads. These were the nastiest and least factual attacks,
because their backers evaded accountability by hiding behind blandly
named groups.
Many public-interest groups
protested this abuse of charitable status to the Internal Revenue Service, which licenses non-profits. This week, the IRS
released a
proposed rule change that would expand the definition of political
activity to any communication to more than 500 people that mentions a
candidate’s name in the runup to an election. The idea is to try to
ensure that the primary activity of a non-profit is charitable, or
public education on issues, but not explicitly working to elect or
defeat candidates.
Here, too, the GOP and its allies have been
screaming
censorship, saying that First Amendment freedoms are being violated.
They’re saying, “How dare you?” That’s how dare you stop us from saying
whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want, without any
accountability or disclosure of who is behind attacks on candidates—even
though we also are using government-granted benefits, namely non-profit
tax status.
The
Journal, as expected,
called the
proposed rule, “the latest IRS political crackdown.” It’s actually an
overdue and sensible step to push political campaigns back into the
political sphere, where, ironically, there’s barely any campaign finance
regulation left that has teeth. For example, since the mid-1970s, any
person could spend unlimited sums of their own money on a political
campaign message. That was the result of the Supreme Court’s
Buckley V. Valeo ruling. But the super-wealthy donors to non-profits set up and run by Rove and the
Koch brothers don’t want to campaign that way.
It’s worth remembering that the GOP and conservative Christians have filed
dozens of suits to try to blow up the little that remains of federal and state campaign finance laws. The Supreme Court
heard a
case this fall brought by the GOP that challenges a cap on the total
contributions that any person can give to both candidates and political
parties in a campaign season. The basis for that legal limit is
preventing political corruption by essentially turning piles of campaign
cash into legal bribes.
There are dozens of additional
suits brought
by the GOP and conservative Christians, especially surrounding same-sex
marriage state ballot measures, to overturn disclosure laws that would
list donors. Here, again, the party that is complaining the loudest
about losing First Amendment freedom doesn’t want to stand in public
next to its own words. Tea Party groups have sued to hide their
funders,
claiming they’re like black Americans in the worst of the Jim Crow era.
These
self-serving abuses of the First Amendment are ridiculous and an insult
to history. Nobody is stopping right-wing crusaders from following
their religious beliefs at home or from reaching into their pockets to
pay for their own political messages. But once they step into the public
sphere, either though running government-chartered corporations or
creating non-profit charities, there are legal obligations to employees
and tax laws to be followed. I may be late for work, but that doesn’t
mean I get to run red lights.
Waving the freedom flag is the
right’s favorite argument. But claiming First Amendment rights as a way
to evade uncomfortable laws and inconvenient legal standards—passed by
an administration they intensely dislike—turns the Constitution’s most
fundamental protections into a refuge for scoundrels and oligarchs.
on
November 26, 2013 at 11:16 am
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) coined a spirited term over the weekend for a trio of high-powered Republicans from the Badger State.
In a Saturday interview with USA Today’s Capital Download, Walker talked about his friendship with Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). When asked if both he and Ryan could run for president in 2016, Walker said it was an "interesting question," adding that "who knows what the future will bring?"
What he was sure of was the success of three big-name Wisconsin Republicans, remarking how he, Ryan and Reince Priebus all grew up within miles of one another.
"Paul grew up 15 miles to the west of me," Walker said. "Reince Priebus, who’s the RNC (Republican National Committee) chair, grew up about 20 miles to the east of me. There must have been something in the water at the time….We say it’s kind of a Cheesehead Revolution."
With nearly three years to go before the 2016 presidential picture hits its peak, HuffPost Pollster's latest compilation of 27 publicly available polls shows Ryan and Walker both in the mix as potential GOP candidates. Ryan, who served as the party's 2012 vice presidential candidate, netted 11 percent of the hypothetical vote, while Walker earned eight percent.