Former justice Stevens wants to change Constitution
His solution: Amend the Constitution.
Four years into a hard-earned retirement after serving 35 years on the nation's highest court, Stevens is still speaking out, writing books and book reviews, even swimming in the ocean as long as someone's nearby to help him out. His latest book, Six Amendments: How and Why We Should Change the Constitution, calls attention to some of the nation's most intractable problems.
The bow-tied Stevens, who turned 94 on Sunday, is using the publication of his second book as an opportunity to reflect not only on his literary efforts but also on today's justices, the complex cases they face, and the issues likely to reach the court in the near future, from same-sex marriage to government surveillance.
His main focus is on a half-dozen issues that he believes have been wrongly decided or avoided — issues that can best be addressed by altering a document that's been amended only 18 times in history, and just once since he joined the court in 1975.
"It's certainly not easy to get the Constitution amended, and perhaps that's one flaw in the Constitution that I don't mention in the book," he said during a wide-ranging interview with USA TODAY in his chambers at the court. Noting his book's half dozen proposed amendments, he mused, "Maybe I should have had seven."
Among the amendments Stevens suggests:
• Changing the Second Amendment to make clear that only a state's militia, not its citizens, have a constitutional right to bear arms.
• Changing the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual punishments" by specifically including the death penalty.
• Removing from First Amendment protection any "reasonable limits" on campaign spending enacted by Congress or the states.
• Requiring that congressional and state legislative districts be "compact and composed of contiguous territory" to stop both parties from carving out safe seats.
• Eliminating states' sovereign immunity from liability for violating the Constitution or an act of Congress, which he calls a "manifest injustice."
• Allowing Congress to require states to perform federal duties in emergencies, in order to reduce "the risk of a national catastrophe."
It was the December 2012 school shootings in Newtown, Conn., that focused Stevens' attention on a rule that prevents Congress from requiring states to perform federal duties. The rule had led to holes in a federal database of gun purchases.
"It's called the anti-commandeering rule, which turned out to be the first chapter of a book that kind of grew like Topsy," Stevens said. "I thought that maybe the only way to get rid of the rule is to have a constitutional amendment, and then it occurred to me ... that there really are other provisions of the Constitution that should be looked at more closely."
While Stevens proposes precise language for each proposed amendment, he admits the process is extremely difficult. It takes two-thirds of both houses of Congress or state legislatures to propose an amendment and three-fourths of the legislatures to approve it. The last amendment, blocking Congress from changing its members' salaries between elections, passed in 1992.
"I'm not the kind of optimist that expects this all to happen in the next couple of years," he said.
In the meantime, the third-longest serving justice in history will continue working a couple days a week in his book-lined chambers while splitting time between the nation's capital and Fort Lauderdale. He makes occasional trips to his native Chicago to visit three generations of offspring. "Don't even ask me to count them all up right now," he pleaded.
"I haven't had a single regret" since retiring in 2010, Stevens said. That's due largely to his respect for his replacement, former Harvard Law School dean and U.S. solicitor general Elena Kagan.
"There are a few times where I would have decided a case differently than she has," he acknowledged, but "she's a beautiful writer. She's doing a fine job."
Stevens cautioned against labeling what's become known as "the Roberts Court," after conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. While the four liberal justices usually are allied, the five conservatives often don't stick together. Antonin Scalia is a renegade on criminal defense issues, Samuel Alito in some First Amendment cases, Anthony Kennedy on questions of equal protection and due process, and Roberts himself cast the deciding vote to uphold President Obama's health care law in 2012.
Even Clarence Thomas, a reliable conservative, is often misunderstood, Stevens said. "He's often unfairly judged as not being prepared because he never says a word during oral argument," he said. "But I can tell you he has read the briefs and thought the case through before he votes in conference, and before the argument starts."
Among the issues to watch for, he said, are a constitutional right to same-sex marriage ("Sooner or later, they'll have to address the question"), gun control (Scalia's 2008 opinion protecting handguns in the home won't be the final word), and government surveillance programs, which Stevens defends as constitutional.
As for bringing cameras into the court chamber, Stevens is a traditionalist. "If you leave it up to members of the court, I don't think there's a chance in the foreseeable future," he said. "The downside is that whenever you bring television into a new arena, you're never sure what's going to happen."
The downside of growing old, Stevens has discovered, is that he's finally slowing down. A "bum knee" requires regular cortisone shots. His wife Maryan's worsening health has cut back on their trips to Chicago. Even in Florida, "I found this year that it was not wise to go in the ocean if I didn't have a friend available to help me get out."
But there's still golf, perhaps a little tennis, and a lot of reading. He just finished The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism, by Doris Kearns Goodwin, and is almost through former defense secretary Robert Gates' recent Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. For Stevens, each book is filled with new discoveries.
Even at 94, he said, "It's amazing how many interesting things there are to learn about the world."
Obamas headline Easter Egg Roll
Obama stopped shooting after making one out of three shots from the foul line Monday -- not a great percentage to be sure, but much better than last year's 2-of-22 effort.
"The worst shooting I have ever done," Obama said of his 2013 performance before heading to the tennis court for another activity at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll.
The president and first lady Michelle Obama welcomed hundreds of children and parents who massed on the South Lawn for the 136th edition of this event.
In addition to basketball and tennis, Obama did some book reading — Where the Wild Things Are — and, of course, officiated an egg roll.
"Hey, my brother, you've got to be ready!" he told one egg roll participant.
As he pulled in some two dozen kids for photos and high fives, the president said: "Everybody is a winner!"
Earlier, Obama officially welcomed egg roll revelers to the White House during brief remarks from a White House balcony.
"Is everybody having fun?" Obama said. "Happy Easter! This is the biggest event that we have at the White House all year long and it is our most fun event."
The day featured live music, cooking stations, storytelling, and sports and games.
Up to 30,000 people, each with timed tickets, were expected to cycle through the South Lawn during the day-long event.
Obama joked that he has two main duties on this day every year: Officiating an egg roll and introducing his wife, the first lady.
In her remarks, Michelle Obama stressed the themes of health and fitness, urging adults to make sure "our young people are active and healthy."
She also advocated healthy eating, saying that "I'm going to be over there on the chef's stage doing some demonstrations. I want to make sure that kids know that healthy eating and being active can be fun."
The first lady also praised volunteers as well as a special guest: "And we want to thank the Easter Bunny, as always, for being here."
Republican Odds of U.S. Senate Takeover Rise as Turnout Shrinks
Yet life got in the way for this 27-year-old mother of four, a nursing student, when Florida held a special election for an open congressional seat last month. Without her or a lot of other Obama-backers voting, Democrats lost that contest by almost 2 percentage points in a district the president carried by 1.5 percentage points in 2012.
“The day of the voting, it seemed like everything just went wrong,” Tisdale said. “I had school, my car broke down. I just didn’t make it to the polls.”
A fall-off in turnout is the biggest threat Democrats face in the 2014 midterms when the electorate will trend older and whiter, two constituencies their party hasn’t won in recent elections.
That potentially more hostile voter pool comes amid other signs of trouble for Democrats. In October, nonpartisan political analysts had just one race featuring a Democratic incumbent, Senator Mark Pryor in Arkansas, rated a “toss-up;” five such contests now have that ranking.
Outside money from groups such as a committee founded by the billionaire industrialist brothers, Charles and David Koch, has helped make more Senate races competitive, plowing money into ads targeting vulnerable Democrats.
Add, finally, a factor that political strategists call “the environment:” Obama suffering lagging public approval, the nation’s economy undergoing a slow recovery, and polls showing voters closely divided over which party’s candidates they’re likely to back in November.
National Polls
Obama’s approval rating has run at an average of 42.9 percent in eight national opinion polls conducted since March 20, matching former President George W. Bush’s standing in early 2006, when Republicans lost control of both the House and Senate in midterm elections that he called “a thumpin’.”Jennifer Duffy, senior editor at the nonpartisan Cook Political Report in Washington, has raised her estimate of Republicans taking control of the Senate from a 25 percent chance last fall to 50 percent today. The tilted turnout of midterm elections is only part of her calculation.
“We are weighting environment much higher -- the president’s approval ratings, the generic congressional ballot, just basically what Americans are thinking,” Duffy said in an interview. “The Republicans have been able to expand their own playing field, putting races on the map that weren’t there.”
Toss-Up Races
Republicans need to gain six additional seats to take control of the Senate, and Democratic incumbents are defending most of the hotly contested seats. The party’s chances of retaining seats it now holds in Louisiana, Arkansas, Alaska, North Carolina and Michigan are all rated toss-ups by the Cook Political Report. The report rates two other Democratic seats -- in West Virginia and Montana -- as leaning Republican.Americans for Prosperity, a secret-donor group founded by the Koch brothers, already has run TV ads 21,014 times in House and Senate races through April 7, according to New York-based Kantar Media’s CMAG, which tracks advertising -- more than twice as many as anyone else advertising in the 2014 campaign.
With ads hammering Democrats for support of the president’s Affordable Care Act, the Koch-backed group has targeted nine Senate races where Democrats are defending seats. Its four top targets: incumbents Pryor, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Begich of Alaska.
Democratic Strategy
Democrats, focused on their turnout challenge, say they are investing $60 million in a data-driven, door-to-door, mailbox and e-mail appeal to targeted voters in a campaign the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee calls the “Bannock Street Project.”It draws its name from the Denver campaign headquarters for Colorado Senator Michael Bennet’s 2010 campaign, when he was seeking a full term after being appointed to his seat in 2009. He believes he won a close contest in part by rallying a higher-than-predicted voter turnout and, as current DSCC chairman, he is putting his Colorado model to work for the party.
“This is going to be a turnout election,” Bennet said.
The DSCC says it spent just $7 million on this sort of work nationwide in 2010 -- $2.5 million in Colorado. This year, it is combining intensive polling with a paid staff and volunteer efforts to fuel a voter-turnout drive in 10-12 states, counting on gaining one- to four-percentage point advantages from it.
“It is something we are hyper-focused on,” Matt Canter, DSCC deputy executive director, said in an interview. “The purpose behind these efforts is to make the 2014 electorate look more like 2012 than 2010.”
Florida’s Vote
They’ll need that, based on the results of the year’s first congressional election, the one Tisdale skipped. In the March 11 face-off for the House seat on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Republican David Jolly won by fewer than 4,000 votes, with about 184,000 cast. Just 39.5 percent of registered voters turned out. He defeated Democrat Alex Sink, who narrowly lost a bid for governor in 2010.Tisdale, who is black and said she was motivated to vote for “the first black president,'' also said she would have voted for Sink because Jolly campaigned in opposition to the president’s health-care law.
‘‘Once I saw the election, I was like, ‘Aw man, she lost,’’’ Tisdale said of Sink.
Tisdale also sat out the 2010 midterm elections, when the president’s party lost control of the House.
‘Screaming Siren’
David Plouffe, architect of Obama’s first presidential campaign and author of ‘‘The Audacity to Win,” has called the Florida results “a screaming siren that the same problems that afflicted us” in 2010 “could face us again.”In the 2010 elections, 45.5 percent of those Americans eligible to vote did so, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The youngest voters, those 18 to 24, turned out the least, at 21.3 percent. The oldest turned out the most, with 62.1 percent of those aged 65 to 74 voting. Among the age groups, only the youngest voted Democratic, exit polling showed.
Turnout among white voters was 47.3 percent, versus blacks at 43.5 percent and Hispanics at 31.2 percent. Whites voted Republican by a margin of 62 to 38 percent, while blacks voted Democratic by 9-to-1, Hispanics by about 2-to-1.
In the 2012 presidential election, the Census Bureau reported, eligible-voter turnout was 61.8 percent. For younger voters, the figure was 41.2 percent -- almost twice as high as in 2010. Turnout by those between the ages of 65 and 74 rose by more than 10 percentage points, to 73.5 percent.
Among whites, 62 percent of those eligible voted. Turnout among black voters was 66 percent, while close to half of eligible Hispanics voted.
2014 Prediction
White voters will account for almost 80 percent of this year’s midterm electorate, according to Andrew Kohut, founding director of the Washington-based Pew Research Center. And public opinion of Obama’s performance poses the biggest challenge for his party, Kohut says.When the public isn’t “satisfied with the way things are going for the nation or the way the economy is going, the vote tends to become a referendum on the times,” Kohut said in an interview.
“A good campaign, a good strategy, can help a lot,” Kohut said. “But it’s a matter of how well it deals with the incoming tide and the strength of that tide.”
Virginia Example
Obama’s 2012 re-election benefited from voter turnout operations in states such as Virginia, where canvassers made repeated door-to-door visits to his backers. A similar effort helped Democrat Terry McAuliffe win the state’s governorship last November.Arkansas is not Virginia, though. It’s not a state that Obama carried in 2008 and 2012, as he did Virginia.
Democrats with their intensive organizing efforts “have to go into states this time where they’ve never worked -- Arkansas, Louisiana -- and try to make a difference there,” Duffy said.
In a difficult political environment, Democrats acknowledge, they need to produce a stronger vote than they did in 2010.
“If we don’t do it, we get wiped out,” Representative Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina Democrat, told Bloomberg editors and reporters in an interview. “If we do it, we get back in charge. It’s just that simple.”
Rob Ford, Man of the People
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Rob Ford is some freak Canadian thing, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t representative of his closeted pipe-sucking brothers to the south.
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Sidenote: Drug warriors have long maintained that Nancy Reagan was
misquoted in her famous imprecations to curious teens: What she really
said was “Just say snow.” But I digress.I know what you’re muttering: When we think of American mayors on crack, we think Marion Berry. Rob Ford is just some Freak Canadian Thing. Well, you’re half right. He is some freak Canadian thing, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t representative of his closeted pipe-sucking brothers to the south. Ford’s claim to fame is fiscal hawkdom. His slogan is “I watch every dollar” – and I know this from watching his talk show, which he started with his brother immediately after being stripped of power by those blue-noses in the Toronto City Council.
Ford Nation lasted exactly one episode – but kudos to Sun Media for putting it on the air. Obviously, the forward-looking bigwigs at Sun thought the public was ready for “Crack Chat,” a whole genre of its own—and not a new one, either. Have you watched Meet The Press Lately? David Gregory’s questions pack the same whiff of ass-kissy desperation as an up-for-a-week pipehead telling you he likes your hair before hitting you up for a twenty. (To quote Jonathan Swift, “climbing is performed in the same position as crawling.”) Young Dave needs Access—or “Crack-cess,” as the wags in the NBC makeup parlor like to snicker. Where’s a butane torch when you need one?
Speaking of butane, I’m not the only one to notice the “torch tan.” A certain prominent politician is working from the neck up. I mean, I hate rumors as much as the next guy, but let’s just say it takes more than a tanning booth to get that not-found-in-nature chemical orange. Spend a few thousand nights sucking fun-fumes from a scalding hot stem, and your face will change colors too. (You’ll also weep a lot. Nerves get raw on the Devil’s Dandruff.) I knew a white guy in the Tenderloin whose face turned baboon-butt pink after a bad rock run. It even seeped a little, which the free clinic volunteer said was from flame-based excito-toxins.
The right lighter is important for your crack professional. As for dark tales of high-end firestarters, stamped with the Congressional Seal—perfect for late-night Iowa caucus confabs—who knows? It may be urban legend. But I did once sit next to a famously right-wing Texas legislator on a DC shuttle who ogled a catalogue, reciting the specs for a Colibri Coleman Flexion. I can still hear his voice, in a gently accented Rick Perry purr: “Black. Soft flame. Single-action ignition. Extendable, flexible goose-neck nozzle.”
At “goose-neck nozzle,” I’m nauseous to relate, the man actually moaned, in a Ron Jeremy kind of way, and I don’t even want to speculate what went on south of his seatbelt. Which takes us back to Mayor Ford, who actually requires a manly two seatbelts, Chris Christie-style. For the husky Ford—who proudly told Matt Lauer he had no need for any kind of drug of alcohol rehabilitation—smoking crack does not say “addict.” It says “Man of the People.” Let your fancy-pants Congressmen like Florida’s Trey “Drug Tests for Food-Stamp Leeches” Radell buy the sniffy stuff, so he can sit around with deep-pockets donor climate-deniers and snort ColombianDrano. Big Rob doesn’t play that.
His Honor does what he says and he says what he does. For that I love him, people. Whether he’s got a glass dick in his mouth or not, he’s not afraid to say “I suck.”
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GOP Senators Criticize CIA Ex-Official, Demand Benghazi Probe
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Not Implicated In the Lois Lerner IRS Furor: The White House
Some Republicans charged early in the scandal that the White House or President Barack Obama's reelection campaign had targeted conservatives seeking non-profit status for their so-called social welfare groups. It turned out a handful of liberals got targeted, too.
Nearly 10 months later, Rep. Darrell Issa's (R-Calif.) Oversight Committee on Thursday and Rep. Dave Camp's (R-Mich.) Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday approved referrals that aim to have the Department of Justice punish Lois Lerner, the former head of the IRS Exempt Organizations division.
Issa's committee resolution calls on the full House to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress for asserting her Fifth Amendment rights in not testifying to them. It would theoretically require federal prosecutors to draw up charges. Camp's committee voted to disclose certain taxpayer information to the Justice Department in a request to have Lerner prosecuted for what she may have done to cause the scandal.
That comes after extensive investigations by the committees that included questioning of dozens of IRS workers for depositions. The Oversight Committee collected more than 400,000 pages of documents and the Ways and Means Committee obtained 660,000.
In all of that, if there was any suggestion of White House involvement, no one mentioned the discovery. Indeed, it showed how much the focus has narrowed to one mid-level IRS worker, Lois Lerner.
While Republicans insist there is still more material to be examined, at least one suggested the trail may be at in end, according to a transcript of the closed Ways and Means hearing. The transcript, released Friday, shows Rep. Pete Roskam (R-Ill.) suggested the buck stops with Lerner.
"Based on what we have seen here and the commonsense world of politics that we have all experienced, we know exactly what Lois Lerner was doing. She was targeting people," Roskam said, adding that it was his committee's responsibility to forward the matter to the Department of Justice, and the DOJ's job to determine if she broke the law.
"We are not going to sit here and just look away," Roskam continued. "We are going to give this the imprimatur of the Ways and Means Committee to say, this is so egregious on the part of this employee of the federal government, it appears to us she took it upon herself to target people, to release information, to obstruct an ongoing investigation that we all rely on.
"I would say, look, this is not about donkeys and elephants; this is about the assertion of this committee and our responsibility to call balls and strikes," Roskam added.
And so far, the White House isn't in the ballpark.
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Turkish Govt Says Will Abide By Court Ruling On Judicial Reforms
ANKARA, April 11 (Reuters) - Turkey's government will abide by a
constitutional court ruling rejecting party of a law tightening
government control of the judiciary, Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said
on Friday.
"The regulation we have prepared is a
regulation that conforms with the constitution. The constitutional
court's cancellation decision has not changed my opinion. But of course
we will abide by the court's decision," Bozdag told reporters.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk; Writing by Jonny Hogg; Editing by Nick
Tattersall)
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The Government Listens To Lobbyists And The Wealthy, Not You And Me
That’s according to a forthcoming article in Perspectives on Politics by Martin Gilens of Princeton University and Benjamin I. Page of Northwestern University. The two looked at a data set of 1,779 policy issues between 1981 and 2002 and matched them up against surveys of public opinion broken down by income as well as support from interest groups.
They estimate that the impact of what an average citizen prefers put up against what the elites and interest groups want is next to nothing, or “a non-significant, near-zero level.” They note that their findings show “ordinary citizens…have little or no independent influence on policy at all.” The affluent, on the other hand, have “a quite substantial, highly significant, independent impact on policy,” they find, “more so than any other set of actors” that they studied. Organized interest groups similarly fare well, with “a large, positive, highly significant impact on public policy.”
When they hold constant the preferences of interest groups and the rich, “it makes very little difference what the general public thinks,” they note. The probability that policy change occurs is basically the same whether a small group or a large majority of average citizens are in favor. On the other hand, all else being the same, opposition from the wealthy means that a particular policy is only adopted about 18 percent of the time, but when they support it it gets adopted 45 percent of the time. Similar patterns are true for interest groups. The impact could also be even higher than their findings, as there may be policy differences among those they count as wealthy, which means that the imprecision in their measure “is likely to produce underestimates of the impact of economic elites on policy making,” they write.
One mitigating factor is that they note other research shows that the interests of the average citizen often align with what the wealthy want, although that is not typically true for interest groups.
But plenty of past research has backed up the idea that our government is far more responsive to the needs of the wealthy than those of the poor. Research from the University of Connecticut found that the Senate is only responsive to the policy preferences of the rich, not those of the poor and middle class. And with income inequality continuing to worsen, the problem will only become exacerbated.
One clear example of this problem was the across-the-board, automatic spending cuts of sequestration, which gutted things like Head Start, and Meals on Wheels, while Congress responded quickly to the needs of business-class travelers who faced long airport lines during Federal Aviation Administration furloughs.
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RUSH LIMBAUGH: CBS 'Declared War On The Heartland Of America' By Hiring Stephen Colbert
Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh is not happy with CBS' hiring of comedian Stephen Colbert to replace David Letterman as host of "The Late Show."
"CBS has just declared war on the heartland of America," Limbaugh said on his radio show Thursday. "No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values [and] conservatives. Now, it's just wide out in the open. What this hire means is a redefinition of what is funny and a redefinition of what is comedy."Colbert said in the announcement that he would retire his faux conservative character from "The Colbert Report" when he starts on CBS. However, Limbaugh argued CBS was "blowing up" the traditional, 11:30 p.m. late night show with a brazenly political hire. It amounted, he said, to media "planting a flag."
"They've hired a partisan, so-called comedian, to run a comedy show," Limbaugh said. "So, that's what I think."
