OPINION
At mid-term, it’s Obama vs. Koch
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t is never a tribute to the savvy of voters when an election degenerates into a battle of surrogates or whipping boys, to borrow a great institution from the Tudor kings, who when the prince misbehaved had his best friend cudgeled.
Democracy depends upon the voters not being gulled so easily. But that is what we have in 2014 in Arkansas — and in many other places as well. If you are a Republican running for the U.S. Senate, or even the state legislature, your opponent is Barack Obama and maybe his evil friends, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. Why shouldn’t you run against them? Since 2010 they have supplied the angst for many a Republican victory and you won’t have Obama for another election after this one. Democrats have badly needed to find their own stand-ins when the Republican candidates are themselves not quite scary enough. They may have found them in the Koch brothers, David and Charles. It remains to be seen whether the Kochs, who between them are rich enough to run
the whole state of Arkansas from their hip pockets for the next 16 years, can be made to be as scary as the black ERNEST man from ChiDUMAS cago who signed the Affordable Care Act and then killed Osama bin Laden. Probably not, but they are the best the Democrats have. They are the best that Sen. Mark Pryor has at the moment. If the election were to be decided on political philosophy and the self-interest of voters or even on personality, Pryor would run away with it. His cautious middle-ofthe-road stance on just about everything, which dismays liberals and enrages archconservatives, is where most voters think they are. Only the tea-party right agrees with Rep. Tom Cotton’s position on much of anything — Social Security, Medicare, the rest of Paul Ryan’s spending ideas, foreign policy and warmaking, wages or you name it.
Hobby Lobby case affects more than just contraception
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’ve known for years that the founders of Hobby Lobby and I diverged on some fundamental societal values. Still, lacking the patience for activities such as scrapbooking or candle-making, the store has never been relevant to me; avoiding it created as little personal sacrifice as veering away from Chick-fil-A (as a vegetarian, not much). Because of the corporation’s lawsuit challenging a provision of the Affordable Care Act, heard this week by the U.S. Supreme Court, it’s a company that soon may be deeply relevant to all Americans. In a compromise that was key to the law’s passage, most employers that provide employees health care coverage must now allow female employees to access all contraception methods without charging copays or other fees. Hobby Lobby (along with a Pennsylvania cabinet company in a separate case) argues that certain emergency contraception methods that must be covered veer into abortifacients and, therefore, the company is forced to choose between its core religious tenets and the large fine brought about by violating the act. Obamacare will ultimately be recognized
as one of the nation’s most important sex antidiscrimination measures and the contraceptive provision is a key comJAY ponent of its being BARTH a force for equality. American women vary dramatically in access to contraceptive coverage and myriad studies have shown that even when women’s insurers provide coverage, high copays often push women to use less effective methods or to use contraception in an inconsistent manner. The well-regarded Guttmacher Institute, which filed an amicus brief in the case, notes the disproportionate impact on working class women. Starting to use implants and IUDs have costs equal to a minimum-wage worker’s monthly pay; emergency contraception used in the most dire circumstances is similarly not fiscally feasible for many women. But, the import of the case goes far beyond women’s equality. Hobby Lobby grounds its claims in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, a law that was overwhelmingly passed by Congress and signed by Presi-
But those are matters about which voters know very little and Pryor and his party have had and will have little success in educating them. Neither the president nor the Democrats in Congress who wrote it or voted for it could explain or convincingly promote the Affordable Care Act, at least with anything like the cleverness, gusto and often deceit of the opposition. So now Pryor will face an electorate hostile to the health reforms that he voted for, although the only 300,000 or so Arkansans directly affected by it so far — those who have won health insurance, most for the first time, or benefited from expanded coverage or benefits — should be grateful to him. But it is safe to say that many, perhaps most, of them won’t connect their better fortunes to either Obamacare or Pryor. So we have a proxy race for the Senate between Barack Obama and the Koch brothers, who with eight months to go have spent $30 million on attack ads against Pryor and the handful of other Democratic senators who are considered vulnerable this year. Whatever portals you go to on the Internet, you are liable to come across ads warning about Pryor’s “lies” or mischief. When you click on them, Barack Obama morphs into the scene. Now you’re seeing a few retaliations with the Kochs as the demons. They actually make pretty persuasive
ones, maybe more persuasive than Obama as a surrogate for Pryor. Pryor has been less supportive of the president than any other Democrat in the Senate. The Kochs’ $80 billion in personal wealth includes vast holdings in oil, gas, coal, pipelines and manufacturing, including ownership of much of the paper industry in Arkansas and across the country. The price for owning pivotal congressional seats and legislative factions in states like Arkansas, where their interests are so manifestly subject to pollution regulation and taxation, is trivial compared with the benefits. Despite throwing tens of millions of dollars at defeating Democrats in 2012, Charles Koch added $6 billion to his net worth that year, according to Forbes. Political bogeymen are nothing new. Al Smith and John F. Kennedy had to run with the pope as their proxy. Sen. Dale Bumpers’ opponents, Asa Hutchinson and Mike Huckabee, regularly accused him of voting with Sen. Ted Kennedy, so widely despised in the South, 96 or 98 percent of the time. They’re absolutely wrong, Bumpers would reply. “Kennedy votes with me 98 percent of the time.” He was going to have a stern talk with Kennedy about leaving the traces that 2 per cent. Humor doesn’t work in this climate, and Pryor doesn’t have the Bumpers touch anyway. Who does?
dent Clinton. Its purpose was, in essence, porations as “persons” in the eyes of the to overturn a 1990 Supreme Court case in Supreme Court. While the infamous Citiwhich a majority opinion by Justice Antonin zens United case in 2010 granted corporaScalia argued that religious practices should tions First Amendment protections in the not trump a “neutral law of general appli- realm of political speech, a favorable ruling cability.” The Supreme Court reasserted for the corporations here would extend the 1990 decision in striking down RFRA the constitutional rights of a corporation to as applied to state and local governments another component of the First Amendment in a 1997 case. — free exercise of religion. As two authors of The Hobby Lobby case centers on amicus briefs in the Hobby Lobby case point whether RFRA can be used to stymie a out, across the decades and across the ideofederal regulatory act. A victory by Hobby logical spectrum, Supreme Court justices Lobby would give rise to challenges to cur- have agreed that corporations should have rent and future federal laws that infringe only narrowly defined constitutional rights, upon some private entities’ religious tenets. differentiating them starkly from individuMoreover, it will send a signal for how state- als. Another positive outcome for corporate level RFRA’s (several around the country, personhood in this case would move us with more under consideration) will be ana- increasingly towards a reality where, indeed, lyzed by the federal courts. Most attention “corporations are people, my friend.” Such on this issue has focused on the implica- a reality would starkly limit the governtions of RFRA’s in “protecting” those with ment’s ability to control those corporations religious objections from being subject to even when they engage in practices that are laws that bar discrimination against gays harmful to society. and lesbians, but others have argued with The current Supreme Court has tended a straight face that minimum wage laws toward narrow decisions saving some and health and safety rules intrude into aspects in key cases to be answered later. their core religious beliefs. Thus, a win for Thus, the legal questions related to religious Hobby Lobby has the potential to create “a freedom and corporate personhood that are system in which each conscience is a law part of the Hobby Lobby case may not be unto itself” (to quote Justice Scalia from fully answered this year. Yet even a nudge in one direction or the other will have big the 1990 decision). Finally, a victory for Hobby Lobby ramifications for more than just access to would only further cement the rise of cor- contraceptives. www.arktimes.com
MARCH 27, 2014
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