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Liberal Opinion Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Vol. 27 NO.9 March 2, 2016

Week

E.J. Dionne Jr.

Getting Obama’s Story Straight There is an imbalance in the argument at the heart of the 2016 presidential campaign that threatens to undercut the Democrats’ chances of holding the White House.

You might think otherwise.

The divisions among Republicans are as sharp as they have been since 1964. Donald Trump may be building on the politics of resentment the GOP has pursued throughout President Obama’s term. But Trump’s mix of nationalism, xenophobia, a dash of economic populism and a searing critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy offers a philosophical smorgasbord that leaves the party’s traditional ideology behind.

Jeb Bush, the candidate who represents the greatest degree of continuity with the Republican past, is floundering. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both CubanAmericans, are competing fiercely over who is toughest on immigration. So much for the party opening its doors to new Americans.

As for the less incendiary John Kasich, he probably won’t be relevant to the race again until the primaries hit the Midwest.

Add to this the GOP’s demographic weakness -- young Americans are profoundly alienated from the party, and non-whites will only be further turned off by the spectacle created

by Trump, Cruz & Co. -- and the likelihood of a third consecutive Democratic presidential victory is in view.

But then comes the imbalance: If there is a common element in the rhetoric of all the Republican candidates, it is that Obama’s presidency is an utter disaster, and he is trying to turn us, as Rubio keeps saying, into “a different kind of country.” You’d imagine from hearing the Republicans speak

catastrophe that struck at the end of George W. Bush’s term. But the democratic socialist from Vermont is not shy about insisting that much more should have been done to break up the banks, rein in the power of the wealthy, and provide far more sweeping health insurance and education benefits.

(Kasich is a partial exception) that we are in the midst of a new Great Depression, have just been defeated in a war, have lost our moral compass entirely, have no religious liberty, and are on the verge of a dictatorship established by a slew of illegal executive orders.

Oh, yes, and the president who brought about all these horrors has lost the authority to name a Supreme Court justice, no matter what the Constitution -- which should otherwise be strictly interpreted -says.

You can laugh or cry over this, but it is a consistent message, carried every day by the media whenever they cover the Republican contest.

The Democrats offer, well, a more nuanced approach. True, Hillary Clinton has embraced Obama more and more, seeing him as a life raft against Bernie Sanders’ formidable challenge. In particular, she knows

A good case can be made -- and has been made by progressives throughout Obama’s term -- that if Democrats said that everything was peachy, voters who are still hurting would write off the party entirely.

But ambivalence does not win elections. Running to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, George H. W. Bush triumphed by proposing adjustments in Reagan’s environmental and education policies, but otherwise touting what enough voters decided were Reagan’s successes.

Democrats need to insist that while much work remains to be done, the United States is in far better shape economically than most other countries in the world. The nation is better off for the reforms in health care, financial regulation and environmental protection enacted during Obama’s term and should be proud of its energetic, entrepreneurial and diverse citizenry.

If Clinton, Sanders and their party don’t provide a forceful response to the wildly inaccurate and ridiculously bleak characterization of Obama’s presidency that the Republicans are offering, nobody will. And if this parody is allowed to stand as reality, the Democrats will lose.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne.

that African-American voters deeply resent the way Obama has been treated by Republicans. (No other president, after all, has ever been told that any nomination he makes to the Supreme Court will be ignored.) Tying herself to Obama is a wise way of shoring up her up-tonow strong support among voters of color.

Nonetheless, because so many Americans have been hurt by rising inequality and the economic changes of the last several decades, neither Democratic presidential candidate can quite say what hopefuls representing the incumbent party usually shout from the rooftops: Our stewardship has been a smashing success and we should get another term.

Sanders, in fact, represents a wholesale rebellion against the status quo. He tries to say positive things about Obama and how the (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group president dealt with the economic 2-18-16

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Leonid Bershidsky

Sanders Can Win Black Votes Away From Clinton Anyone who thinks that Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders can’t win black votes should have seen him at a prayer breakfast in Columbia, South Carolina, on Tuesday. He may not have enough time to erase the big lead that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton enjoys with the state’s African-Americans, but he’s far from hopeless on that front. It helps him that Clinton’s support, as elsewhere, is pragmatic rather than inspired.

Allen University, where the prayer breakfast took place, is a small, historically black school with a fouryear graduation rate of just 5 percent and a loose admissions policy, where every student gets at least some needbased financial aid. A few professors were pretty much the only white people in the audience, and Sanders was the only white person on stage.

Sanders, who was brought up Jewish, has said he’s not “particularly religious,” but the people next to him were ministers, and when one asked the audience to bow their heads in prayer, the senator bowed too. When R&B star Shirley Murdock, a bornagain Christian invited to sing at the gathering, asked those who had a dream to raise a hand, Sanders’s hand shot up with the others.

Sanders is an unlikely choice for the people who welcomed him at Allen.

State Rep. Joe Neal, D, who is also a Baptist pastor, had to come up with a creative way to integrate the senator’s

stump speech into what was essentially a prayer meeting. He recalled Sanders responding to a question about of his faith by saying, “My spirituality is that we are all in this together.” “That resonated with me,” Neal said.

Sanders is a white guy of 74. At one point in the meeting, he asked the audience whether any of them were around during Martin Luther King’s march on Washington. “It makes me feel really old,” he said, when no hands went up. “I was there.”

Yet the magical simplicity of Sanders’s socialist agenda does resonate with audiences, black or white. He got enthusiastic applause for the same speech he has been making since Iowa, and at times, everyone rose to their feet to acknowledge the boldness of his ideas. That speech has always contained parts about combating youth unemployment, particularly severe among blacks, and about ending arrests for marijuana possession, which give too many black youngsters a criminal record. Sanders evidently doesn’t think it makes sense to tailor it to different audiences: All his beliefs are already in it. He looked incongruous in these surroundings -but sincere, despite his concessions to the format.

The event was by invitation only, so a small crowd of uninvited potential voters -- all black -- waited for the senator at the exit. As I came out,

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a boy of about 10 thought I (also a white man) was Bernie Sanders, and his mother had to disabuse him of the notion. A local Sanders campaign staffer, who had been with him since the early days of his run, told me that at the beginning, no one in South Carolina had even heard of him, but as the grapevine and the volunteers worked, he began attracting unlikely allies. Sanders’s strategy was simple but smart: Knowing he is popular with students, the Vermonter has been purposefully touring historically black schools. He has also gone to the leftist pastors who could relate to his preaching manner and his message of sharing and compassion.

will probably shrink further by voting day -- I doubt her race-focused speech Tuesday in Harlem was of any use to her in South Carolina, where, like in the other early voting states, local presence appears to win more points than media reports -- she is poised to win here.

Clinton’s better name recognition is still part of it. The other part -- Clinton’s pragmatic, step-by-step approach to the progressive agenda -- may turn out to be more important to black voters in South Carolina than it was to almost exclusively white ones in Iowa and New Hampshire.

I talked about it with Ken Riley, president of the International Longshoremen’s Association’s Local 1422, which counts about 850 members, almost all of them black.

Riley is a charismatic 62-year-old Charlestonian who fought his way through segregated schools and a harsh four years at Charleston College (then almost all white) to become an important union organizer. At the ILA, he’s also regional vice president for the entire South. South Carolina has a Republican-dominated legislature, and unions have a hard time in the state.

“If someone wants to bring union jobs here, these guys say, ‘We don’t want them,’ “ Riley says.

The union has endorsed Clinton, and Riley supports her. “I have lived in the South all my life,” Riley told

He has made a connection with Black Lives Matter activists and people close to the victims of police shootings At a rally in Columbia on Tuesday, Sanders was accompanied by state Rep. Justin Bamberg, D, the lawyer for the family of Walter Scott, the black motorist shot last year by an officer in North Charleston.

All this has worked to some extent.

Sanders’s support among South Carolina Democrats has risen from 1.9 percent in July 2015 to about 36 percent today. According to Public Policy Polling, in November, 86 percent of the party’s African-American voters backed Clinton and only 11 percent were for Sanders. Now it’s 63-23 in Clinton’s favor. Though her advantage Bershidsky continued on page 3

Reference Guide Government Democrats 1 Dionne

Bernie Sanders 2 Bershidsky 3 Jaffe

Hillary Clinton 4 Hunt 4 Tannen 5 Lyons

Government

Government

National

10 Leahy/Goldman 10 Wilkinson 11 Carter 12 Harrop 12 Petri 13 Allen 14 Marcus 14 Page

15 Reid 18 Wilkinson 18 Lane 19 Collins 20 Witcover 20 Feldman 21 Page 22 Kaul 22 Downie 23 Press 24 Hirshman 24 Witcover

26 Kristof 26 Smith

Republicans

2016

6 Friedman 6 Harrop 7 Krugman

Republicans 8 Robinson 8 Hunt 9 Bruni

16-17 Liberal Delineations

Republicans

Economy

Gun Control 27 King

Race

28 Swanson

Technology

28 Bershidsky 29 Wadhwa

Women

30 Rosenberg 30 Petri 31 Gadebusch

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Harry Jaffe

Sanders Can Win The Minority Vote Organizing a protest against police violence in the black community, a curly-haired kid from Brooklyn found himself with a Chicago police officer’s finger in his face. “It’s outside agitators like you who’re screwing this city up,” the cop told him. “The races got along fine before you people came here.”

That young man was Bernie Sanders, and the confrontation took place in 1962, while Sanders was a University of Chicago student. In the following years, Sanders would lead sit-ins against housing discrimination and get arrested while marching for equal education.

Now, as the 2016 campaign for president bears down on the fractious states beyond Iowa and New England, Sanders - today a 74-year-old U.S. senator from Vermont and candidate for the Democratic nomination for president - needs to convince minority voters that black lives still matter as much to him as they did 50 years ago.

Can he attract African Americans, Latinos and other minorities nationwide? And does Sanders - an avowed democratic socialist - have the ability to do this while finding ways to win over white voters beyond the progressives fueling his surprising rise?

In short, does the Sanders campaign have legs?

I recently spent a year researching Sanders’s life for my book “Why Bernie Sanders Matters,” and I’m

Bershidsky continued from page 2

me, “and I struggle every day against the establishment. I like Bernie and the lofty goals he’s laying out, but how realistic are they? Tell me how, what bills you’re gonna pass with this Congress? Hillary is a leftist tempered by reality. I like her connections on both sides of the aisle.”

Riley fears that if Sanders wins and tries to push his idea of a singlepayer health-insurance system, that will only open up the health-care issue to Republican interference. “I have a 23 year-old son who is covered by my policy thanks to Obamacare,” Riley said.

In 2008, Riley and his union were about to back Clinton but switched to Barack Obama: “Our membership is 99.99 percent African-American, and it could have been the only serious chance we had to elect an AfricanAmerican president.” Now, Clinton comes off as more protective of

convinced it would be a mistake to turns his opponents’ aggression against underestimate his political skills and them by declining to respond in kind. stamina.

This worked in 2005, when Republican Richard Tarrant told voters “not a For starters, Sanders cut his single business will move to Vermont” political teeth running against if Sanders won a Senate seat. Sanders established opponents who didn’t take ignored him and won 70 percent to 30 him seriously. Sound familiar? In his percent. first race for mayor of Burlington, Vt., in 1980, the five-term incumbent Sanders famously runs against Democrat scoffed at the young “the establishment,” but make socialist for dwelling on the Vietnam no mistake: He’s an established War and imperialism. Sanders won politician. Counting his first quixotic by 10 votes by bringing together low- campaign for Senate in 1971, he’s income people, disaffected Democrats run for office 20 times, including for and municipal workers fed up with mayor, governor, congressman and the city’s Democratic machine. The senator. For his presidential quest, he’s Democrats called it a fluke and vowed assembled a top-tier team that’s been to unseat him two years later. Sanders with him for decades and augmented won a second term, then two more. it with 2008 Obama campaign digital In 1990, Sanders moved on to the guru Scott Goodstein, who is helping House of Representatives. By the time Sanders raise millions online and he ran for his fourth term, in 1996, the through social media.

Republican National Committee had The senator has leveraged his him in its crosshairs. Coincidentally, represention of a rural state. “Bernie has current GOP presidential contender built ties to farmers across the country,” John Kasich, then House Budget says Dexter Randall, a seventhCommittee chairman, came to Vermont generation dairy farmer in Vermont’s to campaign against him. Republicans remote “Northeast Kingdom.” “He sicced a private investigator on his ex- gets us. He speaks our language.” He wife. Vermonters cried foul and sent gets veterans, too. After Sanders voted Sanders back to Congress - four more against a 1991 resolution supporting times. the Gulf War, veterans turned their Which highlights another feature of backs on him at a Burlington event.

Sanders’s repertoire: Attack ads seem Chagrined, he began catering to vets, to boomerang. Sanders has perfected and he’s found a way to straddle the a kind of political jujitsu whereby he fault line between questioning the Obama’s legacy than Sanders, and voters like Riley, who are proud of their choice in 2008 and 2012, appreciate it.

Yet Riley isn’t a Clinton fan in the way Sanders’s supporters are fans.

“I’m not feeling the movement, not even seeing any signs or anything,” he complains, though a Clinton staffer told me that the campaign has held nearly 2,100 grass- roots campaign events and that its volunteers have spent 20,000 hours knocking on doors and calling neighbors.

If it were up to Riley, the labor unions would set up a third party and pick their own candidates. “Somehow that only ever comes up a year before a presidential election,” he says.

Stuck with the Democrats, though, he just hopes for an easier battle in the general election: “If Bernie wins the nomination, we’ll support him, too, but we will have to pray and fight really hard for him to beat the Republicans.”

This kind of support for Clinton

doesn’t amount to a “firewall” -- a term that has been used to describe her advantage in more ethnically diverse states than Iowa and New Hampshire. I can’t help thinking that had Sanders been more active in the South before, he could have broken through the skepticism of important African-American leaders such as Riley. As it is, his effort is impressive but it probably comes too late both for South Carolina and for the Southern states that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 1. Clinton’s superior preparation counts for more here than it did in the first two states.

African-American voters’ experience has taught them that it’s harder to get things done than to break things.

They want a president who can make progress.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-17-16

military budget and supporting those who serve. The Veterans Affairs reform bill he crafted with Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, in 2014 strengthened this bond.

Sanders’s Democratic opponent, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, has strongly criticized his record on guns, especially his vote against the Brady bill and for legislation shielding gun makers from lawsuits. But this issue, too, could be a hidden strength.

Sanders explains that he respects gun owners because he represents a state where so many residents hunt. Might such a stance win him votes among the nation’s gun owners?

Finally, if you’ve paid any attention at all to the 2016 campaign, you’ve no doubt heard Sanders hammer away at his major themes: The top 1 percent has an inordinate amount of wealth, American democracy has become an oligarchy, the economy is rigged. It’s not a message that’s narrowly aimed at minorities, but it’s not hard to see how it might resonate with them all the same.

Indeed, given recent reports of Sanders making headway with supposedly proClinton Hispanic voters in Nevada, this may already be happening.

His longtime aide Phil Fiermonte calls it “the oligarchy speech,” and he’s been delivering it for decades.

“The world has come around to see things like he does,” Fiermonte told me, “through the same lens.” Does “the world” include Nevada and South Carolina? How about Florida and Ohio?

That’s the skeptics’ biggest question.

Pundits love to compare Sanders’s campaign to the failed efforts of stalwart liberals such as Howard Dean, George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy. They roll out Republican Barry Goldwater. But these are extraordinary times. A great many voters seem receptive to Sanders’s brand of political revolution. If he can calibrate the 1960s rhetoric to the moment, persuade minorities to join his fight and build on his connections with Middle American constituencies, his campaign could go much further than anyone - even Sanders himself ever thought possible.

Harry Jaffe is the author of the new book “Why Bernie Sanders Matters” and a writer for Washingtonian magazine. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-17-16

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Albert Hunt

On Planet Clinton, Where Everyone’s A Critic Hillary Clinton’s New Hampshire trouncing at the hands of Bernie Sanders has set Clintonland afire. The rout set loose a cacophony of complaints from allies about the candidate’s campaign strategy and staff.

If she loses the Nevada caucuses this weekend the clamor will grow louder.

It stands to reason that the biggest targets for second-guessing are the most visible and obvious staffers: campaign chief Robby Mook and pollster Joel Benenson.

QuickTake U.S. Campaign Finance Some of the second-guessers talk about better candidate messaging, or taking on Sanders more effectively, or reassigning staff in key battlegrounds.

Yet there’s more criticism than solutions and for a good reason: There’s not much they can do about the shortcomings of their candidate.

Some of the carping is from people who have personal scores to settle. Take Mark Penn, the top strategist in Clinton’s ill-fated 2008 campaign. He is putting out the word that he regularly talks about the campaign with former President Bill Clinton, who had started criticizing this year’s staffers even before the New Hampshire votes were tallied.

Penn was taken to the cleaners in 2008 by the team representing Senator Barack Obama, and eventually dumped.

Clinton donors are not a happy lot after New received from big Wall Street firms appear to be the Hampshire, and if the inevitability of a Clinton bigger problem. People know that the Clintons are victory disappears so will some of the money. wealthy. So why did they need to take hundreds of thousands of dollars to pal around with moneyed It’s easier for Clinton partisans to blame interests? That’s harder to explain than email. staffers than to acknowledge their candidate’s flaws. The best answer to Clinton’s political problems She’s failed to make the emotional connection to is patience. After a tough slog, she’s still better voters that any successful politician needs; she positioned than Sanders to be nominated in represents gradualism in an agitated time. She Philadelphia this summer. Republican presidential will continue to have a problem with young voters candidates have plenty of personal and political however often she pals around with Katy Perry. flaws, too. But in the Hillary constellation, patience A little more transparency could help. I used to is in short supply. believe that the controversy over her private email Albert Hunt is a Bloomberg columnist. server at the State Department caused most of the (c) 2016, Bloomberg View decline in her favorability ratings.

2-18-16 Now, though, the huge speaking fees she

But there are other second-guessers, with various motives and perspectives. They include: -- The ex-president and some of his allies. This gets complicated. No politician is closer to the Clintons than Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe.

He is high on Mook, who ran his gubernatorial campaign. Bill Clinton isn’t, and his political instincts are the stuff of legend, but he often wears blinders when it comes to analyzing his wife’s performance. This group talks about recruiting veterans from old Clinton wars; Ron Klain, a former staff chief to two vice presidents, has recently been mentioned.

-- Hillary Clinton aides like Huma Abedin, officially the deputy campaign manager but perhaps the candidate’s closest confidant, and Cheryl Mills, another longtime adviser. The most equal of equals is the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea, who, insiders say, forcefully offers political advice despite a lack of professional political experience.

-- The super PACs. Guy Cecil, a longtime Clinton adviser and top Democratic strategist, runs the Super PAC Priorities USA Action. A top strategist is Paul Begala, who along with James Carville was the architect of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential victory. They steer clear of the campaign, as the law requires, but deal with donors and politicians. More problematic is another proClinton Super PAC, Correct the Record. That’s the research and response group run by David Brock, a onetime Clinton-hating right winger turned Clinton cheerleader.

-- The donors. Whether from Hollywood, trial lawyers’ associations or Wall Street, fat cats want one thing: a return on investment, namely winning.

But pair the word with Hillary Clinton, and a search spews headlines accusing her of “naked ambition,” “unbridled ambition,” “ruthless ambitions” - even of being “pathologically ambitious.” In a spoof, the satirical websitethe Onion exposed the injustice and absurdity of demonizing a candidate for this requisite quality through its own version of such headlines: “Hillary Clinton Is Too Ambitious to Be the First Female President.”

Robin Lakoff, the linguist who first identified the double bind as it applies to women in her 1975 book “Language and Woman’s Place,” has pointed out that it accounts for the persistent impressions of Clinton as inauthentic and untrustworthy. We develop these impressions, Lakoff notes, when people don’t talk and act as we think they should, given who they are and what we know about them.

In Clinton’s case, she explains, they come precisely from the fact that she has characteristics, such as toughness, that we require of a candidate but that just don’t feel right in a woman.

The trickiest thing about the double bind is that it operates imperceptibly, like shots from a gun with a silencer. “It has nothing to do with gender,” I heard recently. “It’s just that she’s shrill.” When is the last time you heard a man called shrill? “She should stop shouting,” another critic advised. How is a candidate to be heard over the din of a cheering crowd without shouting? Both these comments came from women. Surprising? No. Women are just as likely, if not more likely, to react this way.

After all, it’s from peers that girls learn to play down their power lest they be ostracized for being

Deborah Tannen

The Double Bind Trapping Hillary Clinton

Now we know that Gloria Steinem and Madeleine Albright don’t actually think that anyone should vote for Hillary Clinton simply because she’s a woman. Does that mean we can forget about Clinton’s gender? I don’t think so. But the question we face is subtler, more complicated and harder to address than “Do I vote for her because she’s a woman?” Rather, it’s “Can I be sure I’m judging this candidate accurately, given the double bind that confronts all women in positions of authority?”

A double bind is far worse than a straightforward damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t dilemma.

It requires you to obey two mutually exclusive commands: Anything you do to fulfill one violates the other. Women running for office, as with all women in authority, are subject to these two demands: Be a good leader! Be a good woman!

While the qualities expected of a good leader (be forceful, confident and, at times, angry) are similar to those we expect of a good man, they are the opposite of what we expect of a good woman (be gentle, self-deprecating and emotional, but not angry). Hence the double bind: If a candidate - or manager - talks or acts in ways expected of women, she risks being seen as underconfident or even incompetent. But if she talks or acts in ways expected of leaders, she is likely to be seen as too aggressive and will be subject to innumerable other negative judgments - and epithets - that apply only to women.

An example: Anyone who seeks public office, especially the highest one, must be ambitious, yet that word is rarely applied to male candidates because it goes without saying. And ambition is admirable in a man, but unacceptable - in fact, downright scary - in a woman. Google “Bernie Sanders ambitious,” and you get headlines about the candidate’s “ambitious plans.” Try it with Donald Trump, and you find references to his

“ambitious deportation plan” and “ambitious real estate developments.” When the word is used to describe Trump himself, it’s positive, as in “Trump is proud and ambitious, and he strives to excel.”

Tannen continued on page 5

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Gene Lyons

Media Misrepresentations Of Clintons Are Nothing New Alas, this is pretty much where I came in. Starting in 1994, when your humble, obedient servant was approached to contribute weekly political columns, I found the behavior of the national political press shocking and alarming.

Today, it’s even worse.

Even so, it’s not every day a TV talker apologizes for broadcasting a doctored video misrepresenting something Bill Clinton said about President Obama. So it’s definitely worth taking note.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes did that the other night, at least temporarily persuading me that the network hasn’t yet gone full Fox News.

But first, some ancient history on a theme directly relevant to today’s Democratic primary campaign: Hillary the Big Liar.

See, by 1994, I’d been writing professionally for years, mainly as a literary journalist and monthly magazine reporter. The publications I’d written for employed assiduous fact-checkers.

Opinions were expected, so long as they were grounded in fact. After all, what’s the point of winning an argument if you’ve got to cheat to do it?

However, that’s not how Washington journalism works. One incident in particular astonished me.

In April 1994, Hillary Clinton had given a press conference about the make-believe Whitewater scandal.

She answered every question the press threw at her for a couple of hours. The immediate effect was rather like last fall’s Benghazi hearings: Her detailed

answers calmed the storm. Having previously given sworn testimony to Treasury Department investigators probing Jim McDougal’s failed savings and loan, she was on solid ground.

Tannen continued from page 4

woman has to be better than her male counterparts - just as Clinton is, according to the New York Times editorial endorsing her last month, “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified candidates in modern history.”

Voters of all ages must ask whether the lens through which they view Clinton is being clouded by these invisible yet ubiquitous forces.

To make sure they’re seeing clearly, they need to understand - and correct for - the double bind.

Deborah Tannen is a linguistics professor at Georgetown University and the author of “Talking From 9 to 5: Women and Men at Work.”

“bossy.”

Two years further on, ABC’s “Nightline” dug up a video clip of an answer she’d given about a specific issue and seamlessly deleted two sentences by substituting stock footage of journalists taking notes.

Then they pretended she’d been asked a much broader question, and accused her of lying about the information they’d subtracted.

Specifically, Hillary acknowledged signing a letter “because I was what we called the billing attorney” for the Madison Guaranty account.

“Nightline” charged her with concealing exactly that fact. Jeff Greenfield said no wonder “the White House was so worried about what was in Vince Foster’s office when he killed himself” -- a contemptible insinuation.

Within days, the doctored quote was all over ABC News, CNN, the New York Times and everywhere else. Almost needless to say, Maureen Dowd ran with it. William Safire predicted her imminent criminal indictment.

In short, the theme of Hillary Clinton as epic liar began with an instance of barefaced journalistic fraud.

Everybody involved should have been run out of the profession. It wasn’t exactly an obscure mystery.

This helps answer the question that Steinem and Albright brought into focus: Why aren’t more young women (or, more precisely, as Post reporter Janell Ross recently pointed out, young white women) flocking to support the first woman with a serious shot at the presidency? The double bind lowers its boom on women in positions of authority, so those who haven’t yet risen to such positions have not yet felt its full weight. They may well believe (as I did when I was young) that when the time comes, they’ll be judged fairly, based on their qualifications. They probably Special to The Washington Post have not yet experienced the truism 2-21-16 that to get equal consideration, a

Video of the press conference existed.

The New York Times had printed the full transcript.

But there was no Internet. Beltway pundits covered for each other like crooked cops.

don’t have a president who is a change-maker with a Congress who will work with him. But the president has done a better job than he has gotten credit for. And don’t you forget it!”

(APPLAUSE) “Don’t you forget it! Don’t you forget it!”

(LOUDER APPLAUSE) “Don’t you forget it. Let me just tell you. I’ve been there, and we shared the same gift. We only had a Democratic Congress for two years.

And then we lost it.

“There’s some of the loudest voices in our party say -- it’s unbelievable - say, ‘Well the only reason we had it for two years is that President Obama wasn’t liberal enough!’

Is there one soul in this crowd that believes that?”

Judging by the crowd response, there was not.

Mediaite.com’s Christopher put it succinctly: “This is an edit so egregious, it rivals the worst in dishonest political ads, and surpasses them.”

Greatly to his credit (and my surprise), Chris Hayes subsequently rebroadcast Bill Clinton’s remarks in full. “We shouldn’t have done that,” he admitted.

No, they certainly should not.

Arkansas Times columnist Gene Lyons is a National Magazine Award winner and co-author of “The Hunting of the President” (St. Martin’s Press, 2000). You can email Lyons at eugenelyons2@yahoo.com.

So anyway, last week Bill Clinton made a campaign appearance for his wife in Memphis. If you’d only seen it on MSNBC or read about it in the Washington Post, you’d think he made a political blunder, trashing President Obama as a weak leader.

On Chris Hayes’ program “All In,” the host chided the former President for going “a bit off message.”

MSNBC aired this video clip: “BILL CLINTON: She’s always making something good happen.

She’s the best change-maker I’ve ever known.

A lot of people say, ‘Oh well, you don’t understand. It’s different now. It’s rigged.’ Yeah, it’s rigged - because you don’t have a president who is a change-maker.”

Full stop.

Ouch! To the Washington Post’s Abby Phillips, “it sounded like he was agreeing with one of (Bernie) Sanders’s central arguments about income inequality -- but blaming the sitting president for it.”

Older and thinner, Mr. Yesterday was clearly losing it.

Except he wasn’t. The real villain was, once again, creative video editing. Tommy Christopher at Mediaite.com restored the full context.

So here’s what Bill Clinton actually Copyright 2016, Gene Lyons said about President Obama: 2-17-16 “Yeah, it’s rigged -- because you

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Thomas Friedman

Who Are We? I find this election bizarre for many reasons but none more than this: If I were given a blank sheet of paper and told to write down America’s three greatest sources of strength, they would be “a culture of entrepreneurship,” “an ethic of pluralism” and the “quality of our governing institutions.” And yet I look at the campaign so far and I hear leading candidates trashing all of them.

Donald Trump is running against pluralism.

Bernie Sanders shows zero interest in entrepreneurship and says the Wall Street banks that provide capital to risk-takers are involved in “fraud,” and Ted Cruz speaks of our government in the same way as the anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist, who says we should shrink government “to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” (Am I a bad person if I hope that when Norquist slips in that bathtub and has to call 911, no one answers?)

I don’t remember an election when the pillars of America’s strength were so under attack — and winning applause, often from young people!

Trump’s famous hat says “Make America great again.” You can’t do that if your message to Hispanics and Muslims is: Get out or stay away.

We have an immigration problem. It’s an outrage that we can’t control our border, but both parties have been complicit — Democrats because they saw new voters coming across and Republicans because they saw cheap labor coming across.

But we can fix the border without turning every Hispanic into a rapist or Muslim into a terrorist.

Trump seized on immigration as an emotional wedge to rally his base against “the other” and to blame “the other” for lost jobs, even though more jobs, particularly low-skilled jobs, are lost to microchips, not Mexicans.

What we have in America is so amazing — a pluralistic society with pluralism. Syria and Iraq are pluralistic societies without pluralism. They can only be governed by an iron fist.

Just to remind again: We have twice elected a black man whose grandfather was a Muslim and who defeated a woman to run against a Mormon!

Who does that? That is such a source of strength, such a magnet for the best talent in the world. Yet Trump, starting with his “birther” crusade, has sought to undermine that uniqueness rather than celebrate it.

Sanders seems to me like someone with a good soul, and he is right that Wall Street excesses helped tank the economy in 2008. But thanks to the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, that can’t easily happen again.

I’d take Sanders more seriously if he would stop bleating about breaking up the big banks and instead breathed life into what really matters for jobs: nurturing more entrepreneurs and starter-uppers. I never hear Sanders talk about where employees come from. They come from employers — risk-takers, people ready to take a second mortgage to start a business. If you want

more employees, you need more employers, not percent of new jobs created since 1995 have just government stimulus. come from small enterprises.”

Unlike Sanders, Ted Cruz does not have a I have just the plan for him:The 2015 “Milstein good soul. He brims with hate, and his trashing Commission on Entrepreneurship and Middle- of Washington, D.C., is despicable. I can’t defend Class Jobs” report produced by the University of every government regulation. But I know this: As Virginia, which notes: “The identity of America the world gets faster and more interdependent, the is intrinsically entrepreneurial [enshrined] by quality of your governing institutions will matter the founders, popularized by Horatio Alger, more than ever, and ours are still pretty good. I embodied by Henry Ford. … With enough hard wonder how much the average Russian would work anyone can use entrepreneurship to pave pay to have our FBI or Justice Department for a their own way to prosperity and strengthen their day, or how much a Chinese city dweller would communities by creating jobs and growing their pay for a day of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission or Environmental Protection local economy.”

Agency? Cruz wraps himself in an American flag In short, we’re not socialists.

The report outlines many steps government can and spits on all the institutions that it represents. take — from deregulation to education to finance America didn’t become the richest country in — to unlock more entrepreneurship in America, the world by practicing socialism, or the strongest and not just in Silicon Valley, but anywhere, like country by denigrating its governing institutions, Louisville, where “a vibrant startup community or the most talent-filled country by stoking fear of has developed. … Today, the city boasts five immigrants. It got here via the motto “E Pluribus accelerators, a vibrant angel investor community Unum” — Out of Many, One. and partnerships with large companies to support Our forefathers so cherished that motto they startup enterprises like the GE FirstBuild center, didn’t put it on a hat. They put it on coins and which brings together micro-manufacturing then on the dollar bill. For a guy with so many of and the maker movement.” We can do this! We those, Trump should have noticed by now. are doing it. “Roughly half of private-sector c.2016 New York Times News Service employees work in small businesses, and 65 2-16-16

Froma Harrop

Put Puppy-Whistle Politics On A Leash

In politics, the “dog whistle” is coded language designed to delight a targeted subgroup and pass over the heads of everyone else. Other terms, such as “establishment,” “Washington insider” and “free trade,” are not quite full-grown dog whistles. Let’s call them puppy whistles.

These are expressions whose meanings remain vague. For the puppy whistle, the vaguer the better.

Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders rail against “the establishment.” This is a way of saying that they are not favored by the traditional leaders of their parties -- the leaders said to have let us down.

“Establishment” is hard to define, and when you do, it’s sometimes carries positive feelings. Who among us wouldn’t be impressed by a plumber’s ad reading, “The Wrench Brothers, Established in 1971”?

On the left, “the establishment” is itself a highly established term. It gained steam in the 1960s as a designation for the adults who messed things up for us kids. Sanders uses it as pure pejorative.

When Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Fund endorsed Hillary Clinton, Sanders responded, “Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time, and some of these groups are, in fact, part of the establishment.”

Clinton’s unfortunate comeback was that no one would be less establishment than the first woman president.

Harvard political scientist Danielle Allen then wrote a piece in The Washington Post titled, “Sorry, Hillary: You are the establishment.” She never explains why, uh, Hillary should be sorry for that -- or more basically, why being part of the establishment is necessarily bad. The National Audubon Society has been around for 111 years.

Is that any reason to hold it in low regard?

Allen offers this line: “Bernie Sanders is right that Clinton’s long list of endorsements represents her muscle within the Democratic Party.” That may be so, but if President Obama had that kind of muscle, we’d probably now have a governmentrun public option on the federal health insurance marketplace.

“Washington insider” is a puppy whistle favored by populists across the spectrum. It’s No. 2 on the right’s list of condemnations (after liberal).

The coded meaning is that long-time Washington politicians become servants of lobbyists. It really shouldn’t matter how long a politician has worked in Washington but rather what the politician has done in Washington.

“Free trade” has long held negative meaning for populists in both parties. The left continues to use NAFTA -- the North American Free Trade Agreement -- as almost a curse word, as the cause of devastating losses among our manufacturing workers. But how many sweatshirts in your

Harrop continued on page 7

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Paul Krugman

Varieties of Voodoo America’s two big political parties are very different from each other, and one difference involves the willingness to indulge economic fantasies.

Republicans routinely engage in deep voodoo, making outlandish claims about the positive effects of tax cuts for the rich. Democrats tend to be cautious and careful about promising too much, as illustrated most recently by the way Obamacare, which conservatives insisted would be a budget-buster, actually ended up being significantly cheaper than projected.

But is all that about to change?

On Wednesday four former Democratic chairmen and chairwomen of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers — three who served under Barack Obama, one who served under Bill Clinton — released a stinging open letter to Bernie Sanders and Gerald Friedman, a University of Massachusetts professor who has been a major source of the Sanders campaign’s numbers. The economists called out the campaign for citing “extreme claims” by Friedman that “exceed even the most grandiose predictions by Republicans” and could “undermine the credibility of the progressive economic agenda.”

That’s harsh. But it’s harsh for a reason.

The claims the economists are talking about come from Friedman’s analysis of the Sanders economic program. The good news is that this isn’t the campaign’s official

assessment; the bad news is that the Friedman analysis has been highly praised by campaign officials.

And the analysis is really something.

The Republican candidates have been widely and rightly mocked for their escalating claims that they can achieve incredible economic growth, starting with Jeb Bush’s promise to double growth to 4 percent and heading up from there. But Friedman outdoes the GOP by claiming that the Sanders plan would produce 5.3 percent growth a year over the next decade.

Harrop continued from page 6

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the new trade boogeyman. Its purpose is to strengthen America’s hand in dealing with China, but that gets lost in the political discourse.

Trade agreements tend to be a mixed bag in terms of who benefits. They are not inherently evil. Likewise, so-called political establishments and Washington insiders should be judged by what they do, rather than what they are.

But gray is an unpopular color in campaign season.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

closet were made in Mexico? Go into Home Depot and see where the hammers, screws and lighting fixtures come from.

Even more telling, I’d argue, is Friedman’s jobs projection, which has the employed share of American adults soaring all the way back to what it was in 2000.

That may sound possible — until you remember that by 2026 more than a quarter of U.S. adults over 20 will be 65 and older, compared with 17 percent in 2000.

Sorry, but there’s just no way to justify this stuff. For wonks like me, it is, frankly, horrifying.

Still, these are numbers on a program that Sanders, even if he made it to the White House, would have little chance of enacting. So do they matter?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes, for several reasons.

One is that, as the economists warn, fuzzy math from the left would make it impossible to effectively criticize conservative voodoo.

Beyond that, this controversy is

On the Republican side, Trump rails against Chinese imports. At least he knows where most of those jobs have gone.

The consensus among economists is that NAFTA provided modest benefits for the U.S., as well as for Mexico and Canada. Some American jobs did move to Mexico, but many would have otherwise gone to Asia. The remedy for victims of globalization Copyright 2016 Creators.com is not to stop the unstoppable but to 2-18-16 strengthen their social safety net.

an indication of a campaign, and perhaps a candidate, not ready for prime time. These claims for the Sanders program aren’t just implausible, they’re embarrassing to anyone remotely familiar with economic history (which says that raising long-run growth is very hard) and changing demography.

They should have set alarm bells ringing, but obviously didn’t.

And there’s an even larger issue here: Good ideas don’t have to be sold with fairy dust.

Sanders is calling for a large expansion of the U.S. social safety net, which is something I would like to see, too. But the problem with such a move is that it would probably create many losers as well as winners — a substantial number of Americans, mainly in the upper middle class, who would end up paying more in additional taxes than they would gain in enhanced benefits.

important economists, they’re important figures in the progressive movement.

For example, Alan Krueger is one of the founders of modern research on minimum wages, which shows that moderate increases in the minimum don’t cause major job loss. Christina Romer was a strong advocate for stimulus during her time in the White House, and a major figure in the pushback against austerity in the years that followed.

The point is that if you dismiss the likes of Krueger or Romer as Hillary shills or compromised members of the “establishment,” you’re excommunicating most of the policy experts who should be your allies.

So Sanders really needs to crack down on his campaign’s instinct to lash out. More than that, he needs to dissociate himself from voodoo of the left — not just because of the political risks, but because By endorsing outlandish getting real is or ought to be a core economic claims, the Sanders progressive value. campaign is basically signaling c.2016 New York Times News Service that it doesn’t believe its program 2-18-16 can be sold on the merits, that it has to invoke a growth miracle Online Subscription to minimize the downsides of its Beat The Postal Delay, vision. It is, in effect, confirming its critics’ worst suspicions.

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What happens now? In the past, the Sanders campaign has www.liberalopinion.com responded to critiques by impugning Or call Toll Free the motives of the critics. But the authors of the critical letter that 1-800-338-9335 came out Wednesday aren’t just

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Eugene Robinson

Trump Dispels A GOP Fantasy “Surely this time,” the establishment chorus cries with joy, “Donald Trump has gone too far!”

Sorry, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

What Trump did at Saturday night’s debate was ruder than any of his prior insults, profanities or remarks about women. He corrected the historical record about the 9/11 attacks, demolishing the fairy-tale version that has become a central tenet of Republican dogma. It’s true, and you can look it up: George W. Bush was president when the World Trade Center towers fell.

Trump went too far, of course, as he always does. He sought to actually blame the attacks on negligence by Bush and his administration. As I’ve argued in the past, terrorist atrocities should be blamed on the terrorists, not on the officials who try and sometimes fail to thwart them.

But historical fact is historical fact -- except in polite GOP circles. After Trump committed his heresy, telling Jeb Bush that “the World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign,” Marco Rubio quickly began an incantation of the Republican Creed: George W. Bush “kept us safe,” Rubio said, “and I am forever grateful for what he did for this country.”

When Trump claimed he lost “hundreds of friends” in the World Trade Center and said “that is not safe,” Rubio responded with another line in the GOP’s confession of faith: “The World Trade Center came down because Bill Clinton didn’t kill Osama bin Laden when he had the chance to kill him.”

There you have it, a great example of the made-up stories the GOP establishment tells to lull voters to sleep. It is strictly forbidden, Republicans insist, to suggest that Bush bears even the slightest responsibility for 9/11, though he was president at the time. But it is appropriate, perhaps even mandatory, to blame the whole thing on Bill Clinton, who had been out of office for nearly eight months.

And of course it’s fine to blame President Obama for any terrorist attack that happens anywhere in the world, since he is Evil Incarnate.

I disagree with Trump on almost everything. I want to curl up in the fetal position when I imagine him sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. But his primal scream of a campaign has done a tremendous service by forcing the GOP establishment to deal with truths it would prefer to ignore. Trump runs around letting cats out of bags, and they are not easily put back in.

Republicans love to talk tough about illegal immigration, for example, and use the issue to bludgeon Democrats. But when Trump takes the bombast to its logical conclusion -- all right, then, let’s deport the 11 million undocumented -- the establishment has to hem and haw about how all that partisan rhetoric wasn’t meant to be taken literally.

Likewise, Republicans love to suggest that Democrats are somehow soft in the fight against terrorism here and abroad. A favorite trope is to complain that Obama refuses to “utter the words

‘radical Islamic terrorism,’” as Ted Cruz is fond of saying. But when Trump called for temporarily banning all foreign Muslims from entering the country, other candidates who try their best to sound hawkish had to acknowledge that Islam itself isn’t really the problem.

“war on terror.” Months ago, Trump pressured all the other candidates -- including Jeb Bush -- into agreeing that the war in Iraq was a mistake. Now he is challenging what I call the Bogeyman Claim: Vote for Democrats and terrorists will come and get you. Vote for Republicans and your family will be safe.

Saturday night’s debate was nothing short of a bare-knuckles brawl, full of personal attacks and allegations of bald-faced lying. But the most serious damage was not to any candidate but to the GOP’s carefully constructed fantasy world. It’s unclear whether one of the first Republicans, Abraham Lincoln, actually said this, but it’s true: You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Eugene Robinson’s email address is eugenerobinson@washpost.com.

Trump challenges his party’s economic orthodoxy as well. He calls himself a “free trader” but opposes existing trade pacts as unfair; Republicans have historically championed free trade but are loath to examine what agreements such as NAFTA have really meant for working-class jobs.

Trump promises to somehow reduce the $19 trillion national debt but wants to expand entitlements, not shrink them; many GOP voters, it turns out, feel the same way.

But the biggest transgression, perhaps, was to cite (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group a more accurate history of the Bush administration’s 2-15-16

Albert Hunt

A Brokered Convention Isn’t What You Think It Is

It’s time to take seriously the possibility that Republicans could arrive at their presidential nominating convention this summer without having chosen a candidate. If that happens, the crucial disputes at the gathering in Cleveland will be about rules and procedures, not platforms and policies.

The power brokers won’t be big-name senators but rather influential state officials and interest groups.

This was brought home with the death this past weekend of Drew Lewis, a central figure in the last contested convention. That was in 1976, when Ronald Reagan faced off against President Gerald Ford.

It’s an instructive model for what could happen starting this July 18 if billionaire Donald Trump, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and a mainstream Republican divide up the delegates and no one has a majority.

Lewis, who was 84, is usually remembered as Reagan’s transportation secretary when, in 1981, the government successfully broke a strike by the union representing air traffic controllers. But in 1976 he was a pivotal player in denying Reagan the Republican nomination in an intense struggle decided by a few votes.

The context: After losing all the initial contests against the incumbent, Reagan rallied conservative forces with demagoguery, arguing that returning the Panama Canal to Panama would lead to the encirclement of the U.S. by hostile naval forces. (A Panama Canal treaty was signed a year later and took effect on Dec. 31, 1999.) Reagan won most of the later primaries, and when the contests ended in early June the two Republicans were virtually tied.

Then, using the perquisites of the presidency -appointments, trips on Air Force One, small projects -- Ford began to pick up delegates. John Sears, the

brilliant Reagan campaign manager, realized that the challenger couldn’t win a war of attrition. With Sen. Paul Laxalt, a Reagan confidant, he persuaded the Gipper to choose the liberal Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker, as his running mate. This was announced three weeks before the convention opened.

As Sears hoped, it had the effect, in football parlance, of freezing the linebackers; it was such a shock that Republicans stepped back to take stock.

Ford, however, retained a small but clear advantage, so while conservatives focused on the platform, Sears’s next gambit was a proposed rules change that would have required any candidate to announce a running mate before being nominated.

The idea was to force Ford to make a choice that might alienate one faction or the other and swing votes to Reagan.

Delegations from Mississippi to Illinois were in play on the rule-change vote, held on the second day of the convention. But a key was the proFord Pennsylvania delegation. If Schweiker could persuade his fellow Pennsylvanians to support it, it would send a message across the Kansas City convention.

But Schweiker’s longtime friend, neighbor and former campaign manager was Lewis, head of the Ford delegation in the state. With carrots and sticks, he outworked his old pal and Pennsylvania voted overwhelmingly against the rule change. That sealed the nomination for Ford.

That history shows why fights over rules, not platform planks, are likely to be decisive in Cleveland if no Republican comes into the convention with a majority for the first time in 40 years.

Hunt continued on page 9

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Frank Bruni

The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Trump Donald Trump has been recognized for his mastery of the media, his fascination with gilt and his bold advocacy for baffling hair.

But I think his greatest distinction is as a surrealist. Not since Salvador Dalí has someone so ambitiously jumbled reality and hallucination.

I’m thinking of his news conference in South Carolina on Monday and of one assertion in particular, although with Trump it’s always hard to pick and choose.

In an appeal to African-American voters, he charged that Barack Obama had done nothing for them, and drew a contrast between himself and the president by saying: “I’m a unifier.

Obama is not a unifier.”

The second of those sentences is debatable. The first is just a joke.

Trump sneeringly divides the world into winners and losers, savagely mocks those who challenge him, dabbles in sexism, marinates in racism, and on and on.

To call that unification is laughable under any circumstances. To make that claim to blacks is perverse. Not long ago, he insistently questioned the legitimacy of Obama’s presidency by latching onto the popular rightwing conspiracy theory that Obama had been born in Kenya and couldn’t produce a proper U.S. birth certificate.

Has he forgotten that? Or is he simply betting that Americans have?

Every campaign is a painstaking manipulation of memory, an attempt to get voters to focus on only certain parts of the past and disregard the rest.

Candidates say that they’re eager to run on their records, but what they want from voters isn’t total recall. It’s selective amnesia.

Hillary Clinton would have us

Hunt continued from page 8

dwell on her fight for civil rights in the 1960s. She’d prefer that we edit out bits of the 1990s, when she supported the crime bill and welfare reform.

Bernie Sanders would have us luxuriate in his vision of economic justice. He’d rather us not glance backward and note how little headway he’s made to date.

But Trump is in a different category altogether. He doesn’t so much recast his yesterdays as utterly reinvent them, confident that the brio of his proclamations will mask their bogusness.

Lately he’s been trumpeting his prescience in having urged the Bush administration not to invade Iraq back in 2003, but there’s no such urging on record.

The website PolitiFact went Pennsylvanian who helped defeat him that he enlisted Lewis for his cabinet when he won the presidency four years later.

The Ford forces remained confident that even with Schweiker they could hold Pennsylvania on any test vote. “We had Drew,” recalls Stuart Spencer, the chief Ford strategist in the campaign. “We knew Drew controlled that delegation.”

Albert Hunt is a Bloomberg columnist.

And it suggests that the key players won’t be powerful Washington lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell or House Speaker Paul Ryan. They’ll be representatives of interest groups like the National Rifle Association and religious-conservative organizations, who are working to elect delegates this year for most of the leading contenders.

Someone may be even fortunate enough to find a Drew Lewis. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View Reagan was so impressed with the 2-16-16

in search of it, combing through newspapers and television transcripts, and came up empty-handed.

“Trump makes it sound like he stood on a railroad to try to stop the Iraq war train in its tracks,” PolitFact reported. “In reality, by the time he got around to forcefully criticizing the war, that train had already left the station.”

His greatest trick, though, isn’t to toy with memory but to overwhelm it, rendering insults and provocations at such a hectic pace that the new ones eclipse and then expunge the old ones.

It’s as if the DVR of the electorate and the media can store only so many episodes before it starts erasing earlier indignities.

His flamboyant present overwrites his distressing past. It’s the eternal sunshine of the spotless Trump.

His proposed ban on Muslims coming into the country exited the discussion much more quickly than it should have. So did his false claims that Muslims in Jersey City celebrated by the thousands on 9/11.

about Trump the birther (unless it’s in relation to Ted Cruz and Canada).

And while that’s partly because his Republican rivals see no profit in an attack on him that could be taken as a defense of Obama, it’s also because there’s been so much other, fresher fodder since.

The sheer volume of his offenses minimizes each affront, and as his shock tactics become predictable, they inevitably grow less menacing, too.

I hear it in the conversations around me; I see it in media coverage that increasingly treats him as a normal candidate. Familiarity breeds surrender, even rationalizations: He doesn’t actually mean what he says.

He doesn’t ultimately believe in anything. It’s all strategy, all spectacle.

Sit back and enjoy the show.

“It’s so fun to watch,” Ezra Klein of Vox recently wrote, “it’s easy to lose sight of how terrifying it really is.”

I might quibble with “fun,” but not with the notion that Trump has used a kind of sensory overload to numb us At the Republican debate to the fictions he spins, the indecency Saturday night, when Jeb Bush he indulges. brought up Trump’s galling dismissal We can’t lose track. We must keep of John McCain’s ordeal as a prisoner score. The sum of them is the essence of war, he was like a D.J. dusting off a of him, a picture worth a thousand golden oldie from the vault. We hadn’t slurs. heard that song in a while. c.2016 New York Times News Service We seldom read much anymore 2-16-16

10

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Norman Leahy & Paul Goldman

Virginia For The Win: If Other States Had Followed Virginia’s Lead, The Republican Party Could Stop Trump Virginia for the Win is a series examining Virginia’s crucial role in the 2016 presidential race and national politics.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand,” declared Abraham Lincoln before a standingroom-only SRO crowd at the 1858 Illinois Republican State Convention in Springfield.

Lincoln discussed the growing divisions already responsible for the Whig Party’s collapse that now threatened to destroy the nation. His political advice, updated to reflect the current clash between the Republican Party’s brand of conservatism and Donald Trump’s personalitydriven presidential campaign, is still prescient today: “I don’t expect the Republican Party to be dissolved - I do not expect the house to fall - but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or the other.”

The question now is what the Party of Lincoln will become: a house built on broad conservative principles, or one built around Donald Trump’s personality.

At last weekend’s GOP debate, Trump made his strongest bid yet to see it becomes the latter.

He blamed many of the nation’s woes on conservatism, going to far as to say former President George W. Bush had blood on his hands for failing to heed advice that would have stopped the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

On Monday, Bush traveled to South Carolina to bolster his younger brother Jeb’s campaign in the GOP primary. Trump warned “W” not to attack him. Bush never mentioned Trump’s name.

Trumpism, the political thought of Donald J. Trump -- former liberal Democrat, turned liberal Republican, turned Reform Party presidential hopeful, turned center-left Democratic supporter of Hillary Clinton, turned independent potential presidential hopeful, turned self-styled conservative GOP White House aspirant -- isn’t a platform built on philosophic principles. It is a cult of personality.

Conservatism believes substance matters.

Trumpism believes substance is for losers.

Conservatism appeals to individual hard work; Trumpism to collective anger. Conservatism has a long history; Trumpism has Trump for as long as he keeps winning.

Trumpism’s populism mocks Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders’s, IVermont, populism. Sanders is prepared lose in defense of long-held principle. The billionaire New Yorker only values winning, principles be damned.

Trump’s rivals have long said the real estate mogul isn’t a conservative. But now, after his blood-soaked attacks on former president George W. Bush, and increasing support for certain policies long identified as Democratic, Trump’s opponent’s claim he isn’t even a Republiacan.

Trump defines his politics this way: He intends

to be a winner in 2016, even if that means Republican will be losers.

Kirk wrote, “In the statesman, prudence is chief among virtues.” Trump’s “your momma” threats may have been acceptable in his former role as a Hall of Fame promoter for World Wresting Entertainment. But not as president.

A Democratic victory over conservatism is a partisan triumph. But GOP primary voters choosing Trumpism over conservatism would be a philosophical watershed.

George Bush went to South Carolina to save his brother’s wounded campaign. Jeb Bush, once heavily favored to win the nomination, is not going to win this year. It seems to us that Bush 43’s reluctance to directly defend conservatism from Trumpism shows the party of Lincoln may soon face its Whig moment.

Trump is unsuited for the presidency. If conservatism is worth saving within the GOP, then the most recent conservative president has to say, “I will not dishonor the office by helping Trump win it.”

If not, then Trump may leave conservatism’s carcass for the buzzards to pick over as his followers fill the hall in Cleveland this summer to hail their Republican Caesar.

This understandably panics the conservative GOP establishment. But it wouldn’t be so potent a threat had the Republican National Committee listened to the Republican Party of Virginia.

The RPV adopted rules for its March 1 primary giving every candidate receiving at least 2 percent of the vote their proportional share of Virginia’s convention delegates. Thus, Trump’s 35 percent in New Hampshire would entitle him to only the same percentage of the commonwealth’s delegates to the Republican National Convention.

However, many key upcoming GOP primaries allows a candidate who wins 35 percent of the vote to get up to 100 percent of a state’s delegates.

While the national pundits claim Trumpism can be stopped as the primary schedule pivots to the more “moderate” states after Super Tuesday, this 35 percent reality suggests otherwise.

Virginia’s approach would have saved conservatives. This salvation may be necessary, given the GOP debate last Saturday.

Trump made clear his utter contempt for one of conservatism’s key governing principles: (c) 2016, The Washington Post prudence. As the conservative philosopher Russell 2-16-16

Francis Wilkinson

Imagine A Republican Party Under Trump

As this week’s slugfest between Donald Trump and the Pope confirms, the 2016 election is unlike others we have known. Trump may eventually lose to another candidate. Or he could end up with the most delegates and the Republican nomination for president.

Which raises a basic question: What is the Republican Party if Trump is its nominee?

The answer is not immediately obvious. Parties are amorphous and hard to define, but they are much more than the shadow cast by a presidential nominee. The Republican Party has traditions and factions, dispositions and interests, and it embodies and conveys an identifiable set of values.

The gun lobby and conservative Christians are generally components of the party. Unions and environmentalists are generally not. And pretty much everyone gets that.

If Trump gains the nomination, however, many Republican verities are up for grabs. Trump has proposed a sometimes fiercely protectionist agenda in a party known for free trade. He has converted to the more than three-decade-old party line opposing abortion, but countered its more recent demonization of Planned Parenthood. He has advanced a wholly new Republican aspiration -- government protection of the sort of jobs made vulnerable by globalization -- while at the same time endorsing most of the party’s habitual tax policies to further enrich those who benefit most

from globalization.

“He has the potential to reshape the party around a new coalition,” said Republican consultant Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, in an interview. A new coalition means a new set of interests, supporters and attitudes. Blue-collar concerns, protectionism and white nationalism would be ascendant; some Democrats, including some Bernie Sanders supporters, might answer Trump’s call. “Big companies, the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street would all take a big hit,” Schmidt said.

On national security, the orthodox Republican narrative portrays the 21st century as a matrix of threats to which Democrats render us vulnerable, and from which only the Republican Party can keep the nation safe.

Trump obliterated that narrative in a South Carolina debate last week, accusing President George W. Bush of being unprepared for alQaida’s 2001 attacks, and thus responsible both for the devastating result and his administration’s disastrous response -- invading Iraq. Trump repeated the claim at a CNN forum Thursday night, blaming Bush for destabilizing the Middle East, leading to the creation of Islamic State, while scaling back his charge that Bush had “lied” about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Wilkinson continued on page 11

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

11

Stephen Carter

Pope vs. Trump Isn’t A New Phenomenon Many years ago, when Oliver North was running for the Senate from Virginia, I received a call from a reporter. She told me that some church groups in the commonwealth were praying for North’s election. Then she asked if their behavior violated the separation of church and state. I explained to her that as separationism is a rule of constitutional law, only the state and not the church can violate it.

My answer got on her nerves.

That story came to mind with this week’s news that Pope Francis, returning from his visit to Mexico, had said some, um, controversial things about presidential candidate Donald Trump. Much of the commentary has focused on the likely effect of the pope’s comments on the Republican nomination battle. I’ve found more interesting the voices questioning whether the pope should have said anything at all.

Let’s get one thing straight from the beginning. Contrary to what I kept reading on the Chyron, the pope didn’t actually say that Trump isn’t a Christian. What Francis said was: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not

Christian.”

As so often in this papacy, the proof is in the parsing. The reference to building bridges is plainly metaphorical. This suggests that Francis also had metaphor in mind when he spoke of building walls. In other words, he was speaking less of Trump than of the human heart -- all of our human hearts. This interpretation is consistent with what Francis has said about immigration, and many other challenges, from the start of his papacy. It has long been his habit to take the questions asked by journalists traveling with him and turn them into teaching opportunities.

I think that’s what the pope was up to here, and the press simply missed his point.

But let’s put that aside.

Wilkinson continued from page 10

Lincoln, arguably the greatest Republican president, celebrates Ronald Reagan as its patron saint.

Reagan’s presidency solidified the Republicans’ post-1964 transition to a white, southern-based party wedded to individualism and unfettered free enterprise, and laced with a potent dose of racial resentment.

That regional shift, Schmidt maintains, has hindered the party in national elections. “The country’s southern party traditionally doesn’t win presidential elections,” he said.

The emergence of a brash New Yorker vying for the party’s leadership signals change. “It seems like we’re at a moment when something new is forming,” Schmidt said. A Trump nomination would confirm it.

The impact of a Trump nomination would be felt among Democrats as well. Sanders, the Vermont socialist, is waging a spirited insurgency against the quintessence of a middle-of-the- road Democrat. The Democratic coalition, too, is looking shaky. But Sanders needn’t win to shake up his party; Trump might do it for him. It’s possible that a fight

If Trump manages to win despite such flagrant heresy, what tenets of the Republican faith remain sacred?

Will the party keep insisting that tax cuts for wealthy “job creators” really create jobs? That the tax on wealthy estates is truly so onerous? Protecting the interests of the wealthy rarely ranks high on the demands of bluecollar voters, regardless of their party affiliation.

Trump has already rejected the Republican gospel that runaway “entitlements” -- Medicare and Social Security -- are bankrupting the nation. He attacks Obamacare, but has also rejected the implicit Republican stance that Obamacare can be repealed without dangerous consequences. If someone is dying on the street, Trump told Sean Hannity, some Republicans would say “let him die.” Trump repeatedly promises something more humane (albeit less explicit).

A party is partly the sum of its history, and what it tells itself about that history. The Party of

Let’s take it that I’m wrong, and Francis indeed announced that in his opinion, Trump isn’t a Christian.

Is there supposed to be something wrong with that? Religious leaders have been raining anathemas on the heads of politicians for as long as the U.S. has existed. There are always people who don’t care for the practice, but it’s a part of the electoral landscape.

Back in 1990, when Cardinal John O’Connor was warning of possible excommunication of prochoice Catholic politicians, liberals trembled with fury, but New York Mayor Ed Koch famously shrugged: “That’s his job.” Three decades earlier, when Archbishop Joseph Francis Rummel of New Orleans threatened to excommunicate several pro-segregation legislators, many conservatives were furious, some managing to place the blame on the Catholic president sitting in the Oval Office.

The preachers of the Social Gospel in the early 20th century told their flocks to vote for representatives who would support a fairer distribution of the nation’s resources. People who “call themselves Christians,” wrote a leader of the Federal Council of Churches of Christ in 1929, should not “live in comfort, accepting the dividends of industries where women toil for ten hours a day in the heat and noise of a factory for thirteen dollars a week.”

We can go back a lot further. Here’s the Rev. Charles Finney, the most prominent among the abolitionist clergy, preaching about the 1860 election: “I should be very prone to between Hillary Clinton and Trump would push more white working class Democrats into Trump’s column, leaving the Democrats to manage an increasingly awkward partnership of prosperous coastal white elites and vastly less affluent racial minorities.

A Trump presidency promises to confound. The party’s head, grafted to a distrustful body, would be facing one direction and its Congressional majority another. The chance that Trump would simply dominate an inevitable battle of wills seems slight; the chance that Republicans would steal their party back is perhaps even slighter.

Indeed, as Trump’s threat to decades of strict Republican orthodoxy grows more real, party elites will no doubt rush to co-opt him. Good luck with that. It may already be too late even for Trump to apply the brakes to his runaway campaign.

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-19-16

think that no one ought to cast his vote against [a slave’s] liberty for the mere sake of money or office.” Everybody understood that he meant for his listeners to vote for Abraham Lincoln.

Another prominent abolitionist, the Rev. Theodore Parker, had included in an 1854 sermon a list of names of politicians who should be voted out of office because of their support for slavery. “Call meetings, bring out men of all parties, all forms of religion, agitate, agitate, agitate.”

The pro-slavery side rejected such interference in politics. When during the 1850s a group of Protestant ministers petitioned Congress, contending that no Christian could support slavery, Senator Benjamin Butler complained that the signatories “have dared to quit the pulpit and step into the political arena.” Senator Stephen Douglas agreed, dismissing them as “political preachers” who “ought to be rebuked, and required to confine themselves to their vocation.”

Not every critic of the abolitionist preaching was pro- slavery. During the 1820s, for example, the great Baptist iconoclast Alexander Campbell condemned engagement with politics.

Christians, he wrote, should simply submit themselves to those who had charge of earthly government, not try to change them. But even Campbell included a proviso: “unless where any of their commands might require a breach of the law of Christ.”

The truth is, you can pick an era you like, and you will find clergy denying that any Christian can hold a particular political position. It’s all part of the tumult and diversity that is America. When the pope wades in, perhaps the news media pay more attention. But all Francis is doing is what clergy have always done.

Stephen Carter is a Bloomberg View columnist and a law professor at Yale. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-19-16

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12

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Froma Harrop

Trump Shows His Inner Rabbit I am sorry to note that Donald Trump no longer seems to be at war with the pope.

“No, I like him,” Trump said during a town hall on CNN. He added that he had “a lot of respect for the pope. I think he’s got a lot of personality.”

There are several troubling matters here. One is that there is nothing more dangerous than having Donald Trump express a sudden fondness for you.

“I like China.”

“I love Mexican people.”

“I love the Muslims.”

Trump, you’ll remember, got ticked off because Francis said that anybody who obsesses about building walls to keep people out “is not Christian.” Trump retorted that anybody who doubted the moral stupendousness of wallbuilders was “disgraceful.”

But on CNN, Trump was reformulating. The pope’s comment was not so disgraceful after all.

“I think it was probably a little bit nicer statement than it was reported by you folks in the media,” Trump said.

Now, you could see how he might have jumped to the wrong conclusion if somebody had yelled, “Hey, the pope thinks you’re not acting like a Christian!” while he was walking into McDonald’s for lunch. (He really likes McDonald’s. Thinks they’re clean. I refuse to follow that thought any further.)

same decision.

2) Challenge Cruz to a duel for talking trash about his sister.

3) Change the subject entirely by describing Michael Jackson’s plastic surgery.

But Trump pummeled the papacy with a prepared statement at a rally in a golf course clubhouse. Cynical minds might have thought that the candidate jumped on the pope’s comments because it looked like a good way to remind South Carolina voters about his plan for a border wall. The same minds might also suspect that as criticism mounted, the idea of a war with the Vatican looked less enticing.

Perhaps you didn’t see Trump’s town hall on CNN. It was very interesting, but there’s a limit to how many of these things you need to watch.

You could learn a foreign language in the time it takes.

The great theme of the night was things that Trump said he doesn’t remember or didn’t necessarily mean. This happens all the time.

Either our great business genius is incapable of mental fact-checking or he has about as much political courage as a rabbit.

A while ago, Trump joked that his sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a senior judge on the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, would make a great Supreme Court justice. Ted Cruz pretended to take the idea seriously and laced into Barry as a “radical pro-abortion extremist.” (She once wrote the majority opinion in a ruling that found a New Jersey law outlawing partial-birth abortion unconstitutional.)

Trump had three possible responses: 1) Point out that Samuel Alito, who is now one of the Supreme Court’s most right-wing members, heard the case, too, and came to the

Hear me out.

Our present pope, popular as he is, can surely not expect to be pope forever. Whereas Donald Trump is immortal, and knows it. Why else would he behave as he does?

It is not such a far-fetched idea to suggest that he should be gunning for the Chair of St. Peter instead of the puny, tiny, not-at-all classy chair in the Oval Office. Which is more Trump to you, a small chair where losers like Jimmy Carter have sat in their time, or a huge, beautiful chair where you are always right?

Please.

This man was born to be pope.

Now the papacy doesn’t win any more. Masses in English, giving to the poor -- just giving things away to them, not even trying to make deals of any kind. Handouts, charity. Pssh! Just throwing away blessings and absolutions when you could be making billions from the sale of indulgences.

Letting the little children come unto you - children of all faiths! -- before those children have been properly vetted.

Give me a break.

Not only would Trump fix it, but also he’d fit right in. They nominate the next pope by blowing smoke of a particular color out through the chimney of the college of cardinals. Trump is accustomed to blowing smoke.

St. Peter’s Basilica is Huge and Great and Classy -- a bit of a downgrade from the Trump Taj Mahal, but still respectable, in its way, considering how few surfaces are brass.

Stern asked Trump if he thought U.S. troops should go in, and Trump said, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Didn’t count! “When you’re in the private sector, you know, you get asked things and, you know, you’re not a politician, and probably the first time I was asked,” Trump protested. “By the time the war started I was against it. And shortly thereafter, I was really against it.”

In a dramatic highlight of the most recent Republican debate, Trump accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the U.S. public about the invasion. (“They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none.”) It was a potentially historic moment: a top Republican candidate for president attempts to lead his party into a frank reappraisal of the Bush-Cheney administration’s inherent honesty.

Here we are, one week later: “I’m not talking about lying. ... Nobody really knows why we went into Iraq.”

Meanwhile, reporters continue to ask Trump supporters what the attraction is. And his fans say that he tells it like it is.

The answer is: None of the above! Although Trump did veer off into a disquisition on the plastic surgery issue later. Here’s the answer: “I don’t even know what her views are on abortion. I really don’t. ... She may have made a decision one way or the other. I never asked her.”

People, how many of you have siblings? Do you know how they feel about abortion? If your sister was one of the most influential jurists in the nation, would you keep up with her major decisions? At least have a minion leave newspaper clips on your desk?

The biggest part of the cornucopia of retractions, evasions and garbled babbling involved Iraq.

Trump constantly brags that he was opposed to the Bush administration’s invasion. From the very, very beginning. But while the town hall was underway, BuzzFeed News posted a radio c.2016 New York Times News Service interview from Sept. 11, 2002, in which Howard 2-19-16

Alexandra Petri

Donald Trump For Pope

Trump is what is needed to Make the Papacy Great Again, the way it was in the days when popes were popes, like the Borgias. This is either our Vatican or it isn’t. Where’s the temporal power that used to make things tick? The Vatican should be run like a business. And speak Latin, if you’re going to set foot here, within the huge, beautiful wall.

Look, Trump has the qualities of a spiritual leader. Trump is better at not judging than anyone.

At least, he is this week: “No leader, especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.” He was not last week: “How can Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian when he lies so much and is dishonest?”

But hey, a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.

Besides, he is on the record, as my colleague Catherine Rampell points out, as being the Most Humble of anyone out there. “I do have actually much more humility than a lot of people would think,” he told John Dickerson on “Face the Nation.” The pope only has as much humility as you would expect.

Trump has made the case already, in his retort to the pope, that the pope is doing a bad job. Why not take the next step and claim the Holy See for himself?

Trump could do this so much better. And we should encourage him to do so.

The pope, like Aladdin’s genie, possesses Phenomenal Cosmic Power coupled with itty-

Petri continued on page 13

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

13

Danielle Allen

Moment of Truth: We Must Stop Trump Like any number of us raised in the late 20th century, I have spent my life perplexed about exactly how Hitler could have come to power in Germany. Watching Donald Trump’s rise, I now understand. Leave aside whether a direct comparison of Trump to Hitler is accurate. That is not my point. My point rather is about how a demagogic opportunist can exploit a divided country.

To understand the rise of Hitler and the spread of Nazism, I have generally relied on the GermanJewish émigré philosopher Hannah Arendt and her arguments about the banality of evil. Somehow people can understand themselves as “just doing their job,” yet act as cogs in the wheel of a murderous machine.

Arendt also offered a second answer in a small but powerful book called “Men in Dark Times.” In this book, she described all those who thought that Hitler’s rise was a terrible thing but chose “internal exile,” or staying invisible and out of the way as their strategy for coping with the situation. They knew evil was evil, but they too facilitated it, by departing from the battlefield out of a sense of hopelessness.

One can see both of these phenomena unfolding now. The first shows itself, for instance, when journalists cover every crude and cruel thing that comes out of Trump’s mouth and thereby help acculturate all of us to what we are hearing. Are they not just doing their jobs, they will ask, in covering the Republican front-runner? Have we not already been acculturated by 30 years of popular culture to offensive and inciting comments?

Yes, both of these things are true.

But that doesn’t mean journalists ought to be Trump’s megaphone.

Petri continued from page 12

bitty living space (there are postage stamps larger than the Vatican, I believe). If we can just convince Donald Trump that this is what he wants, instead of the presidency -we may be able to dodge this yet.

Alexandra Petri writes the ComPost blog, offering a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day. She is the author of “A Field Guide to Awkward Silences”. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-18-16

Perhaps we should just shut the lights out on offensiveness; turn off the mic when someone tries to shout down others; re-establish standards for what counts as a worthwhile contribution to the public debate. That will seem counter to journalistic norms, yes, but why not let Trump pay for his own ads when he wants to broadcast foul and incendiary ideas? He’ll still have plenty of access to freedom of expression. It is time to draw a bright line.

One spots the second experience in any number of water-cooler conversations or dinner-party dialogues. “Yes, yes, it is terrible.

Can you believe it? Have you seen anything like it? Has America come to this?” “Agreed, agreed.”

But when someone asks what is to be done, silence falls. Very many of us, too many of us, are starting to contemplate accepting internal exile. Or we joke about moving to Canada more seriously than usually.

But over the course of the past few months, I’ve learned something else that goes beyond Arendt’s ideas about the banality of evil and feelings of impotence in the face of danger.

Trump is rising by taking advantage of a divided country.

The truth is that the vast majority of voting Americans think that Trump is unacceptable as a presidential candidate, but we are split by strong partisan ideologies and cannot coordinate a solution to stop him.

Similarly, a significant part of voting Republicans think that Trump is unacceptable, but they too, thus far, have been unable to coordinate a solution. Trump is exploiting the fact that we cannot unite across our ideological divides.

The only way to stop him, then, is to achieve just that kind of coordination across party lines and across divisions within parties. We have reached that moment of truth.

Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump.

I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest

between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable. Trump has to be blocked in your primary.

Jeb Bush has done the right thing by dropping out, just as he did the right thing by being the first, alongside Rand Paul, to challenge Trump. The time has come, John Kasich and Ben Carson, to leave the race as well. You both express a powerful commitment to the good of your country and to its founding ideals. If you care about the future of this republic, it is time to endorse Marco Rubio. Kasich, there’s a little wind in your sails, but it’s not enough. Your country is calling you. Do the right thing.

Finally, to all of you Republicans who have already dropped out, one more, great act of public service awaits you. As candidates, you pledged to support whomever the Republican party nominated. It’s time to revoke your pledge. Be bold, stand up and shout that you will not support Trump if he is your party’s nominee. Do it together. Hold one big mother of a news conference.

Endorse Rubio, together. It is time to draw a bright line, and you are the ones on whom this burden falls.

No one else can do it.

Marco Rubio, this is also your moment to draw a bright line. You, too, ought to rescind your pledge to support the party’s nominee if it is Trump.

Donald Trump has no respect for the basic rights that are the foundation of constitutional democracy, nor for the requirements of decency necessary to sustain democratic citizenship. Nor can any democracy survive without an expectation that the people require reasonable arguments that bring the truth to light, and Trump has nothing but contempt for our intelligence.

We, the people, need to find somewhere, buried in the recesses of our fading memories, the capacity to make common cause against this formidable threat to our equally shared liberties. The time is now.

Danielle Allen is a political theorist at Harvard University and a contributing columnist for The Post.

Ted Cruz is, I believe, pulling votes away from Trump, and for that reason is useful in the race.

But, Mr. Cruz, you are drawing too close to Trump’s politics. You too should change course.

Democrats, your leading candidate is too weak to count on as a firewall. She might be able to pull off a general election victory against Trump, but then again she might not. Too much is uncertain this year. You, too, need to help the Republicans beat Trump; this is no moment for standing by passively.

If your deadline for changing your party affiliation has not yet come, re-register and vote for Rubio, even if, like me, you cannot stomach his opposition to marriage equality.

I, too, would prefer Kasich as the Republican nominee, but pursuing that goal will only make it more likely that Trump takes the Special to The Washington Post nomination. The republic cannot 2-21-16 afford that.

14

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Ruth Marcus

The Budget Plan of a Charlatan In this depressingly unserious campaign season, it’s time -- past time -- to take Donald Trump seriously. In particular, to take seriously what passes for Trump’s domestic policy, aside from that wall.

Trump purports to care about the national debt.

“We can’t keep doing this,” he said of the debt at MSNBC’s town hall Wednesday. “We’ve got to start balancing budgets.”

Except, Trump -- alone among Republican candidates -- insists that he will leave entitlement spending untouched, although it consumes more than two-thirds of the federal budget.

On Social Security, for instance, Trump rejects raising the retirement age (a move he once endorsed), increasing payroll taxes, reducing cost of living adjustments and trimming benefits.

In Trump world, the solution to controlling entitlement spending is that refuge of lazy and dishonest politicians everywhere: waste, fraud and abuse. “It’s tremendous,” Trump said at the recent CBS News debate, citing “thousands and thousands of people that are over 106 years old” and collecting Social Security.

Reality check: A 2013 audit found 1,546 people who had received Social Security benefits, despite being dead. Total cost? $31 million. Cost of Social Security that year? $823 billion.

Another Trump favorite -- empowering Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices -- produces claimed savings, $300 billion annually, that are mathematically impossible. Medicare spending on prescription drugs was $78 billion in 2014. Total national spending on prescription drugs, not just by the federal government, was $300 billion in 2014, according to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Stick with Trump! He’ll get the drug companies to pay us to take their meds!

Push Trump on cuts elsewhere in the budget, and you get suggestions that are paltry and unrealistic.

“I’m going to cut spending big league,” Trump pronounced at the MSNBC town hall. His sole example, when pressed by Joe Scarborough, was the Department of Education.

Which part, please? The $28 billion to fund Pell Grants for low-income college students? The $16 billion to local school districts with large numbers of low-income elementary and secondary students?

The $13 billion to states for special education? The entire $78 billion federal education budget?

Sometimes Trump tosses in abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency (budget $8.1 billion). Which brings his potential cuts to $86 billion. The Congressional Budget Office projects this year’s deficit at $544 billion.

This would not be so maddening if Trump were not simultaneously pushing a tax cut costing the double-digit trillions of dollars over the next decade. His Republican rivals peddle big tax cuts -- Trump’s is huuuger.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates its 10-year cost at $9.5 trillion, or $11.2 trillion with interest. The Tax Foundation gives the Trump plan credit for generating economic growth; as a result,

its estimated $12 trillion cost of Trump’s plan would drop to a mere -- mere! -- $10 trillion, excluding interest.

How to pay for this? The Tax Policy Center illustrates the magnitude of cuts required. The Trump tax plan would reduce revenues by $1.1 trillion in 2025. Federal spending that year is estimated to be $5.3 trillion, excluding interest payments. Thus, Congress would have to cut spending across-theboard by 21 percent merely to pay for the tax cut, no less bring the budget into balance.

Trump asserts that his cuts “are fully paid for” by cutting deductions for the wealthy and corporate special interests, plus generating extra cash from corporate profits held overseas.

But the Tax Policy Center numbers already account for that new revenue and for limits on deductions Trump has already specified. So how is Trump going to pay the $1 trillion annual cost? TPC Director Leonard Burman tells me that wiping out all individual and corporate deductions would raise perhaps $700 billion annually at Trump’s tax rates.

That’s all deductions -- charitable contributions, mortgage interest, retirement savings, health insurance. Which would Trump eliminate?

Trump also claims his plan would spur economic growth to offset the cost. “My policies are going to reduce taxes, OK?” he told MSNBC. “And the taxes is going to bring jobs back and we’re going to bring jobs back into the country big league, and we’re going to have a dynamic economy again.”

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget calculates that paying for Trump’s tax plan would require the economy to grow at more than 7 percent annually. The average since 1946 has been 3.3 percent. The Federal Reserve predicts future growth in the 2 percent range.

Trump is a charlatan. Exposing his ignorance is harder than covering his boorishness, but it is no less essential.

Ruth Marcus’ email address is ruthmarcus@ washpost.com. (c) 2016, Washington Post Writers Group 2-21-16

Clarence Page

Trump Lures Pope Francis Into 2016 Race

So now The Donald is running against the pope.

After waging a presidential campaign that appears to have been all but directed by Triumph the Insult Dog, billionaire developer Donald Trump has outdone his earlier displays of bold audacity.

This time he’s taking on Pope Francis.

That’s right. A man whose name is associated with wealth, power and self-promotion is taking on a man who chose to be named after the patron saint of the poor, Francis of Assisi.

Yet, as much as Trump risks losing voters in heavily Catholic states, he may have helped to energize other elements of his base, particularly social conservatives who think Francis’ policies have been too liberal.

Either way, it is almost amusing to watch Trump play the victim card like a champ, all because his little feelings were somehow injured by the Pope’s opposition to Trump’s signature issue: his desire to wall off the Mexican border and somehow persuade Mexico to pick up the bill.

Pope Francis’ response to that questionable idea was clear and direct: “A person who thinks only about building walls, wherever they may be, and not building bridges, is not Christian,” Francis said in response to a question from reporters on the papal plane back from Mexico. “This is not in the Gospel.”

As criticisms of Trump go, this one falls on the mild side. Yet it was too painfully precise for the notoriously thin-skinned Trump to shrug off.

Instead, the billionaire fell back into his usual civility-challenged defensiveness. He asserted

during a South Carolina campaign stop, that if the Islamic State attacks the Vatican, “I can promise you that the pope would have only wished and prayed that Donald Trump would have been president because this would not have happened.”

Thank you, General Trump.

But what really caught my ear was the theological rebuke in Trump’s prepared response to the Pope: “For a religious leader to question a person’s faith is disgraceful,” he said. “No leader,” Trump declared, “especially a religious leader, should have the right to question another man’s religion or faith.”

Oh really? For a “religious leader,” it seems to me, questioning other people’s religious faith is part of the job description.

More important, if anyone has quite publically judged other people’s religious faith with willful abandon, it is Donald Trump, especially when talking about President Barack Obama.

Remember how Trump became a leading “birther” in 2011, claiming that Obama might secretly be a Muslim -- a claim from which Trump more recently has backed away.

“He doesn’t have a birth certificate,” Trump told Fox News. “He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim. I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”

Maybe, maybe, maybe. That’s a great word to throw around when you want to raise suspicions about somebody without a shred of hard evidence.

Those are the classic questions raised by

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

15

Harry Reid

Reid to Republicans: Don’t Take The Path of Partisan Sabotage

We are entering uncharted waters in the history of the U.S. system of checks and balances, with potentially momentous consequences. Having gridlocked the Senate for years, Republicans now want to gridlock the Supreme Court with a campaign of partisan sabotage aimed at denying the president’s constitutional duty to pick nominees.

Republicans should not insult the American people’s intelligence by pretending there is historical precedent for what they are about to do. There is not.

The Senate has confirmed Supreme Court nominees both in election years and in the last year of a presidency - as recently as 1988, a presidential election year when a Democratic Senate confirmed President Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Justice Anthony Kennedy in the final year of his administration. My colleague and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Chuck Grassley, RIowa, was a member of the Judiciary Committee then and voted to confirm Kennedy. More recently,Grassley stated, “The reality is that the Senate has never stopped confirming judicial nominees during the last few months of a president’s term.” That is true.

For his part, my counterpart, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Saturday called for the American people to have a “voice” in this process. Their voice was heard loud and clear when they elected and reelected President Obama, twice

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demagogues when they want to smear someone without evidence.

Sometimes all you have to do is nod your head when somebody else spouts lunacy, as when Trump let a questioner in his audience at a Rochester, N.H., town hall rattle on: “We have a problem in this country.

It’s called Muslims. You know our current president is one. You know he’s not even an American.”

Trump’s failure to correct the man was conspicuous. “We need this question,” he said.

But when “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert asked Trump a week later whether he believed Obama was born in the United States, which he was, Trump said only, “I don’t talk about it anymore.”

Yet as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz began to

handing him the constitutional power to nominate Supreme Court justices.

That is how our system works and has worked for more than 200 years. Until now, even through all the partisan battles of recent decades, the Senate’s constitutional duty to give a fair and timely hearing and a floor vote to the president’s Supreme Court nominees has remained inviolable.

This Republican Senate would be the first in history to abdicate that vital duty.

issued a few hours after Justice Antonin Scalia’s death was announced framed the precedent at stake in the broadest possible terms, arguing that, starting now, any president should be denied the right to fill a vacancy in a presidential election year. Not only is that principle absurd on its face, but if we set that precedent now, there is nothing to stop future Senates from sliding further down that slippery slope. It is a small and easily envisioned step to go from “no Supreme Court confirmations in this specific election year” to “no confirmations in any election year.”

Our founders who envisioned a fair, bipartisan process must be rolling in their graves.

If we enshrine these precedents and declare a functioning Supreme Court optional, subordinate to the whim of the Senate majority, it is easy to envision a future where the Supreme Court is routinely crippled.

If my Republican colleagues proceed down this reckless path, they should know that this act alone will define their time in the majority. Thinking otherwise is fantasy. If Republicans proceed, they will ensure that this Republican majority is remembered as the most nakedly partisan, obstructionist and irresponsible majority in history. All other impressions will be instantly and irretrievably swept away.

If there were ever a time to take a stand for moderation and common sense, this is it.

I have participated in my fair share of fights over the judiciary.

But throughout them all, we always guaranteed Supreme Court nominees a fair hearing and a floor vote. Even nominees such as Robert Bork, whom Democrats vehemently opposed, were given that basic courtesy.

Indeed, in the most recent debates over the judiciary, Democrats’ actions have been aimed at guaranteeing fair votes for as many qualified nominees as possible. In response to unprecedented Republican obstruction, Democrats changed the Senate rules in 2013 to allow qualified nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority vote, instead of 60 votes. This change alleviated judicial emergencies across the country by allowing a flood of qualified nominees to be confirmed. (We stopped short of changing the threshold for Supreme Court nominees - maybe that was a mistake.) If Republicans proceed down this path, one side effect will be settling that debate once and for all and proving that Republican obstruction is so extraordinary - so historically unprecedented - that this “nuclear option” was indeed necessary. That said, I would much rather be vindicated in some other way.

I urge my Republican colleagues, for the good of the country and the sanctity of the American system of government, to recall what Grassley said only a few short years// ago: “A Supreme Court nomination isn’t the forum to fight any election. It is the time to perform one of our most important Constitutional duties and decide whether a nominee is qualified to serve on the nation’s highest court.”

Those words are as true today as when they were first spoken. Pursuing their radical strategy in a quixotic quest to deny the basic fact that the American people elected President Obama - twice - would rank among the most rash and reckless actions in the history of the Senate. And the consequences will reverberate for decades.

Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, is Senate minority leader.

This constitutional duty has transcended partisan battles because it is essential to the basic functioning of our co-equal branches of government.

By ignoring its constitutional mandate, the Senate would sabotage the highest court in the United States and aim a procedural missile at the foundation of our system of checks and balances.

The good news is that there is still time for heated rhetoric to yield to reasoned action. The Senate can get there if Republicans take a deep breath, put partisan politics aside and think this through, as Americans first and foremost. It is easy to get caught up in the partisan swirl of an election year, but I would urge my Republican colleagues to remember that the consequences of blocking any nominee, regardless of merits, would hang over their heads for the rest of their careers.

The rash statement that McConnell My Republican Senate colleagues should know, too, that they will rise ahead of Trump with evangelical be unconditionally surrendering Christians in Iowa polls in December, their party to hard-line presidential Trump suddenly wanted to talk about candidates Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Cruz’ religious faith.

Donald Trump. Behind closed doors, “Just remember this,” Trump many of my colleagues complain hinted to a rally crowd, “you gotta about the direction their party has remember, in all fairness, to the best taken in recent years. But if they cross of my knowledge, not too many this Rubicon, they will be as culpable evangelicals come out of Cuba, as Cruz or Trump themselves, having OK?” resigned any claim to leadership and And just a week before the pope’s enlisting as foot soldiers in a radical remarks, Trump tweeted, “How can effort to obstruct and delegitimize Ted Cruz be an Evangelical Christian President Obama at all costs. when he lies so much and is so I understand that this is a strategy dishonest?” born of necessity, not strength. My Yes, Trump is a great respecter of Republican colleagues fear the right other people’s religious faiths -- as wing of their party. But I would ask long as they stay behind him in the my colleagues: Are the cheering of polls.

Trump’s crowds or the adulation of E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ Cruz’s acolytes worth sacrificing your tribune.com. basic constitutional duty? Are these The Washington Post (C) 2016 Clarence Page the forces you went into public service 2-16-16 2-21-16 to serve?

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March 2, 2016

LIBERAL DELINEATIONS

Liberal Opinion Week

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Francis Wilkinson

The Thurmond Rule Shows Republican Weakness Republicans insist on strictly following the Constitution. Just not right now. Now is special, they say. Now is not the time to resort to a nitpicky document drawn up by bewigged ancients.

No, for Republicans, the only sensible course now is to be governed by norms -- those longestablished byways that govern the behavior of esteemed institutions such as the Senate without having been written into the Constitution or Senate rules. Actually, what Republicans want is not so much adherence to longstanding norms as adherence to a single, somewhat suspect and shortstanding norm -- the “Thurmond Rule.”

The Thurmond Rule is not one of the Senate’s more concrete guides. Politico in 2008 reported that it “decreed that no lifetime judicial appointments would move in the last six months or so of a lame-duck presidency.” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, had invoked it that year, saying specifically that the Senate shouldn’t push through any controversial nominees to lifetime appointments after June of President George W. Bush’s last year.

In response, a Bush White House spokeswoman said that the “only thing clear about the so- called ‘Thurmond Rule’ is that there is no such defined rule.”

After the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia last week, the New York Times reported that the newly relevant rule “has its origins in June 1968, when Senator Strom Thurmond, Republican of South Carolina, blocked President Lyndon B. Johnson’s appointment of Justice Abe Fortas as chief justice.”

Thurmond is most famous as a Dixiecrat who impregnated his family’s 16-year-old black housekeeper and kept their daughter a lifelong secret.

A hazy, ad-hoc rule uniquely identified with a racist hypocrite might not be a fount of righteousness. But it’s the leaky base on which Republicans now rest their case.

The party’s inability to reckon with the loss of consecutive presidential elections is pitiful.

Republicans dominate statehouses across the land but are so convinced of their own weakness and unpopularity that in state after state they’ve erected barriers to voting, hoping simply to shave a couple of poor people’s votes off the tally here and there. They have large governing majorities in the House and Senate, yet time and again argue and second-guess their way into legislative paralysis or buffoonery.

Their Bourbon fiscal policies anticipate the deluge, seeking to shovel as much gold as possible into the coffers of the ruling class before the revolution, leaving only deficits behind for the hordes gathering restlessly outside the palace walls. Meanwhile, they ask themselves how the likes of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz ended up as viable candidates for their party’s presidential nomination.

We still don’t know how far down the Republican Party has to go before it begins to bounce back.

Cruz low? Trump low? Lower? After the last presidential election, party operatives produced a

blueprint calling for moderation and, essentially, a re-engagement with mainstream American national life. Since that 2013 document was issued, the party has accelerated its retreat, engaging in massive resistance to cultural, demographic and political change that it can slow but not stop.

might behave. A president of the opposing party would nominate a replacement, and the Senate majority would use the subsequent hearings to showcase its judicial and political philosophy, drawing contrasts with an outgoing president possessed of middling approval ratings and a party inextricably tied to him.

At the very least, the hearings, controlled by the majority party, would show that party in its preferred light, providing its candidates with a strong push toward victory in November. In a best-case scenario, it would provide the public rationale for rejecting the president’s choice, further undermining his standing in advance of the election.

For a party with faith in itself and in the American project, a Supreme Court vacancy is worthy of a pitched, strategic battle. But Republicans don’t believe they have a popular judicial or political philosophy, and they are so dependent on the court’s activist conservative bloc that a potential shift of a single judge is deemed catastrophic.

What defines the party is an abiding fear of the future combined with an unwillingness to adapt to meet it. (That Obamacare replacement is coming any day now.) Republicans are the wrench in the works, halting all they can without a plan for the day after the machine breaks. The only question is whether the machine breaks first, or the party does.

Francis Wilkinson writes on politics and domestic policy for Bloomberg View.

The Supreme Court’s conservative majority is the ultimate brake on 21st-century designs. Thus the conservative howls of outrage when Chief Justice John Roberts or frequent swing vote Anthony Kennedy declines to stop the train.

Scalia, by contrast, stood reliably athwart history.

He did his best to kill Obamacare and established, even at the risk of creating it, the individual right to possess firearms, among other accomplishments.

His death has induced panic. Flustered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, failed even to rely on artifice; normally shrewd and strategic, he simply announced that the Senate would not consider Obama’s nominations for the vacancy -- 11 months before the president’s term ends. Senate Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa subsequently implied that he might hold hearings but not allow them to get so out of hand that they actually lead to a new justice on the court.

“This is a very serious position to fill, and it should be filled and debated during the campaign and filled by either Hillary Clinton, Senator Sanders or whoever’s nominated by the Republicans,” he said. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View Imagine how a more confident political party 2-16-16

Charles Lane

Darkness at the Supreme Court

Someday the Senate will consider a president’s nominee for the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the late Antonin Scalia.

Meanwhile, interested parties should prepare by reading a gripping new book about one of the court’s darkest moments.

“Imbeciles” is the arch title that lawyer-journalist Adam Cohen has given his narrative of Buck v.

Bell, the 1927 case in which the justices approved Virginia’s involuntary sterilization of “feeble minded,” epileptic and other purportedly genetically “unfit” citizens.

The vote was 8 to 1. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.’s opinion dispensed with young Carrie Buck’s physical integrity in five paragraphs, the six cruelest words of which characterized Virginia’s interest in preventing Buck from burdening the state with her defective offspring: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

As Cohen shows, everything had to go wrong in the legal system to produce this horror, and everything did, starting with a crooked local process that declared Buck intellectually inferior based on her out-of-wedlock pregnancy - an indicator, state doctors averred, of promiscuity, which connoted feeblemindedness.

In fact, she had been raped by her foster parents’

nephew; the couple then sought to cure this embarrassment by having Buck sent away to the state colony for her “kind.”

Virginia established the institution to isolate those who supposedly threatened “racial hygiene” and prevent them from breeding. All told, more than 30 states had such laws during the mid-20th century, though only California surpassed Virginia’s 8,300 involuntary sterilizations. It conducted roughly 20,000.

Today, the evil of such laws is universally recognized. The governors of North Carolina, Virginia and California apologized a decade ago, and in 2013 North Carolina approved $50,000 for each surviving victim.

But the story isn’t over: Virginia has promised $25,000 per person in compensation but appropriated only enough for 16 awards. The Golden State has no compensation plan.

And Buck v. Bell, though basically a dead letter, has never been formally overruled. It stands as a baleful monument - not to the court’s malice, but to the eternal flaws in human nature that cause people to commit injustice with the best of intentions.

Many, if not most, right-thinking Americans

Lane continued on page 19

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Gail Collins

Republicans See How Long They Can Hold Their Breath

Maybe we’d better refrain from having any new opinions until after the election.

Follow the leader. Mitch McConnell says the Senate shouldn’t do anything about the Supreme Court’s vacancy as long as Barack Obama is president. Not even go through the motions of pretending to think about it. We’ve hit a whole new level in the politics of obstruction.

Why stop there? For the next 11 months it’s probably better if we let everything go except for the purchase of food staples.

Don’t even bother to fake it.

Virtually every Republican with a job more elevated than zoning commissioner thinks the best thing to do with any Supreme Court nomination is to act as if it isn’t there, like a wad of gum on the sidewalk.

“Delay, delay, delay!” cried Donald Trump at the last debate.

Some listeners might have presumed he was calling for the return of the former House majority leader who resigned during a campaign finance scandal and later rehabilitated himself by doing the cha-cha on

“Dancing With the Stars.” Exactly the kind of guy Donald Trump would like. But in this case he was talking about stonewalling any Supreme Court nomination.

“If I were president ... I guess I’d put in a name,” Trump admitted in a phone call to Stephen Colbert.

This is extremely mild language for the leading Republican presidential candidate. Normally you’d expect Trump to say something like: “If I were president I’d nominate somebody who would scare the hell out of them. Putin! I’d nominate Putin. And then they’d be so nervous that they’d let me have anybody I wanted, which of course would be Sarah Palin.”

Lane continued from page 18 approved of involuntary sterilization at the time. Doctors, lawyers, politicians, educators: All marveled at advancements in biological science, anxiously surveyed multiplying Appalachian poor or Eastern European immigrants - and concluded government could and should improve the country’s human “stock” just as a rancher breeds better steers.

At its peak, in the years before, during and just after World War I, the pseudo- science of “eugenics” was a national fad, almost a mania.Advocates were not only or even especially right wing; state sterilization laws emerged first in the North and West, and many progressives embraced “racial hygiene” along with pure food and drug laws or urban sanitation.

A good companion volume to Cohen’s is “Illiberal Reformers,” by Princeton’s Thomas C. Leonard, which describes how some Progressive era economists actually made eugenicist arguments for early minimum- wage laws. Raising the wage floor would encourage employers to hire only the most productive workers, who would prosper and propagate, while

“unemployables” exited the labor course, ran afoul of church doctrine. force and got “treated.”

Cohen plausibly speculates, as did Holmes himself at the time, that In an era of apocalyptic warnings Butler’s religion influenced him. of “race suicide,” Virginia’s plans I like to imagine Butler also for Carrie Buck made perfect sense wondered how Buck v. Bell would read not only to Holmes but also to his to future generations, asking himself illustrious colleagues: William whether they might look back on the Howard Taft, a former president; “expertise” embodied in Virginia’s Louis D. Brandeis, the great “people’s law and see not dispassionate science lawyer”; and Harlan Fiske Stone, who but the opposite. The case certainly would later be one of the New Deal’s wasn’t the first to present the justices judicial defenders. with an intellectual fad or popular To be sure, some state supreme prejudice dressed up as something courts had struck down sterilization finer, nor would it be the last. laws, which is why Virginia sought a For whatever reason - faith, legal green light at the highest court common sense, a well-functioning in the land before sterilizing Buck moral compass and BS detector pursuant to a freshly adopted 1924 Butler found it within himself to say law. “no” while a powerful, high-minded For the justices, though, elite flock all around him chorused “yes.” groupthink and the “strength of the Let’s hope the next justice, whenever State,” as Holmes put it, outweighed he or she arrives, is occasionally a few lower courts’ misgivings - capable of that, too. precedents Holmes did not even Charles Lane is a Post editorial address, let alone refute. writer, specializing in economic One justice, the obscure Pierce policy, federal fiscal issues and Butler, dissented, without a written business, and a contributor to the opinion. Butler was a son of Irish PostPartisan blog. immigrants and the only Roman (c) 2016, The Washington Post Catholic justice; sterilization, of 2-17-16

People, do you remember what Mitch McConnell used to say when he was the powerless Senate minority leader? Of course you don’t. There’s just so much stuff that fits into a human brain and no reason whatsoever that McConnell should be taking up space.

He used to say that when Republicans got control, democracy

and venerable tradition would rule.

No more of those sneaky tricks that his predecessor Harry Reid used to keep the other side’s ideas from coming up for a vote: “The answer is to let folks debate, to let the Senate work its will.” He had a vision of a deliberative body that argued so long and hard that eventually all the Democrats would collapse from exhaustion and he, Majority Leader Mitch, would walk over their prostrate bodies to principled victory.

That was the good old days. We remember them with nostalgia, like the golden era when members of both parties drank in the same bars. Now apparently the Senate can’t even be trusted to hold a committee hearing.

“We’re not moving forward on it, period,” said Sen. Marco Rubio.

He used to be regarded as the most rational person in the Republican presidential field. That was just because we hadn’t had time to get acquainted yet.

If you want to understand why the Republicans are broadcasting their commitment to obstructionism,

it’s useful to take a look at Rubio’s campaign. Given the tenor of our times, it’s natural that all the candidates would depict Barack Obama as the worst thing that’s happened to America since ... oh, I don’t know. Pearl Harbor? The Panic of 1837? But Rubio also insists that the president has been ruining the country on purpose: “All this damage that he’s done to America is deliberate.”

This is a theory, much loved on talk radio, that involves an insidious presidential plot to make America just a run-of-the-mill country — smaller and weaker and burdened with universal health care. When things go wrong it isn’t because of ineptitude.

It’s a careful Obama scenario aimed at bringing the country down. A man that sinister can’t be allowed to even put a nomination into play. God knows what would happen. Close your eyes and pretend he isn’t there.

Ben Carson made the same point in his traditional way — that is, in language that made no sense whatsoever: “It is imperative that the Senate not allow President Obama to diminish his legacy by trying to nominate an individual who would carry on his wishes to subvert the will of the people.”

Ted Cruz vowed to filibuster any attempt by the Senate to vote on a nominee. Because filibuster is, you know, what Ted Cruz does. Just put your hands over your ears and hum very loudly until you get your way.

And Jeb Bush ... OK, we don’t need to talk about Jeb Bush. This is the man who recently tweeted a picture of a handgun with his name engraved on it, over the title “America.” The only good thing you can say for his campaign is that he did not send out a video called “It’s Morning Again in America” that opens with footage of Vancouver. That was Marco Rubio. c.2016 New York Times News Service 2-17-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Jules Witcover

Scalia’s Political Legacy In the end, Justice Antonin Scalia’s greatest influence may yet turn out to be in the political rather than in the judicial realm.

For all his record and reputation as the leading conservative and “originalist” advocate of a generation on the Supreme Court, the manner in which his death has intruded on the 2016 presidential election may well be best remembered.

Already Scalia’s passing has inspired all the Republican candidates to throw down the gauntlet to the lame-duck President Obama, demanding that he withhold the nomination of a successor and leave the choice to the next president.

Obama quickly disabused them of that notion, whereupon some of them have vowed to deny his eventual nominee a Senate committee hearing while he is still in office. Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said he would filibuster such a nomination and that the Senate was “not remotely” required to take it up.

Such a filibuster would hand Cruz, in the midst of his fight with current Republican frontrunner Donald Trump over leadership the antiestablishment row within the GOP, a dominant forum to showcase his claim to be the purest conservative in the field.

At the same time, the two contending Democrats, Hillary Clinton and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, can rail against further evidence of the Republican obstructionism that has marked the party’s stonewalling of the Obama presidency from its start.

With the GOP holding a 54-46 majority in the Senate, it would take all the Democrats and 14 Republicans to muster the 60 votes required to invoke cloture against a filibuster. That would seem impossible in light of the political stakes involved, as would any Democratic effort to change the 60-vote requirement.

Instead, one option for the Obama White House might be to nominate an individual whose rejection by the Republicans could be politically damaging to them in the context of the presidential election. That is, for example, a highly qualified African-American from a federal appellate court, such as Judge Paul Watford of the 9th Circuit Court, whose choice might encourage black voter support for the Democratic presidential nominee in the fall even if his choice was not seated.

That such considerations should be weighed involving that critical decision, both by the president and members of the Senate, is of course a lamentable recourse. With so many critical issues to be adjudicated by the Court involving the well-being of the nation and its citizens, political games-playing should be out of order, but clearly they will not be.

It is ironic that in this argument over Scalia’s successor, the famously originalist interpreter of the Constitution as written by the founders, the Republican presidential aspirants would seek to depart from the long-sanctioned practice of

the U.S. Senate taking up in a timely fashion a and would assure that the selection of Scalia’s presidential nomination of a Supreme Court replacement would remain a dominant issue justice. in an already extremely contentious and bitter presidential election.

The contention that the sitting president is in The acerbic but witty Scalia probably would his final year in the Oval Office should as a lame have been enormously amused by the way his duck yield his Constitutional right to nominate a parting from the bench, and from the universe, has successor to a Supreme Court vacancy is without complicated the campaign for the leadership of a any legal validity whatever. nation in which he had such a significant voice Article II, Section 2 specifically gives the for 30 years. And under the circumstances, the president “Power, by and with the advice and controversial spirit of Justice Scalia will continue consent of the Senate” to appoint “judges of to be around in absentia for months to come. the Supreme Court.” It also stipulates that he Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American “shall have the power to fill all vacancies that Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” may happen during the recess of the Senate, by published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond granting commissions which shall expire at the to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net. end of their next session.”

(C) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

But the Republican-controlled Senate could 2-17-16 be counted on in this instance not to recess,

Noah Feldman

Scalia May Be The Last Of The Originalists

Justice Antonin Scalia didn’t invent originalism. The credit for that on the modern Supreme Court goes to Justice Hugo Black, who developed the approach to constitutional interpretation as a liberal tool to make the states comply with the Bill of Rights. But Scalia did more to bring originalism into the conservative mainstream than any other Supreme Court justice.

In fact, his role as the godfather of the conservative constitutional rebirth of the 1980s and ‘90s derived from his originalist advocacy.

But will Scalia’s originalist legacy last? Can the philosophy outlive the man? There is reason to doubt it -- because Scalia is literally irreplaceable, and because the younger conservative justices aren’t originalists of the same stripe.

Scalia’s influence was not only intellectual but also charismatic, driven by his outsize personality, and institutional, driven by his role writing for the court. Without the force of his character and his steady stream of opinions, his long-term impact will depend on how much his ideas have seeped into the water of conservative constitutional thought. At a broad level, originalism has had one important effect that isn’t going away: It’s fueled the growing academic field of constitutional history.

But you can study the history of the Constitution without thinking that it’ll lead you to the promised land of objective historical truth. Scalia thought that such history could be found, as he argued in a lecture he gave repeatedly in recent years.

Most historians doubt that. Indeed, training in history departments tends to yield the opposite result. Historians don’t think there’s a single answer to most complex historical problems.

What’s more, they often believe in historical

evolution and change, which is more compatible with the idea of a living Constitution than of Scalia’s dead one. More constitutional history of the careful kind won’t be a legacy that Scalia would’ve embraced as his own.

On the court, Justice Clarence Thomas is carrying the torch of historical originalism, and will no doubt continue to do so. In many cases, Thomas has taken historical inquiry deeper and further than Scalia did. Thomas at times seems willing to scrap much of constitutional precedent when it’s inconsistent with what he considers the original public meaning of the document.

But Thomas doesn’t have Scalia’s influence among conservative legal thinkers. Many movement conservatives admire him personally, but unlike Scalia, Thomas doesn’t present himself as a hard-hitting intellectual, eager to wage the war of ideas in every possible venue. Thomas’s opinions do show historical originalism, and sometimes very deep and hard research. But his public lectures and nonjudicial writings aren’t designed to promote his jurisprudence.

To illustrate: Thomas’s best-known book is his autobiography. Scalia’s is an essential volume published in 1998 by Princeton University Press titled “A Matter of Interpretation.” It’s the record of Scalia’s Tanner Lectures on human values -- the most prestigious lecture series in the humanities. It contains not only Scalia’s serious and penetrating text, but also responses by four major thinkers: the historian Gordon Wood, the late legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, and two of my law professor colleagues, Mary Ann Glendon and Laurence Tribe.

Feldman continued on page 21

Liberal Opinion Week

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Clarence Page

Supreme Court’s Future Could Go To The Voters The Onion’s wizards of wacky wit struck just the proper tone with this headline: “Justice Scalia Dead Following 30-year Battle With Social Progress.”

I can easily imagine the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who professed a robust belief in the existence of heaven, would have nodded his approval of that satirical sendoff.

He defended his conservatism with the happy abandon of William F. Buckley’s classic definition of a conservative: “someone who stands athwart history yelling Stop.”

Scalia was a giant as an “originalist,” which also is the title of a play about the justice that premiered in Washington last year.

Originalism, simply put, holds that the Constitution must be applied based on the original meaning of its text, not on legislative history or the assumed intention of its authors.

In other words, we are to judge justice in today’s world by the standards of a time when women and nonwhites could not vote and slaves were counted as threefifths of a person for purposes of reapportionment.

I prefer the view of the late Justice Thurgood Marshall, who was about as liberal as Scalia was conservative. Marshall observed that the original Constitution should be celebrated, not for the rights it failed to include but for the ingenious ways that it contains the tools for its own improvement -- through the

Feldman continued from page 20

Given our current confirmation practices, it’s hard to imagine a future conservative justice with the combination of intellectual heft and desire to perform in public that led to Scalia’s Tanner Lectures.

That leaves Scalia’s originalist legacy mostly in the hands of the other Supreme Court justices. Chief Justice John Roberts isn’t anything like a pure originalist. A brilliant doctrinal lawyer, Roberts is far more comfortable sorting through complex precedents in the U.S. Reports than finding new sources that shed light on constitutional history. What’s more, Roberts in recent years has shown a tendency toward judicial restraint that’s at odds with the swashbuckling conservative.

amendment process.

Yet, as much as I disagreed with Scalia, I read his arguments with the admiration of someone who appreciated the challenges he posed.

Regardless of where you stand, it pays to keep track of what your adversaries are up to.

I also admired his cordial relationship with his liberal colleagues, particularly fellow Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But as one long-tenured Washingtonian once told me, “If you let politics get in the way, you’ll never have any friends in this town.”

Which brings us to the big political showdown that Scalia’s death immediately ignited.

The White House announced that President Barack Obama will nominate a replacement. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, among other Republicans, demanded that the decision be left to the next president -- who they, of course, hope will be a Republican. S u d d e n l y the vacancy turns the future of all three branches of government into a presidential election year issue.

That may well prove to be a big favor to the Democrats in a year that so far has not brought out nearly as robust of a voter turnout as Republicans have seen. As much as Obama excited liberals eight years ago, anger at Obama now energizes conservatives.

That also could be good news for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who Justice Samuel Alito might on the surface look like a more promising figure to inherit Scalia’s mantle. But he’s no “Scalito,” as some critics charged when he first joined the court. Alito is certainly deeply conservative. But his conservatism seems to rest more on deeply cherished values, like religious liberty, than Scalia’s did.

For Scalia, what mattered first and foremost about constitutional interpretation was the method. For Alito, what matters is the result and its compatibility with conservative values.

Of course, if elected president, Sens. Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio or even businessman Donald Trump might elevate other conservative intellectual originalists to the court.

But unless that happens, it seems

looks barely like the Democratic presidential frontrunner as “democratic socialist” Sen. Bernie Sanders has mounted a surprisingly successful campaign.

Republican stubbornness and the high stakes involved with a lifetime appointment to a Supreme Court seat gives Clinton something her campaign so far has oddly lacked: a theme.

Think about it. Donald Trump has “Make America Great Again.”

Sanders has his battle to take back the real America from “the millionaires and billionaires.” Clinton? So far, her big theme boils down to a third term, more or less, for Obama’s policies.

probable that, over the long-term, Scalia’s originalism will fade as an intellectual force. Clever lawyers will keep on making originalist arguments to the courts -- but they’ll stop if no one’s buying. Conservative justices will use originalist arguments sometimes, but except for Thomas, they won’t make originalism their touchstone. With no replacement for Scalia to lead the charge, originalism as a constitutional philosophy will recede - until a new generation finds it useful for as yet unknown purposes.

Noah Feldman, a Bloomberg View columnist, is a professor of constitutional and international law at Harvard. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-17-16

Against the big “revolution” promised by Sanders, she offers sermons on pragmatism -incremental changes that “get things done,” even if they are not all that you might dream of doing.

Trouble is, it is nowhere near as easy to motivate people to vote by offering pragmatism as it is to offer revolution, even when the details of your revolution leave a lot of unanswered questions -- like how it is to be paid for.

With that in mind, it would have been a wiser strategy for Republicans to play along with the process in the way it usually has been done. Invite the president to send a nominee and then drag your heels in the vetting process. Then, after running down the clock, reject the nominee and force the process to start over again.

But today’s generation of Republican lawmakers and their party’s base don’t want to hear about subtleties. As a result, they may stir the sort of backlash from previously apathetic liberals that cost Republicans dearly in 2012.

History could repeat itself, once liberals remember what’s at stake: The future of civil rights, abortion rights, press freedom, gun laws - you name it. As Justice Marshall said, the Constitution contains the tools for its own improvement. One of those tools is our right to vote.

Use it or lose it.

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@ tribune.com.

(C) 2016 Clarence Page 2-17-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Donald Kaul

The Passion of Scalia My mother always told me never to speak ill of the dead.

For that reason I won’t go on at length about Antonin Scalia, the recently departed Supreme Court justice. My opinion wouldn’t be worth that much anyway. I didn’t know the man — I was never even in the same room with him.

However, I do find this avalanche of posthumous praise of him as “a judicial giant” and one of the great justices of our history a little gag-inducing.

OK, he was a bon vivant and a fun guy who wrote snarky, entertaining opinions. I get that. As a jurist, however, he left much to be desired. As a matter of fact, he was terrible — one of the most destructive justices of recent times.

Named to the court by Ronald Reagan in 1986, he revived a conservative judicial philosophy that had long lain dormant: originalism.

It’s an approach that treats the Constitution as holy writ, a set of rules written in stone that allows very little room for broad interpretation. Cases that came to the Supreme Court, in Scalia’s view, were to be viewed exclusively through the lens of an 18th-century document, with no attempt to adjust to the changes in society wrought by time.

He didn’t want a living, breathing Constitution.

He wanted a dead one.

His argument was that the wisdom of nine unelected jurists was no match for the wisdom of the people as expressed in laws written by their elected representatives.

In other words, if people wanted social change, let them vote for it. That argument makes hash of the theory of constitutional government, which holds that the Constitution acts as a bulwark to protect the rights of the minority against the desires of the majority.

And Scalia might say: “Where are those rights in the Constitution? Show me.”

Generally speaking I’m against literalists, whether religious or political. The people who believe in the literal truth of the Bible, for example — who arrive at the conclusion that the earth was created 5,000 years ago because that’s what the “begats” add up to — are only one step removed from the originalists who are slaves to our founding fathers.

Who, not incidentally, accepted the enslavement of millions of Americans and denied a majority of this country’s inhabitants the right to vote.

Scalia was perhaps useful as a check on judges who might take unbridled license with the Constitution. But I object to the constant theme in Scalia’s obituaries that he was a man of ironclad principles who didn’t deviate from his beliefs to satisfy expedience. For those who believe that, I offer two words and a letter: Bush v. Gore.

Scalia was the point man on the court when it halted the recount of ballots in Florida and effectively gave the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush, who received fewer votes nationwide than his opponent, Al Gore.

Subsequent reporting revealed that a full recount

would have proven that Gore beat Bush in Florida, too — and therefore won that White House race.

to have had George W. Bush made president by judicial fiat. Imagine what might have been, just in one regard. Our troops wouldn’t have invaded Whether or not you agree with Scalia’s belief Iraq. Perhaps the Middle East wouldn’t have that we should supposedly treat the Constitution exploded, sending its toxic fallout throughout the as a “sacred” document, there’s no evidence that Western world. it gives the Supreme Court any role in the conduct That’s not how things went. I think Scalia of elections. That task is left to the states. went against his principles to make a political Where was Scalia’s famed originalism then? decision that favored the party to which he owed Somehow he swept it under the carpet. his career.

Scalia was unapologetic about his pivotal role That’s his real legacy. in the election. When asked about it in later years, OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in he would dismiss the question with the sneering Ann Arbor, Michigan. remark: “Get over it.”

OtherWords.org.

Get over it? I’d love to get over it. I’d love not 2-17-16

James Downie

How The Fight To Fill Scalia’s Seat Could Change American Politics Forever

Hours after Justice Antonin Scalia died on Saturday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said, “The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new President.” Similar statements followed from other Republican senators. Democrats decried the delay as “unprecedented,” and political commentators wondered whether Republicans could indeed pull off delaying until next January.

It’s true that the GOP’s historical case for an 11-month delay is shaky at best. And it’s true that, as my Washington Post colleague Catherine Rampell documented this week, Republicans have been obstructing President Barack Obama’s judicial nominees long before his last year in office.

But the debate over whether Republicans can delay the nomination for a year obscures how the Scalia fight could change the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches.

Suppose one party emerges from 2016 in control of the White House and the Senate. Barring a big change before Election Day and a sweep of truly historic proportions, the minority party will still have enough seats to filibuster whomever is nominated. Will the majority party -- Democrat or Republican -- get rid of the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees? In similar circumstances in 2005, McConnell supported this “nuclear option” as Senate majority whip. In 2013, Democrats frustrated with blatant GOP obstruction, ditched the filibuster for non-Supreme Court judicial nominees. In an op-ed for The Post on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., wrote of excepting Supreme Court nominees, “Maybe that was a mistake.”

In recent decades, as the White House and the Senate have changed hands, the party out of the White House has voted against presidents’

nominees in increasingly large numbers and with increasing frequency. Once, it took someone as extreme as Robert Bork to face united opposition.

(Some conservatives have made Bork into a martyr to Democratic partisanship. It’s true that they objected -- to a nominee who, among other things, did not recognize a constitutional right to privacy or equal protection for women and who had called the Civil Rights Act state coercion of “unsurpassed ugliness.” No wonder six Republicans voted against him.) Under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, filibustering nominees of the opposing party increasingly became standard practice. If in 2017 one party controls both the White House and Senate, that party’s voters likely will demand an end to the filibuster if it’s the sole obstacle to a nomination.

But the potential of a Senate filibuster has served in the past as a useful, often unseen check on presidents when choosing whom to nominate, and the demise of the filibuster would increase the executive branch’s share of power over the makeup of the Supreme Court.

The other, perhaps more unprecedented scenario would greatly alter the current balance of legislative and executive power in the other direction. In this scenario, either McConnell & Co. decide to give Obama’s nominees a floor vote, or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders is elected president while Senate Republicans hold their majority. (In the latter instance, by the way, it should be noted that Clinton or Sanders likely will be forced to spend their first 100 days, when a president’s political capital is traditionally highest, on a Supreme Court fight, rather than on legislative priorities that could use the boost.)

Senate Republicans have built their majority on unbending opposition to everything Obama and Democrats do, and given the importance

Downie continued on page 23

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

23

Bill Press

Mitch McConnell’s Supreme Blunder It’s one of the first Latin sentences we learned to translate in high school: “De mortuis nil nisi bonum” -- roughly translated as “If you can’t say anything good about the dead, don’t say anything at all.”

In which case, I should end this column about Justice Antonin Scalia right now.

Except -- having interviewed him twice, introduced him as a luncheon speaker, had dinner with him, and chatted on many social occasions -- there are good things I can say about Scalia. He was an engaging conversationalist, fun to be around.

He was a brilliant, if wrong-headed, intellectual. He was the most powerful presence on the Supreme Court. And he was a talented wordsmith. Only Scalia could write such obnoxious opinions in the most felicitous and memorable language.

In 2015, he ridiculed the majority’s arguments for upholding the Affordable Care Act as “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” while dismissing another part of the decision as “pure applesauce.” In his dissent to the court’s 2003 decision on gay rights, he derided their signing on “to the so-called homosexual agenda.” In King v. Burwell, he criticized Chief Justice John Roberts for writing “with no semblance of shame” and assembling a “defense of the indefensible.” And his response to those who still question the court’s

2000 Bush v. Gore decision? “Get over it. It’s so old by now.”

Scalia himself was the first to admit that he loved the role of troublemaker. He told Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes,” “I love to argue.

I’ve always loved to argue. And I love to point out the weaknesses of the opposing arguments. It may well be that I’m something of a shin kicker. It may well be that I’m something of a contrarian.”

Downie continued from page 22

otherwise, the legislative branch will have unprecedented control over the next Supreme Court nomination.

If the fight over filling Scalia’s seat ends the filibuster on Supreme Court appointments, or if the GOP majority rejects Democratic nominees until a conservative (or at least someone who leans conservative) is chosen, that will alter checks and balances at the heart of the American political system. So buckle up: The debate over whether Republicans can block a high-court nominee in an election year is only a warmup. The bigger fight is just getting started.

James Downie is The Washington Post’s Digital Opinions Editor.

He previously wrote for The New Republic and Foreign Policy magazine.

Downie preserving a conservativemajority court, GOP voters expect nothing less. Even if McConnell lets the Senate vote, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) won’t miss a chance for a grandstand filibuster, and McConnell won’t go nuclear for a Democratic nominee. Democrats might be able to convince a few purple-state Republicans to vote for a Democratic president’s choice, but how conservative would Obama’s or Clinton’s or Sanders’s nominee have to be to break a filibuster?

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution says the president appoints Supreme Court nominees with “the advice and consent of the Senate.” There’s no dictionary or precedent that defines “advice and consent” as “the Senate picks your nominee for you.” But if, under huge pressure from the conservative base, enough Republicans think

Well, somewhere, Justice Scalia must be smiling, because he’s managed to shake things up in death even more than he did in life. His death profoundly impacts all three branches of government: the judicial, the executive and the legislative. It shakes up the court especially because this is the moment Democrats have been seeking and Republicans have been dreading: the chance for President Obama to move the highest court in a whole new direction, from 5-4 conservative to 5-4 liberal.

Meanwhile, until a new nominee is confirmed, the court will be at a standstill, locked in a 4-4 tie, unable to decide on six big cases before the court this term: immigration reform, affirmative action, public employee unions, abortion, contraception and voting rights. Those issues could remain unresolved for over a year.

Gridlock on the court.

(c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-18-16

Scalia’s death also shakes up the 2016 presidential race because it makes “electability” even more of a key issue for both Democratic and Republican voters and, with a historic Supreme Court nomination at stake, will dominate the political debate and drive more people to the polls.

But, most of all, Scalia’s passing shakes up the Senate -- especially since Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, even before Scalia’s body was cold, made the supreme political blunder of telling President Obama not to bother making a nomination to the Supreme Court because the Senate would not even consider it. No hearing, no vote.

After all, this is an election year, McConnell argued. Obama should let the people decide who gets to nominate.

2013; Judge Jane Kelly, confirmed 96-0 in 2013; or Attorney General Loretta Lynch, confirmed 56-43 in 2015. Do Republicans really want to spend the next 10 months acting like pure obstructionists, blocking an obviously qualified Supreme Court nominee out of pure, naked partisanship? Mitch McConnell’s asking them to commit political suicide.

The ultimate irony is that, by attempting to shut down the nomination process, McConnell is trashing the legacy of Justice Scalia. Faced with a vacancy on the court, there’s no doubt what strict constructionist Antonin Scalia would say: Follow the Constitution.

Let the president do his job. Let the Senate do its job. Yes, even in an election year.

Bill Press is host of a nationallysyndicated radio show, CNN political analyst and the author of a new book, “Buyer’s Remorse,” which is available in bookstores now. You can hear “The Bill Press Show” at his website: billpressshow.com. His email address is: bill@billpress. com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter at @bpshow.

As Justice Scalia himself might say, what “legalistic argle-bargle.”

First, McConnell’s wrong on the facts. Article 2, Section 2 of the Constitution clearly gives the president power to appoint judges of the Supreme Court, “with the advice and consent of the Senate.” There’s no asterisk that says: “except in his (c) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, LLC. last year in office.” And, besides, the 2-18-16 people have already voted. In 2008 and in 2012.

Second, McConnell has walked Join Republican senators up for reelection into a classic election year Liberal Opinion political trap. President Obama’s Week most likely to nominate someone with impeccable credentials, recently on Facebook. confirmed by the Senate: like Judge Sri Srinivasan, confirmed 97-0 in

24

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Linda Hirshman

The Revival of Liberal Justice Nothing separated the odd couple of the Supreme Court -- the late Justice Antonin Scalia and his best buddy, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg -- more than their visions of the Constitution they both loved. Scalia saw the Constitution as a “dead” document, limited to the meaning of the original words at the moment the ink was dry, a moment when white, propertied men ruled. Ginsburg’s Constitution, by contrast, is the expansive charter of an evolving society. She celebrates “the extension (through amendment, judicial interpretation, and practice) of constitutional rights and protections to once ignored or excluded people: to humans who were once held in bondage, to men without property, to the original inhabitants of the land that became the United States, and to women.”

While Scalia’s originalism certainly has its disciples among conservatives, with his death, Ginsburg’s vision of a living Constitution becomes more likely to prevail. President Obama (or his successor) has a chance to appoint at least one more liberal to the Supreme Court. That would give the court a liberal majority for the first time since 1971.

It would allow the court to resume the progressive push -- on issues including school desegregation, reproductive rights, organized labor and voting rights -- that stalled almost a half-century ago. It would enable a revival of a dramatically different role for the court: as an institution that drives social change instead of halting it.

Before President Richard Nixon’s four conservative appointments abruptly tilted the court to the right, the country was in the middle of a social revolution, or what we now call the Sixties.

Relations of race, gender and, less obviously, class were mutating at warp speed. The federal courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, were at the heart of the transformations.

The high court issued a series of decisions enshrining the principle of “one person, one vote.”

Unevenly apportioned districts had enabled white voters in sparsely populated rural areas to pick most of the people in state legislatures, while minorities and people concentrated in cities and suburbs got little say. The court ordered that legislative districts had to be roughly equal in population. Everything, from policy agendas to the allotment of pork, changed.

School desegregation was also a live issue.

Litigants asked the courts to address the educational impact of housing segregation by integrating city school systems with their mostly white suburban counterparts. Other advocates sought a constitutional order compelling states to fund all their public schools equally, rather than using a property-tax-based system that left poor and minority systems wildly underfunded. If schools remained separate, at least they would be equal. In both sets of cases, litigants were winning in lower courts. Supreme Court action seemed promising.

Labor was another big issue. In 1969, the Supreme Court approved a new extraordinary remedy for labor unions, compelling an employer

to recognize a union on the basis of cards signed by a majority of employees and finding that an employer’s refusal to do so had been a blatant play for time with the effect of rendering the union vulnerable. After the Supreme Court ruled, unions began to inundate the National Labor Relations Board, and the courts of appeals that supervise it, with requests for orders to bargain.

And then there were issues related to women’s rights. In 1971, in the last days before the conservative court takeover, the court ruled in Reed v. Reed that the equal protection clause applies to sex discrimination. Soon afterward, women’s advocates asked the courts to order that distinguishing between pregnancyrelated disabilities and other disabilities is sex discrimination. Formal equality was great, they thought, but the real social change would come when the single largest factor making women’s lives harder ceased to be a burden women must bear alone. A district court agreed.

Then the music stopped. Nixon had campaigned against the “activist” decisions of the Warren court and vowed to replace liberal justices with “strict constructionists,” an early version of originalists.

He got to do that four times, appointing Warren Burger in 1969, Harry Blackmun in 1970, and Lewis Powell and William Rehnquist in 1971.

(Rehnquist replaced John Marshall Harlan II, who was a Republican appointee but took liberal positions on race and sex.) When the court convened in 1972, conservatives were in the majority. And the Nixon justices set about blocking avenues of inclusiveness one by one.

more damaging than any particular judicial action.

Lower courts have refused to enforce orders to bargain seemingly authorized by the court’s 1969 decision. And the Supreme Court has refused to chastise them for it, helping to propel labor’s downward spiral, which may now be too far along to reverse. An additional blow seemed imminent last month when the court heard oral arguments in a case involving California teachers who claim that their free speech rights are violated when they are forced to pay union dues. As The Washington Post’s Robert Barnes reported, “The court’s conservatives appeared ready to junk a decadesold precedent.” With Scalia’s death, the outcome of the case is uncertain.

Voting rights, for a time, fared relatively well under the conservative-majority court. It helped that the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 put a statute and the Justice Department on the side of electoral equality. But a counter-revolution has sought to strip the act of its power. The Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby County v. Holder nullified the law’s enforcement formula. And in December, the court revisited the meaning of “one person, one vote” in a case that questions whether all residents or just eligible voters should be counted when apportioning voting districts. The decision in that case, Evenwel v. Abbott, threatens to once again transfer political power from dense and diverse urban areas to sparsely populated and predominantly white rural ones.

Now, with the prospect of the court shifting once again, liberals are rightly rejoicing over the preempted conservative rulings. Without the court as a roadblock, President Obama’s liberal initiatives on emissions and immigration are likely to move the country in a new direction. There’s hope for a reversal of several 5 to 4 precedents, including Citizens United, which many liberals describe as the worst decision of the late conservative period.

A liberal-majority court, however, guided by Ginsburg’s vision of increasing inclusiveness, could be even more transformative.

It could affirm that pregnancy, including abortion, is indeed a sex discrimination issue. As such, any restriction on abortion rights should have to meet the standard of “exceedingly persuasive justification” set forth in Ginsburg’s landmark sex discrimination case, United States v. Virginia, not the forgiving low bar of “undue burden” on reproductive decisions. Under a liberal Supreme Court, it’s hard to imagine how a state could make an “exceedingly persuasive” argument for subjecting women to extended waiting periods or scientifically fanciful discouragement lectures before getting an abortion.

A liberal court, picking up where the court left off in the early ‘70s, could affirm that racial inclusiveness and equality are more pressing goals than local control of education. It could help remedy the effects of residential segregation and racial gaps in wealth by supporting regional school

Also in 1973, the court famously protected abortion rights in Roe v. Wade. But by grounding the decision in privacy rather than equality principles, the court exposed Roe to pushback. The following year, the court went further in decoupling pregnancy and women’s equality. Justice Byron White, a Democratic appointee who often voted against women’s claims, joined five Republican appointees to rule that pregnancy discrimination is not sex discrimination. The opinion had a shortlived impact on the immediate question: Ginsburg, then director of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project, successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978. Last year, the court applied that law to help protect a UPS worker who was denied accommodation while pregnant.

But the court’s insistence on addressing abortion and pregnancy separately from women’s equality has had monumental consequences for abortion rights. In 1980, four Republican appointees plus White upheld the Hyde Amendment, cutting abortion coverage out of Medicaid. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood in 1992, the standard of “undue burden” has replaced the protective language of Roe v. Wade and allowed an almost unlimited array of restrictions on abortion to pass muster.

For labor organizing, court inaction has been Hirshman continued on page 25

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

25

Jules Witcover

A Supreme Court Fight For The Ages The approaching battle over the Supreme Court vacancy created by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia is likely to be one for the ages, considering the huge political stakes as well as the depth of bitter partisanship in which it will unfold.

Up for grabs will be the ideological balance of the court now left divided 4-4 between conservatives and liberals after the departure of Scalia, who embodied right-wing thinking at its most acerbic.

Among the most contentious political clashes between the political camps on the Supreme Court was the 5-4 decision in the Citizens United decision, which threw open the door to virtually unlimited campaign contributions by wealthy individual and corporate donors.

Based on the conceit that spending money is a legitimate form of free speech, the ruling arguably has put

elections in the hands of the rich, at the expense of lower and middleclass Americans.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, the principal recipients of this free-flowing largess have been the Republicans, though their frontrunner, Donald Trump, has made much of the fact that he is financing his campaign from his own deep pockets as a highly successful real estate operator.

On the Democratic side, former Obama Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has tapped into the coffers of prominent Wall Street firms, even as she campaigns as a reformer of the practices unleashed by the Citizens United decision.

made the issue a centerpiece of his own campaign. He figures to benefit at the polls from the national spotlight on it, while remaining an underdog at this stage of the campaign.

But political money is only one of the many critical issues that have separated the Supreme Court, whose the majority would probably switch to the liberal side with the next Obama judicial nomination.

Such litmus tests as abortion rights and same-sex marriage will add more fuel to the incendiary debate over the confirmation or rejection of Obama’s eventual nominee.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s original insistence that he would not bring Obama’s choice to the Senate for a hearing during Her opponent for the Democratic the 11 months remaining in his nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie presidency has already caused some Sanders, limiting his own campaign concern among Senate Republicans, financing to small contributions, has who sense possible voter pushback

(with predictable partisan results). equal-funding Even before Scalia’s death, the court seemed inclined to disallow it. But racial gerrymandering is always hard A liberal court could resuscitate to defend. A liberal court should be the orphaned 1969 decision on the equally concerned with partisan remedies for union-busting, adding, gerrymandering, which similarly for example, real damages for distorts the wishes of voters. employees who are illegally fired And finally the court could go back for organizing. A liberal court could to sharpening -- instead of pulling also stop businesses from using the - the teeth of the Voting Rights Act. Federal Arbitration Act to force Ploys such as requiring elaborate employees and consumers into the identification and limiting access to hostile world of private arbitration. registration would be treated as the Ginsburg has been graphic on the exclusionary devices that they are. injustice of the past decade of 5-to- Some readers may question 4 decisions cutting disempowered whether Ginsburg’s vision, or that of players out of the last collective a new liberal justice, would include a remedy they have: class-action more revolutionary role for the court.

After all, Ginsburg is often called a litigation.

Protecting electoral representation “judicial minimalist,” and she has is perhaps the most promising criticized Roe v. Wade for going “too prospect of a revived liberal far, too fast.” Obama, meanwhile, jurisprudence. The court could, has said that while he admires what and surely would, reject the claim the Warren court did to “break that that only potential voters should logjam” on segregation, he “would count when apportioning political be troubled if you had that same kind representation. Where geography is a of activism in circumstances today.” rough stand-in for common interests, counting nonvoters advances the But Ginsburg’s criticism of Roe is not about goals, it’s about strategy. cause of democratic governance.

A liberal court also would watch She believes that incremental court for efforts by one party to pack the decisions inoculate themselves other side’s voters into the fewest against controversy better than number of districts. The court had ones that unnecessarily leapfrog the been scheduled to hear arguments legislative process. Her commitment shortly on a Virginia districting to preserving the right to abortion, scheme that put almost all of the and to the larger project of women’s state’s black voters into one district equality, is incontestable.

Hirshman continued from page 24

placements schemes.

and

As far as Obama, if sincere, his willingness to consign the unfinished business of the Warren court to the dustbin of history would be conservatism’s ultimate victory. But he made that comment in the midst of his 2008 presidential bid and may have been strategic in his answer.

Indeed, just a few sentences later, he concluded, “The kind of justice that I’m looking for. . . has a sense of what’s happening in the real world and recognizes that one of the roles of the courts is to protect people who don’t have a voice.” The two justices he has appointed certainly appreciate that role.

Still, it’s a testament to conservative legal dominance over the past 45 years that a liberal African American constitutional law professor feels the need to qualify the accomplishments of the Warren court. Conservatives have not only dominated the outcomes of cases since the early ‘70s, they’ve changed the way people think and speak about the federal courts.

With a liberal majority, the Supreme Court could finally redeem itself as a celebrated hero in a story of inclusion.

Hirshman is the author of “Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Went to the Supreme Court and Changed the World.”

Special To The Washington Post 2-19-16

in the 2016 election.

But given that GOP presidential aspirants Sens. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio urge obstruction, the Supreme Court vacancy is sure to be a critical voting matter in the November election. President Obama obviously occupies the high ground in insisting that the Republicans meet their responsibility to hold the Senate hearings while he remains in the Oval Office.

The last time a Republican president submitted a Supreme Court candidate to a Democraticcontrolled Senate -- George H.W. Bush’s nomination of Clarence Thomas in 1991-- stormy and ugly hearings ensued. Thomas alleged he was being subjected to “a hightech lynching for uppity blacks,” but he was eventually confirmed by a 52-48 vote, though with the most votes ever cast against a successful nominee.

The Republicans contend now that it has been nearly 80 years since a Supreme Court justice was nominated in the final year of a president’s occupancy, as if this were an immutable precedent.

In 1968, when Lyndon Johnson in his last year sought to promote Abe Fortas to chief justice, he was rejected. Subsequently, GOP Sen. Strom Thurmond argued for a socalled Thurmond Rule that said lifetime appointments should not made in the last six months of a presidential term. But it never was embraced.

Nevertheless, the Senate Republicans will keep looking for a way to get out of a corner in which fate has deposited them. Obama has been given an early going-away present, with which he can relieve a longtime political headache plaguing American progressives.

He can be expected to put forward a nominee so conspicuously qualified that his or her rejection would cause the Republican Senate a comparable headache contemplating turning that choice down.

Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books.

You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@comcast.net. (c) 2016 Tribune Content Agency, llc.

2-21-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Nicholas Kristof

America’s Stacked Deck It’s a little bizarre this political season to see wealthy candidates in both parties denouncing our political system for representing mostly the interests of, well, wealthy people.

Bizarre, perhaps, and sometimes a tad hypocritical, but also accurate. America’s political system is rigged. The deck is stacked against ordinary people. That’s the frustration that has fueled, in very different ways, the antiestablishment campaigns of Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders in particular, and that is leading other candidates, like Hillary Clinton, to grab their pitchforks as well.

“Yes, the economy is rigged in favor of those at the top,” Clinton declared in the Democratic debate last week.

One glimpse of the structural unfairness in America is this: A dumb rich kid is now more likely to graduate from college than a smart poor kid, according to Robert Putnam of Harvard University.

Another: The 20 wealthiest Americans, a group that would fit comfortably inside a luxury private jet bound for a private Caribbean island, are worth more than the poorer half of the American population, according to a recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies. Forbes’ wealthiest 100 are worth as much as all 42 million AfricanAmericans, the report says.

“Correctly, we suspect that the system is rigged, our government has become coin-operated and that we’ve been sidelined,” Wendell Potter and Nick Penniman write in their eye-opening new book about money in politics, “Nation on the Take.”

They call for a “profound course correction,” like those the United States has periodically undertaken before.

So it’s healthy for American voters to be demanding change. But when societies face economic pain, they sometimes turn to reforms, and other times to scapegoats (like refugees this year).

So the historic question for 2016 is which direction the popular revolt among American voters will ultimately take. A President Trump or President Cruz would build walls and waterboard suspected terrorists, a President Clinton or President Sanders would raise the minimum wage and invest in atrisk children.

It seems to me to make more sense to target solutions than scapegoats, but sense is often in short supply in politics. After a characteristically brilliant speech by Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic nominee for president in 1952 and 1956, a supporter is said to have bellowed, “Every thinking American will vote for you!”

Legend has it that Stevenson shouted back: “That’s not enough. I need a majority!”

In the solutions domain, a starting point should be to reduce the influence of money in politics.

The pharmaceutical industry, for example, has used its lobbying heft — it spent $272,000 in campaign donations per member of Congress last year, and it has more lobbyists than there are

members of Congress — to bar the government from bargaining for drug prices in Medicare.

That amounts to a $50 billion annual gift to pharmaceutical companies.

and in highly unequal America and asked them which kind of society they would prefer to live in, without saying which country each chart represented. Some 92 percent of Americans chose Sweden’s distribution.

Likewise, the great philosopher John Rawls developed a thought experiment to judge the fairness of a society: Imagine that you will be placed in a society but don’t know your station there. You’re unsure if you’ll be rich or poor, smart or dumb, black or white, male or female. In that case, many of us might choose Sweden as well, rather than risk ending up in the wrong ZIP code in the United States today.

So American voters are right to feel angry. Yet the challenge is not just to diagnose the problem but also to prescribe the right fixes and achieve them in this political environment.

So may the insurrection gain ground but be channeled not by punishing scapegoats, but by pursuing reforms that make the system work better for ordinary Americans.

Contact Kristof at Facebook.com/Kristof, Twitter.com/NickKristof or by mail at The New York Times, 620 Eighth Ave., New York, NY 10018.

The rise of inequality has complex roots, and some aren’t easily solved. For example, the empowerment of women, coupled with the tendency of people to marry those like themselves, means that high-earning men increasingly pair with high-earning women to form super-high-earning families.

Likewise, many Americans are wealthy in part because they worked hard, saved constantly and invested brilliantly. That’s to be celebrated, but all this plays out on a tilted field that also affects outcomes, and social values.

Paul Piff, a social psychologist, has conducted experiments in which Monopoly games are rigged so that one player has more money to start with and is almost predestined to win. It turns out that the wealthy player lords it over others and even grabs more pretzels from the communal bowl.

In this election season, many Americans feel that they are living that rigged Monopoly game.

Two business school professors, Michael c.2016 New York Times News Service Norton and Dan Ariely, showed people charts of 2-17-16 the distribution of wealth in egalitarian Sweden

Noah Smith

The Next Big Idea Is Just What The Economy Needs

This presidential election has driven home a problem that others have been noticing the last few years: The U.S. seems to be out of ideas for economic growth. The main argument appears to be over redistribution -- tax rates, the size of the welfare state, free college. Protectionism is also making a comeback; Bernie Sanders would restrict trade and punish Wall Street, while Republican candidates would curb immigration.

These are mostly debates about the size of the pie. But what about growing it?

Most ideas for growth still endorse some form of neoliberalism -- a catch-all term that advocates free-market policies and deregulation. Free marketers tend to assume that slashing regulation will boost growth, possibly by dramatic amounts, despite only mixed evidence on the matter. On the left, “third way” proponents continue to emphasize targeted deregulations, such as a reduction in occupation licensing, weakened intellectual-property protections, a reduction in land- use restrictions, and increased immigration.

I tend to agree with the latter, but neoliberalism is fundamentally an old idea. We’ve been trying to boost economic freedom for decades now, and there’s a good possibility that all the low-hanging fruit has been picked.

So what else is there? Looking around, I see the

glimmer of a new idea forming. I’m tentatively calling it “New Industrialism.” Its sources are varied -- they include liberal think tanks, Silicon Valley thought leaders and various economists.

But the central idea is to reform the financial system and government policy to boost business investment.

Business investment -- buying equipment, building buildings, training employees, doing research, etc. -- is key to growth. It’s also the most volatile component of the economy, meaning that when investment booms, everything is good. The problem is that we have very little idea of how to get businesses to invest more. Unfortunately, net U.S. business investment has been more or less in decline for decades.

Some people have suggested that the way American businesses make their investment decisions is fundamentally broken. Standard corporate finance teaches us that businesses invest to maximize shareholder value. The people we call “investors” -- lenders and shareholders -- are thought to drive business- investment decisions with their financial-investment decisions. Lending money or buying stock -- financial investment - is supposedly a vote of confidence in the real

Smith continued on page 27

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

27

Colbert King

An American Export Canadians Don’t Want: Guns The United States is to Canada what Mexico is to the United States: the reason for border trouble. We get illegal immigrants smuggled from Mexico; Canada gets illegal guns smuggled from us.

But who, pray tell, gets the worst of it?

Much is made about the impact of illegal immigration on states along the southern U.S. border. But what about the impact of illegal weapons making their way into the country to our north?

Smuggled firearms from the United States are fueling bloodshed in Canada. A couple of sentences from a story in The Post this week

by William Marsden said it all: “Homicides in Toronto spiked to 80 in 2005, from 64 in 2004, and the majority were shooting-related.

About 70 percent of the guns used were handguns and automatic weapons smuggled from the United States, police say.”

While the number of shootings has decreased, gun seizures by the

Smith continued from page 26

investment plans of a business. In fact, our theories assume such a tight connection between financial investment and business investment that we use the same word for both activities.

But what if this system just doesn’t work as well as it should?

If financial investors have shortterm horizons, they may not push businesses to do the long-term investment that really boosts the economy. J.W. Mason, a researcher at the Roosevelt Institute, found that businesses have recently been borrowing money not to make real investments, but to make cash payouts to shareholders: In the 1960s and 1970s, an additional dollar of earnings or borrowing was associated with about a 40-cent increase in investment.

Since the 1980s, less than 10 cents of each borrowed dollar is invested...

Today, there is a strong correlation between shareholder payouts and borrowing that did not exist before the mid-1980s. This change in corporate finance, associated with the “shareholder revolution”, means there is good reason to believe that the real economy benefits less from the easier credit provided by

Canadian Border Services Agency reportedly are up: 226 illegal weapons were seized in 2012, most of them handguns; there were 316 by 2015.

To be sure, our own gun-violence numbers swamp Canada’s: There were 156 gun-related homicides in Canada in 2014, Marsden reported, compared with 10,945 the same year here. That may be cold comfort to Canadians, who experienced a 16 percent increase in gun-related killings in 2014.

Alarmed by the increased number of high-powered handguns and semiautomatic and automatic weapons in his cities, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau indicated that he will seek tougher laws that would “get handguns and assault weapons off our streets.”

Folks in our nation’s capital should wish him luck. We know all too well about illegal guns. And we are learning more about what those weapons can do, especially in young, undisciplined hands. macroeconomic policy than it once did.

This could be happening because investors don’t see much of a future for American businesses, and are thus choosing to get out while the getting is good. On the other hand, it could mean that investors are simply thinking in the short term and are more interested in quick cash grabs than in pushing companies to maximize their long-term value.

Meanwhile, Silicon Valley’s titans of industry are starting to complain about the system. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, for example, regularly laments public financial markets’ short-term focus.

The evidence is on his side: Public companies invest much less than private ones.

If the public markets are broken, how can they be fixed? Intel cofounder Andrew Grove suggests tax incentives for companies to increase their scale. Eric Ries, a startupmanagement guru, offers a more radical idea: a new stock exchange that would force investors to hold stocks for long periods of time.

This so-called Long Term Stock Exchange would be a far more radical step than the tax on financial transactions being suggested

by Sanders and others. It would

Canada shouldn’t want to witness a development of this kind, though there are indications that youth gangs in the commonwealth up north are getting their hands on guns as well.

To gauge the impact of illegal guns on youth here, I asked the District of Columbia Office of the Attorney General to total the number of gunrelated juvenile cases it prosecuted between Jan. 1 and Nov. 1, 2015.

OAG reported that law enforcement presented 136 cases of juveniles arrested in the District in connection with gun-related offenses for that period.

Each case, the office said, involved at least one gun offense, such as carrying a pistol without a license, possessing an unregistered firearm or unregistered ammunition or at least one offense related to the use or ready availability of a firearm for crimes such as armed robbery, assault with a dangerous weapon or assault with intent to kill while armed.

force public companies to choose whether they wanted the liquidity of the normal stock exchanges or the security of knowing that their owners would remain the same from year to year.

Ries’s idea would be a sort of intermediate step between opaque private markets and highly transparent but short-termist public markets. It would take significant regulatory changes to implement, and Wall Street firms would likely be skeptical, if not outright opposed.

But it’s a big, bold, fresh idea in a country where such new approaches are few and far between.

When Silicon Valley’s capitalists and researchers at left- leaning East Coast think tanks are roughly in agreement, they may be onto something big. New Industrialism -- the idea of using regulatory, financial and tax policies to push businesses toward greater real investment -- is not yet mainstream, but it could be just the thing we need to fix the holes in our neoliberal growth policy.

Noah Smith is an assistant professor of finance at Stony Brook University and a freelance writer for finance and business publications. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-16-16

Of the 136 arrests, the attorney general’s office brought charges in 100. The office said it “no-papered,” or declined to prosecute, 36.

Reasons for no-papered cases, OAG explained, included insufficient evidence, constitutional error by law enforcement, witness noncooperation and a hold on bringing some gun charges in early 2015 because of questions regarding the charges’ validity, given litigation over the District’s gun laws.

Again, these juvenile gun-related statistics are limited to arrests.

The count of unsolved gun-related cases by juveniles was not readily available.

Canada, faced with the possibility that illegal guns can reach juveniles more easily than legal guns, may take a page from D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine’s playbook.

Racine and city agencies have started a program to divert low-risk juvenile offenders out of traditional prosecution into a city-run program known as ACE (Alternatives to the Court Experience). This program is aimed at steering young people away from guns and the juvenile criminal justice system.

A January report from ACE shows significant success, according to the attorney general’s office. Of the 742 youths participating from its inception in June 2014 through 2015, 92 percent had no further involvement in the legal system while in the program.

Even after completing the full sixmonth intervention, 92 percent had not been rearrested.

This kind of program is not a sidebar to the discussion of gun violence or the proliferation of illegal guns in this city, Canada or anywhere else. It is central to the effort to reduce the shootings and the crossfire on our streets.

Meanwhile, our neighbors up north, fearful of the firearms smuggled from the United States, are planning to install devices at border stations to “detect and halt illegal guns.”

Calls to mind the proposed construction of a wall and fence along our southern border to halt illegal immigration from Mexico.

Because it appears we are doing to Canada what Mexico is doing to us. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-19-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Ana Swanson

We Never Really Learned The Lesson of ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’

“A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men who make it up,” Atticus Finch, the lawyer in “To Kill a Mockingbird,” tells the jury in his closing arguments. Finch has just convincingly argued to acquit a black man, Tom Robinson, who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in a small Alabama town. Atticus Finch demonstrates for the jury that Tom could not have committed the crime. But the jury of 12 white men vote to convict Robinson, anyway.

Harper Lee, the author of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” passed away at 89 today, leaving behind a massive legacy. Her book sold more than 40 million copies since it was published in 1960, and Americans rank it among the most influential books they’ve read. But after more than 50 years and millions of classroom lessons, some of its central lessons still, at least at times, go unheard.

Research suggests that the same racial prejudices that led to Robinson’s conviction are thriving, if in more subtle ways, in courtrooms today. Numerous studies show that black defendants are more likely to be convicted of crimes than white defendants, and that people found guilty of murdering white victims are significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murder blacks. In one study at Cornell, researchers found that defendants with more stereotypically black features -- a broad nose, thick lips and darker skin -- were more likely to receive a death sentence in crimes against a white victim.

These differential results have a lot to do with a lack of diversity on judicial benches and juries, which tend to be disproportionately white, male and older, as the jury in “To Kill a Mockingbird” was.

Though racial discrimination in jury selection is illegal, it has a long history in the U.S. Research has long suggested that the selection process is biased against minorities, women, the young, the poor, and those with particularly high or low education levels.

An 1880 decision by the Supreme Court prohibited judges and lawyers from striking or selecting jurors solely because of their race -- though it allowed exclusions for other factors, like age or education.

However, the decision also decreed that juries didn’t have to be racially diverse or representative of the broader population. It rung in a long tradition in which attorneys excluded minorities from juries, but came up with other reasons for doing so beyond race.

When a jury is selected today, the judge will first strike jurors he or she deems incapable of being partial. Then lawyers for both the prosecution and defense can ask that a certain number of jurors be removed, a practice called peremptory challenges.

As Adam Benforado describes in his book, “Unfair: The New Science of Criminal Injustice,” peremptory challenges were meant to give lawyers the freedom to detect and eliminate subtle, preexisting biases against their clients that might influence the outcome of the case. Instead, the practice is often used to introduce more bias into the system.

A 2011 study that looked at 173 death penalty cases in North Carolina found that peremptory challenges were used to remove blacks from juries at twice the rate of whites. In Houston County, Alabama, 80 percent of the African Americans qualified for jury service were removed from juries between 2005 and 2009 using peremptory strikes.

Though the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that attorneys need to be able to offer a race-neutral reason for barring a juror, in practice it’s been easy for attorneys to come up with a laundry list of reasons to exclude people, like not making sufficient eye contact, working in the same kind of industry as the defendant, or having a family member who has been accused of a similar crime, according to Benforado. Judges are not well-equipped to decide which of these reasons might actually be based on race, and which are not. As Benforado points out, people often use race-neutral terms to justify racist

actions or beliefs outside of the courtroom as well.

The result, Benforado argues, is that the justice system has yet to deal with the core problem of discrimination in the courtroom.

This same practice may have been at work in “To Kill a Mockingbird.” As Scout, the little girl who is the book’s main character, sits in the courtroom, watching her father argue in favor of Robinson, she describes the all-white jury. The 12 jurors were from out of town, “sunburned” and “lanky.” They all seemed to be farmers, Scout says in the book, “but this was natural: townsfolk rarely sat on juries, they were either struck or excused.”

Ana Swanson is a reporter for Wonkblog specializing in business, economics, data visualization and China. She also works on Know More, Wonkblog’s social media channel. (c) 2016, The Washington Post 2-19-16

Leonid Bershidsky

Apple’s Fight With FBI Isn’t About Encryption

The most striking aspect of Apple’s message to customers on Tuesday wasn’t the rejection of U.S. authorities’ demand that the company help them break the encryption of an iPhone owned by Syed Rizwan Farook, who was involved in last year’s murders of 14 people in San Bernardino, California.

It was Apple’s admission that it has the technological capacity to help, despite previous statements to the contrary.

In other words, Apple is acknowledging that it isn’t encryption that protects the personal data of its customers, but the company’s stubborn insistence on keeping its software proprietary and its refusal to accept open source software. That, however, is hardly perfect protection.

In October, Apple filed a response to a New York court’s order that asked about the feasibility of gaining access to private data on an encrypted iPhone. It repeated numerous previous statements from Apple executives: “For devices running iOS 8 or higher, Apple would not have the technical ability to do what the government requests -- take possession of a password protected device from the government and extract unencrypted user data from that device for the government.”

The Federal Bureau of Investigation, clearly, wasn’t satisfied with this answer. In the Farook case, presumably after trying all the other ways of getting at an iPhone user’s data, it actually provided the judge with a technical description of what it wanted Apple to do. Here it is, cited in Judge Sheri Pym’s order: “Apple’s reasonable technical assistance may include, but is not limited to: providing the FBI with

a signed iPhone Software file, recovery bundle, or other Software Image File (“SIF”) that can be loaded onto the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will load and run from Random Access Memory and will not modify the iOS on the actual phone, the user data partition or system partition on the device’s flash memory. The SIF will be coded by Apple with a unique identifier of the phone so that the SIF would only load and execute on the SUBJECT DEVICE. The SIF will be loaded via Device Firmware Upgrade (“DFU”) mode, recovery mode, or other applicable mode available to the FBI.” As Apple explained in less technical language in its message to customers, this amounts to designing a special version of the iOS operating system that could be loaded onto Farook’s iPhone to give the FBI access to the data stored on it. The FBI and the court are not actually asking the company to decrypt the phone: They just want the custom iOS version to disable the feature that erases the data on the phone after 10 unsuccessful attempts to break the password. Disabling it would allow officials to just break the password by “brute force,” bombarding the phone with tens of millions of possible character combinations.

Apple can no longer say that is not technically possible, because it is. Instead, in the message to customers, it talks about the absence of guarantees that the iOS version allowing for the unlimited electronic input of passwords will be used only once.

The iPhone maker also accuses the government of asking it to hack its own customers, though technically, the FBI intends to do the hacking itself

Bershidsky continued on page 29

Liberal Opinion Week

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29

Vivek Wadhwa

Apple’s iPhone Battle With The Government Will Likely Be A Privacy Setback

Imagine if the government required you to have a combination lock on your door and to give it the key.

It would create security and privacy risks for you and your family. This is what could happen if we required the technology industry to add back doors to its software and devices. Hackers, criminals, and foreign governments could crack the code and abuse it.

This is what the technology industry is rightfully rallying against.

But this isn’t the fight that Apple just picked with the U.S. government.

It refused to comply with a search warrant to unlock an iPhone that was used by one of the terrorists who killed 14 people and injured 22 in San Bernardino last year. The government had the permission of the owner of the device, San Bernardino County, and made a reasonable request.

Apple claims that complying with the request would have required it to develop a new version of its operating system-and create a back door. But technology experts disagree. They say that Apple could easily unlock the phone without creating a back door or security risk. Security researcher Trail of Bits says it could add support for a peripheral device which facilitates PIN code entry and use this through a customized version of iOS that only works on a single device. It could do this on its own and not share the firmware with the FBI -- or anyone else.

Apple has, after all, done such things before. The Daily Beast reports that it

complied with government requests to unlock iPhones at least 70 times in the past. And Apple acknowledged that it had the technical capacity to do this.

Its objection to the new request was on “reputational grounds.” It seems that Apple wasn’t as concerned about its reputation until now.

By picking this particular fight, Apple is doing the technology industry a big disservice. The public desperately want protection from terrorists, foreign governments, and hackers.

After 9/11, Americans have accepted certain limits on civil liberties-which protect their privacy yet provide the government with enough information to be effective at its job.

Apple will very likely lose this case in the courts and suffer a public relations disaster. And this will be a setback for privacy. After all, this battle isn’t going to be portrayed as being about encryption and back doors; it is going to center on protection of data of murderous terrorists. Other than Silicon Valley purists, few will side with Apple on this.

The technology industry is really not in a position to throw stones; it lives in a glass house. It has, after all, created the operating systems and devices that are hacked so easily. In other industries, product manufacturers would be held liable for the safety and security of their products. Yet tech seems to get a free ride; its hacked customers take the blame.

Big Brother would be envious of the surveillance capabilities of Google and

Apple. They read our emails before we do and keep track of our searches; their mobile devices log our movements and activities; the apps that we download commonly trick us into giving them our contact lists and other personal data; our smartphones have the ability to turn our cameras and microphones on without us being aware that this has happened.

Bershidsky continued from page 28

not even be asking for court orders.

Although user content is encrypted on Android devices, too, Android is open-source software. Theoretically, the government can produce its own version of the system that would make it possible to hack the encryption. By choosing a product from a company that is paranoid about patent protection, Apple customers have made their data somewhat safer -- but still not completely safe.

such cases involved breathalyzer test software that defense lawyers in drunk driving cases wished to inspect for errors. In 2009, Facebook was ordered to release its entire source code to Leader Technologies, which had sued it for patent infringement (Facebook fought this and succeeded in having the Leader patent invalidated three years later).

China is already asking U.S. companies to show their source code to government experts to prove it doesn’t present security threats. IBM complied with such a request last year.

Apple’s stand is now an election issue. “Who do they think they are?” asked Donald Trump. “They have to open it up.” According to Trump, this is only common sense; Apple

-- it just needs an opening to do it.

Those who think encryption protects their personal data from the government -- or, for that matter, from anyone determined enough to invest the effort in a brute force attack - - are naive. Any encryption can be broken.

Customer protection is entirely in the hands of the software companies that make household-name products, and they will pursue it only as long as that’s in their business interests.

For now, Apple is in its customers’ corner. But I’m not sure it will stay there forever: Creating an iOS version with a backdoor is not its last line of defense.

If Farook had used a device with the Google-designed Android operating system, the FBI might

If Apple argues that compliance with the court order is “unreasonably burdensome,” it soon may be asked - and ordered - - to produce the iOS source code so that the government may attempt to modify it independently.

Courts have ordered source code handovers in the past. One series of

The tech industry wants to learn all it can about us so that it can market more products and services to us-and sell our data to others. It believes that it owns our data and can use it in any way it wishes. These companies are not required to tell consumers what information they are gathering or how they will protect it. They keep us in the dark while profiting from us. When our data is hacked, they simply plead ignorance.

We should have ownership of our own data and receive royalties from any use that we permit.

Things are only going to get worse.

The next big technology, the Internet of Things, will embed sensors in our appliances, electronic devices, and our clothing. These will be connected to the Internet via Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, or mobile-phone technology. They will gather extensive data about us and upload it to central storage facilities managed by technology companies.

Google’s Nest home thermostat already monitors our daily movements to optimize the temperature in our homes.

In the process, Google learns all about

our lifestyles and habits. Our smart TV’s will watch us to see if we want to change channels -- and learn which shows we like and how attentively we watch them. Our refrigerator will keep track of what we eat so it can order more food -- and know our dietary weaknesses.

This is bad enough, but the bigger problem is that these devices aren’t secure. Children’s toys and cars have already been hacked. Our TV sets and medical devices will also be. Because they don’t face enough of a liability, device manufacturers don’t feel obliged to invest the time, money and effort necessary to secure their devices.

It is cheaper for them to apologize and do product recalls than to build ultrasecure products.

So it is great to see Apple and Google supposedly standing up for consumer rights. But they need to provide us with the same protections they are demanding from the government. We need to have our software and hardware secure and our data protected from them -- as well as from the bad guys.

Vivek Wadhwa is a fellow at Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University, director of research at Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke, and distinguished fellow at Singularity University. His past appointments include Harvard Law School, University of California Berkeley, and Emory University.

Special To The Washington Post 2-18-16

executives may end up feeling that way, too, if the alternative is to hand over its fiercely protected code to the FBI. What if it leaks out?

For now, Apple’s righteous fight for its customers is generating enough favorable publicity to eliminate the sour taste of the Error 53 “right to repair” scandal. At some point, however, the company might have to decide whether further resistance poses a danger for Apple’s closed ecosystem. Then, privacy-minded iPhone owners may find themselves on their own.

Leonid Bershidsky, a Bloomberg View contributor, is a Berlin-based writer. (c) 2016, Bloomberg View 2-17-16

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Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

Alyssa Rosenberg

I Dread What Will Happen When America Finally Elects A Woman President

I was born in 1984, the year Walter Mondale selected Geraldine Ferraro to join him on the Democratic ticket, making her the first woman to contend for the presidency or vice presidency with the backing of a major party.

I watched Hillary Clinton give her concession speech in 2008. I was covering the Republican National Convention for National Journal when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to be his running mate, sending me scrambling to the Alaska Women’s Republican Clubs to find out how Palin was regarded in her home state. And now the 2016 race has given us two substantive female candidates, Carly Fiorina for the Republicans and Hillary Clinton for the Democrats, even if Fiorina was never likely to capture her party’s nomination.

All of these efforts have made me eager to see a woman stand on the steps of the United States Capitol and pledge to do everything in her ability to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” And even more than that, I cannot wait for the moment when that woman has served out her terms and the sexist backlash that will be one of the responses to her presidency is over.

Both the 2016 campaign trail and the Obama presidency itself have offered previews of what might await America’s first female president during her time in office.

Ugly sentiments have cropped up on both sides of the campaign trail this season. Donald Trump, never one to adhere to the rules that govern a gentleman’s behavior in any context, has complained about Fiorina’s looks, implied that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly’s tough line of questioning at a debate was inspired by her menstrual cycle and ultimately skipped a debate rather than face her again. Chris Christie, outflanked by Trump in the crassness contest, managed to fantasize about spanking Clinton before exiting the campaign to spend more time with his New Jersey-based grudges.

Some Bernie Sanders supporters have adopted language and stances so aggressive and so tinged by gender that the candidate himself disavowed them, declaring “We don’t want them. I don’t want that.” Wednesday, the rapper and Sanders surrogate Killer Mike came under fire for quoting a woman who told him that “a uterus doesn’t qualify you to be president” -- he might have noted that, the historical record notwithstanding, possession of male genitalia seems incidental, if not downright detrimental, to the duties of the presidency.

The idea that such sentiments would dissipate once Clinton, or any other woman, took the oath of office is both sweet and utterly risible.

When Obama was running for president in 2008, his political opponents spread all sorts of racist memes to prevent him from gaining

the presidency, from suggesting that his birth certificate had been falsified, to trying to tie him to former radical underground figures like Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dorhn, to insisting that he was an intellectual clone of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. Those attacks failed to keep Obama out of the highest office in the land. But if his inauguration was a moment of national self-congratulation, seeming proof that we had overcome the biases that have defined the United States since its inception, the subsequent reaction to Obama’s presidency proved that optimism wrong.

for the presidency, which are considerable, there is a part of her résumé that is particularly relevant to this dilemma. More than any other woman in the United States, Clinton has experience absorbing tides of sexist trash and getting along with her work, whether she’s representing New York in the U.S. Senate, serving as secretary of state, or stumping on the campaign trail.

It’s true that being attacked doesn’t, in and of itself, make Clinton a virtuous person. And the decades of scurrilous attacks on the Clintons have left them less able to admit error than I might like. But even so, Clinton has had decades to learn how to withstand the attacks that will be aimed at the first female president, and to build relationships with other lawmakers, bureaucrats and foreign heads of state who now know her for herself.

Perhaps asking her to weather another four or eight years of viciousness is unfair. But Clinton appears to want the role. And if she wins it, she could spare another woman the very specific politics of personal destruction aimed at the first women and people of color to hold major roles in American public life.

The first woman to be elected president of the United States seems likely to face a similar experience. Her victory at the polls and her inauguration would undeniably be symbolically significant. But that triumph and her tenure in office would also provoke a nasty wave of sexist response.

As much as I will be proud to see a woman serve as president, I’ve also come to dread that time and the ugliness that will inevitably accompany it. I can’t wait to for those four or eight years to have come and gone. (c) 2016, The Washington Post For all the debates about Clinton’s qualifications 2-18-16

Alexandra Petri

Journey Through The Nine Levels Of Feminist Hell

We have been hearing a lot lately about special places in hell for women who are insufficiently supportive of other women. I was wondering what else Feminist Hell contains, when, at the midpoint of my life, I found myself lost in a wood so dark that the path ahead was blotted out. I felt a terrible fear, heard immense wailing and there was a big sign overhead about Abandoning Hope Of Having It All, Ye Who Enter Here.

Fortunately, Feminist Virgil was nice enough to give me a tour. (This was regular Virgil but he had fixed the Dido parts.) He led me down through the Vestibule and into Limbo and over the river of Man-Tears and the forest of armpit hair, sown by our Amazon forebears, explaining to me what each thing was and who the souls were being tormented. I have also drawn a crude map, which follows.

Vestibule: Women Who Lived In An Era Before Feminism Really Took Off And Were Feminist In Some Ways But In Other Ways Were Problematic. Punishment: They are doomed to spend eternity watching Meryl Streep become increasingly tone-deaf about intersectional issues while unable to stop her. She won’t stop being

Meryl Streep, you just wish she were a little better on these things, you know?

First Circle: Women Who Don’t Identify As Feminists Because They Think People Should Just Be Equal. They must spend eternity listening to a man explain a subject they understand much better than he does, having written an entire book on it whereas he has only read the review.

Whenever they try to interrupt him, he raises a finger to indicate that he is not yet done talking.

Second Circle: Women Who Didn’t Buy “Bad Feminist.” They must spend eternity making sandwiches.

Third Circle: Women Who Don’t Appreciate Beyonce. They must spend eternity running for office and being told that they are not sufficiently inspiring, yell too much, are the wrong age and that what they are wearing is wrong. (Hillary Clinton is there now.)

Fourth Circle: Women Who Laughed At A Joke That Punched Down. Must spend eternity being forced to argue about whether women are

Petri continued on page 31

Liberal Opinion Week

March 2, 2016

31

Ruth Gadebusch

Neglected Stories March is Women’s History Month so designated to focus on all the neglected stories of women’s contributions to this nation’s society.

Due to the same type of neglect, February has long been named Black History Month.

Mitigating the latter is a museum due to open on our National Mall next September. A group chartered as the National Women’s History Museum (www.nwhm.org)is attempting to build a like museum. Congress has at long last established a committee to look into the possibility of a women’s museum but unlike the one that resulted in the building of others on the mall the women are left to raise the entire funding - just to investigate the possibility! A major part of the quest is to secure the last site on the mall.

In the meantime a determined group of citizens is busy raising money, gathering materials, maintaining a small museum in Washington, D.C., and furiously lobbying Congress for support. After all women of all races and ethnic groups constitute more than 50% of the population of this nation. It is only fair to tell their stories. Half a history is detrimental to women and, more truthfully,

Petri continued from page 30 funny.

Fifth Circle: “Cool Girls.” Must spend eternity being Chicks Who Can Hang: eating giant hunks of meat while boasting about not having female friends because they can’t take that drama, laughing loudly at sexist jokes and never getting to go Gone-Girl on anyone.

This may seem fun at first, but not if you can never step into a room by yourself and scream.

Sixth Circle: Slut-Shamers. Must spend eternity walking down a long sidewalk while people tell them to “smile,” catcall and ask what their problem is.

Seventh Circle: Women Who Used Too Many Exclamation Points In An Email: Every time they open their mouth, words fall out, but those words are said incorrectly, either with too much vocal fry or too little or with a rising inflection or even a single ‘just.’

The Abyss. Nothing to see here

detrimental to the country.

With the recent opening of all military jobs to females perhaps this is a good time to focus on some of their experiences with government in general and the military in particular.

One such often overlooked story is that of the WASP, Women Airforce Service Pilots.

These women did everything except participate in battle. They flew test flights for experimental planes, ferried planes all over the country, and trained the pilots who did take the planes into battle! In 1977 their service was finally recognized as qualifying them for veteran status.

In 2010 they were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and became eligible to have their ashes in Arlington. That was over six decades after their service with many never living to experience that recognition.

Worse yet, the army recently revoked the policy of allowing their ashes to be laid to rest in Arlington.

Another miscarriage of justice is the serious mistreatment of the women who first tested for the space program. A significant number of women far surpassed the men in the grueling tests, but I don’t have to tell

you who went into space, or who stayed grounded.

Geraldyne (Jerri) Cobb was the first of the Mercury 13 as the women came to be known. She qualified in every way. Having learned to fly at age 15 she had over 10,000 flights to her credit. In the way of NASA she simply had the wrong gender allowing Russia’s Valentina Tereshkova to be the first woman in space.

5, 1931, she apparently is still living; though I have been unable to find verification and a means of contact.

Unfortunately she never fulfilled her dream of flying in space. Even when NASA decided to test the effects of space on older humans it was Senator John Glen who received the second opportunity of space flight despite efforts to have women tested.

In 1963 when both were testifying before Congress the Senator said Overcoming her disappointment “Men go off and fight the wars and Cobb did commendable missionary fly the airplanes...and women are work in the Amazon. Born on March not astronauts because of our social order.” Tell that to Sally Ride and except body-shamers and floating apologized for having. . . limbs from bad Photoshop jobs.

- Women Who Have Said That the women who have followed in They Miss “When Men Were Men.” her footsteps. A Women’s History Eighth Circle: Bad Feminists.

Doomed to spend eternity actually Museum will help change attitudes - Women Who Enjoyed “Blurred putting Cosmopolitan’s sex tips into by telling the stories of the many heroic exploits of women.

Lines.” Doomed to stand next to practice. their boyfriends who work in the - Women Who Didn’t Help Other In this time let us not forget that we same field, while he gets asked Women. Special Place. Forced to still await our first female President. substantive questions about his walk down a long pink aisle filled While I had always hoped that our first woman in the office would work and then the same person with gendered toys forever. turns and asks how their dogs are - Women Who Judged Other not have to do it on the shirttails of doing.

Women For Not Working/Working/ her husband I recognize that has - Women Who Let A Man Hold A Having Kids/Not Having Kids. frequently been the case with men Door For Them, Even Once. They Doomed to spend eternity laughing as well using family shirttails. We certainly have an example of a male must spend eternity standing behind alone with salad. a man while he takes credit for their Ninth Circle: Voted For A candidate for President currently well accomplishments.

Candidate Just Because Of Gender. endowed with such credentials.

- Women Who Spoke Critically Must spend eternity listening to I can think of no more history Of A Movie Star’s Appearance. a gaggle of male state legislators making event than to elect our first Must spend eternity trapped in a attempt to describe how the female woman president especially when we have such a well qualified candidate. commercial, wiping down counters body works. using a single piece of hyper- - Friend Zone: This is where Following our first black president it absorbent paper towel, then smiling MRAs are trapped and left keening quite possibly would once and for all time awaken us to the fact that history with glee, or putting on a cream that for all eternity. will hide those fine lines.

- Women Who Leaned In, But must include all. With all due respect - Women Who Did Not Pursue Not Far Enough. Punishment: Have and appreciation to white males there STEM Careers. Doomed to it, but only SOME of it, not ALL of is more to history that needs to be told. It is time to quit neglecting the spend eternity apologizing, then it. other stories. apologizing for having apologized, (c) 2016, The Washington Post Happy Women’s History Month. then apologizing for having 2-19-16 2-20-16

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