This is a stale story, but one I want to share given the recent electoral shellacing.
The 2010 Springfield July 4th Parade (complete with GOP Sponsored elephant, but not someone to scoop up the poop, obviously) also had a marching contingent of Teabaggers, proudly sporting their ‘Don’t Tread on Me’ tshirts.
At the end of the parade, there is a gathering in a playground, with ice cream, balloons, and kids’ activities. NONE of the Teabaggers were in attendance. It appears that the limit of their civic participation and community involvement is rhetorical bomb throwing.
So, the GOP has rolled out their new fall product – Contract with America 2.0 the Pledge to America – which looks like an email forward from a crazy aunt less the clip art and colored fonts:
This is a nice bit of copypasta which will be useful for campaigning, but does absolutely NOTHING to make the country better. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we will be able to look back in 2012 and see they’ve accomplished nothing save making things worse.
The main argument with this post is at the OkCupid blog is that it is not a longitudinal study; that post is the result of a cross-sectional analysis of their dating site data.
My point behind saying this is that there are differences in ideology in a population at a single point in time across age groups, which should not necessarily mean that there are similar changes in an individual person across time.
For example, the person at the point where economic and social beliefs intersect (at age 32) was born in 1978 and first voted in a Presidential election in 1996. Think Ross Perot and “I did not have sex with that woman”. The point where economic beliefs begin getting more restrictive (at age 40) was born in 1970 and likely first voted in a Presidential election 1988. The point where economic beliefs cross over from permissive to restrictive translates has the person being born in 1959, who was voting age in 1977 and likely voted in their first Presidential election in 1980. The point where they cross again, presumably near age 60, has them being born in 1950, and first voting for President in 1968.
One could see how the voting behavior might change post Clinton Impeachment (Clinton ‘won’ in a three-way race in 1996 with 49.23% of the vote), to the left or right. One could see how the voter in the age of Reagan might have thought about Dukakis (who lost by to George H. W. Bush by 7.72%; BTW, Ron Paul was running as well, and earned 0.47% of the vote); Similarly, the Carter voter in 1980 (who lost to Ronald Reagan by 9.74%; incidentally non-Republican and -Democratic vote share was 8.23%!, which might explain the teabaggers) or the Nixon voter in 1968 (Nixon won by only 0.7%; the independent vote share was 13.86%!). Context is important.
One would expect there to be switch to risk-aversion as you approach middle-age and retirement, and a reversal towards entitlements once you are eligible. But what is also important is the starting point. Political behavior is often set in adolescence (although there can be changes, myself for instance). The party with the electoral advantage now is going to be at an advantage over time, especially giving the baby boom and post baby boom demographics. I suspect that the 18-year old voter in 2008 is substantially more liberal than any in recent American history. I tend to agree with “the Demographics as Destiny” from Cato regarding Republicans and the Tea Party rather than a headline of “the Democrats are Doomed”.
As an early 1960s vintage member of the then-new conservative movement, I remember us focusing on the 10th amendment during the 1964 Goldwater campaign. It has been a staple of conservative thought, and the continued dormancy of 10th amendment enforcement has been one of the failures of our now half-century-old movement.
But just as the Tea Party movement in so many ways seems to represent the 2.0 version of our movement, so I again thought about the 10th amendment anew. After about 10 seconds’ thought, it struck me that the best way to revive the 10th Amendment is to repeal the 17th Amendment — which changes the first paragraph of Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution to provide that each state’s senators are to be “elected by the people thereof” rather than being “chosen by the Legislature thereof.” (As I Googled the topic, I found out that Ron Paul and others have been talking about this for years. It may be the only subject that could be proposed and ratified at a constitutional convention with three-fourths of the state legislatures.)
That’s a fabulous idea. Let’s let the much cheaper local whores do the bidding of the corporations. These poor companies are going to have to spend a lot more money if they expect to buy 435 House seats and endless local and state offices, so any break they can get would be good for the economy.
That was not one of them. Fifty little corrupt House of Lords would not be better than the US Congress.
Did you know Corporations are people too, and that they have a right to free speech (which of course equals money), even though they can’t speak. Why someday, Corporations may even be given the right to vote!
For most of our Nation’s history, Supreme Court doctrine comported with the Constitution’s text and history. Governments created corporations and conferred on them special privileges to encourage investment and economic growth, but, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall in the famous Trustees of Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, corporations were “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and existing only in the contemplation of the law. 1 Corporations were neither “citizens nor part of “We the People. A corporation was a “creature of the law that did not possess inalienable human rights, but rather “only those properties which the charter of creation confer on it. 2 Corporate interests were protected in some ways, of course ”for example, corporations could assert rights under provisions like the Constitution’s Contract Clause, which prohibits states from “impairing private contracts “ but corporations could be extensively regulated to ensure that they did not abuse the special privileges and protections governments conferred on them that were not shared by individuals.
This was the settled understanding both before the Civil War, and after, when the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the Constitution, requiring states to respect the fundamental rights of all Americans. This settled understanding was thrown into question in 1886 when the Court’s decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.3 appeared to announce ”because of the court reporter’s note ” that corporations were “persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Supreme Court’s actual opinion never reached the constitutional question in the case, but the court reporter “ himself a former railroad man “ took it upon himself to insert into his published notes Chief Justice Waite’s oral argument statement that the Fourteenth Amendment protects corporations. Through this highly irregular move, bereft of any reasoning or explanation, the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals “ for some purposes at least “ was introduced into constitutional law. In the 1920s and 1930s “ as the nation was roiled by the Great Depression “ many speculated that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had “smuggled into the Amendment “a capitalist joker, 4 giving corporations special rights and protections under an Amendment ratified to secure equal citizenship for living Americans, but it is now clear that this joker was created by the court reporter and developed by the Lochner era Supreme Court.
Corporate personhood has been reaffirmed over the last Century, but has been somewhat constrained by campaign finance laws passed by Congress, at least until those Conservative activist justices (Scalia, Alito, Thomas, and Roberts) ignored precedents with yesterday’s ruling. Corporations (as well as Unions and special interest groups) can essentially shovel unlimited amounts of money into the election process. Given that the candidate with the most money usually wins, the winner is decided by whoever has the deepest pockets, which is never the voter.
This is also nothing new “ Conservatives have been preparing for this moment for 40-years, starting with the Powell Memo authored by then right-wing activist and eventual Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr. [wiki] in 1971.
Although its influence is disputed, the framework Powell established was executed smartly by the Conservative movement, undermining academia, conning the poor and middle-class to vote against their own self-interest, created the think tanks that dream up foreign adventures at the expense of other’s blood and the taxpayers treasure, starting the Culture Wars, and allowing corporations to take over the political process.
The cruelest irony? The Constitutional Amendment that granted equal protection to the newly freed slaves subsequently shackles us to a corporate master.
Forget about Ted Kennedy’s seat, tea baggers, Scott Brown, smacking down bankers, and healthcare reform. THIS is the important news of the week. For all the talk of socialism, what you have just seen what amounts to a codification of the corporate welfare state.
For most of our Nation’s history, Supreme Court doctrine comported with the Constitution’s text
and history. Governments created corporations and conferred on them special privileges to encourage
investment and economic growth, but, in the words of Chief Justice Marshall in the famous Trustees of
Dartmouth College v. Woodward case, corporations were “artificial being[s], invisible, intangible, and
existing only in the contemplation of the law. 1 Corporations were neither “citizens nor part of “We
the People. A corporation was a “creature of the law that did not possess inalienable human rights,
but rather “only those properties which the charter of creation confer on it. 2 Corporate interests were
protected in some ways, of course ”for example, corporations could assert rights under provisions like
the Constitution’s Contract Clause, which prohibits states from “impairing private contracts “ but
corporations could be extensively regulated to ensure that they did not abuse the special privileges and
protections governments conferred on them that were not shared by individuals. This was the settled
understanding both before the Civil War, and after, when the Fourteenth Amendment was added to the
Constitution, requiring states to respect the fundamental rights of all Americans.
This settled understanding was thrown into question in 1886 when the Court’s decision in Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.3 appeared to announce ”because of the court reporter’s note ” that corporations were “persons within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses. The Supreme Court’s actual opinion never reached the constitutional question in the case, but the court reporter “ himself a former railroad man “ took it upon himself to insert into his published notes Chief Justice Waite’s oral argument statement that the Fourteenth Amendment protects corporations. Through this highly irregular move, bereft of any reasoning or explanation, the idea that corporations had the same rights as individuals “ for some purposes at least “ was introduced into constitutional law. In the 1920s and 1930s “ as the nation was roiled by the Great Depression “ many speculated that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment had “smuggled into the Amendment “a capitalist joker, 4 giving corporations special rights and protections under an Amendment ratified to secure equal citizenship for living Americans, but it is now clear that this joker was created by the court reporter and developed by the Lochner era Supreme Court.
