Rodney Dangerfield used to joke, "It's not easy being me." After reading this book, I would say that it was not easy being Richard Nixon. To say that he was a complicated man would be the least of it. Perhaps he had the most convoluted mixture of good and bad of any US President.
Did Nixon interfere with President Johnson's efforts to give HHH good publicity in the closing days of the '68 presidential race over Viet Nam. The author can't say for sure. If so this surely would have been treason on Nixon's part. Nixon had no secret plan to end the war.
Was RN in some sense autistic?
Howard Baker asked, "What did he know, and when did he know it?" The author cannot say.
RN was physically and mechanically clumsy. I can relate. :)
Nixon also wondered about the events of his life that led his becoming President. It was all so unlikely that given his origins that he would go as far as he did. Like me Nixon was chilled by the contingencies that moved his life forward. It all could have been totally different for him and for me. The biggest thing was that Ike picked him to be his running mate in 1952.
"Nixon ay have just been jabbing at Garment for being a boy scout; on the other hand, Nixon did believe that deviousness was an important attribute for a successful politician." P. 141
Nixon's main interest was always foreign policy. He made the stupid statement that the country could run itself domestically. P. 144
"The FBI wiretaps strongly suggest that the Nixon campaign was signaling Saigon to go slow, but they are not conclusive." P. 180
The image of Nixon as a dark trickster fits the Nixon caricature too neatly. P. 180
"The whole truth will never be known, but the evidence suggests that Nixon, through layers of deniability, took measures to make sure that Thieu would not agree to the peace talks in time to swing the 1968 election to Humphrey. Johnson did declare a bombing half, and the Paris negotiations did (fruitlessly) commence, so no permanent harm was done to the peace process, which was not likely to go anywhere. The effect on Nixon was more long-lasting. He continued that LBJ had tried to steal the election from him." P. 181
It seems like Nixon was constantly referencing Hiss. P. 434
Did Pat Nixon suffer a stroke because of reading Woodward and Bernstein's "The Final Days?" P. 523
"She (Pat) never quit." P. 523
His favorite campaign was 1952 because the band would play "You Are My Sunshine" and it would make him think of Pat. P. 523
He suffered a stroke on 4/18/94 and died four days later. P. 524
"He achieved greatly, and he suffered greatly, but he never gave up."
-Henry Kissinger P. 525
"Nixon was no saint. But the fears and insecurities that led him into sinfulness also gave him the drive to push past self-doubt, to pretend to be cheerful, to dare to be brave, to see, often though sadly not always, the light in the dark." P. 531
The good Nixon and the bad Nixon were both the same person. It is impossible to disentangle the two.
Supporters
of keeping the Confederate battle flag flying at a Confederate monument
at the South Carolina Statehouse wave flags during a rally in front of
the statehouse in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday, June 27, 2015. Gov. Nikki
Haley and a number of other state leaders have called for the removal
of the flag following the shooting deaths of nine black parishioners in a
church in Charleston last week. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)(Credit: AP)
Confederate
flags returned to the cradle of the Confederacy on Saturday as hundreds
of flag supporters arrived at Alabama’s Capitol to protest the removal
of four rebel flags from a Confederate monument next to the building
where the Confederacy was formed.
Standing
at the bottom of the Capitol’s steps, where 50 years ago Martin Luther
King Jr. led a march for civil rights, Tim Steadman said it wasn’t right
to remove the flags.
“Right now, this past week with everything
that is going on, I feel very much like the Jews must have felt in the
very beginning of the Nazi Germany takeover,” he said. “I mean I do feel
that way, like there is a concerted effort to wipe people like me out,
to wipe out my heritage and to erase the truths of history.”
Days
earlier, Gov. Robert Bentley had ordered the flags taken down from the
1898 monument amid national controversy about whether Confederate
symbols should be displayed on state grounds.
Standing next to
Steadman was Ronnie Simmons, who wore a t-shirt with the face of
Confederate President Jefferson Davis. Davis, who was elected as the
first and only Confederate president inside the historic Alabama Senate
chamber inside the Capitol in 1861, once lived a block away in the First
White House of the Confederacy while Montgomery was briefly the
capital.
Simmons said Bentley was a “scallywag,” referring to a
term used in the years after the Civil War during the Reconstruction
period to describe white southerners who collaborated with northerners.
“It’s
alienating the white people in the state of Alabama when you take
something down in a historic setting,” Simmons said. “If scallywag
Bentley thinks he’s improved race relations in this state, he’s as crazy
as a bed bug.”
Some attendees dressed in
Civil War attire while others arrived in motorcycle apparel with
Confederate flag patches sewn into vests. Flags flew on motorcycles
playing “Sweet Home Alabama” and rested on the shoulders of men in Civil
War uniforms. One woman held a sign that said “Southern Lives Matter,” a
variation of the “Black Lives Matter” phrase that became a rallying
call after the shootings of unarmed black men in multiple states.
Many in the white audience said they feared their heritage was being taken away.
Sherry Butler Clayton said the flag is a way to honor her relatives tied to the Confederacy.
“I
have many, many ancestors,” she said. “A lot of them are in unknown
graves up North where they died on the battlefield. A lot of them came
back maimed. And it’s just a way. I don’t hate anyone. I love all
people. My daughter-in-law is black and I love her and I love her
family. So it’s not a black white issue. It’s a heritage issue.”
Bentley
has received broad support for his decision to remove the flags. In an
open letter to the governor, state Sen. Vivian Figures praised him for
his action. Figures, who is black, said supporters of the Confederate
battle flag “have used the guise of ‘heritage’ to mask the true meaning
of the flag.”
“That flag is a message of hatred, bigotry,
negativity, white supremacy, shackles, whips, segregation, church
bombings, beatings, lynchings, and assassinations,” she wrote.
Event
organizer Mike Williams said he was pleased with the turnout. Williams,
who was one of the first protesters to arrive at the monument after the
flags were removed, said he hopes anyone organizing similar events in
southern states will keep rallies “about heritage and not hate.”
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. in 2008.Credit
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
LIBERALS and conservatives were exercised and confused by the combination of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s vote to uphold the Affordable Care Act’s tax subsidies on Thursday and his dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision recognizing a constitutional right of same-sex marriage
on Friday. Both sides accused him of voting politically: On Thursday he
was taken to task by the right, and on Friday by the left.
In
fact, the chief justice’s votes in both cases were entirely consistent
and constitutionally principled. He embraced a bipartisan vision of
judicial restraint based on the idea that the Supreme Court should
generally defer to the choices of Congress and state legislatures. His
insistence that the court should hesitate to second-guess the political
branches regardless of whether liberals or conservatives win is based on
his conception of the limited institutional role of the court in
relation to the president, Congress and the states.
On
Thursday, when Chief Justice Roberts wrote a 6-to-3 decision preserving
a key part of the Affordable Care Act (for the second time), Justice Antonin Scalia
accused him once again of engaging in liberal judicial activism. “The
somersaults of statutory interpretation” the chief justice had performed
in both health care cases, Justice Scalia wrote, signaled to America
“the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States
favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to
uphold and assist its favorites.”
The
Roberts-Scalia debate is part of a longstanding argument about how
judges should interpret laws passed by Congress. As Chief Judge Robert
A. Katzmann of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
in New York argues in his recent book, “Judging Statutes,” the chief
justice embraces an approach called “purposivism,” while Justice Scalia
prefers “textualism.” In Judge Katzmann’s account, purposivism has been
the approach favored for most of American history by conservative and
liberal judges, senators, and representatives, as well as administrative
agencies. Purposivism holds that judges shouldn’t confine themselves to
the words of a law but should try to discern Congress’s broader
purposes.
In
the 1980s, when he was a lower court judge, Justice Scalia began to
champion a competing view of statutory interpretation, textualism, which
holds that judges should confine themselves to interpreting the words
that Congress chose without trying to discern Congress’s
broader purposes. (By contrast, originalism, which Justice Scalia also
embraces, holds that judges should consult both text and history to
understand constitutional meaning.) Textualism, in this view, promises
to constrain judicial activism by preventing judges from roving through
legislative history in search of evidence that supports their own policy
preferences. But in the view of its critics, like Chief Judge Katzmann,
textualism “increases the probability that a judge will construe a law
in a manner that the legislators did not intend.” Chief Judge Katzmann,
who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, also accuses Justice Scalia
of inconsistency for consulting the intent of the framers in the case
of constitutional interpretation but not statutory interpretation.
Chief
Justice Roberts echoed these criticisms of textualism in his decision
holding that federally created health exchanges were eligible for tax
subsidies. “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health
insurance markets, not to destroy them,” the chief justice wrote, in a
line that enraged conservatives. “If at all possible, we must interpret
the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the
latter.”
The
chief justice’s embrace of bipartisan judicial restraint in the second
Affordable Care Act case was consistent with his embrace of the same
philosophy in the first Affordable Care Act case in 2012, where he
quoted one of his heroes, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr: “The rule is
settled that as between two possible interpretations of a statute, by
one of which it would be unconstitutional and by the other valid, our
plain duty is to adopt that which will save the Act.”
By
construing the Affordable Care Act, twice, in ways that respect
Congress’s broader purposes rather than thwarting them, Chief Justice
Roberts was not, as Justice Scalia charged, rewriting the law. Instead
he was advancing the view that he championed soon after his
confirmation: In a polarized age, it is important for the Supreme Court
to maintain its institutional legitimacy by deferring to the political
branches.
The
chief justice’s dissent on Friday from the court’s 5-to-4 decision
recognizing a right of same-sex marriage defended precisely the same
vision. Once again, he quoted Justice Holmes for the same proposition
that he invoked in the Affordable Care Act cases: “As this Court has
been reminded throughout our history, the Constitution ‘is made for
people of fundamentally differing views.’ ”
His
dissent in the marriage equality case is undoubtedly the fieriest
opinion the chief justice has written on the court. “Five lawyers have
closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage,” he writes.
He compares Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s same-sex marriage opinion to
Roe v. Wade and to Lochner v. New York, a 1905 case striking down maximum hour laws for bakers, both of which he considers prime examples of judicial activism.
CHIEF
JUSTICE ROBERTS insists that his passionate opposition to Justice
Kennedy’s majority opinion is based on his commitment to judicial
restraint, not on his personal disagreement with same-sex marriage. In
his dissent on Friday, the chief justice said he would not “begrudge”
the celebrations that would follow. Instead, his passions were engaged
by his commitment to the court’s limited role in American politics.
However,
the chief justice’s commitment to judicial restraint and a limited
conception of the court’s institutional role is not unvarying. He has
written or joined opinions striking down federal campaign finance laws
and voting rights laws. Earlier last week, he wrote an opinion for the
court that removes one of the last New Deal farm programs propping up
price supports for raisins as a violation of the Fifth Amendments
prohibition on takings of property without just compensation. In all of
these cases, however, Chief Justice Roberts identified a particular
clause of the Constitution — the First Amendment, the Fifth Amendment or
the 14th Amendment — that he believed invalidated the federal law in
question. In the marriage equality case, he concluded that no clause of
the Constitution clearly protected a right of marriage equality, which
is why he accused the majority of substituting its own policy
preferences for those of the people, as reflected in state legislation.
It’s
understandable that liberals and conservatives are disappointed with
the chief justice for rejecting positions they deeply favor. But Chief
Justice Roberts’s relatively consistent embrace of judicial deference to
democratic decisions supports his statement during his confirmation
hearings that judges should be like umpires calling “balls and strikes.”
As he put it then: “Umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them. The
role of an umpire and a judge is critical. They make sure everybody
plays by the rules, but it is a limited role. Nobody ever went to a
ballgame to see the umpire.”
Although
the chief justice’s statement was subsequently mocked, both the
Affordable Care Act cases and the marriage equality case show that he
meant what he said. Whether writing for the majority or in dissent, he
believes that judges should set aside their policy views and generally
uphold laws unless they clash with clear prohibitions in the
Constitution. In the long term, if he continues to pursue this
conception of the deferential role of the court, he may help liberals
and conservatives more readily accept their Supreme Court defeats.
I continue reading the new Nixon biography. What a character. Would Nixon be accepted by today's Republicans? Don't think so for RN had a pragmatic side that allowed him to do some liberal things. He wasn't pure like today's clan.
Stephens' speech declared that African slavery was the "immediate cause" of secession, and that the Confederate Constitution had put to rest the "agitating questions" as to the "proper status of the negro in our form of civilization".
The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions relating to our peculiar institutions—African
slavery as it exists among us—the proper status of the negro in our
form of civilization. This was the immediate cause of the late rupture
and present revolution. Jefferson, in his forecast, had anticipated
this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would split." He was right.
What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact. But whether he
fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood and
stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most
of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old
Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation
of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally
and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with;
but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or
other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent
and pass away... Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They
rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error.
It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon
it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."
Our new Government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its
foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that
the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to
the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.
. . . look with confidence to the ultimate universal acknowledgement
of the truths upon which our system rests? It is the first government
ever instituted upon the principles in strict conformity to nature, and
the ordination of Providence, in furnishing the materials of human
society. Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the
subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were
and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such
violation of nature's laws.
Alexander Stephens
Vice-President of the Confederate States of America
Marh 21, 1861
This post first appeared atSlavery By Another Name blog.
When
I was a Boy Scout in Leland, Mississippi, my patrol in Troop 42 called
itself “the Rebels” during 1976. I still have locked in a trunk
somewhere little wooden blocks I painted with the names of each scout
imposed over a crude image of the Confederate battle flag – a wall
decoration of some sort for the scout hall. I was fascinated by the
Confederacy, the Civil War, the rebel monuments on every courthouse
lawn, the headstone of my ancestor Morris Foshee, with its inscription
of his unit, the 47th Alabama infantry.
For a southern boy raised
in the wet hothouse of what I call neo-Confederate, nostalgic
triumphalism, it is astonishing to see the swift political moves in
South Carolina to lower the Confederate battle emblem in the wake of the
massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. All the more
so, when compared to the decades of intransigence about Confederate
symbols in the South and among a certain lethargic group of white
Americans everywhere. How could this change happen in the blink of eye –
if it does – when there was such fierce resistance and seeming fealty
in the recent past to that striking blue cross and 13 stars on a red
field?
Author Douglas Blackmon on 20th Century Neo-Slavery
It
is a mistake however, to interpret the resilience of the Confederate
battle flag as “popularity” among large numbers of people, or as
something that triggers outpourings of affection or other
positive emotions. It is wrong even to suggest that support for public
display of the flag is even closely related – as it was for me in
childhood – to some fond remembrance of the past, or even a
sentimental connection to soldiers of long ago who sacrificed for a
cause they believed in. No, only the tiniest numbers of southerners with
an attachment to the emblem of the Confederate revolt have even a vague
awareness of their familial connections to the Civil War, or even
faintly what life looked like in the sweaty, un-airconditioned,
drawling, poverty stricken, overalls bedecked, brutish farm boy
landscape of the pre-1960s South. Only the most dedicated sad-sack
members of the Sons of the Confederacy or unshaven faux intellectuals at
loony fringe groups like the “League of the South,” or naive little
boys in the 1970s, can even tell you that the “Rebel flag” began as a
symbol of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and gradually came
to identify in the eyes of all Americans the entire white southern
uprising to defend slavery. Even fewer white southerners can tell their
own family histories – like that of my great-great-grandfather Foshee,
and his years as an obscure private under that banner in the 47th
Alabama.No, the seeming immovability of that symbol over the
past half century has been about something very different from an
appreciation of actual history. The modern resurrection and defense of
the flag was wholly a product of the civil rights struggles since the
1950s, and the need for a rallying point for defenders of segregation
and apologists for white discrimination and white privilege. The flag
wasn’t even flying in most southern states until the 1960s, and then it
was hoisted with the explicit intention of telling the rest of the
country, finally emerging from its own racial dark ages, to go to hell.
And wherever that flag was invoked, it was accompanied in those days by
explicit defenses of the most virulent racism and ethnic hate.
There
was no sugar coating what it meant. The legislators and state officials
who brought the battle flag out of the closet in the 1960s were the
exact same people who openly praised the murders of civil rights
workers, openly called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a communist ape,
openly predicted the “mongrelization” of the white race if segregation
ended, publicly said science proved the mental inferiority of
African-Americans. The flag was as open a symbol of violent oppression
of black people and resistance to democracy, as the German swastika was
the symbol of fascism and a desperate desire to murder the Jews of
Europe. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who said ending segregation would
be to “drink from the cup of genocide,” knitted together all the
imagery, meanings and vile intentions in September 1962, in a 15-word
speech at an Ole Miss football game. Standing in a Nuremberg-esque sea
of Confederate battle banners, Barnett declared: “I love Mississippi. I
love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage.” The next
day, thousands of white men attacked federal marshals protecting the
first black student to enroll at the university. It took 30,000 federal
troops to restore calm.
The private letters among carriers of the
Confederate battle flag back then are most remarkable in one way: those
men actually believed the heinous things they were saying in public. And
they acted under a misguided belief that most of the rest of white
America, actually shared those views deep down. They honestly
believed the Civil Rights Movement was an aberration – a course
deviation caused by one spectacularly gifted black orator, his
weak-bellied liberal supporters, and, it surely must be, his secret
controllers in the Soviet Union. They truly believed all that for a good
reason: just 15 or 20 years earlier, they would have been right. In the
1940s, white Americans in every part of the country – including
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most members of his cabinet and the majority
of the Supreme Court – agreed that almost all black people were
naturally inferior to white people. When southern politicians
resurrected Confederate emblems in the 1960s, it was part of a genuine,
if gigantically mistaken, belief that white Americans everywhere could
be led or inspired back to their own past racist instincts.
Fortunately, that effort failed. Spectacularly.
The refusal to take the flag back down
over the 50 years since then has been simply this: an effort to falsely
obscure the explicitly racist nature of those leaders – and white
southerners and lots of other white Americans generally – in that
two-decade long extended moment of national decision when white
southern men, women, teachers, preachers, politicians, police, judges,
doctors, lawyers, mechanics and every other stripe overwhelmingly
failed. Faced with the greatest question of social conscious they would
ever confront, they failed as Americans. They failed as Christians. They
failed as believers in freedom. They failed as parents and
grandparents. And for the next two generations or more, it became
important among white southerners to conceal or excuse that abject
failure.
As it became apparent that the nation collectively
rejected the immoral, backward views of the white South, it became
necessary to “window dress” what had happened. The argument hadn’t been
about white supremacy, they began to claim, it was about the government
getting too big. The objection wasn’t about having black and white kids
in school together, it was about violence on campus, they said. They
hadn’t meant to suggest that all black boys are inclined to rape, only
that teen pregnancy and “welfare queens” are not good. They hadn’t meant
to suggest that the people whose labor they had exploited for 300 years
were in fact lazy and incompetent. And yes, as Gov. Barnett told you in
1962, the Confederate battle flag wasn’t about suppressing black
people, or defending slavery, or endorsing the violence of the Klan. It
was about bravery, honor, appreciation of genteel women, limited
government and constitutional principles.
It was about “heritage not hate.”
The
reason the tide may be turning against this long misuse of the
Confederate flag is because, thankfully, enough time and generations
have passed that the number of Americans who know anything about the
flag or have any legitimate interest in it is getting smaller and
smaller. The architects of the flag propaganda of another time have,
presumably in the wisdom of god, been taken from the earth, and those of
us who remain didn’t listen well. It’s not just young African-Americans
who don’t know as much as they should about the abuses suffered by
their forebears; hardly any young Americans are interested in all that
unpleasant past – especially now that so many of them are dating or
coveting members of the other race, listening to Hip Hop and seeing a
black man in the White House. One way or another, it has been absorbed
that black people achieving some semblance of equality did not in fact
cause the earth to consume itself in fire.
So the only people
today who exhibit the Confederate flag – other than state governments,
ironically, and a few holdout private schools – are in fact white
supremacists, loutish rednecks, a has-been country music singer or two,
neo-Nazis, and pathetically undereducated fools. Oh, and yes, people who
make meth in broken down trailer houses.
That wasn’t the case as
recently as the debate in Georgia 20 years ago that led to the removal
of the battle emblem from that state flag, or the statewide vote on
changing the flag in Mississippi at about the same time. (It failed –
with even African-American voters supporting the flag in a twisted
expression of home state “loyalty.”) Even as late as those events in the
1990s, there were still a lot of aging white southern males around who
had grown up feeling, even after the dust had settled, that the civil
rights movement had been at a minimum “unfair” to whites and wrongly
impugned them and their fathers before them.
Even if polite about
race in public, they were still offended by and quietly seething at the
suggestion that poverty and other difficulties of African-Americans were
the fault of past and present white racism – instead of laziness as
they had always believed. They still needed to believe their teachers
were truthful when they taught the historical hoax that enslaved people
actually liked slavery in the 1850s, and were happy to have been brought
to America – saved from cannibalism, paganism and bestiality. That
generation of southern men were not generally supporters of the Ku Klux
Klan or racial violence, but at their core they enjoyed the idea that
the continued use of the flag bothered the people who so bothered them.
They didn’t care a whit – or generally even know a whit – about the true
history of the flag or their own connections to the slave-holders
rebellion, but they relished how this antiseptic and increasingly
invoked “heritage” propaganda innocently explained the battle flag
and could be used to goad the critics they so despised.
But time
marched on those gentlemen. Those aging white males are no longer the
overwhelmingly dominant cohort in the southern states – just as those
white voters are declining in political control of the South. Hence
Virginia, Florida and North Carolina are presidential battleground
states. Georgia is in play. Not many people are so obtuse still to
believe that the declining performance educationally and economically of
white males in rural America, especially the South, is because of
affirmative action or because black people today are allowed to go to
high school, and to vote.
We all understand pretty clearly now
that a Dylann Roof actually has to stand on his own two feet. He can’t
depend on an entrenched system of silent abuse and unspoken
conspiracy to prevent women or African-Americans from seeking the same
entry level job that Dylann might have desired. He can’t count on
“heritage” and tradition to make sure that the majority of the black
kids in his town can’t get an education sufficient to seek upwardly
mobile employment – as heritage and customs guaranteed for 150
years. The Dylann Roofs of the world have to actually compete now. And
for the first time in at least a century, they actually have to be men
now – not just members of cowardly mobs protecting themselves with
violence and intimidation, and always anonymously. We all understand
that now, at least on some level. The government isn’t going to ensure
your success by openly harming black people for you anymore, white man.
You’re actually on your own now. The petty complaints and invented
aggrievements of that generation – blaming black people for all their
woes – make sense to a smaller and smaller group of other people now.
Even the sons of the men who still feverishly insisted on that pitiful,
self-emasculating logic 20 and 30 years ago increasingly don’t get their
own dads anymore.
It’s not dissimilar to what happened with gay
marriage: at some point the hollow nature of ridiculously inflexible
positions simply begins to be obvious – especially when confronted by
some event so clearly horrifying and indefensible as what happened in
Charleston.
That’s the reality that Dylann Roof – and the rest of
his scraggly, stupid ilk – are truly reeling from. Their own inadequacy.
Their own failures. The slow disappearance of the certainty that all
the white men will look out for all the other white men first – and
somehow still save some kind of place even for the broken,
intellectual runts like him. The Dylann Roofs of American today
instinctively realize that their day is past. He never even had that
day. They see white girls at school making the very rational choice to
prefer over them black boys who are actually going somewhere. They
discover that the police are willing to arrest them too for their petty
drug schemes – and that harsh sentencing laws will wreck their
misbegotten lives too.
Even the people that the Dylann Roofs once
imagined might be allies now profess politics in which white losers like
him – along with everyone else – are on their own. The government isn’t
here to help anymore. There is no certainty. Just being white isn’t
good enough, Dylann.
So a Dylann Roof lashes out in the perverse
way that such an inadequate, violence-intoxicated mind can invent,
swathed in the ideas and imagery so intertwined with the Confederate
battle flag today. Yet, his rampage becomes a renunciation of whatever
little honorable character attached to that symbol long ago. When my
great-great grandfather and the rebels fighting with him to dismantle
the United States charged up the hill called Little Round Top on July 2,
1863, in a decisive moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, they and their
flag made clear who they were and the wrongs they were fighting for. We
can at least give them that. And a third of the regiment of 1,500 fell
on the battlefield that day, repulsed, thankfully, by soldiers defending
the America we live in now.
Perhaps the Confederate battle flag did represent some sort of misguided valor back then. But no more.
Today,
it stands for Dylann Roof, a wretch unable even to meaningfully
articulate his anger at being required to take responsibility for
himself, enraged at being forced to compete and survive in a world
finally glimmering with at least a potential for equality. It stands for
a coward like him, stripped of the protection of the lynching mobs that
would have carried his flag. It stands for a loser without the spine to
tell the people he found at Emanuel church who he truly was or what he
truly believed – until he already had his gun trained on them. It stands
for people like him who lie – by omission or commission – about their
intentions. It stands for a murderer who could only savage the
defenseless–who was so blind and terrified by his own emptiness that he
would assault the only people who actually wanted to help him.
What bloodless shell of a person would choose to fly such a flag now? Finally, all who are willing can see that. The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers.
Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,
and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same
name. His is also a contributing editor at The Washington Post and chair
and host of Forum, a public affairs program produced by the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 100 PBS
affiliates across the US.
The Supreme Court has again made the correct decision by affirming the constitutional right of same-sex couples to marry. This is another deserved blow to conservatives who rally against equal rights, dignity, and respect for all Americans. Their politics of divisiveness, inequality, and fear is fading. Love is at the heart of religious freedom; the "religious freedom" of conservatives is really discrimination. Gay rights is the civil rights of my generation. Today this nation took another step towards progress, and we are a better country for it.
As Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion for the court,
No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right. The judgment of the Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit is reversed. It is so ordered.
The
party label is meaningless. The white South was solidly Democratic
after the Civil War, vowing never to vote for the party that liberated
the slaves. A hundred years later, the white South changed allegiances
with the advent of the civil rights movement. Richard Nixon then sealed
the transformation with his Southern Strategy, which parked Southern
whites firmly in the Republican Party.
For
the many Republicans who believe in free markets, less government and
the racial legacy of Lincoln, the question has to be asked: What do some
of society’s worst elements see in their party? It’s the coded
language, yes, the hard voices of its broadcast wing, but also actions.
Of late, this is the party that has been behind restrictive voting
measures aimed squarely at blacks. Don’t give racists anything to root
for, and they’ll crawl back under their rocks.
In the 5-4 decision, Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion of the court, saying the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution requires states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.
"Our nation was founded on a bedrock principle — that we are all created equal," the president said at the White House Rose Garden following the announcement of the decision in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Obama said that, often, progress on the journey to equality "comes in small increments. Sometimes two steps forward, one step back."
"And then sometimes there are days like this, when that slow steady effort is rewarded with justice that arrives like a thunderbolt," the president said.
"When all Americans are treated as equal, we are all more free," he added, acknowledging that "Americans of good will continue to hold a wide range of views on this issue."
"For all our differences, we are one people — stronger together than we will ever be alone. That has always been our story," Obama said.
"Today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we made our union a little more perfect."
The
debate about the Charleston Bible study shooting has morphed into a
debate about the Confederate battle flag and other symbols of the
Confederacy. This is not a trivial sideshow. Racism is not just a
personal prejudice and an evolutionary byproduct. It resurfaces year
after year because it’s been woven by historical events into the fabric
of American culture.
That
culture is transmitted through the generations by the things we honor
or don’t honor, by the symbols and names we celebrate and don’t
celebrate. If we want to reduce racism we have to elevate the symbols
that signify the struggle against racism and devalue the symbols that
signify its acceptance.
Lowering
the Confederate flag from public properties is thus an easy call. There
are plenty of ways to celebrate Southern heritage and Southern life
without choosing one so enmeshed in the fight to preserve slavery.
The
harder call concerns Robert E. Lee. Should schools and other facilities
be named after the great Confederate general, or should his name be
removed and replaced?
The case for Lee begins with his personal character. It is almost impossible to imagine a finer and more considerate gentleman.
As
a general and public figure, he was a man of impeccable honesty,
integrity and kindness. As a soldier, he displayed courage from the
beginning of his career straight through to the end. Despite his
blunders at Gettysburg and elsewhere he was by many accounts the most
effective general in the Civil War and maybe in American history. One
biographer, Michael Korda, writes, “His generosity of spirit,
undiminished by ideological or political differences, and even by the
divisive, bloody Civil War, shines through in every letter he writes,
and in every conversation of his that was reported or remembered.”
As
a family man, he was surprisingly relaxed and affectionate. We think of
him as a man of marble, but he loved having his kids jump into bed with
him and tickle his feet. With his wife’s loving cooperation, he could
write witty and even saucy letters to other women. He was devout in his
faith, a gifted watercolorist, a lover of animals and a charming
conversationalist.
In
theory, he opposed slavery, once calling it “a moral and political evil
in any country.” He opposed Southern secession, calling it “silly” and a
rash revolutionary act. Moreover we shouldn’t be overly guilty of the
sin of “presentism,” judging historical figures by contemporary
standards.
The case against
Lee begins with the fact that he betrayed his oath to serve the United
States. He didn’t need to do it. The late historian Elizabeth Brown
Pryor demonstrated that 40 percent of Virginia officers decided to
remain with the Union forces, including members of Lee’s family.
As
the historian Allen Guelzo emailed me, “He withdrew from the Army and
took up arms in a rebellion against the United States.” He could have at
least sat out the war. But, Guelzo continues, “he raised his hand
against the flag and government he had sworn to defend. This more than
fulfills the constitutional definition of treason.”
More
germane, while Lee may have opposed slavery in theory he did nothing to
eliminate or reduce it in practice. On the contrary, if he’d been
successful in the central task of his life, he would have preserved and
prolonged it.
Like
Lincoln he did not believe African-Americans were yet capable of
equality. Unlike Lincoln he accepted the bondage of other human beings
with bland complaisance. His wife inherited 196 slaves from her father.
Her father’s will (somewhat impractically) said they were to be freed,
but Lee didn’t free them.
Lee
didn’t enjoy owning slaves, but he was considered a hard taskmaster and
he did sell some, breaking up families. Moreover, he supported the
institution of slavery as a pillar of Confederate life. He defended the
right of Southerners to take their slaves to the Western territories. He
fundamentally believed the existence of slavery was, at least for a
time, God’s will.
Every
generation has a duty to root out the stubborn weed of prejudice from
the culture. We do that, in part, through expressions of admiration and
disdain. Given our history, it seems right to aggressively go the extra
mile to show that prejudice is simply unacceptable, no matter how fine a
person might otherwise be.
My
own view is that we should preserve most Confederate memorials out of
respect for the common soldiers. We should keep Lee’s name on
institutions that reflect postwar service, like Washington and Lee
University, where he was president. But we should remove Lee’s name from
most schools, roads and other institutions, where the name could be
seen as acceptance of what he did and stood for during the war.
This is not about rewriting history. It’s about shaping the culture going forward.
We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.Credit ILLUSTRATION BY SARAH MAZZETTI
Several
years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a
bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which
offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional
challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really
like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally
preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity
in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books
themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them
(on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or
in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of
studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain
readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands
with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that
books mean different things to people—or different things to the same
person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories
about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my
thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.
But
the session was a gift, and I found myself unexpectedly enjoying the
initial questionnaire about my reading habits that the bibliotherapist,
Ella Berthoud, sent me. Nobody had ever asked me these questions before,
even though reading fiction is and always has been essential to my
life. I love to gorge on books over long breaks—I’ll pack more books
than clothes, I told Berthoud. I confided my dirty little secret, which
is that I don’t like buying or owning books, and always prefer to get
them from the library (which, as I am a writer, does not bring me very
good book-sales karma). In response to the question “What is
preoccupying you at the moment?,” I was surprised by what I wanted to
confess: I am worried about having no spiritual resources to shore
myself up against the inevitable future grief of losing somebody I love,
I wrote. I’m not religious, and I don’t particularly want to be, but
I’d like to read more about other people’s reflections on coming to some
sort of early, weird form of faith in a “higher being” as an emotional
survival tactic. Simply answering the questions made me feel better,
lighter.
We
had some satisfying back-and-forths over e-mail, with Berthoud digging
deeper, asking about my family’s history and my fear of grief, and when
she sent the final reading prescription it was filled with gems, none of
which I’d previously read. Among the recommendations was “The Guide,”
by R. K. Narayan. Berthoud wrote that it was “a lovely story about a man
who starts his working life as a tourist guide at a train station in
Malgudi, India, but then goes through many other occupations before
finding his unexpected destiny as a spiritual guide.” She had picked it
because she hoped it might leave me feeling “strangely enlightened.”
Another was “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ,” by José Saramago:
“Saramago doesn’t reveal his own spiritual stance here but portrays a
vivid and compelling version of the story we know so well.” “Henderson
the Rain King,” by Saul Bellow, and “Siddhartha,” by Hermann Hesse, were
among other prescribed works of fiction, and she included some
nonfiction, too, such as “The Case for God,” by Karen Armstrong, and
“Sum,” by the neuroscientist David Eagleman, a “short and wonderful book
about possible afterlives.”
I worked my way
through the books on the list over the next couple of years, at my own
pace—interspersed with my own “discoveries”—and while I am fortunate
enough to have my ability to withstand terrible grief untested, thus
far, some of the insights I gleaned from these books helped me through
something entirely different, when, over several months, I endured acute
physical pain. The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning
gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a
secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining
paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance
between the self and the universe shrinks. Reading fiction makes me lose
all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely
myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us
into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the
complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with
another mind.
Bibliotherapy is a very broad
term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic
effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916
article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” In it,
the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an
acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he
dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy
is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a
sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do
something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the
nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard
plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,”
Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels.
Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be
searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw
is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a
patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the
author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set
the life pulse strong but slow.” Today,
bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run
for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from
dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for
“lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of
books. Berthoud and her longtime friend and fellow bibliotherapist Susan
Elderkin mostly practice “affective” bibliotherapy, advocating the
restorative power of reading fiction. The two met at Cambridge
University as undergraduates, more than twenty years ago, and bonded
immediately over the shared contents of their bookshelves, in particular
Italo Calvino’s novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller,” which is
itself about the nature of reading. As their friendship developed, they
began prescribing novels to cure each other’s ailments, such as a broken
heart or career uncertainty. “When Suse was having a crisis about her
profession—she wanted to be a writer, but was wondering if she could
cope with the inevitable rejection—I gave her Don Marquis’s ‘Archy and
Mehitabel’ poems,” Berthoud told me. “If Archy the cockroach could be so
dedicated to his art as to jump on the typewriter keys in order to
write his free-verse poems every night in the New York offices of the Evening Sun,
then surely she should be prepared to suffer for her art, too.” Years
later, Elderkin gave Berthoud,who wanted to figure out how to balance
being a painter and a mother, Patrick Gale’s novel “Notes from an
Exhibition,” about a successful but troubled female artist.
They
kept recommending novels to each other, and to friends and family, for
many years, and, in 2007, when the philosopher Alain de Botton, a fellow
Cambridge classmate, was thinking about starting the School of Life,
they pitched to him the idea of running a bibliotherapy clinic. “As far
as we knew, nobody was doing it in that form at the time,” Berthoud
said. “Bibliotherapy, if it existed at all, tended to be based within a
more medical context, with an emphasis on self-help books. But we were
dedicated to fiction as the ultimate cure because it gives readers a
transformational experience.”
Berthoud and
Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the
Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes
that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into
its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began
using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World
War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often
prescribed a course of reading. “Librarians in the States were given
training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story
about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at
the same time in the U.K.,” Elderkin says. Later in the century,
bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and
has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care
workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy.
There
is now a network of bibliotherapists selected and trained by Berthoud
and Elderkin, and affiliated with the School of Life, working around the
world, from New York to Melbourne. The most common ailments people tend
to bring to them are the life-juncture transitions, Berthoud says:
being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your
relationship, or suffering bereavement. The bibliotherapists see a lot
of retirees, too, who know that they have twenty years of reading ahead
of them but perhaps have only previously read crime thrillers, and want
to find something new to sustain them. Many seek help adjusting to
becoming a parent. “I had a client in New York, a man who was having his
first child, and was worried about being responsible for another tiny
being,” Berthoud says. “I recommended ‘Room Temperature,’ by Nicholson
Baker, which is about a man feeding his baby a bottle and having these
meditative thoughts about being a father. And of course ‘To Kill a
Mockingbird,’ because Atticus Finch is the ideal father in literature.” Berthoud
and Elderkin are also the authors of “The Novel Cure: An A-Z of
Literary Remedies,” which is written in the style of a medical
dictionary and matches ailments (“failure, feeling like a”) with
suggested reading cures (“The History of Mr. Polly,” by H. G. Wells).
First released in the U.K. in 2013, it is now being published in
eighteen countries, and, in an interesting twist, the contract allows
for a local editor and reading specialist to adapt up to twenty-five per
cent of the ailments and reading recommendations to fit each particular
country’s readership and include more native writers. The new, adapted
ailments are culturally revealing. In the Dutch edition, one of the
adapted ailments is “having too high an opinion of your own child”; in
the Indian edition, “public urination” and “cricket, obsession with” are
included; the Italians introduced “impotence,” “fear of motorways,” and
“desire to embalm”; and the Germans added “hating the world” and
“hating parties.” Berthoud and Elderkin are now working on a
children’s-literature version, “A Spoonful of Stories,” due out in 2016. For
all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their
entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for
your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why
and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s
effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of
“mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an
action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone
else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study
published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis
of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read
about an experience, they display stimulation within the same
neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves.
We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when
we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.
Other
studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people
who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others
(even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that
people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels).
And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found
that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary
nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social
perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the
ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be
thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age
of four.
Keith Oatley, a novelist and emeritus
professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, has for
many years run a research group interested in the psychology of fiction.
“We have started to show how identification with fictional characters
occurs, how literary art can improve social abilities, how it can move
us emotionally, and can prompt changes of selfhood,” he wrote in his
2011 book, “Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction.” “Fiction
is a kind of simulation, one that runs not on computers but on minds: a
simulation of selves in their interactions with others in the social
world…based in experience, and involving being able to think of possible
futures.” This idea echoes a long-held belief among both writers and
readers that books are the best kinds of friends; they give us a chance
to rehearse for interactions with others in the world, without doing any
lasting damage. In his 1905 essay “On Reading,” Marcel Proust puts it
nicely: “With books there is no forced sociability. If we pass the
evening with those friends—books—it’s because we really want to. When we
leave them, we do so with regret and, when we have left them, there are
none of those thoughts that spoil friendship: ‘What did they think of
us?’—‘Did we make a mistake and say something tactless?’—‘Did they like
us?’—nor is there the anxiety of being forgotten because of displacement
by someone else.”
George Eliot, who is rumored
to have overcome her grief at losing her life partner through a program
of guided reading with a young man who went on to become her husband,
believed that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of
amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men
beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” But not everybody agrees with
this characterization of fiction reading as having the ability to make
us behave better in real life. In her 2007 book, “Empathy and the
Novel,” Suzanne Keen takes issue with this “empathy-altruism
hypothesis,” and is skeptical about whether empathetic connections made
while reading fiction really translate into altruistic, prosocial
behavior in the world. She also points out how hard it is to really
prove such a hypothesis. “Books can’t make change by themselves—and not
everyone feels certain that they ought to,” Keen writes. “As any
bookworm knows, readers can also seem antisocial and indolent. Novel
reading is not a team sport.” Instead, she urges, we should enjoy what
fiction does give us, which is a release from the moral obligation to
feel something for invented characters—as you would for a real, live
human being in pain or suffering—which paradoxically means readers
sometimes “respond with greater empathy to an unreal situation and
characters because of the protective fictionality.” And she
wholeheartedly supports the personal health benefits of an immersive
experience like reading, which “allows a refreshing escape from
ordinary, everyday pressures.” So
even if you don’t agree that reading fiction makes us treat others
better, it is a way of treating ourselves better. Reading has been shown
to put our brains into a pleasurable trance-like state, similar to
meditation, and it brings the same health benefits of deep relaxation
and inner calm. Regular readers sleep better, have lower stress levels,
higher self-esteem, and lower rates of depression than non-readers.
“Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines,” the author Jeanette Winterson
has written. “What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the
imagination.”
One of Berthoud’s clients
described to me how the group and individual sessions she has had with
Berthoud have helped her cope with the fallout from a series of
calamities, including losing her husband, the end of a five-year
engagement, and a heart attack. “I felt my life was without purpose,”
she says. “I felt a failure as a woman.” Among the books Berthoud
initially prescribed was John Irving’s novel “The Hotel New Hampshire.”
“He was a favorite writer of my husband, [whom] I had felt unable to
attempt for sentimental reasons.” She was “astounded and very moved” to
see it on the list, and though she had avoided reading her husband’s
books up until then, she found reading it to be “a very rewarding
emotional experience, both in the literature itself and ridding myself
of demons.” She also greatly appreciated Berthoud guiding her to Tom
Robbins’s novel “Jitterbug Perfume,” which was “a real learning curve
for me about prejudice and experimentation.” One
of the ailments listed in “The Novel Cure” is “overwhelmed by the
number of books in the world,” and it’s one I suffer from frequently.
Elderkin says this is one of the most common woes of modern readers, and
that it remains a major motivation for her and Berthoud’s work as
bibliotherapists. “We feel that though more books are being published
than ever before, people are in fact selecting from a smaller and
smaller pool. Look at the reading lists of most book clubs, and you’ll
see all the same books, the ones that have been shouted about in the
press. If you actually calculate how many books you read in a year—and
how many that means you’re likely to read before you die—you’ll start to
realize that you need to be highly selective in order to make the most
of your reading time.” And the best way to do that? See a
bibliotherapist, as soon as you can, and take them up on their
invitation, to borrow some lines from Shakespeare’s “Titus Andronicus”:
“Come, and take choice of all my library/And so beguile thy sorrow…”
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act
have generally taken the high road in response to Thursday’s decision
by the Supreme Court to uphold the heart of the law.Credit Photograph by Al Drago/CQ Roll Call/Getty
Supporters
of the Affordable Care Act, starting with President Barack Obama, have
generally taken the high road in response to Thursday’s decision by the
Supreme Court to uphold the heart of the law. Graciousness in victory
is, perhaps, its own reward. But it may also be appropriate, on the
occasion of the 6–3 decision in King v. Burwell, to observe that this
lawsuit was from its inception a shameful and cynical exercise, which
illustrated the debasement of the contemporary conservative legal
movement.
The facts of the case are by now well
known. The core goal of the Affordable Care Act was to provide health
insurance to as many Americans as possible. States were encouraged to
set up exchanges, or marketplaces, where individuals could buy
insurance, and there would be subsidies from the federal government for
people who needed them. Before it passed, in 2010, the A.C.A. was
subject to one of the longest and most contentious congressional debates
in recent history. The law was attacked and analyzed from every
conceivable perspective. The law may have been wise, or it may have been
foolish, but it was universally understood.
Months
after the law went into effect, a group of conservative lawyers
discovered what was, at most, a drafting error in the law. A section of
the law suggested that the subsidies should only go to individuals who
bought insurance on exchanges “established by the State.” This discovery
prompted the lawyers to argue that the subsidies would not be available
to people who bought insurance on the federal exchange, which is the only
exchange in thirty-four states. Notably—crucially—not one member of
Congress who debated the law suggested that subsidies were to be denied
to purchasers on the federal exchange. Still, these lawyers recruited
plaintiffs and argued that more than six million people who bought
insurance on the federal exchange should be denied their subsidies.
What
principle was at stake in this lawsuit? The correct answer is none.
This is a contrast to National Federation of Independent Business v.
Sebelius, which was the first challenge to the A.C.A. In that case, the
plaintiffs argued that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to
pass the law in the first place. The case made a respectable (if
ultimately unsuccessful) argument for a narrow conception of the
government’s ability to regulate health care under the Constitution.
King v. Burwell did not implicate the Constitution at all. It was,
rather, based on a claim that the Obama Administration violated the
A.C.A. itself by offering subsidies to purchasers on the federal
exchange. The case was, in other words, a sophisticated game of gotcha,
based on what was, again, essentially a typographical error. The case
was only about trying to destroy the law by denying insurance to
millions and setting in motion a death spiral of raised premiums,
cancelled policies, and more rate hikes until the system collapsed. (The
sheer callousness of the plaintiffs’ lawyers in King was something to
behold. Millions tossed off health insurance? Hey, deal with it.)
For
writing the opinion upholding the law, Chief Justice John G. Roberts,
Jr., is being hailed (and denounced) as a latter-day Earl Warren—a
Republican appointee who turns out to be a secret liberal. This is
hardly accurate. Roberts is still the author of the Shelby County case,
which gutted the Voting Rights Act, and an eager member of the court
majority in Citizens United and all the other cases that undermined our
system of regulating political campaigns. But as his restrained and
cogent opinion in King demonstrated, he is not a partisan ideologue.
Quoting liberally from opinions by Justice Antonin Scalia, Roberts made
the commonsensical observation that a law must be interpreted as a
whole, not by the analysis of a few stray words here and there. And the
context of the full A.C.A. compelled the obvious conclusion that the
subsidies were intended to go to individuals on both the federal as well
as state exchanges. The law would otherwise make no sense. As Roberts
wrote, “The statutory scheme compels us to reject [the plaintiffs’]
interpretation because it would destabilize the individual insurance
market in any State with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very
‘death spirals’ that Congress designed the Act to avoid.” Recognition of
this obvious fact does not make Roberts a liberal; it makes him a
judge.
In dissent, Scalia cranked up his
increasingly tired act as the Court’s sound-bite generator. According to
Scalia, the Court engaged in “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” spouted
“pure applesauce,” and should prompt Obamacare to be renamed
“SCOTUScare.” The problem with Scalia’s dissent is the problem with the
lawsuit as a whole. It’s a transparent attempt to undermine the law by
whatever means happen to be available rather than by any consistent
jurisprudential principle. Back in the nineteen-sixties and seventies,
judicial conservatives believed in restraint—in deference to the elected
branches of government. That led them to oppose such decisions as Roe
v. Wade, which overturned state laws banning abortion, and to support
broad exercises of executive power. The King case shows that some
conservatives have abandoned their old idea of deference to the
executive branch and are simply filing lawsuits against the laws they
don’t like—and coming up with whatever reasons they can to support them. Obamacare
remains controversial, and its future will be an important issue in the
2016 elections. That’s as it should be. If Republicans can win the
Presidency and extend their control of Congress, they may well have the
chance to undo the law, and they will have every right to do so. But
today the Court said that the future of the law should be decided in
that political process and not in response to litigation stunts like
King v. Burwell.
