Centerfield

And yet, the Dems gave her a pass in the filibuster-busting deal. I wonder why. Let's see: reelected several times to a blue-state bench with substantial majorities; rated "highly-qualified" by the (left-leaning) ABA, and a judicial record a mile long open for all to see.

IMO, a hundred JRB's ajudicating for a hundred years won't damage the Democratic Party as much as 10 well-scripted minutes from a HD speech. Before he is done, the only people voting Democratic will be Dan Rather, the faculty at Yale, and you.

Posted by: Literally Retarded at June 9, 2005 05:04 PM

Let me also ask in return: Have you read anything else about JRB?

http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/kirsanow200505170812.asp

With embedded links.

Posted by: Literally Retarded at June 9, 2005 05:11 PM

Art,

First, she is now a circuit court judge, not a district court judge as you state in your post.

Second, what exactly do you find so offensive about the comment that you quote? She is making a very broad point, but there are several particular issues which I'm sure underlie her comments.

For example, there has been much debate about the lesser-known part of the Fifth Amendment that says: "nor shall private property be taken for public use without just compensation." Over the past decades, there has been a growing trend to limit the protections provided by that Amendment. In Kelos v. City of New London, now pending before the Supreme Court, local authorities wanted to expropriate private property in order to give it to some real estate developer who would use it for private, for-profit businesses. Not exactly "public use". In Lucas v. South Carolina City Council, a private land owner had purchased two beachfront lots, planning to build houses on them as then allowed by law. After he bought them, the legislature passed a law which prevented building houses on that type of beach front property. These are but 2 examples showing the on-going fight against government intrusion into the realm of private property ownership. Judge Brown generally believes in protecting economic liberty as much as we protect our civil liberties today, because without economic liberty, we are in fact dependent on the government for our care and support.

All the libertarians who chimed in on the marijuana thread should definitely be cheering for Judge Brown. One of the many unjust criticisms of her (unjust because her actual court opinions have shown ample respect for existing precedents) is that she would turn the clock back to before the "1937 revolution", a reference to the Supreme Court's upholding of major components of the New Deal that year. One of those cases (it actually was decided in 1942) is Wickard v. Filburn, the case which the majority in the marijuana case relied on. Impossible to predict for sure, but I'm pretty sure she would have joined Justice Thomas and the other dissenters in that case.

Finally, in addition to citing this review of Judge Brown, I would call your attention to Nat Hentoff's editorial about Judge Brown, particularly taking to task the Judge Brown's critics (particulary the New York Times, the NAACP, and Senator Reid) for "ignor[ing] the facts in a story and deeply sully[ing] someone's reputation."

Posted by: PatHMV at June 9, 2005 05:14 PM

I'm with Pat on this. I fail to see anything remotely "flaming" in the judges comments. She has strong views on the current regulatory climate and where it leads. She can be debated on that subject. She has made no ad hominem attacks on individuals or groups, at least not in the quote you provided. I believe I counted four uses of the pronoun "we" and no uses of "them".

Loads of people from across the political spectrum are concerned about the lack of respect for fundamental freedoms, whether the issue is the right to property, the right to commerce, the right to control reproduction, or the right to die.

The judge's views are strong and she is not shy in declaring them. I don't see that as "flaming."

Posted by: Jay at June 9, 2005 06:03 PM

More "pretty objectionable stuff": ;-)

Brown also consistently upholds such rights as freedom of speech, privacy, and the rights of criminal defendants—a position that bothers many conservatives. In People v. Woods (1999), Justice Brown objected to a police search of a home justified by the fact that a roommate was an ex-felon. "In appending the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the framers sought to protect individuals against government excess," she wrote. "High in that pantheon was the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Likewise, Justice Brown voted to strike down a warrantless search of a man arrested for riding a bicycle on the wrong side of the street. Describing the search as excessive, Brown noted that an arrest for such a silly infraction never would have taken place in an affluent neighborhood. "If we are committed to a rule of law that applies equally to 'minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich,' we cannot countenance standards that permit and encourage discriminatory enforcement."

Posted by: Scott at June 9, 2005 06:28 PM

Everything I've read about Justice Brown just doesn't seem all that extreme. It's pretty in line with modern conservative thought. Her oratory is expressive and I think her refferences to slavery are a over-the-top, but there is a lot of good, intellectual theory about the negative effects of the welfare state and the statist form of government in general.

She seems quite intelligent and appears to have interpreted the law fairly, if conservatively. I don't think she's any furhter right than Ginsberg is left. Probably not my choice for a judgeship, but certainly not extreme in the context of modern legal thought.

Also, I don't think comparing Dean to Brown is really fair. Brown's quotes came as a legal scholar expressing a personal opinion. Dean's came while representing a major party.

Posted by: Alan at June 9, 2005 06:40 PM

I'd like people who say JRB is extreme to explain how she is more extreme than Justice Ginsberg, who has proudly noted (not "admitted", positively gloated, in fact) that she used provisions of a treaty that had not been ratified by the US Senate in a case before SCOTUS; I'd like to know how the use of foreign law by Justices Breyer, Ginsberg and Kennedy is less radical than someone who wants to go by what the constitution actually says.

I'm hoping to get around to finishing up a shot post r.e. what I believe is the proper role of the court - a role I think JRB fully appreciates, but which almost half the current SCOTUS does not - as a semi-riposte to comments in Newt Gingrich's Winning the Future. If it's centrist enough, maybe I'll apply to have it as a guest post here, too. ;)

Posted by: Simon at June 9, 2005 07:14 PM

It's always been my opinion that presidents should be able to get the nominees they want for executive and judicial seats as long as they can get 51 votes in the Senate. That's the way it's been for decades and I don't see any reason to change it now, other than that the Left is afraid of losing their last gasp of power. A few far-right judges won't do anything worse than the bevy of far-left judges that came out of LBJ, etc, accomplished.

Posted by: Dave at June 9, 2005 07:31 PM

Dave,
I don't disagree with that, but what I don't accept is that the filibuster was unconstitutional. They should have followed Newt's advice last fall and changed the rules at the start of the session.

Posted by: Simon at June 9, 2005 07:40 PM

No, it's not unconstitutional. They were acting within the scope of Senate rules when they filibustered. I would argue that they were fairly close to abusing those rules, but it is true they were still acting within them. I think that McCain and Co. should be applauded for finding the grownups in the Senate to diffuse the whole thing.

BTW, if Republicans listened to Newt more often, they'd be better off :)

Posted by: Dave at June 9, 2005 07:51 PM

The filibuster isn't unconstitutional. Neither is the so-called "constitutional" option. It was a Senate rules squabble, one that's been going on for over a century. But it's entirely within the rules and the Constitution, the argument is over which rules to use.

Posted by: Tully at June 9, 2005 08:30 PM

I wrote at considerable length dissenting from the party over the nuclear option, here. I added a somewhat shorter follow-up comment noting that I opposed the nuclear option, not necessarily the nominees, and a slightly lengthier riposte to comments made by Pat Buchanan over the nuclear option.

Posted by: Simon at June 9, 2005 10:38 PM

I never understood why they couldn't just have a real filibuster. The Republicans should have called the Democrats on it and made them talk as long as they possibly could. Maybe the Dems could have successfully worn out the Republicans on one judge, but by the time they had to filibuster the second, those Georgetown feather beds would look pretty good.

Truth is, our Senators are soft and didn't want to hassle of a real filibuster.

Posted by: Alan at June 9, 2005 11:14 PM

Alan,

That's not the case. A number of years ago, the rules were changed to provide for this "soft" filibuster. The GOP actually did try to force a "real" filibuster on the judges months ago, brought in cots and everything. Here's what actually happens under current Senate rules:

Dem starts speaking. He can yield his time to other Dems. They only need 1 Dem in the chamber, speaking, at any given time. The other Dems can go home and sleep. But the GOP can't go home. At any time, the speaker can suggest the absence of a quorum. If there's not a majority of the Senate present during the quorum call, then the Senate is automatically in recess, and the Dem speakers can stand down. That's why the GOP has to stay there, to ensure a quorum.

So under the current rules of the Senate, there is very little cost to the filibustering party, and a great deal of personal cost (staying up all night, etc.) on the non-filibustering party. There have been a number of blogosphere posts on the issue, but I'm too tired right now to look them up, sorry.

Posted by: PatHMV at June 9, 2005 11:31 PM

Dave,

Until 2001, Senators had the blue slip process that they could use to remove judicial nominees. Republican Senators used this tactic against Clinton's nominees. When Bush took office, Senator Hatch removed that option. So the Democrats had the filibuster as their last resort.

Art,

Didn't it strike you as odd that the NYT would give such a in-depth review of JRB the day after her nomination? Had that article appeared one week earlier, would you have contacted your Senator?

Posted by: EG at June 9, 2005 11:34 PM

The reason the NYT waited until a day after her confirmation, was that IMHO they knew they were stretching it. They still want to trash her, but they must still have some shred of ethics about them.

No, JRB doesn't have view points that always line up with mine. We most likely disagree in a lot of areas. That aside, I don't think she was treated fairly by the press or Senate Democrats. She was the victim, as so many where on the other side during the Clinton years, of a smear campaign. Somehow, she managed to survive.

Posted by: AR at June 10, 2005 06:16 AM

But how did the press (or at least, the NYT) wish to smear her if they waited until after the nomination to write an article like that? Wouldn't the publication been moved up several weeks before the vote?

Posted by: EG at June 10, 2005 07:50 AM

Pat,

Interesting. I did not know that. But I question, if there are no other Democrats there, once one Dem stops speaking and before the next one starts, can't the Republicans call for cloture? With no Dems there, couldn't they secure it with a 3/5ths vote of the Senators present?

Maybe not. I remember reading a National Review editorial about this several months back and they seemed to think the Republicans could end this by forcing a real filibuster. Maybe I missed the point.

Posted by: Alan at June 10, 2005 09:21 AM

The Dem speaking can yield the podium to another Dem. Others can make sundry side motions, but the podium still remains the speaker's, and he can assign it out. Side motions don't "close out" his possession of the podium, or his ability to transfer that to whomever he designates. And you can't move for cloture while he (or his designate) continues to hold the podium--unless they allow it.

Posted by: Tully at June 10, 2005 10:58 AM

By the way, on a related note, the blog E Pluribus Unum - listed in Centerfields' blogroll - carries this story:

Imagine a Supreme Court nominee with a mainstream approach to the law who has earned the respect of both Republicans and Democrats. Imagine a nominee for the Supreme Court of unquestioned stature with decades of judicial experience. Stop imagining...Meet Judge Ed Prado.

But this is preposterous. In what way is Judge Prado reccomended to Republicans? What is Judge Prado's view on the use of foreign law? What is his view on emminent domain? What is his view on federalism? None of these questions are answered by this site, and I can't help but suspect that Democrats make the mistake of believing that a Judge that they aren't entirely comfortable with is ipso facto a "moderate choice with bipartisan appeal".

It seems to me that we don't need liberal judges (we need anything but), we don't need conservative judges (not as such, at any rate), we don't need moderate judges (what is a "moderate" contract, anyway?) - on the Supreme Court, we need originalist judges. If you want a Justice with "broad, bipartisan support", show me a Judge who is a lifelong Democrat, but who is first and foremost an originalist, with a proven record of voting for the constitution against their own policy preferences, and I'll back her for the Supreme Court, and I suspect so would many moderate Republicans. Where is the evidence Judge Prado is any such thing?

Posted by: Simon at June 10, 2005 11:03 AM

Tully, thanks.

I think then that the rule change that needs to occur is making both parties stick it out on the cots.

Posted by: Alan at June 10, 2005 11:04 AM

Alan,

I'm not sure which NRO piece you're thinking of, but there were several proposals to change the rules not to eliminate the filibuster but to force it back to the old days where the Senate really could do no other business while the filibuster was going on. That may be what you're thinking of... that you don't have to change the rules to eliminate the filibuster, you just have to change the rules to impose a very visible political cost on the side filibustering.

Posted by: PatHMV at June 10, 2005 11:06 AM

Ha, let's see Democrats nominate this Judge Prado to the Supreme Court when they get to the White House and control the Senate..."too inconsistent" they'll say. He may be a great pick but this effort is total baloney.

Posted by: Scott at June 10, 2005 01:40 PM

Ok, a couple things.

Thank you, Pat, for your correction. She is working in the District of Columbia. That's where "district" came from. My bad.

Secondly, I don't want you all to misunderstand the point of my frustration. I am not getting all up in arms over the fact that another conservative judge has been appointed. BFD. That'll happen. Ebb and flow.

This is not a politics thing, this is a rhetoric thing. Throwing around suggestions that "liberalism = slavery" is bad beyond simply being offensive or mean. It's downright dangerous.

Posted by: Art at June 10, 2005 01:49 PM

I'd like to repeat:

Brown also consistently upholds such rights as freedom of speech, privacy, and the rights of criminal defendants—a position that bothers many conservatives. In People v. Woods (1999), Justice Brown objected to a police search of a home justified by the fact that a roommate was an ex-felon. "In appending the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, the framers sought to protect individuals against government excess," she wrote. "High in that pantheon was the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unreasonable searches and seizures."

Likewise, Justice Brown voted to strike down a warrantless search of a man arrested for riding a bicycle on the wrong side of the street. Describing the search as excessive, Brown noted that an arrest for such a silly infraction never would have taken place in an affluent neighborhood. "If we are committed to a rule of law that applies equally to 'minorities as well as majorities, to the poor as well as the rich,' we cannot countenance standards that permit and encourage discriminatory enforcement."

What JRB thinks is the liberal ideal (which I assume she broadly defines as "liberalism") in the United States, an ideal which she grew up with and believed in, contains some aspects that resemble citizen enslavement to the state. To prove she does not believe in throwing the baby out with the bathwater, I give you above citation which show examples of such "enslavement".

The one thing I agree with you on is that it's surprising to see a judge use such rhetoric; but I don't think it's dangerous and I'm not bothered by it. It's simply out of the norm.

Posted by: Scott at June 10, 2005 02:19 PM

Art,

That rhetoric is just not that bad. She didn't say, precisely, that "liberalism = slavery". She said that "if we can invoke no ultimate limits on the power of governmment, a democracy is inevitably transformed into a kleptocracy - a license to steal, a warrant for oppression." Do you disagree that without the constitution and the bill of right (ultimate limits on the power of government) our democracy would be in bad trouble?

Let's take a look at the entire paragraph in that speech to the Federalist Society:

Writing 50 years ago, F.A. Hayek warned us that a centrally planned economy is "The Road to Serfdom."3 He was right, of course; but the intervening years have shown us that there are many other roads to serfdom. In fact, it now appears that human nature is so constituted that, as in the days of empire all roads led to Rome; in the heyday of liberal democracy, all roads lead to slavery. And we no longer find slavery abhorrent. We embrace it. We demand more. Big government is not just the opiate of the masses. It is the opiate. The drug of choice for multinational corporations and single moms; for regulated industries and rugged Midwestern farmers and militant senior citizens.

Notice the criticism of multinational industries and regulated industries; this is not a one-sided pro-big-business speech. She goes on to cite Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand similarly attributes the collectivist impulse to what she calls the "tribal view of man."14 She notes, "[t]he American philosophy of the Rights of Man was never fully grasped by European intellectuals. Europe's predominant idea of emancipation consisted of changing the concept of man as a slave to the absolute state embodied by the king, to the concept of man as the slave of the absolute state as embodied by 'the people' — i.e., switching from slavery to a tribal chieftain into slavery to the tribe."15

I don't agree with everything she says in that speech. In particular, I don't think the country is nearly as bad off as she makes out in a few passages. But it remains a learned (32 footnotes!), thoughtful analysis. It is entirely appropriate to use strong language from time to time in such an address, to emphasize a point. It was NOT a simple-minded, tossing red meat to the party faithful, akin to an assertion that Republicans are a bunch of white Christians. That idiocy serves little purpose, provokes little thought, advances no intellectual arguments. It's just designed to inflame and offend, peroid.

I think, in fact, that the NYT article and your post actually prove a point Judge Brown made in an earlier paragraph:

This is a fascinating subject which we do not have time to explore more thoroughly. Suffice it to say that this phenomenon accounts for much of the near hysterical tone of current political discourse. Our problems, however, seem to go even deeper. It is not simply that the same words don't have the same meanings; in our lifetime, words are ceasing to have any meaning. The culture of the word is being extinguished by the culture of the camera. Politicians no longer have positions they have photo-ops. To be or not to be is no longer the question. The question is: how do you feel.

"Politicians no longer have positions, they have photo-ops." Or sound bites. You've picked one phrase of a long, thoughtful speech and seized on it as exemplifying a terrifying attitude. You are certainly not the first to do so. Many politicians do that on a regular basis. But if we're going to be centrists and decry traditional politics, then we should strive for something higher, strive to raise the level of analysis and discourse, not lower it.

Posted by: PatHMV at June 10, 2005 03:01 PM

===It was NOT a simple-minded, tossing red meat to the party faithful, akin to an assertion that Republicans are a bunch of white Christians. That idiocy serves little purpose, provokes little thought, advances no intellectual arguments. It's just designed to inflame and offend, peroid.===

Gee, Pat, you mean like when House Speaker Dennis Hastert recently said 'The Democrats don't want any Hispanics in places of power." (Apparently, aside from Gov. Bill Richardson, Rep. Sanchez, and oh, a couple thousand other examples.) ? That kind of idiocy?

There's an old saying in Washington; "a gaffe is when a politician accidentally tells the truth." I agree that what Dean said was a gaffe. since it was the truth. If you don't believe me, then check out "The Great Divide: Retro vs. Metro America, by Dr. John Sperling, which says:

"Of 3,643 Republicans serving in the state legislatures, only 44 are minorities, or 1.2 percent. In the Congress, with 274 of the 535 elected senators and representatives Republican, only five are minorities - three Cuban Americans from Florida, a Mexican American from Texas and a Native American senator originally elected as a Democrat....Texas, with a minority population of 47 percent, has 106 Republicans in the state legislature, but there are 0 blacks and 0 Hispanics among them....No major corporation doing business with the government could be so white without being subject to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) action!"

Tell you what; as Adlai Stevenson once said, "If you stop telling lies about us, then we'll stop telling the truth about you." ;-)

Posted by: Blue Jean at June 10, 2005 03:41 PM

Gee, Jean, you think the lack of African-Americans in the Republican party might have anything to do with the NAACP airing false ads trying to tie George Bush to despicable lynchings? Or the repeated efforts by the NAACP, Jesse Jackson, and others to label African-Americans who support "Republican" causes like ending racial discrimination in California as "black hustlers and hucksters", or "house slaves" and "puppets of the white man"?

I would also note that President Bush increased the percentage of the black vote he received in 2004 by 2% or more. In some states, he took 16% of the Black vote, up 7% from 2000.

Just a thought... ;-)

Posted by: PatHMV at June 10, 2005 04:17 PM

Blue Jean - Sperling is a Democratic partisan, the conclusions of whose book (that Democrats should, in the short and longer term, forget the red states and win the blue states) were firmly repudiated by the results of the last election and clear evidence that blue states are, in the longer term, losing population while the red states are gaining it. So I don't trust his figures (which are, at best, somewhat out of date - Nighthorse Campbell left Congress last year), I note that he fails to quote how the Democrat numbers stack up by comparison, and I deny that he is in any way an authoritative or reliable source of information.

And in any instance, the idea that there is (or should be) a "normal" quote of minorities smacks of affirmative action. The appropriate number of minority representatives is however many the voters choose to return to office, and the appropriate number of minority employees is the total number who applied for positions for which they were better qualified than the other applicants for that position.

Posted by: Simon at June 10, 2005 04:19 PM

Pat-

She can be as centrist as you please, that doesn't change the fact that her rhetoric is brash. At least in that instance.

Even in that context (which I appreciate by the way, thanks agian), she is being overly-strong. True, we may be less sensative to what slavery actually means today (as I think we are about tyrrany as well, but that's a differnet story), but she's not helping her cause. True, she may not have been making blunt remarks to the party faithful, but she was, in my mind, callous in her use of the term.

I think it's a pretty big logical leap to suggest that big goverment, five or six steps (or really any number of steps) down the line, will induce slavery. It's just bad logic. She is pretty obviously referring to Communism as slavery (IMO), and even the most liberal democracy is no where near Communism. I don't think I have to go into why we don't have to worry about a Communist revolution in America.

So, at best it was sloppy use of the term to make a point that may or may not be grounded in solid logic, at worst it was misuse of a sensative term that feeds into her complaints about the loss of meanings of words.

Posted by: Art at June 10, 2005 06:35 PM

It was NOT a simple-minded, tossing red meat to the party faithful, akin to an assertion that Republicans are a bunch of white Christians. That idiocy serves little purpose, provokes little thought, advances no intellectual arguments. It's just designed to inflame and offend, peroid

Engenders:

If you stop telling lies about us, then we'll stop telling the truth about you

American political dialogue at its finest.

Posted by: C3 at June 10, 2005 07:31 PM

Thank you, c3, for that enlightening comment.

Wow, Pat, a whole 16% of the African American vote! Hey, if the GOP improves that much every four year cycle, then by 2048, they'll get 38%! The Dems better watch out! Of course, by that time, we'll probably be too old to care. ;-)

Kidding aside, there would probably be a lot less of those ads if W and company did less to feed them. Speaking at Bob Jones University is part of it. Another part of it is treating James Byrd's daughter as if she were a badly dressed party crasher instead of a grieving woman in need of comfort. A third part is using your campaign chairman to purge all vaguely African American sounding names from the voter rolls. Another part is acting as though appointing a few African Americans to high posts is all you need to do to fulfil civil rights obligations. Considering W's record, I would say 16% is a ceiling, not a floor.

Well, Simon, your red state/blue state analogy is interesting, but one needs to factor in a few things. It's not that the red states are growing, it's how they're growing. If you check in at Ruy's site over at Donkey Rising, you'll see that the American population is steadily becoming less WASP and more black and more Hispanic. This may not be a big deal if you're a private company run by WASPs, but if you're a party that's just about all WASP, it's a cause for concern. It means that each generation of voters indentifies less and less with you, and more and more with your opponents.

As Jon Stewart put it on "The Daily Show" during the Clinton impeachment in the House, when he looked at the Judiciary Committee "To me, the Democrat side looked like America; they had the black guy, the Jewish guy, and the gay guy. The Republican side looked like every man who's ever fired my father."
It looked that way to me too.

But buck up; it's not a black and white issue, or even a blue and red one. (No, it's not a newspaper either!) ;-)

Posted by: Blue Jean at June 10, 2005 11:02 PM

Jean:

if you're a party that's just about all WASP, it's a cause for concern. It means that each generation of voters indentifies less and less with you, and more and more with your opponents.

But I think there's a serious fallacy in that statement, because it assumes that non-whites wlil continue to identify with Democrats in the manner which they have for thirty or so years. There is no basis for any such assumption; the GOP's core principles, IMO, offer blacks and latinos far more than the democrats' stagnant affirmative action and corrosive racial division, and there is no reason to believe that blacks will continue to align with Democrats. Newt Gingrich, J.C. Watts and Ken Mehlman have made it clear that the GOP's number one priority is to expand the party to include a larger number of non-whites, and I see no reason to believe that this isn't possible.

Posted by: Simon at June 10, 2005 11:24 PM

C3, Jean was just picking at me, and I did kind of ask for it by slipping that in (though it is basically the defense that the Democratic Party has made for Dean's remarks, when they're not saying he doesn't speak for the party).

Art, I was not saying that Brown is a centrist, she is not. I was saying that we, as centrists, should not just pick isolated comments by public officials and proclaim that they render that public official unfit for office, reprehensible, etc. How many Democrats and Democratic candidates have proclaimed that Republicans are racist, that the religious right is "like the Taliban"? Is Charlie Rangel unfit for office because he compared the war in Iraq to the Holocaust? Or claiming that advocating tax cuts makes one akin to a Klansman? It's a very common rhetorical tactic, practiced by politicians and debaters everywhere. "If we go down this road unchecked, then this is where we'll end up." It's very rarely literally true, and I doubt many users of the technique really believe that it will. As she quoted in her speech: "There's something happening here. What it is ain't exactly clear."

All of Rangel's rhetoric (not to mention Julian Bond's and Jesse Jackson's) offends me and is wrong. But I'd still rather talk about policies than get caught up in political "gotchas" of finding the really bad sound bite.

P.S. Jean, Simon's right, sorry... :P

Posted by: PatHMV at June 11, 2005 01:46 AM

You're a good sport, Pat; that's why I like debating with you. :-)

That said, you guys are wrong! (hey, did you expect me to say anything else?)

I agree that the Dems can't take the African American vote for granted, and I applaud the efforts of Gingrich, J.C. Watts, et al to reach out to the black community. It certainly beats the covert racism of Nixon's "Southern strategy", Jesse Helms' "white hands" ads, etc, up to and including the secret smear campaign against John McCain in 2000, the denial of black voting rights, etc. All of which inflames racial divisions far more than anything the Rev. Jesse Jackson and company ever said.

Yes, Simon, it's "possible" that the GOP will gain more than 16% of the African American vote, just as it's possible that I may win the Powerball lottery next week. But possible is one thing; "probable" is another.

I'm afraid you never said just what the GOP has to offer African Americans besides "stagnant affirmative action programs". "Equality for all" is a grand idea, but when you and yours have faced discrimination both brutal and covert for the past 400 years, it's a nice phrase and nothing more. Refusing to see such a thing will not help the GOP. That's why I put more stock in Hillary Rodham Clinton's voting reforms, Bill Clinton's "mend it but don't end it" proposal, Eliot Spitzer's efforts to go after discriminatory agencies in New York, and so forth.

So what, exactly, is the GOP doing for the African American voters? As Ross Perot said "I'm all ears." :-P

Posted by: Blue Jean at June 11, 2005 09:52 AM

Jean;

So what, exactly, is the GOP doing for the African American voters?

You should ask the black voters that question, not us lily-white rascist republicans.;-)

OK the increases in black votes for Republicans aren't much but they can make a signficant difference in certain elections (read "Ohio").

Bottom line for me: I can't speak for black voters about what appeals to them, only they can. But I can certainly understand their frustration with being "taken for granted". As a white, evangelical republican the assumption is that I will vote republican. (But then again do regularly disagree with other white evangelicals.) Its never politically safe to take a block of votes "for granted"

Posted by: c3 at June 11, 2005 12:05 PM

Okay, BJ, you know I love debating you. :) I'll take the bait...

First of all, let me distance myself from good 'ole Jesse. Without getting entirely personal, let's just say Jesse would have no use for me in the GOP. So, I've never paid any attention to any of the crap that spews from his mouth.

The GOP has emerged as the party of the middle class. I don't agree with all of the Bush Administrations proposals in regards to tax cuts, child credits, and social security reforms, but I think we could all agree that the emerging black middle class has benefited from them. In fact, Social Security is one area where the GOP has the potential to win black votes. If the push privatization (which I am still unsure about), blacks would certainly benefit. As it is, they have a shorter life span, and are therefore a lot of black Americans are being taxed to support the condo dwellers in Palm Beach, but they'll never benefit from this taxation.

I'm not endorsing privatization, I'm just saying that the GOP has potential here with black voters. Don't make me get into the moral coalition the GOP tried to push to win black votes...I don't agree with that at all.

:)

Posted by: AR at June 11, 2005 01:10 PM

I agree that she is very bad, although I'm not sure about her being worse than 100 Howard Deans. That's over exaggerating.

Posted by: Chris Brown at June 11, 2005 03:47 PM

Abel, I love debating you too. And there may be hope for you yet! :-)

Like I said, I think it's wonderful the GOP is reaching out to African Americans, though I would say the black middle class has been around for quite a while. But I'm not sure SS privatization is the way to do it. It may be true that African American men have shorter lifespans than non African American white men, but SS isn't just a retirement fund. It also pays disability, and sometimes survivors' benefits as well.

Posted by: Blue Jean at June 12, 2005 08:42 PM

I should add "It's wonderful that the GOP is reaching out to African Americans, but they're not going to get far if they are as tactless as W was during the Jan. 11, 2005 meeting on Social Security." For more, here's http://www.smirkingchimp.com/viewtopic.php?topic=51649&forum=3

Posted by: Blue Jean at June 13, 2005 12:05 AM