Independent Investigative Journalism Since 1995
By
Michael Winship
January 28, 2011
Editor’s Note: The
Reagan-Bush legacy to the United States includes a politicized
Judiciary and a blatant disregard for laws restricting the powers of
the Executive – all done while knowing that the national political-media
structure would do nothing to demand accountability.
With Reagan-Bush political
descendants again wielding substantial power, the country is faced with
the dilemma of what to do when such a group holds itself above the law
and the traditional checks on that power no longer work, as Michael
Winship notes in this guest essay:
The Detroit Tigers are
retiring the great baseball manager Sparky Anderson's number 11 this
season. "It's a wonderful gesture," Detroit Free Press columnist Michael Rosenberg wrote. "I just wish Sparky could see it."
Anderson won three World Series -- one managing the Tigers,
two with the Cincinnati Reds -- and passed away this past November.
Rosenberg said, "Retiring his number now is the baseball version of
waiting until a relative dies to say thank you."
That's because it comes 16 years after Anderson left the
Tigers in a bitter feud with owner Mike Ilitch. Yet as Sparky once
said, "I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them.
There's no future in it."
I wish I could say the same, let bygones be bygones and the
rest, but when it comes to two other baseball devotees, the Presidents
Bush, it's tough. Father and especially son left behind a heap of
wreckage.
I hear some of you say forget it, time to move on. Maybe, but
theirs is not a legacy that simply fades in the distance and leaves us
in peace. What they did continues to impact our lives in deleterious
ways, notably when it comes to the full speed, head-on collision of
partisan politics with American justice.
Just this week, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC)
released a long overdue, 118-page report concluding that George Jr.'s
White House used government agencies for Republican pep rallies and
sent officials off on electioneering trips using taxpayer money,
especially in the lead-up to the 2006 midterm elections.
These are violations of
the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in
partisan political activities in the workplace and forbids the use of
tax revenues for political purposes.
According to the OSC's findings the abuses were "a systemic misuse of federal resources."
As the website Talking Points Memo
reported, "The Office of Political Affairs (OPA) in Bush's White
House, overseen by Karl Rove, dispatched cabinet officials to campaign
for Republican candidates on the federal dime and forced federal
political appointees to attend political meetings during work time."
One memo, at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services,
read, "This meeting is mandatory. It will essentially be the same
large meeting that we had last year about this time. So, please clear
your schedule, put your pom-poms on, and let's go!!!"
There won't be any punishment for the cheerleaders -- unless
you count Democrats taking back the House and Senate in 2006, despite
Rove and the GOP pulling out all the stops with their White House
boiler room operation.
No request has been made
asking the Justice Department to file charges; Rove and any other
miscreants fled the scene of the crime before Inauguration Day 2009 and
can no longer be prosecuted. The Obama White House, however, has moved
its Office of Political Affairs to Democratic National Committee HQ
and the presidential re-election effort to Chicago. What could possibly
go wrong in Chicago?
Attempting to rectify another Bush injustice this week, the
Obama administration named two new commissioners to the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights, which currently has an imbalance of four Republicans
(two claim to be "independents") to three Democrats (one commissioner's
reappointment by House Speaker Boehner will even things up -- it's a
little complicated).
Talking Points Memo: "The
Bush administration stacked the commission with conservatives by having
two of the commissioners switch their affiliation from Republican to
independent. The move, said the Justice Department's Office of Legal
Counsel, was legal.
“But it was also, as former
Commission Chairman Gerald Reynolds (a Republican appointee)
acknowledged, intended to 'game' the system. The scheme unfolded in
2004, and the panel has since focused on racism against white people
and claimed that measures intended to aid minority groups are
discriminatory."
Meanwhile, the Bush family's Supreme Court appointees -- along
with that mossback relic of the Reagan era, Antonin Scalia --
habitually thumb their noses at the very notion of an independent and
impartial judiciary.
Last week, the citizen's
lobby Common Cause formally requested that the Justice Department
investigate whether Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas (Bush Sr.'s
notorious appointee) should have been disqualified from hearing the Citizens United
case, last year's landmark ruling that lifted restrictions on
corporate political contributions, allowing huge amounts of secret cash
to pour into our elections.
In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Common Cause
President and CEO Bob Edgar wrote, "It appears both justices have
participated in political strategy sessions, perhaps while the case was
pending, with corporate leaders whose political aims were advanced by
the decision.
“With respect to Justice Thomas,
there may also be an undisclosed financial conflict of interest due to
his wife's role as CEO of Liberty Central, a 501(c)(4) organization
that stood to benefit from the decision and played an active role in
the 2010 elections."
Justice Thomas dismissed his failure to report his wife's
income -- not only from the right-wing Liberty Central but also the
conservative Heritage Foundation -- as a "misunderstanding of the
filing instructions."
As for those "political
strategy sessions," Thomas and Scalia attended secretive,
invitation-only desert retreats, fundraisers held by billionaire
Charles Koch, who, with his brother David, owns the energy giant Koch
Industries, the second largest private company in the United States,
and bankrolls the right wing, including elements of the Tea Party
movement.
At those sessions, discussions may have been held about Citizens United
while the case was under consideration; certainly, many of those in
attendance have taken full advantage of the ruling and poured millions
into the campaigns of conservative candidates -- Common Cause reports
that Koch Industries' political action committee spent $2.6 million on
last year's elections, in addition to tens of millions contributed by
Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing group founded by the two
brothers.
(The 2011 Koch retreat
takes place this weekend; thousands plan to gather in nearby Rancho
Mirage, California, to protest.)
This isn't the first time Justices Scalia and Thomas have
hobnobbed with corporate bigwigs and right-wing muck-a-mucks. Scalia is
a regular headliner at the right-wing Federalist Society. In 2009,
Thomas was featured at the Heritage Foundation's annual fundraiser and
in 2008 delivered the Wriston Lecture at the conservative Manhattan
Institute, an event that costs $5,000 to $25,000 to attend.
Conservative court
colleague and George W. Bush appointee Samuel Alito has also given the
Wriston Lecture and attended fundraisers for The American Spectator magazine and the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the wonderful folks who gave us ACORN hoaxster James O'Keefe.
(Thanks for this information to the progressive ThinkProgress
website. And yes, I know liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has
allowed the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund to name a lectureship
after her; that's an issue, too.)
"The Supreme Court is the guardian of its own integrity," The Boston Globe
editorialized on Thursday. "That means staying above politics and
maintaining an air of dispassionate consideration of constitutional
issues.
“The court is not an elected body,
and shouldn't function like one. This is especially important because,
unlike with an elected body, there are few external constraints on the
justices: They set their own rules, and the need for comity on the
court largely prevents them from policing each other. Their shared
commitment to maintaining judicial decorum is all that binds them."
No one is above the law, it's said, but Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito certainly behave like they are.
None of them attended
Tuesday's State of the Union address -- certainly not the first time
that's happened, but still symbolically disrespectful. Sadly, unlike
baseball legend Sparky Anderson's, their numbers are unlikely to be
retired any time soon.
Michael Winship was senior
writer at Bill Moyers Journal on PBS and is president of the Writers
Guild of America, East.
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