CT Blue

Just to show I keep my promises, I now present yet another installment of good news. The New York Times reports that school boards across the nation are re-thinking their zero tolerance policies. “Zero tolerance” is another way of saying that the adopting school boards have abandoned their obligation to use considered judgment in matters of discipline. The decision on punishment is made before the “crime” is committed.

I had some experience with “zero tolerance” during my brief service on the Groton Board of Education. The first defendant brought before us was a young boy who had brought a pocket knife to school. It was a tiny little knife. Nonetheless, it could have done real harm in the hands of a determined assailant, provided the victim fully cooperated. He said that he had forgotten he had it in his pocket, and we all believed him, but of course that was beside the point. It had been decided in advance that we were not to exercise any discretion whatsover in such cases. He had brought a “weapon” to school, and we were obligated to give him a ten day suspension (that's my recollection of the punishment; it may have been some other draconian penalty), whether the punishment fit the crime or no. After all, who were we to distinguish between a tiny little pocket knife and an assault weapon? That we must leave to god, I suppose, since people elected to exercise their judgment obviously should do no such thing. I don't recall anyone arguing that he deserved the punishment; only that we had no choice but to mete it out. None of the other cases we heard were much different; in none was there any indication that the boy involved had any intention of doing harm to anyone.

In a sane world our miscreant would have been required to stay after school, or pick up litter, or perform some other menial task that would have driven home the lesson that he should not do that again. Instead he received a punishment that did him no good, and no doubt taught him the lesson that he could not expect justice in this world. I suppose some might argue that was a lesson worth learning, given its truth, but I'd argue it's a lesson that is more profitably learned a bit later in life.

So, it's good news that zero tolerance is being zeroed out. Now, if only the voters would adopt a zero tolerance policy toward crazy, we might be able to improve things in the Congress.

Each of our political parties is under attack. The Republicans are besieged by ever growing numbers of voters of all hues, but most frighteningly, for them, those of a brownish hue. They have responded to the attack in a most simple and direct fashion: by depriving those voters of the right to vote. They have done this without shame and have done it aggressively. They have taken effective action against voters, shutting them out of polling places in red states and those blue tinged states in which they gained temporary power. They have been particularly effective and aggressive in those states, such as Texas, in which they fear the oncoming demographic brown tide the most.

The Democrats are under attack by the forces of reaction, led by rich folks such as the Kochs, backed by frightened, ignorant aging whites. What they lack in numbers they make up in money, and their chosen instrument for gaining power is the 501(c)(4) non-profit supposedly devoted to “social welfare” but which really devote themselves to partisan politics pure and simple. The administration, you may recall, beat a hasty and craven retreat when it was discovered that the IRS was slow walking requests from such groups for certification that they were in fact legitimate. The right claimed that it was being targeted because the IRS looked for words like “tea party” in an organization's name when deciding who needed special attention. It turned out that they were searching for liberal buzzwords too. No matter, the people responsible for this eminently reasonable course of conduct were obliged to resign.

So what, you may ask, is the good news? It looks like business as usual; Republicans using power to maintain power; Democrats cringing and allowing their opposition to run roughshod over them.

Except, maybe, the Democrats, at least some in the Obama administration, are growing a spine:

New rules proposed by the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service would clarify both how the I.R.S. defines political activity and how much nonprofits are allowed to spend on it. The proposal covers not just television advertising, but bread-and-butter political work like candidate forums and get-out-the-vote drives.

Long demanded by government watchdogs and Democrats who say the flow of money through tax-exempt groups is corrupting the political system, the changes would be the first wholesale shift in a generation in the regulations governing political activity by nonprofits.

The move follows years of legal and regulatory shifts, including the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling in 2010, that have steadily loosened the rules governing political spending, particularly by those with the biggest bank accounts: corporations, unions and wealthy individuals.

…

Under current rules, promoting social welfare can include some political activity, along with unlimited amounts of lobbying. Some of the largest political nonprofits — like Americans for Prosperity, backed by the conservative philanthropists Charles and David Koch — have used that provision to justify significant expenditures on political ads.

But under the new proposal, a broad swath of political work would be classified as “candidate-related political activity” and explicitly excluded from the agency’s definition of social welfare. Those activities include advertisements that mention a candidate within 60 days of an election as well as grants to other organizations making candidate-related expenditures.

“Depending on the details, this could be dramatic,” said Marcus S. Owens, a former chief of the I.R.S.’s exempt organizations division.

via New York Times

Of course, Republicans are already counterattacking, but my guess is that the Administration will stick to its guns. If the Democrats had any sense, they'd mount a propaganda campaign in support of this as noisy as the Republican’s incessant claims that we must eliminate voter fraud by eliminating voters. Once again, as is so often the case, the Democratic argument would have the virture of truth. These organizations are polluting our political system. There are ways to make that point take hold with voters. It is necessary in the first instance to be loud and proud about what you're doing. I’d be happy to see the odd progressive 501(c)(4) disappear if we can also get rid of, or at least hamstring, the Koch Brothers and ALEC. So here's hoping they won't back down, and that's the good news for this week.

At long last, the Democrats in the Senate have ended the filibuster abuse by the Republicans. This is truly good news, making it easy to meet my weekly obligation to recount such things, and this time I doubt that I'll be limning the good news with cynicism, though first by way of aside: “Shame on you, Carl Levin”.

Let me balance that with “Thank you, Harry Reid”. It's about time, for sure, but better late than never.

There will no doubt be many pundits warning that the Democrats will rue this day. I doubt it.

McConnell has made threats that if Reid takes this half measure (it only applies to presidential appointments of the non-Supreme Court variety), he will retaliate by abolishing the filibuster altogether.

The reasons this should not concern us are legion.

First, the Democrats never made effective use of the filubuster in the first place. Witness the composition of the present Supreme Court. Need I remind anyone, that the filibuster did not stop the truly bad things that Bush did, such as transferring money to the rich through his “tax cut”. Democrats are too easily shamed, whereas the Republicans cannot be shamed. The only emotions they know are greed and fear.

In the short run, we have nothing to fear. It is, of course, possible that the Republicans will take control of the Senate next year. I personally have faith that they'll shoot themselves in the foot as they did in 2012, but let us assume for the moment that they don't. They can abolish the legislative filibuster in 2014, but to what end? It takes 67 votes to override a veto, and that's in the constitution.

Should they take the majority, and they abolisth the filibuster altogether, we also win. I suppose it is possible that one can find examples of the use of the filibuster to prevent something truly bad from happening. But the sad fact is that it has mainly been used to stop progress on every imaginable front. The filibuster was used in the thirties to protect lynch mobs, and its use since then has hardly been more noble. There are no Jimmy Stewarts in real life.

Imagine, if you will, what Obama could have accomplished in 2009 were it not for the filibuster. An effective stimulus, for one. Dare I say it? Perhaps he would even have gone for single payor, or at least a public option. The 2010 backlash would not have happened if Obama had been able to deal effectively with the depression in which we are still mired. Perhaps his own lack of vision would have stopped him anyway, but in real life it was the Republican's determination to bring down the economy in order to make him fail.

There is something to be said for a rule that allows a minority to slow the system down a bit. There is no defense for a system that allows the minority to call the shots, particuarly when, in actuality, only one of the two parties gets to do so. Up until today, the Republicans have controlled the Senate whether they were in the minority or majority. Those days are over, at least when it comes to appointments. Now it's up to Obama to pack the courts and the agencies with real Democrats.