The Reason Republicans Love War So Much

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

The Reason Republicans Love War So Much

 

The GOP and the South can’t stand the fact that Obama seeks diplomacy.

 

 

 

 

March 28, 2014  |  

 

“Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today,” says a North Carolina Civil War enthusiast in 1998’s Confederates in the Attic.

That's why the Republican Party is piling on President Obama as he seeks a diplomatic peace in Ukraine. The United States is acting like a nation in decline in its dealings with Russia rather than projecting strength, say former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, while Sen. John McCain has criticized Obama’s diplomatic efforts on so many occasions in a way that suggests if we don’t start bombing Russia in the next 72-hours, the senator from Arizona will chew through a lamp post.

On Tuesday, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that even a “trained ape” has better foreign policy skills than President Obama. Mind you, Rumsfeld also said in 2002, “That even a trained ape knows Iraq has weapons of mass destruction.” Just kidding, but that's the guy we're dealing with here.

The Republican Party is the party of the South. The Republican congressional delegation is disproportionately southern, and unsurprisingly a majority of the party’s leaders talk with a southern accent. If you want to know why there has never been a war the Republican Party didn’t want another person’s kid to fight, it’s the Republican Party’s slavish devotion to the monolithic South. In Better off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession, Chuck Thompson writes, “The southerner’s enthrallment with war and bloodshed, his veneration of defeat and disaster, his zeal for religious crusade, and easy compliance with the corporate profit motive, has repeatedly dragged the nation into unnecessary wars.”

The GOP and the South can’t stand the fact that Obama seeks diplomacy, or occasionally walks back from his own self-imposed “red lines.” They view his hesitancy to use military force as weakness, while at the same time forgetting the blood and treasure this country has forfeited in its previous rush to war; an invasion and occupation that cost 186,000 Iraqis and 5,000 Americans their lives. While also not forgetting that misadventure came with a $3 trillion pricetag and an immeasurable moral cost.

Interestingly, a 2003 Pew Research Poll showed that Southerners were by far the most supportive of the Iraq invasion, with 77 percent believing it was the right choice, as opposed to barely half of Americans in general. In fact, Southern whites expressed the strongest support for military action in Iraq with 83 percent saying it was the right decision.

Going back further, C. Vann Woodward noted in The Burden of Southern History, “Not only had the strongest support for the Vietnam War come from the South, but so also had the President and the Secretary of State who led the crusade.”

The Republican Party’s new attack line is to blame the world’s woes on a weakened America. With the slow but steadily growing success of the Affordable Care Act, it appears the GOP is readying to roll out its old timey “Democrats are weak on national security” tagline for 2014 instead of attacks on the President’s signature legislation.

Obama, according to likely 2016 GOP presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz, endeavors "to alienate and abandon our friends, and to coddle and appease our enemies." Former Vice-President Dick Cheney said it’s Obama's weakness that encouraged Putin to trample into Ukraine and seize Crimea, while simultaneously forgetting he was the Vice-President when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. You know, when President Bush did nothing. 

This neo-con language is designed specifically for the GOP’s Southern base. University of Georgia history professor James Cobb observes, “The long standing determination of so many southerners to show their ‘Americanness’ through ostentatious professions of patriotism and an aggressive ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude has typically translated into historically high levels of military participation and enthusiasm for military action.”

Certainly the loudest pro-war voices in the Republican Party are those who chose to avoid military service through the good fortune of deferment or family fortune. The chickenhawk phenomenon cuts across all regions of the U.S., but its pathology is most prevalent in the South, along with a handful of other pro-military industrial complex districts like Southern California’s Orange County and the Sunbelt states. Chickenhawk advocacy finds a reliable home in think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation, while also consistently splashed across the opinion pages of the neo-conservative Weekly Standard and the Washington Post. Mike Lofgren, who spent 28 years as a Republican in Congress and is author of The Party Is Over, writes, “If you ever wondered how the United States came to be embroiled simultaneously in two major wars and a half dozen covert ones in the past decade, the cheerleading of Washington’s laptop commandos, with their disproportionate influence in major media, has been a major factor.”

These “laptop commandos” give the GOP base its foreign policy cues. Today’s Republican Party is effectively nothing more than a pro-Southern, pro-corporate sound machine. Other than tax cuts for the rich, the party does not possess a single coherent policy, domestic or foreign. When it comes to dealing with Russia, the GOP offers nothing that can be confused for an actual solution. Mitt Romney is doing the talk show circuit purely to remind Americans it was he who said Russia is our number-one geo-political foe. Not only was he wrong then and is wrong now—Russia poses no immediate threat to U.S. security—he offers nothing in terms of how he’d manage the Ukraine crisis differently than Obama.

Republicans criticized Obama for not having the nerve to carry out his threat against Syria, but when the President threw the decision to a congressional vote, House Republicans balked. They balked because a majority of American voters, faced with a lingering economic crisis at home, are uninterested in fighting another country’s crisis abroad. But history has proven that the nation’s mood on issues changes quickly, and it’s fair to conclude that the nation’s appetite for war might easily be renewed, so long as the Republican Party plays its military adventurism whistle—a tune heard mostly clearly by Southern voters.

“How depressing that we already know that the next Republican warmonger to sweep into power will do so on the same tarnished epaulets of military fanaticism enabled by the outsized influence of the southern polity on electoral America,” writes Chuck Thompson. As the Civil War enthusiast said, “Southerners are a military people. We were back then, still are today."

CJ Werleman is the author of "Crucifying America," and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back." Follow him on Twitter: @cjwerleman

The Gospel of Citizens United: In Hobby Lobby, Corporations Pray for the Right to Deny Workers Contraception

The Gospel of Citizens United: In Hobby Lobby, Corporations Pray for the Right to Deny Workers Contraception

A Report by Jamie Raskin, PFAW Foundation Senior Fellow

“[C]orporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”

— Justice John Paul Stevens, dissenting in Citizens United, 558 U.S. 310, 466 (2010)

“We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.”

— Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius, 723 F.3d 1114 (10th Cir., 2013), Judge Tymkovitch, United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit for the majority

If right-wing America had set out to design a Supreme Court case that combined all of its political fetishes, it could not have done better than to come up with Hobby Lobby Stores Inc. v. Sebelius, a devilishly complex assault on Obamacare, women’s health care rights in the workplace, and the embattled idea that the Bill of Rights is for people, not corporations.  The outlandish claims of the company involved would not have a prayer except for Citizens United, the miracle gift of 2010 that just keeps giving.

Hobby Lobby is a big business that wants to deny thousands of its female employees access to certain contraceptives, like Plan B and certain IUDs, which are supposed to be available to everyone under Obamacare but which the company says it finds theologically objectionable.  Ironically, Hobby Lobby’s private insurance plan fully funded these religiously incorrect forms of birth control for several years before the 2010 passage of the Patient Care and Affordable Care Act and the Department of Health and Human Services’ issuance of its “Preventive Services” Rule, which made coverage for them obligatory.  So it was the workings of Obamacare which apparently gave this business entity its corporate epiphany that these forms of birth control were sinful and the will to fight the contraceptives it had once been perfectly content to subsidize.  Amazingly, this challenge produced an off-the-rails decision by the United States Circuit Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit that the company’s “religious” rights had been violated.

The Supreme Court has now taken up the case, which offers the five conservative Justices in the Citizens United majority the chance to:

• find that for-profit business corporations enjoy not just the political rights of the people but the religious rights of the people;
• declare that the "Preventive Services" Rule under Obamacare violates the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 U.S.C. 2000bb et seq., by compelling major business employers to fund religiously offensive contraceptive care for women employees;
• and grant business corporations a sweeping new religious pretext for escaping a wide range of federal laws in the future.

Hobby Lobby has been consolidated with Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, 724 F.3d 377 (3d Cir., 2013), in which the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit rejected the same package of arguments, advanced by a company owned by Mennonites, concluding simply that “for-profit, secular corporations cannot engage in religious exercise” and remarking that “we are not aware of any case . . . in which a for-profit, secular corporation was itself found to have free exercise rights.”

It is a sign of the times that the Tenth Circuit refused such an obvious conclusion, one arising out of centuries of American jurisprudence about the corporation, and instead voted to give Hobby Lobby the power under RFRA to deny its women employees coverage for certain contraceptives.  It is a sign of the perilous corporatist path we are on that the Roberts Court now seems poised to take these claims seriously and to baptize for-profit business corporations as pious citizens, giving them the selective power to discriminate against employees who want nothing more than an equal right to comprehensive health care services.

As we shall see, not only is the Hobby Lobby corporation not being forced to violate its religious rights here (it doesn’t have any), but it is not even being forced to pay for the offending contraceptive coverage at all because it is perfectly free under Obamacare simply to pay taxes into the general program rather than to purchase insurance plans for its employees. Payment of the tax would be both a less costly alternative and one that removes the corporation’s alleged discomfort about paying for certain kinds of birth control. But the case is sufficiently complex, as a matter of fact and law, that there are many opportunities for conservatives to obscure the reality and promote the brazen claim that corporations are persons and Obamacare is trampling their religious freedoms.

Citizens United: The Walls of Separation Come Tumbling Down 

The American people have built two essential walls to protect the integrity of political democracy. The original one is Jefferson's "wall of separation" between church and state, embodied in the First Amendment religion clauses. This wall fosters and protects religious diversity and at the same time makes certain that neither secular government nor individual conscience will be overrun by religious power.

The second one is the wall separating corporate treasury wealth from campaigns for federal public office. This wall was built in federal and state law over the course of the twentieth century by progressive movements to guarantee that democratic process and political leadership would not be overrun by private corporate wealth and power, the problem that confronted America in the First Gilded Age.

This wall between corporate wealth and democratic politics was bulldozed and nearly flattened in 2010 by the Supreme Court in Citizens United. In that watershed 5-4 decision, the Court granted for-profit business corporations the political free speech rights of the people under the First Amendment, wiping out dozens of federal and state laws, reversing key precedents, transforming corporate treasuries into campaign slush funds, and unleashing untold billions of dollars in the political process.

Now, in Hobby Lobby, conservatives on the Court are on the verge of taking a ferocious swing at the wall of separation between church and state, and their sledgehammer is none other than the Citizens United decision itself. Although the case is framed as whether corporations are “persons” under RFRA, the meaning of that important federal statute is determined with respect to the Supreme Court’s Free Exercise precedent prior to its decision in Employment Division v. Smith, 494 U.S. 872 (1990).  So the underlying question is necessarily whether corporations have Free Exercise rights.

Hobby Lobby comes from an en banc ruling of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which has advanced an extraordinary and dangerous conclusion: that a for-profit corporation operating more than 500 arts-and-crafts chain stores across the country and employing about 13,000 workers is actually a “person” engaged in the “exercise of religion” within the meaning of RFRA and, therefore, is immune from having to offer certain contraceptive coverage to its women employees under the Affordable Care Act.  The basis for the ruling is that the five members of the Green family who own and operate Hobby Lobby have stated their commitment to “honoring the Lord in all we do by operating the company in a manner consistent with biblical principles.”  723 F.3d at 1122.  The Tenth Circuit found that, because Hobby Lobby has thus expressed itself “for religious purposes, the First Amendment logic of Citizens United, where the Supreme Court has recognized a First Amendment right of for-profit corporations to express themselves for political purposes, applies as well.  We see no reason the Supreme Court would recognize constitutional protection for a corporation’s political expression but not its religious expression.” (emphasis added)

The Tenth Circuit thus not only found that this giant corporation was a “person” practicing its (his? her?) religion but that Obamacare has forced it to violate its sincerely held religious belief that life begins at conception.  Specifically, it ruled that the law substantially burdened the corporation’s “religion” by arguably obligating it, under its employer-sponsored health plan, to cover several forms of contraception—including two types of IUDs and the emergency contraceptives Plan B and Ella—that the corporation considers religiously objectionable.
Furthermore, in performing the analysis required under RFRA, the en banc court found that the United States had no compelling interest in making Hobby Lobby, a religiously pious and devout corporation, offer such contraceptives to its female employees against its professed sectarian principles.  The comic dimension of the case is that Hobby Lobby’s employee insurance policy was already covering the contraceptives it allegedly deplores when Obamacare became the law.  In other words, the corporation only became exorcised and religiously activated on the contraceptives when it decided to oppose the new federal policy.
  

Business Corporations Have Never Had Religious Rights and the Idea Is Absurd

The astounding nature of the decision becomes clear when we focus on the fact that Hobby Lobby is a regular business corporation, secular in its operations and devoted to profit-making purposes.  It is neither a church nor a religious organization.  It does not hire its workers based on religious preferences or practices.  Under the Affordable Care Act, if Hobby Lobby were a church or a non-profit religious organization that had as its purpose the promotion of religious values, and if it primarily employed and served people along religious lines, it would be considered a “religious employer” and it would be completely exempted from the contraceptive-coverage requirement.  Even if it did not meet those stringent criteria, the company could still be exempt under the law if it were a non-profit institution that objected to contraceptive coverage for religious reasons, as do certain religious institutions of higher education.

But Hobby Lobby is neither a “religious employer” nor a non-profit institution.  It is a standard for-profit business corporation.  That is why the case is of such surpassing importance.  It threatens to carry over Citizens United’s transformation of corporations into “persons” for political spending purposes into the realm of religious worship and free exercise, with dramatic implications.
This whole business of humanizing and now ensouling corporations is a radical departure from conventional understandings of what a corporation is, going all the way back to the beginnings of the republic.  In 1819, in the Dartmouth College case, Chief Justice John Marshall declared that “a corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” 
17 U.S. (4 Wheat.) 518, 636 (1819).  Chief Justice Marshall thought that, being artificial creatures of the state, corporations had only the rights expressly or impliedly conferred upon them by the states chartering them. The Supreme Court proceeded over its history to reject claims that corporations enjoy many of the personal rights guarantees contained in the Bill of Rights, like the privilege against compulsory self-incrimination, see Wilson v. United States, 221 U.S. 361 (1911), or the right to privacy, see California Bankers Assn. v. Shultz, 416 U.S. 21 (1974).  To be sure, corporations have enjoyed due process and equal protection property rights ever since the controversial Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad decision of 1886, and ever since the Citizens United Court took a giant step to the right by declaring the political free speech rights of corporations under the First Amendment in 2010.

The question in Hobby Lobby is whether there is anything in the history or doctrine of Free Exercise jurisprudence, or the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to indicate that corporations are to be treated as rights-bearing for religious purposes.  As the Third Circuit found in Conestoga Wood, there is absolutely no history of courts providing free exercise rights to corporations, and the whole “purpose of the Free Exercise Clause ‘is to secure religious liberty in the individual by prohibiting any invasions thereof by civil authority.’” 724 F.3d at 385 (quoting School District of Abington Township v. Schempp, 374 U.S. 203 (1963) (emphasis added)).  The Supreme Court has upheld the Free Exercise rights of persons and churches, but it has never upheld the Free Exercise rights of a private business corporation.  As the Oklahoma District Court that was overruled by the Tenth Circuit put it so cogently: “General business corporations do not, separate and apart from the actions or belief systems of their individual owners or employees, exercise religion.  They do not pray, worship, observe sacraments or take other religiously-motivated actions . . .”  Hobby Lobby Stores v. Sebelius, 870 F. Supp. 2d 1278, 1291 (W.D. Okla. 2012).

Corporations Can't Pray — Even If the Court Treats Them Like Gods

This is the crucial point. The author of the First Amendment, James Madison, argued that religious exercise was a freedom belonging to individuals, who have reason, conviction and a relationship with God, and this freedom could not be tampered with by the state, the church or any other institutional power.  As he put it in his famous Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Taxation, quoting from the Virginia Declaration of Rights, “we hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth ‘that religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction . . .’  The Religion then of every man must be left to the conviction and conscience of every man; and it is the right of every man to exercise it as these may dictate.”

The Court’s campaign to treat corporations like “persons” for constitutional purposes actually gives corporations the power to dominate the political and private lives of citizens.  Citizens United was decided in the name of free speech, but no person’s right to spend his or her own money on political campaigns was enlarged by it in any way.  The effect of the decision was to give CEOs the power to take unlimited amounts of money from corporate treasuries and spend it advancing or defeating political candidates and causes of their choosing.  Its real-world consequence was thus not to expand the political freedom of citizens but to reduce the political power of citizens vis-à-vis huge corporations with vast fortunes.  These corporations, endowed with limited shareholder liability and perpetual life, may now freely engage in motivated political spending to enrich themselves and their executives, leaving workers and other citizens behind.  Adding insult to injury, most of the stock in large corporations is owned by large entities, like retirement funds, mutual funds, and foundations, which cannot take positions on political races but invest the money of real, live citizens in these corporate and political behemoths.

Similarly, Hobby Lobby was decided by the Tenth Circuit in the name of Free Exercise of religion and free individual choice, but the decision makes a mockery of religion and, in the real world, destroys the free individual choices of women who are denied their rights to full contraceptive care under the Affordable Care Act.  Anyone who has the slightest bit of spiritual belief knows that the religionist’s relationship with God is intensely personal and bound up in one’s deepest values, beliefs, and ideas about the world.  But, as Justice Stevens observed in dissent in the Citizens United case, “corporations have no consciences, no beliefs, no feelings, no thoughts, no desires.”  558 U.S. at 466. Corporations cannot believe in God even if they are being treated like Chosen persons by the Supreme Court.  Corporate religiosity is both an unconstitutional idea and a profoundly impious one.

The real-world effect of giving corporations religious rights under RFRA or the First Amendment  is not to deepen the corporations’ personal relationship with God, but to give their owners and managers the power to impose their religious and political beliefs on their employees—in this case, to deny their women employees free individual choices in reproductive and contraceptive care.  Hobby Lobby (conveniently) involves only four contraceptive drugs which are alleged (falsely according to many experts) to be abortifacients, but if corporations get the right to deny certain contraceptives because of their religious beliefs, they will of course have the right to deny their employees access to all contraceptives because of religious beliefs.  The Court has always emphasized that it does not police the content or consistency of religious beliefs and dogmas.

Indeed, it follows logically from the Tenth Circuit decision that corporations have a presumptive right to get out from under any federal law considered religiously objectionable, because RFRA provides that the government “shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion” unless that burden is the least restrictive means to further a compelling governmental interest.  42 U.S.C. 2000bb-1(a) and (b).  Thus, a secular corporation owned by Christian Scientists could presumptively refuse to pay for any insurance plan involving doctors or hospital care; a secular corporation owned by Jehovah’s Witnesses could presumptively refuse to pay for any insurance covering blood transfusions; a secular hotel chain owned by Fundamentalists could insist, against the requirements of federal labor and employment law,  that all employees join the church; and any hotel, motel or restaurant owned by a member of the Aryan Nations’ Church of Jesus Christ Christian, which forbids “race-mixing” as a matter of church doctrine, could claim exemption from the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The fact that Hobby Lobby is a “closely held” family-owned corporation makes no difference, because all corporations are legally distinct from their shareholders in all cases, and the rights being asserted in Hobby Lobby are the rights of the corporation, not the owners.  In any event, as a number of states point out in an amicus brief led by California, family-owned or controlled businesses account for more than 80% of all American businesses, 60% of all U.S. employment, and one-third of all Fortune 500 companies.  The religious rights that a small or family-owned corporation wins are the religious rights that a big or publicly held corporation will have.  See Citizens United.  There is definitely no constitutional difference between the status of a large corporation and a smaller one.

Saving Grace: The Whole Premise of the Case Is Flawed

It seems quite likely that the Citizens United five-Justice majority could vote for Hobby Lobby because the strongest pro-corporate Justices are also the weakest defenders of the separation of church and state.  As usual, a high burden of hope rests with Justice Kennedy to pull the Court back from another jarring assault on constitutional democracy.

But even if the Court, disastrously, gets it wrong on the central question of whether for-profit business corporations can exercise religious freedoms, there is another chance for the Court to pull back from the brink at least on the Obamacare question.  The whole premise of the litigation in Hobby Lobby is that federal law (specifically, the HHS “Preventive Services” Rule) compels the company to furnish employees a health insurance package that covers the offending contraceptives, thus substantially burdening the company’s alleged RFRA and Free Exercise rights.  But this is a complete misunderstanding of how the law works because the company is not compelled to offer its employees any health insurance package, much less a package with specific contraceptives.
As Marty Lederman has pointed out in great detail in a trenchant blog post (“Hobby Lobby Part III—There Is No ‘Employer Mandate’”), federal law and the HHS rule specifying covered contraceptives “do not impose any obligations at all on employers, such as Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood.”  Rather, federal law “requires virtually all group health-insurance plans, and insurers of group or individual health insurance, to include coverage for various preventive services, including 18 forms of FDA-approved birth control, without ‘cost sharing’ . . . .” (emphasis added).  However, it is true that if a plan or insurer fails to include the required items in a plan, the government can tax not only the plan and the insurer but the sponsoring employer as well.

But here is the key point: as Lederman writes, “federal law does not impose a legal duty on large employers to offer their employees access to a health insurance plan, or to subsidize such a plan.  There is no such ‘employer mandate.’” (bold in the original). Rather, the Affordable Care Act imposes a tax on large employers in order to have them share in the cost of paying for the new national entitlement to health insurance.  This is also how Social Security works: employers pay taxes to the government, which in turn pays Social Security benefits to individuals.  However, unlike employers in the Social Security system, large employers in the ACA also have an option to offer a health insurance plan directly to their employees, which is what Hobby Lobby is doing, and then to escape the new tax entirely.  But the courts that have been examining the issue have wrongly characterized this tax system as a series of fines or penalties on employers for not covering their workers.  This is plainly wrong.  In fact, the statute calls the direct payment to the government a “tax,” and the tax payment that Hobby Lobby or any other large business would pay, for reasons Lederman explains in detail, “is almost certainly far less than the employer would spend on insurance premiums and/or outlays if it offered its employees a health-insurance plan.” (emphasis in the original)

Thus, as the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals stated in the Liberty University case, the ACA “leaves large employers with a choice for complying with the law—provide adequate, affordable health coverage to employees” or else “pay a tax,” a tax under the law which the Fourth Circuit, no liberal court, described as “proportionate” and not “punitive.”

By explaining how the ACA really works with respect to the employers, Lederman properly frames the RFRA and constitutional questions.  Since Hobby Lobby can simply pay its tax (and save money along the way), it must prove that payment of the ACA tax would itself constitute an impermissible “substantial burden” on its religious free exercise.  That proposition is, of course, absurd since the company’s tax dollars already go to support Medicaid and Medicare, and the Supreme Court has never found, nor could it find, that taxing people (or corporations!) to provide contraception or abortion services violates their religious free exercise rights.  If that were the case, every Quaker pacifist in America would be getting a rebate for that portion of his or her tax dollars going to military spending, every Scientologist would be getting a rebate for psychiatric services paid for by the military or federal prisons, and every Christian Scientist would be getting a rebate for that portion of his or her taxes going to pay for any conventional medical care at all.  It simply does not “substantially burden” anyone’s religion to pay the government taxes for public services that they disagree with, such as war and military spending, the draft, Social Security, psychiatric services, or contraceptive education and coverage.

The Supreme Court in United States v. Lee, 455 U.S. 252 (1982), rejected an argument by an Amish employer that he should be exempt from paying Social Security taxes for his employees because it violated his religious faith, a decision that simply precludes any effort to assert that the Obamacare tax itself violates RFRA or Free Exercise.  Furthermore, as Lederman observes, “a central component of plaintiffs’ own RFRA arguments is that a ‘less restrictive’ means for government to further its interests without substantially burdening plaintiffs’ religious exercise would be for the government to use its own revenues to subsidize contraceptive use by Hobby Lobby and Conestoga Wood employees.  Well, that is exactly what would occur if those employers were to choose to make a [tax] payment rather than offering their employees access to an employer plan.” (emphasis in the original)

In short, even if corporations were persons with a religious conscience, and even if it authentically offended the religious sentiments of these corporate persons to have to pay a third-party health insurance provider for making certain contraceptives available to employees, there would still be no problem under RFRA or the Free Exercise Clause because the affected corporations can simply pay a tax instead.

The Religion of Business, the Business of Religion

Hobby Lobby is a case whose major claims would not have a prayer in any other Court at any other time.  Yet, the Citizens United Court has made a religion out of business, so it is only natural that some people will now want to make a business out of religion.

But it is time for the Court to restore some reality to the conversation.  Business corporations do not belong to religions and they do not worship God.  We do not protect anyone’s religious free exercise rights by denying millions of women workers access to contraception.  And, as a matter of fact and law, employers are not being forced to purchase insurance plans at all for their workers because they can pay a simple and cheaper tax instead.  The Hobby Lobby case is a tissue of misunderstandings, propaganda, and excruciating extrapolations from the Citizens United decision.  It might be nice if the Court used the occasion of this train wreck of a case to rewind the tape on Citizens United.  But some things may be too much even to pray for.     

* * * * * * *

Jamie Raskin is a professor of constitutional law at American University, a Maryland State Senator, and a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way Foundation.

The Koch Brothers Destroyed the Republican Party

  Tea Party and the Right  

Salon / By Simon Malloy

Could the Koch Brothers End Up Destroying the Republican Party?

Sure, they're pretty much in sync right now. But here's why Koch money, power and ideology could divide the right.

March 24, 2014  |  

I confess to having once been agnostic toward Charles and David Koch. For quite a while, actually. To me they were the boogeymen of the left, the people liberals complained about to agitate the base, or when they had no better ammunition to fire against conservatives and Republicans. Despite countless exposés of “Koch-funded” organizations, they just didn’t seem that threatening. The Koch brothers’ most public outlet for political activism, Americans for Prosperity, was a joke. The group spent its money fighting climate change legislation by flying a 70-foot hot air balloon across the country. Hot air, climate change, zing.

I’ve since been disabused of that attitude. Americans for Prosperity has grown from a collection of sideshow balloonists to one of the heaviest-hitting political groups in the country (though you can still get a balloon ride if you want). The sprawling, multi-state operation is working to kick Democrats out of office and put together a “personal electoral laboratory to fine-tune get-out-the-vote tools and messaging for future elections as it pursues its overarching goal of convincing Americans that big government is bad government,” per the New York Times.

Now, you may be asking yourself: “Isn’t that what the Republican Party is supposed to be doing?” In a word, yes. But the Kochs are creating their own political machine. And while that’s bad news for vulnerable Senate Democrats facing down the onslaught of TV ads AFP has planned, it should also be worrying for the GOP.

The animating purpose of a party is to have control – over the influence, over the money, over the policy. And it has to have control of the agenda. That is what makes a party a party. It sets an agenda and then uses money, policy and influence to get the public on its side. Republicans have not been very successful over the past decade at selling their agenda to the public. All the while, conservatives have been left to sit and stew while the Obama agenda slowly, inexorably marches toward fruition. There’s palpable frustration from movement conservatives at the Republican establishment.

The GOP left a vacuum, and the Koch brothers are filling it by constructing a competing political operation, competing fundraising operations, and competing ideological foundations. Right now the GOP and the Koch machine are largely in sync; their political arguments are congruent (Obamacare sucks!) and they share a common enemy in Barack Obama. But what happens when their interests start diverging?

AFP campaigned hard against Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and as Greg Sargentpointed out, they’re going to keep fighting to make sure those states that rejected the expansion hold the line. “Critical to AFP’s agenda is to block the expansion from moving forward or succeeding wherever possible.” While AFP may be stalwart in its commitment to denying health coverage to the poor, Republican lawmakers from states that rejected the Medicaid expansion are starting to crack, reports the National Journal.

Many of the wavering lawmakers are looking to carve out compromise proposals – block grants, work requirements, etc. Could AFP and the Republicans themselves find a happy compromise by attaching conditions to the receipt of federal Medicaid funds?

It doesn’t seem likely. Arkansas was one of the few Southern states to agree to the Medicaid expansion, but it needed a bit of compromise. Gov. Mike Beebe, a Democrat, worked out a deal with the GOP-controlled Legislature to use the federal money to buy private insurance for people who would otherwise be eligible for Medicaid. They called it the “private option.” AFP called it “Medicaid expansion by another name” and concluded that “advocates for taxpayers should not expand Medicaid through the traditional expansion mechanism or through the modified private insurance model.”

As more states jump on board with the expansion, or as Republicans start making peace with the fact that Obamacare’s future is almost certainly secure, the GOP and the Koch empire are going to find themselves increasingly at odds on an issue that right now holds them together. AFP backs full repeal of Obamacare, but as more people start receiving benefits through Obamacare, full repeal becomes an increasingly untenable position, which puts pressure on Republicans to moderate.

That gets to the key philosophical difference between the Kochs and the GOP. As extreme as they often are and as infuriatingly obstructionist as Republicans can be, they are still vulnerable to prevailing public sentiment and beholden to the realities of governing. The Kochs answer only to themselves. They act according to self-interest and the interests of their tax bracket. “Leaders of the effort say it has great appeal to the businessmen and businesswomen who finance the operation and believe that excess regulation and taxation are harming their enterprises and threatening the future of the country,” the New York Times noted.

AFP has a functionally unlimited budget and no reason to alter its agenda. The Koch network is outspending everyone in its attempt to bring down big government in 2014. If it can be demonstrated that they played a key role in the Republicans’ (likely) electoral gains this year, then the money, power and ideology of the Koch brothers will stand alongside that of the Republican establishment. And if there’s one thing political parties don’t do well, it’s share power.

Understanding Paul Ryan's Racism in 3 Easy Steps

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By Chauncey DeVega

Understanding Paul Ryan's Racism in 3 Easy Steps

 

 

The question is not 'Is Ryan a racist?' but 'What type of racist is he?'

Photo Credit: Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com

March 20, 2014  |   

 

 

Paul Ryan has attempted to clarify his racist argument that “inner city” black people are lazy and do not want to work. He issued a statement that:

After reading the transcript of yesterday morning’s interview, it is clear that I was inarticulate about the point I was trying to make. I was not implicating the culture of one community—but of society as a whole.

This is a false and disingenuous pseudo apology. Paul Ryan is the leader of a political party that is the country’s premier white identity organization. The Republican Party has also merged conservatism and racism in such a way that appeals to white racial resentment are its Lingua Franca and a taken for granted way of thinking about political and social reality.

Paul Ryan traffics in racism because the Republican Party is a racist organization. The calculus is not complicated.

There has been some smart writing about Paul Ryan’s use of coded racial appeals. However, the majority of the news media is asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to figure out “if” Paul Ryan is a racist, the more revealing question is “what type of racist is he?”

There are three basic ways to understand Paul Ryan’s racism, both as part of a pattern of behavior by Republicans, and as an example of (symbolic) white racism in the post civil rights era.

The Southern Strategy.

Paul Ryan’s claim that black people have “bad culture”, may be genetically defective, and do not have “normal” “middle class” values about the merits of “hard work”, is a simple channeling of legendary Republican strategist Lee Atwater’s tactics for mobilizing white voters by leveraging their hostility to black Americans.

Atwater famously advised Republicans to:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

The Southern Strategy has been the cornerstone of Republican politics for at least five decades. While former Republican National Committee chairmen Ken Mehlman and Michael Steele admitted (and apologized) that Republicans use racist appeals to motivate white voters, the Southern Strategy remains central to their party’s electoral logic and approach. Paul Ryan’s racism and embrace of the Southern Strategy is the Republican Party’s conventional wisdom in practice.

Colorblind racism and White Victimology.

Paul Ryan’s use of “dog whistles” and coded racial appeals to disparage and slur African-Americans exist within a social context where overt racism is a violation of public speech norms and values.

Following the triumphs of the civil rights movement, colorblind white racism has largely replaced “old fashioned” racism.

While whites still use very explicit and racist speech in the “backstage”, private spaces, or online, America’s embrace of multiculturalism and pluralism have deemed such acts anathema to “decent” people. This is especially true for a nationally known politician like Paul Ryan.

Colorblind racism inverts reality and distorts the facts. It involves denying that racism still exists as a serious social problem; black and brown people are limited in their life chances not because of institutional discrimination but because of their “bad culture” or “laziness”; white supremacy and systems of white racial advantage are dismissed as either exaggerated or non-existent; racism is reduced to mean words by white people, as opposed to systematic institutional discrimination against people of color.

The most perverse result of colorblind racism is that many white people now believe that they are “victims” of "racism", and that “anti-white racism” is a larger problem in the United States than is discrimination against black and brown Americans. Mountains of research and empirical data detail how Americans society is oriented around maintaining white privilege and white material advantages over people of color.

Colorblind racism overrides those facts by distorting white people’s (and some others’) ability to process and understand reality.

Paul Ryan’s “inner city” comment is a quintessential example of colorblind racism. He cannot plainly state that lazy black people are genetically predisposed to idleness, crime, violence, and sexual promiscuity. However, Ryan can suggest that the supposed failures of black people are really their own fault, and that all they need to do is “work hard” and have “good culture” to get ahead in America like "normal" (read: white) people.

Paul Ryan’s defenders are enabling colorblind racism by trafficking in its other distortion of reality: white victimology. Paul Ryan is portrayed as a victim of political correctness. Black conservatives such as Ron Christie claim that Ryan is a “truth-teller”. Ryan will tell interviewers that he is just misunderstood and is being unfairly criticized.

Once more, colorblind racism protects white people from the consequences of their racist behavior by transforming them into “victims”.

White privilege and white racial innocence.

Paul Ryan’s faux apology emphasized his intent, and how he was “inarticulate” in his claim that black people are lazy and have bad genes.

Paul Ryan meant what he said and said what he meant. White privilege is more than the unearned advantages that come with being identified as “white” in American society and elsewhere. White privilege is an assumption that whiteness, and white people, are benign. White privilege is also an assumption of preeminent good intent and innocence.

The historical record suggests otherwise: whiteness was born of violence towards people of color. Whiteness works and is made real through many lies both small and large.

Paul Ryan, like other racists, will deploy the common phrase “I didn’t mean it that way” or “that was not my intention”.

By contrast, the twin facts of white privilege and white racism are not dependent on intent.

The racist cannot tell the victim of the former’s racism how and if they should be offended.

Moreover, Paul Ryan’s claim to have made a mistake will be granted because he is white and male. The errors of prominent (as well as rank and file) African-Americans for example, are never excused away or viewed as aberrations or outliers. No. When black folks are “inarticulate” or “misspeak” the white racial frame deems such moments as indications of incompetence, or proof that people of color are somehow “not qualified” or as “intelligent” as white people.

The white gaze does not view black Americans as individuals. When a black person makes a mistake it becomes the focus of a “national conversation” about the black community, one in which “black leaders” are forced to publicly explain and condemn the actions of other black people. There is not an equivalent ritual for white people. White conservatives and the white community will not be forced to condemn Paul Ryan. Nor will white people be held publicly accountable for Paul Ryan’s and the Republican Party’s racism.

Whiteness deems that Paul Ryan is a “racial innocent”, an “individual”, and that he should be treated as such.

Paul Ryan and other movement conservatives are racial political arsonists. Ryan’s racist claims about lazy black people with bad genes are a function of a willful political strategy and determined worldview. They are not exceptions, outliers, or bizarre happenings.

Paul Ryan and other conservatives can claim that they are innocent of their racist political arson. But, they are repeatedly caught, hiding behind the dumpster, or in the bushes, as the building burns. The hand is concealing a lighter. The police approach, shake their heads, and say “you again!”
Paul Ryan and his fellow racial political arsonists in the Republican Party apologize, flummoxed, and indignant with the police that “you have the wrong guy!”

The police will just slap his wrist and say “don’t do it again”. Why? Because Paul Ryan and other racial political arsonists in the Republican Party are really decent people who are just misunderstood.

Chauncey DeVega, a pseudonym, is editor and founder of the blog We Are Respectable Negroes. His essays on race, popular culture and politics have been published in various books and Web sites. He can be reached at chaunceydevega@gmail.com.

Deliverance II: Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia

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Guns May Soon Be Everywhere in Georgia

—By Hannah Levintova

| Thu Mar. 13, 2014 3:00 AM GMT

 

 

Georgia stamp: William Howell/Thinkstock; Bullet holes: Enterline Design Services LLC/Thinkstock

 

 

Soon gun owners in the state of Georgia may be allowed to pack heat almost anywhere—including K-12 schools, bars, churches, government buildings, and airports. The "Safe Carry Protection Act" (HB 875) would also expand Georgia's Stand Your Ground statute, the controversial law made famous by the Trayvon Martin killing, which allows armed citizens to defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are faced with serious physical harm.

The bill could pass as soon as next week, before the current legislative session ends March 20. It is the latest effort in the battle over gun laws that continues to rage in statehouses around the country. It is perhaps also the most extreme yet. "Of all the bills pending right now in state legislatures, this is the most sweeping and most dangerous," Laura Cutiletta, a staff attorney with the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, told PolitiFact. Americans for Responsible Solutions, the gun reform advocacy group founded by former congresswoman Gabby Giffords after she was shot in the head, has deemed it the "guns everywhere" bill. For its part, the National Rifle Association recently called HB 875 "the most comprehensive pro-gun reform legislation introduced in recent state history."
In addition to overturning current state laws and dramatically rolling back concealed-carry restrictions, HB 875 would loosen other gun regulations in the state. The law would:

• Remove the fingerprinting requirement for gun license renewals
• Prohibit the state from keeping a gun license database
• Tighten the state's preemption statute, which restricts local governments from passing gun laws that conflict with state laws
• Repeal the state licensing requirement for firearms dealers (requiring only a federal firearms license)
• Expand gun owner rights in a declared state of emergency by prohibiting government authorities from seizing, registering, or otherwise limiting the carrying of guns in any way permitted by law before the emergency was declared
• Limit the governor's emergency powers by repealing the ability to regulate the sale of firearms during a declared state of emergency
• Lower the age to obtain a concealed-carry license from 21 to 18 for active-duty military and honorably discharged veterans who've completed basic training
• Prohibit detaining someone for the sole purpose of checking whether they have a gun license

The sweeping bill would also expand the state's Stand your Ground law into an "absolute" defense for the use of deadly force in self-protection. "Defense of self or others," the bills reads "shall be an absolute defense to any violation under this part." In its current wording, the bill would even allow individuals who possess a gun illegally—convicted felons, for example—to still claim a Stand Your Ground defense.

The Stand Your Ground provision has drawn some notable opposition: Lucia McBath, a resident of Marietta, Georgia, and the mother of Jordan Davis, the 17-year-old victim in another high-profile Stand Your Ground case, spoke out against the bill at a Senate hearing Wednesday. She also published an op-ed in the Savannah Morning News to express her opposition to the gun bill.

"I believe Florida's Stand Your Ground law, and the aggressive culture it fosters, is the reason my son is not here today," she wrote, regarding her son's death in Jacksonville in 2012. "Our legislature is looking to expand this dangerous law even further. Legislation here in Georgia, HB 875, would extend our state's Stand Your Ground law to protect felons who kill using illegal guns…The last thing our families need is for criminals to be shielded by this law."

The legislation passed the House overwhelmingly in February and moved to the state Senate, where it went into committee. But in a strategic move on Tuesday, House Republicans revised the bill and then tacked it onto a separate piece of legislation, HB 60, which would allow some judges to carry guns. The move accomplished two things: First, it allowed the bill to bypass committee and go to the Senate floor for an immediate vote because HB 60 had already been approved by both the House and Senate. Second, the revision did away with a provision that would have decriminalized carrying guns on college campuses—the bill's supporters knew that the Senate had struck down a similar legislative effort at the end of last year's session due to a campus carry statute.
"If the Senators were hiding behind campus carry, they can't hide behind campus carry now," Rep. Alan Powell, one of the bill's sponsors, told Atlanta's WSB radio. Meanwhile, Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal has a robust record of supporting pro-gun policies, and an "A" rating from the NRA.

The Georgia bill is one of several recent efforts to push for laxer concealed-carry laws. A bill now moving through Indiana's Legislature would allow guns to be kept locked inside cars on school property, while a South Carolina bill that passed last month allows concealed carry in bars and restaurants.*


For more, see our special reports: Newtown: One Year After and America Under the Gun: The Rise of Mass Shootings.

Correction: An earlier version of this article said that the South Carolina concealed carry bill did not pass.

Disastrous State of Conservative Movement on Full Display at CPAC

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

Disastrous State of Conservative Movement on Full Display at CPAC

 

Party leaders stay focused on appealing to their rabid Christian evangelical base, at the expense of the majority of the public.

March 7, 2014  |  

 

This week is the right wing’s annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which is organized by the 50-year old American Conservative Union. CPAC is where conservative stars are born, and where hopeful Republican Party presidential candidates undergo the mandatory rite of passage.

"After the Super Bowl and the two parties' national conventions, CPAC is the most covered event in the country," says Al Cardenas, chairman of the American Conservative Union. "It's the only venue where thousands of activists get to see, back to back during our three-day conference, the likely 2016 leading GOP presidential candidates and begin to create perceptions which last through Election Day."

With the national mainstream media tuning in, it’s an opportunity for the Republican Party to let America know exactly where it stands on the issues du jour.

Last month, the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released the results of a major new survey that reveals the American people's list of issues they believe should be the focus of government attention in 2014.

Healthcare reform tops the public's list of priorities, mentioned by 52 percent of respondents as one of the top 10 problems, followed by unemployment (42 percent), the economy in general (39 percent), and the federal deficit (31 percent). On healthcare, it’s significant to note that a majority of Americans favor improving the Affordable Care Act, despite the GOP’s never-ending story of voting to repeal it.

Day 1 of CPAC addressed absolutely nothing when it comes to what concerns Americans the most. Instead it became the usual conservative conference where middle-class Republicans go to have rich Republicans teach them how to beat up on middle-class Americans. The first day of the event had no shortage of offensive sound bites.

Donald Trump said, "Immigrants are taking your jobs," while also mistakenly contending that President Carter was deceased. The NRA's Wayne LaPierre said Americans need more guns because there are "knockout gamers and rapers" around every corner. Center for Neighborhood Enterprise president Robert L. Woodson, Sr. said black liberals made Detroit look like Hiroshima after it was nuked. “Poor people are suffering from their friends in Detroit, where they have been led by liberal black Democrats for 40 years, and it looks like Hiroshima did when it was bombed. Hiroshima looked like Detroit did 60 years ago.”

Woodson left out the part where since the mid 1960s, the majority of Michigan state legislators and governors have been Republicans. He also left out how cheap, non-unionized labor in the South has drained Detroit of its auto industry jobs. But that’s another story.

Leading into the event, CPAC made headlines for all the wrong reasons when it shut out gay and atheist groups, while welcoming an anti-immigrant organization run by a white nationalist. If there was ever a textbook example of political tone-deafness, surely this must be it, especially given the national outrage Arizona Republicans whipped up in voting for a bill that would have enacted Jim Crow-era laws against gay Americans.

A recent Public Religion Research Institute study reveals that nearly 7 in 10 (69%) Millennials (ages 18 to 33) favor same-sex marriage, yet the Republican Party is waging a war to discriminate against LGBTs in a dozen states. The GOP is alienating itself from average Americans in so many ways, but the party’s undemocratic and un-American efforts to suppress the voting rights of minorities surely ranks at the top of the list.

After they got hammered in the 2012 election, and with early polls indicating the GOP might be facing an even bigger wipeout in 2016, a moment of introspection might have revealed valuable insights to the party. Instead, party leaders seem hell-bent on continuing the trend of demonizing the poor, gays, atheists, liberals, Muslims, and women in an effort to appeal to its rabid Christian evangelical base.

A new Pew Research Poll shows how dramatically the Republican Party is losing touch with young people, with 50% of millennials identifying as independent, 27% Democrat, while Republicans only draw 17% support. This is a big deal. Eventually, the party will run out of old, angry, white, heterosexual, religious people. Middle-class Republicans may soon realize that conservative headwinds are blowing against them, too.

On almost every issue, the GOP is on the wrong side of history and popular opinion. A majority of Americans now favor liberal policies, whether it's same-sex marriage, women's reproductive rights, immigration reform, sensible gun control laws, tax code reform, the minimum wage, the role of government, and healthcare.

Bizarrely, and against all the points raised above, the GOP will dominate in the 2014 midterms, due in part to the Republican Party's gerrymandering efforts post-2010 midterms. They may even take the Senate. This short-term win will only serve to push the party further to the right and, in doing so, further away from where most Americans stand.

CJ Werleman is the author of "Crucifying America," and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back." Follow him on Twitter: @cjwerleman

How Hyper-Religious Political Stunts by Republicans Keep Voters Captive to Corporate Ideology

  Tea Party and the Right  

AlterNet / By CJ Werleman

How Hyper-Religious Political Stunts by Republicans Keep Voters Captive to Corporate Ideology

 

The Ten Commandments stunt in Alabama is a case study in how to ensure inequality in the Bible Belt.

Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com/JeremyWhat

March 3, 2014  |  

 

Last week, a bill to make way for the display of Ten Commandments in public buildings, such as courthouses and schools, passed out of an Alabama Senate committee, sending it to the full Senate for a vote as early as next week.

If you want to know why nine out of the 10 poorest states are located in the hyper-religious South, look no further than this calculated right-wing political play, which is designed for one purpose: to ensure Southern and Sunbelt voters continue to vote against their own self-economic interests.

If passed by the state Senate and signed by the governor, the state would put a constitutional amendment on the next ballot to let Alabama voters decide the issue. The theocratic authors and the Republican Party sponsors of this bill are fully cognizant of the fact that the bill is unconstitutional, and thus it will, inevitably, be struck down by the courts.

The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is clear: "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion." It is the very basis of the separation of church and state.

For state Sen. Trip Pittman (R-AL), the constitution is a secondary concern. "We talk about the constitutionality of them, but we have to understand the purpose of these is the laws of God," he said. "And we think they may have passed irrelevance because of the constitutional question, but beyond that, which is the most important, it's also about behavior and conduct through the ages."

State Rep. DuWayne Bridges (R-AL) declared, “School shootings, patricide and matricide are due to the Ten Commandments not being displayed in schools and other government buildings.” Bridges also said, "The Tenth Amendment [sic] was adopted before the people of Israel crossed the Red Sea because Moses didn't get to cross the Red Sea.”

While both Pittman and Bridges may sound like idiots, they’re actually shrewd political strategists, for the promise of tax cuts for the rich is hardly an effective platform for rallying the Republican Party base in a midterm election year. The promise of the Ten Commandments, however, is how you get a person without healthcare to vote for the party whose platform is based on repealing the Affordable Care Act.

According to the Pew Research Center, Alabama is the second most religious state in the nation with 74 percent of residents saying religion is very important in their lives. Number one is Mississippi. It is a pitiful irony that those states that are most religious are also states with the most individual suffering. More than 30 percent of the children in these two states suffer extreme poverty. In both states, the primary reason for abject poverty is that more than a third of children have parents who lack secure employment, decent wages, and healthcare. But thanks to Jesus, these poor saps vote for the party that rejects Medicaid expansion, opposes early education expansion, legislates larger cuts to education, and slashes food stamps to make room for oil and agriculture subsidies on top of tax cuts and loopholes for corporations and the wealthy.

All this despair comes courtesy of low-information voters being duped by the corporate elite to vote against their own economic self-interest. The corporate elite and their political appointees have convinced tens of millions of Americans that a vote for the Ten Commandments is more important to a Christian’s needs than a vote against cuts in education spending, food stamp reductions, the elimination of school lunches and the abolition of healthcare programs.

It’s no secret that social wedge issues are used by the Right to drive low-income people to the polls. The point is that in an overly religious country it works too well, and to America’s detriment. Pushing sophisticated tax schemes for already wealthy venture capitalists, like the 16 percent tax rate Mitt Romney gets away with, doesn’t excite the base. On the other hand, “taking back the country” from the gay, socialist, Muslim, liberal agenda does, as do issues like abortion and stopping sodomy. The Right’s passion for these social issues often makes them the loudest in these debates, and the sheer volume, which is amplified through the right-wing echo chambers, makes progressives limit themselves.

Mississippi and Alabama are not isolated examples. The three other worst states, in terms of children living in extreme poverty, are Arizona, Nevada and Louisiana. Other than having Republican state legislatures, what do these five states share in common? All five enacted anti-union "right-to-work" laws that funnel more people into poverty as a result of creating pathetically low wage conditions, while corporations in each state are thriving with record levels of profits. Three of the states, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, have rejected Medicaid expansion. According to the site, PoliticsUsa.com:

In all, there are 13 states not participating in the free expansion (of Medicaid) and six others leaning toward non-participation. Those 19 states — to no-one’s surprise — are all Republican-controlled and more than pleased to prevent millions of their residents, especially children, from benefiting from the most basic health care provisions. From a Republican perspective, it likely makes sense to keep the poorest, and youngest, residents in ill-health to go along with daily hunger, thereby rounding out an existence steeped in suffering and despair.

Nine of the top 10 poorest states are found in the South. Thompson writes, “It’s a region [the South] that stands out from the nation at large for its slavish devotion to economic policies that increase the burden on its poor, rather than allowing its lower and working classes to share in the financial harvest that its politicians and business leaders are so eager to tout in speeches.” A book titled Taxing the Poor looks at the way we tax the poor in the United States, particularly in the South, where poor families are often subject to income taxes, and where regressive sales taxes apply even to food for home consumption. The authors, Newman and O’Brien, write:

The legacy of the past — southern opposition to property taxation in the nineteenth century — continues to define the disparity in tax structure and revenue we see today. ... That legacy has cost the southern states dearly [and] is placing a heavy burden on the rest of the country as well. The pattern is distinctive and destructive. The problem is very much with us today in part because ... very high barriers to change are in place throughout the South and have been for decades.

The Republican Party, particularly in the South, will always dredge up these cultural issues to ensure its base remains a captive tool of corporate ideology. That way its corporate sponsors can maintain a perpetually impoverished lower class from which to draw its cheap labor.

CJ Werleman is the author of "Crucifying America," and "God Hates You. Hate Him Back." Follow him on Twitter: @cjwerleman