Strange Bedfellows: Unions Protesting For The Right To Target Private Residences Get Tea Party Approval

Union thugs protesting outside the homes of their targets has become a weapon more and more unions have added to their already-large arsenal. Now that the State of Georgia may become the first state to outlaw the offensive tactic, oddly enough, unions are getting support from an unlikely source–the Tea Party Patriots.

Last year, when 45,000 union members struck telephone carrier Verizon, IBEW union radicals showed up outside the home of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s House causing a disturbance in McAdam’s neighborhood (see video below). In another incident, up to 3,000 CWA protesters conducted a mock funeral outside the home of Verizon’s chairman.

Though it shouldn’t be necessary for any legislature to even have to consider the protection of private residences from protesters, these incidents (and others like it) have drawn the attention of Georgia’s legislature, which has moved to pass Senate Bill 469 to prohibit the targeting of individuals at their private residences.

Related:

While the original bill was aimed at prohibiting unions from protesting outside private residences, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Jim Galloway, the Georgia House altered the bill last night to include all private residences:

The change doesn’t show up on the Internet version of the bill yet, but we’re told that the House Rules Committee last night altered SB 469 so that it would ban demonstrations at or near all private residences in Georgia.

[snip]

Pickets targeted at any home – whether belonging to corporate CEO, union executive, crack dealer, child molester, or even newspaper columnist – would be off-limits under the latest version of the bill. Which, according to one constitutional scholar we talked to, has a much better chance of surviving a court challenge.

As usual, however, union bosses view their collective rights as superior than individual rights and have been protesting the bill with rhetorical fury reminiscent of last year’s Madison madness.

Related:

What makes this issue more interesting is the fact that unions have found an ally in the Tea Party Patriots:

Julianne Thompson, Georgia state director for Tea Party Patriots, told The Huffington Post that she and her fellow organizers don’t see SB 469 as a political issue so much as a free-speech issue. Thompson spoke out against the bill at the state capitol Monday.

“When we’re talking about the first amendment of the U.S. Constitution, we’re not talking about political right-versus-left. We’re talking about right versus wrong,” Thompson said. “If it’s a violation of free speech we’re going to be on the side of the Constitution. I’m happy that we’ve reached across party lines with regard to this issue.”

[snip]

Charlie Flemming, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO, told HuffPost that the state’s unions are happy to see Tea Party activists coming down on the same side as them.

Apparently, the Tea Party Patriots believe, as do their new collectivist union allies, that targeting the homes of their opponents is something that falls under the guise of Constitutionally-protected activity.

By those standards, noise ordinances should be stricken, anti-harassment laws erased, and the ability of municipalities to allow parades, marches or protests by permit only should be done away with.

Then, every American can enjoy this spectacle outside their front doors:

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“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, American Federation of Labor, 1918

Cross-posted at LaborUnionReport.com

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Liberals, conservatives, values and how we perceive each other

Another day, another book I need to buy and hopefully read some day.  In the March 21st NYT, Nicholas Kristof reviews a new book:  ”The Righteous Mind”.  In it, author Jonathan Haidt discusses some original research that investigates some key values held by conservatives and liberals – and how these two groups perceive each other on these values.  I have long been interested in why Republicans and Democrats believe as they do, and this type of research on values zeroes in on this question.

A couple of key observations emerge.  First, the author points out how both conservatives and liberals adhere to values that are formed around a moral code, but conservatives follow some additional core values that liberals do not. Kristof phrases it as:

Americans speak about values in six languages, from care to sanctity. Conservatives speak all six, but liberals are fluent in only three. And some (me included) mostly use just one, care for victims.

Kristof summarizes the values:

…for liberals, morality is largely a matter of three values: caring for the weak, fairness and liberty. Conservatives share those concerns (although they think of fairness and liberty differently) and add three others: loyalty, respect for authority and sanctity.

In his research, Haidt and his colleagues refer to the latter three values as “binding values”, as they bind together people into larger groups.

These foundations are Ingroup/loyalty (supporting moral obligations of  patriotism and “us vs. them” thinking); Authority/respect (including concerns about social order and the importance of traditions and role-based duties in maintaining that order) and Purity/sanctity (including concerns about treating the body as a temple and living in a higher, more “divine” way, versus a baser, more carnal way).

These sound pretty familiar to a conservative. In fact, Haidt’s definition for the second category (authority/respect) sounds like a sound bite description of what conservatism is.

The second, more interesting observation from Haidt’s book and research is touched upon briefly by Kristof:

Moderates and conservatives were adept at guessing how liberals would answer questions. Liberals, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal,” were least able to put themselves in the minds of their adversaries and guess how conservatives would answer.

Much of Haidt’s research centered around the accuracy of stereotypes of “out groups” – i.e. how liberals see conservatives and vice versa.  The research showed that, by a significant margin, liberals were less accurate in their depiction of conservatives than the converse.  The ironic part of this comes when reading the comments on Kristof’s article – this liberal lack of other-awareness is illustrated over and over by the left-leaning commentariat…but what else would we expect from the NYT’s readers?

A summary from the original research:

Results indicate that people at all points on the political spectrum are at least intuitively aware of the actual differences in moral concerns between liberals and conservatives: they correctly predicted that liberals would care more than conservatives about the two individualizing foundations and that conservatives would care more than liberals about the three binding foundations. The results also confirm previous studies of partisan misperception (e.g. Chambers, et al., 2006) by showing that, in general, people overestimate how dramatically liberals and conservatives differ. Remarkably, people even morally stereotype their own ingroup, with liberals overestimating liberals’ strong individualizing concerns and underestimating liberals’ weak binding concerns, and conservatives exaggerating conservatives’ moral concerns in the opposite directions.

Our results go beyond previous studies, however, in finding and explaining an otherwise puzzling result: liberals were the least accurate. We presented three competing hypotheses about accuracy: 1) We found no support for the hypothesis that liberals would be most accurate; liberals were the least accurate about conservatives and about liberals. The largest inaccuracies were in liberals’ underestimations of conservatives’ Harm and Fairness concerns, and liberals further exaggerated the political differences by overestimating their own such concerns. 2) We found some support for the hypothesis that moderates would be most accurate, which they were in the case of the binding foundations. However, and most crucially, partisan inaccuracies were not mirror images of each other. On the contrary, liberals and conservatives both tended to exaggerate their binding foundation differences by underestimating the typical liberal and overestimating the typical conservative. 3) Finally, we found some support for the hypothesis that conservatives would be the most accurate, which they were in the case of the individualizing foundations. In line with Moral Foundations Theory, liberals dramatically underestimated the Harm and Fairness concerns of conservatives.

So why do we care?

Of course there’s the reassurance that we as conservatives can take from the fact that liberals are provably inaccurate in their stereotyping of conservatives’ moral positions.  But more important is the confirmation of the fact that conservatives do care about those issues that liberals claim we do not (not that we didn’t know that already…).

As I have mentioned previously on these pages, most, if not all of our policy positions originate largely from our beliefs about these core value issues.  In many respects, social conservatism maps into the other “legs” of the conservative stool.  Fiscal conservatism, defense conservatism, immigration policy, foreign policy, etc. – all stem from the values we hold in these categories.  The fact that liberals seem to be sorely lacking in the “binding values” may (probably, IMO) explain how their positions on many/most policy areas differ from ours.  One of the most contentious points made by Haidt is brought out by Kristof:

“Moral psychology can help to explain why the Democratic Party has had so much difficulty connecting with voters,” writes Haidt, a former liberal who says he became a centrist while writing the book.

Ouch.  The liberals commenting on Kristof’s article didn’t like that one a bit.  But it does explain a lot.  If one accepts the theory that America is a center-right nation, I would say there’s a pretty significant likelihood that the difference lies in this disconnect in these core values that are shared – and not shared – between liberals and conservatives.

Yes, we are all values voters.

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RS Interview: Dr. Scott Keadle (R-CAND, NC-08 PRI).

 

North Carolina’s Eighth District is currently held by Larry Kissell, with an emphasis on ‘currently;’ some long-overdue redistricting reform in that state ended up making the two-term Democrat’s seat… precarious. I talked to one of the conservatives running for the Republican nomination: Dr. Scott Keadle, a dentist and former county commissioner from the region. We talked about the race, as well as a little about its wider implications:

Scott’s site is here.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

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Senator Obama Was Correct – The Ex-Im Bank Is Corporate Welfare

On September 22, 2008, Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) sounded like a conservative in the below speech.  Candidate for President Obama railed against programs “that don’t work” like a “reading program that hasn’t improved our children’s reading.”  This talk was music to the ears of independent and conservative leaning democratic voters who don’t like government waste. 

Sen. Obama talked about duplication in government programs and advocated cutting those programs.  The Senator hammered the Export-Import Bank “that’s become little more than a fund for corporate welfare.”  He promised as President to “go through the entire federal budget, page by page,  line by line, and I will eliminate the programs that do not work and are not needed.”  And Americans were dumb enough to believe this bunk.  It did sound good at the time.

What ever happened to that guy?  I kind of liked him. (h/t to Club for Growth for finding video)

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Day Two: Obamacare is Going Down

From the diaries…

Wow.  To continue with Handicapping Health Care.

Bottom line, I stand by what I said in Handicapping Health Care; however, I increase the odds.  I would handicap it at 65% unconstitutional.  The vote is likely 5-4, but plausibly 6-3, and remotely 7-2.  If the vote is Constitutional, it will be 5-4 (95% chance) and 6-3 (5% chance).

The Solicitor General began horribly, sounding as if he had a cold for several minutes.  While he recovered his style, he lost his arguments, becoming flustered at questions from the CJ (for a couple minutes).  Justice Sotomayor  rescued him with a wonderful soliloquy, but no question other than “Don’t you agree?”

Mr. Toobin at CNN overstates the disaster for the government, as does Drudge.  The first 45 minutes was indeed a government disaster on the Commerce Clause, along with a one or two minute throw-away on the Taxing Power.  Essentially, the government has conceded that the ACA cannot be justified under the Taxing Power.  But the remaining 75 minutes were, at time, dicey for the states and other opponents.

Justices Ginsberg, Sotomayor, and Kagan were tough with Mr. Clement, who represented the States.  He performed brilliantly and almost flawlessly.  He could have better answered Justice Ginsberg’s questions regarding Social Security, but otherwise, he was nearly perfect.

That said, I see Justice Kennedy teetering a bit.  One must listen to the entire argument and read the entire transcript.  Justice Kennedy is almost sold, but not quite.  I believe Justices Scalia and Alito, along with Thomas, are sold: this is unconstitutional.  The CJ is close behind, but not quite as open.  I would be very surprised if any one of them voted to uphold.

This is mostly going to be about Justices Kennedy and Breyer, but we always knew that. Each asked tough questions.  Justice Kennedy appears to want to find it unconstitutional, but wants to think more, which is good.  Justice Breyer appears to be the opposite, but struggling.  He suggested Congress has the power to compel the purchase of cell phones and similar items.  I have doubts he was serious.  I suspect he was attempting to provoke a response from the Solicitor General.  Throughout both days, Justice Breyer questioned both sides very well and appeared reachable.

Justice Sotomayor, for the most part, appears (as one would expect) to support constitutionality; however, she also appears open.  I doubt she will vote for unconstitutional, but it is not unthinkable.  Justice Kagan is, I believe, probably lost, which is no surprise.  I feel better today about Justice Ginsberg, but I wish someone would have answered her questions on Social Security.  Let me do so.

Justice Ginsberg, Social Security and Medicare are very different from the ACA.  SS and Medicare are constitutional income taxes on people who choose to earn wages or who self-employ.  They are also constitutional excises on employers.  As an entirely separate matter, both involve Congress’ spending power, which it annually uses to pay money for the general welfare for old age, survivor’s, disability, and health care benefits.  Congress could constitutionally repeal all the benefits tomorrow and keep the taxes, both past and future.  The two are entirely separate.  Thus neither Social Security nor Medicare is an insurance program.  In contrast, the ACA compels people to purchase real health insurance from a real private party.  It then directly taxes people who have no insurance, but does so in a manner which is not apportioned.  Both aspects are unconstitutional.  The first compels commerce, which violates the commerce clause.  The second is an impermissible unapportioned direct tax and thus violated the Taxing Power.  For Social Security and Medicare, the notion that the two halves (the tax and the benefits) are connected is a myth.  They are not.  Indeed, each is constitutional separately under different powers.  For the ACA, the two are connected and each is unconstitutional – both together and separately.  In sum, the ACA is about the health insurance market.  Neither social security nor medicare have anything to do with insurance: that they do is a myth . . . and a fraud – a sometimes difficult-to-understand myth, but a myth nevertheless.

I doubt anyone will reach Justice Ginsberg, either in argument, in brief, or in discussion on the Court.  I doubt anyone will convince Justice Kagan, either.  I thus predict the vote will be 5-4 or 6-3 unconstitutional, with a remote chance of 7-2 unconstitutional.  I predict it will be on commerce clause grounds, but with at least a concurring opinion on the Taxing Power.

I take some pride in believing my co-author and I destroyed the taxing power argument so thoroughly (in four articles and four briefs), the government relegated it to a minute or so.  They gave up because they could not defend it.  I wish the opponents had seized upon that opening and hammered the Taxing  Power argument, but they did not.  Had they done so, I would be predicting better odds. I did not think they would.  But, Mr. Clement performed so well, I can hardly be disappointed.

I am confident, this act is going down.

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Sinners In the Hands of Anthony Kennedy

The left cries foul as the right uses the federal courts to do as the left has done for years. “The left is pretty sure if they scream partisanship loudly enough, no Republican will stand up and defend the Court as the left assaults its integrity.”

Yesterday the left descended into madness. The madness came early in the day. It happened shortly after 10 o’clock in the morning. Justice Anthony Kennedy opened his mouth and uttered his first question on the issue of the individual mandate. He asked, “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” The question, the second asked yesterday morning, bothered the left.

As the clock approached 11, Kennedy spoke again, sending shockwaves through the legal community. He stated matter of factly,

the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don’t have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that’s generally the rule.

And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

It was the quote heard round the world. It is what the tea party movement, libertarians, conservatives, and so many private citizens have been saying. It was an expression of what every legal scholar on television has pooh-poohed as the troglodyte rhetoric of plebeians not educated enough to understand their own founding compact.

That Justice Kennedy expressed something so obvious to so many Americans that so many well educated legal analysts have mocked for two years as an outmoded view of the constitution put forward only by hicks, rubes, and the racist middle class tea partiers not cool enough to defecate on police cars like the Occupy Wall Street hipsters should deeply, deeply trouble every radio station, newspaper, and television news network along with the American people.

Just how out of touch are the people the news media relies on as legal experts used to help form both their and their audiences’ opinions? More so, is it not abundantly obvious that legal experts let their own partisanship shape their opinions?

All of this, however, overshadows a more important issue — how the hell did a constitutional, democratic republic come to depend on the whims of one man in a black robe who nobody ever elected to anything?

Two years ago, Jan Crawford of CBS News noted the President, in his State of the Union, deviating from modern precedent in those speeches to lash out at the United States Supreme Court.

Mr. Obama, for the first time in modern history, took a direct shot at the Supreme Court in his State of the Union address, when he slammed the justices for their recent campaign finance reform decision. Six of them looked on — including the author of the opinion, key swing vote Anthony Kennedy — while Democrats jumped up to whoop and holler.

Shortly thereafter the Democrats, without a single Republican vote, passed Obamacare.

That Justice Kennedy yesterday raised a point that has been raised by so many non-lawyers is irrelevant to how the Supreme Court rules. All that is relevant is the President’s insult two years ago. Why?

This morning the New York Times reports that “many legal scholars, including some conservatives, have been predicting that the Supreme Court will uphold the 2010 health care overhaul.” In a profile of Randy Barnett yesterday in the New York Times, the paper reported there as well that “many of his [Randy Barnett's] colleagues, on both the left and the right, dismissed the idea [that Obamacare is unconstitutional] as ridiculous — and still do.” See also this Politico story also pushing the Democratic line that Chief Justice Roberts is in danger of his own Bush v. Gore. This is precisely the Democratic spin and you can see which outlets are mouthpieces for the Democrats by those so quick to push the partisan line against the Court.

Legal scholars the media pays attention to — who are typically on the left, though with a few token like minded “conservatives” — all thought that, based on their jurisprudential biases, Obamacare would be constitutional. About the only left leaning constitutional scholar in America who agreed with the tea party movement and, consequently, with Anthony Kennedy was Barack Obama in 2008.

Justice Kennedy, raising the same point raised by so many on the right going back to the 1990's when Republicans originally suggested the individual mandate as an alternative to Hillarycare (yes, many conservatives and libertarians opposed it then too), stunned the legal community yesterday because he deviated from a liberal echo chamber.

Consequently, his deviation can only be explained away by partisan politics, not legal jurisprudence. That so many liberal legal scholars disagree with Kennedy is proof he is a partisan. Already the White House and Democratic operatives are screeching that this is just like Bush vs. Gore all over again. They do not presume that the liberal justices are partisan — only the conservatives. On this argument of partisanship, as Steve Hayes notes, it is striking that the presumption in the Obamacare arguments is that one or more conservative justices will bolt left. In other words, the liberal justices are locked in and the conservatives are persuadable. How exactly does that make the conservative justices partisan and the liberal justices pure?

In fact, it is both projection by the left, which makes everything from Trayvon Martin’s tragic death to a Supreme Court oral argument political, and an argument designed by the left to cook the books in their favor, calculating the GOP will not engage in a fight over the partisanship of the Supreme Court because the right does not want to revisit Bush v. Gore. The left is pretty sure if they scream partisanship loudly enough, no Republican will stand up and defend the Court as the left assaults its integrity.

But they miss one thing. A sizable majority of Americans agree with Justice Kennedy. They are also not helped by widespread agreement on the left and right today that the Solicitor General of the United States had an atrocious performance and Paul Clement, arguing for the states, hit every ball out of the park assisted by some terribly insipid questioning from Sonia Sotomayor.

As partisans on the left start screaming that the conservatives have politicized the federal bench in a way they did not by attacking Robert Bork or some such nonsense, they ignore both their partisan attacks on Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, etc. and their intellectually dishonest legal progeny derived from Roe vs. Wade. That case, still a source of conflict in America, is no longer even defended as intellectually rigorous by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. She may like its holding, but not how that holding was reasoned.

Every time the left wins an argument expanding the meaning of the constitution, the Court somehow got it right. Every time the left loses an argument over the constitution, the Court somehow became politicized. And while the right says the same on the opposite cases there is a fundamental difference.

The right’s position on constitutional jurisprudence boiled down to its essence is that every man and woman in America should be able to read the constitution and have a fair understanding of it and how government is supposed to work. One cannot read the constitution and legitimately understand exactly how an abortion right is extrapolated out of the Bill of Rights. Likewise, one cannot read the constitution and understand how a Congress of limited powers can compel any person to purchase a product he does not want.

But liberal legal scholars so stunned at Justice Kennedy’s point favor a constitution where the public must hire them and their brethren to bow before men and women in black robes offering up prayers and petitions that our black robed masters divine from the text of the constitution some new right or government power no man on the street can see.

We have complicated our tax code, our regulations, and our legal system. In each we must now pay self-appointed experts trained in the art of gobbledegook to parse words, divine intent, and lobby for exceptions that prove rules.

Our nation is no longer a nation of laws, but a nation of elites who interpret those laws for us. It has all led to a very logical place.

In placing our constitution in the hands of a black robed elite who can divine from thin air powers, rights, and duties neither contemplated nor easily extrapolated from the constitution, our republic has become a kingdom. Our king is Anthony Kennedy. Every argument advanced is advanced with him in mind. On every major issue he is the decisive vote.

Put bluntly, the constitutional integrity of our republic has been ceded to one man in the third branch of our federal government. It makes him more powerful than the democratically elected Congress and President. It is not a sign that our system is too partisan. It is a sign that our system is broken in a fundamental way.

But the dirty little secret is that while legal experts and scholars may agree the system is broken, they only think so when Anthony Kennedy disagrees with them.

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