THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 4/5/12

OBAMA CALLS OUT REPUBLICAN RADICALISM: In an impassioned and detailed speech on Tuesday, President Obama called out the Republican budget plan, authored by Paul Ryan, as the radical, extremist vision for our country that it is. For a century, Obama said, “we have been having the same argument with folks who keep peddling some version of trickle-down economics.” “Now, the problem for advocates of this theory is that we’ve tried their approach -- on a massive scale. The results of their experiment are there for all to see.” Obama pointed to the slashed tax cuts on the wealthy over the Bush years: The rich got richer, for sure, but we had the slowest job growth in 50 years and average Americans saw their income fall. “So we tried this theory out,” Obama said. “And you would think that after the results of this experiment in trickle-down economics, after the results were made painfully clear, that the proponents of this theory might show some humility, might moderate their views a bit.” Of course, that’s not what happened: Instead, the GOP “doubled down” and passed a new budget that “makes the Contract with America look like the New Deal.” Obama then methodically laid out what Ryan’s budget would actually mean for America: Financial aid to students cut. Medical research slashed. Investment in clean energy eliminated. Head Start reduced to crumbs. Food assistance for women with young children demolished. The FAA dismantled. (It should be noted that I came up with all of those verbs without the assistance of a thesaurus!) Obama didn’t mince words:

[The Republican budget] is a Trojan Horse. Disguised as deficit reduction plans, it is really an attempt to impose a radical vision on our country. It is thinly veiled social Darwinism. It is antithetical to our entire history as a land of opportunity and upward mobility for everybody who’s willing to work for it; a place where prosperity doesn’t trickle down from the top, but grows outward from the heart of the middle class. And by gutting the very things we need to grow an economy that’s built to last -- education and training, research and development, our infrastructure -- it is a prescription for decline.

And he reminded the audience that Mitt Romney -- the now-essentially-official GOP nominee -- has fully and wholeheartedly embraced this plan.

Obama used the speech not only to call out the GOP for its radicalism, but to reclaim the middle ground. “I think it's important to remember that the positions I'm taking now on the budget and a host of other issues, if we had been having this discussion 20 years ago, or even 15 years ago, would have been considered squarely centrist positions. What's changed is the center of the Republican Party.” Full video here. Full text here.

MARRIAGE EQUALITY IN THE COURTS: This week, the odious Defense of Marriage Act is in the news and in the courts. On Wednesday, the First Circuit hears appeals from a case in which a federal district judge struck down DOMA’s bar on benefits going to legally married same-sex spouses of federal employees. Earlier this week, another anti-DOMA lawsuit was filed, this time by legally married bi-national couples, where, because of DOMA, the non-US citizen cannot gain citizenship by virtue of her same-sex marriage. “when it comes to gays and lesbians, we have no recognized family under federal law since DOMA, and therefore bi-national couples are literally strangers to one another in the law,” Andrew Sullivan explained (a British-born subject, Sullivan was legally married to an American man a few years ago, and just got a green card this past year, without his marriage granting him one automatically). Thousands of couples literally face the choice: Your country or your spouse. In the First Circuit, it is up to the House of Representatives, paying TWIPN-favorite Paul Clement, to defend the law, as the Obama administration announced last year that it would not appeal Judge Tauro’s stirring decision striking down DOMA. Clement’s argument will offer an almost perfect Bizzaro-Land mirror image of the case he presented last week at the High Court, as Andrew Cohen brilliantly points out:

Congress has no constitutional authority to punish people who don't want to have health insurance, Paul Clement argued last week before the United States Supreme Court. This week? The heralded attorney is arguing, to another panel of federal judges, that Congress has plenty of constitutional authority to punish people who don't want to marry someone of the opposite sex. Last week, Clement defended states' rights and labeled as "unprecedented" the federal health care policy. This week, he says that Congress can dictate terms of a federal marriage policy over the objections of states which have legalized same-sex marriage. […]

If you were explaining the past week's arguments to an alien -- and by alien, I mean someone from Outer Space -- it would be hard to get around the contradictions here. In America today, a federal law designed to reshape the health care market breaches some "fundamental" right to be free from federal oppression. But a federal law that punishes people who want to marry their same-sex partner is worthy of obeisance from the judges. An economic law that does not discriminate is supposed to be given less judicial deference than a moral one which does. I know the standards and precedents are different. But on every level, this is crazy.

A WORD ON WHAT’S AT STAKE IN OBAMACARE SUIT: A final word (until June, of course) on the health care suit that was argued before the Supreme Court last week. A loss for the Obama administration would obviously be both a political and policy disaster. Those who argue that a loss could help Obama in the 2012 elections are, I believe, delusional: In what world is the erasure of Obama’s signature (and, in the minds of many, only) significant achievement a boon to his electoral prospects? How does it make him look like anything other than a failure who squandered the enormous good will of his election and came out, four years later, with a bitterly divided political system and populace, and nothing to show for it? But a loss at the Court would be much, much worse -- and have much broader consequences -- than any potential effects on Obama’s political fortunes. It would call into question our country’s capacity for self-government, and our government’s ability to address the largest and most intractible structural problems we face.
If you look at what Paul Clement, who represented the states challenging Obamacare, argued with respect to severability, its wide-ranging and dire consequences become clear. He argued that, without the individual mandate, the entire health law was unworkable (and thus the whole thing needed to be scrapped). The mandate was the only way to make the other parts of the bill -- the parts guaranteeing equal rates for all and coverage for those with preexisting conditions, along with every other provision of the bill -- function, he said, and so without the mandate, the whole law must fall. The day before, of course, he argued that the individual mandate was beyond the scope of Congress’s powers. If the Court buys these two arguments, it is buying the idea that the very thing that is necessary to address the enormous problem of the uninsured and skyrocketing health care costs in this country is itself outside the bounds of Congressional power. It would in effect be saying that Congress does not have the power to solve serious, national problems, problems that cross state lines and wrek substantial havoc on state and federal budgets, problems that states cannot solve themselves.* What is at stake in this case, then, is not simply the fate of Obamacare but the fundamental question of whether our federal government can address national problems and solve them with reasonable means. A loss at the Court would give us a plain answer: No.

*Note: I know that single-payer would still be a constitutional option to address the problem of the uninsured. But it would be an extremely radical position for the Court to take to say that Congress may use only one particular method to solve an admittedly national problem with obvious and uncontested effects on interstate commerce. No one contests that regulating the health care market is within Congress’s power. A loss for Obamacare at the Court would be saying that the federal government cannot use reasonable means to address issues clearly within its constitutional ambit.

GOP UPDATE -- MITT IS IT: On Tuesday, Mitt Romney all but made it official when he swept the Maryland, D.C., and WIsconsin primaries, all by healthy margins. There’s really not that much exciting new stuff to talk about here, but I will point you to this blog post highlighting Romney taking both sides of a single issue in a matter of 6 sentences. I also want to highlight a speech he made this week in which he accused Obama of hiding his true intentions for his second term: “[Obama] does not want to share his real plans before the election, either with the public or with the press. … He is intent on hiding. You and I will have to do the seeking. … He wants us to re-elect him so we can find out what he will actually do.” A pretty absurd claim, but a fairly standard one on the right. What makes this absolutely, mind-blowingly hilarious/pathetic/facepalm-inducing is that this critique is coming from a man -- Mitt Romney -- who is on the record as saying that he will not specify the cuts he plans to make because it would be used against him in the election. As he very, very recently told the Weekly Standard, “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education. … So will there be some that get eliminated or combined? The answer is yes, but I’m not going to give you a list right now.” Rachel Maddow has taken to referring this as the “I’m Rubber You’re Glue” strategy, and it’s apparently the only idea Romney has to turn his massive liabilities into strengths lesser liabilities.


Holy S**t Moment(s) of the Week: Arizona legislators declare that you can be legally pregnant up to two weeks before you have the sex that makes you pregnant. And in an unrelated but equally Say What?! moment, the Supreme Court ruled this week that jail officials can strip search anybody arrested for any reason (no matter how minimal the crime), who is going to be put into the general jail population.
Must Read of the Week: In 2006, State Department advisor Philip Zelikow told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques amounted to felony war crimes, a memo obtained this week by Spencer Ackerman through a three-year-old FOIA request reveals. You can read the memo here.
Fun Video of the Week: Meet Edith Childs, the woman behind Obama’s “Fired Up, Ready to Go” chant.
Awesome Thing of the Week: First, look at this totally awesome photo of HIllary Clinton. Then, enjoy the tumblr it inspired.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/30/12 [Friday Morning Edition]

THE CASE OF THE CENTURY: This week, the Supreme Court heard three days of arguments on the constitutionality of Obamacare (it’s okay to call it that now). On Monday, the Court heard argument on the implications of the Tax Injunction Act, which holds that taxpayers cannot challenge the constitutionality of a tax until they pay it. If the law applied to Obamacare, the Court would not be able to hear the case until the “tax” portion (the penalty for having no insurance) kicks in, in 2014. The Justices seemed to have no trouble getting around the law, and appeared poised to move forward and rule on the law’s constitutionality now. (Dahlia Lithwick’s wrap-up of Day One is here.) On Tuesday, the Court heard the real meat of the argument: whether the individual mandate is constitutional. By all accounts the Government did not have its best day in court. The conservative justices repeatedly pressed Solicitor General Don Verrilli for a “limiting principle” -- i.e., a way to say that, while the government could force you to buy insurance, it couldn’t force you to do other things, like join a gym or buy broccoli. Although there are myriad convincing, simple, and clear limiting principles on hand, Verrilli struggled to articulate any to the Court, leaving court-watchers perplexed, frustrated, and predicting disaster. The bottom line is that the health care market is unlike any other market: In no other market do we allow people to take what they need even when they haven’t or can’t pay for it. When Verrilli brought up this point, saying that we have “obligated ourselves” to caring for the sick and dying when they show up at the hospital, regardless of ability to pay, and that’s why the mandate is both necessary and unlikely to spill to other sectors, Justice Scalia retorted, “Well, don’t obligate yourself!” Let them die! If that seems extreme, Wednesday’s arguments ventured even farther down the rabbit hole, when the Justices contemplated doing away with all of Medicaid. For reals. There were two arguments on Wednesday: First, the Court puzzled over what portions of the law would have to fall if they found the mandate unconstitutional (i.e., whether that provision was severable from the rest of the bill or whether it would take other parts -- or the whole thing -- down with it). Turning the entire idea of judicial restraint upside down, Justice Kennedy suggested it would somehow show more restraint to strike down the entire law than to just cut out the mandate. Huh? (The role that the filibuster plays here is also interesting.) Then it discussed the expanded Medicaid provision. Garrett Epps explains: “The ACA offers states massive new Medicaid funding, but to get it they must expand their eligibility rules for low-income people. Clement argued that this was ‘coercive.’ The precedent for this argument was as follows: nothing.” And yet, the conservatives seemed to be buying it! They seemed to take seriously the idea that Medicaid itself may be unconstitutional. There’s really only one possible reaction: !!!!!!!!!!. Do that -- make 10 exclamation points -- with your face, and you have an image of how every non-radical legal prognosticator looked this whole week. What was perhaps most remarkable was the extent to which the conservatives on the bench had internalized the various right-wing talking points about the law -- talking points that have nothing to do with the constitutionality but focus instead on the politics, the policy, or made-up outrages that don’t exist in the law at all. It’s impossible to say what will happen at this point. But it is certainly true that liberal scholars who took the Court vastly underestimated the politicized, partisan zeal with which the conservative Justices would attack Obama’s singular achievement.

Some more recommended reading: Jon Chait has a great take on the conservative panic that engendered the outrage to Obamacare here. Jonathan Cohn marvels at the idea that the decision not to use the word “tax” could be the entire basis for striking down the law. Read Dahlia Lithwick’s wrap-up of Day Two and Day Three. Matt Yglesias points out that there’s no “limiting principle” on the power to tax, but that doesn’t make taxes unconstitutional. And Mark Tushnet wonders if Scalia has jumped the shark.

GOP LASHES ITSELF TO RYAN BUDGET: Yesterday, the House voted to approve Paul “I’m Extremely Radical But The Media Pretends Not To Know That” Ryan’s budget, which, you’ll recall, essentially ends the federal government by 2050 (excluding defense, Social Security, and Medicare), and spells complete doom for Medicaid (although the Supreme Court might just beat him to the punch on that one!). Oh, and in justifying his budget’s large increases in defense spending even as it eviscerates the rest of government operations, Paul Ryan asserted that the generals who had requested a smaller budget were simply lying. What do you know, the budget passed 228 to 191, with every single Democrat, joined by 10 Republicans, opposing the measure. (It should be noted that most of those GOP no-votes appear to be based on the idea that the bill is not radical enough.) Given the extreme nature of the budget, and its extreme unpopularity, it’s worthwhile to point out, again, that this vote was wholly unnecessary and is thus fairly mystifying. “To tell the truth,” Jon Bernstein writes, “I can’t really think of any good precedent: a vote on something that neither the party’s conservative or moderate wings wants to take on something that has no chance of advancing beyond that chamber.” Ed Kilgore’s explanation: “All in all, it appears House Republicans are so upset that they were backed into a bipartisan agreement last year...that they want to put on a demonstration of what Congress would be like if there were no Democrats in it. Democrats should be very grateful.”

ROMNEY LOVES THE TASTE OF HIS SHOE: This meme is getting a little old, I admit, but sometimes it’s just too good to pass off. After extolling the trees in Michigan, giving shout-outs to his friends who own football and Nascar teams, telling audiences that he enjoys firing people and that his $300,000-plus earnings from public speaking were “not much,” Mitt Romney told a hilarious anecdote this week about his father closing down auto factories in Michigan and moving the jobs to Wisconsin. More substantively, Romney faced perhaps the toughest questions he’s received yet on his opposition to Obamacare from, of all people, Jay Leno. Leno asked him whether he would rescind the coverage guarantees for people with preexisting conditions, and Romney cagily answered that those people would still have coverage if they already have insurance. Leno pressed, asking about those who haven’t been able to get insurance before. What would happen to them? Romney wouldn’t really give an answer, but the implication was clear: What do we do about those people? Nothing. Even more interestingly (and hilariously), Romney’s answer provided an excellent explanation for why a mandate is necessary. Romney told Leno, “Well, if they’re 45 years old, and they show up, and they say, I want insurance, because I’ve got a heart disease, it’s like, `Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you’re well, and if you get ill, then you’re going to be covered.’” Exactly! You can’t let people wait until they get sick before they try to buy insurance, especially if we have a requirement that insurance companies cannot discriminate against people with preexisting conditions. The anti-discrimination provision necessitates a mandate, so that people don’t game the system and drive up prices for the rest of us. Romney clearly understands this; indeed, he seems to sincerely believe in its veracity. And yet, there he goes, proclaiming that Obamacare is part of a “broader attack on economic freedom unlike anything we have ever seen before.” In the race for who has less intellectual honesty and a lower respect for his voters, no one beats Romney.

GOOD NEWS -- Idaho Drops Ultrasound Bill; Wisconsin Recall Happening: Good News Item #1: “The Republican-controlled Legislature is backing away from a bill requiring women seeking an abortion to have an ultrasound. The legislation stalled after State Representative Thomas F. Loertscher said on Tuesday that he would not schedule a committee hearing, ending the bill’s chances this year.” Item #2: The recall of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker is officially on, and is expected to be set for June 5.

Must Read of the Week: The right-wing fringe has taken it upon itself to smear Trayvon Martin. Because we all know that if he ever did anything wrong in his life ever, then he totally deserved to get shot and killed on his way home from the corner store.
Fun Video of the Week: The Daily Show team is absolutely brilliant on Trayvon Martin’s death and its racial meanings.

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/22/12

THIS WEEK IN POLITICAL NEWS -- 3/22/12

YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT TRAYVON MARTIN: If you haven’t already heard about this case, you need to. Late last month, 17-year-old Trayvon, an African American, was shot and killed in Florida by George Zimmerman, a 28-year-old white and/or Hispanic man. Zimmerman, who was armed with a gun, claimed self-defense; Martin was armed with a pack of Skittles and an ice tea. Zimmerman saw Martin walking through a gated community to a friend’s house where he and his parents were visiting, after going to get a snack. Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watchman, saw Martin and called 911, claiming that Martin looked “real suspicious” and that he was “up to no good” and may be on drugs. “These assholes. They always get away,” he told the 911 dispatcher. Zimmerman followed Martin on foot, despite the 911 dispatcher telling him expressly not to. After that, it’s not entirely clear what happened. ABC News reports that Trayvon was on the phone with a friend and told her that a man was following him. She told him to run away, but he thought he had escaped the follower. Suddenly he was there again, and the girl told ABC News she heard Trayvon ask, “What, are you following me for?” before she heard pushing noises and the phone drop to the ground, disconnecting the call. In other 911 calls from neighbors, you can hear someone screaming for help and pleading -- Martin’s parents say it’s his voice -- and then a gun shot go off, silencing the pleas. The shooting itself is tragic enough, but the real horror started when the police arrived. They apparently accepted Zimmerman’s story completely at face value, and failed to administer a drug or alcohol test -- a standard part of normal procedures. And then they let Zimmerman go. He was never arrested, and remains free today. The police say that nothing has disproven Zimmerman’s self-defense claim. Late Monday afternoon, the Department of Justice announced that it would open an investigation into the state police’s handling of the case, a welcome development. The police chief is certainly raising questions into the adequacy of the investigation he ran. He declared that, while he’s sure Zimmerman would change things if he could, so would Martin -- the victim who did nothing wrong. And then he suggested that it was himself, a white man in uniform, who was somehow the victim of racial targeting. (This evening, that police chief temporarily stepped down.)

Ta-Nehsis Coates* has been covering this story beautifully and compellingly. Read his posts here, here, and here; here he highlights what a grand jury investigating Zimmerman will be focusing on, and provides a link to an interview he did on the topic on the Brian Lehrer Show. He also has this essential post highlighting two other cases of “Stand Your Ground” killings. James Fallows urges people (and journalists) not to think of this just as a “race story.” Emily Bazelon has a history of Florida’s self-defense/stand your ground law here, and here she concludes that Zimmerman is almost certainly lying about what happened. Charles Blow covers the story here, and Mother Jones has a comprehensive and thorough run-down of the story (along with lots of very upsetting 911 calls) here. And not-so-liberal-at-all John McWhorter shares a moving and personal perspective.

COURT SHUTS ITS EYES TO GENDER DISCRIMINATION: This week, in a five-to-four split, the Supreme Court held that state employees cannot sue the state (their employer) when the state violates the Family Medical Leave Act, a federal law requiring employers to grant employees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to recover from illness or care for a sick family member. A 2003 case allowed suits against state employers for violations of the portion of the law dealing with caring for sick family members; this week’s decision came to the opposite conclusion regarding violations of the self-care component of the law. This is a bit confusing, and it sounds dry, but this has extraordinary bearing on the legality of state-sanctioned gender discrimination, and it’s seriously important. So stick with me!

Because of something called “sovereign immunity,” normal people can’t sue states unless Congress has specifically allowed it. And Congress can only allow such suits pursuant to their power under the Fourteenth Amendment (authorizing Congress to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation”). So the question in this week’s case was whether the self-care provision was enacted to combat sex discrimination (and was thus enacted under the Fourteenth Amendment), or rather was passed only through Congress’s interstate commerce power -- a power which cannot abrogate state sovereign immunity. The 2003 case I mentioned above found that the care-for-others provision was a key part of Congress’s effort to break down gender roles: Justice Rehnquist (Rehnquist!), writing for the Court, explained that Congress had authority to remove “the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work.”

But the current Court is far, far to the right of even Justice Rehnquist. Justice Kennedy wrote for the Court to find that the self-care provision was not similarly part of a congressional anti-discrimination project. Since it was not a “congruent and proportional” response to documented sex discrimination, it could not be part of Congress’s Section 5 power and thus could not abrogate sovereign immunity.

This is a really big deal, I promise you. The conservative majority was blind to this argument (or just ignored it), but the people who absolutely reap the most protection from the FMLA self-care provision are pregnant women and new moms. As you know, the United States has no automatic maternity leave; the FMLA is the closest thing we have. As Justice Ginsburg wrote in dissent, “[T]he overarching aim of the FMLA [was] to make it feasible for women to work while sustaining family life.” This decision allows state employers to violate the FMLA -- meaning they can fire women who take maternity leave -- without fear of monetary consequence, since wronged employees cannot sue them for damages. Though states could face injunctive suits, they essentially have immunity to fire pregnant women and new moms. I’m hoping that, day by day, I’ll start getting used to living in 1961...

RYAN EXTREMO BUDGET V.2: Since last year’s right-wing budget was such a hit [Note: It was not a hit], GOP whiz kid Paul Ryan decided to release another right-wing fantasy budget this year, which passed the House budget committee by exactly one vote after two Republicans defected. ThinkProgress lists the five worst parts about the budget, but by far the most troubling has to be its absolutely massive and unprecedented cuts to programs benefitting the poor, especially Medicaid, even as it gives what some estimate to be a $3 trillion tax cut to corporations and the wealthy. “Ryan's budget asks for enormous sacrifice from, say, disabled Medicaid beneficiaries even as it appears to provide enormous tax benefits to wealthier Americans,” Ezra Klein explains. “The Republican Party has backed itself into a fiscal strategy in which this kind of concentrated sacrifice on the part of the poor is the only possible path forward.” Ryan’s projected deficit savings depend entirely on the assumption that, by 2050, everything the federal government does besides Social Security, Medicare, and defense spending will have to cease to exist -- no more air traffic control, Pell grants, scientific research, food safety regulation, highway spending, etc. “Republicans don’t really want to shut down the FDA, the FBI, and the national parks, not to mention patrolling the border and farm programs and roads,” Jonathan Bernstein insists. “And yet that’s the implication of this document. It’s not even remotely realistic — and neither is Ryan’s claim that his budget would cut the deficit way down.” It’s also important to remember that his budget would explode the ranks of the uninsured. “Altogether, the CBO says, spending on Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and subsidies for private insurance would be nearly 75 percent lower in 2050 than projected under current law,” which at least one group says means between 14 and 27 million people would lose their insurance. If you think this represents an extremely extreme -- one might say “severely” extreme -- position, you’d be right. It’s also the position that Mitt Romney enthusiastically and unequivocally embraced this week. Your Republican nominee, folks!

RELUCTANT GOP UPDATE: I don’t know about you, but I am officially sick of covering the GOP primary race. It was fun for a moment there, when it looked like a series of certifiably crazy people may have taken the prize. But now it’s just boring and painful and boring; all we have is Romney’s Uncanny Valley-esque demeanor and his flabbergastingly omnipresent mendacity. So Romney won Illinois by a huge margin this week, and keeps his steady track toward the nomination (though he likely won’t accumulate enough delegates to make it official until mid-June). God knows what Gingrich is still doing in the race. John Dickerson points out that Gingrich’s plan -- to deny Romney the magic number of 1,444 delegates so that it all gets thrown open at the convention, where he will sweep in as the only nominee who can take Obama on in a debate (side note: Has Gingrich ever actually watched his own debate performances? Or Obama’s?) -- has a major flaw (besides the obvious, reality-based reasons): The GOP rules require the eventual nominee to have won a plurality in at least five state primaries. So far, Gingrich has won only 2.

So Romney may be inevitable, but that doesn’t mean he’s at all -- and I mean at all -- good at campaigning. The big story this week was not, it turns out, his double-digit Illinois win but rather a comment one of his advisors made the very next morning. (This isn’t the first time Romney has stepped on his own narrative the day after a big win.) When asked on CNBC whether the drawn-out GOP fight would force Romney to take hard-right positions that could hurt him in the general campaign, Romney aide Eric Fehrnstrom replied:

Well, I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all of over again.

Unsurprisingly, Romney has been roundly mocked and criticized for this aide’s comment. The image almost perfectly encapsulates both conservatives’ massive discomfort with Mitt “severely conservative” Romney and liberals’ massive disgust over his wholesale abandonment of his governing record. It also reminds me of the essential importance of not letting Mitt let go of the extreme far-right positions he has staked out in this campaign once we get around to the general election. We simply can’t let him erase the comments he’s made.

GOOD NEWS -- Court Holds Defendants Entitled to Effective Assistance of Counsel During Plea Bargaining: For the first time, the Supreme Court held this week that criminal defendants are entitled to the effective assistance of counsel during the plea bargaining stage. Given that 98 percent of criminal matters are resolved through plea deals rather than trials, the decision “‘constitute[s] the single greatest revolution in the criminal justice process since Gideon v. Wainwright provided indigents the right to counsel,’ said Wesley M. Oliver, a law professor at Widener University, referring to the landmark 1963 decision.”

Must-Read of the Week: Three reasons why Republicans are blocking the Violence Against Women Act: Gays, immigrants, and Native Americans.
Must Watch Video of the Week: There are no words to describe how impressive this is.


*Ta-Nehisi Coates will be at Yale next week to participate in an incredible panel discussion on the Civil War. Moderator David Blight is a truly incredible speaker and scholar. If you’re at all interested in the Civil War and you're in the New Haven area, you won’t want to miss this!

Details: Thursday, March 29, 2012. 4:30 p.m. Linsly-Chittenden Hall, 63 High Street, Room 102
To commemorate the sesquicentennial of the Civil War and Emancipation, the GLC will host a roundtable discussion with five major historians and writers, moderated by GLC Director, David W. Blight. The group takes up questions of the changing character and controversies over the memory of the Civil War and Emancipation over the past 150 years. The panel includes: Gary Gallagher, Stephanie McCurry, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Andrew Delbanco, and John Fabian Witt. Books will be available for sale following the event.