After The Tidal Wave

Ben and I tackle the question of "what's next after the election?" in our Scripps Howard column. My take:

On Wednesday morning, while most of her friends and flock were still hung over in despair of the election results, a liberal Kansas pastor sent a short note to the newly elected ultraconservative governor of her state, Sam Brownback.

"Dear Sam Brownback, I am pleased that Kansas has a governor who respects the sacred nature of life," the pastor wrote. "In the upcoming legislative session, I urge you to apply your pro-life principles to all people and support the repeal of the death penalty in the state of Kansas."

The pastor gives a fine sermon, but this act may have constituted her greatest lesson. Yes, liberals and their allies were defeated at the polls on Tuesday. But their causes endure -- providing aid and comfort to the needy; expanding the rights of gay and lesbian Americans; resisting the siren call of militarism in a violent age. A day or two of post-electoral bellyaching is understandable, but there is still work to be done. Republican victories don't change that.

Liberals can spend the next few years griping about their GOP rivals --or the folly of voters who elected them -- or they can accept their beating and begin work on rebuilding their coalitions, all while looking opportunities for to advance their agenda in the meantime.

Those advances may be smaller than desired, but doesn't make them unimportant.

Such advances may be more difficult at the federal level. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has plainly said the objective of the GOP during the next two years is to deny President Obama a second term. Also true: In some debates there is little or no room for common ground. But liberals might find opportunities at the local and state levels. And they might take a lesson from the Kansas pastor: there's no time for despair.

Iowa Justices and an Independent Judiciary

At The Corner, William Duncan sniffs about liberal handwringing over the booting of three Iowa justices who voted to approve gay marriage there:

"Prominent law professors and advocacy groups are apparently concerned that the vote threatens the independence of the judiciary.

The framers of the Iowa constitution certainly didn’t see it that way, since they provided for retention elections. Those raising this concern seem to view the independence judges enjoy as independence from responsibility and from the text and meaning of the constitution they are supposed to be interpreting."

Fair enough. My concern isn't that there's a mechanism for removing justices, but that the process is asymmetric. The New York Times reports:

The most sustained effort to oust judges in this election cycle was in Iowa, where out-of-state organizations opposed to gay marriage, including the National Organization for Marriage and the American Family Association, poured money into the removal campaign. Judges face no opponents in retention elections and simply need to win more yes votes than no votes to go on to another eight-year term. In Iowa, the three ousted justices did not raise campaign money, and they only made public appearances defending themselves toward the end of the election.

You can, I suppose, blame the justices for not campaigning harder to save their jobs. For better or worse, that's not something they've ever had to do before -- and thus were defenseless when the tidal wave from NOM and the AFA hit their state. I'm certain that a fair number of Iowans oppose gay marriage, but I'm also certain that Iowans only really got to hear one side of the story during the election season. That makes it a rather less inspiring show of democracy.

That probably won't happen again. The judges are going to have to campaign for their jobs from now on. And where campaigns exist, so does money to influence the outcome. My concern about judicial independence isn't that the justices were held accountable for their actions, but that the form of accountability will drive them into the arms of campaign donors -- making the whole independence thing a little more tricky.

Should Philly ban Happy Meals?

There's no real proposal to duplicate what San Francisco did this week; nonetheless, the Inky decides to make trouble:

"Should the Philly area try to catch up to San Francisco? Put the freeze on cheeseburgers? Deny fries to small fries?

Should Philly go further? Under the California cutoff, a Happy Meal with a plain burger, fries and a soda would be fine.

Or should little consumers get to consume whatever food they want and get Transformers, too?"

I'm not going to claim that Happy Meals are good for you, but this does smack of the kind of nanny-statism that's all too easy for conservatives to use to tar all left-of-center law-making. Besides, the problem with Happy Meals isn't that they have toys -- it's that they're cheap, an easy way for poor families to put calories into their kids without offering quite so many nutrients. But even if a Happy Meal ban is somehow justified, it's completely tone deaf as a political matter. Maybe not in San Francisco, but everywhere else. The problem is that such stories make it hard to do important progressive changes elsewhere.

George W. Bush: War Criminal

We already knew it. It's just official now:

"The Washington Post reports that in his new memoir ... President Bush's response to a request to waterboard 9/11 big nut Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was, 'Damn right.' (Meanwhile, Cheney stated earlier this year that, 'I was a big supporter of waterboarding.')

The Post quotes Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch: 'Waterboarding is broadly seen by legal experts around the world as torture, and it is universally prosecutable as a crime. The fact that none of us expect any serious consequences from this admission is what is most interesting.'"

President Obama hasn't been the civil liberties president I hoped for. But as far as we know, he hasn't done this. George W. Bush was a moral disaster for our country, and I'm not sure we'll ever entirely get over it.

ACLU Sues Philly Over 'Stop & Frisk'

The stats certainly don't look good:

"The lawsuit says pedestrian stops have more than doubled since 2005, to 253,333 in 2009. Of those pedestrians stopped, 72 percent were African-American and only 8 percent led to arrests.

'The majority of these arrests were for alleged criminal conduct that was entirely independent from the supposed reason for the stop and/or frisk in the first place,' the suit says.

The plaintiffs are seeking class status and rulings to prevent the police from conducting pedestrian stops based on race or national origin.

The suit also asks the court to order more police training, supervision and monitoring to ensure that 'stops, frisks, searches and detentions comport with constitutional requirements.'

'Mayor Nutter repeatedly promised that this policy would be carried out in a way that respected the Constitution,' said Mary Catherine Roper, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Pennsylvania. 'But instead of stopping people suspected of criminal activity, the police appear to be stopping people because of their race.'"

Emaw: We're the ones we've been waiting for

Emaw continues the conversation. Government is unsustainable, he agrees, but that's because our culture has become unsustainable:

"But we got ourselves into this mess. And we're going to have to get ourselves out. It's not going to be easy. I suspect that it will get much, much worse before it gets better. But I also think the best place to start is in your own neighborhood, in your own town, in your own city and state.

Democrats nor Republicans nor presidents nor senators will be able to help us. Relying on the government isn't the answer. We all need to pull together. Find people who need your help. There are a lot of great organizations and churches that are dedicated to feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, trying to heal the sick.

We need to focus on our responsibilities as citizens, not our rights. Make personal changes like eating better food and less of it. Using less energy (I personally have lowered my body temperature to 94 degrees).

Voting is nice. But it is more important to get out and help than it is to get out the vote."

There is, I should say, some small overlap between this and my contribution to this week's Scripps Howard column with Ben Boychuk. I'll be posting that later today.

Michael Smerconish's Weird Pervez Musharraf Column

This column is weird, even for Michael Smerconish. Pervez Musharraf is in town, so Smerconish takes him to vote:

"We discussed apathy, and I described voter turnout patterns in the U.S., explaining that in 2008, only 63 percent of those eligible came out to vote.

'In Pakistan, it's the opposite.

'It's the educated class which does not vote. You said you've always voted. Let me shock you by saying that I have never voted - except in the last eight years.

'Yes, in this, I did go to vote. Otherwise, before that, when I was not the president, I never voted,' he told me.

Why not?

'Because I thought it was useless going to vote like that,' he answered.

What Smerconish never says -- and this seems really relevant if we're going to lump discussions of democracy and Pakistan together -- is that Musharraf didn't need to vote because he had a bigger vote than the whole rest of Pakistan combined: He took power through a military coup! In fact, he still advocates the Army be given a formal veto power over democracy there!

None of this makes it into Smerconish's column. Instead, we're supposed to value American democracy a little more because, heck, a former Pakistani president seems to think it's kind of cool. Smerconish had the chance to interview somebody influential and important about a part of the world that's critical to current U.S. interests ... and he pulled a radio DJ stunt. Disappointing.