What They Mean by ‘Civility’ The New York Times raises no objection to murderous, racist rhetoric at a Common Cause rally.
The New York Times editorial page, a division of the New York Times Co., on Saturday endorsed Common Cause’s personal attack on Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. As we explained Friday, Common Cause, a Washington-based corporation, is complaining about Scalia and Thomas’s having joined Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, the 2010 decision that overturned a law criminalizing certain political speech by corporations.
As the Times explains, Common Cause implies that Scalia and Thomas had a conflict of interest:
The framers of our Constitution envisioned law gaining authority apart from politics. They wanted justices to exercise their judgment independently–to be free from worrying about upsetting the powerful and certainly not to be cultivating powerful political interests.
A petition by Common Cause to the Justice Department questioned whether Justices Scalia and Thomas are doing the latter. It asked whether the court’s ruling a year ago in the Citizens United case, unleashing corporate money into politics, should be set aside because the justices took part in a political gathering of the conservative corporate money-raiser Charles Koch while the case was before the court.
If the answer turns out to be yes, it would be yet more evidence that the court must change its policy–or rather its nonpolicy–about recusal.
The answer will not turn out to be yes, for Common Cause’s complaint is not only meritless but frivolous. Koch was not a party to the lawsuit. Citizens United, which brought the case to the court, is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit corporation, just like Common Cause.
Further, both Justices Scalia and Thomas, in joining the majority opinion, merely reaffirmed the legal positions that they, along with Justice Kennedy, had previously taken in dissenting from the precedents that Citizens United overturned: McConnell v. FEC (2003) and, in Justice Scalia’s case, Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce (1990, the year before Thomas joined the court). Thus it is preposterous to suggest that their purported association, years later, with “powerful political interests” influenced their decision in Citizens United.
Common Cause’s complaint does not even allege any actual impropriety on the justices’ part. In its letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, the corporation asserts that “it appears” the justices “have participated in political strategy sessions.” This is based on promotional material for a conference called “Understanding and Addressing Threats to American Free Enterprise and Prosperity,” which says that “past meetings have featured such notable leaders as Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas.”
What exactly did Justices Scalia and Thomas do at the conferences “it appears” they attended? Neither Common Cause nor the Times offers any evidence bearing on the question. But the Times makes another accusation against Justice Scalia that may provide a clue:
Justice Scalia, who is sometimes called “the Justice from the Tea Party,” met behind closed doors on Capitol Hill to talk about the Constitution with a group of representatives led by Representative Michele Bachmann of the House Tea Party Caucus.
Here the Times deceives its readers in an effort to defame Justice Scalia. Enough is known about this meeting that we can be certain his conduct there was above reproach. TalkingPointsMemo.com, a liberal website, filed this report Jan. 25, the day after the Scalia appearance:
Two progressive members who attended the seminar vouched for Scalia and the event, and dispelled the notion that anything untoward happened.
According to Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who addressed reporters just outside the forum, the event was “incredibly useful, partly just to get the sense of Justice Scalia as an individual.”
“He talked about a couple of old cases where the Congress made mistakes, he felt, in its judgment,” Schakowsky added. “But they were not especially of a political nature. . . . This was pretty dry, actually.”
All members of the House were invited and allowed to bring a staff member. “There was absolutely no effort to keep anyone away,” Schakowsky added. “Certainly it’s useful to have justices come.”
Rep. Jerrod Nadler (D-NY)–one of the foremost Constitutional experts in Congress–largely confirmed Schakowsky’s interpretation, noting that Scalia steered clear of addressing timely issues, and that the members who asked questions weren’t pressing him for legislative guidance.
We have attended speeches by both Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas on various occasions, and this is consistent with our experience. Common Cause’s and the Times’s insinuations that the justices behaved improperly at the Koch conference are baseless and almost certainly false. This is nothing but an effort to suggest guilt by association–and the man with whom they are accused of associating, Charles Koch, is “guilty” only of participating in the political process. The Times has joined Common Cause in a classic McCarthyite smear campaign against government officials they suspect of holding subversive views. Are you now, or have you ever been, a conservative?
“Roger Ailes should be strung up. . . . Kill the bastard.”
That campaign took an even more sinister turn at a Common Cause protest Jan. 30, as we noted Thursday. Participants in the rally were captured on video advocating the assassination of Scalia, Thomas, Thomas’s wife and Chief Justice John Roberts. Two of them explicitly called for Justice Thomas, the court’s only black member, to be lynched. One man also asserted that Fox News president Roger Ailes “should be strung up,” adding: “Kill the bastard.”
A statement from Common Cause made clear that what it called these “hateful, narrow-minded sentiments”–rather a delicate way of describing lurid calls for murder–were contrary to the corporate position of the self-styled “grassroots organization.” But the Times editorial expresses no disapproval of the Common Cause supporters’ racist and eliminationist statements.
To be sure, the Times doesn’t express approval of these statements either. It ignores them altogether. This is the same New York Times that, as we noted Jan. 11, seized on the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona to announce that “it is legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible” for a “gale of anger” that the Times claimed had set “the nation on edge”–even though it had already been established that the vicious crime in Arizona had nothing to do with Republicans or their “supporters in the media.”
By the Times’s standards, surely it is legitimate to hold Common Cause, and particularly its most virulent supporters in the media, responsible for the depraved sentiments expressed at the Common Cause rally. That the editorial said nothing at all about the subject is further evidence that the paper’s pieties about “civility” are fraudulent–a cheap exercise in partisanship and a thuggish attempt to burnish its own reputation by tearing down those of its media competitors.
Thuggish but ineffectual. Lefty blogger Jason Easley notes that in yesterday’s pre-Super Bowl interview on Fox, “Bill O’Reilly used a Wall Street Journal editorial to try to make the case that [President] Obama is a left wing socialist out to redistribute income”:
The President easily knocked down this claim by saying, “Well the Wall Street Journal would probably paint you as a left wing guy. I mean if you are talking about the Wall Street Journal editorial page, you know that is like quoting the New York Times editorial page.”
This columnist, a member of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, finds the president’s comparison hurtful and invidious. The newspaper that employs us adheres to the highest standards of journalistic integrity.
But Obama’s comment is telling as well. Imagine: The most liberal president America has ever had is attempting to discredit a criticism by likening the critic to the New York Times. What stronger indication could there be of how low the Times’s reputation has sunk?
Party Animals
Common Cause describes itself as “nonpartisan.” Strictly as a legal matter, this is accurate: The corporation is not a political action committee and has no formal affiliation with any party. But the substance of its positions tells a different story.
Blogger Jonathan Adler notes that on Dec. 10, 2010, Common Cause issued a press release headlined “Day 5: Senate Minority Uses Filibuster to Hold Hostage Judicial Nominees”:
If you seek justice, don’t go looking for it in the U.S. Senate.
Today’s filibuster-happy Senate minority is threatening to cripple our federal judiciary, abusing the Senate’s own rules to delay or block the confirmations of dozens of highly-qualified lawyers and state court judges nominated by President Obama to the federal bench.
“Because of the filibuster and other delaying tactics, fewer than half of the President’s nominees to date have been confirmed,” said Bob Edgar, Common Cause’s president. . . .
“Every high school civics student learns that justice delayed is justice denied,” Edgar said. “These vacancies deny justice to crime victims by forcing trials to be postponed; they deny justice to individuals and businesses that see their finances wrecked while they wait for a judge to hear their civil lawsuits.
“This is the kind of obstructionism that Republicans rightfully complained about when Democrats practiced it against some of President Bush’s nominees. But rather than end it, the current Republican minority has doubled-down, obstructing more judges and for a longer time.”
Now Common Cause says Republicans “rightly complained.” But in a 2005 press release, the corporation took the position that, as the headline put it, “Filibuster Shouldn’t Be Tossed Aside to Convenience Senate Majority”:
“The filibuster shouldn’t be jettisoned simply because it’s inconvenient to the majority party’s goals,” said Common Cause President Chellie Pingree. “That’s abuse of power.” . . .
Common Cause on Monday launched an online petition in opposition to banning the filibuster and collected about 20,000 signatures in less than 48 hours. . . .
“To remove a long-standing parliamentary maneuver to serve immediate partisan goals violates core democratic values and is an anathema to the Senate’s long standing commitment to consensus and a bipartisan deliberative process,” the Common Cause petition reads.
Pingree left the corporation in 2007 to begin a political campaign. Since 2009 she has been a representative from Maine. From 1975 though 1987, Edgar, her successor, was a representative from Pennsylvania. You will not be shocked to learn that both are Democrats.
Common Cause advertises itself as high-mindedly concerned with matters of democratic process. Yet its position on this procedural question in 2010 was the exact opposite of its position in 2005–except that in both cases, it was on the same side as the Democratic Party.
Sarah Palin: A Reuters Editorial
Yesterday was the centenary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, and Sarah Palin gave a speech Friday in his honor at the Ronald Reagan Ranch Center in Santa Barbara, Calif. A Reuters reporter filed a dispatch on the speech that begins as a straight news story, but then gives some highly tendentious “background” information:
Palin, who visited Reagan’s ranch on Friday afternoon, has adopted bits of his personal style, from his folksy manner of speaking to frequent references to faith and religion.
Really, Palin is just aping Reagan? Does Reuters think that no one who came before him ever spoke in a “folksy manner” or made “frequent references to faith and religion”? The report continues:
But she has been a lightning rod for liberal critics for her inflammatory speeches and political commentary on the Fox News Channel.
In our opinion, Palin’s speeches and political commentary are not especially inflammatory. It’s totally legitimate to hold an opinion to the contrary, but not to put it into a news story. And remember, Reuters is the same “news” service that refuses to call the destruction of the World Trade Center a terrorist act because somebody somewhere may disagree. But Reuters repeats its opinion about Palin in the next paragraph:
Last month, she accused critics of “blood libel” in linking her inflammatory rhetoric to a deadly Arizona shooting spree, igniting another in a series of firestorms around her.
The “blood libel” phrase, which refers to a false, centuries-old allegation that Jews were killing children to use their blood in religious rituals, has been employed for centuries to justify the killing or expulsion of Jews.
Palin made no reference to that controversy, the Arizona shooting or the uprising in Egypt during the Reagan speech, focusing her remarks on his continuing relevance today.
Palin made no reference to any of these things, but Reuters devoted five paragraphs to them. That’s called editorializing, and it has its place. The middle of a news story isn’t it.
