Racists and Corporatists

Today's right-wing fusillade of propaganda is unrelenting and, if it often seems foolish, it is nonetheless red meat for wanna-be candidates in 2010 and 2012 and impacts every corner of the political landscape from government programs to court appointments.

Republicans' nominal intellectual, Newt Gingrich, established his rightwing bona-fides at the party's recent fundraiser with constant references to God and religion - - the best measure of Republican hopefuls no matter what they say about that big-tent thing. Seeing John McCain and Sarah Palin at the event Gingrich mused that the "... country would be amazingly better off if they had been elected." In what way exactly one wonders? And in a not-so-veiled criticism of Obama's international outreach, Gingrich doesn't pretend to be "a citizen of the world" a concept he describes as "stunningly dangerous." The old notion of American exceptionalism still seems to work for him.

Master of Ceremonies Jon Voigt closed the festivities by saying "Do not tell me it cannot be done" referring to a Republican resurgence in 2010 that seemed to echo the passionate "Yes we can" rallying cry of the Obama campaign. What could be more appropriate from the party of no than a syntactical shower of negatives? And, as the party's "idea man", Gingrich talked of charter schools, smaller government and national defense as if nothing had changed since his days as Speaker of the House, long before the country's economic challenges became so worrisome.

Gingrich and other scaredy-cats on the right say the party has room for Rush Limbaugh as well as other rabid media types whose vituperative attacks on the president and Democrats are nothing more than mindless partisan broadsides unworthy of those who would call themselves patriots. But instead of being ashamed that such drivel is spread by its conservative wing, Republican leaders open wide the flaps of their tent to include them, rather like the racists they tolerated to shore up the Southern vote in the past.

In recent days frantic true believers, including Rush Limbaugh and Gingrich, have called Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor a racist because she remarked that her particular experience and ethnicity provides her with insights a white male might not possess. She always adds, however that the law is the principle that informs her decisions. In reality accusations of racism and reverse discrimination and Pat Buchanan's charge that white males are the most discriminated against segment of the population these days masks an insidious racial angst that continues to resonate in some establishment political circles.

It isn't as highly charged as claims of racism to suggest that a justice is a corporatist or RUI (ruling under the influence of business interests) but that proclivity has profound implications for our highest court. In a recent five-four decision the Supreme Court majority ruled that elected judges should recuse themselves from cases that involve substantial contributors to their campaigns - - a seemingly logical response to litigation in which a lower-court judge decided in favor of a major campaign donor.

However, with the four conservatives dissenting, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the minority that "today's opinion requires state and federal judges "...to act as political scientists (why did candidate X win the election?), economists (was the financial support disproportionate?) and psychologists (is there likely to be a debt of gratitude?)," adding, "the end result will do far more to erode public confidence in judicial impartiality than an isolated failure to recuse in a particular case." Ah, the wisdom of the white male jurist.

Actually, the public isn't convinced courts render justice for ordinary Americans as things stand today. While the propaganda mill churns on, institutionalized bias is sometimes confused with strict adherence to constitutional principles and narrow-minded decisions erroneously attributed to judicial restraint.

Recent Bush Supreme Court appointees tend to have a business-favoring agenda as well as a social one. Considerations of race and gender may create balance on the Court in certain ways, but, more generally, how the law is interpreted as it affects real people is the most important determination courts can make.