Sunday, June 28, 2015

EXPLORING WHY SCALIA’S DIATRIBES KEEP GETTING VERSE

It's no longer a case of assuming
What sends Scalia fuming
His mind gets unfettered
When others write better
His reputation entombing.

By Dominique Paul Noth
Final part of Kennedy's remarkable same sex marriage decision

The week of  June 22 was the worst of Antonin Scalia’s reputation on the US Supreme Court. He went  ballistic on the losing side of both Obamacare and same sex marriage.

The longest ensconced justice (President Reagan, 1986) -- self-proclaimed as the outstanding wordsmith of the right (Ruth Bader Ginsburg is generally so acknowledged on the left), famous for assigned decisions and caustic dissents laced with erudite  flights of fancy and  abrasive superiority -- Scalia has been tolerated and even taught in law schools for a gift of language and an insistence on textual interpretation.

Basically here’s his concept of originalism involving the laws and the Constitution -- they only say what they mean according to Scalia.  It is a sometimes laughable theory that underneath promotes legal attention to textual purpose -- extremely confrontational but lively fodder for debate.

Yet of late his excursions into musing pompous language and offhand  insults have come a  major cropper – tending to make the pinhead side of conservatism even more litigious  and sending even Federalist Society lawyers scurrying from knee-jerk Scaliastic acceptance.

Moreover, reason-based conservatives on the court have been writing rings around him by focusing on balancing values within the laws -- even turning his own interpretations against him.

Only Scalia and Ginsburg have earned operatic stature for their personalities and phraseology. But as her reputation for insight ascends, Falstaff has descended to buffoon arias of rage. 

Recently, comity thrown to the winds,  his invective was aimed at that Reagan White House  pup John Roberts (sure he’s 60 but Scalia is 79 and thought he had a new acolyte) who   regularly fails to succumb in deference to his elder (who wanted that chief justice job 10 years ago). 

Now Roberts is certainly no progressive’s ideal of  a justice. He’s hardly  free from obeisance to  the wealthy right or entrenched Babbittry. But in the case of the Affordable Care Act that might have actually helped. It was not just Obama backers but  the business community that saw financial calamity in undoing ACA despite some 56 times the House GOP voted to repeal it.  Wall Street needed a pragmatic jurist reaching logically beyond flame-thrower politics.
Roberts upholds Obamacare  and
again draws Scalia's wrath.

Roberts’  first decision in 2012 upheld the legislative legality of ACA as a taxing initiative. Then his second this June 25  wrote the clincher opinion that puts ACA beyond reasonable reach of congressional enemies.  As pundit Andy Borowitz laughingly pointed out in The New Yorker, Roberts’ opinion has forced  Reince Preibus and the GOP to search for a new anti-Obama myth to attack. 

Actually it wasn’t even close, 6-3, since Roberts was joined by the other remaining Reagan justice, Anthony Kennedy (1988), long regarded as a swing vote but ideologically more attuned with Scalia. In the first ACA case, he and Scalia were on the same side of the  constitutional  issue,  but last week they parted ways because it was an interpretation of the intent of the statute, and normally the conclusion was so inevitable it would be a petty waste of the court’s time to even take it up. Except ACA opponents anticipated that Scalia’s fondness for textual sleight of hand might bring other conservatives around.

But sometimes the justices agree to take a Hail Mary pass in order to permanently spike it. Kennedy joined Roberts in going to  the heart of the case, ignoring the Scalia attempt to isolate four words (“established by the State”) from the overriding language that the federal government had on a cabinet level authorized  “such Exchanges” including subsidies. In fact, Scalia’s selective lifting could only carry along Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas.

Roberts is a sturdy opinion writer but there was something more powerful than routine scholarship in his quotations from past decisions (“We cannot interpret federal statutes to negate their own stated purposes”) and in his straight to the point summation: “Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter.” 

But he couldn’t resist an ironic slam at Scalia’s dissent in the first ACA case that admitted  “without federal subsides the Exchanges cannot operate as Congress intended,” confirming even Scalia really knew what Congress wanted. 

In dissent Scalia was forced to "wholeheartedly agree with the Court that sound interpretation requires paying attention to the whole law, not honing in on isolated words or even isolated sections."  But falsely hone in he did and went linguistically childish because Roberts was using workmanlike accuracy to show him up. 

He demeaned Roberts’  reasoning with a disconnected fruity harrumph ("Pure applesauce”) and turned to old Scottish insults ("jiggery-pokery") that didn’t address diddly.  Prof. Ed Fallone in a  Marquette University blog has more brilliantly than any layman could explained how sound Roberts’ reasoning was and truer to the “ancient principle of statutory interpretation”  that Scalia keeps pretending to defend.

With a fetish for verbal diarrhea
That angry old justice Scalia
His colleagues to harm ‘em
Became P.T. Barnum
With hokum of hoary Anglophilia

Scalia’s manner became even more unhinged and personal the next day (June 26) when Scotus 5-4 declared a constitutional right to same sex marriage in the secular realm.

The main opinion came from Kennedy, who has shown previous sensitivity to homosexual freedom from government persecution. In 1996 he struck down a Colorado state amendment that classified  homosexuals “not to further a proper legislative end but to make them unequal to everyone else.” In 2003 he invalidated an anti-sodomy law that “involves liberty of the person.” In 2013 in a landmark case his opinion struck down key components of DOMA (Defense of Marriage Act) and likely opened the door to gay advocates looking at the  hundreds of state regulations denying gays what one man one woman marriages were allowed.
Kennedy's eloquence comes
under attack

But even these advocates, I suspect, didn’t anticipate the reach,  breadth and power of Kennedy’s articulate validation. Calling marriage the “keystone of our social order,” he insisted that  "no longer may this liberty be denied" the homosexual community, as it was long denied interracial couples. He actually elevated the importance of marriage for all.

In this case, Roberts was on the other side, acknowledging the social value of gay couples (“Many will rejoice in this decision and I begrudge none of their celebration”) and suggesting that they might win his support as a legislator. But he insisted it was too sweeping a decision (reducing his brethren to “five lawyers” not jurists in his ire) and was  defying judicial caution and the lengthy traditions of only opposite sex marriage, even citing the values of the Kalahari Bushmen, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs to support his notion.

(That comment brought a swift response in Slate June 27  from a respected judge on the federal 7th District Court of Appeals who has been considered for the highest court, Richard A. Posner. Calling Roberts dissent “heartless”  Posner described the long history of social persecution suffered by the gay community and poked fun at Roberts’ example.  “Most of us are not convinced that what’s good enough for the Bushmen, the Carthaginians, and the Aztecs should be good enough for us. Ah, the millennia! Ah, the wisdom of ages! How arrogant it would be to think we knew more than the Aztecs — we who don’t even know how to cut a person’s heart out of his chest while he's still alive, a maneuver they were experts at.”)

Even Roberts had to acknowledge that “injustices” such as civil rights are often not recognized in their  own time. But he still fulminated about a major disruption in the social order by letting the court lead the people. One can imagine how such private contrary discussions on the court  invigorated Kennedy’s language throughout, thusly:

“Without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers, their children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser. They also suffer the significant material costs of being raised by unmarried parents, relegated through no fault of their own to a more difficult and uncertain family life. The marriage laws at issue here thus harm and humiliate the children of same-sex couples.”

In this era of economic, family and social pressure, the polls suggest nearly 43% of opposite sex couples are living together or  raising children without benefit of marriage, so soured have they become on the institution.  Seen in that light, Kennedy has done more to magnify the importance and special legal protections of marriage for all Americans.

That was missed by Scalia in a dissent so unbridled that  Roberts pointedly refused to sign aboard though he was on the same side.

Angered by Kennedy's eloquence
In poetic gay marriage defense
What emanates from Scalia
Is fury akin to Sharia
Ego offended by his own irrelevance.


Scalia railed at what he sarcastically saw as the majority’s presumption: “These justices know that limiting marriage to one man and one woman is contrary to reason; they know that an institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry.”  Strange language given Scotus’ central role in settling issues brought before the court. Stranger still that it was not true unless talking about Christian countries.  It made it easy to interpret his tirade as more religious in nature than based on understanding of human rights  and the pain of denial, which clearly is what moved the majority to action.

Even religious and conservative leaders thought Kennedy rose to such memorable language  out of compassion and belief  in the power of the law to correct error. Not Scalia.
“The opinion is couched in a style that is as pretentious as its content is egotistic,” Scalia wrote of his Reagan colleague’s work, not thinking for a moment of how pretentious and egotistic much of his own writing sounds. “The opinion’s showy profundities are often profoundly incoherent.”
If there was any doubt that Scalia has strayed from
jurisprudence, dissents prove it.

Scalia seems upset by Kennedy’s phrase-making to the point that he “would hide my head in a bag” rather than write such stuff and even seemed to accuse Kennedy of being bought or catering to public opinion. What struck others as florid elegance became to Scalia a signal that the court “has descended from the disciplined legal reasoning of John Marshall and Joseph Story to the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

It is a valuable sidebar to point out that chief justice Marshall (1801-1835) solidified acceptance of the court as the independent branch by pushing the politics of the times and conservative Story (1811-1845) didn’t just expand the property rights of rich white men he also vehemently opposed the slave trade. Part of their “disciplined reasoning” was stretching the norms of  society.

Scalia’s attacks on his colleagues for seeing the rights issue differently  reminded several devout federalists of the warnings of a Founding Father, Georgia educator Abraham Baldwin, who actually didn’t want the US Constitution to name the rights reserved to governments, arguing that "If we enumerate specific rights, then some fool in the future will argue that people are entitled only to those rights and no others."  

Scalia sure sounded like that fuming fool in his dissent especially when he suggested that the court should not defend anything other than rights regarded as “fundamental by every person alive at the time of ratification”  of the Constitution.  He also insisted that gay marriage eroded the rights of the non-beatniks (“One would think Freedom of Intimacy is abridged rather than expanded by marriage. Ask the nearest hippie.”) and derided the majority justices for where they came from and where they go to church (six are actually Catholics). 

Incoherently this was his own  brand of  activism disguised as originalism, even insisting that it ought to take super-legislative action to change the civil definition of marriage, ignoring the expanded role government today plays in marriage rights.

Yet as nasty as many view his dissent, it was less brutal and close-minded than what sprang from Thomas. He suggested the damage done by the government to the LBGTs  who want to marry was grossly exaggerated. “All people have dignity,” he began, stating the obvious. “Human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved. Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

The view that government has no role in advancing human dignity is hard to swallow on any side.  But at least another dissenter, Alito, focused on a more frequent if ridiculous worry -- that religions that resist same sex marriages will be mocked into agreement.  The secular decision  “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy,” Alito wrote. “In the course of its opinion, the majority compares traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for African-Americans and women. The implications of this analogy will be exploited by those who are determined to stamp out every vestige of dissent” – in other words intimidating churchgoers to give in.

Alito’s fear implies the religious will react violently or are easily swayed in their convictions. He suffers from horrible timing.  If nothing else on a different issue of terrorist massacre, the religious in Charleston have just demonstrated extraordinary charity, tolerance and forgiveness of a racist while peacefully insisting on their rights.

That is the analogy most people will see, not Alito's scare tactics. No wonder Kennedy believes we are mature enough.  Maturity vs. appeals to fear are becoming a determinative factor in American progress.  

The ruling reaffirms the freedom of religion, the value of marriage  and tells the government to keep its nose out of what couples can enjoy full legal recognition of marriage.

Scalia’s colleagues still rely on his First Amendment passion, particularly on issues he has long felt strongly about, such as the ambiguity in California law that sentences the convicted to longer terms than needed. So he was chosen to write that 7-1 opinion issued June 26 (California vs. Johnson). 

But it was a bone after the  enormous double whammy that left him pushing words around too loosely and way off target, insulting colleagues on the right even more than the left.

No wonder his  reputation for ferocity no longer scares people or carries that old ideological weight.

Once praised as a master word hustler
Scalia is commonly outmuscled 
He’s been left in a lather
And reduced to blather
Not once but twice out rustled 

With all apologies to Edward Lear

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.



Monday, June 15, 2015

ALDERMEN MAKE COST TO MPS, IN-HOUSE OVERSIGHT ESSENTIAL TO FUTURE CHARTER SCHOOL DEALS

By Dominique Paul Noth

JS coverage rushed past the innovative scrutiny of
Ald. Kovac's winning ordinances June 11.
A five year moratorium on City Hall creating charter schools had become a symbolic cause of the Stop MPS Takeover movement and drew an overflow crowd of worried charter supporters and anxious MPS families to the June 11 hearing by the influential Common Council Steering & Rules Committee.

The only newspaper coverage of the hearing by Journal Sentinel missed the heart of what actually happened – a three to one victory for more scrupulous public standards and a deliberate set of barriers if not absolute halt to the creation of more city authorized charter schools. 

Nor did any establishment media touch the primary motive for tabling the moratorium proposal. 

Most aldermen thought that idea was too easy to reverse in future council votes and probably too aggressive a stick in the eye of the Madison legislature. The state, alas, has the purse strings and legislative authority to take away the Common Council’s power to approve its own schools. 

Not that the aldermen didn’t sympathize with or share the outrage at the interference from Madison by this constantly evolving Darling-Kooyenga K-12 hustle, whose autocratic motives and clumsy research leap off the pages of their original fancy brochure proposal. 

Except the Darling-Kooyenga hustle wasn’t in front of the aldermen. They just didn’t like the strategy of the ordinance author, Ald. Tony Zielinksi. Some also took Zielinski’s effort as overwrought opportunism to court votes since next April he faces a former school board member, Meagan Holman, who has sometimes supported charter projects.  They may agree on the bubble-headedness emanating from Madison, but local officials are touchy if proposed ordinances seem too obviously election motivated.

So without the charter movement crowd or the reporter much noticing, in two new ordinances sponsored by vice chair Nik Kovac the panel required the Charter School Review Committee (CSRC) to add to its evaluation criteria the financial impact on MPS of any new school considered. That puts the onus back on how the state uses taxpayer money for schools and forces the Common Council to acknowledge up front its culpability in MPS fortunes.

The committee also imposed controls that will shut down the often automatic financial spigot enjoyed by Howard Fuller and his Marquette University Institute for the Transformation of Learning. (Approved city charters almost routinely receive large federal startup grants.)

Look in vain inside the JS story for information about these major changes and even the rebuke to CSRC chair Jeanette Mitchell for not providing aldermen with better information. 

Quietly the aldermen had recognized that something needed to be done about the flawed funding formula that means every new charter it allowed was stealing money from MPS and fudging the income and population realities of the city.  Meanwhile the runaway train that is Wisconsin’s current government continues to expand the failed voucher and charter models. 

It may not want to be but City Hall is part of the problem.  Of the city’s 10 charter schools with more than 3,200 students, only its downtown Montessori exceeds expectations (as it did long before it was a city charter) while the others often fail expectations. 

Some converted from voucher schools because they would gain more taxpayer money as charters.  A few are sincerely meant with new ideas for teaching, but struggle with staff and accountability goals. Others are part of the trend of national chains selling lower-cost promises, a revolving door of novice low-paid teachers, babysitting video games masked as education and friendliness at the entrance steps while actually treating kids as a new profit center, yet all these still lag in academic performance.

No wonder many in the movement had come to think of city charter approval as a pushover.

Until June 11. To the surprise of many MPS advocates who regard the city as unsympathetic, the committee insisted on better results and higher scrutiny. (How can Madison attack that?) What they passed will make it more difficult for charter approval and probably force re-examination of previously approved chains expecting slam-dunk expansion. The decisions linked any further growth of city charter schools to performance and professional in-house oversight – something like MPS is doing with its own charter schools, including those that chart their own course and those that follow existing training and union pay standards.

It’s been little touted that Wisconsin’s most successful charter schools are the tightly monitored ones of both sorts run by public school districts. 

The simplistic pros and cons of the charter, voucher and MPS debate brought an abnormally high turnout for this hearing – but that doesn’t excuse how Vivian Wang's JS story  didn’t see the nuances or the undercurrents. That brought complaints about the story from elected officials. Several aldermen felt their shrewd attempt at balance was overlooked. They learned the hard way that the intellectual colors of past journalism have vanished and today’s Milwaukee newspaper, in terms of thoughtfulness, is printed in black and white.

City Clerk Jim Owczarski moved in
One new ordinance turns over to respected City Clerk Jim Owczarski and his publicly accountable staff the office duties once controlled by Fuller’s people.

Owczarski confirmed in an interview that his public officials will be “taking over the staffing of meetings, posting of agendas, taking of minutes, and will likely work on the custodianship of records.”  The Marquette institute will assist in the application and monitoring process rather than staffing or even holding meetings in its own space, something that the Common Council didn’t at first know was happening when it selected this Catholic university division as  review agent. It has only belatedly realized how many schools guided through the city process were connected to groups and conduits Fuller was part of. 

The city also pledged June 11 that all future meetings of the CSRC will be televised – and miked, which hasn’t always been the case. 

The aldermen are tightening up, demanding deeper better reports from a CSRC  appointed equally by the mayor and the president of the Common Council (with the comptroller adding a financial officer). Under departed council president Willie Hines, whose appointments still dominate, the process drew constant citizen complaints of being too obedient to Fuller’s power plays in the national charter school network. Marva Herndon of Women Informed noted she was hopeful after “years of fighting with them” because this new action acknowledges what her group wanted -- recognition that “the Common Council was responsible for the CSRC” and that the past process “was not transparent.”  

Ald. Michael Murphy in charge.
The new council president, Ald. Michael Murphy, cannot be regarded as an MPS or MTEA proponent. He is respected for a crisp studious air and an understanding of compromise politics. He has been criticized for not being tough enough on charter and voucher schools, such as backing away from a stricter ordinance requiring playgrounds at all elementary schools, preferring a milder approach. He even chastised a research minded advocate from a community organization for public education, Schools and Communities United, that “your interest does not lie in the improvement and proper supervision of charter schools but their elimination,” sternly reaffirming Murphy’s  legal obligation.

He may not yet realize he is protecting a vapid ordinance written loosely in the 1990s, but at least he’s trying to tighten the system around it.

Consider the wishy-washy mandate in city ordinances: “The proposed school will operate an education program that has a reasonable prospect of providing Milwaukee children a good education.” 

“Reasonable prospect”? That’s a low standard, hardly a match for the original vision of charter schools. That was to innovate on methods and specialties or, as former president Bill Clinton succinctly explained, “They’re supposed to do a better job educating students.”

But during the Clinton era the city set up shop with a definition that has stretched the meaning of “reasonable prospect” beyond reasonable recognition. The original ordinance didn’t require annual external accounting to the public but at least required an annual academic “scorecard” from the respected Children’s Research Center (CRC), a division of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. It still mystifies citizens that schools that didn’t score well or didn’t show advancement in the past were given multiple second chances by the city system, but it becomes clearer when you look at the limp wording of the original ordinance.

Now it’s Murphy fielding lingering complaints from parents and community groups about what even fellow aldermen call “abysmal” results and in philosophical musings he has demeaned the attitude that to benefit the minority community aldermen can let in schools with persistent low outcomes "because they mean well.”  

So the hearing revealed a new balance. Murphy wants the city to keep its power to create schools but seems troubled about the consequences, including punishing MPS with every new student and keeping alive several schools previously identified as laggards.  

Murphy on June 11 saw that both sides were primed for a prolonged debate over the Zielinski proposal with signs, children, speakers and more. The MPS parents and teens who arrived early for the hearing were somehow pushed to the back rows while the later-arriving T-shirt emblazoned Rocketship parents, middle school children and charter forces armed with green placards took the prominent rows before the cameras – a common public relations ploy of using children in the education debate.  But there were so many in both camps that dozens more were relegated to the overflow chamber down the hall (many muttered it was just the same as staying home and watching it all on the access channel). 

To the disappointment of the well prepared, Murphy shut down any public testimony (avoiding not just redundancy but the likelihood that the meeting would stretch into the evening). After minimal debate he sped to setting aside the Zielinski proposal – all with studious goodwill. These actions cleverly pulled attention away from the ordinances that vice chair Kovac had previously introduced and been smoothly passed. 

Murphy, as one wag put it, “runs a great railroad.” With brisk businesslike manner he made sure all aldermen had time to speak. It was an exercise in intelligent politics.  Even Stop MPS Takeover advocates were impressed at the positive results, crediting their “shovel and spade work,” as one put it.  “Dare I say hopeful?” one member told colleagues.

Clearly it is a different world from the Hines days and the Fuller rubber stamp even if it wasn’t the moratorium some wanted as they see all the out of town evils descending on MPS. But the demand for real proof of important educational gains deepened when the panel pulled back an outrageous but previously routine  request for a new five-year contract for the still on-probation King’s Academy, giving the new principal only two years to live up to her promises.

On June 14, even the JS veteran education reporter, Alan Borsuk, took notice, though buried near the end of a Sunday  Q&A “primer” for novices on what charter schools are and aren’t. (“Q. Are charter schools getting better results? A. Yes, no and maybe so.”)

But he offered the aldermanic cutback on King’s Academy as “a good example of how the idea is supposed to work.” 

In this era of gridlock where progressive Milwaukee is the obvious target of flailing  state government, there will be constant arguments about the best tactics for dealing with that Madison beast with the big teeth threatening further bites if local officials strike back.

MPS is the ugliest case, a farewell gift to Alberta Darling, presumed to retire in 2016. Despite bizarre acquiescence from County Executive Chris Abele buddying up to a beneficiary of his financial largesse, GOP co-sponsor Dale Kooyenga, this is still a horrible concept in new hair coloring

But it has spurred the search for citizen awareness, new strategies and even surprise attacks to deal with the power hungry who can’t be shamed or reasoned into looking outside their own bubble.

In its indirect assault on a small piece of the puzzle, the Common Council just took a tactical approach so subtle that the JS reporter on the scene didn’t notice. But the public should.

In the interest of transparency, Borsuk who did notice a bit continues as a Sunday columnist for JS but is now actually a senior fellow in law and public policy in a different division of the same university (Marquette) that employs Fuller as professor. It is also the campus where I have taught, organized events and am listed as alum. 

About the author: Noth has been  a professional journalist since the 1960s, first as national, international and local news copy editor at The Milwaukee Journal, then as an editor for its original Green Sheet, also  for almost two decades the paper’s film and drama critic. He also created its Friday Weekend section and ran Sunday TV Screen magazine and Lively Arts as he became the newspaper’s senior feature editor. He was tapped by the publishers of the combining Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for special projects and as first online news producer before voluntarily departing in the mid-1990s to run online news seminars and write on public affairs and Internet and consumer news. From 2002 to 2013 he ran the Milwaukee Labor Press as editor. It served as the Midwest’s largest home-delivered labor newspaper, with archives at milwaukeelabor.org.  In that role he won top awards yearly until the paper stopped publishing in 2013. His investigative pieces and extensive commentaries are now published by several news outlets as well as his culture and politics outlets known as Dom's Domain.  He also reviews theater for urbanmilwaukee.com.