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States’ Rights Redux for Conservatives
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O
n February 9, 1861, a West
Point graduate and former
U.S. Army officer from
Kentucky who went on to become
a U.S. senator from Mississippi,
Jefferson Davis, garnered every
vote cast at a constitutional con-
vention in Montgomery, Alabama,
becoming the president of the
Confederacy.
Davis’s election, a provocative
development that ultimately
brought on the bloody Civil War,
didn’t happen spontaneously. A
series of lesser events in southern
state legislatures led up to it. One
by one, lawmakers in the soon-to-
be-breakaway states expressed
outrage over what they perceived
as an overreaching, liberal federal
government in Washington. They
feared an end to their way of life
(read: slavery) and, for the most
part, acted in concert with the pop-
ular will of their states’ elec-
torates.
This month, a century and a half
later, conservative statehouse law-
makers are on a similar march,
reflecting a dubious perception
that state officials—not the federal
government—ought to have the
ultimate say in politically charged
social and budget matters of
national consequence. And, as it
was long ago, race is the unspoken
and largely denied point of con-
tention.
The most out front in this debate
today are Civil War revisionists,
who argue that slavery had little to
do with the War Between the
a MeriCaN P rOgreSS
Sam Fulwood III
States because the conflict was
about allowing Southerners the
right to determine their own affairs
without meddling from unsympa-
thetic and hostile liberals in the
North. They and other modern-day
states’ rights activists are making
the same argument today in state
legislatures—and not just in the
former Confederacy—not about
to repeal, restrict and repress,” he
notes in his column.
And these states’ rights champi-
ons believe they have a new man-
date to do so. On the heels of their
sweeping victories in last year’s
midterm elections, Republicans
swelled their ranks by some 700
seats in statehouses across the
country, a figure that Reuters
News Service tallied as the
“largest numbers since the Great
Depression.” As this fresh crop of
conservative lawmakers takes
power, many of them express feel-
Sam Fulwood III draws the parallels
between the reasoning of the
Confederacy 150 years ago and the
misguided righteousness of some
conservatives today
slavery but rather new conserva-
tive causes.
As the new York times’ Charles
Blow made clear in a recent op-ed,
statehouse conservatives are
declaring war on minorities,
women, immigrants, and the poor
by proposing harsh legislation tar-
geted specifically at them. “In the
first month of the new legislative
season, they have introduced a
dizzying number of measures on
hot-button issues in statehouses
around the country as part of what
amounts to a full-throttle mission
ings of oppression by lawmakers
on Capitol Hill and the Obama
administration. They are taking
out their frustrations on the power-
less and underrepresented people
of their respective states.
A key flash point is immigration,
where some 15 states are debating
copycat anti-immigrant bills, fol-
lowing in the spurious shoes of
lawmakers
in
Arizona.
Immigrants, it seems, are the polit-
ical straw men for conservative
legislators to beat their breasts and
appear to be all-powerful defend-
ers of their community’s way of
life. The fact of the matter is that
such an argument is shortsighted
and potentially suicidal politically,
especially in Arizona, California,
Florida, and Texas, where the
Latino population is the single-
largest ethnic group.
Meanwhile, conservative legis-
lators in Kentucky, Missouri,
Nebraska, and Oregon think it’s a
good idea to defy common sense
and court edicts to propose bills
that would require drug testing of
all public assistance recipients.
The 1996 Welfare Reform Act
authorizes—but expressly didn’t
require—states to impose manda-
tory drug testing as a prerequisite
to receiving state welfare assis-
tance. But the one state that tried
to test welfare recipients,
Michigan, saw its effort struck
down as unconstitutional in 2003.
Blow makes a compelling case
that conservatives have their
sights on rolling back recent gains
by gay-rights activists, antideath-
penalty advocates, abortion-rights
defenders, and other socially pro-
gressive causes.
I’m only asking the obvious
questions: Why fight old, lost
causes? And haven’t these conser-
vative statehouse lawmakers
learned anything about U.S. histo-
ry over the past 150 years?
Sam Fulwood iii is a Senior
Fellow at the Center for american
Progress.
Obama Budget: Valentine’s day massacre
P
resident Obama released his
$3.7 trillion budget proposal
for fiscal 2012 on Valentine
Day and it immediately became
the object of a Valentine’s Day
Massacre by Republicans in the
House and Senate who want deep-
er budget cuts.
Lost amid the GOP criticism
was that President Obama pro-
posed $61 billion in cuts. His plan
includes a 50 percent cut ($2.5 bil-
lion) in the government’s program
to help low-income people pay
their heating bills and slicing $300
million in community develop-
ment block grants. At a time
Obama is highlighting the need for
infrastructure spending and a
clean environment, he is propos-
ing eliminating almost $1 billion
from grants that go to states for
water treatment plants and infra-
structure programs.
Republican leaders say that
Obama’s budget was dead on
arrival. GOP leaders have pro-
posed returning federal spending
to 20.6 percent of gross domestic
product (GDP), the average of fed-
eral spending from 1970 to 2008.
“Limiting spending to a histori-
cal average of some kind has been
a longstanding goal of very con-
servative organizations such as the
Heritage Foundation,” noted a
report by Paul N. Van de Water of
the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities, a non-partisan think
tank in Washington, D.C. “The
reality is, however, that policy-
makers will find it virtually
impossible to maintain federal
spending at its average level back
Page 4 The Portland Skanner february 16, 2011
T He C urrY
r ePOrT
George E.
Curry
to 1970 without making draconian
cuts in Social Security, Medicare,
and an array of other vital federal
activities.”
Trying to peg federal spending
to an arbitrary figure from the past
ignores the enormous changes in
American society that ranges from
increased federal responsibility in
the post 9/11 environment to a
flood of baby boomers reaching
retirement age. There are three key
reasons why trying to roll back
federal spending to 1970 or even
2000 levels ignores today’s reality,
according to the Center on Budget
and Policy Priorities report:
The aging of the population –
the percentage of Americans aged
65 and older will grow by more
than half during the next 25 years
– and that growth will increase the
cost of the three largest domestic
programs: Medicare, Medicaid,
and Social Security.
Federal responsibilities have
grown. Since 2000, for example,
federal responsibilities have
expanded in the aftermath of the
September 11, 2002 terrorist
attacks; aid to veterans has
increased as a result of the Iraq
and Afghanistan wars; the
Medicare prescription drug benefit
added by Congress in 2003 along
with health care reform will also
expand federal spending, even
though health care will eventually
lower the deficit.
Spending on federal debt will be
substantially higher than it has
been the past 40 years. The combi-
nation of the Iraq and Afghanistan
wars, the Bush-era tax cuts and
their extensions and a severe
recession have contributed to the
public debt being almost twice as
large (as a percentage of GDP) as
it was in 2001.
The budget debate isn’t just a
matter of numbers. The budget
also defines us as a country.
“There are limits to how much
Social Security can be cut without
undermining its crucial role in
reducing poverty and replacing
income lost when a wage earner
retires, dies, or becomes disabled,”
the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities report states. “Social
Security benefits are quite modest,
averaging only $1,175 a month (or
$14,105) a year) for a retired
worker. Social Security checks
now replace about 37 percent of an
average worker’s pre-retirement
earnings –one of the lowest of any
western industrialized country
–and that figure will gradually fall
to about 32 percent over the next
two decades, largely because of
the scheduled increase in the full
retirement age to 67.”
Obama’s pledge to freeze the
pay of federal employees and any
tampering with Social Security
would have a disproportionate
impact on people of color.
According to the latest “State of
the Dream” report by United for a
Fair Economy, 59.1 percent of
Blacks and 64.8 percent of Latinos
depend on Social Security for
more than 80 percent of their fam-
ily income. And, African-
Americans are 70 percent more
likely than Whites to work for the
federal government.
In his budget, Obama proposed
allowing the Bush tax cuts to
expire in 2012, ending subsidies to
oil and gas companies and elimi-
nating tax breaks for companies
that do business overseas.
Unfortunately, Obama provided
no details or specific proposals.
GOP leaders who insisted on
extending the Bush era tax breaks
for the wealthy are unlikely to
favor curbing corporate welfare.
It is clear than neither Obama
nor Republicans will on their own
volition protect the interests of the
truly needy in the budget debate.
That’s why Americans need to
mobilize to force them to make
more sensible decisions. It’s easy
to admire how protesters in Egypt
and Tunisia have rallied in recent
weeks to force a change in their
government.
It’s time to raise our voices in
the U.S. We have social media and
technology at our disposal. Let’s
use it to now let our elected offi-
cials know we want them to pro-
tect average Americans, not big
business and the wealthy.
george e. Curry is former edi-
tor-in-chief of emerge magazine
and the nnPa news Service.