What the Supreme Court Isn't Seeing in the Prop 8 Case and What it Should See

First reports coming back from the Supreme Court hearings today about same-sex marriage have started to outline a mixed court, a Supreme Court that seems to still be trying to find its way around the argument rather than trying to find its legality. The trouble seems to be not on interpretation of statutes or relating the issue to the true ideals of the founders. It is instead the issue of states’ rights, not the issue of gay marriage. That is to say, a decision will hang in the balance not because of civil rights, but instead on the never-ending battle between the federal and states’ government.

If you feel something is wrong with that picture, don’t worry, you’re right. The issue of what effect a Supreme Court ruling over the 50 states should be an important consideration to make, but it shouldn't be the consideration to make; the biggest consideration should be what sort of civil rights the Supreme Court, the main law of the land, can side with. Regardless of the outcome, the Supreme Court should now realize that this issue is not simply the questioning of the constitutionality of one state’s proposition, but is instead the most prominent civil right fight at the moment.

There is no easy way to get around this fact; a Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage is going to have national ramifications. The main support for this is history itself. All major civil rights cases have left the jurisdiction of states’ rights advocacy and been put under the protection of the 14^th amendment by the federal government.  Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board, Lawrence v. Texas, even Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission all qualify as potential if not outright state-driven and Supreme Court ruled civil rights decisions which were then extended to all 50 states.

The Supreme Court today unfortunately has shown a lack of leadership in this matter when the ball is clearly in their court. The justices have a specific job to do; keep the rest of the government in legal check all the while evaluating questions of fairness and equality for Americans, not just Californians or Virginians or Ohioans. This is especially true for issues regarding civil rights, where a country, not provinces or states, are entrusted to take a stance in order to make sure that the starting point of equality is the same regardless of where one is born or where their life takes them.

It is troubling to hear justices consider the validity of the suit or even questioning their agreement to hear the case. It is absolutely their responsibility to decide this issue now, given that the states themselves simply have not coalesced around a true definition of marriage. That in itself should be signal enough to the Supreme Court that their intervention is needed. Not that there needs to be a firm definition of marriage for everyone to use from now on until the end of time, rather that there needs to be a final decision taken one way or the other.

This is because this issue is older than Prop. 8. Homosexuality did not spring out of nowhere in 2008, it has been an issue that’s been around for a while now, circa beginning of human time. It is also an issue that has already been indirectly covered by some already on this Supreme Court. Simply because this issue is riding on the back of a fight to relieve a state-voted proposition doesn't make it more dynamic or introduce special barriers. Those barriers only exist if the justices are too politically preoccupied with balancing state and federal powers rather than address a civil rights issue, or if the justices think that American society is simply not ready for a ruling on the issue. I hope for the sake of putting this conflict to bed that neither of those options are true.

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If You Are Going to Scream "Fire" Make Sure There's Smoke

As your cable news networks will have told you in the past couple of days, Sen. Rand Paul and co. stood on the Senate floor this past Thursday to filibuster the confirmation of John Brennan as Secretary of Defense by talking for over 13 hours straight about the supposedly imminent threat of warrant-less drone strikes by the United States on American nationals on American soil. While it's a great sign that we have elected officials supporting our right to not be blown to smithereens (whatever those are) at the touch of a button, the whole episode is rather unsettling for a different reason.

You see, there is a significant portion of the population from all sorts of demographic backgrounds that simply distrusts the government, thinking its only reason for existence is to slowly chip away at citizens’ civil liberties. This line of reasoning has even led some to believe that the United States government is secretly plotting, at all times, to turn this beautiful experiment in democracy into a “V for Vendetta” style totalitarian government. I am here to say that this worry of an evil government is an unnecessary one. Additionally, if taken seriously at the national level, it is downright dangerous.

The worry is as unreasonable as Eric Holder’s response to Sen. Paul’s speech-a-thon was laconic. This is mainly because if the United States of America wanted to become the Totalitarian States of America, they would accomplish that goal in less time than it will take you to finish this article. The armament gap between the populace and all the branches of the military are such that a slow and gradual removal of civil liberties would plainly be too laborious and time consuming when compared to what a quick strike would do.

However, let’s indulge those who watch New York fashion week for the latest in tin-foil headgear. Let’s assume the United States indeed wants to limit civil liberties. If that were the case, we would have to honestly say that the United States has been failing tremendously at it. The entire history of the United States constitution is marked by a continuous stream of enlargement of civil liberties, first to the people who are to enjoy them and even the specific rights themselves. Aside from specific Supreme Court rulings and prohibition, the net result of rights granted to American citizens is largely positive. Logistically speaking, that’s bad news for anyone wanting to take away ever-increasing civil liberties.

So why is this talk dangerous? Should we not just leave it to those of us who read too many Tom Clancy books? Unfortunately, the more this sort of sentiment is picked up by those with an audience, or elected officials, or the media the more exposure it is going to get. The more exposure it gets, the more misinformed the electorate becomes, and a misinformed electorate is inherently detrimental to the democratic process.

To go out and present reason to wrongly fear the government for limiting civil liberties it may have also has physical consequences; for instance when President Obama announced intention to more effectively regulate gun-ownership in America there was a run on guns, and it’s not hard to foresee that more guns will always lead to more gun deaths, accidental or otherwise.

It’s important to mention that these sorts of negative externalities are not generated by the people who fear the government or not even necessarily their message. They are instead being generated by the element of fear in each individual that is tapped into whenever these claims are made. In a sense making these valueless claims is a bit like yelling “fire” in a crowded theater  It is very helpful when there is actually smoke present. But when there is no smoke, and therefore no fire, we would all appreciate it you kept it to yourself and allowed the rest of us to watch the movie.

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You Are Responsible for the Sequester

So the sequester came and went, and the apocalypse did not come after all. Although to be fair it probably did not happen because the Four Horsemen were furloughed, but that's another story. Up until the 2014 midterms, all Americans will hear will be attacks by both Democrats and Republicans as to who is responsible for the sequester. Politically speaking they will each have good points to make, but neither Democrats or Republicans are objectively responsible for the sequester or the fight or the budgeting that led to it. The sad truth is that Americans are wholesomely responsible for the mess in D.C.

That's right, the big fight in D.C. between political fat-cats and their ever present lobbyist friends have literally nothing to do with the fact that the sequester passed. Instead, it is the mix of an overwhelming anti-tax culture and a hidden approval of congressional discourse that has allowed for the U.S. Budget to turn into a political "telenovela" over the last 30 years.

I will begin with the most shocking of the two previous statements; Congress' approval. Congress is actually very well liked by the United States electorate. Congress overall might be lucky to have its approval rating hit the single digits but there is a more applicable approval rate, the local lawmaker approval rating, that should act as the metric by which congressional approval is measured. You see, ask anyone whether or not they support Congress and you are likely to get a resounding "no", at least that is statistically the case. Ask again whether or not that same person supports their local congressman or their respective senators and you will get a much higher chance of acceptance. Last I recall, in my high school civics class, the number floats between 40-50%, but that may vary on year and textbook.

Whatever the number, it makes sense that the generic local congressmen would have more approval than the whole of Congress simply because Congress as a whole still exists. It only took 12% of the Californian electorate to recall then Gov. Grey Davis, and while California is only one state, it goes to show that in practice it doesn't take many petition signatures to send lawmakers packing. Yet with such low approval ratings, Congress is still there today. The problem is that the Congress is made so that individual congressmen are only responsible to their constituency, not the whole country. What that means is that the overall congressional approval rating is in fact useless as a tool for motivating lawmakers into changing things. If anything, it shows that at the polls, there is a much higher candidate retention rate than the overall approval rating would suggest because those disenchanted with the whole of Congress cannot vote to remove all of Congress.

Unfortunately, voter laws and electoral politics are not the core of the reason why the sequester took shape the way it did. Voting laws provide the structure for which a Congress can be universally loathed yet remain in power election cycle after election cycle. The main driver for the sequester instead was a strong anti-tax culture that has been building in the United States ever since the Reagan years.

To clarify, "anti-tax" is a very broad term to play with here, so "anti-tax" in this case cannot simply mean someone who dislikes paying taxes. If that were the case then everyone in the world would fall into this category. What "anti-tax" means here is that there is not simply a dislike of not wrangling in more money on the margins, but that there is a deep moral obligation on the part of the "anti-tax" people to limit government government revenue out of some innate fear of the government having too many resources. To be "anti-tax" is to enter the tax conversation with the idea that the government 1) has no responsibilities to provide any social goods to its citizens 2) is inherently filled with people whose purpose is none other than to harm its citizens in some way 3) exists, by evidence of taxation, only to restrict personal autonomy.

That definition above is purposely set to the extremes not to embellish or ridicule those in this category, but instead to be able to cover all possible reasons of why someone would have a morally visceral reaction to increasing or even paying taxes. This is true of any population in any country, but in the United States at least, there is an elevated level of "anti-tax" sentiment that is, rather poetically, supported from the top and sustained in a trickle-down effect.

The system works like this; you have people like Grover Norquist who generate the organizational level of the "anti-tax" movement. They provide the firms and lobbying groups who create the message in neatly prepared and presentable package. They then find people in the general populace who either 1) are wealthy enough to enjoy a good "anti-tax" message or 2) those who are not at all terribly wealthy but are promised great financial things to come and rescue them from their current situation should they take up the message. Those two sorts of people are then both involved in supplying the public petitions, the Tea Party rallies, and the "Average Joe" soundbites politicians in Congress represent and, by way of electoral politics, must appease in order to maintain the afore-mentioned individual approval rating as high as it is. What's the best way to do this? Sign a tax-chastity pledge designed at the organizational level in order to prove your words with actions.

The end result is political gridlock not caused by party bickering or hateful congressional relationships but instead by electoral hand-tying. This process should come as no surprise to anybody who was paying attention to the details in the sequester fight leading up to the final hours before it finally kicked in. What is surprising is that within that fight, at no point was there ever an argument from the opposition saying that tax revenue was necessary to protect the autonomy of those who struggle financially through little fault of their own. Why this was the case is beyond me, but I can think of a reason why.

If you think about it, the origin story of the United States did not come from an angry set of gods or the spontaneous creation of land emerging from the sea; it came from a tea-soaked tax protest. Colonists went to war for lesser taxes just as much (some would argue more) as they did for human rights. Because of that, having a fear of the government or wanting lower taxes is seen as something patriotic instead of libertarian overkill. Because of this, even those on the left of the political-economic scale in the United States are afraid of touching the subject of tax hikes even if they would in theory provide necessary revenue for programs that truly help people that truly need the help.

That is the very unique issue that the United States has with its taxes. The issue of over-taxation or fraudulent government spending isn't as normal as it is in other countries because it takes root in the very foundation of the country and to some the very definition of being patriotic and perhaps American. Call it mob mentality or peer pressure, this isn't a phenomenon that has been lost over generations since the fight for independence, it is part of the American identity to be wary of taxes and where they go. It becomes a tragedy when those who stand to profit immensely from lower taxes at the top range exploit this soft-spot to favor their tax returns. 

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