Gay Marriage Triumphs, Roberts Be Damned

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

27 June 13

Every week, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich talks with contributor Eric Benson about the biggest stories in politics and culture. This week: SCOTUS defeats DOMA, the Voting Rights Act suffers a mortal wound, and Obama fights back on climate change.

he Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act this morning, while dismissing the case over California's Prop 8. The result is that same-sex marriages will now resume in California and married gay couples everywhere can receive federal marriage benefits. How important are these decisions? And what lies ahead for the gay-rights movement?

The DOMA decision is momentous, broad, and moving, sending to a just oblivion one of the most bigoted laws in the country's history, one that Bill Clinton never should have signed in the first place. President Obama's legal decision to halt the Justice Department's defense of DOMA will prove an important historical marker for him and the country. The narrow Prop 8 decision was largely viewed as inevitable, but the resumption of same-sex marriage in California, the biggest state, will have a snowball effect elsewhere, politically and with time legally, and I have little doubt that marriage will continue on a generally fast track as a national proposition. Though most Republicans and most Republican politicians still oppose gay marriage (among other gay rights), the conservative commentators Doug Mataconis and Josh Barro both noted last week that the right has increasingly grown silent on the issue; everyone knows it's a loser for the GOP if it wants voters under Social Security age. But let us not forget that were it not for the expected swing vote of Anthony Kennedy, the court's conservative contingent would have upheld DOMA. I had thought Roberts might be movable, too, if only because he seems to care about being on the right side of history (e.g., his Obamacare decision), but I was wrong. The Roberts Court continues doing everything it can to permit the abridgment of the rights of minorities even as it strengthens the rights of corporations. It turns out that John Roberts's famous laissez-faire mantra about racial animus also sums up his views about homophobia: "The way to end discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race." This will be his epitaph, and not in a good way.

So how big a setback is yesterday's Court decision - the striking down of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act - for civil rights in this country? And how will it play out politically?

In the short - even the immediate - term, it is a real setback. To take just one example: The Texas voter photo-I.D. law, blocked by a federal court last year, will now go immediately into effect, potentially disenfranchising 800,000 voters, according to the best-versed analyst on voting-rights issues, Ari Berman of The Nation. But the long-term effect of the Court's action, largely because of its political fallout, could be an anti-Republican backlash at the polls. As Chief Justice Roberts himself wrote in yesterday's decision, in the 2012 election, "African-American voter turnout exceeded white voter turnout in five of the six states originally covered" by the law. Why? Because the GOP was engaged in a nationwide voter-suppression effort last year, and outraged black voters were highly motivated to vote no matter how long the lines or other hoops they had to jump through. Now that the Court has given state and local jurisdictions a green light to pursue even more egregious voter-suppression efforts, it has also given the right a gun with which to shoot itself. Outraged Hispanic and Asian voters may well join black voters in both political activism and stepped-up Election Day turnout to counter a lily-white party's last-ditch efforts to use anti-democratic stunts to thwart the tidal wave of demographic change that threatens it.

President Obama has been criticized for falling well short on his environmental promises. On Tuesday, he announced he would use executive orders and the EPA to sidestep Congress and address climate change. Is this a winning issue for Obama? And can he really make a difference?

As we've seen from Obama's belated but ultimately productive stand on same-sex marriage, his leadership can make a difference. I don't think anyone believes that he can achieve more than incremental environmental goals by executive order; the legal challenges alone will long outlast his presidency. But by acknowledging that governance is impossible with the current Congress and taking action, he has catapulted over Washington to the voters and strongly identified his party and presumably its next presidential candidate with policies that are in sharp contrast with what he calls the "Flat Earth Society" on the other side. And clearly that stings the right: The knee-jerk howls that regulating fossil fuels is a "job killer" and "a war on coal" are really tired. (Yes, the Democrats will lose West Virginia for a generation, but what else is new?) As with gay civil rights and immigration reform (some of it also by executive fiat), Obama has put his party firmly on the side of the country's future, not its past. And by supporting nuclear power and (hazily) suggesting there are circumstances under which he could tolerate the Keystone pipeline, he is insulating himself from charges that he's an uncompromising greenik.

On Sunday, Meet the Press host David Gregory all but accused the Guardian's Glenn Greenwald of aiding and abetting Edward Snowden's fugitive travels, asking, "Why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?" Was Gregory over the line? And, speaking to his larger point, do you see Greenwald as a journalist or an activist in this episode? And does it matter?

Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he's covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he's conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer. Meet the Press has fallen behind CBS's Face the Nation, much as Today has fallen to ABC's Good Morning America, and my guess is that Gregory didn't mean to sound like Joe McCarthy (with a splash of the oiliness of Roy Cohn) but was only playing the part to make some noise. In any case, his charge is preposterous. As a columnist who published Edward Snowden's leaks, Greenwald was doing the job of a journalist - and the fact that he's an "activist" journalist (i.e., an opinion journalist, like me and a zillion others) is irrelevant to that journalistic function. If Gregory had integrity and guts, he would have added that the journalist Barton Gellman of the Washington Post, who published the other set of Snowden leaks (and arguably more important ones), aided and abetted a crime. But it's easier for Gregory to go after Greenwald, a self-professed outsider who is not likely to attend the White House Correspondents' Dinner and works for a news organization based in London. Presumably if Gregory had been around 40 years ago, he also would have accused the Times of aiding and abetting the enemy when it published Daniel Ellsberg's massive leak of the Pentagon Papers. In any case, Greenwald demolished Gregory on air and on Twitter ("Who needs the government to try to criminalize journalism when you have David Gregory to do it?"). The new, incoming leadership of NBC News has a golden opportunity to revamp Sunday morning chat by making a change at Meet the Press. I propose that Gregory be full-time on Today, where he can speak truth to power by grilling Paula Deen.

Did I Say Ugly American?

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

27 June 13

anks who live abroad famously feel more American than we ever did before. But the misery comes when our fellow citizens back home act like "Ugly Americans," as they have ever since the dramatic whistle-blowing of the National Security Agency's Edward Snowden.

Listen to Secretary of State John Kerry lecture other countries on their responsibility to help catch our errant techie. Washington was "just not buying" Hong Kong's assertion that the US extradition papers were not in order, he said. "This was a deliberate choice by the government to release a fugitive despite a valid arrest warrant, and that decision unquestionably has a negative impact on the US-China relationship." Weren't we the country that gave the world Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People?"

"Do the right thing," Kerry told the Russians. "Live by the standards of the law because that's in the interests of everybody." This from the country that intercepted the communications of Russian president Dmitry Medvedev during a G20 summit in London - and also gave the world Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, extraordinary rendition, the solitary confinement of Bradley Manning, and that wonderfully apt phrase "chickens coming home to roost."

Only days ago, when the young Snowden was spying on foreigners (as well as ourselves), Kerry had no problem. Spying was what spies did, preferably without scaring the children. We were the good guys and American visitors could still tell their British hosts how backward we found their Official Secrets Act and lack of a First Amendment guaranteeing free speech, and how invasive we found their CCTV cameras looking down at everything in the streets. Forgive me for being gross, but every time I went to London I had to fight the urge to pick my nose or scratch my ass while looking up at the nearest camera and shouting, "Do you like your job?"

This was all B.S. - Before Snowden. Now that he is spilling the beans about British as well as U.S. spying, Americans on the home-front sound more like a lynch mob. Even urbane sophisticates like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer compete with mossback Republicans to tell the rest of the world what to do. They also make it impossible for Snowden ever to get a fair trial should he return to the United States. If Americans - especially those in high office - want to fret about Snowden's oath not to reveal secrets and similar legal issues, they might start with their own responsibility not to judge guilt before the courts decides which laws to apply and which evidence to admit.

Even scarier, a few noise-makers like NBC's David Gregory and defense attorney Alan Dershowitz are adding their voices to the Obama administration's campaign to use America's incipient official secrets act - the Espionage Act of 1917 - against journalists like The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald who have worked to bring Snowden's story to light under the ever-present threat of prosecution.

"Greenwald, in my view, clearly has committed a felony," Dershowitz told CNN's Piers Morgan. "Greenwald's a total phony. He is anti-American. He loves radical regimes. And he did this because he hates America."

Senator Joe McCarthy could not have shown more venom - or made such a jackass of himself. Though Greenwald is not naturally a gifted writer and often more of a bulldog attorney defending a client than an independent story-teller eager to spread about the conflicting evidence, he has used his drive, smarts, and integrity to become one of the finest journalists of his generation.

As with Washington's barely concealed campaign to bring down Julian Assange and Wikileaks, Dershowitz has branded himself as an old-fashioned red-baiter. It's classic stuff. Define Greenwald as a radical with a dangerous agenda. Deny at every opportunity that he is a bona fide journalist. And ignore the obvious fact that Greenwood's employers at The Guardian know just how good a journalist he is. His rapidly growing readership would agree, and the profusion of important stories he produces makes him much more of a journalist than, say, NBC's David Gregory, who is little more than a talking head and curator of Beltway opinion.

But let me stop right there. It is not for me, mainstream pundits, outraged lawyers, or government agencies to define who is - and who is not - a "real" journalist. If we ever "license" journalists, even informally, we could lose most of the independent investigators we have. They would find themselves excluded from access to official sources and would-be whistleblowers, deprived of the resources they need to do serious investigations, blacklisted (as was the iconic I.F. Stone), and occasionally thrown behind bars. The result would not even have to look like text-book Fascism or a party-line press, just a permanently embedded media corps that knows which questions to ask and which subjects to avoid.

Just consider how narrowly they have already tried to frame the Snowden story, primarily as a case of individual law-breaking, possible treason, and threats to our national security. Whatever you may think of Edward Snowden or Glenn Greenwald, the bigger threats are elsewhere.

Do you want to live in an Orwellian world where your privacy has no protection? Do you want to live under a Kafkaesque government that makes up the rules as it goes along? And, if not at this auspicious moment, when do you plan to curb the power Google, Facebook, and other digital titans now exercise to do with your private life whatever they want?

Call me an old-timer, but these questions are far more newsworthy than whether Snowden ever spends a single night in jail, or whether Washington sends bounty hunters or CIA rendition teams to plague the rest of his days in whichever country he seeks refuge.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.