POLITICAL SAWDUST

Various political, social sweepings from the last couple of days.

The following opinions are purely mine and nobody else's
Not content with losing on the omnibus abortion bill in Texas, a governor elected with less than forty percent of the vote is calling ANOTHER special session to try (again) to pass bills they couldn’t get through during the regular session. Restrictions that more than half of citizens of Texas have said they don’t support. Guys make sure you get out and vote next time and for heaven's sake don't split the vote for governor between four different candidates. The rest of us have to live with the results too.

During the rather epic filibuster at the end of the session a CNN pundit Chris Cuomo basically admitted he didn’t understand what was going on and why didn’t the opponents of the bill try harder to compromise? Chris you do know the meaning of the word compromise? That’s where both sides give up something in hopes of getting a result everybody can live with. It’s impossible to compromise when one side won’t give on anything and insists that YOU have to go along with what THEY support.

See also the Republican definition of bipartisanship.

Justice Antonin Scalia threw an epic temper tantrum yesterday over the majority ruling of the court on marriage rights. I mean epic. This just might qualify as what my Iowa born grandma called a little blue butter bean. I mean he just threw affirmative action and the core of the voting rights act under the bus. And he voted with the majority when they defined corporations as persons when it came time to hand out the political contributions. I mean, what’s his problem? Besides the fact that he’s Catholic and well over the Biblical three score and ten.

And last but not least we come to the other candidate for least popular justice. From a liberal point of view at least, Clarence Thomas. He is supposed to have said that affirmative action made his degree from Yale Law worth about fifteen cents.

Well, it was worth slightly more than that since he probably wouldn’t be on the Supreme Court without it. Current breakdown? Columbia (1), Yale (3) and Harvard (5). As it stands, if you aren’t Ivy League you probably won’t even be considered. I’m willing to concede that race might have been a problem for Thomas but there’s an even bigger problem than early affirmative action. Thomas was born in 1945 so I’m betting he got into Yale on brains; Holy Cross and Yale Law and admitted to the bar in Missouri in 1975.

The Northeast was still a powerhouse back in the sixties and early seventies and Thomas had two strikes against him. And neither had anything to do with race. He was from the south. And his last name wasn’t Cabot, Lodge, Prescott, Adams, etc. Pure hard work might get the black kid from Georgia into Yale Law but it wouldn’t get him into the old boy network that went back for generations of who knew who, who married who and who got admitted to the best clubs where the decisions were made over cigars and a couple of fingers of top shelf single malt. Politics just as down and dirty as the old Pendergast machine or Tammany Hall but carried on behind closed doors and with more refined accents. WASP’s as opposed to the newly arrived Irish or that uppity black guy from Georgia.

Remember the Grand Poobahs may have supported Kennedy for president but they never forgot that Old Joe made most of his early money as a rumrunner. And when LBJ became president? I’m guessing the entire Northeast had severe attack of the vapors. The old Dixiecrats probably figured they’d gone to heaven until Johnson started pushing the first Civil Rights Bills and the Great Society. Lordy, Lordy, he was worse than Truman! :-)