Citizen Pocan and the Truth

Citizen Pocan is lucky he didn’t have to take the test you have to pass to become a naturalized citizen. He would have got at least one question wrong.

The only powers the United States can constitutionally exercise are those specifically enumerated powers delegated by the several states and through them by the people. The power to guarantee the right to vote was not so delegated. It’s not that the United State does not guarantee the right to vote; it’s that it cannot. Only the states can. They retained, they did not delegate, that power. And it seems to me that for the most part, they use it; they do guarantee the right in question. The negative guarantees Constitutional amendments give to former slaves, women, and persons aged 18 or older are the result of fresh delegations of power by the legislatures of three fourths of the states.

The constitutional lawyers the PolitiFact investigators of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel engaged to confirm Mr. Representative Pocan’s claim of course know this is its explanation. That does not render the claim itself true. It is rather an obnoxious piece of ignorance, and as such quite completely false. Publishing it as true is a disservice to a public already superstitious about such matters.

It is more difficult to explain why the claim is misleading and false than just to make it. But the explanation is not something contemporary readers of the Federalist Papers – lay citizens – would likely have misunderstood. And the difficulty does not afford an excuse either to Mr. Pocan for making the claim, or to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel for rating it true.

What’s Mine is Mine

A few side notes to the previous post.

Weren’t Godfrey & Kahn the firm the Republicans used to redistrict the state legislature  in secret? Well, it just shows how effective they can be when the interests of their clients are at stake.

And didn’t the Bad River band run into a little trouble themselves? over wastewater treatment? Now the paper says Cline’s hands – I should say lands – are not the cleanest either. But prior bad acts are not the issue here; they may not even be admissible in court.

Of course the band would have to prove the likelihood of violations or other harm before construction of the mine could be blocked. But nobody really knows what’s in the body of ore except Gogebic. Are there sulfides or not? It’s a closely guarded secret about which the legislature appears to have been irresponsibly incurious. My hunch is, if there were none, Gogebic would be only too happy to prove it so. No worries! But no proof either.

Here’s something for the general public to do and see.

I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, in Dickinson County, site of the long-shuttered Groveland Mine. They made taconite pellets there as well. I guess they remediated the site too – more or less – according to the requirements of the times.

But it sure doesn’t look like it on Google. A plume of tailings is invading what seems to be a retention pond that drains into the Pine Creek. The water flows from there into the Sturgeon and Menominee Rivers (Google has them mislabeled the Iron River; I filed a report of error) and finally Green Bay. Nothing seems to be growing on the lands where the tailings were dumped – it’s now at least 30 years since the mining stopped – unless the vegetation is grey.

Google Groveland Mine, Felch, Michigan. You’ll see an oval body of water (the mine pit) surrounded by fields of tailings, access roads, etc. A bit south of the biggest such fields are irregularly shaped retention ponds, the easternmost of which clearly shows the plume. Pine Creek runs away south and east from there, while the West Branch of the Sturgeon runs alongside Highway 69 north of the mine site. They seem to have kept the tailings out of that stream, but I can’t say for sure what the smaller roundish shapes just north of the mine pit represent.

Local note: North of Highway 69 not far from the mine is North Dickinson High School, new when I was a kid and built no doubt with property taxes on the mine and the homes the fathers and grandfathers of the current students could afford when the mine was in operation. But where will the current students go to work? That’s just the way mines are. Fortunately, trees are still growing…except not on the site of the mine.

It’s pretty ugly from outer space. People who are unsympathetic to the Chippewa ought to look at it before they settle their judgments.

That’s another thing. Suppose the band does block the mine, or that litigation drags on. Who are the shiftless unemployed individuals who inhabit the taverns and hunting shacks of the North Woods going to blame? Not their shiftless selves. Racial violence has erupted from less potent causes.

But that’s mere speculation. It doesn’t constitute a reason supporting either side of the argument. Yet the band has proven to be well organized to carry out what used to be called demonstrations, and before that agitation, but now has the character and name of public relations. And maybe that will be the field of combat until the permitting process is done.

We’ll see which side is compelled to litigate at that point. Meanwhile it’s amusing to consider that a bill designed to accelerate permitting is so deeply flawed on the point of Native American rights that it will only delay it. It’s just as well; the lawyers were already rich.

Good Lawyers Get Good Results

It’s good to have legally recognized rights, but it’s even better to have good lawyers too.

I never doubted that the Bad River Chippewa had the right to decide what’s not in the water that flows through their reservation from upstream. But I have lately wondered whether they have lawyers with the skills and resources necessary to defend that right.

Now I see they will be represented by a specialized, expert team within Godfrey & Kahn. Attorney Pierson’s editorial in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this week shows he and his people thoroughly understand the legal ground of the right. His argument based on land cession treaties is already convincing, and he didn’t even mention the EPA’s grant of additional rights over water quality to Native American tribes so situated.

The upshot is, the mine will never be built without the consent of the Bad River band.

Here’s a notion: give the Penokee Hills back to the Chippewa – if not to the Bad River band, to the whole Ojibwe nation. The nation has reservations; for purposes of treaties they are a nation pretty much like the United States is. So they’ll be there forever. And so will the iron…

…that is, until the Ojibwe decide when and how to remove it. Same amount of ore, same amount of jobs, same amount of wealth creation, moreover the same duration of the mining operations and hence the jobs, and no legal obstacles – assuming only and reasonably that the Ojibwe would impose even stricter environmental safeguards than those Gogebic Taconite and billionaire Cline, through their friends in the legislature, chose to accept.

What were they thinking? Did they think they could steamroller the band once they got the enabling legislation? They wrote the bill to impose the greatest expense for environmental safeguards they would profitably accept, at the least actual level of environmental protection their friends in the legislature could politically accept. A nice balance! – all in active disregard of the band’s interests and rights.

An organization as grasping and arrogant as this is not the right organization to operate the mine. Anyway, they’ll have their hands full with Godfrey & Kahn.

The Self-Styled Republican “Party”

We in Wisconsin have seen any number of assaults by the Republican Party on people and organizations opposed to their political aims, indeed on the fundamental rights of those people. Not satisfied with the passage of constitutionally infirm legislation requiring the poor, the feeble, the old to present official pictures of themselves in order to be permitted to vote, they’d like to relieve a merely fanciful burden on poll workers by outlawing same-day registration. Apparently they consider this worth the money it would cost to implement, but the Governor does not. It just shows who is willing to pay what to disenfranchise poor folks and young folks who move around a lot and tend to vote democratic. And without the law the Governor would have had one fewer vote last fall, that of his son.

But that’s old news. Late news is that the Democrats had 53% of the legislative vote in that election, but won only 39% of the seats. Thanks to a really ingenious (it must be admitted) plan of redistricting that Republicans paid their lawyers handsomely to devise in secret.

It’s been a theme, really the main argument, of this blog to show why most of the people who vote Republican do so against their own objective economic interests, to try to understand why they do it, and to give them reasons to stop doing it. Just as the class analysis indicates the Republicans ought to be a minority based on the class interests it endeavors to protect and the number of people who actually belong to those classes, so it is a minority party by every measure except the occupancy of the seats of power. At least in Wisconsin. I assume without knowing that similar stories could be told about at least some of the majority of states where the Republicans control the legislatures.

So they just don’t represent that many people. Then how do they get so many votes? They can’t do it solely and only by making it harder for their opponents to vote. They can’t do it solely and only by frightening people about their class interests and fooling them about which class they belong with. They have to give people who don’t share, or who merely imagine they share, the class interests they represent some other kind of reason to vote for them.

That’s how the Republication party became the home of a bizarre collection of minority beliefs collectively labeled “social conservatism,” but the whole of which virtually no Republication – no one living citizen – accepts.

What’s in the collection? In no particular order:

·         That the Founding Fathers meant this to be a Xian nation.

·         That the mainstream media are part of a liberal conspiracy to deceive the public about etc., etc.

·         That abstinence is the only morally acceptable form of sex education and birth control.

·         That the moral obloquy of fetal stem cell research outweighs its benefits for medical science and the sufferers of disease, and the entire legislative agenda of NRLC.

·         That the planet is not getting warmer and that the scientists who say so are part of the liberal conspiracy.

·         That good people with guns is the only constitutional answer to bad people with guns.

·         That any and all advocates of gun control really just want to take away “my guns,” and the entire legislative agenda of the NRA.

·         That homosexuality is a curable moral condition.

·         That marijuana is dangerous because it leads users to become addicted to even more dangerous drugs.

·         That tithing is a religious duty.

·         That the world was created with the fossils already in it.

·         That homo sapiens is not a primate by origin, and the entire biblical account of creation.

·         That marriage must always and only be a union between a male and a female.

·         Ditto sex acts.

Social conservatives believe something obnoxious about conception too, but it’s difficult to express in a way that makes what is obnoxious about it transparent.

See how many moral judgments they make in order to defeat their political enemies? It’s not even nearly a complete list. Mind you, I’m not even trying to include in the list beliefs that range from covertly to unconsciously openly racist, etc., etc.

The point is, then, even if only two or three percent of the people feel strongly enough about any one item on the list to let it decide their vote – I’ll do the math. Ten items at 3% per item is 30% of the vote. What percent of the people are self-described social conservatives? What proportion of them shares the class interests of the electorate Republicanism serves, that is, the Few? Almost all the social conservatives are additive because the real Republications are, let’s just say for the sake of argument, better educated than that. They learned tolerance in college and money afterwards.

Or to do the math again: embracing social conservatism alone is still not enough to win elections because all the positions are minority positions. But take the 3% who may be expected based on objective economic interests to be and vote Republican, and add the 15-20% whom they’re frightened or fooled into voting with them on policy grounds. And then you add 30% more who are equally frightened or fooled, and who also happen to hold one or more of those noxious minority beliefs. How far have they gotten? To return to the original argument, the Republicans have to game the elections and the laws regulating the right to and manner of voting. If that effectively subtracts or neutralizes 2-5% of the vote, and social conservatism adds 30%, the 15-20% of the people who normally vote Republican might elect their candidates.

So it’s not about the 47% who happen to be entitled o something from the government. It’s about the 47% who happen to have been collected together around a set of minority beliefs and, secondarily, class interests. Reagan didn’t proceed entirely this way because he didn’t have to. The last honest Republican president was Eisenhower, who could have chosen to become the Democratic candidate instead, but decided, let’s say again for the sake of the argument, that the best way he could help his soldiers build a middle class life was to run under Republican principles as they then existed.

Now, Romney, to get the nomination, had to pretend to share most of these beliefs, and then, to win the election, to turn his back on most of them.

Is this the situation of a viable political entity? A bizarre set of ideological minorities that can only be kept together by a consummate liar? Could it now be possible to get rid of the Republican Party and replace it with….? I’m not sure what that new thing would look like so I can’t say what would make it possible. I can say the Republican Party looks about dead to me. If it hadn’t had real principles (A. Lincoln, T. Roosevelt) in its distant past, it would be.