Confusion Over the First Amendment
By Robert Parry, Consortiumnews.com, March 1, 2012
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Exclusive: The Blunt Amendment went down to a narrow defeat in the Senate on Thursday, but its contention that employers must be allowed to impose their religious beliefs on the medical insurance choices of their employees will remain a hot political topic – one dressed deceptively in the First Amendment, writes Robert Parry.

To state what should be obvious but is apparently not, liberties – even those cited in the Bill of Rights – are not absolute and indeed many liberties that Americans hold dear are inherently in contradiction. Since the nation’s founding, it has been a key role of government to seek out acceptable balances in this competition of interests.

For instance, the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech, but not to cry “Fire!” in a crowded theater. The press is protected, but that does not mean that newspapers can do whatever they want. If they print malicious lies against a citizen, they can be subject to libel laws – because it is accepted that people also need some protection against losing their reputations unfairly.


Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri
It also would be illegal under federal law to hack into a person’s cell phone as Rupert Murdoch’s media empire did in Great Britain. In the United States, there is a constitutional expectation of some personal privacy.

Similarly, you can make the claim that the Second Amendment gives you the right to have a gun for self-protection, but you’d be on a lot shakier ground if you insisted that your “right to bear arms” justified your possession of a surface-to-air missile or a tactical nuclear bomb. Then, the competing right of others in society to expect a reasonable level of safety would trump your weapons right.

Churches, too, were afforded broad protections under the Bill of Rights, but they still must abide by civil laws. For instance, a religion that practices pedophilia or polygamy or fundraising fraud cannot simply assert a blanket right under the First Amendment to do whatever it wants.

Yet, today we’re being told by the Right that religious liberty is boundless and that any moral or religious objection by an employer against giving an employee some specific health benefit trumps the employee’s right to get that medical service. In other words, the religious freedom of the employer should trample the rights of the employee who may have a different moral viewpoint.

A compromise from President Barack Obama on whether a religious-owned institution can deny women employees access to contraceptives in health plans (Obama shifted the costs for that coverage directly to the insurance companies) has failed to satisfy the Catholic bishops who continue to protest the plan as an infringement on their religious dogma against birth control, although many other Catholic groups have praised Obama’s compromise.

In this campaign year, Republicans have denounced Obama’s plan as an unconstitutional infringement on religious freedom. Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri proposed an amendment that would allow any employer to cite a moral objection in denying insurance coverage for any medical service. That raised the prospect that some owner who, say, considers AIDS a judgment from God against immoral behavior could exclude that expensive coverage for employees.

Appeals to the Founders

On the Senate floor on Thursday – as his proposal was facing a narrow defeat – Blunt said “this issue will not go away unless the administration decides to take it away by giving people of faith these First Amendment protections.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky claimed to be speaking for the nation’s Founders: “It was precisely because of the danger of a government intrusion into religion like this one that they left us the First Amendment in the first place, so that we could always point to it and say no government – no government – no president has that right. Religious institutions are free to decide what they believe, and the government must respect their right to do so.”

The Blunt amendment also tapped into the “hate-government” message of the Tea Party, that “guv-mint” shouldn’t be imposing regulations that impinge on “liberty,” either for individuals or the states. But these propaganda themes rely on a revisionist founding narrative of the United States, pretending that the Founders opposed a strong central government and wanted a system of states’ rights and unrestrained personal liberty.

This narrative — pushed by Tea Partiers and libertarians — always skips from the Declaration of Independence of 1776 to the U.S. Constitution of 1787, while ignoring the key government document in between, the Articles of Confederation, which was in force from 1777 to 1787. The Articles represent an inconvenient truth for the Right since they created a system of a weak central government with independent states holding almost all the cards.

Key Founders, such as Virginians George Washington and James Madison, regarded the Articles as unworkable and dangerous to the nation’s survival. They decided to reshuffle the deck. So, in 1787, operating under a mandate to propose amendments to the Articles, Washington, Madison and others engineered what amounted to a coup against the old system. In secret meetings in Philadelphia, they jettisoned the Articles and their weak central government in favor of the Constitution and a strong central government.

Madison, the Constitution’s chief architect, was also the author of the Commerce Clause, which bestowed on the central government the important power to regulate interstate commerce, which many framers recognized as necessary for building an effective economy to compete with rivals in Europe and elsewhere.

Fooling the Tea Partiers

Today’s Right leaves out or distorts this important chapter because it undercuts the message that is sent out to the Tea Partiers — that they are standing with the Founders by opposing a strong central government. This propaganda has proved to be a very effective way to deceive ill-informed Americans about what the true purpose of the Constitution was.

The Founders also spoke and wrote frequently about the necessity of trading off some liberty for a functioning society. Contrary to the Right’s founding myth, the Founders were not absolutists for liberty (beyond the obvious fact that many were slaveowners); they had read the works of political philosophers who recognized that civilization required some constraints on individual actions.

The Founders also were mostly practical men who wanted a vibrant and successful nation – recognizing that only such a country could protect the independence that had just been won at a high price in blood and treasure. To make the Founders into caricatures of religious zealotry, who would place the dogma of any religion over the decisions of individual citizens, is a further distortion of what the leading framers were thinking at the time.

Some of Madison’s key allies in the fight for the Constitution and later enactment of the Bill of Rights were Virginian Baptists who believed fiercely in the separation of church and state. Thus, the First Amendment begins by prohibiting establishment of an official religion before barring interference in religious practices. Nothing in the First Amendment says churches are exempt from civil law or that the government must help them impose their doctrines on citizens.

So, what is this coordinated attack on the federal government really all about? Clearly, the Right does not truly care about Americans having freedom of conscience on religious matters. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be seeing all these attacks on women’s access to contraception and abortion services. The Right has no compunction against intruding on the religious beliefs of those women.

Demonizing the New Deal

Which gets us to the key point about the orchestrated hostility toward any action by the U.S. government when its supports the welfare of the average American. What we are watching is a class war – as billionaire Warren Buffett has rightly noted –and that the wealthy are winning. As part of that war, the wealthy and their operatives have developed what might be called a “united front” against government, with poorer Americans drawn in by the so-called “cultural issues.”

The wealthy understand that in the absence of government intervention on behalf of common citizens, nearly all power would accrue to corporations and to the rich. The average American would become, at minimum, a second-class citizen with far fewer meaningful rights and, in some ways, a virtual slave to the powerful.

What many Americans seem to have forgotten is that the Great Middle Class wasn’t a natural outgrowth of the nation’s economic system; it was the creation of the federal government and especially the New Deal. After the Great Depression – brought on largely by vast income inequality and rampant stock speculation – President Franklin Roosevelt launched the New Deal, pitting the federal government against the titans of business.

The New Deal’s goal was to spread the wealth of the country more equitably by legalizing unions and investing public funds in building the nation, while simultaneously reining in reckless financial practices and restraining the power of the rich. Inevitably, that meant intruding on the “liberty” of the wealthy to do whatever they wanted. It meant allowing workers to engage in collective bargaining and to strike. It meant imposing higher taxes on the rich so the national infrastructure could be expanded and modernized.

Those efforts grew in the post-World War II era with veterans benefiting from the GI Bill to go to college and buy homes. And later, with projects like the Interstate Highway system, which sped goods to markets, and the Space Program, which spurred technological advances. Even more recently, the government-created Internet introduced dramatic growth in productivity.

These innovations generated great national wealth – and combined with high marginal tax rates on the rich – created a much more equitable society, both economically and politically. But many of the rich never accepted the social contract implicit in the New Deal, that all Americans should share in the nation’s bounty and that a strong middle class was good for everyone, including fair-minded businessmen who benefited from larger markets for their products.

Instead, many rich Americans wanted to keep their money for themselves and to pass it on to their progeny, creating what would amount to an aristocracy, a class that would essentially own and govern America. Of course, they couldn’t exactly express it that way; they had to dress up their greed in different clothing. After all, even the dumbest American wasn’t likely to sign on to a program for restoring the Gilded Age under an unrestrained financial system that had led to the Great Depression.

The rich had to sell their new era of plutocratic dominance as a “populist movement,” essentially as “liberty” from government. The national government, in particular, had to be transformed from the defender of the middle class and the promoter of a broad-based prosperity into an oppressor holding back “enterprise” and restricting “freedom.”

That required building a powerful propaganda megaphone with angry voices blaring out messages that exploited the frustrations of average Americans. Instead of blaming the rich for shipping jobs overseas and for eroding middle-class incomes, the villain had to become the “guv-mint.” The answer had to be giving money and power back to corporations and their allies.

In some ways, the Blunt amendment fits into this pro-corporate philosophy (albeit with a religious twist of empowering the Catholic Church’s hierarchy as well as company bosses with moral qualms). The GOP plan would have transferred even more power to employers over their employees’ lives, down to their choices of medical services.

The Senate rejected the Blunt amendment, 51-48, but Republicans vowed to make it an issue in the presidential campaign.

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook.com. His two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth’ are also available there.

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Blunt Amendment
byGeorgia Logothetis for Daily Kos
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The New York Times sums up the significance of yesterday's vote on the Blunt Amendment, which would have radically curtailed access to health care services for women in America:

Only one Senate Republican — Olympia Snowe of Maine, who is retiring — voted against a truly horrible measure on Thursday that would have crippled the expansion of preventive health care in America. The amendment, which was attached to a highway bill, was defeated on a narrow 48-to-51 vote. But it showed once again how far from the mainstream Republicans have strayed in their relentless efforts to undermine the separation of church and state, deny women access to essential health services and tear apart President Obama’s health care reform law.
The amendment, which was enthusiastically endorsed by Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, would have allowed any employer or insurance company to refuse coverage for any activity to which they claim a religious or moral objection.

That would have meant that any employer who objects to cervical-cancer vaccines could have refused to provide health insurance that covers them. The same goes for prenatal sonograms for unmarried mothers, or birth control, H.I.V. screening or mammograms.

Louis G. Trubek writes about her experience fighting for privacy rights in the Supreme Court:
We can celebrate Griswold, Roe and all the cases that stemmed from the Poe litigation. They are important landmarks in American jurisprudence. But as I look back I am dismayed by how few of the issues I was fighting for at the time of Poe are resolved. To be sure, we have important rights and more legal privacy. But we still have not provided all the support women need to combine rewarding careers and healthy families. Planned Parenthood is under siege and poor women who are seeking comprehensive reproductive care are still at risk. Presidential candidates can get away with saying that all contraception should be outlawed. Comprehensive child care services are difficult to locate, and fully financed family and medical leave is still controversial.

Eleanor Clift looks at the attack on privacy and the Blunt amendment saga and argues it's an example of why Republicans won't win the Senate:
A Republican activist who worked on Capitol Hill and who does not want to be quoted says the debate over the availability of contraceptives is “way bigger than a wedge issue” because it goes against settled thought for two generations, and makes the Republican Party look out of touch. “Younger people hear [a debate about contraception] and think those people are Martians. They are unlike me or anybody I know or care about. Republicans risk becoming irrelevant to a whole generation of people, and I include Catholics in that. This is a private matter between a woman, her God, her spouse, and her physician. It’s a crowded enough conversation without government in there.”

Carter Eschew at The Washington Post:
Twenty-five years ago, Ted Kennedy delivered a speech against Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork that even some liberal opponents of the former solicitor general thought was over the top. It led to the pejorative phrase, "to bork," meaning to assail one's character inaccurately and unfairly.
When I was reading about the Blunt amendment yesterday, I went back to Kennedy's words about “Robert Bork's America.” “It is a land,” Kennedy thundered, “where women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors … and schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution.”

It seems to me that we are actually closer to this dark vision of America than we were in Bork’s day.

Finally, in a brilliant (non-Blunt) column, Paul Krugman tears aparts the economic blueprints of the four Republican presidential candidates:
Mitt Romney is very concerned about budget deficits. Or at least that’s what he says; he likes to warn that President Obama’s deficits are leading us toward a “Greece-style collapse.”
So why is Mr. Romney offering a budget proposal that would lead to much larger debt and deficits than the corresponding proposal from the Obama administration?

Of course, Mr. Romney isn’t alone in his hypocrisy. In fact, all four significant Republican presidential candidates still standing are fiscal phonies. They issue apocalyptic warnings about the dangers of government debt and, in the name of deficit reduction, demand savage cuts in programs that protect the middle class and the poor. But then they propose squandering all the money thereby saved — and much, much more — on tax cuts for the rich. And nobody should be surprised.