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- John Paul Stevens on The Supreme Court's Voting Rights Decision
- Hating Trolls, Envying Jack Handey: The Week's Best Pop-Culture Writing
- Deception in Counting the Unemployed
- Back to Asiana 214
| John Paul Stevens on The Supreme Court's Voting Rights Decision Posted: 20 Jul 2013 09:27 AM PDT  Last month, in Shelby County v. Holder, the United States Supreme Court by a 5-4 vote voided the "coverage formula" of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act, upending Congressional authority to root out voter suppression under the 15th Amendment. To give you a sense of how radical the majority opinion was, I give you the recent words of a long-ago Republican appointee to the Court, a man who served 12,611 days as a justice, a man who presided over three of the four Congressional "re-authorizations" of the federal law. I give you, in other words, the retired John Paul Stevens, the lone Supreme Court appointee of President Gerald Ford, the third-longest serving justice in Court history, writing in The New York Review of Books under a headline titled "The Court & the Right to Vote: A Dissent." To the surprise of many, Stevens has offered a sharply critical evaluation of Chief Justice John Roberts' majority opinion in Shelby County- a rebuke that strikes like a thunderclap over a nation still coming to terms with what the Court's five conservatives have done to the Voting Rights Act and what it means for minority citizens. What gives Stevens the right to criticize his former chief in such a fashion? Plenty. Justice Stevens earned his conservative bona fides on voting rights long before he authored the Court's 2008 majority opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, a case that sanctioned the current generation of (largely suppressive) state "voter identification" laws. In Crawford, Justice Stevens stood with those who sought to make it harder, not easier, for people to vote. A state did not have to prove voter fraud, Justice Stevens wrote in Crawford, to justify using the threat of voter fraud to impose burdens upon registered voters. That is why his complaints about Shelby County carry such weight. In his NYRB essay, which every member of Congress ought to read before saying anything more about the future of the federal statute, Justice Stevens first takes issue with the argument offered by the Chief Justice that Section 4 (and Section 5) of the Voting Rights Act merited heightened judiciary scrutiny because those provisions treat different states differently. Stevens writes:
Both the underrepresentation of blacks and the overrepresentation of white supremacists in the South during that period contradict the notion that the "fundamental principle of equal sovereignty among the States" is a part of our unwritten Constitution. As Justice Ginsburg pointed out in her largely unanswered dissent in the Shelby County case, the Court in its opinion upholding the original 1965 Voting Rights Act:held, in no uncertain terms, that the principle [of equal sovereignty] "applies only to the terms upon which States are admitted to the Union, and not to the remedies for local evils which have subsequently appeared." Next, Stevens takes issue with the historical context in which the Chief Justice framed his argument. Voter suppression by whites of would-be black voters didn't begin in the 1890s, Stevens reminds us. It began decades earlier when Reconstruction ended. Yet the Court did not make that clear in Shelby County. Stevens writes: "Except for his reference to the fact that the first century of congressional enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment's guarantee of the right to vote 'can only be regarded as a failure,' Chief Justice Roberts's opinion gives the reader the impression that the Voting Rights Act was Congress's response to a specific problem that developed in the 1890s." Then comes the passage in Stevens's essay that naturally got the most publicity following its publication. In it, Stevens is not just attacking the majority's judgment in Shelby County but the fact that the Court's conservatives were willing to judge at all. What follows is a direct accusation against the Roberts Court that, in Shelby County, it engaged in a form of so-called "judicial activism" that conservatives typically decry. What Stevens is saying here is that the Chief Justice and his four colleagues inappropriately inserted themselves between the 15th Amendment and Congress when it comes to voting rights. He writes: The statistics set forth in Roberts's recent opinion persuasively explain why a neutral decision-maker could reasonably conclude that at long last the imposition of the preclearance requirement on the states that lost the Civil War--or more precisely continuing to use the formula that in 1965 identified those states--is not justified by the conditions that prevail today. The opinion fails, however, to explain why such a decision should be made by the members of the Supreme Court.
Finally, Stevens steps back from the four corners of the Shelby County decision and bravely identifies the hypocrisy of it all. He does so by citing the very same paragraph from Justice Antonin Scalia's dissent in the Defense of Marriage Act case, United States v. Windsor, that I focused upon here at The Atlantic the week it was issued. What I said then, and what Stevens is saying now, is that the Court's conservatives did in the Voting Rights Act case precisely what they decried was being done to them in the federal same-sex marriage case. As Stevens suggests, the result isn't just bad law: It gravely undercuts the Court's eternal concerns about appearing impartial. Here's how Stevens ends his memorable essay:
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| Hating Trolls, Envying Jack Handey: The Week's Best Pop-Culture Writing Posted: 20 Jul 2013 08:49 AM PDT Click the links in the article titles to read the full pieces, and let us know what we've missed: Last week's best pop-culture writing 
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| Deception in Counting the Unemployed Posted: 20 Jul 2013 08:47 AM PDT
Leo Hindery, Jr. is one of those big personalities in real life that we see characters trying to play in the movies. He sees himself as a larger than life change agent, working to rewire America's social contract to be more fair to American workers. A former CEO of cable firm TCI, then AT&T Broadband, Global Crossing, and the Yankee Entertainment Sports Network, Hindery helped lead firms to rationalize their assets, streamline staffing, and pump up productivity. From a CEO perspective, he saw businesses offshore their production and service lines rather than re-invest in workers in the United States. Believing that financial institutions were being deregulated even as the labor market was stuck in 1930s-era legal structures, Hindery believed that the American government, U.S. business leaders, and the markets were on track to wreck the foundations on which middle class America was based. He believed that workers would see their jobs continually off-shored, and their pensions and savings ripped off in a system increasingly designed to work at odds with them. In the end, Hindery surmised that this would forfeit America's future to other rising powers like China, which was making smart investments in manufacturing, infrastructure, and in workers. As a CEO who found his soul and developed a profound concern for the state of American workers, Hindery wrote a book called It Takes a CEO: It's Time to Lead with Integrity, in which he argued for a new deal between workers, firms, government and the financial markets -- one that was fairer and more supportive of the aspirations of workers. I got to know him when he supported some of the work at the New America Foundation, where I had founded the American Strategy Program. After this, HIndery joined the worker-concerned presidential campaign of John Edwards as senior economic adviser to the failed and now legally beleaguered former candidate. When Edwards' campaign sputtered Hindery was assigned the task of proposing that the ascendant Obama take Edwards as his vice presidential running mate. Obama adviser David Axelrod shrugged that off, but Hindery nonetheless joined the Obama campaign ranks as someone carrying the flag for American working families and the eroding middle class. As soon as Obama prevailed in his first presidential win, Hindery and many of the labor leaders and worker-concerned Congressional leaders working with him believed that their sector of campaign supporters would be elevated in Obama Land. This didn't happen. Instead, those with a general neoliberal economic tilt, who tended to see workers as micro-economic distractions to bigger macro-economic crises, took over the helm of Obama's financial and economic team. A former big-time CEO who had turned into one of the nation's leading supporters of organized labor might have been perceived by Obama as the kind of bridge-builder he needed between divergent national economic factions -- he could have made for a distinctive Secretary of Commerce. But in fact, has America had a distinctive Secretary of Commerce? Not in recent memory -- not perhaps since the late Ron Brown held the post. Penny Pritzker, confirmed just weeks ago, may emerge as a Secretary of Commerce who finally does something -- but Hindery's profile indicates that he would have either succeeded or crashed in ways there that made Commerce consequential. But while he was on the list for the job, the administration kept him at arm's length, in part because "he was too close to labor," a White House source shared with me. To make matters worse, Hindery offered a car and driver to his friend and business colleague Tom Daschle, former Senate Majority Leader and leading health care adviser to the Obama campaign, as well as a potential vice-presidential running mate or chief of staff to Obama, which helped undermine Daschle's political perch in Obama Land. While the press reported this as Daschle accepting a gift on which he did not pay taxes, the real story is that Hindery kept on his payroll a driver he had known for years, whose health care needs were significant, and who desperately needed a job lest he and his family face destitution because of their medical costs. Hindery didn't need a full-time driver in Washington -- he lived in New York -- but he was moved by the needs of this individual and wanted to keep him working. That's the guy Daschle would occasionally get rides from, and that's what cost Daschle any number of political appointments. Daschle's rivals kicked back with happy grins when they learned that the worker-loving Hindery had hurt Daschle's appointment prospects by helping out a struggling driver. This context is important because whether Hindery was maladroit at points in his own political aspirations -- which included for a short time considering a Quixotic run for the presidency to raise the fact that the American middle class was under siege -- he has been obsessive in getting a fair deal for and more focus on the real plight of workers. One of the ways the Obama administration, as well as many administrations before it, cheat American workers is through an institutionalized duplicity about worker employment figures. For decades, the only employment numbers that anyone would discuss were those issued by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). For the latest month, June 2013, the BLS reported a 7.6% unemployment rate, noting that U.S. employers had added 195,000 non-farm jobs and that there were 11.8 million unemployed persons in the United States. But in the last few years, Hindery's dogged efforts to get pundits, reporters, and policy practitioners to abandon discussion of "official unemployment" rates to "real unemployment" figures has percolated in the media more and more. The latest example was New York real estate baron and US News & World Report owner Mortimer Zuckerman's extensive discussion of the real unemployment challenges facing America in the Wall Street Journal last week, titled "A Jobless Recovery is a Phony Recovery." In a monthly email that Hindery personally sends to leading members of Congress, labor leaders, a large flock of journalists ranging from Fox News to The Atlantic, business leaders, and others, he dissects the BLS statistics and notes what is missing. Hindery says up front that the BLS only notes those specifically looking for work. That may make sense to some -- until one learns who is left out. According to the Hindery report, those who are left under the rug of America's unemployment mess are a number of discouraged workers who have given up looking for work and partially-employed workers. He notes those that BLS does not include are: a. Marginally attached workers, of whom there are now 2.6 million. These are workers who, "while wanting and available for jobs, have not searched for work in the past four weeks but have searched for work in the past twelve months." Currently included among them are 1.0 million "discouraged workers" who did not look for work specifically because "they believe there are no jobs available or none for which they would qualify." The zinger from the Hindery unemployment assessment is that: In June 2013, the number of Real Unemployed Persons increased by 757,000 to 22.6 million and the Real Unemployment Rate increased by 0.4% to 14.3%, reflecting large increases in the number of "marginally attached" and "part-time-of-necessity" workers. In other words, BLS reports that official unemployment stayed flat at 7.6% while Hindery's more extensive figures show that real unemployment increased by 0.4% to 14.3%. As America struggles with not only those entering the workforce now but also those trying to stay in it and get back into it, it's important to realize that the scale of need is about 22.6 million jobs. That should be the policy target -- not some scaled down version that is more politically palatable. For those interested, here is the Hindery report on real unemployment for June 2013. If anyone would like to receive this report on a monthly basis, email me at "sclemons @ theatlantic.com" or send a note to me on Twitter at @SCClemons, and I will forward my monthly report to those interested. 
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| Posted: 20 Jul 2013 06:49 AM PDT Let me try to work through a few of the leads, responses, red herrings, and insights that readers have sent in since the crash two weeks ago. 1) An illuminating video recreation. Here is a useful animation of the difference between a normal "stabilized" approach to San Francisco's runway 28L, and what can be deduced about flight 214's path. A professional pilot added this commentary about the clip:
2) What's wrong with "Confucius in the cockpit" / "this is how Asians fly" hypotheses. If you've been following this topic, you've seen countless circulated emails from Western pilots alarmed at what they have seen at Asian, and especially Korean and Chinese, flight schools and airlines. I don't have time to fish these all out at the moment. I will say that if you'd like a bracing retort, the place to start is with the "Ask a Korean" site, notably this post (which goes right at Malcolm Gladwell-ism) and then this omnibus followup, including a reply from Gladwell. When I can I will try to give a Solomonic pronouncement on winners and losers in this dispute. Two-sentence preview: Of course Asian-style education and culture can lead to distinctive dynamics in the workplace or in an airline cockpit. But I'm skeptical of moving directly to civilizational interpretations of events with more modest potential explanations. (OK, a third sentence: At face value it appears that for some reason there was a failure of basic flying skills here, but just the same appeared to be true in the 2009 Colgan crash in Buffalo, whose two home-grown American pilots had no known connection to Confucianism.) 3) The NASA view of culture in the cockpit. One of the seminal papers in this discipline, by a NASA official back in 2000, is available in a grainy but legible scanned version of the original printed pages, here. Worth reading in light of the Asiana discussions. 4) 'Children of Magenta.' In the piloting world, this crash has revived a perennial debate on whether pilots are becoming so dependent on automation that they have lost basic "stick and rudder" flying skills. This is the aviation analogy of the old debates about whether 1960s-era calculators were destroying people's ability to do math, or whether today's GPS systems are destroying a sense of direction. The difference is that pilots in most cases still actually have to land the plane. A classic discourse on perils of automation is enjoying new popularity now. It's a 25-minute lecture called "Children of Magenta" (with autopilot and GPS systems, the plane is often programmed to follow a magenta-colored line). Here you go: There's more in the queue, but that is what I have time for now. Essay-question topic for bonus credit: precisely because commercial airline accidents have become so rare, with the "normal" causes of accidents being eliminated one by one, the accidents that do occur almost always involve improbable, complex, surprising, or puzzling combinations of circumstances. In much of life, the medical-diagnostic nostrum that "when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras" makes sense. Accidents on major airlines these days are nearly all zebras. 
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