By “Yes” I Mean “No”
We’ve grown accustomed in recent years to thinking of the Supreme Court as having a “left” bloc, a “right” bloc, and a “center” block. In truth, relative to the state of the judiciary in the 1970s and 80s we’ve seen an entire wing — judges who took the kind of positions that Justice Thurgood Marshall and others espoused — to the left of the current liberals essentially vanish. Someone like Justice Kennedy should be seen as representing a center-right viewpoint and the current liberals are a center-left viewpoint. The more robust liberal jurists of yesteryear believed in affirmative economic rights. Barack Obama was on Chicago public radio back in 2001 and said he disavowed those views:
“Maybe i am showing my bias here as a legislator as well as a law professor, but you know, I am not optimistic about bringing about major redistributive change through the courts,” he said. “You know the institution just isn’t structured that way. Just look at very rare examples where during he desegregation era the court was willing to, for example, order … changes that cost money to local school district[s], and the court was very uncomfortable with it. It was hard to manage, it was hard to figure out, you start getting into all sorts of separation of powers issues in terms of the court monitoring or engaging in a process that is essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time. The court is not very good at it, and politically it is hard to legitimize opinions from the court in that regard. So I think that although you can craft theoretical justifications for it legally, I think any three of us sitting here could come up with a rationale for bringing about economic change through the courts, I think that as a practical matter that our institutions are just poorly equipped to do it.”
This should all be clear enough, but a lot of the right-wing, led by the McCain campaign and the Drudge Report, have decided that it would be good to pretend that Obama said the opposite of what he said. So we get a series of posts by Mark Levin dedicated to that idea. But the text is clear — Obama thinks you could come up with a rationale for affirmative economic rights if you wanted to, but that it would be a bad idea to do so. On this topic, the right would do well to take “yes” for an answer.
59 Responses to “By “Yes” I Mean “No””
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October 27th, 2008 at 3:12 pm
The point is, they found him using the word “redistributive” and that’s all they really need to keep running around calling him a socialist. No one said they had to understand or even pretend to understand what he was trying to say. They’re also counting on really dumb journalists who don’t quite understand what he was asked and what he was saying. Pathetic, but in the last eight days, what do you expect?
October 27th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
He doesn’t say it’s a bad idea. He says it’s not practical given the current structure of the judiciary. This passage is inconclusive on his actual views of redistribution, although I didn’t read the linked piece. It’s not clear whether his stated position here would change or not if the branch of government in question was the legislature.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
It’s really easy to make your point when you leave out half of the quote:
“I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”
October 27th, 2008 at 3:36 pm
“On this topic, the right would do well to take “yes” for an answer.”
They would do well to aquire some basic reading comprehension skills.
October 27th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
WBEZ has posted a blog entry with links to all their Obama interviews. Web site is slow so I imagine traffic is heavy:
http://apps.wbez.org/blog/?p=639
October 27th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
You’re right, Dave: that quote you highlighted, in which Barack Obama states that it’s best to bring about economic change by means other than the courts, is a clear indicator that Barack Obama intends to bring about economic change through the courts.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
Dave’s talking about a different question. He doesn’t like the idea of redistributive change regardless of the political means employed.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
ok i’m done, today was officially the last straw. i quit mccain… i quit, i’m done and i’ve lost all respect i had for him. why? he definitely grabbed hold of the obama interview but he quoted it in full and bashed the civil rights movement in the process. that’s just ignorant and now i know he’s gone off the deep end.
Is he crazy? I am seriously offended. One of the things that King advocated for was an economic civil rights movement! And yes, it involved the distribution of wealth because hey, black folks were in a pretty terrible situation after being denied civil rights since… i dunno slavery? And yea, the fact that that economic civil rights movement failed (even though Nixon supported it… random) is part of the reason why most black people are in terrible economic situations today.. I feel like I’m going insane! I swear, the next thing I’m going to hear is that the voting rights act is socialism. or hey, we really shouldn’t have passed that civil rights act in ‘64 since we’re strict constitutionalists and all. To bash Obama for saying “hey, yea, the civil rights movement should have done more on the ground to accomplish their goals and redistribute the wealth” is idiotic. This whole socialism marxism crap has just gone too far.
it’s like any and every opportunity he gets to pounce on obama… no matter how stupid or offensive it is… he does it!
I’m a moderate independent black voter that has dabbled with voting for the GOP before. Honestly, this is the kind of crap that keeps me from voting for the party or joining the party. And it simply reinforces to the rest of the 94% of black folks who hate the GOP why they dislike the group in the first place. Ugh!
(Oh yeah, and Sarah Palin didn’t exactly help either *rolls eyes*)
————-
“In a radio interview revealed today, he said that one of the quote — “tragedies” of the civil rights movement is that it didn’t bring about a redistribution of wealth in our society. He said, and I quote, “One of the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change,” said McCain at a half-full rally in Kettering, Ohio. “That’s what change means for the Obama administration. They’re redistributing. It means taking your money and giving it to someone else.”
October 27th, 2008 at 4:31 pm
Here’s the key passage from Obama (sorry about the horrific transcription):
“i mean if you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movemtn 39:48 and its litigation strategy and the court i think wehere it succeeded was to vest formal rigths in previously dispossessed peoples so that i would not have the right to vote would now be able to sit at lunch counter and as lpong as i coudl pay for it would be ok 40:10 but the supreme court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth and sort of basic issues of political and economic justice in this society and to that extent as radical as people try to characterize the warren court it wasnt that radical 40;30 it didnt break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the constituion at least as it has been interpreted and the warren court interpreted it generally in the same way that the constitution is a document of negative liberties 40:43 says what the states cant do to you says what the federal govt cant do to you but it doesnt say what the federal govt or state govt mst do on your behalf and that hasnt shifted and i think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was that 41:01 the civil rights movement becaem so court focused i think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and organizing activities 41:12 on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change 41:20 and in some ways we still suffer from that.”
So, Obama is saying that it was a tragedy that the civil rights movement focused too much on winning individual rights and equal opportunity for blacks through the courts and not enough on building “coalitions of power” to achieve “redistributive change.”
This interview shows Obama the law professor and politician saying that to bring redistribution of wealth to blacks, it’s less effective to be, say, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court than it is to be, say, President of the United States.
Obama’s statement seems perfectly plausible: he’s spent years studying and teaching Constitutional law and he has concluded that his goal, redistribution of wealth to his race, is more likely to be achieved through politics than through the judiciary.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Well I don’t think it’s as cut and dry as you’re making it out to be. He says that as a pragmatic matter, courts shouldn’t take up redistrubitive policy-making. But – and to me as a conservative and someone who does generally buy in to how the courts have interpreted the 14th Amendment, this is troubling – he does say that you could craft theoretical justifications for courts trying, and seems to think it’s a pity that courts aren’t suited to do this work (”I’m not optimistic about major redistributive change through the courts”).
October 27th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
A close reading of “Dreams from My Father” shows that achieving political power to bring about redistribution of wealth to blacks was the main goal of Obama’s life — those (personal power and redistribution to his race) were, precisely, the “Dreams from My Father” — up at least through the book’s writing in 1995.
This interview extends that up through 2001.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Come on, Matt. You read “Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.” You know perfectly well what are the dreams from his father, as indoctrinated in him by his mother: to achieve personal political power in order to redistribute wealth and power to the black race.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:40 pm
Asher, you ask a Constitutional Law Professor a legal theory question, you get a legal theory answer. He is saying he’s aware of the arguments that could be made, he knows how to make them, and he thinks they’re weak. The quote you highlight simply means that even though he knows how such arguments would be made he thinks their prospects would be poor. His message, which is pretty clear, is that anyone trying to achieve such goals would be better advised to work by building grassroots support and achieving a legislative result than to try through the courts.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
This explains, by the way, why Obama never bothered to publish any legal scholarship, even though he had the same post at the U. of Chicago Law School, “Senior Lecturer,” as Richard Posner. He didn’t see the point: litigation just wasn’t going to be as effective at getting “redistributive change” as would be “coalitions of power.”
October 27th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Obama is basically articulating the conventional wisdom among contemporary liberals. Courts are good for enforcing individual rights; they are not good for creating broader social changes that involve allocation of limited resources. To do that, you need to control the levers of powr in the legislature and executive branches. That is the only way of enacting the things that liberals want to accomplish – universal health, progressive income tax, increased funding for schools other social programs, and other redistributive policies.
This stuff is amazingly uncontoversial. If you want to make big changes, convince the people to elect you to office. I don’t see how conservatives could object to that.
October 27th, 2008 at 4:57 pm
His message, which is pretty clear, is that anyone trying to achieve such goals would be better advised to work by building grassroots support and achieving a legislative result than to try through the courts.
It is pretty clear. And perhaps it doesn’t make any actual difference what his legal view is here, so long as he recognizes that redistribution doesn’t belong in courts for pragmatic reasons. But I do get the sense that he would be happy to read positive rights into the 14th Amendment if he thought courts could handle the work. And I think it’s fair to say that he probably thinks the Court got San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez wrong.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
As usual, I think Matt is being more than a little disingenuous. Obama clearly doesn’t have any philosophical objections to positive rights, but thinks that as a practical matter the courts are incapable of delivering them. I think it’s dangerous to have anyone near the levers of power who supports the Orwellian concept of positive rights. Levin is right to be alarmed.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:05 pm
steve sailor
you’re joking right?
i seriously hope you’re joking
October 27th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
I think it’s dangerous to have anyone near the levers of power who supports the Orwellian concept of positive rights.
Like FDR?
October 27th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Obama is basically articulating the conventional wisdom among contemporary liberals. Courts are good for enforcing individual rights; they are not good for creating broader social changes that involve allocation of limited resources. To do that, you need to control the levers of powr in the legislature and executive branches. That is the only way of enacting the things that liberals want to accomplish – universal health, progressive income tax, increased funding for schools other social programs, and other redistributive policies.
This stuff is amazingly uncontoversial. If you want to make big changes, convince the people to elect you to office. I don’t see how conservatives could object to that.
Yeah I agree with “blah.” You need broad social movements, not just judges creating law. I heard Limbaugh playing this stuff on his show today. “Redistribution! Redistribution!” “Spreading the wealth!”
Like Governor Palin redistributing the oil companies’ profits to Alaskan voters?
October 27th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
This is an absolute game-changer, no doubt about it. This is the beginning of the end for Obama. If there is one thing that could change the course of this election, it is an esoteric debate about 14th Amendment jurisprudence. I am Joe the Strict Constructionist!
October 27th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Anon, Steve Sailer is not joking, he just hopes that no-one has actually read the book he traduces.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Just wanted to point out that as much as Steve Sailer sounds like one of those retrogrades that escape from the zoo and wind up at the McCain-Palin rallies accusing Obama of being a black nationalist abortionist islamic socialist, keep in mind he was still perfectly willing to support him so long as he promised to keep the mexicans out of the country.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:28 pm
The subtle point is that Obama sees redistribution as a continuation of the civil rights movement — i.e., it’s for blacks.
As a practical matter, however, he understands that to take money from whites and give it to blacks, which is what he cares about, his dreams from his father, he’ll need to asseble broad “coalitions of power.” He can’t just hand out money on a blacks-only basis. He’s got to cut all sorts of people in on the deal.
The problem with that is that his goal then becomes vastly more expensive. The U.S. can afford to subsidize the descendants of slaves as a form of reparations. What we can’t afford to do is cut everybody else in on the deal in order to make it politically palatable.
We’ve seen that with the broad bipartisan consensus for more minority homeownership that caused the mortgage meltdown. Bush’s denunciations of down payments as the chief barrier to adding 5.5 million new minority homeowners would have been less disastrous if only he’d said: “No down payments for blacks. Everybody else still has to put money down.” But, you can’t be that obvious about it. So, huge amounts of money flowed to non-blacks (especially to Hispanics), and here we are. Bush helped increase the amount of mortgage money for home purchase going to Hispanics 693% from 1999 to 2006, with disastrous consequences for the economy. Mortgage money to blacks went up 397%, 218% for more prudent Asians, and about 100% for whites.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
This stuff is amazingly uncontoversial. If you want to make big changes, convince the people to elect you to office. I don’t see how conservatives could object to that.
Other than the wee issue they have with the potential changes in question. Frankly, we really need to relabel the “conservative movement” as it exists in and around the Federal Government.
Broadly, they want all of the existing capital, IOUs for all future capital from the next generation of taxpayers, and to husband all opportunities to accumulate capital. Policies towards that end are the only ones that their leaders give any priority.
But, the “Scrooge McDuck movement” lacks punch.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
Sailer, stop being a douche bag if you can. If you a problem with any specific policy advocated by Obama, state the policy and your objection.
The policies that I have seen advocated by Obama will benefit blacks – as well as whites and Hispanics and Asians.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Sailer, stop being a douche bag if you can
That’s like asking him to stop being Steve Sailer–like asking him not to be. For Steve Sailer to stop being a douche bag would be a logical contradiction. Douchebaggery is his very essence. A non-douchey Steve Sailer would be like a square circle.
October 27th, 2008 at 5:48 pm
Run Steve, run! The black folks is comin’ for your plasma screen and your Hummer! Take your women and head for the hills!
October 27th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
We’ve seen that with the broad bipartisan consensus for more minority homeownership that caused the mortgage meltdown.
How does Steve Sailer explain the presence of a housing bubble in countries like Ireland, Spain, & the UK? Does he blame relaxed lending standards to Poles in Liverpool?
October 27th, 2008 at 6:12 pm
This explains, by the way, why Obama never bothered to publish any legal scholarship, even though he had the same post at the U. of Chicago Law School, “Senior Lecturer,” as Richard Posner.
Yes, because the only thing that kept Posner employed in his part-time gig was his publishing.
(By the way, I had them both. Obama was about six trillion times better in the classroom, and I didn’t even like him as much as my classmates. As good as Posner is in writing, he’s that bad at lecturing.)
October 27th, 2008 at 6:29 pm
ok so let me get this straight
obama is embracing a conservative position… and conservatives are mad?
do conservatives have a monopoly on conservatism? and sheesh, what IS conservatism in 2008? mccain is proposing to federally subsidize mortgages! Alaskans get 2000 bucks just for being Alaskans and living in a state that produces oil! By her own admission, Sarah Palin said it’s spreading the wealth! none of that sounds conservative to me. I’m also dying to know what Palin and McCain would cut from spending, what would get frozen in this planned spending freeze, and how they plan to balance the budget in t-4 years. oh yeah and build the military and expand our global terrorism fight… and provide increased healthcare and fix wall street. oh! and more jobs, forgot about that one. Man…slashing earmarks is not gonna balance that budget!
no but seriously, if there are any readers who define themselves as conservative, can you explain mccain’s plan for the economy and balancing the budget? i’m also curious as to what you’d do if you had the president’s ear… like what would you cut and how would you fix the economy and could you balance the budget in 4 years?
October 27th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
ok i’m done, today was officially the last straw. i quit mccain… i quit, i’m done and i’ve lost all respect i had for him.
I don’t give a shit about McCain. What I’m worried about is McCain supporters. McCain’s going to head off into the sunset. His supporters, whipped into a borderline-violent fervor based on delusions promoted by demagogues within the RNC aren’t going away and are completely detached from reality. They’re the ones I’m worried about.
October 27th, 2008 at 8:10 pm
This explains, by the way, why Obama never bothered to publish any legal scholarship, even though he had the same post at the U. of Chicago Law School, “Senior Lecturer,” as Richard Posner.
The reason people take “lecturer” positions in a university is so that they don’t have to bother publishing. It’s a purely teaching position. The question is not why Obama, who was a lecturer, didn’t publish. The more interesting question is why Posner, if he wants/wanted a career as an academic scholar, would take a position as a “Senior Lecturer” rather than a tenure-track professor.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:13 pm
“The more interesting question is why Posner, if he wants/wanted a career as an academic scholar, would take a position as a “Senior Lecturer” rather than a tenure-track professor.”
Err- Posner was a full professor (with an endowed chair) at Chicago until he was appointed to the federal bench in 1981. And since he has life tenure as a federal judge, he doesn’t really need to be a tenure-track professor anymore not that he really has to worry about getting a job.
Senior Lecturer is a position on the Chicago Law faculty for less-than-full time professors. Obama was a civil rights lawyer and then a state senator during the years he was a senior lecturer.
October 27th, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Err- Posner was a full professor (with an endowed chair) at Chicago until he was appointed to the federal bench in 1981. And since he has life tenure as a federal judge, he doesn’t really need to be a tenure-track professor anymore not that he really has to worry about getting a job.
Ding ding ding. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that Posner is probably on of the 2 or 3 most influential American legal scholars of the last quarter or so of the 20th century. He had the misfortune of being slightly too young and “unpredictable” when Bush I had slots open up, and much too old and unpredictable when Bush II did.
But he’s a crappy classroom performer.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:42 am
Steve Sailer, if you really want to advocate this “Obama is a secret black militant who wants to take money from whitey and give the plunder to black people” idea, you could at least do us the courtesy of quoting the specific sections of his book where you believe Obama reveals this master plan, somehow I get the feeling your extreme fixation on race *might* be causing you to misread things or take quotes out of context (much like I don’t take creationists very seriously when they paraphrase statements by evolutionary biologists to show the theory is full of holes, since in 100% of these cases when I go to look up the full quote it says nothing like what they are interpreting it to say).
October 28th, 2008 at 3:42 am
It is absolutely shocking to think that America might realign its policies so that African Americans actually stand a chance to earn their way to prosperity. We’ve certainly never denied them any opportunity to do so (other than owning them as chattel, selling them, torturing them, murdering them at will, denying them every civil right, terrorizing them, redlining them, and discriminating against them in every modern sense). God forbid we look to “socialism” when instead we could simply return to our proud heritage of slavery and terrorism.
Steve Sailer, you might want to read the New Testament before you appear at the pearly gates and find out just where you’re headed.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:56 am
The hilarious laughable whole pile of dogshit that McCain is espousing (thank God he’s losing, cos otherwise it would be too horrid to imagine) is that socialism consists of letting the W. Bush tax cuts that McCain opposed expire. How does this old fuck even face himself in the mirror every morning? I guess he puts on his game face so his filthy rich second-trophy-wife (who inherited hundreds of millions of dirty money from a bootlegging and corrupt government beer-distributing monopoly) won’t dump his ass out of the bedroom.
October 29th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
Seems odd to me that all of these conservatives are calling Obama out for saying that in this area decisions are best left to legilatures acting in response to the vox populi. I thought they were all in favor of a non-activist judiciary and leaving questions to the state legislatures
October 29th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
Hmmm… yes… the term “redistributive change” is somewhat vague. Given the rest of the interview, I suppose a reasonable interpretation might include things like affirmative action, fair housing laws, and having schools and publicly owned hospitals be well funded even in poor and inner city areas.
This attack, at its core, is more than just an attempt to paint Obama as a radical. This attack is also based on the right wingers’ indefensible belief that poverty is not a systemic problem but a personal failing of each person who is poor; regardless of age or circumstances. They are wildly critical and scream “Socialism” whenever public money is spent to try to bring people out of poverty. So much for “compassionate conservatism.”
October 29th, 2008 at 11:01 pm
All them words is makin’ my head hurt… I JUST WANNA SHOOT SOMETHIN!
December 6th, 2008 at 5:34 am
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama’s election as president probably does not herald a new liberal era at the Supreme Court, since none of the conservative justices — who are in the majority — is expected to retire in the next four years. But if
December 6th, 2008 at 5:34 am
WASHINGTON — Barack Obama’s election as president probably does not herald a new liberal era at the Supreme Court, since none of the conservative justices — who are in the majority — is expected to retire in the next four years. But if
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