The Real Bush Legacy Project

For the last several weeks, and I'm sure until George Bush steps aside next week as well as in tonight's "farewell address," officials of the outgoing Administration are wearing themselves out selling an image of him as a wise, judicious, successful President with bold vision and unflappable will. 65-70% of the country think this is insane, nor do they believe it, and going on television to proudly announce that the death of 4,500 soldiers was well worth the foreign policy catastrophe created in Iraq, for example, isn't helping. The question of how history will judge these individuals can at this point only be altered by whether or not they are prosecuted for the crimes they willingly committed.

I'm wondering if they even need to bother with all this. The Bush regime will have a legacy, and not just the expansion of executive power or the model for future Presidents on how to break the law repeatedly, treat Congress with nothing but scorn, and get away with it. No, there's an even more tangible legacy than that, which will play out every day for the next couple decades at 1 First Street NE in Washington:

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that evidence obtained from an unlawful arrest based on careless record keeping by the police may be used against a criminal defendant.

The 5-to-4 decision revealed competing conceptions of the exclusionary rule, which requires the suppression of some evidence obtained through police misconduct, and suggested that the court’s commitment to the rule was fragile.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the majority, said that the exclusion of evidence should be a last resort and that judges should use a sliding scale in deciding whether particular misconduct by the police warranted suppressing the evidence they had found.

“To trigger the exclusionary rule,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “police conduct must be sufficiently deliberate that exclusion can meaningfully deter it, and sufficiently culpable that such deterrence is worth the price paid by the justice system.”

That price, the chief justice wrote, “is, of course, letting guilty and possibly dangerous defendants go free.”

The case itself is noteworthy. Bernie Herring had an adversarial history with a cop in his Alabama town. His truck was impounded and he went to the sheriff's office to pick it up. The cop ran a check for outstanding warrants and found what he thought to be one, he arrested Herring. The officers detained Herring, and found a gun and traces of methamphetamines on him. Minutes later, the officers discovered that the arrest warrant was faulty. Nevertheless, he was tried for drug possession and sentenced to 27 months(!).

And the Supreme Court now has ruled that the evidence, gained through what amounts to a warrantless search, is admissable.

The decision in the case, Herring v. United States, No. 07-513, may have broad consequences, said Craig M. Bradley, a law professor at Indiana University.

“It may well be,” Professor Bradley said, “that courts will take this as a green light to ignore police negligence all over the place.”

Chief Justice Roberts, who was joined by Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., said the exclusionary rule was unlikely to deter isolated careless record keeping and should be reserved for “deliberate, reckless or grossly negligent conduct, or in some circumstances recurring systemic negligence.”

Of course, these 5 will decide what ought to be considered negligent conduct for the near future. And that line will get moved, and moved, and moved. Scott Lemieux has a lot more.

We'll be dealing with reactionaries on the Supreme Court for a long time, two of them placed there by this President. Civil liberties, women's rights, consumer protection, and a host of other issues will be at stake. Among the next up is the Voting Rights Act.

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to examine whether a central component of landmark civil rights legislation enacted to protect minority voters is still needed in a nation that has elected an African American president.

The court will decide the constitutionality of a provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that seeks to protect minority voting rights by requiring a broad set of states and jurisdictions where discrimination was once routine to receive federal approval before altering any of their voting procedures.

The Supreme Court has upheld the requirement in the past, saying the intrusion on state sovereignty is warranted to protect voting rights and eliminate discrimination against minorities. But challengers say it ignores the reality of modern America and "consigns broad swaths of the nation to apparently perpetual federal receivership based on 40-year-old evidence."

This comes conveniently before the 2010 Census and the next round of reapportionment and redistricting in the states.

That right-wing bloc on the Court is relatively young, incidentally. Weep not for George W. Bush. He's got a legacy. Not content just to screw us for eight years, the pain will be felt for decades.

When In Doubt, Blame It On The Darkies

I thought the idea that the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 isn't responsible for the financial crisis of 2008 would be self-evident, simply because you would have to believe that the system worked fine for 25-30 years until now, which is just ridiculous. But I underestimated the ability of Republicans to willingly delude themselves. They are desperate to find a scapegoat that doesn't have an (R) next to their name, and people with dark skin are an inviting target. I mean, you have one House Republican getting out the Photoshop and painting his opponent as a bearded darkie (the guy is in fact as white as could be and clean-cut).

So here we go with the blaming of the CRA and minority homeowners, claiming that the government forced the banks to give bad loans out. It doesn't matter than the biggest foreclosure regions are in rural areas and exurbs. It doesn't matter that the CRA only applies to banks and thrifts, and not across the lending market, and certainly not where almost all subprime mortgages were created. Bonddad has the best refutation:

While we're on the topic -- the CRA had nothing to do with the problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac either:

Note, too, that Fannie and Freddie have nonpareil lobbying operations and formidable political strength, owing to their hefty donations and penchant for hiring former political operatives. Besides, the agencies claim they've landed in their current predicament through no fault of their own. As Freddie Mac Chairman and CEO Richard Syron recently put it, the GSEs have been hit by a 100-year storm in the housing market, accentuated by some higher-risk mortgages that they were forced to buy to meet government affordable-housing targets.

The latter contention is more than disingenuous. A substantial portion of Fannie's and Freddie's credit losses comes from $337 billion and $237 billion, respectively, of Alt-A mortgages that the agencies imprudently bought or guaranteed in recent years to boost their market share. These are mortgages for which little or no attempt was made to verify the borrowers' income or net worth. The principal balances were much higher than those of mortgages typically made to low-income borrowers. In short, Alt-A mortgages were a hallmark of real-estate speculation in the ex-urbs of Las Vegas or Los Angeles, not predatory lending to low-income folks in the inner cities.

A simple Google search with help from Wikipedia would have revealed how clueless the CRA caused this mess claim is. But that's not the point. The entire financial system is under tremendous stress on the Republican's watch. It's their policies that are under the microscope right now. And they just don't look that good. So now the political game is to shift the blame to Democrats. And who better then to blame then ... Jimmy Carter.

It's just utter know-nothingism, but that hasn't stopped the Republicans before. Good for the CBC to challenge these racists directly, pivoting off of comments supporting this nonsense from Rep. Michelle Bachmann:

In a new letter to House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) obtained by ThinkProgress, 31 members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) call Bachmann’s claims “ridiculous” and ask Boehner whether her comments represent the views of the Republican Caucus:

It is clear from Rep. Bachmann’s comments that she believes that the bipartisan laws enacted over the past decade ensuring that minority communities have equal access to banking and other financial services are the cause of this financial situation. […]

There is no evidence to support Rep. Bachmann’s assertion that “minorities” caused the current financial crisis. Laws designed to open opportunities for equal access to credit do not require banks or thrifts to make loans that are unsafe or unprofitable. In fact, laws like the CRA mandate exactly the opposite. […] Additionally, research clearly shows that the majority of the predatory loans that have led us to this financial mess were originated by non-bank financial institutions and other entities that did NOT have a CRA obligation and lacked strong federal regulatory oversight. Shifting the blame for the current economic crisis to laws that allow equal access and opportunities to communities of color is ridiculous.

As members of the CBC, we simply ask if Rep. Bachmann’s position that it was lending to minority communities that caused the current financial crisis, represent the position of Republican Caucus?

I'm waiting for an answer.

It's The OVERT Dismissiveness of Minorities That Gets Me

Bringing the number to umpityteen.

In recent weeks, Republican presidential candidates have found time in their busy schedules to speak or debate before the Republican Jewish Coalition, “Value Voters,” conservative Floridians, even Wyoming Republicans, who hold virtually no sway in the primary race. They’ve also agreed to appear at the CNN/YouTube debate they at one point shunned.

But it appears that some GOP frontrunners are once again letting an opportunity to appear before African-American voters lapse…. The Congressional Black Caucus Institute announced in September that it had scheduled a debate for November 4 on Fox News for Republican presidential candidates. But a spokeswoman for the group confirmed to the Huffington Post that it has now been postponed, with no new date set. […]

Republican candidates have cited scheduling conflicts in resisting new proposed dates, [CBC Institute spokesperson Georgella Muirhead] said.

Yes, talking to white people does conflict with any date the CBC would set.

One of the biggest things forgotten in this reign of Bush is that the President of the United States is the President to all Americans. He doesn't pick and choose his constituents. We've seen that these Republican pretenders to the throne have no desire to talk with very large sections of the population. Not just no interest in their concerns - no desire to even TALK to them. It's a sad day for the Grand Old Party, which is building walls and gates around themselves so they don't have to interact with the rabble. The problem is that what left inside is inevitably too small to be a ruling party any longer.