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Immigration

Conservative Columnist Takes Down GOP Senator For Ignoring ‘The Facts’ On Immigration Reform

By Nicole Flatow on Apr 14, 2013 at 12:39 pm

Minutes after Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) emphasized the need for bipartisan support on a carefully negotiated immigration reform deal that could be announced this week, Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) revived the tired argument that bringing undocumented workers out of the shadows is bad for American workers. “It’s logical that if you bring in a massive supply of low-wage workers, you’re going to pull the workers down,” Sessions said Sunday morning on This Week With George Stephanopoulos.

But his so-called logic is not supported by the research — a point emphasized by conservative columnist George Will in urging Sessions to focus on “the facts”:

WILL: Every conservative sympathizes with what Jeff Sessions was saying about not rewarding lawbreaking. However, conservatism begins with facing facts. And the facts are 11 million people are here illegally. Two-thirds have been a decade or more. 30%, 15 years or more. They’re woven into our society. They’re not leaving. And the American people would not tolerate the police measures necessary to extract them from our community. Therefore, the great consensus has to be on the details of a path to citizenship. The most important thing Rubio said in your interview is, even if the system weren’t broken, if we had no illegal immigrants, we’d need to do something about this. We need the workers. As the baby-boomers retire, and as the birthrate declines, we need something to replenish the workforce to sustain the welfare state.

In an exchange with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Sessions also asked whether Schumer would continue to support immigration reform if “this legislation is established by reputable economists, as pulling down the wages of suffering American workers.” “That’s not going to happen, Jeff,” Schumer retorted, citing recent analysis by the conservative CATO Institute. And that’s just one of numerous economic studies to find that the economic benefits to immigration reform far outweigh any harm.

As economists have explained, immigration reform not only stops under-the-table exploitation of workers from driving wages down; it also fills gaps in the economy by creating a labor force for jobs that are complementary to low-wage jobs typically held by native worker. “Contrary to common fears, immigrants are not frequently in direct competition with native-born American workers, in part because they tend to have different skill sets,” a Center for American Progress analysis of economists’ research explains. While studies by restrictionist groups like the Center for Immigration Studies have suggested immigration reform would harm the economy, they fail to account for the fact that 11 million undocumented workers are already in the United States, which is why even Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform has rejected this conclusion.

 

Justice

How Marriage Equality Could Win In The Worst Possible Way At The Supreme Court

By Ian Millhiser on Mar 25, 2013 at 10:30 am


One way or another, marriage equality is coming to the United States. A recent poll shows support for equality at 58 percent, up 21 points from just a decade ago, and a massive 81 percent of adults under 30 support treating same-sex couples just like any other. The Supreme Court should strike down the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and California’s equally anti-gay Proposition 8 because they are unconstitutional, but one way or another, marriage equality is happening. And it is happening soon.

Perhaps for this reason, two leading conservatives published columns last week advocating a way the Supreme Court could strike down DOMA while doing maximal damage to the social safety net. Five days after anti-science columnist George Will published a piece seeking to discredit the social science supporting marriage equality, Will endorsed a radical misreading of the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment that would lead to DOMA being struck down. One day later, Michael McConnell, a former federal judge and leading socially conservative law professor, made the same argument in the Wall Street Journal. Here’s McConnell’s version:

[T]he court need not base its decision in Windsor on the merits of the same-sex marriage question. The leading argument against DOMA all along has been that the federal government lacks authority under the Constitution to create and enforce a definition of marriage different from that of the state in which a couple resides. It is hard to think of an issue more clearly reserved to state law under constitutional tradition than the definition of marriage.

The court has held that “regulation of domestic relations” has “long been regarded as a virtually exclusive province of the States” (Sosna v. Iowa, 1975). In the past, the court has recognized a “domestic relations exception” to federal judicial power. Although the legal question is close, the court could take the same path in Windsor—holding that DOMA improperly intrudes on the reserved powers of the states.

This is constitutional gobbledygook. McConnell and Will are both arguing that, because the Constitution does not give the federal government power over “domestic relations” it follows that DOMA exceeds Congress’ lawful powers. This is similar to the argument conservatives raised against the Affordable Care Act, and it is also compete nonsense.

Federal law grants married couples numerous financial benefits that unmarried individuals do not enjoy. Married couples pay taxes at different rates than single people. They are exempt from estate and gift taxes that apply to their spouse’s property. They receive certain benefits under Social Security, Medicare and other federal programs, and so forth. These financial benefits are constitutional because the Constitution gives Congress the power “to lay and collect taxes . . . and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States” — what lawyers call the “tax and spending power” — and the power to tax and spend necessarily includes the power to decide who pays what taxes and who receives what benefits. DOMA does not, as Will and McConnell suggest, define the meaning of “marriage” for the entire nation. Rather, it mostly just defines the meaning of the word “marriage” for the purpose of determining who is eligible for federal benefits that are given only to married couples.

If Congress does not have the power to decide who pays what tax rates and who receives what federal benefits, than the entirety of America’s safety net could be in danger. Retirement programs like Social Security cannot exist unless the government can limit it to persons of retirement age. Veterans benefits cannot exist unless the government can limit them to veterans. Even progressive taxation is in jeopardy under Will and McConnell’s theory, because the government must have the power to decide who pays more and who pays less taxes.

In other words, if the Supreme Court embraces Will and McConnell’s misreading of the Constitution, it could radically rework America’s social contract and leave most Americans much worse off as a result.
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LGBT

The Shaky Science Behind George Will’s Column On Same-Sex Marriage

By Zack Ford on Mar 16, 2013 at 3:45 pm

Washington Post columnist George Will.

The Washington Post published an opinion piece Friday by conservative pundit George Will called “The shaky science behind same-sex marriage.” Though Will has admitted there is an “emerging consensus” for same-sex marriage and predicted that the issue will prevail in the Courts, he highlights a brief from Maggie Gallagher’s Institute for Marriage and Public Policy that argues against equality by suggesting that the social science research currently available is not a sufficient rationale for that victory:

A brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court concerning the California case by conservative professors Leon Kass and Harvey Mansfield and the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy warns that “the social and behavioral sciences have a long history of being shaped and driven by politics and ideology.” And research about, for example, the stability of same-sex marriages or child-rearing by same-sex couples is “radically inconclusive” because these are recent phenomena and they provide a small sample from which to conclude that these innovations will be benign.

Unlike the physical sciences, the social sciences can rarely settle questions using “controlled and replicable experiments.” Today “there neither are nor could possibly be any scientifically valid studies from which to predict the effects of a family structure that is so new and so rare.” Hence there can be no “scientific basis for constitutionalizing same-sex marriage.”

The brief does not argue against same-sex marriage as social policy, other than by counseling caution about altering foundational social institutions when guidance from social science is as yet impossible. The brief is a preemptive refutation of inappropriate invocations of spurious social science by supporters of same-sex marriage.

Will endorses two arguments here, both of which are unsupportable. The first is that any social science that supports a liberal position shouldn’t be trusted because social science already has a liberal bias. The second is that it’s reasonable to conclude that it’s impossible to measure anything that hasn’t been legalized, even if legalizing it is the only way to test it. Together, these form a tautological argument that social science is only valid and useful if it supports keeping things the way they already are, which is not only a very narrow dismissal of the work social scientists already do, but also a philosophy that inherently prevents change.

Will then proceeds to demonstrate just how susceptible he is to conservatives’ fraudulent interpretations of what science is available:
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Climate Progress

Shameless Flameout: Washington Post Once Again Publishes George Will’s Anti-Scientific Nonsense

By Joe Romm on Jan 27, 2013 at 12:16 pm

You may recall the Washington Post‘s editorial page editor coming to his senses (briefly) in April 2011, writing, “The GOP’s climate-change denial may be its most harmful delusion.”

But that was apparently no reason for the paper to stop deluding its readers with the umpteenth piece of disinformation from resident anti-scientist George Will. While many studies have shown climate change has worsened wildfires, drought, and deluges, Will mocked the President’s inaugural remarks:

He says that “the threat of climate change” is apparent in “raging fires,” “crippling drought” and “more powerful storms.” Are fires raging now more than ever? (There were a third fewer U.S. wildfires in 2012 than in 2006.) Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices?

2006? Seriously, George Will — and blinkered editors at the Washpost?  If you wonder why in Hell (and High Water) Will just happens to pick the year 2006, you need look no further than the above graph of annual U.S. acreage burned from the National Fire Center (via Tamino).

For Will and the Washpost, the “decline” since the record-smashing 2006 disproves climate change. In Will’s logic, unless ever year is worse than the previous year in all respects, humans are not suffering the effects of global warming.

We have moved beyond a time when such op-eds should be seen as just the outgrowth of a polarized political system. George Will, with the support of the Washington Post, is spreading disinformation whose goal is to delay or stop efforts to deal with climate change. If these efforts are successful, they will cause billions of people to needlessly suffer. As President Obama said, such Willful denial of “the overwhelming judgment of science” can only be seen as an effort to “Betray Our Children And Future Generations.”

Shame on George Will and the Washington Post. While it would be trivial to debunk Will’s entire piece, wasting everyone’s time is a key goal of disinformers like Will, so I’ll just focus on the fires.

Will coyly asks, “Are the number and severity of fires determined by climate change rather than forestry and land-use practices?” The key debater’s word there is “determined.” It should be “increased.”

The goal of disinformers and their media allies is to create a straw man whereby those who accept the overwhelming judgment of science are accused of saying global warming is the sole cause of a given extreme event, rather than an aggravating cause.

Will, a pedant of the worst kind, doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know. There is a large and growing literature that global warming is increasing the number and severity of wildfires in this country — and that it is going to get much, much worse. A 2006 cover story in the prestigious journal Science magazine, “Warming and Earlier Spring Increase Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity
explains:

We compiled a comprehensive database of large wildfires in western United States forestssince 1970 and compared it with hydroclimatic and land-surface data. Here, we show that large wildfire activity increased suddenly and markedly in the mid-1980s, with higher large-wildfire frequency, longer wildfire durations, and longer wildfire seasons. The greatest increases occurred in mid-elevation, Northern Rockies forests, where land-use histories have relatively little effect on fire risks and are strongly associated with increased spring and summer temperatures and an earlier spring snowmelt.

Even worse, the wildfire threat is poised to grow, causing a feedback effect that accelerates global warming. The 2006 study concluded:

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Media

Conservative Columnist: Simplifying Voting Process Would Let The Wrong Kind Of People Vote

By Zack Beauchamp on Dec 20, 2012 at 12:08 pm

Reducing state-level voting discrimination is a Trojan Horse for creeping expansion federal power, according to Washington Post Columnist George Will.

Will’s spider sense started tingling after reading remarks by Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez, who suggested the government automatically register all adults by computer rather than require prospective voters to jump through a series of onerous state-imposed hoops. The conservative columnist took this proposal as the first “step toward making voting mandatory,” even though the administration has not endorsed compulsory voting schemes. Will’s main point, however, is that registering more people to vote will give the wrong crowd access to the ballot box:

Because the likelihood of any individual’s vote mattering is infinitesimal and because the effort required to be an informed voter can be substantial, ignorance and abstention are rational, unless voting is cathartic or otherwise satisfying. A small voting requirement such as registration, which calls for the individual voter’s initiative, acts to filter potential voters with the weakest motivations. They are apt to invest minimal effort in civic competence. As indifferent or reluctant voters are nagged to the polls — or someday prodded there by a monetary penalty for nonvoting — the caliber of the electorate must decline.

These so-called “small voting requirements” are often anything but: in Florida, for example, state officials have erected a series of bureaucratic roadblocks and fines that make registration extremely difficult, while several other states have created ID requirements for registration that many citizens can’t meet. Moreover, state-level election officials around the country have been working diligently to make voting as difficult as possible.

Will should also be careful when he talks about “the caliber of the electorate.” Florida’s restrictions on voter registration disproportionately affect poor and minority voters, according to Justice Department lawsuits. Despite an increasingly diverse America, voter suppression laws appear to have driven down African-American and Latino voter registration. The outcry from minority communities about these organized drives to limit voting rights might suggest that Will should rethink the idea that everyone who isn’t voting is doing so by choice.

The column also absurdly invokes Nazism as point against voting rights advocates, suggesting that more voting isn’t necessarily a good thing because “in three German elections, 1932-33, turnout averaged more than 86 percent, reflecting the terrible stakes.” But many instances of high turnout don’t involve a choice over whether to be ruled by Hitler: the French election this year, for example, had roughly 80 percent. American turnout is also extremely low when compared to other developed nations.

(HT: Simon Maloy, who has more.)

NEWS FLASH

George Will: Obama Is Winning Because He’s Black | Washington Post columnist George Will suggested in his Tuesday column that President Obama was only ahead in the polls because he’s African-American. After dismissing Obama’s record as being obviously “in shambles,” Will suggested that Americans were supporting him only because they didn’t want to see a black president fail, writing that “the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant not to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.” Credible academic estimates suggest Obama lost a net 3 to 5 percent of the national vote in 2008 as a consequence of his race.

Justice

George Will: Corporations Have A Constitutional Right To Exploit Workers — Unless They Play Football

By Ian Millhiser on Aug 6, 2012 at 9:00 am

In a column last week, conservative pundit and global warming denier made an uncharacteristic display of compassion for professional football players, explaining how the changing nature of the sport endangers players’ long term health:

Football is bigger than ever, in several senses. Bear Bryant’s 1966 undefeated Alabama team had only 19 players who weighed more than 200 pounds. The heaviest weighed 223. The linemen averaged 194. The quarterback weighed 177. Today, many high school teams are much bigger. In 1980, only three NFL players weighed 300 or more pounds. In 2011, according to pro-football-reference.com, there were 352, including three 350-pounders. Thirty-one of the NFL’s 32 offensive lines averaged more than 300.

Various unsurprising studies indicate high early mortality rates among linemen resulting from cardiovascular disease. For all players who play five or more years, life expectancy is less than 60; for linemen it is much less. . . . [A]ccumulating evidence about new understandings of the human body — the brain, especially, but not exclusively — compel the conclusion that football is a mistake because the body is not built to absorb, and cannot be adequately modified by training or protected by equipment to absorb, the game’s kinetic energies.

Will is right to raise these concerns as all workers have a right to a safe working environment. The fact that NFL players are both well-compensated and often national celebrities does not deprive them of this basic human right.

It’s just too bad Will doesn’t recognize this basic right with respect to nearly any other worker.

Last year, Will published a column calling the Supreme Court’s 1905 anti-worker decision in Lochner v. New York “correctly decided.” Lochner is widely viewed, along with Supreme Court decisions upholding segregation or Japanese detention camps, as one of the worst court decisions in American history. Even Robert Bork, the failed Reagan Supreme Court nominee who once described the federal ban on whites-only lunch counters as “unsurpassed ugliness,” accepts that Lochner is an abomination.

The crux of the Lochner opinion is that elected officials cannot be trusted to enact laws protecting the health, safety or general well-being of workers, and so any law directed at improving working conditions must be viewed with a very skeptical eye by judges. Lochner struck down a New York law preventing bakeries from overworking their employees, but the decision placed any pro-worker law at the mercy of one of the most conservative Supreme Courts in American history.

So Will’s compassion for NFL players rings more than a little hollow in light of his willingness to declare most laws protecting workers from exploitation — likely including overtime laws, minimum wage laws and many workplace safety laws — unconstitutional.

NEWS FLASH

Conservative Columnist: Early Voting Is ‘Deplorable’ | Conservative columnist George Will described early voting as “deplorable” during ABC’s This Week, arguing that the phenomena “complicates” campaigning for the presidential candidates. Democratic strategist Donna Brazile responded with, “I’m glad that we still have early voting, George, because that means there won’t be a lot of congestion on Election Day. We should have more accessibility.” Watch it:

Media

Global Warming Denier George Will Blames Historic Heat Wave On ‘One Word: Summer’

By Ian Millhiser on Jul 8, 2012 at 1:30 pm

Washington Post columnist George Will spent much of 2009 denying the overwhelming scientific consensus that man-made global climate change is a real and dangerous phenomenon, sometimes publishing objectively false information. At one point, for example, Will claimed that “according to the University of Illinois’ Arctic Climate Research Center, global sea ice levels now equal those of 1979.” The Arctic Climate Research Center almost immediately responded will real data contradicting Will’s claim, adding “[w]e do not know where George Will is getting his information.”

On ABC News’ This Week this morning, Will resumed his crusade against science, this time trying to blame the record heat wave spreading across America on an ordinary summer:

WILL: How do we explain the heat? One word: summer. I grew up in central Illinois in a house that had air conditioning. What is so unusual about this? . . . We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.

Watch it:

To answer Will’s question, what is unusual about the current heat wave is not that it is hot in summer. Warm summers are nothing new. What is new is that America is now experiencing a heat wave of unprecedented length and nearly unprecedented force. In Washington, DC, for example, the 11 day stretch of temperatures above 95 degrees is the longest in recorded history. DC also has not experienced temperatures this high in eight decades.

If this were an isolated incident, it could possibly be dismissed. But the truth is that unusually high temperatures are no longer, well, unusual. All 12 of the hottest years on record occurred in the last fifteen years.

At this point, it’s clear that no amount of new information, no amount of scientific evidence, not even his own experience stepping out into a record heat wave every day for nearly two weeks, can get Mr. Will to stop claiming that global warming is a myth. The fact that Will is so completely incapable of adapting to new information — not to mention his record of printing pure falsehoods — raises serious questions about why the Washington Post continues to publish him.

Politics

Romney Surrogate Trump Trashes George Will: A ‘Loser’ With ‘Little Round Spectacles’ And ‘Cute Little Greasy Haircut’

By Faiz Shakir on Mar 6, 2012 at 9:29 am

In a Washington Post op-ed this weekend, conservative columnist George Will wrote that both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum don’t stand a chance of beating President Obama in a general election contest. Conservatives, therefore, should “turn their energies to a goal much more attainable than, and not much less important than, electing Romney or Santorum president. It is the goal of retaining control of the House and winning control of the Senate.”

Conservatives such as Bill Kristol and Ramesh Ponnuru wrote pieces rejecting Will’s argument. Unwilling to simply register his own friendly disagreement, Donald Trump trashed Will in more colorful terms, calling him a “fool” and a “hack” on Fox & Friends yesterday.

This morning on CNBC, Trump — who has endorsed Mitt Romney for president and is a high-profile surrogate for the campaign — took his animus against Will to a more distasteful level, mocking his personal appearance:

I think George Will is a loser. … He actually spoke for me at Mar-A-Lago a long time ago, I was very unimpressed. … You take away his little round spectacles and his cute little greasy haircut, and I think he probably realizes he’s not a very smart guy.

CNBC host Joe Kernen light-heartedly quipped, “You sure it’s good idea to be making fun of someone else’s hair?” “Well, I have a beautiful crop of hair,” Trump responded, reassuring the audience, “It’s actually not a comb-over.” Watch it:

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