In return for our general compliance, as Americans we trust that most people in positions of political authority are at least minimally qualified for their jobs and take their duties seriously, especially when they hold positions like Supreme Court Justice. So how can it be that in the United States of America in 2012, during a legitimate and important debate about mandatory health care coverage, we hear this brain-fart from one of the 9 deciders of all that is constitutional…
Could you define the market — everybody has to buy food sooner or later, so you define the market as food, therefore, everybody is in the market; therefore, you can make people buy broccoli.
I spent the first 12 years of my life living on or near military bases while my father served in the United States Marine Corps. Those were stressful times for a lot of reasons. We moved a lot, including one year living with my grandparents on their dairy farm while my father served overseas. Things became even more stressful and chaotic after my father returned, but one good thing about that time was a stretch of three years in the same school system at Camp LeJeune, North Carolina. (We found out years later that the drinking water was contaminated, but that’s a whole ‘nother story as they say.)
While in 6th grade there I served on the school color guard. We were responsible for raising and lowering the flag each day. Our school did a lot of pledging of allegiance and singing of patriotic songs (maybe a little too much) but we also learned about the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. We didn’t memorize them. We learned what they meant and how they applied to what was happening at that moment in history – the civil rights movement, the Vietnam war protests, and basic stuff like elections and separation of powers. I don’t remember the teachers taking sides on specific issues, but I remember we discussed things like freedom of speech and the press and how we had to allow all sides to have their say. It was a very practical and necessary lesson because we lived on the base among people of all backgrounds from all over the United States and beyond. We had to learn to get along, which was relatively easy for young kids, harder for some of the adults.
There were a few things I didn’t care for about our life on the base, but my solid education in what it means to be an American citizen is something I am grateful for to this day. I learned, and still believe, that in most situations we need to respect legitimate authority after the arguments are done, even when they decide against our personal wishes. There are exceptions to that rule, though, like when the authority violates sacred trusts enshrined in the Constitution, or the authority proves to be unfit to serve, or when the authority is corrupted by conflicts of interest.
The hardest duty of a citizen is judging when authority has overstepped its bounds and deserves to be actively resisted, but that, too, is part of being an American. So what do you do when something as inane as the Broccoli Doctrine is uttered by a United States Supreme Court Justice? I'm just baffled by it. My 1971 sixth grade class at Stone Street Elementary School would have had a more substantive debate about health insurance than the one that happened yesterday in Washington, DC. (We were being trained with the latest and greatest government-funded math and science textbooks because we were all going to be rocket scientists and/or Apollo astronauts someday, so our logic skills were pretty sharp back then.)
After hearing the Justice’s quote on the radio last evening on my drive home, I began to ask myself “Am I still in America?" Was he perhaps referencing an obscure case like George Herbert Walker Bush vs. Broccoli, where it was asserted by the then-President that the government has no right to make elected officials eat their vegetables? I am not a lawyer, right? I’m sure Justice Scalia had a good reason to pose the broccoli question. He must have. Please?
When I got home, I fired up the PC and checked the news on the web site of the Wisconsin State Journal, hoping that while I was driving home, the Milwaukee County District Attorney had finally issued an arrest warrant for Scott Walker. No luck, but then I saw this headline:
6 State Journal staffers signed recall petitions; all but 1 not involved in news coverage
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding, I thought. I closed my eyes and clicked, afraid to look. It was worse than I thought.
Only one of the employees who signed a petition … is involved in news coverage. Three are imaging technicians who handle photo toning and graphics processing, and two are part-time sports clerks/writers.
(State Journal editor John) Smalley said the newspaper considers signing a petition of any kind a violation of the company's ethics policy. A portion of the code reads: "Participation in public affairs or events that may leave the impression that news judgment is being influenced by activism is prohibited."
He said potential disciplinary actions are being reviewed internally.
The Wisconsin State Journal admits in the article that they utilized an online database posted by a coalition of right-wing fringe groups to find the names of employees who signed recall petitions. The database was hastily compiled by Tea Party members and other “volunteers” from outside Wisconsin. It has been shown through sampling done by other organizations to be woefully incomplete and filled with thousands of transcription errors.
So here's what editor Smalley would have me believe: The Wisconsin State Journal endorsed Scott Walker in the 2010 election, used a blatantly inaccurate application built by a partisan coalition to perform a witch-hunt on its own employees, yet it’s a recall signature from a part-time stringer typing in scores from the high school basketball tournament that might give me the impression that their news coverage is slanted.
To which I say: I'm good enough. I'm smart enough. Now, somebody please help me climb out of this rabbit hole.
Signing a recall petition is non-partisan, and it’s a fundamental right written explicitly into the Wisconsin Constitution. A recall is a command from the voters to hold a new election, which could easily result in a new governor from the same party as the old governor's. An employer cannot prohibit someone from voting, and they cannot prohibit someone from signing a recall petition.
The State Journal management says their policy is there to avoid the appearance of having influenced the outcome of events, yet what could be more influential than possibly changing the outcome of a recall drive by threatening citizens with their jobs if they signed the petition? In a recall where nearly 50% of the electorate signed, not signing was just as much a political statement as signing. Every signature they prevented from appearing on the recall petition was another endorsement of Scott Walker by the management of the Wisconsin State Journal.
The Wisconsin State Journal has, by their own actions, legitimized the McCarthy-esque tactics employed by an ultra-right wing political group that hides behind disclaimers about the accuracy of its work, but whose true motivation is to intimidate citizens into foregoing their Constitutional rights.
Yikes.
I don’t pledge allegiance to flags any more. It’s a personal philosophical and religious choice I make (I think that choice is even protected by our Constitution), but I’m not a militant anti-pledger, and I do display an American flag from time to time. I also love singing our national anthem, because it asks questions.
Oh say, does that star-bangled banner yet wave o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave?