Is There Still a Common Good?
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Robert Reich

Peace & Justice
by Robert Reich | January 8, 2022 - 7:31am

— from Robert Reich's Substack

We’ve gone through the shameful first anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol and of the refusal of 147 members of Congress (all Republicans) to certify all the e*****rs from states that v**ed for Biden, on the basis of no evidence of fraud. So far, no political figure has been charged with any criminal wrongdoing. We’ve seen 34 v**er-suppression bills enacted by 19 Republican state legislatures; at least 8 give state legislatures the power to disregard e******n outcomes. More than 400 additional v**er suppression measures are now being prepared. And we are now witnessing a struggle in the Senate to reform the filibuster so that v****g rights legislation can be enacted. All of which raises a basic question: Is there still a common good?

I was at the impressionable age of fourteen when I heard John F. Kennedy urge us not to ask what America can do for us but what we can do for America. Seven years later I took a job as a summer intern in the Senate office of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It was not a glamorous job, to say the least. I felt lucky when I was asked to run his signature machine. But I told myself that in a very tiny way I was doing something for the good of the country.

That was more than a half century ago. I wish I could say America is a better place now than it was then. Surely our lives are more convenient. Fifty years ago there were no cash machines or smart phones, and I wrote my first book on a typewriter. As individuals, we are as kind and generous as ever. We volunteer in our communities, donate, and help one another. We pitch in during natural disasters and emergencies. We come to the aid of individuals in need. We are a more inclusive society, in that Black people, L***Q people, and women have legal rights they didn’t have a half century ago.

Yet our civic life—as citizens in our democracy, participants in our economy, managers or employees of companies, and members or leaders of organizations—seems to have sharply deteriorated. What we have lost is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

Starting in the late 1970s, Americans began talking less about the common good and more about self-aggrandizement. The shift is the hallmark of modern America: From the “Greatest Generation” to the “Me Generation,” from “we’re all in it together” to “you’re on your own.” In 1977, motivational speaker Robert Ringer wrote a book that reached the top of The New York Times bestseller list entitled Looking Out for # 1. It extolled the virtues of selfishness to a wide and enthusiastic audience. The 1987 film Wall Street epitomized the new ethos in the character Gordon Gekko and his signature line, “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good.”

The last five decades have also been marked by growing cynicism and distrust toward all of the basic institutions of American society. There is a wide and pervasive sense that the system as a whole is no longer working as it should. R****m, xenophobia, and religious intolerance are on the rise.

A growing number of Americans feel neglected and powerless. Some are poor, or Black or Latino. Others are white and have been on a downward economic escalator for years. Some have been seduced by demagogues and conspiracy theorists.

Is there a common good that still binds us together as Americans? Yes, and it’s not the whiteness of our skin, or our adherence to Christianity, or the fact that we were born in the United States. We’re bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.

After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”—not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.” During the Great Depression of the 1930s and World War II, Americans faced common perils that required us to work together for the common good. That good was echoed in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “Four Freedoms”—freedom of speech, of worship, from want, and from fear. The common good animated many of us – both white and B***k A******ns—to fight for civil rights and v****g rights in the 1960s. It inspired America to create the largest and most comprehensive system of public education the world had ever seen. And it moved many of us to act against the injustice of the Vietnam War, and others of us to serve bravely in that besotted conflict.

Americans sharply disagree about exactly what we want for America or for the world. But if we are to participate in the same society we must agree on how we deal with our disagreements, our obligations under the law, and our commitment to democracy.

It’s our agreement to these principles that connects us, not agreement about where these principles lead. Some of us may want to prohibit a******ns because we believe life begins at birth; others of us believe individuals should have the right to determine what happens to their bodies. Some of us want stricter environmental protections; others, more lenient. We are free to take any particular position on these and any other issues. But as political equals in this democracy, we are bound to accept the outcomes even if we dislike them.

Our central obligation as citizens is to preserve, fortify, and protect our democratic form of government. We must defend the right to v**e and ensure that more citizens are heard, not fewer. We must require that presidents be elected by the will of the people, and prevent political parties and state legislatures from disregarding the popular v**e. We must get big money out of politics so the moneyed interests don’t have more political power than the rest of us.

Democracy doesn’t require us to agree. It requires us to agree only on preserving and protecting democracy. This meta-agreement is the essence of the common good.

Those now attacking American democracy are attacking the common good that binds us together. They are attacking America.

We must join together — progressives and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, inhabitants of blue states and of red states, business leaders as well as leaders of nonprofits and of the public sector — to rescue American democracy from those who now seek to destroy it. There is no time to waste.

Your thoughts?

Deadline
Ted Johnson
Thu, J****** 6, 2022, 8:55 PM

All of the news networks carried events marking the anniversary of J****** 6th, albeit with differences in tone and tenor, but by the time of the opinion-heavy primetime hours, there were wildly different characterizations of the significance of attack on the Capitol.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes opened his how at 8 PM ET saying that “today we saw on full display the battle over the meaning of this date,” talking of Donald Trump’s “failed c**p” as the probably the most infamous event since 9/11.

Fox News’s Tucker Carlson said it was “really just only a r**t — maybe just barely,” while he again gave a platform to a theory that the events were a “false f**g” operation. He even had on as a guest Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), who rather sheepishly said it was “sloppy and it was frankly dumb” to refer to the J****** 6th r**t as a “violent terrorist attack” earlier this week. Carlson had slammed Cruz for the characterization on his Wednesday show.

CNN, meanwhile, presented a two hour primetime special, live from Statuary Hall in the Capitol, with Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper presenting interviews with lawmakers who were there that day. They started with a segment recapping the events, as r****rs burst through barricades, fought with police and chanted to “hang Mike Pence.”

Cooper asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi what she thinks would have happened had the r****rs found her.

“They said they were going to shoot me in the brain,” she said, adding that she “wasn’t worried
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/january-6th-anniversary-gets-wildly-035529080.html

https://conservativebrief.com/chief-2-57366/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=getresponse&utm_content=%27Under%20Attack%27%3A%20Justice%20Roberts%20Delivers%20Bombshell%20News&utm_campaign=

Chief Justice John Roberts used his annual year-end report to push back against what he sees as increasingly “inappropriate political influence” being used in an attempt to sway the Supreme Court to rule certain ways on high-profile cases.

Constitutional scholars will tell you that our founders chose to have federal judges and Supreme Court justices serve lifetime appointments as a way to ensure they could rise above the political fray as administrations and successive congresses changed hands.

But somewhere along the way throughout our history, politicians and presidents discovered that they could permanently influence the country by choosing judges and justices who shared their political and cultural ideologies. The process of nominating judges and justices, thus, became very political.

And today, no matter how much some justices and judges protest that reality, it is still true: Presidents do not nominate jurists who do not share their political views, and the Senate typically does not confirm judges who don’t align with their party’s ideologies.

And as such, now the process has become so overtly political it has alarmed Roberts and other federal court watchers who know that the supposed independence of the Judicial Branch is at risk of becoming a policy enforcement wing of the current party in charge and that threats from outside political forces can serve as a means to ensure a ‘correct’ ruling.

Decisional independence is essential to due process, promoting impartial decision-making, free from political or other extraneous influence,” Roberts, who serves as head of the entire federal judiciary, noted in his report on the status of SCOTUS and the 107 federal district and appeals courts around the nation.

Roberts noted another area of importance: “The Judiciary’s power to manage its internal affairs insulates courts from inappropriate political influence and is crucial to preserving public trust in its work as a separate and co-equal branch of government.”

Constitutional law professor and expert Jonathan Turley, a self-avowed liberal who nonetheless has more respect for our governing processes than for political outcomes, explained how the high court is being coerced by the left to ‘comply’ with certain desired political outcomes:

We have been discussing the ramped up threats from Democratic leaders that the Court will either v**e with the liberal justices on key issues or face “consequences,” including court packing. Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), a former law professor, became the latest to voice such reckless views.

What Democratic members are demanding is raw court packing to add four members to the Court to give liberals an instant majority — a movement denounced by figures like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer.

Last year, House Judiciary Committee Chair Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass, and others stood in front of the Supreme Court to announce a court packing bill to give liberals a one-justice majority. This follows threats from various Democratic members that conservative justices had better v**e with liberal colleagues . . . or else.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., recently issued a warning to the Supreme Court: reaffirm Roe v. Wade or face a “revolution.” Sen. Richard Blumenthal previously warned the Supreme Court that, if it continued to issue conservative rulings or “chip away at Roe v Wade,” it would trigger “a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court. It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers of v**es to strike down certain past precedents.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer also declared in front of the Supreme Court “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”

These are thuggish political threats, nothing more, but the left is known for making them, as Turley noted. Roberts, meanwhile, appears to be trying to sound the alarm. Hopefully, we have enough ethical members of Congress left to heed his warning.

at this point it is no longer necessarily important to show how the progressive left have damn near k**led the United States of America. the average citizen already knows this and have massively rejected their policies. why anyone in the current political realm would be so afraid of the progressive left is pure lunacy and stupidity. the American people have never ever wanted to have anything to do with socialism Marxism or more to the point c*******m which unfortunately means that there are numerous t*****rs within this country who are and have been pushing this crap. this definitely includes our entire education system.
Mike

https://youtu.be/NCYpUjawm8A

It fits that because Women have rights.
They have right to maintain control over their own bodies without intervention from anyone , including Jesus and his ilk.
RoevWade was written expressly for the Constitution and Women's Rights .
If they should elect to terminate a Pregnancy it is their right. The law was written to provide guidelines for terminations to keep women safe. Rather than flying to Mexico for terminations. Or using back alley solutions that in fact were k*****g women.
If you should elect to have facial work done to lift up your sagging Jowls would you need government or Jesusical intervention to decide for you ?
This lies with you and your personal choice.
What if you needed to fly to Mexico to have it done?
You can’t talk about the constitution while you’re still talking outside of the Constitution to suit your personal agenda.