Below is my column in The Hill on the sudden embrace of bipartisanship in Washington … by some of the most partisan figures in our political system. Press and pundits are suddenly reframing Vice President Kamala Harris as a moderate while heralding Justice Amy Coney Barrett for her independence. It is enough to give you vertigo from the media and political spin. Update: GovTrack has responded to the column, which is discussed at the end of the column.
Here is the column:
The late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo once famously observed that “you campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.“ One of the greatest poetic licenses in this election has been the claim of bipartisanship from some of the most rigid partisans in our politics.
Many in the media are reinventing history to appeal to citizens who want more moderation in government. This theme was picked up by Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz in his speech before the Democratic National Convention, when he claimed that Vice President Harris was not just a moderate but “never hesitated to reach across that aisle if it meant improving your lives, and she’s always done it with energy, with passion and with joy.”
Harris was one of the most liberal members of the Senate and was never viewed as someone likely to form a compromise on key votes. She was not one of the Democrats commonly referenced as moderates in that body on close votes.
Harris was even rated to the left of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). After her ranking by GovTrack was cited widely in the media as showing her as the most liberal member of the Senate, the site took down the page, which had been up for years.
Harris is now to be portrayed as a moderate, whether it is true or not.
What was so striking is that Harris was valued by supporters precisely for being so uncompromising and consistently voting with the left. In her prior unsuccessful presidential run, she moved even further left. Harris was the only candidate other than Sanders to say that she wanted to abolish private insurance plans, a position which, like so many others, she has now recanted.
These same advocates of bipartisanship are lionizing Republicans who support Harris while demonizing Robert Kennedy Jr. for doing the same for Trump. To them, one is a profile of courage, the other a profile of corruption.
The poetry of politics was also evident this week after Justice Amy Coney Barrett joined the three liberal justices in voting in dissent in a case involving Arizona’s voter identification law. Barrett was praised for opposing the ruling to set aside a lower court order blocking enforcement of a 2022 law requiring registered voters to provide proof of citizenship. The majority (with the liberal justices) also blocked a provision that would have prevented tens of thousands of prior voters in Arizona from voting.
Conservatives were irate at Barrett, particularly after Virginia claimed to have found hundreds of non-citizens on its voting rolls. Other states such as Georgia found a smaller number of non-citizens registering to vote, but polls show widespread support for voter ID laws. None of that seemed to matter to Barrett, who ruled based on her conscience and understanding of the law.
The left’s response to Barrett’s vote was the most telling. Her willingness to cross the ideological divide was celebrated. These are some of the same voices who denounced Barrett in her confirmation hearing as a robotic conservative stooge.
Few Democrats were willing to vote for this obviously qualified nominee. That included the newly minted moderate Harris, who voted “nay.”
While some of us at the time challenged this media narrative, given Barrett’s impressive scholarship and proven independence, she was denounced by senators, and her home was even targeted by protesters. Bloody dolls were thrown on her lawn with her young children inside after the location was revealed by activists.
Some of these activists might even take credit for Barrett’s repeated votes with the left of the court. But it is not their coercion, but Barrett’s convictions that led to these votes. She has always been a jurist who shows a willingness to follow her principles wherever they take her.
Barrett continues (with Justices Roberts and Kavanaugh) to moderate many decisions with three colleagues on both ends of rulings. Roberts and Kavanaugh routinely rank as the most likely to vote with the majority of the court.
This brings us back to the poetry. In her confirmation hearings, senators such as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) attacked her nomination in the same way that they attacked the nomination of Justice Neil Gorsuch. Whitehouse portrayed both nominees as adding guaranteed votes for a conservative agenda, reading off the many decisions where conservatives voted as a block.
As I stated in my own testimony in the Gorsuch confirmation hearing, Whitehouse and his colleagues often seem to ignore that the liberal justices in those cases also voted like a block. Justice Sotomayor shows the same low percentage of voting with the opposite end of the court as do her colleagues Justices Alito and Thomas. Yet in her case, the pattern of voting was not viewed as partisan, but as simply getting cases right.
Both Gorsuch and Barrett have routinely voted with their liberal colleagues in major cases, despite the attacks of critics on their independence and integrity.
Most cases before the Supreme Court do not break along ideological lines, despite the portrayal in the media. Indeed, most are resolved unanimously (roughly half) or nearly unanimously by the court.
Take the 2023 cases. Only half of the 6-3 splits featured the six conservative and three liberal justices on opposite sides. Only eight percent (five of 57 cases) were decided 6-3 with the six Republican appointee/three Democratic split. The rest mixed up alliances. The least likely to join the majority of their colleagues were the three liberal justices, Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson.
The liberal justices, however, are rarely portrayed as ideologues in the media, which consistently portrays the court as controlled by a six-conservative block of rigid partisans. In reality, they are all conscientious jurists trying to get cases right from their jurisprudential viewpoints. The consistency in voting reflects their adherence to their fundamental principles.
Politicians and pundits, ignoring the facts, continue to claim that the court is dysfunctional and ideologically divided. When elections or nominations come along, Democrats attack those on the other side as refusing to compromise or “cross the aisle.”
Many value the poetry of bipartisanship in politics but demand the prose of strict partisanship in governance. Calling Harris a moderate and Barrett a partisan is just part of the poetic license of American politics.
Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University. He is the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage” (Simon & Schuster).
Update: Joshua Tauberer, Founder of GovTrack.us, wrote to me on August 27 to object to the portrayal of the decision to remove the ranking of Harris as more liberal than Sen. Bernie Sanders. He claimed that the portrayal was “false and defamatory,” which I believe is untrue. However, as we have done in the past, I wanted to share his objections so you can reach your own conclusions.
While Tauberer does not deny that ranking was taken down after being posted for years, he objected that the context for the decision was omitted:
“The implication that a “sudden” change was made to the GovTrack website is false and defamatory. In fact, I warned of the unreliability of the statistic in question back in a 2020 — that’s four years ago — article in The Washington Post.”
He also objected to the line about how the media is now portraying Harris as a moderate. He noted, in reference to how his own company has treated Harris, that:
* GovTrack ranks Harris as the leftmost Democratic senator during part of her Senate tenure and very nearly leftmost for her entire Senate tenure.
* GovTrack ranks Harris as the least likely to join bipartisan bills among Democrats during part of her tenure.
Poetry:
Dominant media help Chameleons Walz and Harris
to joyfully rewrite personal and national history, i.e., dare us.”
Oh please, just spare us.
Prose:
In a world where human communication
is now controlled en masse
The enemy is not Republican or Democrat,
conservative or liberal,
but rather
totalitarian Media.
Cliff’s Notes on the above:
Whoever controls the message, controls the nation.
Lin,
Well said!
Although I would add “DNC enabled” totalitarian Media.
Cliff’s Notes on the above:
Whoever controls the message, controls the nation.
Lin, how about this:
“the revolution is not complete until the language is perfect”
George Orwell – 1984
Old Airborne Dog: Perfect!
Gorsuch and Barrett have done what they’ve been hired to do, and they’ve done it by ignoring consensus.
Harris is doing what politicians have to do to get elected in the media defined political horseracing system we’ve had dictated to us in what seeks to define itself as a democratic Republic.
I see Harris as aspirational, Gorsuch and Barrett not so much.
Those of us who have been part of the pro-life movement for decades, leading, speaking, evangelizing, organizing marches, etc, know that the MSM/DNC current rewriting of history of Kamala Harris is part of their standard wash, rinse, repeat news coverage modus operandi.
Ive been active in the pro-life, anti-abortion movement since college, 1980s, and have attended the annual Right to Life March event in Washington DC various times, as well as local city events. Without fail the legacy media has portrayed the events as partisan bitter scolds, minimizing the number of attendees and characterizing us as violent, illiterate, uneducated, knuckle dragging cultists. Catholic Nuns in religious habits, priests, older and pregnant mothers and young college women, all characterized in the most abhorrent manner. For decades.
Thus as I stated yesterday, theirs is a propaganda ala Cuba’s Communist bitter scolds, denigrating Cubans for not appreciating Marxist “freedom, love, joy”.
To wit, the following two headlines show the dishonesty of the Democrats / DOJ:
National Review Headline:
Alabama Antifa Sympathizer Pleads Guilty to Detonating Bomb outside State AG’s Office
https://www.nationalreview.com/news/alabama-antifa-sympathizer-pleads-guilty-to-detonating-bomb-outside-state-ags-office/
DOJ Headline:
Alabama Man Pleads Guilty to Detonating an Explosive Device Outside of the Alabama Attorney General’s Office | United States Department of Justice
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/alabama-man-pleads-guilty-detonating-explosive-device-outside-alabama-attorney-generals
NB:
Had this violent, antigovernment event been perpetrated by a young pro-life Catholic woman praying the rosary at an abortion center, where an assault allegedly occurred, as if often the case, the entire nation would still be hearing about it and for months thereafter in perpetuity, by the MSM. Democrats would seize it and rail about it nonstop, portrayed as a Christian, white nationalist moment, esp by partisan scolds Charles Schumer, Elizabeth Warren, Nancy Pelosi, et al. Since however it was an ANTIFA supporter, the DOJ goes out of the way to give them cover. Meanwhile a Catholic parish in Richmond was targeted by DOJ
Matt Taibbi has written extensively about the DNC / Legacy Media copying the propaganda tactics of USSR’s Pravda. This is nothing new.
* KEELEY
Proof of citizenship for voter registration? It’s all citizens have left.
Perhaps it’s a move toward roaming herds of human animals. Animals don’t have principles. They thrive on instinct.
OT: Hamas terrorist official Ghazi Hamad said the October 7 attack was enormously successful because it damaged Arab-Israeli relations and encouraged further attacks on Israel.
Hamad, who promised more October 7-style attacks, said the 2023 attack that murdered 1,200 and wounded over 5,300 was “able to slap at the progress of the normalization of effort, and this is, of course, a very important political success.”
“. . . whether it is true or not.” (JT)
Just as the Afghanistan withdrawal was a “success” — whether it is true or not.
And as inflation doesn’t exist or is “transitory” — whether it is true or not.
Just as he’s a “she” — whether it is true or not.
And as the coronation of KH is “democracy in action” — whether it is true or not.
For the Left, the truth is merely a casualty in its manic desire for approval and power.
Flip-Flopper In Chief
I’m surprised that Professor had no mention of the arrest of Pavel Durov in France over the weekend. He is the developer and owner of Telegram and this has raised a firestorm in the free speech community because the apparent reason for the arrest is his failure to moderate content on Telegram. A very dangerous development. Now there may be legitimate reasons for the arrest but in light of Macron’s call for controls on free speech and the EU threats, one must wonder.
Elon Musk weighed in on this arrest as an attack on free speech.
And then who do you think weighed in and basically threatened Musk. None other than Lt. Col. (Ret) Alexander Vindman. He raised his head up out of the pile of ——- where he works and threatened Mr. Musk.
I have had serious doubts about Mr Vindman since his testimony before congress. Seemed to me he thought he had greater sway over American Foreign Policy than the President. This recent threat seems to confirm to me that the erstwhile retired Lt Col does not believe much in civilian control of the military and has less than a stellar view of free speech.
I realize he has served the country in the military and was wounded but he seems to have a very inflated view of his importance. Wounded and brilliant offices have betrayed this country before, going as far back as the Revolution.
Coming from a military family whose father was also a Lt. Col. I found that Mr Vindman’s comments before congress disturbing and basically mutinous. But that’s my opinion. I would likely not give him a good reference. I am glad my father never saw this, since he passed away in 2007, because he was always apolitical except he did not like generals except Eisenhower.
@GEB
See today’s other column. And yes, it’s bonkers. We now have sovereignty on the ballot as well, and it is madness. The dems would hand people over to foreign ‘authorities’ in a red hot minute. No one can tell me we aren’t dealing with a totalitarian globalist cabal on the left. That something as seemingly insignificant as free speech on Twitter can incite this tells us pretty much everything.
Mistyped my email address, wrong gravitar.
GEB,
Vindman is a disgrace to the uniform.
Upstate: I can still see his smirky, arrogant, condescending, supercilious face during his televised testimony…
* Vindman is a little worm.
Professor Turley wrote about the arrest of Pavel Durov in another column this morning.
That was after my comment. I was up early.
I am sick of trying to get Democrats to “try to reach across the aisle” when Republicans take pride in the opposite. I want Harris to be highly partisan and not give one hoot about what Republicans want.
A dems idea of reaching across the aisle is extending a hand to drag someone over to their side.
Joe the uniter, right? Y’all come on over here, and we’ll be united. All bipartisan like.
Get real with that turd, Sammy Metamucil.
$6T without cloture. Is that what you call reaching out? SIX FRIGGING TRILLION, numbskull.
HR2 sits on shumers desk, while libtards gaslight about some “bipartisan” bill in the Senate. BIPARTISAN BILLS pass CLOTURE.
By the way, hoiw did Trump manage to get SIX democrats to vote against it?
Name ONE major social policy liberal/progressives have not eventually gotten their way on in the past century.
New Deal Welfare state: check
Great Society welfare state: check
Obamacare welfare state: check
Legalize killing preborn children: check
Legalize dope smoking: check
Legalize homosexual marriage: check
Normalize transgenderism: check
Let’s see your progressive wish list of all the things Republicans have successfully blocked.
Senator Rand Paul has just co-sponsored proposed legislation with Senator Wyden. Senator Vance has reached across the aisle; so has Senator Hawley, filibustering in partnership with, again, Senator Wyden
Do the species a favor. Earn yourself a Darwin Award. I’m quite sure it will require very little effort on your part.
Partisanship, what we’ve had since 2008. How’s that working out for the country. Here’s a tip, try for a bit of critical thinking. You’re welcome.
Obama, Biden, Harris and Waltz, all have been highly partisan. How do you think the country got to where it is now?
Does she not do that already?
Well Sammy, you can rest well knowing that Senator Harris was rated or 2019 as the 3rd least likely Democratic senator to “work across the aisle”. She was tied with Senator Patty Murray and was a wee bit less partisan than Senators Marie Cantwell or Chuck Schumer. For the rest of us that think working across the aisle is a sign of political skill and willingness to pursue the good without insisting on the perfect (that is not a political robot), VP Harris, despite the claims of Gov Tim Walz, would seem to fall short.
A good opportunity to out the RINOs and shame them into declaring themselves as Dems.
* KEELEY
Professor, when citing a case please give the reference identification
as Snake v. Warthog etc. It’s helpful.
Thank you
And the state run media like Jon Karl Marx are carrying Kamala’s water, claiming that Kamala has changed her position on all of these issues. When he was corrected by Tom Cotton, he continued to dishonestly argue “Kamala said”, when she has done no such thing.
Cotton might have said, well then, roll the clip of her changing even ONE of these positions.
It wasnt some lackey who said she would ban fracking, so some lackey doesnt get to say she wont.
It wasnt some lackey who said we need fewer police, so some lackey doesnt get to say she changed her mind.
It wasnt some lackey who said she would eliminate private health insurance, so some lackey doesnt get to say she wont.
And the list goes on. Kamala owes her supporters an explanation for why she is abandoning these core values, or how can they trust her not to flip on abortion.
A Harris campaign spokesman, Quentin Fulks, appeared on Howie Kurtz’s show. Asked about her attempted flip-flopping, lack of substance, and lack of policy he said:
“We’re not going to be worried about explaining anything.”
Why would anyone vote for a candidate who shows you this level of contempt?
Anonymous11:22 AM, The same people who voted for Obama and Biden
So…..people changing their minds or adjusting to reality is a….bad thing?
People lying about it to win an election is a bad thing. Keep up
Are you really that dumb? When someone running for the office of the president flip-flops on major issues like these, after a lifetime, supporting them, they need to give an explanation for exactly why they had a change of heart. They need to explain exactly why they now stand with the opposition view.
Poor George, he is such a useful idiot. This isn’t whether or not we should have a stop sign or a red light at a certain intersection. This isn’t about whether a $2M bird watching bridge in Arizona is really “infrastructure”. This isn’t even an issue like gay marriage. These are MAJOR issues at the core of where we are headed as a country.
After casting the deciding vote in MULTIPLE pieces of legislation that printed, borrowed and spent $6T, with ZERO cloture in the Senate, no one gets to say they reach across the aisle. Revisionist history.
I was against gay marriage until I was for it. Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden
Not at all. So let Harris say, “I was wrong. That was a stupid position, I am very sorry I ever held it. I won’t be that stupid again.”
I might just possibly be able to swallow a small portion without fear of lethal poisoning.
This point of view in journalism is entirely expected. The media are blind to almost everything that does not fit their world view and that, therefore, gives them the right to confabulate or even lie to make sense of their world. Nothing is sacred. Nothing that is said is carved in stone. It is all written in the sand so it can easily be disposed of. Supposedly. Unfortunately the digital world lasts “forever” and those old sayings and columns and prognostications are just a search away, especially if you do not use Google.
I think it has become apparent more and more to people that Google is less about search and more about digital guidance away from those troubling things like free speech and facts.
After all, if you can’t find it on Google, is it really a fact?
I would say the breakup of Google could be the digital equivalent of storming the Bastille. But it would only be a start.
GEB,
I take comfort when reading about how dismal CNN ratings are, WaPo is losing subscribers, NYT loonies are running the newsroom or NPR listernership is down.
Makes me smile!
I just re-upped my The Free Press subscription. They are doing quite well, having hired even more reporters.
When liberals do it, they cry it is for justice!
When conservatives do it, they cry they are going against the will of the people!
Americans are so divorced from reality at this point. They’ve never really had to face the consequences of believing whatever they want to believe. Even after 4 years of a dumpster fire going over a cliff, people are still doing ok. The parking lots of restaurants where I live are full every night of the week. In my opinion most of them have a lot of credit card debt but they don’t even think it matters. People are always telling you how debt is a good thing because it’s a tax write off or something. If you go bankrupt you get to keep your house and start over. You’re almost rewarded for bankruptcy here. In Europe it’s not that way. If you go bankrupt you end up literally on the street. Which I suppose is how we ended up 35 trillion in debt and nobody cares. When I was a kid, “I can’t afford it” was a normal thing to say but the only time I hear this phrase now is when I say it and then people act like I’m lying. Yeah if I wanted to mortgage my home I could burn a lot of money on non essentials but I’d rather wear old clothes and not go on vacation than be in debt. When this balloon goes up it is going to be apocalyptic but you can’t tell people who have never ever faced consequences that this time it’s going to be different. Why should it be? A few demographics actually have experienced consequences and they are shifting to Trump. But toi many others don’t see a problem. Just put it on your credit card, it’ll all be fine. So many people have died as a result of this disastrous administration. Look at Ukraine and Gaza. None of it should have happened and if it happened it should have been shut down immediately but it’s not my kid, not my father, not my husband so I don’t care, tra la la, JOY JOY JOY JOY. This country is in for a rude awakening and in a way I will welcome it when it comes.
“Even after 4 years of a dumpster fire going over a cliff, people are still doing ok.” Poetic or a bad analogy?
We have $35 TRILLION in debt because in our system politicians are incentivized to give voters what they want. And a majority of Americans demand government give them lots of stuff – but they don’t want to pay for it.
If we were a virtuous and just society who cared about future generations, we would not burden them with $35 TRILLION in debt. But we’re not that kind of society.
Warren Buffett once said he could solve the debt problem in five minutes. His solution? For legislators to enact a law saying members of Congress are disqualified from running for re-election any time the government runs a deficit in excess of 3% of GDP. No exceptions. Simple. Elegant. And gets the incentives right.
13 American service members died 3 years ago today during Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Biden is at the beach with nothing on his schedule all week.
Kamala has nothing on her schedule.
President Trump is at Arlington Cemetery laying a wreath, honoring the 13 soldiers.
Joe Biden is a disgrace.
The fake news media is exactly what Trump said: the enemy of the people.
There is no way the country will accept a Kamala presidency.
They will try to steal the election and install her, but this time the country will not allow it.
The powers that be know it. They are now like cornered animals. What are they gonna do, arrest us all? We have the guns.
This is in God’s hands.
We should appoint judges/justices on their ability to understand the law and their principles, not their ideology. That is why Trump’s appointments are so far superior to those of Obama and Obama, I mean Biden. Neither side should get their own way all the time.
Although I would be perfectly fine with another Scalia
I cannot agree that the liberal Justices don’t just vote as a block but rather follow their legal reasoning. They have NEVER voted in any case for anything but something that supports their cause.
They all voted that states do not have the authority to remove a presidential candidate from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
Read the opinion AND the dissents, they did not go along with the majority.
I’ve read them all. The dissenting justices said the court did not need to reach the question whether the Federal government could only act through legislation by congress. They agreed with all the other justices that in the absence of Federal action, the states could not act on their own. On that question the Court was unanimous.
They all voted that states do not have the authority to remove a presidential candidate from the ballot under the 14th Amendment.
And they did that after repeatedly ruling that Trump did not have standing to appear before SCOTUS with his challenges to what Marc Elias and his dozens of lawyers were doing to unconstitutionally change election law in the critical battleground states. Changes that did nothing but make voting and ballot fraud easier.
It required at least one of Kavanaugh and/or Barrett being in Chief Justice Roberts’ back pocket to get to a majority to refuse to hear those challenges.
Kavanaugh and Barrett are obviously better than anything the country would have gotten from Clinton or now Obama’s Third Term… but they are not even close to being anything remotely like Thomas or Scalia.
This is NOT a soundly constitutional SCOTUS, given opinions and votes by Kavanaugh and Barrett, never mind the feckless Chief Justice Roberts primarily concerned with remaining welcome on the Washington DC cocktails and canapes party circuit.
Stalin, Hitler, Mao, etc loved to reframe
it is called LYING…not reframing