Yesterday, the United States Supreme Court, in a fit of
cowardice mixed with cool logic, let stand the rulings of 5 different United States
Appeals Courts who had all affirmed United States District Court rulings. Those 5 District Courts had each ruled that
laws in 5 states banning Same Sex Marriage violated the Constitution of the
United States. Based on that, Gay
Marriage will now be legal in 30 States and the District of Columbia. Well over half of America’s citizens now live
in states where you are free to marry the adult person you love, whatever their
gender. Sanity seems to be prevailing.
I was struck by the paucity of outrage at the Supreme Court’s
action (or inaction). Across the nation,
elected officials seemed to accept what had happened and within hours people
were getting married in states where such a thing seemed impossible not 10
years ago.
From all that, I wondered if it is becoming clear to
Conservatives how often they have been wrong.
Consistently wrong on almost every single significant issue of public
policy.
They have been wrong, spectacularly wrong, on Civil
Rights. Conservatives opposed the Civil
Right Act, the Voting Right Act, the Equal Rights Act and the 13
Amendment. Conservatives oppose laws
that ban discrimination based on gender, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation,
and religion. Interestingly, they would
often invoke religion (either explicitly or by implication) as justification
for the discrimination that they wanted to continue to practice.
Gay marriage civil rights for homosexuals in general haven’t
had any of the terrible consequences for America that Conservatives have been
predicting. Gay marriage hasn’t harmed heterosexual
marriage in any way. Gay’s are just a
likely to be good parents (and just as likely to be bad parents) as
straights. Homosexuality isn’t the same
as bestiality or pedophilia. All the lies
told by Conservatives about the impacts of Gay Right have all been proven
wrong.
And now they are attacking a woman’s right to chose and
American’s right to vote.
They have been consistently and unequivocally wrong on
economic policy. They opposed the
Minimum Wage, Child Labor Laws, Occupational Safety Laws. They opposed Social Security and Medicare,
two programs that have transformed the lives of America’s elderly for decades.
Tax cuts do and never will pay for themselves. Tax cuts provide a very small short term
boost to the economy but are a long term drag on economic growth because the
deficits that they cause raise the cost of credit for everyone, eliminating any
tiny economic benefit they might have had at first.
They opposed the WWII GI Bill, which sent millions of
returning veterans to college and helped propel the US Economy throughout the
50’s and into the 60’.
The opposed the President’s plan to rescue the GM and
Chrysler and they were utterly and completely wrong about that.
They opposed the 2009 stimulus bill, predicting that it
wouldn’t create job or generate economic activity and they were wrong about
that.
They opposed President Clinton’s 1993 budget which created the
conditions that led to our first balanced budgets since WWII concurrently with
8 years of historic economic growth.
Conservatives predicted that exactly the opposite would happen.
Conservatives predicted the President Bush’s tax cuts would
spur the economy to strong growth and more jobs and what we got was 8 years of
sluggish growth, increasing income inequality, and exploding deficits
culminating in the Great Recession, which they then, amazingly, tried to blame
on poor people.
More recently they opposed the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) inventing a long and inventive list of lies and
distortions, EVERY ONE OF WHICH HAS BEEN PROVEN WRONG. Despite their predictions of doom and disaster,
Obamacare is working better than expected.
More people that originally predicted have signed up for health
insurance, many of them having health insurance for the first time in their
lives. And those newly insurance Americans
are paying their premiums. Obamacare is
reducing the budget deficit and will reduce growth by ~1 Trillion Dollars in
the next decade. The rate of Health Care
Inflation has slowed dramatically since Obamacare was passed. There are no death panels, no FEMA Camps, no
private Army. The number of insurance
companies that are registering on the exchanges to offer insurance is
increasing. Billions of dollars in
Premiums have been rebated to consumers when their Insurance Company didn’t
spend the large bulk of their income from premiums on paying claims. Medicaid Expansion is helping to keep small
local hospitals open, in those states that accepted the Medicaid Expansion. Every significant prediction of failure or
disaster that Conservatives predicted about the Affordable Care Act has proven
to be wrong.
And they pretend not to notice.
It is difficult to find in the past century ANY conservative
policy that has actually been good for this country. I have asked the same question many times,
name one Conservative Policy that has been good for America and I have gotten 1
answer. One person named the Interstate
Highway system, started and supported by President Eisenhower. And that one policy is in reality, one of the
largest publics works projects in American History, not exactly the kind of
policy usually put forward by Conservatives.
In the past 60 years, we have had disputes about what impact
science should have on public policy.
Starting in the late 50’s, it was becoming clear to scientists that the
lead in our gasoline was poisoning our air and our waterways. Scientists and Liberals advocated for the
removal of lead from gasoline. They were
opposed by the oil and auto industries and by those industries Conservative
supporters. The supporters of Lead first
simply denied the science. They paid
other scientists to come up with competing studies that said Lead in our air
and water wasn’t poisoning us, or that it wasn’t coming from our gasoline. When the argument was defeated by real
scientists, they said that shifting away from Lead would ruin older cars and
would hurt the economy. Not surprisingly
they were wrong. Eventually, when we did
finally eliminate lead from gasoline, we prevented thousands, perhaps millions,
of Americans from the suffering that was the almost inevitable result of
exposure to high levels of environmental lead.
The same pattern was repeated by the Tobacco Industry. As it became scientifically clear that Tobacco
was not only addictive, but was deadly, the Tobacco followed the same play
book, hiring shill scientists to produce scientifically flawed studies that
they could tout as proving that Cigarettes were neither Addictive or deadly. When that argument was finally and
conclusively squashed, they then attacked the victims. Conservatives would argue that since it was
now clear that cigarettes were deadly, it was the smokers fault for getting
addicted in the first place, and that to blame the Tobacco companies was to
deny personal responsibility. Now we
know that Tobacco companies have deliberately and systematically advertised
their poisons to children since they need to replace 3000 smokers a day who die
from smoking related illnesses.
When it became clear that we were destroying the very
environment that we all had to live in, Conservatives opposed taking any
actions. They predicted that cleaning up
the Air and Water would devastate the economy and put millions out of
work. And they were wrong, yet
again. Not only did cleaning up the
environment not devastate the economy, it created entire new industries and put
millions of people to work while dramatically improving the health of Americans
and improving the Health of our planet.
And it goes on. With
Climate Change, the stakes are so much higher.
But the players and the tactics are the same. Conservatives deny the science at the top of
their lungs, and accuse thousands of actual Climate Scientists of corruption
and dishonesty, while promoting the opinions of people who aren’t actually
experts in the field. Conservatives,
despite their history and the numerous new studies that disagree with the,
argue that doing anything about Climate Change will devastate the economy and
put millions out of work. Claims that
they have made time and time again in previous “debates” where they have been
utterly and completely wrong every time.
So I was wondering as I watched Conservatives losing another
Civil Right battle, will they, do they every recognize that they are on the
wrong side of history. Do they see that
they are almost in errantly wrong in their predictions.
It doesn’t seem so.
They ability to be self delusional is quite impressive.
They have lost the war on Gay Right, even though there are
ever smaller and smaller battles to be fought, the end isn’t in doubt, and it
isn’t anything like Conservatives have been prediction.
Yet again, wrong on the facts, wrong in their predictions
and on the wrong side of history. Its
almost a Conservative mantra.
