July 2011

Politicians seeking the Republican presidential nomination are splitting over how closely they want to associate with a Religious Right Iowa group dubbed FAMiLY LEADER, and comedians are having a field day with the organization’s blatantly bigoted “marriage vow” pledge, but in a column for the Des Moines Register Graham Gillette says the group’s “nonsense” is not that funny. (Republican presidential candidates Rep. Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum, a longtime darling of the Religious Right, have both signed the pledge. Former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney has distanced himself from the so-called “Marriage Vow” pledge, TPMDC reports.)

The group, led by Bob Vander Plaats, who helped lead the efforts to oust the Iowa Supreme Court justices who ruled that the state’s anti-gay marriage law is unconstitutional, has a long and tawdry record of using his Christian Right platform to trash the LGBT community. RightWingWatch notes that Plaats “is also tied to an effort that likened being gay to being a cigarette smoker and once said that allowing equal marriage rights for gay couples threatened the system of private property and gun-ownership rights. One former adviser said that Vander Plaats is ‘obsessed with the gay marriage issue.’”  

The group’s website describes itself as a “consistent, courageous voice in the churches, in the legislature, in the media, in the courtroom, in the public square … always standing for God’s truth.”

The group’s marriage vow pledge, which it asked the Republican candidates to sign, included in its original preamble the wildly bigoted claim that “African-American families were more secure under slavery than they are today, under an African-American president,” TPMDC reports. That language, TPMDC notes, has since been removed from the pledge.

The marriage vow, however, still includes some laughably outlandish language.

For example its preamble states, “Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order – as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders – upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.”

Moreover “marriage fidelity,” only between men and women “protects innocent children, vulnerable women, the rights of fathers, the stability of families, and the liberties of all American citizens under our republican form of government.”

The historical inaccuracy and general idiocy of the marriage pledge obviously doesn’t matter to Plaats, and apparently neither to the politicos who have agreed to peddle his far-right “nonsense.”

Jonathan Rauch, in a guest post for The Dish by Andrew Sullivan, joins the discussion over a constitutional solution to the ongoing struggle in Washington to reach a deal to allow the nation to continue paying its debts. He writes that since conservatives are dismissively responding to “the 14th-Amendment option,” be believes there might be something to it.

Rauch states:

As you have probably heard, the 14th Amendment says, "The validity of the public debt of the United States...shall not be questioned." In a post-Civil War context, the amendment's framers sought to prevent some political faction—at that time, the South—from refusing to let the government repay its debts. The basic idea of not letting politics hold the debt hostage is certainly relevant to what's happening today, although obviously the situation is different. In any case, whatever the particulars of the amendment's adoption, it clearly suggests that meeting our debt obligations is a constitutional imperative, not merely a statutory one. Otherwise, of course, the amendment wouldn't be there.

As noted in this post, leading constitutional law experts, such as Harvard’s Laurence H. Tribe and Yale’s Jack Balkin have weighed in on the 14th Amendment and the budget crisis.

In his column for The New York Times, Tribe writes:

The Constitution grants only Congress — not the president — the power “to borrow money on the credit of the United States.” Nothing in the 14th Amendment or in any other constitutional provision suggests that the president may usurp legislative power to prevent a violation of the Constitution. Moreover, it is well established that the president’s power drops to what Justice Robert H. Jackson called its “lowest ebb” when exercised against the express will of Congress.

But Rauch says the “dismissers” of the 14th Amendment option are acting, well, too dismissively.  

“When push comes to shove, therefore, and August 2 or some other drop-dead date comes around, does the 14th Amendment trump the debt-limit statute? I would think so,” Rauch writes. “At a minimum, it gives President Obama a compelling case to keep servicing the debt. After all, in the current environment, even a temporary default could have severe economic consequences. Worse, it might be one of those moments in a country's history that frame a turning point in the narrative. "Deadbeat U.S.A.!" Reversing the damage to the country's psyche and image might take years, or forever. Lemme tell you, China isn't about to default.”