Justin's Political Corner

Republicans and Right-Wingers have a rich history of supporting a policy for decades and then opposing the very same program.  In this article we explore just a few of the major flip flops of the GOP since President Obama took office.

Abortion: Believe it or not there have always been many pro-choice Republicans out there. Ironically enough, June 14, 1967, Ronald Reagan signed the Therapeutic Abortion Act, after only six months as California governor. From a total of 518 legal abortions in California in 1967, the number of abortions would soar to an annual average of 100,000 in the remaining years of Reagan’s two terms — more abortions than in any U.S. state prior to Roe v. Wade.

(GOP largely flipped to being anti-Choice, around the time of Reagan’s Presidency).

Cap and Trade: You might remember that Ronald Reagan first conceived of the concept of cap and trade, George H.W. Bush signed the very first cap and trade legislation back in 1990 and George W. Bush gave it his full support.  Now Republicans oppose cap and trade as big oil and coal companies along with

other special interests have spent hundreds millions of dollars over the past two years to convince legislators, politicians, and citizens to oppose cap and trade and other measures that would create jobs, cut oil use, and reduce pollution. 

Child Labor: Republicans were once part of the initial movement to create child labor laws back in 1852, even trying to pass a Constitutional amendment in 1924. Democrats were finally successful in getting the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 passed which established the minimum wage and place limitations on the use of “oppressive child labor,” as defined in the statute.  Republicans are now opposed to child labor protections as part of their overall support of corporations.  You might recall Newt Gingrich referring to child labor laws as “truly stupid” during his unsuccessful campaign last year for the party nomination as President.  Source

Civil Rights: Republicans once championed civil rights ending slavery, adopting the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments and it was even a Republican led Supreme Court that ruled in Brown vs. Board of Education, the landmark casing ending school segregation. 

Deficit Spending: Republican have used deficit spending going back to Ronald Reagan who doubled the national dept and George W. Bush who doubled it again.  With Democrat control of the Presidency and Congress, Republicans have done a complete reversal on the matter.

Public  Education: Education is interesting in that Republicans have managed to do a double flip flop on this one.  Back in 1964 Barry Goldwater and the conservative movement  were against any kind of federal aid to education of any kind.  As time progressed conservative voters came around to supporting federal aid in the form of programs such as college loans and aid for handicapped students.  By 1981 both President Reagan and Senator Goldwater had flip flopped and no longer opposed such funding, but still were attempting to shut down the Department of Education as part of a wider reaching goal of removing what was perceived by them as unnecessary intrusions into state’s rights.  The administration of George W. Bush first proposed the No Child Left Behind Act immediately after he took office and the bill was passed with bipartisan support in Congress. For nearly a generation there has been bipartisan agreement that the federal government has a vital role in public education, primarily in the form of federal funds which compel states to raise academic standards. Fast forward to modern times and the Republicans have done yet another about face and are now pushing to weaken education, particularly public education, by promoting vouchers, charter schools and other forms of privatization now believing that education responsibilities should revert to states and local school districts to sort out their own problems.  

h/t: Samuel-Warde.com

The framers of our Constitution met in 1787 because the weak national governance adopted by the Articles of Confederation utterly failed. Their goal, in their own words, was to ensure that the federal government had the power to “legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union, and also in those to which the States are separately incompetent.” National leaders must have the ability to address national problems, and this is especially true with respect to the national economy. As the Supreme Court explained very early in American history, there is “no sort of trade” that our national leaders cannot regulate, and the the power to regulate something “implies in its nature full power over the thing to be regulated,” so long as Congress does not trample the individual protected elsewhere in the Constitution.

Few living Americans have done more to undermine this vision than Randy Barnett, a Georgetown law professor and one of the leading architects of the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act. In an interview with NPR yesterday, Barnett admitted just how far he’d like to go in reimagining the Constitution if his attack on health reform succeeds.

The “New Deal cases” Barnett objects to rejected the fake constitution that dominated the pre-New Deal era. If Barnett succeeds in restoring this fake constitution, he would usher in a far meaner and less prosperous America:

• Child Labor: One of the seminal cases from this discredited era is Hammer v. Dagenhardt, which struck down a national child labor law. If the New Deal cases Barnett despises were overruled, the longstanding federal protections against exploiting child workers would cease to exist.
• No Minimum Wage: A key New Deal case, United States v. Darby, upheld a national minimum wage and overtime laws. If Darby were overruled, these and other basic labor protections would also cease to exist.
• Whites-Only Lunch Counters: The Court also relied on cases like Darby in upholding basic civil rights protections, including the ban on whites-only lunch counters. Barnett’s fake constitution would almost certainly eliminate most of the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era.
• The Right to Organize: The pre-New Deal justices also struck down laws ensuring workers’ right to organize into labor unions. Restoring their fake constitution would bring this decision back to life.

In other words, the fake constitution espoused by the anti-health reform case’s chief architect would roll back nearly one hundred years of progress — leaving poor children, minorities, workers and women out in the cold.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday said that child labor regulations proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor would lead to America’s decline.

The federal agency is considering updating the Fair Labor Standards Act by strengthening current child labor regulations related to work with animals, pesticides, timber operations, manure pits and storage bins.

“The Obama Administration is working on regulations that would prevent children from working on our own family farms,” she wrote on Facebook. “This is more overreach of the federal government with many negative consequences. And if you think the government’s new regs will stop at family farms, think again.”

However, the proposed regulations would not apply to children working on farms owned or partly-owned by their relatives.

The Labor Department said it proposed the new regulations because of studies showing that children are significantly more likely to be killed while performing agricultural work than while working in all other industries combined.

h/t: Eric W. Dolan at The Raw Story

Newt Gingrich has made headlines and raised eyebrows on the campaign trail for proposing to make poor children work as janitors in their school, saying it would help them understand the value of work and money.

But apparently, even on child janitorial work, Gingrich is employing a double standard. As Karen Tumulty notes, in a 1995 Vanity Fair profile, Gingrich seemed to refuse to get a job as a student. 

h/t: Alex Seitz-Wald at Think Progress Economy

Last month, Newt Gingrich advocated putting our children to work as school janitors. Just in case you thought someone slipped something into his Wheaties that morning, Gingrich doubled down on his statement, calling poor children “lazy,” saying they have no work ethic.

“Really poor children, in really poor neighborhoods have no habits of working and have nobody around them who works, so they have no habit of showing up on Monday. They have no habit of staying all day, they have no habit of ‘I do this and you give me cash,’ unless it is illegal.”

Here’s the video:

Okay. Let’s get past the fact that his comment is racist, classist and downright inhuman (no surprise coming from Gingrich). I almost have to give him kudos for his brazenness.

Gingrich doesn’t really want to see little Janie cleaning vomit from the Ms. Johnson’s first grade class. He really doesn’t want to see little Johnny serving Coke at the local McDonalds. He wants to see little Johnny serving Koch, at the local McDonalds.

If ever you thought the Republican Party **A wholly owned subsidiary of Koch Industries** was interested in lowering the unemployment rate, you were sadly mistaken. The Republican Party, in its current incarnation, has two goals; eliminating the federal government through zero taxes and cheap labor.

The first goal is for another article. Newt’s rhetoric about child labor is all about the second goal. A cheap labor agenda is nothing new to the GOP. They have always been anti-labor, but over the last 30 years, they have launched an all out multi-pronged attack:

* Union busting

* Outsourcing

* Expanding the labor force

That’s right. Republicans don’t want to do anything about unemployment. They want to see more unemployed people. Desperate, unemployed people, take desperate, low paying, no benefit jobs. To ensure a never ending pool of desperate, unemployed people, the Republicans are increasing the numbers. They are advocating prison labor, forcing seniors back into the workforce and adding little Janie and little Johnny as competition. Why in the world would anyone hire a 40 year old unemployed professional, when they can pay Grandpa or a child a fraction of the salary? Even if they screw up, the company would certainly get more than their money’s worth. Prisoners are even better. They are under threat not to screw up.

Conceding ever so slightly to flak he’s taken for calling child labor laws “stupid” and suggesting that schools fire janitors and replace with them poor kids, GOP presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich got more specific today, saying working-class students should be limited to jobs like cleaning bathrooms. Bowing to concerns that janitorial work is dangerous, Gingrich floated, “What if they became assistant janitors and their jobs were to mop the floor and clean the bathroom?”

z-Wald on Dec 1, 2011 at 1:00 pm

Via POLITICO’s Reid Epstein, Newt Gingrich tonight said at an address at Harvard that child work laws “entrap” poor children into poverty - and suggested that a better way to handle failing schools is to fire the janitors, hire the local students and let them get paid for upkeep.

The comment came in response to an undergrad’s question about income equality during his talk at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

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“This is something that no liberal wants to deal with,” Gingrich said. “Core policies of protecting unionization and bureaucratization against children in the poorest neighborhoods, crippling them by putting them in schools that fail has done more to create income inequality in the United States than any other single policy. It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods, entrapping children in, first of all, child laws, which are truly stupid.

“You say to somebody, you shouldn’t go to work before you’re what, 14, 16 years of age, fine. You’re totally poor. You’re in a school that is failing with a teacher that is failing. I’ve tried for years to have a very simple model,” he said. “Most of these schools ought to get rid of the unionized janitors, have one master janitor and pay local students to take care of the school. The kids would actually do work, they would have cash, they would have pride in the schools, they’d begin the process of rising.”

He added, “You go out and talk to people, as I do, you go out and talk to people who are really successful in one generation. They all started their first job between nine and 14 years of age. They all were either selling newspapers, going door to door, they were doing something, they were washing cars.”

“They all learned how to make money at a very early age,” he said. “What do we say to poor kids in poor neighborhoods? Don’t do it. Remember all that stuff about don’t get a hamburger flipping job? The worst possible advice you could give to poor children. Get any job that teaches you to show up on Monday. Get any job that teaches you to stay all day even if you are in a fight with your girlfriend. The whole process of making work worthwhile is central.”