'Activist' conservatives’ judicial con

   Here's the situation coming down the stretch: The Affordable Health Care Act is winning by a nose.

   That would be the one-vote majority by which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld the constitutionality of the most sweeping reform of health care since Medicare.

  A Reagan appointee, of all people, Judge Laurence Silberman, wrote the opinion affirming its constitutionality, saying the Interstate Commerce Clause of the Constitution allowed it.

   And, so, you know what that means.

   It means that conservatives are pleading, beseeching, burning incense on altars for a little judicial activism by conservatives on the U.S. Supreme Court.

   Justice Antonin Scalia, this is your cue to show us the political animal you are and always will be.

   We have been led to believe that you and your cohorts on the court's right wing are "strict constructionists" who don't bend with partisan breezes. Pardon while I sneeze.

   The drone from the right is about villainous judges who ignore the popular (legislative) will.

   If that activism is rejected by Justices Scalia, Roberts, Thomas and Alito, President Obama's signature social achievement has it made in the shade.

   By review relative to the health care that was law "rammed down our throats": Obama ran for president promising reforms to insure all Americans. The Senate and House arrived at a compromise. He signed it. This is called representative democracy.

    Conservatives now beg fellow conservatives on the court to overturn it.

    That, by review, is judicial activism.

    Anyone paying attention to Scalia and company will acknowledge that such activist urges — ignoring the popular will expressed through legislation — is hardly unprecedented. The court overturning key aspects of campaign finance law in the 2010 Citizens United case is Exhibit No. 1.

    Other examples include the conservative wing of the court voting to overturn the Violence Against Women Act and the Gun-Free School Zones Act.

    Then there was a certain presidential election in 2001. The court overruled Florida's courts because — as constitutional constructionist Scalia explained — all that counting and recounting had gone on long enough.

     That, wrote Adam Cohen in The New York Times, "isn't a constitutional argument. It is an unapologetic defense of judicial activism."

     Back to the Affordable Health Care Act, which a gaggle of Republican attorneys general seeks to repeal. The argument is that the individual mandate to have insurance exceeds federal power.

     However, as Silberman points out, the Commerce Clause is open-ended. Additionally, he points out that the circuit court was ruling on "a long-established constitutional power, not recognizing a new constitutional right." This sounds like, um, strict constructionism.

     Republicans challenging the law in court want to construct, 223 years after ratification and through judicial fiat, limits existing only in their minds.

     Once again: The law in question was signed by a popularly elected president after passing Congress. This is how the system works, unless capricious judges can't stomach it.

     Honestly, sometimes it appears Republicans don't know what they want with the courts. One day they advocate court-stripping mechanisms to get judges out of the way of what they do legislatively. The next day, to block duly enacted legislation, they burn incense hoping their favored judges will get a whiff.

    The Constitution? They revere it — except when they can't hack it, and want to amend it. I am reminded of Texas Sen. John Cornyn, who from the moment he came to Washington in 2003 and got seated on the Judiciary Committee seemed to spend every moment conjuring up new constitutional amendments — against gay marriage, against flag burning, against abortion, for school prayer, for an "official" language, and most recently for a balanced budget.

   This is a document conservatives revere? Said reverence is more commonly reserved for toilet paper.

   The conservative wing may in fact bring Obama's chief legislative accomplishment crashing down. If it does, however, know what is at play: partisan judges who say lawmaking is what the legislative branch does, except when they don't like it.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

Zucchini logic with sweet potatoes

 The long campaign continues. It's not quite a lifetime long, like Gandhi's against violence. Nonetheless, many miles have passed beneath my sandals as I've advanced my theme.

  For more than a quarter century each year around Thanksgiving, I have carried out a lonely and thankless campaign about sweet potatoes. Message: Think before you eat.

  Because, surely, sweet potatoes are not for oral application.

  I know this to be true, because I ate sweet potato once. Once.

  Now, you might ask: "Why only a quarter century? You are at least a little bit older than that. Before a quarter century ago, what were you doing relative to such a crucial public issue? Wasting your words and your platform? Wasting precious time to inform humanity?" Yes and no.

   The fact is, I heard the call to inform people back in the '80s when I moved to the South and detected a veneration of (read: misconception about) sweet potatoes that I hadn't while living in the North.

  So, I started writing about this matter — this orange, stringy, steamy, often-subjugated-by-marshmallow-cream matter.

  Once again, however: What was I doing all those years before I took up this cause?

  Well, of course, I was writing anti-zucchini columns.

  This is when I lived and wrote in my home state of Colorado. I didn't write my anti-zucchini columns at Thanksgiving time, but rather earlier in the fall — harvest time for backyard-grown zucchinis. That is when armies of Coloradans parade up and down their neighborhood streets with arms full of oversized zucchinis, some as big as torpedoes.

  They have no use for all of that vegetable matter, so they go around trying to pawn their zucchinis off on friends. Whatever the intent, this is not my idea of kinship. Back when I was a newspaperman in Colorado, I wrote about it.

   The sad thing about zucchini is that when people cannot find unsuspecting victims onto whom to dump the giant cucumbers, they retreat to their kitchens to come up with recipes with which to (get this) EAT the zucchini.

   After I expressed my concerns about this in print, it seemed that not a dinner invitation went by that someone did not seek to sneak something containing zucchini onto my plate. I did not bite.

   "But zucchini is nutritious and full of fiber," I was told.

   "So are (1) tree bark; (2) grass clippings," I replied.

  Fast-forward to the present and the push for truth: that sweet potatoes couldn't possibly be what's for dinner.

  Not only are they food, but they're the "perfect food," say the apologists, "full of vital minerals."

  Yes, and so is molybdenum.

  I have to keep pointing out that I am not opposed to sweet potatoes per se, just to eating them. They have dozens of uses — ethanol, plastic, dye. Just not anything involving a fork.

   All right. So, now we live in Colorado. This summer my wife, in our small backyard garden plot, did what Coloradans do: plant zucchini. Not surprisingly, we had more than we cared to eat.

   Noticing that our dogs love fresh produce, like carrots, she decided to see if they would eat sliced zucchini when mixed with their dog food. They loved it. All of our excess zucchini went away in a flash. We did not have to show up at our neighbors' doorsteps with armfuls.

  Once the zucchini supply was exhausted, Becky looked for other vegetables the dogs might like. She was reminded that the pet store has dog treats made of sweet potato. So, from the grocery store came home an orange tuber the size and shape of a bazooka shell.

  Sliced up, it went into the dogs' meal. They gobbled it up. "At last," I thought, "I have a reason to praise the sweet potato this Thanksgiving."

 Not so fast. Almost as soon as the sweet potato went into the dogs, extremely foul gaseous aromas began to come out.

 We had to evacuate the house.

 Message: Sweet potatoes may be fit for dogs, but what emanates, at least with my dogs, may not be fit for humans  unless they have severe adenoid problems.

 The long campaign continues.

  Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.

‘Occupy’: squatting for glory

     As they took pepper spray in their faces, I wonder if they thought about fire hoses in Birmingham, tear gas in Chicago's Lincoln Park, National Guard bullets at Kent State.

     Probably not. They thought of pain, and disbelief, the kind many felt seeing it on YouTube and on the news.

     That, and inspiration.

     The seated Occupy protesters in Portland and at the University California-Davis were doing something gallant in the face of unblinking authority. In the process they were burrowing into the nation's consciousness.

     Back when Bull Connor was brutalizing uppity "nigras," face it: Most Americans were wholly ambivalent, or on the side of Birmingham's police commissioner. They were concerned with order — you know, commerce, convenience, stability, the blessed status quo.

    So, too, today, do most Americans side with police in whatever they might do to subjugate the Occupy protesters. They wince at the methods, sure, but not the motivations: commerce, convenience, the blessed status quo.

    Back when marchers disrupted that order in the South in audacious and nonviolent defiance, most Americans were saying, "What do they want? To completely overturn all sense of normalcy? Of tradition? Do they hate America? What role are Communists playing in this?"

    Don't believe for a second that most Americans turned on the TV, saw the fire hoses crushing those people, and said, "This is unacceptable." What was acceptable, what they wanted most, was normalcy.

     What the Occupy protesters are doing right now is amazingly gallant and important, even if all they do is make people think about America's definition of "normal." The phrase, "We are the 99 percent" is already etched in history, just as striking "nigra" Memphis garbage workers made "I am a man" part of it in 1968.

    Watch and see the extent to which Occupy's graphic illustration, "America Divided by Wealth," becomes a banner. It shows 1 percent owning everything from the Pacific coast and across the Dakotas, and from the Canadian border to the Texas Panhandle.

    So, what would these protesters suggest that we do about that? Consider these proposals from a list of Occupy demands:

    They want less regressive taxation, such as an end to the cap on Social Security payroll taxes that exempts income after $102,000.

    They want to eliminate tax breaks for capital gains. They want to remove loopholes in the tax code for huge corporations which escape federal taxes.

    They want a federal tax on financial transactions involving securities or derivatives.

    Your response might be: Any of these, though they would raise revenue for what America needs, would be terribly disruptive to the status quo, one which might require sacrifices, crimping markets and affecting all Americans. The amazing thing is that somehow apologists for the status quo think that what we are doing now comes without the very sacrifices that they don't wish to visit.

    Who is going to pay for blue-sky economic policies that drove up the national debt to untenable heights? Will it be America's wealthiest with their tax attorneys? No, it will be the middle class and poor when it becomes evident that this nation can't simply cut its way to a balanced budget, something that should be obvious already. The higher taxes to come will hit those with modest means, and what we cut ("Hands off defense spending") will hit those who already hurt the worst.

    America's fiscal policy is not serving the needs of the 99 percent but those of the lenders, the traders, the insurers, the fiduciary slave masters.

    I'm not sure this is what was going through the minds of the protesters who took faces full of pepper spray, or if bewilderment and disbelief were the extent of it.

    But they have made increasing numbers of the 99 percent think that maybe what America has come to accept as normalcy is not really that. It is a form of oppression that few of us have stopped to consider up to now because, well, order is so much more efficient than justice.

    Longtime Texas newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.