Barack Obama is the "first president to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect." 18JUN14

HERE'S another of those cowardly anonymous chain e mails from conservative, and most likely "christian" bloggers, attacking the Obama administration. Once again, it is being forwarded by ignorant, racist people, most likely "christians" who choose to ignore the admonishment in the 10 Commandments and 1st Corinthians 5 against bearing false witness and slander (this chapter has a lot to say about Christian life that many choose to ignore because it doesn't justify their actions)
It is a sad commentary on their hateful lives as well as a pathetic commentary about their lack of knowledge about the US Constitution, the Presidency and American history. Before forwarding e mails like this, they should consider not only the basics of their faith mentioned above but the words of I Carter Heyward "In the Spirit which draws us into honest engagement with one another, including those who may be very different from us in various ways, God calls us to wake up and learn how to love and respect one another, period." From +PolitiFact .....

The Truth-O-Meter Says:

Barack Obama is the "first president to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect."

Chain email on Wednesday, June 18th, 2014 in

Chain email falsely says Barack Obama is 'first president to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect'

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The front facade and plaza of the Supreme Court.

Readers recently forwarded us an email that’s been making the rounds for several years. We initially checked one of its long list of claims in 2011 -- that President Barack Obama is the "first president to terminate America’s ability to put a man in space." But after rating the space claim Pants on Fire, we got distracted and never took a close look at any of the other three dozen claims in the email.
With this same email now seemingly circulating in heavy rotation again (here’s a version the reader sent us from a conservative blog post) we decided to check a few more.
In this item, we’ll check the claim that Obama is the "first president to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect." As examples of Obama’s purportedly overstepping past practices in suing states, the email specifically alludes to a suit filed by his administration against Arizona’s controversial immigration law, one filed by his campaign against voting-law changes in Ohio, and a case in which his administration filed a friend-of-the-court brief in a suit filed by Planned Parenthood against Indiana.
But there are several problems with the claim.
What does the president swear to protect?
The presidential oath of office says, "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."
There’s nothing in there about protecting the states. Rather, the president is charged with protecting the Constitution of the United States. Sometimes states act in ways that contradict the U.S. Constitution (or federal laws), and when they do, the president’s administration is expected to challenge those states in court. It’s up to the judicial branch to decide whether the states or the federal government is right in that case.
"The federal government does sue states, either to enforce federal law or to enforce the Constitution, and it’s not that uncommon," said Kermit Roosevelt, a University of Pennsylvania law professor.
Who files the lawsuits?
When the federal government sues a state (or anyone), the lawsuit is almost always filed by a federal department or agency, rather than by the president personally.
While it’s true that the president’s policy preferences may have an impact on what types of suits are put at the top of the pile, it’s not correct to say Obama is the "first president to file lawsuits against the states." Much of the decision about whether to sue states is up to lower-level officials, with significant input by nonpartisan, career public officials, and with close attention paid to the plain language of the law in question, rather than simply because of ideological pique.
Is Obama really the first president to sue states?
This is the laughable part of the claim.
Simply by Googling, we found at least 40 examples of Supreme Court cases titled, "United States vs. (name of state)" that fit the email’s definition, going back more than a century. Many of them are fairly mundane -- a lot involve competing land claims between the federal government and states -- but others are more wide-ranging, and a few were quite important.
For instance, United States vs. Arizona (1935) involved a fight over construction of the Parker Dam, in which Arizona threatened the use of military force to stop the work; United States vs. Georgia (2006), which involved a state prison’s alleged failure to adhere to the Americans with Disabilities Act; United States vs. Commonwealth of Kentucky (2001), which addressed whether state or federal law has the final say on radioactive waste rules at a federal Energy Department landfill; and United States vs. Minnesota (1926), in which the federal government, as the guardian of Indians, sued the state for proceeds of land sales that were due the Indians but not received by them.
Several of the most important cases involved civil rights, including United States vs. Alabama (1960) and United States vs. Mississippi (1965), both of which dealt with African-American voting rights, and United States vs. Virginia (1996), which involved the all-male, state-supported Virginia Military Institute.
We also found more than 50 pre-Obama examples of Justice Department civil rights settlements with states based on lawsuits going back to 1988.
But the Justice Department isn’t the only federal agency to sue states -- lots of other federal agencies also bring enforcement actions against states through lawsuits. In some cases, the targets are states or state-run entities.
Consider the docket at the Environmental Protection Agency. Between 2004 and 2006, the administration of George W. Bush settled lawsuits with the South Carolina Public Service Authority, the Virginia Department of Corrections, the Hawaii Department of Transportation, and the Idaho Transportation Department.
A different claim than the one made in the email might have some validity -- that the Obama administration may be suing states more frequently, or on different and "bigger" issues. But even here, numerical proof is elusive.
Carl Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, said it’s logical to assume that Democratic administrations may be more likely to file lawsuits to enforce federal laws than Republican administrations do, since a core tenet of Republican philosophy is a distaste for "big government."
"It sure seems like this administration does it a lot, and that Democrats would do it more than Republicans," said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. He added, however, that on the email’s specific claim, "it doesn't strike me as unusual for the federal government to sue states to enforce federal law, particularly voting rights and environmental regulations."
Our ruling
The chain email said Obama is the "first president to file lawsuits against the states he swore an oath to protect." But no president swears to protect the states -- they swear to protect the Constitution, which sometimes leads to clashes with states and the president is then obligated to challenge them through lawsuits. Our quick search produced dozens of examples of the federal government suing states going back a century. So we rate the claim Pants on Fire.

About this statement:

Published: Wednesday, June 18th, 2014 at 3:38 p.m.
Subjects: Legal Issues, States
Sources:
Example of chain email, accessed June 18, 2014
National Museum of American History, presidential oath of office, accessed June 18, 2014
U.S. Department of Justice, voting rights litigation, accessed June 17, 2014
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, civil cases and settlements, June 17, 2014
Email interview with Kermit Roosevelt, University of Pennsylvania law professor, June 17, 2014
Email interview with Carl Tobias, law professor at the University of Richmond, June 17, 2014
Email interview with Ilya Shapiro, senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, June 17, 2014
Email interview with Stephen B. Presser, Northwestern University law professor, June 17, 2014
Email interview with Andrew Koppelman, Northwestern University law professor, June 17, 2014
Written by: Louis Jacobson
Researched by: Louis Jacobson
Edited by: Angie Drobnic Holan

WHICH OF THE 11 AMERICAN NATIONS DO YOU LIVE IN? (Check out the map) 15NOV13

I love maps, and this map (click on it to enlarge) and the article that comes with it is fascinating. I was born and raised in Yankeedom but now live in Tidewater. From Tufts Universities Tufts Magazine.....

Up in Arms

THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS
BY COLIN WOODARD, A91
ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER
Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.
Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of forests and game hunters like Canada, Sweden, Finland, or New Zealand, and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our national identity.
What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.
The original North American colonies were settled by people from distinct regions of the British Isles—and from France, the Netherlands, and Spain—each with its own religious, political, and ethnographic traits. For generations, these Euro-American cultures developed in isolation from one another, consolidating their cherished religious and political principles and fundamental values, and expanding across the eastern half of the continent in nearly exclusive settlement bands. Throughout the colonial period and the Early Republic, they saw themselves as competitors—for land, capital, and other settlers—and even as enemies, taking opposing sides in the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Civil War.
There’s never been an America, but rather several Americas—each a distinct nation. There are eleven nations today. Each looks at violence, as well as everything else, in its own way.
The precise delineation of the eleven nations—which I have explored at length in my latest book, American Nations—is original to me, but I’m certainly not the first person to observe that such national divisions exist. Kevin Phillips, a Republican Party campaign strategist, recognized the boundaries and values of several of these nations in 1969 and used them to correctly prophesy two decades of American political development in his politico cult classic The Emerging Republican Majority. Joel Garreau, a Washington Post editor, argued that our continent was divided into rival power blocs in The Nine Nations of North America, though his ahistorical approach undermined the identification of the nations. The Pulitzer Prize–winning historian David Hackett Fischer detailed the origins and early evolution of four of these nations in his magisterial Albion’s Seed and later added New France. Russell Shorto described the salient characteristics of New Netherland in The Island at the Center of the World. And the list goes on.
The borders of my eleven American nations are reflected in many different types of maps—including maps showing the distribution of linguistic dialects, the spread of cultural artifacts, the prevalence of different religious denominations, and the county-by-county breakdown of voting in virtually every hotly contested presidential race in our history. Our continent’s famed mobility has been reinforcing, not dissolving, regional differences, as people increasingly sort themselves into like-minded communities, a phenomenon analyzed by Bill Bishop and Robert Cushing in The Big Sort (2008). Even waves of immigrants did not fundamentally alter these nations, because the children and grandchildren of immigrants assimilated into whichever culture surrounded them.
Before I describe the nations, I should underscore that my observations refer to the dominant culture, not the individual inhabitants, of each region. In every town, city, and state you’ll likely find a full range of political opinions and social preferences. Even in the reddest of red counties and bluest of blue ones, twenty to forty percent of voters cast ballots for the “wrong” team. It isn’t that residents of one or another nation all think the same, but rather that they are all embedded within a cultural framework of deep-seated preferences and attitudes—each of which a person may like or hate, but has to deal with nonetheless. Because of slavery, the African American experience has been different from that of other settlers and immigrants, but it too has varied by nation, as black people confronted the dominant cultural and institutional norms of each.
The nations are constituted as follows:
YANKEEDOM. Founded on the shores of Massachusetts Bay by radical Calvinists as a new Zion, Yankeedom has, since the outset, put great emphasis on perfecting earthly civilization through social engineering, denial of self for the common good, and assimilation of outsiders. It has prized education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and broad citizen participation in politics and government, the latter seen as the public’s shield against the machinations of grasping aristocrats and other would-be tyrants. Since the early Puritans, it has been more comfortable with government regulation and public-sector social projects than many of the other nations, who regard the Yankee utopian streak with trepidation.
NEW NETHERLAND. Established by the Dutch at a time when the Netherlands was the most sophisticated society in the Western world, New Netherland has always been a global commercial culture—materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, it emerged as a center of publishing, trade, and finance, a magnet for immigrants, and a refuge for those persecuted by other regional cultures, from Sephardim in the seventeenth century to gays, feminists, and bohemians in the early twentieth. Unconcerned with great moral questions, it nonetheless has found itself in alliance with Yankeedom to defend public institutions and reject evangelical prescriptions for individual behavior.
THE MIDLANDS. America’s great swing region was founded by English Quakers, who believed in humans’ inherent goodness and welcomed people of many nations and creeds to their utopian colonies like Pennsylvania on the shores of Delaware Bay. Pluralistic and organized around the middle class, the Midlands spawned the culture of Middle America and the Heartland, where ethnic and ideological purity have never been a priority, government has been seen as an unwelcome intrusion, and political opinion has been moderate. An ethnic mosaic from the start—it had a German, rather than British, majority at the time of the Revolution—it shares the Yankee belief that society should be organized to benefit ordinary people, though it rejects top-down government intervention.
TIDEWATER. Built by the younger sons of southern English gentry in the Chesapeake country and neighboring sections of Delaware and North Carolina, Tidewater was meant to reproduce the semifeudal society of the countryside they’d left behind. Standing in for the peasantry were indentured servants and, later, slaves. Tidewater places a high value on respect for authority and tradition, and very little on equality or public participation in politics. It was the most powerful of the American nations in the eighteenth century, but today it is in decline, partly because it was cut off from westward expansion by its boisterous Appalachian neighbors and, more recently, because it has been eaten away by the expanding federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk.
GREATER APPALACHIA. Founded in the early eighteenth century by wave upon wave of settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the Scottish lowlands, Appalachia has been lampooned by writers and screenwriters as the home of hillbillies and rednecks. It transplanted a culture formed in a state of near constant danger and upheaval, characterized by a warrior ethic and a commitment to personal sovereignty and individual liberty. Intensely suspicious of lowland aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike, Greater Appalachia has shifted alliances depending on who appeared to be the greatest threat to their freedom. It was with the Union in the Civil War. Since Reconstruction, and especially since the upheavals of the 1960s, it has joined with Deep South to counter federal overrides of local preference.
DEEP SOUTH. Established by English slave lords from Barbados, Deep South was meant as a West Indies–style slave society. This nation offered a version of classical Republicanism modeled on the slave states of the ancient world, where democracy was the privilege of the few and enslavement the natural lot of the many. Its caste systems smashed by outside intervention, it continues to fight against expanded federal powers, taxes on capital and the wealthy, and environmental, labor, and consumer regulations.
EL NORTE. The oldest of the American nations, El Norte consists of the borderlands of the Spanish American empire, which were so far from the seats of power in Mexico City and Madrid that they evolved their own characteristics. Most Americans are aware of El Norte as a place apart, where Hispanic language, culture, and societal norms dominate. But few realize that among Mexicans, norteños have a reputation for being exceptionally independent, self-sufficient, adaptable, and focused on work. Long a hotbed of democratic reform and revolutionary settlement, the region encompasses parts of Mexico that have tried to secede in order to form independent buffer states between their mother country and the United States.
THE LEFT COAST. A Chile-shaped nation wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the Cascade and Coast mountains, the Left Coast was originally colonized by two groups: New Englanders (merchants, missionaries, and woodsmen who arrived by sea and dominated the towns) and Appalachian midwesterners (farmers, prospectors, and fur traders who generally arrived by wagon and controlled the countryside). Yankee missionaries tried to make it a “New England on the Pacific,” but were only partially successful. Left Coast culture is a hybrid of Yankee utopianism and Appalachian self-expression and exploration—traits recognizable in its cultural production, from the Summer of Love to the iPad. The staunchest ally of Yankeedom, it clashes with Far Western sections in the interior of its home states.
THE FAR WEST. The other “second-generation” nation, the Far West occupies the one part of the continent shaped more by environmental factors than ethnographic ones. High, dry, and remote, the Far West stopped migrating easterners in their tracks, and most of it could be made habitable only with the deployment of vast industrial resources: railroads, heavy mining equipment, ore smelters, dams, and irrigation systems. As a result, settlement was largely directed by corporations headquartered in distant New York, Boston, Chicago, or San Francisco, or by the federal government, which controlled much of the land. The Far West’s people are often resentful of their dependent status, feeling that they have been exploited as an internal colony for the benefit of the seaboard nations. Their senators led the fight against trusts in the mid-twentieth century. Of late, Far Westerners have focused their anger on the federal government, rather than their corporate masters.
NEW FRANCE. Occupying the New Orleans area and southeastern Canada, New France blends the folkways of ancien régime northern French peasantry with the traditions and values of the aboriginal people they encountered in northeastern North America. After a long history of imperial oppression, its people have emerged as down-to-earth, egalitarian, and consensus driven, among the most liberal on the continent, with unusually tolerant attitudes toward gays and people of all races and a ready acceptance of government involvement in the economy. The New French influence is manifest in Canada, where multiculturalism and negotiated consensus are treasured.
FIRST NATION. First Nation is populated by native American groups that generally never gave up their land by treaty and have largely retained cultural practices and knowledge that allow them to survive in this hostile region on their own terms. The nation is now reclaiming its sovereignty, having won considerable autonomy in Alaska and Nunavut and a self-governing nation state in Greenland that stands on the threshold of full independence. Its territory is huge—far larger than the continental United States—but its population is less than 300,000, most of whom live in Canada.
If you understand the United States as a patchwork of separate nations, each with its own origins and prevailing values, you would hardly expect attitudes toward violence to be uniformly distributed. You would instead be prepared to discover that some parts of the country experience more violence, have a greater tolerance for violent solutions to conflict, and are more protective of the instruments of violence than other parts of the country. That is exactly what the data on violence reveal about the modern United States.
Most scholarly research on violence has collected data at the state level, rather than the county level (where the boundaries of the eleven nations are delineated). Still, the trends are clear. The same handful of nations show up again and again at the top and the bottom of state-level figures on deadly violence, capital punishment, and promotion of gun ownership.
Consider assault deaths. Kieran Healy, a Duke University sociologist, broke down the per capita, age-adjusted deadly assault rate for 2010. In the northeastern states—almost entirely dominated by Yankeedom, New Netherland, and the Midlands—just over 4 people per 100,000 died in assaults. By contrast, southern states—largely monopolized by Deep South, Tidewater, and Greater Appalachia—had a rate of more than 7 per 100,000. The three deadliest states—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, where the rate of killings topped 10 per 100,000—were all in Deep South territory. Meanwhile, the three safest states—New Hampshire, Maine, and Minnesota, with rates of about 2 killings per 100,000—were all part of Yankeedom.
Not surprisingly, black Americans have it worse than whites. Countrywide, according to Healy, blacks die from assaults at the bewildering rate of about 20 per 100,000, while the rate for whites is less than 6. But does that mean racial differences might be skewing the homicide data for nations with larger African-American populations? Apparently not. A classic 1993 study by the social psychologist Richard Nisbett, of the University of Michigan, found that homicide rates in small predominantly white cities were three times higher in the South than in New England. Nisbett and a colleague, Andrew Reaves, went on to show that southern rural counties had white homicide rates more than four times those of counties in New England, Middle Atlantic, and Midwestern states.
Stand-your-ground laws are another dividing line between American nations. Such laws waive a citizen’s duty to try and retreat from a threatening individual before killing the person. Of the twenty-three states to pass stand-your-ground laws, only one, New Hampshire, is part of Yankeedom, and only one, Illinois, is in the Midlands. By contrast, each of the six Deep South–dominated states has passed such a law, and almost all the other states with similar laws are in the Far West or Greater Appalachia.
Comparable schisms show up in the gun control debate. In 2011, after the mass shooting of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and eighteen others in Tucson, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of sixty-one to thirty-six, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region—the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky—supported gun rights by exactly the same margin. Far Western states backed gun rights by a proportion of fifty-nine to thirty-eight.
Another revealing moment came this past April, in the wake of the Newtown school massacre, when the U.S. Senate failed to pass a bill to close loopholes in federal background checks for would-be gun owners. In the six states dominated by Deep South, the vote was twelve to two against the measure, and most of the Far West and Appalachia followed suit. But Yankee New England voted eleven to one in favor, and the dissenting vote, from Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, was so unpopular in her home state that it caused an immediate dip in her approval rating.
The pattern for capital punishment laws is equally stark. The states dominated by Deep South, Greater Appalachia, Tidewater, and the Far West have had a virtual monopoly on capital punishment. They account for more than ninety-five percent of the 1,343 executions in the United States since 1976. In the same period, the twelve states definitively controlled by Yankeedom and New Netherland—states that account for almost a quarter of the U.S. population—have executed just one person.
Why is violence—state-sponsored and otherwise—so much more prevalent in some American nations than in others? It all goes back to who settled those regions and where they came from. Nisbett, the social psychologist, noted that regions initially “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers, and Dutch farmer-artisans”—that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands, and New Netherland—were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual being capable of uniting for the common good.” The South—and by this he meant the nations I call Tidewater and Deep South—was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values . . . from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue.”
Continuing to treat the South as a single entity, Nisbett argued that the violent streak in the culture the Cavaliers established was intensified by the “major subsequent wave of immigration . . . from the borderlands of Scotland and Ireland.” These immigrants, who populated what I call Greater Appalachia, came from “an economy based on herding,” which, as anthropologists have shown, predisposes people to belligerent stances because the animals on which their wealth depends are so vulnerable to theft. Drawing on the work of the historian David Hackett Fisher, Nisbett maintained that “southern” violence stems partly from a “culture-of-honor tradition,” in which males are raised to create reputations for ferocity—as a deterrent to rustling—rather than relying on official legal intervention.
More recently, researchers have begun to probe beyond state boundaries to distinguish among different cultural streams. Robert Baller of the University of Iowa and two colleagues looked at late-twentieth-century white male “argument-related” homicide rates, comparing those in counties that, in 1850, were dominated by Scots-Irish settlers with those in other parts of the “Old South.” In other words, they teased out the rates at which white men killed each other in feuds and compared those for Greater Appalachia with those for Deep South and Tidewater. The result: Appalachian areas had significantly higher homicide rates than their lowland neighbors—“findings [that] are supportive of theoretical claims about the role of herding as the ecological underpinning of a code of honor.”
Another researcher, Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in “southern” areas “where the institutional environment was weak”—which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins—Dutch, French, and German—were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms.
But it’s not just herding that promoted a culture of violence. Scholars have long recognized that cultures organized around slavery rely on violence to control, punish, and terrorize—which no doubt helps explain the erstwhile prevalence of lynching deaths in Deep South and Tidewater. But it is also significant that both these nations, along with Greater Appalachia, follow religious traditions that sanction eye-for-an-eye justice, and adhere to secular codes that emphasize personal honor and shun governmental authority. As a result, their members have fewer qualms about rushing to lethal judgments.
The code of Yankeedom could not have been more different. Its founders promoted self-doubt and self-restraint, and their Unitarian and Congregational spiritual descendants believed vengeance would not receive the approval of an all-knowing God. This nation was the center of the nineteenth-century death penalty reform movement, which began eliminating capital punishment for burglary, robbery, sodomy, and other nonlethal crimes. None of the states controlled by Yankeedom or New Netherland retain the death penalty today, with the exception of New Hampshire, where the penalty is rarely imposed (the last execution took place in 1939).
With such sharp regional differences, the idea that the United States would ever reach consensus on any issue having to do with violence seems far-fetched. The cultural gulf between Appalachia and Yankeedom, Deep South and New Netherland is simply too large. But it’s conceivable that some new alliance could form to tip the balance.
Among the eleven regional cultures, there are two superpowers, nations with the identity, mission, and numbers to shape continental debate: Yankeedom and Deep South. For more than two hundred years, they’ve fought for control of the federal government and, in a sense, the nation’s soul. Over the decades, Deep South has become strongly allied with Greater Appalachia and Tidewater, and more tenuously with the Far West. Their combined agenda—to slash taxes, regulations, social services, and federal powers—is opposed by a Yankee-led bloc that includes New Netherland and the Left Coast. Other nations, especially the Midlands and El Norte, often hold the swing vote, whether in a presidential election or a congressional battle over health care reform. Those swing nations stand to play a decisive role on violence-related issues as well.
For now, the country will remain split on how best to make its citizens safer, with Deep South and its allies bent on deterrence through armament and the threat of capital punishment, and Yankeedom and its allies determined to bring peace through constraints such as gun control. The deadlock will persist until one of these camps modifies its message and policy platform to draw in the swing nations. Only then can that camp seize full control over the levers of federal power—the White House, the House, and a filibuster-proof Senate majority—to force its will on the opposing nations. Until then, expect continuing frustration and division.
Colin Woodard, A91, is the author of American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. An earlier book, The Republic of Pirates, is the basis of the forthcoming NBC drama Crossbones. He is currently state and national affairs writer at the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram, where he won a George Polk Award this year for his investigative reporting.
http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html 

Scalia Slaps Down GOP’s Tentherism from THINKPROGRESS 25JAN11

MORE disappointment for tea-baggers and right wing fanatics from the gop and arch conservative Supreme Court Justice Scalia tells them flat out they are wrong on the constitutionality of federal spending......these fools are finding out it is a lot easier to stand on the outside and run their mouths than actually govern, and they haven't been impressive in their inability to govern so far........this from ThinkProgress....
Yesterday, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia spoke to a gathering of mostly-Republican lawmakers about separation of powers under the Constitution. During that gathering, Scalia was asked to embrace one of the Tea Party’s pet constitutional theories — but his response did not go well for the far right:

“The question of earmarks came up, whether or not the constitutionality of earmarks would be considered constitutional [sic],” Bachmann told reporters after the seminar. [...]
“It’s up to Congress how you want to appropriate, basically,” Scalia told the members, according to Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX). “He pointed out historically, like when Jefferson was president, [Congress] said here’s a big pot of money, you decide where it goes, and Jefferson ended up paying up a big hunk of it to the Barbary Pirates.”
“I think the fairest thing to say was he took it for granted they were constitutional,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) — one of a small handful of Democrats in attendance. “I don’t think there was any question. I can’t see how you can make an argument that they’re not Constitutional — Congress is the appropriating body.”

Although Scalia was asked about earmarks, his answer is nothing less than a wholesale repudiation of the right’s tenther vision of the Constitution. After President Obama took office, right-wing lawmakers suddenly began claiming that the Constitution places strict limits on how Congress is allowed to allocate federal funds. Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) claims that Social Security, Medicare and federal disaster relief are all unconstitutional. Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) believes Pell Grants, federal student loans and all other federal education programs are unconstitutional. And the GOP’s Pledge to America embraces tenther rhetoric — suggesting the entire party could agree with Lee and Coburn.
Yet, as Scalia indicates, tentherism is baseless. Because Article I of the Constitution gives Congress broad authority to “to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” Scalia is exactly right that it is almost entirely “up to Congress” to decide how it wants to appropriate.
Nevertheless, it is a sad commentary on the state of the modern GOP that ultra-conservative Justice Scalia has transformed into a voice of moderation against the even more radical Tea Party.

Update The Wall Street Journal reports that Scalia had even more disappointing news for his Tea Party hosts:

“He said, ‘States rights? Fuhgeddaboudit!’” said freshman Rep. Joe Walsh (R., Ill.), a self-described “tea-party guy” who came to Washington “to storm the gates.”

Mr. Walsh mentioned a couple of other surprises, including Justice Scalia’s view that the line-item veto, desired by some conservatives, is unconstitutional.

Moreover, “stare decisis—he’s okay with that,” Mr. Walsh said, using the Latin term for following legal precedent. [...]

Freshman Rep. Steve Southerland (R., Fla.) asked about the constitutionality of the Obama administration’s so-called czars. Justice Scalia said the president is entitled to hire advisers, and if that’s what czars were, there was little problem, according to Mr. Nadler. But Justice Scalia declined to get into specifics, saying the issue could come before the court. Mr. Southerland said he felt the justice ducked the question.

Opponents Work To Block Health Bill At State Level 23MAR10

Like Virginia has so much money we can afford the foolishness of Ken Cuccinelli and his cabal of neo-Nazis!

Carl Seymour of Florida was among those protesting the new health care bill this weekend. Florida is one of 12 states already planning a lawsuit to challenge the federal legislation, saying it undermines states' authority.
Carl Seymour of Florida was among those protesting the new health care bill last weekend.

Carl Seymour of Florida was among those protesting the new health care bill this weekend. Florida is one of 12 states already planning a lawsuit to challenge the federal legislation, saying it undermines states' authority.

Once President Obama signs the health care bill into law, look for opponents of the bill to move quickly to the next front: attacking it as unconstitutional.

Opponents have been gearing up for the legal fight for months. Some of the challenges that will be filed in court are widely viewed as frivolous, while others are not.

The first will likely come from states that have enacted laws to exempt themselves from the bill. The Goldwater Institute's Clint Bolick is among those who have spearheaded the drive in the states to opt out of various provisions in the law, including the mandate to buy health insurance.

"Here you have a right that's been recognized under the Constitution — namely the right to direct one's own medical affairs without excessive government regulation," he said, and "you've got an area that is traditionally a matter of state concern, and the federal government is trying to impose on it."

Virginia and Idaho have already enacted opt-out laws, while similar laws have been proposed in 34 other states.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli acknowledges that normally, federal laws trump state laws, but he contends that is not the case with the health care overhaul.

However, a wide variety of experts and scholars across the political spectrum say opt-out state laws are a political exercise with no legal effect.

"The notion that a state can just choose to opt out is just preposterous," says former Reagan administration Solicitor General Charles Fried. "One is left speechless by the absurdity of it."

Fried says similar attempts at "so-called nullification" led to the Civil War.

Conservative scholar and former federal appeals court Judge Michael McConnell agrees that states' opt-out laws are legally meaningless.

"If the mandate is constitutional," he says, "then the state statutes are pre-empted" — they are trumped by federal law. And "if the federal law is unconstitutional, the state laws are unnecessary."

Washington and Lee law professor Tim Jost calls the state opt-out laws "political theater" — an expression by the states that they don't like the federal law, but an expression that has little, if any, legal effect.

More serious, however, are the direct legal challenges to the mandate. Jost says it's hard to think of a situation before in which "Congress has required people to purchase a product in the commercial market."

On the other hand, federal mandates are nothing new. Fried defended many of those mandates when he served as the Reagan administration's advocate in the Supreme Court.

"We have tons of laws that impose obligations on people," he said, "and some people would rather not participate, starting with the Internal Revenue code" — or the draft in wartime, or Social Security, or environmental restrictions on the states.

None of these, of course, is exactly on point. But without a precedent that is exactly on point, there is room for opponents of the health care overhaul to maneuver in court.

Lawyer David Rivkin represents Florida and 11 other states that plan to bring legal challenges to provisions of the law. In addition to the mandate for buying insurance, he says the statute co-opts state authority to an "unprecedented" degree by telling state officials to set up insurance exchanges and regulate insurance companies according to federal standards.

The Obama administration is taking nothing for granted. It is already setting up a cadre of lawyers to defend the health care overhaul.

The last word will come, of course, from neither lawyers nor politicians. It will come from the U.S. Supreme Court — a court that has moved dramatically to the right in the past few years.