Osborne Ink ::

Try as they might, the GOP’s call to tea party activists to oppose Gitmo detainee trials in New York was a big fail. No one but press showed up at the hearing. David Corn reports:

The hearing did heat up—because of the Republican senators present. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) slammed the KSM decision, charging that it demonstrates that for Obama “fighting terrorism is not the priority it once was.” He excoriated the Obama administration for believing “we can return to a pre-9/11 mindset.”

“Pre-9/11 mindset” like when we put the 1993 World Trade Center bombers in prison? Sessions is for gang-rape cover-ups and against trials for terrorists. Why do Republicans distrust the legal system so much?

Thank you for contacting me regarding Senator Franken’s amendment to the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, H.R. 3326.

Unfortunately, a number of media personalities have portrayed the amendment in a misleading manner. The truth is the amendment prohibits basic contract rights between all defense contractors and their employees. This is one of the reasons President Obama’s administration strongly opposed it.

Arguing against the amendment in the Senate, Sessions claimed that it “would impose the will of Congress on private individuals and companies in a retroactive fashion, invalidating employment contracts without due process of law.” But the amendment isn’t retroactive, applying to the fiscal year 2010 defense bill and after. Perhaps that naked untruth is why Sessions has changed his story:

A number of media outlets and political blogs have continued to characterize opposition to this amendment as a vote in support of denying an assault or gang rape victim her day in court. This is false. Indeed, prior to the vote on the Senate floor, the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals had already ruled that allegations of sexual assault or rape in the case cited by Senator Franken should not be arbitrated, but tried before a jury. In addition, the Franken amendment would have prohibited almost any employment dispute from being arbitrated. This, despite the fact that arbitration, which often results in in more victories for the employee at less cost, may be the method of choice for dissolving disputes between some employers and employees. (Emphasis mine)

That might be a Freudian slip, because if Sessions meant that arbitration makes disputes go away then he is absolutely correct. Indeed, mandatory arbitration takes away the legal rights of American workers, and Sessions makes a fallacious argument that restoring your constitutional right to sue is somehow taking away a “right” to arbitration that didn’t exist in 1792.

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. In an apparent attempt to cover up the incident, the company then put her in a shipping container for at least 24 hours without food, water, or a bed, and “warned her that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be out of a job.” Even more insultingly, the DOJ resisted bringing any criminal charges in the matter. KBR argued that Jones’s employment contract warranted her claims being heard in private arbitration — without jury, judge, public record, or transcript of the proceedings. After 15 months in arbitration, Jones and her lawyers went to court to fight the KBR claims.

You may be interested to know that the perpetrators of this crime can now be tried in U.S. criminal court as a result of a law I authored in 2000. I strongly oppose any form of sexual assault or gang rape against an individual on United States or foreign soil. I believe rape is one of the most heinous crimes in our society. The legislation I authored was drafted in response to a sexual assault on foreign land of one of my constituents. It has and can be used to prosecute individuals who commit the type of assaults that were alleged in the case cited by Senator Franken.

It is my understanding that the Department of Justice did investigate this case, but so far no criminal indictments have been issued.

I’m glad that Senator Sessions wrote that law. If only the Department of Justice had agreed with Sessions’ interpretation of it, they might have filed charges against at least some of her assailants; instead, DoJ saw a giant loophole and let them go unpunished. KBR didn’t even make an effort to identify them — in fact, they mishandled the rape kit, so it’s unlikely any of the men who attacked her will ever see jail time.

Assault victims should not be used by members of the Senate or the media to score political points. Unfortunately, this has happened with the Franken amendment. The amendment was not about assault or gang rape, but whether arbitration is useful tool to resolve some disputes. I believe it is, because it does not deny anyone a right to be compensated for harm they have suffered, and it offers a more expedient and less expensive way to resolve litigation disputes. Freedom of contract is one of the core principles that make America a great republic. Therefore, I opposed Senate Amendment 2588.

In the twisted world of excuses, a bill that specifically targets sexual assault is not about sexual assault, and the rights of gang rape victims are less important than their “right” to be forced into arbitration. Bringing up this specific case while arguing for this specific bill that is specifically about cases like hers is just “scoring political points.” See how that works?

Jamie Leigh Jones, age 19, was drugged and gang-raped by fellow employees of Halliburton subsidiary KBR while working in Iraq. The company kept her locked in a crate for several days and then sent her home. The doctor’s notes and the crime reports have disappeared into KBR’s bureaucracy, and Halliburton tried invoking the fine print of her contract to avoid a lawsuit:

The Senate passed an amendment last night allowing employees like Jones to sue. Guess which Republican led the charge against it? Why, Alabama’s very own Jeff Sessions, who called it “unfair to Halliburton.” Fake pimps are a good reason to bust ACORN but billion-dollar fraud and actual rapes aren’t good reasons to bust a major Republican contributor. Ladies and gentlemen, the party of moral rectitude!

Here’s Senator Al Franken, who wrote the amendment, leaving the industry shill speechless in committee:

Franken is swiftly turning into the best thing to happen to the US Senate in a long time.

A zero-sum game is one in which any player’s win is another player’s loss. If two people each have fifty marbles, the total number of marbles in the game can never exceed 100. If one player wins a marble, the other has to lose one of theirs.

That’s fine for marbles, but what about those who’ve lost their marbles — or never had them? Senator Jeff Sessions, for instance, sees race relations as a zero-sum game:

“Empathy for one party is always prejudice against another.” Sessions unwittingly provides a window on the racist mind: a job for a brown person is one less job for a white person; a scholarship for a black person is one less scholarship for a white person; empathy for a yellow or red person is prejudice against a white. The racist mind sees all ethnic groups in competitive opposition, and even makes empathy a limited resource.

That mental landscape is the origin of all prejudice; the leap from racism to chauvinism, homophobia, or back again, is a small one. Why ban gay marriage? Because it will hurt straight marriage. Why pay a woman less than a man for the same work? Because it will hurt manly breadwinning (and by extension, male prerogatives).

It’s all nonsense, of course. In reality, whenever prejudice loses everyone wins:

As I said on Wednesday, Jeff Sessions had an agenda in his questioning. It is the same agenda Pat Buchanan laid out in his editorial Tuesday:

What they must do is expose Sotomayor, as they did not in the case of Ginsburg, as a political activist whose career bespeaks a lifelong resolve to discriminate against white males to the degree necessary to bring about an equality of rewards in society.

The original culture warrior, Buchanan’s solution for a party in dire need of minority membership is to double-down on divisive racial politics. Racists have red-baited every social movement and advance since the Civil War; even now, two decades past the End of History, Buchanan can’t give up his fossilized thinking. He even wants to make the word “equality” a dirty one.

Last night, Rachel Maddow called out Buchanan about his call for Republicans to intensify their race-based politics. The back-and-forth is illuminating:

Buchanan and Sessions speak the language of zero-sum politics. Inverting Clausewitz’s axiom, they see America as a limited field to be won in a perpetual race-competition. Obama’s very presence in the White House proves they are wrong; but in their own minds, it proves they are right.

Today, Left In Alabama notes an incredible miscalculation by the GOP. For not only have the Republicans lost America, they are losing the south.

Admitted that voting patterns seem to show a different story (white southerners turned out in droves to vote against Barack Obama), the GOP began losing the South in November. Paraphrasing Bob Kincaid over at Head-On-Radio a few months ago, the first domino fell in South Carolina. In losing one southern state, the Republican Party can no longer count on a ’solid South.’

Knocked to their partisan knees, the Grand Old Party has doubled down on obstructionism. They have met Obama’s attempts at bipartisanship with venom. Striking at Obama early was supposed to reveal his ‘weakness’ and set the stage for their comeback.

They are doing this because God tells them to, because they are afraid of the world, and because they’re shameless.

What they don’t understand is they are dealing with a whole new kind of president:

Here’s what Redeye had to say at Left In Alabama:

To be clear, this is what Sessions and Shelby in the Senate and Griffith, Bright, Aderholt, Bacchus and the entire Bama House delegation (sans Davis) voted against on behalf of the Alabama citizens;

Impact on Alabama

• Creating or saving 55,000 jobs over the next two years.
• Providing a making work pay tax cut of up to $1,000 for 1,770,000 workers and their families
• Making 70,000 families eligible for a new American Opportunity Tax Credit to make college affordable.
• Offering an addition $100 per month in unemployment insurance benefits to 247,000 workers in Alabama who have lost their jobs this recession.
• Providing funding to modernize at least 156 schools in Alabama so our children have the labs, classrooms and libraries they need to compete in the 21st century economy.

Shelby and Sessions haven’t been paying attention to their own state’s governor. They also haven’t been keeping up with hometown news: Alabama is about $1.3 billion dollars short on its education budget right now. This is going to hit Republican voters harder than anyone. In the rural Black Belt (named for its soil), somewhere this fall an Alabama town will not see its home squad play a football game, and that will be the beginning of the end.

Alabama is in a hole deeper than the numbers show. We are a state utterly dependent on federal money. We refuse to change our state constitution and pay taxes. In short, the only way for Alabama to make ends meet is for our Republican governor to travel to Washington and beg for relief next year.

And here’s the dirty little secret behind the ’solid South’: all these fomer Confederate states are in exactly the same boat.

In a purely partisan move, Senators Shelby and Sessions voted to bankrupt Alabama government. Unless state relief is reintroduced in the House-Senate negotiations, the Senators have guaranteed a very big (and very public) foot in the mouth of the Republican Party — one that will be repeatedly inserted by other Republican governors.

The South shall lose again. And in the process, the Republicans stand to lose the South.

h/t Mooncat: