Glass Ceiling and Class Ceiling: Can Hillary Smash Both? [feedly]

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Glass Ceiling and Class Ceiling: Can Hillary Smash Both?
// The American Prospect



AP Photo/Andrew Harnik, File

In this July 30, 2016 file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton speaks in Youngstown, Ohio. 

A version of this story appeared at The Huffington Post.

Bernie Sanders might be the best thing that ever happened to Hillary Clinton. I don't just mean persuading most of his delegates not to walk out.

Think about it. Without the Sanders campaign, Clinton would be running mainly on three things—her exceptional experience, her breakthrough status as the first woman president, and her embrace of the cultural left that so dominated the Democratic National Convention.

All three elements have as many negatives as positives. Clinton may be the most qualified candidate ever to run for president, but her experience includes some awkward baggage. The first potential woman president runs into headwinds of misogyny, personified by Donald Trump. And the cultural left risks alienating as many voters as it mobilizes.

What Sanders added was to push Clinton and her allies, sometimes kicking and screaming, to advocate a far more progressive pocketbook program. On economics, Clinton has begun to move well beyond her comfort zone—to attack Wall Street, to call for breaking up big predatory banks, to tax the rich to pay for needed infrastructure and jobs, even to challenge dubious trade deals.

All this is the necessary antidote to the risks of what used to be called identity politics. And she needs to do a lot more.

With more of that emphasis, Clinton can securely carry swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Without it, she remains vulnerable.

The narrative of cultural mosaic has been contested territory for Democrats at least since the 1970s. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded in part to push Democrats to the center-right on issues like national defense and social spending, but also to discourage Democrats from campaigning as a rainbow made up of separate group identities. What emerged in 2008 and 2016 as a splendid tapestry was disparaged by the DLC in the 1980s as a tangle of narrow interest groups that alienated regular Americans.

In a famous 1989 paper, DLC theorists William Galston and Elaine Kamarck wrote: "The real problem is not insufficient liberalism on the part of the Democratic nominees; it is rather the fact that during the last two decades, most Democratic nominees have come to be seen as unacceptably liberal."

The DLC lost that fight, big time. The Democratic base is more liberal than ever, and the party has moved left—but left on what?

Barack Obama's election and re-election, and continued emphasis of such issues as LGBT rights and immigrant rights certified that the cultural left had won. The separate identities now make up a broad coalition. Unfortunately, however, the DLC and its progeny won on such pocketbook issues as deficit reduction, alliance with Wall Street, disrespect for unions, support for corporate trade deals, and acceptance of lousy jobs and pay.

The mosaic of cultural pluralism on display in Philadelphia was nothing short of astonishing. Lesbian, gay, and transgender people at the podium, joined by Americans with disabilities, immigrants without documentation; lots of black, Latino, and Asian American speakers; proud, even fierce feminism. All of this is cause for great celebration.

Yet, despite the projections of America as a majority/minority country, despite growing acceptance of same-sex marriage, in the present electorate that tapestry by itself doesn't quite add up to an automatic election win for Hillary Clinton. If it did, a person like Donald Trump would not be running even with Clinton in the polls.

Being culturally avant-garde and economically status quo doesn't do it.

Here in the progressive bubble, the Philadelphia parade felt joyous. But for tens of millions of American workers and their families, the embrace of undocumented immigrants and LGBT rights suggests a Democratic Party that is on a different planet. If Clinton can start sounding as emphatic on the pocketbook issues as she did on all the other issues, then Democrats can begin savoring a victory over Trump, maybe even a crushing one.

Another stunning thing about the Democratic National Convention was the sheer, glorious feminism of it. All spring and most of the summer, the fact that Bernie Sanders stole the hearts of the young denied Clinton some of the drama and appeal that she deserved.

Now, as Sanders both stood aside and vowed to continue to fight for pocketbook issues, the power of electing the first woman president could start to command the excitement that it hasn't quite had until now. Based on a small sample, plenty of young voters, especially young women voters whose first choice was Sanders, are genuinely moved and exhilarated by the Clinton who they saw at the convention.

Having doubled down on her feminism—from the white dress of the suffragists to the somewhat overplayed "Fight Song" and the display of strong womanhood at the convention—Clinton will need the largest turnout of women and the biggest gender gap in history. But she will also need more than a few good men.

Her campaign gestured towards the fact that it isn't just blacks and immigrants and LGBT people who are suffering in America today. There was acknowledgement of general pocketbook distress in her acceptance speech, but not enough. Her three-day post-convention bus tour through the two must-win states of Pennsylvania and Ohio provided more emphasis but did not get enough national press.

Trump is vulnerable on several grounds. One is his lack of specifics; another is his hypocrisy. On pocketbook issues, Clinton needs to show up Trump by being both very specific and a lot bolder than her recent predecessors.

For too long, the Democratic Party of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama has addressed the calamitous downward slide of America's working people with gestures and with policies too feeble to make enough of a difference. At the same time, that Democratic Party, especially at the presidential level, has gotten into bed with Wall Street.

Barack Obama, passing the torch to Hillary Clinton, delivered one of the greatest presidential convention speeches ever, pointing to both ideals and accomplishments. The contrast with Donald Trump could not be greater. Yet by a margin of 73 to 18, most Americans say that the country is going in the wrong direction. Thus Donald Trump.

For the liberal elite, life is sweet indeed. The food is better than ever, the cities are more vibrant, the technology cooler.

But life isn't sweet at all for the broad working class. To win big, Hillary needs to be their champion, too.

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Unions Flex Political Muscle at the DNC -- But Uber and Airbnb Lurk [feedly]

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Unions Flex Political Muscle at the DNC -- But Uber and Airbnb Lurk
// The American Prospect



Randi Weingarten, President of AFT speaks as Lee Saunders, President of AFSCME applauds during the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia , Monday, July 25, 2016. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Labor unions' fingerprints were all over last week's Democratic National Convention, sending a clear reminder to the party faithful that—despite decades of waning membership—unions are still a critical component of the Democratic Party. From convention speeches to sponsored events, unions made the case for their role as both the party's foremost advocate of its most progressive policies and as its most effective foil against pseudo-populist Donald Trump.

On the first night of the convention—largely reserved for the left wing of the party—a lineup of leaders from the country's most powerful unions railed against Trump. "Donald made millions while he ripped off workers and small businesses with his unfair business practices—remember, he ended up bankrupting his companies not once, not twice, but four times," Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers and a longtime Clinton ally, declared in a fiery speech. "And his economic ideas will make millionaires like him richer at the expense of the middle class."

"He thinks he's a tough guy," said Richard Trumka, head of the AFL-CIO, which has long been calling out Trump for the hypocrisy of his working-class message. "Well, Donald, I worked in the mines with tough guys. I know tough guys, they're friends of mine. And Donald, you're no tough guy. You're a phony." 

Perhaps the most prominent union at the convention was the Service Employees International Union, which boasts nearly two million members. On the Sunday before the convention started, the union held a reception at the historic Benjamin Franklin Institute in downtown Philadelphia. Delegates and union allies dined on hors d'oeuvres and milled around an open bar as they listened to prominent Democratic politicians like Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf and Senate hopeful Katie McGinty praise SEIU's work in the state.

Throughout the convention, the union's most successful campaign—the Fight for 15—was on center stage. On the final night of the convention, Michigan home-care worker and Fight for 15 activist Henrietta Ivey spoke about the importance of improving working conditions in the booming home-care industry. "Even as I work my fingers to the bone, I don't always feel the support I need from the leaders I'm supposed to trust. I work two jobs at minimum wage and can barely make ends meet," Ivey said. "For me, and all home-care workers across the nation, and my family, this is personal. I know Hillary Clinton has our backs, and we will have hers."

Earlier in the day, the union held a panel on the importance of creating high standards for workers in the industry, which, as it rapidly grows, faces a massive labor shortage. "Home-care workers are professionals, and that's what you should be called and how you should be treated," U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez said at the panel. "We live in a world of false choices. It is not either a choice of having a caregiver or paying the caregiver well. We need to build the number of caregivers, and we're not going to do it when we pay so little."

In the days before the convention was set to begin, Philadelphia airport workers had voted to go on strike. Behind the scenes, SEIU flexed its muscle and lobbied prominent Democratic delegates and officials to pressure American Airlines to sit down with its local 32BJ in Philadelphia to discuss a path to unionization for its subcontracted airport workers. American succumbed to the pressure and began negotiations with 32BJ, averting the threatened strike. SEIU's effort to organize airport workers has become a cornerstone of its Fight for 15 campaign.

Meanwhile, the teachers unions, American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association, held an event on the importance of education policy in the upcoming election, and the AFL-CIO led daily labor council meetings for union delegates, who numbered roughly one-quarter of the convention's 4,000-plus delegates.

One important by-product of Bernie Sanders's campaign was that unions won important concessions in the party's platform, which called for raising the federal minimum wage to $15 and included radically different language on trade than past platforms. Seeking to head off a convention collision between Sanders and Clinton forces, AFSCME President Lee Saunders prompted the Clinton camp to accept an amendment to the platform, drafted by the AFL-CIO, that condemned the secrecy in which trade deals are drafted, and the system of private courts (the ISDS process) used to resolve corporate-state disputes. While not repudiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership by name (something President Obama wouldn't countenance), the amendment repudiated a number of its key particulars.

Still, there were stark reminders that labor has struggled to keep at bay the party's coziness with corporations, especially those of the Silicon Valley disruption variety. At the convention, the so-called sharing economy loomed large. Ride-hailing giant Uber—not unionized taxi cabs—served as the DNC's exclusive shuttle service, setting up a temporary lounge outside Wells Fargo Arena where riders could hang out as an endless flow of drivers snaked through the traffic to pick them up. Inside the lounge, on big-screen TVs, Uber drivers talked about how the app had given them a newfound sense of economic security. Labor advocates, however, have derided the company for flouting labor law, treating drivers poorly, and resisting unionization drives. Just one day after the convention, The Verge reported that Uber had hired a CIA-linked research firm to dig into union politics in Seattle, which recently passed a law allowing Uber drivers to unionize.

"Home-sharing" company Airbnb also had a big presence at the DNC as it sought to win over skeptical Democrats, including politicians in some liberal big cities who have made it harder for the company to operate. The company is facing allegations of racial discrimination and of negatively impacting the affordable housing supply. Still, of the nearly 40,000 people in Philadelphia for the convention, the company says 7,000 stayed in Airbnb properties, compared with 14,000 who booked hotels. Unions like UNITE-HERE contend that Airbnb is an illegal operation that takes business away from the hotels that many of its members work in. (UNITE-HERE and SEIU had a brief snafu earlier this year when SEIU announced it was partnering with Airbnb to ensure housekeepers were paid $15 an hour. Amid protest from UNITE-HERE, the union swiftly backtracked.)

The company made a hard sell at the convention, releasing a report that asserted that 80 percent of Millennials support Airbnb legally operating in their city, while not so subtly reminding Democrats that many of these young people live in swing states. It also made a five-figure ad buy during the convention to gin up support for its fight to expand in New York City. 

Uber and Airbnb also hosted a panel on the sharing economy featuring Chris Lehane, former aide to Bill Clinton and Airbnb's policy guru; former Obama campaign manager and Uber adviser David Plouffe; and former Philadelphia mayor/sharing-economy enthusiast Michael Nutter. These prominent Democrats discussed how they see the sharing economy as an asset for the middle class and can help reduce income inequality.

The battle between the labor wing and the Silicon Valley wing of the party will likely escalate in coming years, but for now labor will remain the stronger force. "Sharing economy" giants like Uber and Airbnb are just now dipping their toes into politics—and, for now, mostly at the local level. On the other hand, the major labor unions have already pledged to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on ads and ground operations to help Hillary Clinton—and Democratic Senate candidates like Katie McGinty in Pennsylvania, Ted Strickland in Ohio, and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin—win the working-class vote in swing states.

Those efforts, labor leaders hope, will not only earn unions significant clout should a Clinton win the White House, but a big say in the future direction of the party. 

 

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A Power Broker Who Wants Labor at the Table, Not on the Menu [feedly]

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A Power Broker Who Wants Labor at the Table, Not on the Menu
// Portside

lee Saunders, President of the 1.6 million American Federation of State, County and Municipal Workers is not only a major leader in the AFL-CIO, but one of the prime supporters of Secretary Hillary Clinton.

WASHINGTON — The person at the center of defusing arguably the most contentious issue facing Democrats on the eve of their convention in Philadelphia was not a Hillary Clinton adviser or even a party operative. It was Lee Saunders, president of the 1.6-million-member American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees.

With aides to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont threatening a floor fight over the issue of trade, President Obama still hoping to ratify the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the 12-nation trade pact his administration negotiated, and Mrs. Clinton caught in the middle, Mr. Saunders led the effort to broker a final compromise.

The Democratic platform would stay silent on the prospect of a T.P.P. vote in Congress, which the Sandernistas had sought to rule out, but "oppose trade agreements that do not support good American jobs, raise wages and improve our national security."

Senator Sanders's staff deemed the language strong enough to avoid a floor debate, if not strong enough for their liking. The change helped save Mrs. Clinton much stress on an issue that has helped propel Donald J. Trump among white working-class voters in key states like Ohio and Pennsylvania.

At a time when Afscme and other public sector unions have come under relentless pressure from conservative activists and politicians — "probably the most perilous moment the public sector labor movement has faced since its emergence in the '60s and '70s," said Joseph A. McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University — Mr. Saunders is emerging as an increasingly important Washington power broker.

His union's support for Mrs. Clinton during the Democratic primaries, especially in Iowa, proved crucial to helping her win the nomination. Mr. Saunders is one of the architects of a new "super PAC" seeded with tens of millions of dollars from unions and the wealthy environmentalist Tom Steyer that aims to help elect progressive candidates this fall and in the future.

"We talked for a long period of time about how to work together to build a stronger progressive coalition," said Mr. Steyer, adding that he had hosted Mr. Saunders and his wife at his San Francisco home and found him to be "a lot of fun to be around."

Notwithstanding Mr. Saunders's opposition to the president's trade agenda, top administration officials regularly solicit his input on economic policy. "Lee is a great friend of the president's and a great friend of mine," said Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, by email. The president has even been known to quote Mr. Saunders. "He was very taken with Lee's observation that if you're not at the table, you're on the menu," said Thomas E. Perez, the labor secretary.

Yet for public sector unions, which count just over one-third of government workers as members, Washington influence may no longer have the same currency it did in earlier decades. Governors in states like Wisconsin, Ohio and Illinois have sought to scale back the public unions' right to bargain for increases in benefits and, in some cases, wages. Groups financed by right-wing donors have brought a hail of lawsuits threatening the unions' ability to finance themselves through mandatory fees on workers.

Such is the climate that public unions now worry about suffering the same debilitating bleed as private sector unions, whose membership has dwindled from about 25 percent of workers in the early 1970s to under 7 percent today.

If Mrs. Clinton wins this fall, Mr. Saunders may gain an even closer ally in the Oval Office. Certainly the Supreme Court would be more favorable than under a President Trump. But given that some of the greatest threats to public unions emanate far from Washington, is someone best known for navigating the city's corridors of power their most promising savior?

On an unseasonably cold afternoon in May, Mr. Saunders was seated next to a bank of tables at a child services facility in Cleveland when one of the workers listening to him discourse on their union piped up suddenly: "I have no idea who you are. Can you introduce yourself?"

If you happen to run one of the largest organizations in the country, you might be tempted to respond to such a question with thinly concealed annoyance. Mr. Saunders's immediate predecessor, Gerald W. McEntee, who built the union into a Washington force during his three decades as president, was famous for such outbursts.

Instead, Mr. Saunders played the situation for laughs. "You don't know who I am?" he said in mock outrage. Then he deadpanned: "I'm thinking about joining the union. I wanted to hear from you guys as far as why I should do it."

It is hardly the only way Mr. Saunders differs from his immediate predecessor.

Mr. McEntee alienated members with his heavy-handed decision-making — including ramming through a 2007 endorsement of Mrs. Clinton for president even though many senior officials thought Mr. Obama deserved more time to make his case — and nursed blood feuds with rival unions.

Above all, longtime Afscme officials say, Mr. McEntee grew less interested in nurturing his rank-and-file members, preferring to build the union's power mostly through political spending. A former aide challenged that view, however, saying Mr. McEntee cared about cultivating the grass roots, but the urgency simply was not as great until the last few years.

When Mr. Saunders ran for secretary-treasurer, the union's second-ranking position, in 2010, his association with Mr. McEntee — for whom he had worked since the 1980s, ultimately rising to become a top aide — aroused intense suspicion. He eked out a victory by 4,000 votes out of more than a million cast, then won a fairly close race to succeed Mr. McEntee upon his retirement in 2012. He was re-elected by acclamation last week.

But almost from the moment he won that second election, Mr. Saunders made a point of distinguishing himself from his predecessor. He put former dissidents on crucial committees and began a rapprochement with the Service Employees International Union, Mr. McEntee's onetime nemesi

Most significant has been his attention to the rank and file, which includes people as diverse as school cafeteria workers to corrections officers.

In late 2014, he started Afscme Strong, an effort to have union officials and activists conduct open-ended conversations with one million members, the better to create a sense of belonging and to gin up local activism for facing down employers or participating in local political and legislative campaigns.

It is an ambitious undertaking, requiring an investment of millions of dollars. But labor experts say building such cohesion is essential in an era where public sector unions are under assault by politicians like Wisconsin's Republican governor, Scott Walker.

Shortly after Mr. Walker started his campaign against public unions in 2011, some Madison-area labor leaders realized their options for responding, for example, with a strike, were limited because many public-sector unions in the state had grown so remote from their members they were barely in touch with them.

"You'd have to have an activate-able — if that's a word — rank and file," said Harry Richardson, a longtime labor activist and member of the Afscme local in Madison. "And that just didn't exist."

Mr. Saunders's new program is already paying dividends in this regard. According to Ben Gordon, the organizing director of the Afscme affiliate in upstate New York, the affiliate is seeing an increase in activism among its members. "We've had big rallies, done smaller work-site meetings, turned it into a way to settle contracts that have been open for a while in a difficult negotiation," Mr. Gordon said.

In late 1998, Mr. McEntee dispatched Mr. Saunders to New York City to become the administrator of District Council 37, the umbrella body for 56 locals in the city with about 120,000 members. Several leaders of the council and the local unions were on the verge of being indicted on charges of taking kickbacks and embezzlement totaling millions of dollars, and fixing a vote on a contract with the city.

Though Mr. Saunders's first priority was to root out corruption, which he accomplished swiftly, his most impressive achievement may have been helping to turn out tens of thousands of municipal workers and community activists in a protest against Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki in the spring of 1999.

Afscme officials insist the roughly 4 percent annual pay increases he later negotiated would never have been possible had Mr. Saunders not mobilized his members. "The mayor understood what the mayor needed to understand, that we would not deal from a position of weakness but a position of strength," said Eliot Seide, Mr. Saunders's No. 2 at the council.

And yet, for all his obvious faith in grass-roots activism, Mr. Saunders remains very much an institutionalist, at ease working within the system.

Even the enormous 1999 demonstration reflected a certain established protocol. "It did not annoy us — demonstrations are part of the fabric of the city of New York," said Robert M. Harding, a deputy mayor at the time. To this day, Mr. Harding keeps a photo in his office of himself flanked by Mr. Saunders and Mayor Giuliani announcing their contract.

"Maybe I wouldn't call myself a bomb thrower, but I would call myself someone who wants to effectuate change," Mr. Saunders said when asked about his method. "I'm willing to go about doing it through a strategy that I feel most comfortable with. And that's walking with crowds, but it's also talking with very, very important people."

Much of Mr. Saunders's time in Washington has played out in similar fashion, revealing a man whose goals are strongly progressive but who, even if he doesn't defer to the powers that be, shies away from making life too uncomfortable for them.

When I asked whether his intervention had undermined liberals' last best hope of defeating T.P.P., Mr. Saunders said the language he proposed included "the strongest standards" a Democratic platform has ever endorsed on trade. He argued that if the president wants to send the Pacific trade deal to Congress between the election and next year's inauguration, no party platform would stop him.

Likewise for some of Mr. Saunders's efforts to reinvigorate his union. In addition to its more open-ended outreach to members, the union had a market research firm spend several months last year canvassing them through surveys, focus groups and up-close observation, then asked the Washington firm GMMB to translate the findings into a branding effort, known as the "Never Quit" campaign.

One crucial insight was that Afscme members want to be treated as individuals, not part of some undifferentiated mass of workers. The union, at GMMB's recommendation, developed an award program to recognize workers' commitment to their job.

It seemed a reasonable response to an important insight. And yet it was suspiciously Washington-centric: poll-generated, a bit jargon-laden. Jerry Wurf, the leader who arguably did more than anyone else to forge Afscme into its modern form, was famous for inspiring workers to embrace radical means, even striking illegally. It's a long way from illegal strikes to performance prizes.

Which, in the end, brings the story back to Wisconsin.

To the Madison-area leaders who advocated responding to Governor Walker with a strike, the mere absence of a more cohesive organization did not, by itself, mean the unions had no hope of pulling it off. Labor leaders could have harnessed the energy of the more than 50,000 people protesting in the streets, the strike advocates said, but many state leaders lacked the fortitude to try.

"Who knows what could have snowballed if we could have had a one- or two-day walkout," said Mr. Richardson, the Madison activist. "If it had been heavy in some key sectors, it would not have had to be many people. If some prison guards walk out."

Rick Badger, a state-level Afscme official, said union leaders believed they stood a better chance of recalling Mr. Walker and Republican legislators than unifying their diverse membership behind a strike, which could have undermined those efforts, and they expected the courts to overturn Governor Walker's legislation.

Mr. Saunders has begun to address one huge vulnerability for public sector unions — the weakness of members' personal ties to one another and their leaders. But would he rally his members for a fight that could go disastrously wrong, even if it were the only thing that could save them?

Under Mr. Wurf, union officials sometimes calculated that even though the public may initially hate their members if they stopped collecting garbage or manning nursing homes, as a strike went on, voters would begin to hate the politicians even more.

Would Mr. Saunders, at a moment of reckoning, ever embrace that radical strategy?

"I don't know, I'm not a fortune teller," he responded when I asked about the possibility of a statewide strike in Wisconsin. "Maybe it could have been successful. It's just not that simple."

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Ethnography of the far right

http://understandingsociety.blogspot.com/2016/08/ethnography-of-far-right.html?m=1

Are wealth and power the same?

http://econospeak.blogspot.com/2016/08/wealth-and-power-does-one-necessarily.html?m=1

Roubini : Brexit hangover

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/europe-brexit-hangover-by-nouriel-roubini-2016-08

The Five Worst Roberts Court Rulings [feedly]

The Five Worst Roberts Court Rulings
http://prospect.org/article/five-worst-roberts-court-rulings

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the foreground arrives before President Barack Obama's 2016 State of the Union Address on Capitol Hill on January 12.

In a by-now familiar applause line, Bernie Sanders told Democrats gathered at the Democratic National Convention last week that the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. FEC ruling is "one of the worst Supreme Court decisions in the history of our country." And this is not an instance where Sanders conflicts with the conventional wisdom of the party establishment either. Not only Senator Elizabeth Warren but Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton have consistently railed against the case as a symbol of the corporate takeover of democracy, and so have countless grassroots activists.

All this makes sense given the extent to which wealthy interests have been permitted to dominate American politics and policy. After all, big money has the potential to disrupt virtually every aspect of the progressive agenda, from environmental regulations to the minimum wage and health care. But the left's fixation on Citizens United overlooks many Roberts Court decisions that were as bad or even worse. In fact, Citizens United arguably does not rank in the top five rulings handed down during the Roberts era.

So what were the five worst Roberts Court rulings? This list relies on two criteria. First, how plausible was the legal argument? And second, how negative was the policy impact of the decision? By these measures, Citizens United doesn't quite qualify as the worst work of the Roberts Court.

Let's take the first criterion, plausibility. On this score, the First Amendment questions at the heart of campaign financing are genuinely difficult. Indeed, on the very narrow question presented by the case—whether the federal government could suppress the broadcast of an anti-Hillary Clinton movie—Citizens United was arguably correct to answer "no." What makes the decision a bad one is that the Court went far beyond what was necessary to decide that issue. Nevertheless, the constitutional arguments made by the Court had more basis in text and precedent than the Roberts Court's five absolutely worst decisions.

On the question of the ruling's impact, the actual fallout from Citizens United has probably been overrated. Politicians such as Sanders and Clinton can justifiably use that decision as a synecdoche for all of the restrictions the Court has placed on the government's ability to regulate campaign financing. But the more important campaign finance decision remainsthe 1976 case Buckley v. Valeo. There's plenty wrong with Citizens United, as I have argued.But the five absolutely worst Roberts Court decisions are these, in descending order of indefensibility:

1. Shelby County v. Holder. The Roberts Court's evisceration of the most important civil-rights legislation passed since Reconstruction was its lowest moment. The impact of the decision to reverse a key part of the Voting Rights Act is anti-democratic, allowing numerous illegal voter-suppression schemes to go into effect, and making it much more difficult to stop them. But what makes Shelby County especially egregious is its threadbare legal reasoning, which can't even be called "constitutional law." The Constitution unambiguously gives Congress the power to enforce the 15th Amendment. The "equal sovereignty of the states" doctrine that the chief justice used to trump Congress's explicit powers is a Roberts invention, and he has yet to identify any constitutional basis or Supreme Court precedent for it. Even setting aside his failure to base it on the text of the Constitution, Roberts's argument—that Congress once had the relevant power but no longer does because the statute was too effective at protecting the rights it was intended to—defies logic. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted in a dissent that gets the better of the Roberts majority opinion on every point, this argument makes as much sense as "throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet."

2. NFIB v. Sebelius. This case is generally seen as a liberal triumph because Chief Justice Roberts ultimately decided not to rule Barack Obama's signature domestic policy achievement unconstitutional. But its Medicaid expansion holding might actually belong at the top of list. In terms of its policy impact, it would be hard to identify a worse decision in the history of the Supreme Court. Thousands of people a year will literally die because Roberts re-wrote the Medicaid expansion of the Affordable Care Act to make it much easier for states to opt out. According to Roberts, Congress could offer money to the states and place conditions on giving the money to expand Medicaid, but it could not withdraw existing Medicaid funding if states declined it. As a legal argument, it's not quite as bad as the one in Shelby County. It's imaginable that federal spending power might stray so far afield from a law as to unconstitutionally coerce the states—though it's hard to picture any Congress passing such a law. As applied to this case, though, it's quite absurd. If Congress had simply repealed the Medicaid Act of 1965 (which had been modified and expanded many times) in 2010, that would have been plainly constitutional. If Congress had repealed Medicaid I, passed the new Medicaid expansion, and made accepting federal money contingent on accepting the ACA's conditions, this would be constitutional. So what sense does it make to say that Congress can't make all existing Medicaid subsidies contingent on accepting the new conditions? It doesn't.

Some people will object that this case shouldn't make the list because two Justices nominated by Democrats—Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan—joined the majority on this question. But it's almost certain that these votes were strategic. It's enormously unlikely that either Kagan (who ruthlessly attacked the Medicaid expansion argument during oral arguments) or Breyer (who has arguably the broadest conception of federal power of any justice in Supreme Court history) would have provided the fifth vote for it. But even if they had … well, they would have been dead wrong.

3. Connick v. Thompson. This case involved an almost-certainly innocent man who spent 18 years in prison largely because the state illegally suppressed exculpatory evidence. According to a 5–4 decision written by Justice Clarence Thomas, however, nobody in the prosecutor's office could be held accountable for this egregious, willful rights violation.The impact of this case—making it more likely that innocent people will be railroaded into prison—is self-evidently terrible. And legally, it's worth noting that the Supreme Court was not enforcing a constitutional or statutory requirement—this extreme level of prosecutorial immunity is a judicially created standard that the Court is free to modify or abandon at any time. It certainly should have in this case.

4. AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion. In this case, the Court held (in an opinion written by the late Justice Antonin Scalia) that federal law preempted California's limits on forced-arbitration agreements. This decision makes it much harder for consumers to get effective remedies when companies rip them off. If the text of Federal Arbitration Act did, in fact, explicitly prevent California's regulations, that wouldn't be the Court's fault—but it doesn't. If you're in the mood for dark comedy, contrast Scalia reading nonexistent policy requirements into federal arbitration law here with the hyper-literal reading of the law he tried to use to strip health insurance from millions of people in King v. Burwell. For a similarly bad anti-consumer decision, see American Express v. Italian Colors.

5. Arizona Free Enterprise Club's Freedom Club PAC v. Bennett. I actually think that this, not Citizens United, is the very worst of the Roberts Court's campaign-finance decisions. The Court struck down an Arizona law that gave matching funds to candidates based on the money raised by their opponents. Citizens United at least presents a real First Amendment issue, because the government was accused of setting out to restrict speech. Arizona's public funding for candidates, conversely, did no such thing—it expanded speech rather than suppressing it. Since public financing is the most viable means legislatures have to counteract the domination of politics by the wealthy, making it more difficult for states to do so is a big deal, and the arguments that Arizona's provision of matching funds violates the First Amendment were nonsensical. As Justice Kagan observed in dissent, "Except in a world gone topsy-turvy, additional campaign speech and electoral competition is not a First Amendment injury."

A few dishonorable mentions that didn't make this list include District of Columbia v. Heller, which held that bans on the possession of handguns for self-defense violated the Second Amendment. While most liberals abhor the ruling's restrictions on the ability of the state to enact gun control measures, the Roberts Court's legal argument in Heller isn't ridiculous, and at least so far, its impact has been modest.

Other Roberts Court misfires include the decision allowing employers to refuse legally mandated contraceptive coverage to their employees in Hobby Lobby v. Burwell; a series of decisions that restricted employees' ability to bring anti-discrimination lawsuits; a ruling that upheld arbitrary strip searches of people arrested for minor, nonviolent offenses; and the Court's creation in Clapper v. Amnesty International of a First Amendment catch-22.

As Sanders observed in his DNC speech, the implications of who sits on the Supreme Court go well beyond a few high-profile issues like abortion. And with one vacant seat and several justices on the verge of leaving the Court, the Court is about to move substantially in one direction or another. If Hillary Clinton and a Democratic Senate are able to replace Scalia, the Court will swing in a more liberal direction favorable to environmental, reproductive health, criminal justice, consumer protection and other progressive priorities. If Donald Trump wins and is able to replace the Scalia seat and at least one of Breyer, Ginsburg, or Kennedy, the Court will continue down the disastrous path set by Chief Justice John Roberts. Citizens United and the Supreme Court's other campaign-finance rulings will be important parts of the constitutional agenda. But so will a long list of other very important issues.

 -- via my feedly newsfeed