The Flathead Valley’s Leading Independent Journal of Observation, Analysis, & Opinion

 

19 October 2010

It’s getting dirty in Whitefish

It’s getting ugly in Whitefish’s House District 4, where business friendly Democrat Will Hammerquist is squaring off against tea party Republican Derek Skees. Virtually all of the mud being slung is being slung at Hammerquist, who is running a clean campaign.

Examples include:

  • Bogus off-shore phone calls smearing Hammerquist
  • Virtually impossible to fact check Republican pamphlets
  • Nasty personal attacks by supporters of Skees
  • A letter from Skees to the voters that couldn’t keep straight the office that he seeks.

Expect more of the same, and perhaps worse, as 2 November approaches — and expect it, if not from Skees, from the Republican Party, and pro-Skees teabaggers with wads of cash who hurl their mendacious calumnies from the shadows and foreign sanctuaries.

Before discussing the phone calls, etc., in detail, a couple of brief notes on the candidates.

I do not know Skees, but I did meet him briefly in Kalispell at a tea party rally on 20 March 2010 (just coincidentally the date of the local Democratic spring chicken and peas affair that once was known as the Jefferson-Jackson Dinner). He was wearing a “Dirt Bags” baseball cap, glad-handing, and promoting Willard Cleon Skousen’s notorious book, The 5,000 Year Leap. I introduced myself; he graciously posed for a photograph. In June, I posted a report on him, Meet HD-4’s tea party poster boy.

I do know Hammerquist, but not well, having had brief contact with him concerning efforts to keep diggers for coal and drillers for oil and gas from despoiling the British Columbian Flathead River valley. He’s done excellent work on those issues. He has not sought Flathead Memo’s endorsement, but were my home in HD-4, I would vote for him. He’s best described as a technocrat, well educated, smart, and with an impressive resume for a man so young.


The bogus calls — and the “I want to start a bar fight” toned letter

This is the dirtiest anti-Hammerquist maneuver yet. A voter in HD-4 receives a phone call from “Steve” (other names may also be in use), who claims to be calling from Hammerquist’s headquarters in Montana. That’s the first lie. Here’s how Hammerquist explained the calls to a Skees supporter:

Mary —

I am not paying for these phone calls. Multiple people in the district are receiving them. They are actually a push poll intended to hurt my campaign. The caller says they are representing my campaign, they then continue with a series of questions that persuade the voter against me.

Multiple people have told me that the callers sound like [they] are from India, which they probably are. If the caller wouldn’t have hung up you would have heard many things about me that are not true. (I am 100 percent behind the Obama/Pelosi national, liberal agenda, ect.)

The calls are illegal, and you’re exactly right: They are not helping my campaign, which is exactly why they are happening.

Will Hammerquist

Hammerquist, in a voter alert in the Whitefish Pilot, urged recipients of the calls to lodge a complaint with Montana’s Commissioner of Political Practices, at 406-444-2942. I recommend immediately writing down what appeared on caller ID, and working with your telephone company to get a trace on the call. Don’t expect quick action from Political Practices; a snail on Valium moves faster. The most effective thing you can do is to whip out your credit card and send Hammerquist a contribution through ActBlue. If you want to support the dirty tricksters’ candidate, donate here.

In the note reprinted above, Hammerquist was responding to the email message below from Whitefish resident Mary Vail, who endorsed Skees in an advertisement in the Pilot.

Dear Will Hammerquist,

I just received a phone call from Steve at your campaign headquarters in Montana. Before the conversation started, I verified with him that he was in Montana and that he has met you. He told me that I should vote for you, so I asked him why. He started to read some jargon off of a card, but I couldn’t understand him because of his dialect (nothing I’ve heard from anyone living in the Flathead). So, I asked him again if he was in Montana. He said he was but could not disclose the specific location for security reasons. I asked him how much he was getting paid to make these phones calls, and he told me $6.50 an hour. I then asked, “So you’re getting paid $6.50 an hour to call me to ask me to vote for someone you don’t even know? In a place that you’ve never been?” And he replied, “Yes maam.” I then said, “If you are in Montana, then what is the name of our Governor? Because he is endorsing Will and you are calling me because you want me to vote for Will.” That’s when the gentleman hung up on me. This phone call did not help your vote!

So, Will, why should I vote for you? Is this your idea of creating jobs? Instead of having volunteers make these phone calls, you have to hire someone from out of state at $6.50 an hour who doesn’t even know you or the issues in our area.

You are a 30 year old Montana college graduate who has worked in Helena and has been groomed by Governor Schweitzer. What are your real life experiences that qualify you for this job? Have you ever run your own business? Do you pay property taxes in the Flathead? Do you have children in the local school district? Are your family members’ wages frozen because they are not union jobs? Are you uncertain of your future because the government is over spending? I can answer YES to all of these questions. That’s why if someone asked me to vote for you, I would have to say NO.

Next time, just knock on my door, I’d be happy to talk to you.

Mary Vail

Vail, evidently a graduate of the Sharron Angle-Linda McMahon school of charm, self-indulgently employs the sneering, taunting, “I’m trying to start a bar fight” brand of righteous snark that I find all too typical of tea party types with chips on their shoulders and Ayn Rand on their minds.


The ads with useless citations

The Montana Republican Legislative Campaign Committee is flooding HD-4 with strident brochures (Example A, Example B) that denounce Hammerquist as a big taxer and spender, and attempt to tie him to President Obama. “Facts” in the form of frightening numbers are presented, tied to footnoted citations.

The citations are useless. They’re intended to present the illusion of a documented claim, but they’re so general — one references “www.billingsgazette.com” — that they cannot be used to validate the accuracy of the brochure. The technique is used by those who know their claims cannot withstand independent scrutiny.

This has not escaped notice. In their With campaign ads, don’t trust, verify, story in the 15 October 2010 Billings Gazette, Associated Press writers Larry Margasak and Calvin Woodward observe:

Finding an actual fact in this season’s load of campaign ads is like panning for nuggets. There’s a lot of fool’s gold in the way.

Some of that fool’s gold is the Republican claim that because unemployment is high, the Obama administration’s stimulus package (which Republicans in Congress did their best to sabotage) did not create any jobs:

THE FACTS: Whatever economists think of the stimulus, they do not think the infusion of money from Washington actually destroyed jobs. At worst, it did not create enough jobs and cost too much for the employment it did manage to generate. The claim in the Wisconsin ad and the implication in the Maryland one is that the stimulus is responsible for draining employment. The Republican ads simply record job losses in a particular state over a particular time and imply the blame rests squarely on stimulus measures.

Substitute House District 4 for Wisconsin and Maryland and you have the essence of the baseless accusations that Montana’s GOP Roveites are hurling at Will Hammerquist.


Does Derek Skees read his letters before he sends them to you?

Not always. That’s why the good folks in Whitefish just received an anti-labor (more on that below) letter from the Republican candidate for House District 4 that reads:

Finally, at the end of the fourth page, the letter gets it right:

How this happened is no mystery. The state Republican Party hired a professional to write the letter — not only for Skees, but undoubtedly for scores of Republicans running for Montana’s legislature. I suspect it was put together at party headquarters in Helena, perhaps mailed from yet another city, and almost certainly never proofed by the candidate (underlings might miss the “State Senate” blunder, but a candidate never would).

According to my sources, this letter was inflicted on every registered voter in HD-4, not just on Republicans (political parties maintain lists of voters for targeted mailings and get out the vote work). Most likely it’s an attempt to reach newcomers, independents, and weak Democrats who might be in a throw the bums out mood.

But although very well written — the author could work for Publisher’s Clearinghouse — the letter embraces the same old ideas that are always found in GOP prayer books.

Consider just three of the letter’s bullet points: education, right to work laws, and so-called Tenth Amendment rights.


Education — on the one hand, radical consolidation; on the other…

Let’s start with education. A couple of weeks ago, Skees laid out a broad plan of school consolidation to Flathead Beacon reporter Dan Testa:

To cut spending on K-12 education, Skees proposes consolidating school districts down to less than 60 statewide, and introducing a voucher system where students can attend the school of their choice based on its performance. In rural, sparsely populated parts of Montana where students only have one school, he believes the free market will solve the problem.

But here’s what he said in his letter:

So what is he really proposing? More consolidation and less local control? More local control and less consolidation? Both?


Right to work laws & and the love of cheap labor

Like most Republicans, Skees wants Montana to adopt a “right to work” law:

Later on, in the push poll attached to his letter, he asserts:

Right-to-work states are cheap labor states, and many are in the old south, the former Confederate states, where slavery was favored because it was the cheapest form of labor. In his push-poll, Skees cites two statistics, the rate of job growth and disposable income. I’ve selected a more meaningful measure.

Higher rates of job growth in RTW states? Yes — but what kind of jobs? All too often, the burger-flippin’ kind, at minimum wage (and you can thank Democrats and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for the minimum wage).

Here’s the key statistic: union friendly states have significantly higher median household incomes than RTW states. The gap between union friendly and RTW states narrows when measured by mean disposable income per capita (total income minus total taxes) — and the lower taxes in RTW states show up in things like inferior educational systems. The price of living in a RTW state is a lower income for you and a darker future for your children.


The Tenth Amendment and the dangerous doctrine of nullification

Finally, we come to the part of the letter that makes me wonder whether Skees was blowing a dog whistle or simply using bad judgment when he marched in Whitefish’s Memorial Day parade wearing a jacket emblazoned with the Confederate flag:

Contrary to Skees’ assertion, no state is constitutionally empowered to nullify federal legislation. As attorney and former law professor Edward Lazarus observes in his essay, Why the Tenth Amendment “Nullification” Arguments Against the Stimulus Bill Are Sheer Folly, published on Findlaw last year, there is no such power in the Tenth Amendment nor anywhere else in the Constitution. I’m going to stretch the limits of fair use here, and quote him extensively, but I urge you to read the entire post on Findlaw. Now, Lazarus:

In the wake of the passage of the stimulus bill, it was widely reported that a bevy of states, many of them so-called “red” states, entertained legislation purporting to declare the federal legislation “unconstitutional” – as, allegedly, a violation of rights guaranteed the states under the Tenth Amendment – and asserting a right of individual states to ignore the law. Stripped of the rhetoric about the immorality of the stimulus package, what these states are proposing is plain and simple a constitutional scheme under which states have a right to “nullify” any federal laws that they deem to intrude on their prerogatives.

It is difficult to see where the legislators who have drafted these states’ rights bills find this “nullification” authority in the Tenth Amendment. That Amendment simply states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited to it by the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Nowhere in this somewhat opaque text does the Constitution vest states with the right to unilaterally pick and choose what federal laws to obey based on their own conceptions of the Constitution. And if it somehow did, our system would simply fall apart. Federal power either overrules state power – as the Supremacy Clause dictates – or is merely advisory, which is untenable.

But if these state actions have only dubious grounding in the Constitution, they do have long and obvious historical roots – and shameful ones.

The Shameful History Behind the Nullification-Power Claims We Are Hearing Now

Back in 1828, then-Vice President John C. Calhoun gave voice to the doctrine of “nullification” in his fury over the federal tariffs that were then being imposed on states by the federal government. Like the modern-day nullifiers, Calhoun read the Tenth Amendment as providing states with a veto over disfavored federal legislation, to wit, a tariff too high for South Carolina’s views of what was proper.

As Calhoun famously framed the idea: “That the sovereign powers delegated are divided between the General and State Governments ... it would seem impossible to deny to the States the right of deciding on the infractions of their powers, and the proper remedy to be applied for their correction.” And on this theory, a South Carolina convention passed the “Ordinance of Nullification,” which declared the tariffs of 1828 and 1832 to be null and void.

♠♠♠♠♠

It is hard to know what to make of the fact that a bunch of opportunistic politicians are now holding out a tarnished artifact of constitutional history as a serious interpretation of the Constitution and of our national structure. Perhaps this can be written off as mere grandstanding – symbolic gestures by politicians who are hoping to tap into a potential backlash against the inevitable growth of the federal government as it comes to grips with our economic crisis.

But nullification is a deeply pernicious idea. It strikes at the core of the constitutional bargain that was struck after the Revolution when the Articles of Confederation failed – the working principle that we are all in this together and that the purpose of the federal government, a government in which every state is represented, is to calibrate the shared sacrifices that all of us will have to bear to preserve the country’s economic vitality and help it prosper. In place of this unifying idea, nullification substitutes the easy way out – by making the claim that we must all be allowed to judge our own contribution and take our own path, no matter how much our cross-purposes and divergent interests might undermine the common good.

A year later, Cornell Professor of Law Michael C. Dorf, also writing in Findlaw, reinforced Lazarus’ warning:

Opponents of the proposed individual mandate have not been content to challenge its constitutionality in the court of public opinion. To the contrary, legislators in a majority of states have proposed state constitutional amendments that would actually forbid the adoption or enforcement of an individual mandate.

If federal law does not ultimately include an individual mandate, then the state amendments, if adopted, would forbid state-level individual mandates. However, in listening to the proponents of many of these measures, it becomes clear that they have their sights set on a larger target: They would like the state constitutional amendments to forbid enforcement of a federal individual mandate, if enacted.

That position — the idea that a state law or state constitutional amendment can nullify a federal law — has a long history. During the Presidential Administration of John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson secretly authored the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, which asserted the power of those states to disregard as void the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Although history has judged the Alien and Sedition Acts to be oppressive, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions were also problematic: They asserted the power of states to unilaterally disregard federal law, and that assertion threatened both the supremacy and uniformity of federal law.

In the Nineteenth Century, in turn, nullification would increasingly become associated with slavery and a view of states’ rights that threatened to unravel the Union.

And in the middle of the Twentieth Century, the theory of nullification was briefly revived by Southern Congressional opponents to the Supreme Court’s desegregation mandate in Brown v. Board of Education. The “Southern Manifesto” nominally urged only “lawful” means of resistance to Brown, but, in context, it was rightly understood as providing aid and comfort to those who would once again set the cause of states’ rights above racial justice.

Given the unseemly history of the nullification idea, one might think that modern opponents of an individual mandate (or anything else) would be reluctant to invoke it. Yet because they are either ignorant of, or undaunted by, the guilt–by-association of nullification, individual mandate opponents are pressing ahead with the notion that states can refuse to comply with federal laws that they deem unconstitutional.

I’ve quoted Lazarus and Dorf extensively because I want everyone to know just how far outside the mainstream Skees is paddling. If elected, he would not be the only one of his kind in the legislature. Nor would he be the first to introduce resolutions on nullification: see Will Montana fire on Fort Sumter? Working with other off-the-bell-curve legislators, Derek Skees could well bring Montana into profound national disrepute, and get the state into legal trouble that could cost the taxpayers millions.