The tone deafness of this move is fairly astounding:

Gov. Robert F. McDonnell, reviving a controversy that had been dormant for eight years, has declared that April will be Confederate History Month in Virginia, a move that angered civil rights leaders Tuesday but that political observers said would strengthen his position with his conservative base.

The two previous Democratic governors had refused to issue the mostly symbolic proclamation honoring the soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War. McDonnell (R) revived a practice started by Republican governor George Allen in 1997. McDonnell left out anti-slavery language that Allen’s successor, James S. Gilmore III (R), had included in his proclamation.

McDonnell campaigned as a fairly moderate conservative figure, but that image has been undercut by moves like this and his revision of state law to remove employment protections for gay and lesbian workers. McDonnell’s stated reasoning for issuing the declaration is that it would help boost tourism on the eve of the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War.

I have to say that I find that fairly unconvincing, just as is his explanation for why he made no mention of, you know, one of the major reasons that the war was fought:

McDonnell said he did not include a reference to slavery because “there were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.”

Hmm. On the eve of the war, Virginia was both the largest slave state, with over 500,000 men and women in bondage and the state with the most slaveowners. Somehow, I think that counts as a “significant” fact.

I grew up in the southern part of Virginia, a place where, as Faulkner wrote, that the past is not dead; it’s not even past. In my hometown of Martinsville, a city that’s been experiencing severe economic hardship for the better part of the last ten to fifteen years, it’s not uncommon to see the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy flying in the back of a truck or from someone’s house. One of the nicest areas of Martinsville, an upper class neighborhood known as Chatmoss, is peppered with street names that celebrate venerated Confederate generals (Stonewall Jackson Trail, Jeb Stuart Road). Danville, VA, the last capital of the Confederacy, is only about 20 minutes away.

Look, I get it. There’s long been a battle over the symbols of the Confederacy and many people where I’m from and from other parts of the South claim that their elevation of their ancestors who fought and died in the Civil War has more to do with “heritage, not hate”. And, to be fair, I’m sure that’s true for many. However, let’s not rewrite history just to make ourselves feel better about a war that was, at base, an unlawful insurrection against a popularly elected government. The insensitivity this move shows towards the states black residents and descendants of those who fought against the Confederacy is breathtaking. The Civil War was waged for many reasons – states rights being a fairly important one – but to act as if slavery had nothing to do with it borders on the willfully ignorant.

Virginia has a long history of problems with race (Loving vs Virginia, anyone?) and this situation won’t help matters. That the state elected the nation’s first black governor over twenty years ago doesn’t remove the stain and pain of the effects of a war that still resonate today because of actions like Bob McDonnell’s.

Update: I had forgotten that up until 2000, the state of Virginia celebrated Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee on the same day the rest of the country celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sorry that this is coming a day late this week, but here’s some goodies to help you impress at your next social gathering:

• New York asked a good question last week: What if women ran Wall Street?
• Patrick Madden wonders about the fate of the long-form essay at Huffington Post.
• Adam Gopnik examines a new French culinary movement in The New Yorker.
• In last week’s Sunday New York Times magazine, David Leonhardt sketches out what the future of financial regulatory reform might look like.
• With the iPad just days from release, Wired explains why Apple’s newest creation will change computing forever.
• From this week’s New York, the making of Lady GaGa.
• Speaking of music, 50 songs every man should be listening to.

  Here’s two videos (!) this week, taken from the Esquire list above:

  “Stylo” by the Gorillaz (welcome back):
  

  And “Audience” from the Cold War Kids:
  

The political blogosphere started buzzing late this afternoon when news broke that David Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and an increasingly vocal critic of the Republican Party’s approach to health care reform, had been fired from his position at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Speculation ran rampant about the causes and abruptness of the dismissal, but it seems that Frum was let go simply for not following the party line*. Bruce Bartlett, another conservative intellectual who met with a similar fate several years ago, laments:

Since, he is no longer affiliated with AEI, I feel free to say publicly something he told me in private a few months ago. He asked if I had noticed any comments by AEI “scholars” on the subject of health care reform. I said no and he said that was because they had been ordered not to speak to the media because they agreed with too much of what Obama was trying to do.

It saddened me to hear this. I have always hoped that my experience was unique. But now I see that I was just the first to suffer from a closing of the conservative mind. Rigid conformity is being enforced, no dissent is allowed, and the conservative brain will slowly shrivel into dementia if it hasn’t already.

Sadly, there is no place for David and me to go. The donor community is only interested in financing organizations that parrot the party line, such as the one recently established by McCain economic adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin.

I will have more to say on this topic later. But I wanted to say that this is a black day for what passes for a conservative movement, scholarship, and the once-respected AEI.

If you’re a conservative who happens to hold heterodox views on, well, anything, it’s probably hard to consider yourself a member of the Republican Party at the moment. Which, I think, is sad (honestly)! Democracy really does benefit from a diversity of opinion and it’s depressing to see one party voluntarily silence its voice on a range of important issues for the sake of ideological fealty.

Truth be told, some of the best bloggers and thinkers out there at the moment are conservatives, ranging from the well-known (Andrew Sullivan and Ross Douthat) to guys that everyone should be reading now so you can say you were hip to them before they blew up (Daniel Larison and fellow True/Slanter Conor Friedersdorf).

As a person who considers himself to be a fairly conventional liberal, I have to say that I get a great deal of enjoyment from reading all of these guys, and several others, for two reasons. One: They make me challenge my own beliefs. It’s not an infrequent occurrence for me to run across something on one of their sites that I strenuously disagree with, almost on sight. But then I know I have to calm down, read the argument, and process why I disagree with it, because the thoughts being advanced are almost always nuanced and well-considered. In assessing their arguments, I’m forced to look at why I think what I think, and that’s something that most of us don’t do often enough. Being an ideological robot is boring. Which leads me to the second reason I read their work: they’re unpredictable. There have been numerous posts written by Andrew Sullivan on a variety of topics that have almost literally driven me to drink. Other times, it’s as if he wandered into my own head, took out exactly what I was thinking, and arranged and verbalized those thoughts with a depth of feeling and clarity of thought that almost make me want to stop writing, because I know I will rarely reach that level of expression.

I guess the one thing that all of these writers have in common, for the most part, is that they’re working outside the major house organs of the conservative movement. Sullivan writes for The Atlantic and Douthat is at the New York Times, Larison writes for The American Conservative (which doesn’t appear to have the level of influence within conservative circles that the National Review or Weekly Standard do) and Friedersdorf contributes to several websites and produces freelance work. That’s to our benefit as consumers of opinion journalism. It would be a shame to see these live minds shackled because they wouldn’t support policy x or stance y.

So, for your own sake, seek out these voices, read them, and engage them. You’ll find yourself better off and you may end up believing, ever so slightly, that rational discourse on contentious issues can actually still happen in the United States.

*Frum denies that AEI fired him over his criticism of the GOP’s stances/tactics in the health care debate.

Update: One thing I neglected to mention: I think there’s much more room for diversity of opinion with the Democratic Party and the left blogosphere in general. If we learned nothing else during the health care debate, it’s that certain members of the Democratic caucus in the Senate (Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman, among others) and the House (Stupak’s Blue Dogs) didn’t see eye to eye with their more liberal brothers and sisters. You could also see this tension in the fights that broke out over health care reform between more center-left bloggers (Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias) and a more progressive faction who felt that Democrats were caving by giving up on items like the public option (notably Jane Hamsher of FireDogLake). By and large, you just didn’t see those same kind of fights within the conservative movement.

As you may have heard, a health care bill passed the House of Representatives late last night, paving the way for the most sweeping social welfare reform legislation in almost fifty years.

The gavel had barely fallen before a meme started to take hold, which was neatly encapsulated by David Sanger in the New York Times:

But there is no doubt that in the course of this debate, Mr. Obama has lost something — and lost it for good. Gone is the promise on which he rode to victory less than a year and a half ago — the promise of a “postpartisan” Washington in which rationality and calm discourse replaced partisan bickering.

That claim has been echoed by pundits on both the left and the right, but as Matt Yglesias points out, the President and Democrats in Congress offered, repeatedly, to compromise but were met by a unified opposition:

We should also, however, spare a thought for the unsung hero of comprehensive reform, McConnell and his GOP colleagues, who pushed their “no compromise” strategy to the breaking point and beyond. The theory was that non-cooperation would stress the Democratic coalition and cause the public to begin to question the enterprise. And it largely worked. But at crucial times when wavering Democrats were eager for a lifeline, the Republicans absolutely refused to throw one. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and other key players at various points wanted to scale aspirations down to a few regulatory tweaks and some expansion of health care for children. This idea had a lot of appeal to many in the party. But it always suffered from a fatal flaw—the Republicans’ attitude made it seem that a smaller bill was no more feasible than a big bill. Consequently, even though Scott Brown’s victory blew the Democrats off track, the basic logic of the situation pushed them back on course to universal health care.

The narrative taking hold is that Obama and the Democrats rammed through a unpopular bill in unprecedented fashion all while dismissing dissenting voices. Of course, that narrative totally ignores the fact that the GOP never had any intention of cooperating. Bipartisanship takes two sides acting in some semblance of good faith; that was never the case as health care legislation progressed. Jim Fallows provides a perfect example of this dynamic here. He adds, in regards to the down the line “no” stance taken by conservatives, that:

Fine: that’s their strategy, they had every right to choose it, although as David Frum very eloquently argues, this time it didn’t work.** I raise it now in response to a new wave of interpretive hogwash: namely, the idea that although Obama may have “won,” he did so in a fashion that was polarizing, hyper-partisan, and extreme. Please. The quite open GOP strategy was that they were not going to vote for this bill. They had every right to that as a strategic choice. But they can’t now claim that their bloc opposition to the bill is proof that the Democrats were too partisan. Rather, they can and will claim it, but they shouldn’t be believed.

Remember that passage as more postmortems come out over the next few days. The political press can correct the narrative here, should they choose to. However, we all know they won’t.

Yesterday, I got into a back and forth on Twitter with conservative writer and thinker, Reihan Salam, whose opinions I greatly respect. I asked Salam what he thought a bipartisan bill would or should look like and he replied:

“Your q assumes that there is a single R or a single D view. This process has been about getting Ds to agree with each other.”

In the end, that’s right; it was about Dems agreeing with each other. What that ignores, though, is that there was ample opportunity for Republicans to contribute. They just chose not to.

The New York Times reports today that conservative lawmakers across the country are drafting state laws that directly challenge the primacy of federal law:

Whether it’s correctly called a movement, a backlash or political theater, state declarations of their rights — or in some cases denunciations of federal authority, amounting to the same thing — are on a roll.

Gov. Mike Rounds of South Dakota, a Republican, signed a bill into law on Friday declaring that the federal regulation of firearms is invalid if a weapon is made and used in South Dakota.

On Thursday, Wyoming’s governor, Dave Freudenthal, a Democrat, signed a similar bill for that state. The same day, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives approved a resolution that Oklahomans should be able to vote on a state constitutional amendment allowing them to opt out of the federal health care overhaul.

In Utah, lawmakers embraced states’ rights with a vengeance in the final days of the legislative session last week. One measure said Congress and the federal government could not carry out health care reform, not in Utah anyway, without approval of the Legislature. Another bill declared state authority to take federal lands under the eminent domain process. A resolution asserted the “inviolable sovereignty of the State of Utah under the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution.”

The flurry of new legislation seems to be stoked in part by the rise of the Tea Party movement, which has expressed anger at the reach and scope of the federal government under the Obama administration. However, I think this desire to push back is going to put conservative jurist in an uncomfortable position.

The conservative judges on the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John “balls and strikes” Roberts, have repeatedly stated their respect for precedent, even as they ignored it when they saw fit. The most recent example of the conservatives on the bench showing if not contempt, then certainly disregard, for precedent came in the Citizens United decision, in which the jurists found a heretofore undiscovered right of free speech for corporate entities, a right that had previously been reserved for people. Now, I’m not a legal scholar, but I’m fairly certain that the Constitution does not expressly address corporate personhood. If that’s true, then it seems a stretch for a collection of judges who claim to be strict constructionists, loathe to revisit settled law, to do so in such a sweeping fashion as they did in Citizens United (in which they overturned – in full or in part – two previous decisions on the matter). (It’s worth reading Jeffrey Toobin’s new profile of John Paul Stevens in the New Yorker for more on Citizens United)

What, you might say, does that have to do with these laws being passed by the state legislatures? Here’s another section from the Times piece:

Other scholars say the state efforts, if pursued in the courts, would face formidable roadblocks. Article 6 of the Constitution says federal authority outranks state authority, and on that bedrock of federalist principle rests centuries of back and forth that states have mostly lost, notably the desegregation of schools in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Article 6 says that that federal law is supreme and that if there’s a conflict, federal law prevails,” said Prof. Ruthann Robson, who teaches constitutional law at the City University of New York School of Law. “It’s pretty difficult to imagine a way in which a state could prevail on many of these.”

And while some efforts do seem headed for a direct conflict with federal laws or the Constitution, others are premised on the idea that federal courts have misinterpreted the Constitution in the federal government’s favor.

So the potential now exists for the court to have to adjudicate a case in which the conservative wing will either have to choose between the word of the Constitution, which it generally views as inviolable, or show its sympathies to arguments seeking the reduction of federal control over various aspects of life. The latter choice would, of course, leave the conservatives open to that worst of judicial insults, as they would surely be called “activist judges” for overturning Article 6.

It may well be that none of the current laws being drafted and ratified in the states will come before the court, but should one make it, it’s going to very interesting to see how the court decides. Judicial Catch-22 anyone?