According to the White House, John Brennan was sworn in as CIA Director on a first draft of the Constitution including notations from George Washington, dating to 1787.

Vice President Joe Biden swears in CIA Director John Brennan in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, March 8, 2013. Members of Brennan’s family stand with him. Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution, dating from 1787, which has George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it.

That means, when Brennan vowed to protect and defend the Constitution, he was swearing on one that did not include the First, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth Amendments — or any of the other Amendments now included in our Constitution. The Bill of Rights did not become part of our Constitution until 1791, 4 years after the Constitution that Brennan took his oath on.

I really don’t mean to be an asshole about this. But these vows always carry a great deal of symbolism. And whether he meant to invoke this symbolism or not, the moment at which Brennan took over the CIA happened to exclude (in symbolic form, though presumably not legally) the key limits on governmental power that protect American citizens.

Update: Olivier Knox describes how the White House pushed the symbolism of this.

Hours after CIA Director John Brennan took the oath of office – behind closed doors, far away from the press, perhaps befitting his status as America’s top spy – the White House took pains to emphasize the symbolism of the ceremony.

“There’s one piece of this that I wanted to note for you,” spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters gathered for their daily briefing. “Director Brennan was sworn in with his hand on an original draft of the Constitution that had George Washington’s personal handwriting and annotations on it, dating from 1787.”

Earnest said Brennan had asked for a document from the National Archives that would demonstrate the U.S. is a nation of laws.

“Director Brennan told the president that he made the request to the archives because he wanted to reaffirm his commitment to the rule of law as he took the oath of office as director of the CIA,” Earnest said.

Take heart, America. While Fox is doing its best to prevent President Obama from implementing preschool for the poor, it’s totally looking out for the little (white) man and woman’s ability to own assault weapons. Case in point: Dan Bongino, a “former Secret Service agent” on Fox & Friends Weekend to explain why he thinks there’s “no such thing as gun control, only people control.” Host Tucker Carlson forgot to mention that Bongino is also a failed Republican senatorial candidate in 2012, now considering running for governor of Maryland in 2014

Bongino wasted no time getting to his larger platform. “Whether it’s the sequester, health care or the gun control issue, what they do is they manipulate an emotional crisis, a national emotional crisis to further an ideological agenda which involves the evaporation, the slow disintegration of your civil rights, your liberties, your ability to live and let live.” But speaking of manipulating emotions, Bongino quickly went on to push people into thinking that gun control is a matter of the wealthy one percent trying to disempower everybody else.

We have this Downton Abbey class of politicians and bureaucrats who – they understand as clear as day that… gun control, with air quotes, has no effect whatsoever on violence or the ability of wolves in our society to impart violence on you. So they feel the need to be protected by weapons and self-defense and the ability to defend themselves with their security details, of which I was one, but they don’t want to impart the same rights upon you, the average American citizen.

Tucker Carlson, who oozes one percent-ness, agreed.

I’ve noticed that. We seem to be developing a two-tier system where privileged people, Mayor Bloomberg, for example, are surrounded by body guards with high-capacity magazines and the rest of us have to make do with double-barrel shotguns. Is that adequate do you think? I mean, is the average person safe with no firearm at home?

BONGINO: No, you’re not.

Later, Bongino said:

We are living in this post-Constitutional society right now where somehow they have sold to you, the American citizens, that it’s moral, ethical, kind or generous to disarm you… while allowing the wolves in our society, the criminals, to impart violence upon you at will – and they know that you won’t be carrying a weapon in these strict gun-control states, one of which I live in, in Maryland.

Carlson gushed, “That is about the most eloquent defense of the right of self-protection I’ve heard in a long time!”

Forget Social Security. Let ‘em eat guns!

Back in December 2005, John Yoo was asked if any law or treaty could prevent the President of the United States from torturing someone, "including by crushing the testicles of the person's child." Yoo, then head of President Bush's Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice, responded, "I think it depends on why the president thinks he needs to do that." To put it another way, the American people just have to take the President's word for it.

That's what makes the revelations in the Obama DOJ's white paper on lethal strikes targeting American members of Al Qaeda so disappointing--and so disturbing. President Obama or an unspecified "informed, high-level government official" will decide if an American citizen anywhere in the world represents an "imminent" threat to the United States, even if no evidence of a planned attack exists. With no oversight from Congress or review from the equivalent of a FISA court, the President and his team will act as judge, jury and executioner. Trust, but don't verify.

Voices as diverse as the Center for American Progress, former Bush assistant attorney general Jack Goldsmith and a bipartisan group of Senators have called for a new legal regime to govern America's expanding campaign of clandestine drone strikes and special operations. The concern arises not because the targeting of the enemy's operational leaders is a violation of U.S. or international law. (As Attorney General Eric Holder explained in his March 5, 2012 speech which first hinted at the existence of the DOJ guidelines, the killings of Japanese Admiral Yamamoto during World War II and Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan provide ample precedent for the President to exercise his powers as Commander-in-Chief under Article II of the Constitution.) Still, drones are rapidly transforming American national defense itself, with potential surveillance at home and the rising number of deadly strikes abroad altering the very definition of warfare. (It is worth noting that American drone warfare has not only triggered a probe by the United Nations, but more importantly is producing blowback in Pakistan, Yemen and other battlefields in the war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates.) But the targeting of American citizens is new territory altogether. And in the wake of this week's disclosures, Attorney General Holder's pledge to guarantee Americans' due process rights under the Fifth Amendment in March seems woefully insufficient:

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[H/t Dave]

I got to thinking about Justice Antontin Scalia's train of logic on the Second Amendment, at least as he explained it to the talking heads yesterday:

"We'll see," Scalia replied. "Obviously the amendment does not apply to arms that cannot be carried. It's to 'keep and bear' so it doesn't apply to cannons."

"But I suppose there are handheld rocket launchers that can bring down airplanes that will have to -- it's will have to be decided," he added.

That's it? That's the criteria as to whether or not the right exists to keep and bear a weapon of any kind -- its portability?

Wow. Or as my redneck friends back in Idaho who like to blow shit up would put it: Yeeeeeeeehaw!!!!

Scalia seems to be opening the door not just for legalizing fully automatic guns, but all kinds of weapons. I mean, hell, pipe bombs -- which, let's be honest, really aren't quite up there in the rocket-launcher category in terms of lethality -- are currently illegal as hell and tightly regulated by the ATF and various other federal agencies right now.

So, for that matter, are all various kinds of portable bombs, particularly those made with C-4. They pack quite a kick, too.

And I guess if we continue to follow the impeccable logic of District of Columbia v. Heller, as Scalia is doing here, then we'll soon loose the dogs on a whole range of weapons that are currently regulated -- because they certainly can be carried.

But hell, why stop there? Go all the way: Let's establish the right to keep and bear a suitcase nuke, since obviously, it's a kind of arms and you can bear it, too.

In fact, I think every American ought to have a suitcase nuke for their personal use. That way if some nutcase comes into a theater and tries to blow everyone up with a suitcase nuke, the entire audience can set off their own nukes. God Bless Murka!

Thanks, your honor. We owe you one.

"Judicial activism" is in the eye of the beholder. Threatening judges is not. That explains why even Michael Mukasey and Alberto Gonzales, former Bush Attorneys General and ardent defenders of detainee torture and illicit domestic surveillance, denounced Newt Gingrich's assault on the federal bench as "dangerous, ridiculous, totally irresponsible, outrageous, off-the-wall and would reduce the entire judicial system to a spectacle." Sadly, Gingrich has plenty of company among conservatives threatening judges. As the dangerous rhetoric of John Cornyn, Tom Delay and a host of other Republican officeholders and propagandists shows, judicial intimidation is now standard fare for many of the leading lights of the GOP.

On Face the Nation Sunday, Gingrich the fading frontrunner told CBS News host Bob Schieffer he wouldn't hesitate to send the Capitol police or U.S. marshals to round up judges with whom he disagreed and force them to respond to subpoenas. As McClatchy reported Saturday:

In order to restore balance between Congress, the White House, and the courts, Gingrich recommended ignoring rulings, impeaching judges, subpoenaing justices to have them explain their rulings and, as a last resort, abolishing the courts altogether...

"I was frankly just fed up with elitist judges imposing secularism on the country and fundamentally changing the American Constitution," Gingrich told reporters, adding that "it was clear to me that you have a judicial psychology run amok, and there has to be some method of bringing balance back to the three branches."

During the height of the Terri Schiavo controversy in 2005, some Republican leaders darkly suggested what one of those methods might be.

Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), himself a former Texas Supreme Court Justice, has been at the forefront of GOP advocacy of violence towards members of the bench whose rulings part ways with conservative orthodoxy. Back in 2005, Cornyn was one of the GOP standard bearers in the conservative fight against so-called "judicial activism" in the wake of the Republicans' disastrous intervention in the Terri Schiavo affair. On April 4th, Cornyn took to the Senate floor to issue a not-too-thinly veiled threat to judges opposing his reactionary agenda. Just days after the murders of judge in Atlanta and another's family members in Chicago, Cornyn offered his endorsement of judicial intimidation:

"I don't know if there is a cause-and-effect connection, but we have seen some recent episodes of courthouse violence in this country...And I wonder whether there may be some connection between the perception in some quarters, on some occasions, where judges are making political decisions yet are unaccountable to the public, that it builds up and builds up and builds up to the point where some people engage in, engage in violence."

Facing criticism for his remarks seemingly endorsing right-wing retribution against judges, Cornyn held his ground. "I didn't make the link," he said on Fox News Sunday, adding with a note of sarcasm:

"It was taken out of context. I regret it was taken out of context and misinterpreted."

As it turns out, Cornyn was merely echoing the words of the soon-to-be indicted House Majority Leader Tom Delay. On March 31st, Delay issued a statement regarding the consistent rulings in favor of Michael Schiavo by all federal and state court judges involved:

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Fahrenheit 451: The temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns.

They're back.

But then, they've never gone away. The Book Killers have always been with us. Before recorded history they were with us, murdering the scholars and storytellers and mystics of every tribe they ever conquered.

They were there when Great Library burned in Alexandria 2,000 years ago. They destroyed the library known as the House of Wisdom when the Mongol Empire invaded Baghdad in 1258. They say the invaders took the books from every ruined library in Baghdad and piled them into the Tigris River, to serve as a bridge for their soldiers and chariots.

They say the river ran black with ink for years.

In 2003 the United States invaded Iraq with an indifference, incompetence, and arrogance that led to anarchy in the streets. There was widespread rioting, vandalism, and looting of priceless ancient antiquities and manuscripts. The National Library burned, and the flames lit the skies for miles around.

Seven centuries later, the great library of Baghdad died again.

Always before it had been like snuffing a candle. The police went first and adhesive-taped the victim's mouth and bandaged him off into their glittering beetle cars, so when you arrived you found an empty house. You weren't hurting anyone, you were hurting only things!

- Fahrenheit 451

Now the book assassins have come to Wall Street. They removed the people and property from Zuccotti Park, destroying or damaging thousands of books in the process. Occupiers and Supporters brought the surviving books to a press conference this week. They were "torn, wrinkled, coverless and even mangled," as Gianna Palmer reported for McClatchy. "Among the books visible on the table were a leather-bound copy of the Bible, a collection of Chinese mythology and a volume of selected poems by Allen Ginsberg."

Bloomberg hasn't apologized. In his press conference announcing the raid he wore the same arrogant look of self-satisfaction that humanity has seen for thousands of years. It was the face of every Mongol chieftain, every Roman centurion, every officious book-destroying official that has ever lived.

Bloomberg and his compatriots would undoubtedly be horrified at any comparison to these vandals and barbarians. If Bloomberg ever does deign to apologize, which might only happen if there's enough political pressure, he'll undoubtedly say it was an accident.

And since things really couldn't be hurt, since things felt nothing, and things don't scream or whimper, as this woman might begin to scream and cry out, there was nothing to tease your conscience later.

But it was no accident. As Captain Ray Lewis explained to Piers Morgan, police procedure demands that receipts be provide for any personal property that is confiscated. The property must then be stored carefully. Negligence is no defense for the destruction of any property. And a society that values knowledge should be especially horrified at the destruction of books.

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While much about the future of post-Qaddafi Libya remains murky, some things are already quite clear. For starters, Republican leaders and GOP White House hopefuls simply cannot bring themselves to credit President Obama in any way for the apparent success of the rebellion. Unsurprisingly, the same conservative echo chamber which cheered as the United States spent over $1 trillion, losing 4,500 American soldiers and wounding 30,000 in Iraq is furious over the $900 million price tag for the operation in Libya. And now, the right-wing's supposed democracy promoters are denouncing the role of sharia law in the draft Libya constitution. As for the virtually identical place of Islam in the Iraqi constitution the U.S. helped craft under George W. Bush? Not so much.

On Monday, the Heritage Foundation was quick to sound the alarm about sharia in the early draft of a new Libyan Constitution.

Much of the document describes political institutions that will sound familiar to citizens of Western liberal democracies, including rule of law, freedom of speech and religious practice, and a multi-party electoral system.

But despite the Lockean tenor of much of the constitution, the inescapable clause lies right in Part 1, Article 1: "Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia)." Under this constitution, in other words, Islam is law. That makes other phrases such as "there shall be no crime or penalty except by virtue of the law" and "Judges shall be independent, subject to no other authority but law and conscience" a bit more ominous.

If this verbiage all sounds familiar, it should. After all, the language is strikingly similar to the Iraqi Constitution the U.S. helped birth in October 2005. As it turns out, Tripoli's new Article 1 bears an uncanny resemblance to Baghdad's Article 2:

First: Islam is the official religion of the State [of Iraq] and it is a fundamental source of legislation:

A. No law that contradicts the established provisions of Islam may be established.

B. No law that contradicts the principles of democracy may be established.

C. No law that contradicts the rights and basic freedoms stipulated in this constitution may be established.

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As Americans gathered to celebrate their independence this past Fourth of July weekend, for some the festivities were tinged with sadness by the mounting evidence that many simply don't know their own nation's history. While a new study showed that only 35% of fourth-graders knew the purpose of the Declaration of Independence, a Marist poll found that 26% of us couldn't identify the country from which the United States announced its separation.

In the telling of Republican White House hopeful Rick Santorum, it's all liberals' fault. "This is, in my opinion, a conscious effort on the part of the left," Santorum explained, "to desensitize America to what American values are so they are more pliable to the new values that they would like to impose on America."

Which is why everything I know about the Founding Fathers I learned from the GOP.

That education begins in the period before the Founders gathered in Philadelphia to produce the document which changed the world.

Starting with the Boston Tea Party in 1773. As the thousands of furious Tea Party protesters who took to the streets in the spring of 2009, we learned that watershed event was all about "no taxation WITH representation." After all, the duly elected Barack Obama and Democratic-controlled Congress had produced the largest two-year tax cut in U.S. history, delivering relief to over 95% of working American households. And by "Taxed Enough Already" (TEA), the Tea Partiers decried the federal tax burden now at its lowest level since 1950.

The textbooks have the start of the Revolutionary War all wrong, too. The Patriot's Day civic holiday celebrated every April in Massachusetts is especially embarrassing since, as Michele Bachmann pointed out, Lexington and Concord are in New Hampshire. And those annual reenactments of Paul Revere's midnight ride have it backwards, too. As Sarah Palin repeatedly made clear, Revere was warning the British.

As it turns out, all Founders are created equal. As Palin explained to Glenn Beck, her favorite Founding Father was "all of them." That might be because, as she pointed out in 2006, they had the wisdom over 170 years in advance to support adding "Under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance. "If it was good enough for the Founding Fathers," she declared, "it's good enough for me."

Then again, how special could Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin and their ilk have been anyway? As Ronald Reagan told Americans in the 1980's, the Nicaraguan Contras were the "moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers."

Well, according to the Republican National Committee, Madison, Hamilton and the other Framers of the Constitution of the United States were perfect. According to the RNC, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan committed sacrilege when she quoted Justice Thurgood Marshall's assessment that "the government they devised was defective from the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war, and momentous social transformation to attain the system of constitutional government, and its respect for the individual freedoms and human rights, we hold as fundamental today." Unable to prevent three-fifths of the Senate from voting on Kagan's nomination, Republicans instead suggested in an RNC memo that the Founders' three-fifths of a person standard for counting slaves was no defect:

"Does Kagan Still View Constitution 'As Originally Drafted And Conceived' As 'Defective'?"

Not, it turns out, if you leave out that three-fifths of a person stuff. Which is exactly what House Republicans did during their staged reading of the Constitution in January.

Then again, for Glenn Beck, the three-fifths compromise in the Constitution was a feature, not a bug:

"That's why, in the Constitution, African-Americans were deemed three-fifths people, because the Founders wanted to end slavery and they knew if the South could count slaves as full individuals you would never get the control to be able to abolish it."

As for the Constitution's $10 tax on the importation of each new slave levied until 1808, Beck in his book Arguing with Idiots helpfully pointed out that:

"That's right, the Founders actually put a price tag on coming to this country: $10 per person. Apparently they felt like there was a value to being able to live here. Not anymore. These days we can't ask anything of immigrants -- including that they abide by our laws."

In any event, as Michele Bachmann has told us time and again, the Founding Fathers worked tirelessly to rid the United States of the "scourge" of slavery. That includes the Founding Child John Quincy Adams, who died seventeen years before Civil War - and the passage of the 13th Amendment -ended slavery in 1865:

"We know we were not perfect. We know there was slavery that was still tolerated when the nation began. We know that was an evil and it was scourge and a blot and a stain upon our history. But we also know that the very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more in the United States. And I think it is high time that we recognize the contribution of our forebears, who worked tirelessly, men like John Quincy Adams, who would not rest until slavery was extinguished in the country."

As for the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln praised Thomas Jefferson's Declaration for introducing "to into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression." But while Lincoln at Gettysburg turned to Jefferson to redeem the promise of America, his Republican successors inform us that it's best to ignore the Declaration's author and third President altogether.

The Texas Board of Education, which sets the de facto standards for U.S. textbook publishers, removed Thomas Jefferson from the Texas curriculum, "replacing him with religious right icon John Calvin." (There is, of course, the Tea Party exception, which allows gun-toting Tea Baggers and Republican Congressman like Texas Rep. Michael McCaul to proclaim, "Thomas Jefferson said the Tree of Liberty will be fed by the blood of tyrants and patriots. You are the modern day patriots.") That's what you get when you have the temerity to explain the plain meaning of the First Amendment, as Jefferson did in his 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists:

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.

Today's Republicans know better.

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Yes, we used to joke (or half-joke, anyway) that hey, next thing you know, Republicans are going to start demanding a return legalized child labor.

It's not a joke anymore.

As Ian Millhiser reports at Think Progress, Utah's newly elected Republican Senator, Mike Lee -- the Tea Partier who unseated Robert Bennett -- posted a video of a lecture he gave last week on the Constitution. It was quite a lecture: Not only does Lee reveal himself to be a far-right "Tenther" -- a conspiracist approach to the Constitution borne out of the Patriot/militia movement of the 1990s -- but as someone who believes child-labor laws are unconstitutional, too:

Congress decided it wanted to prohibit [child labor], so it passed a law—no more child labor. The Supreme Court heard a challenge to that and the Supreme Court decided a case in 1918 called Hammer v. Dagenhardt. In that case, the Supreme Court acknowledged something very interesting — that, as reprehensible as child labor is, and as much as it ought to be abandoned — that’s something that has to be done by state legislators, not by Members of Congress. [...]

This may sound harsh, but it was designed to be that way. It was designed to be a little bit harsh. Not because we like harshness for the sake of harshness, but because we like a clean division of power, so that everybody understands whose job it is to regulate what.

Now, we got rid of child labor, notwithstanding this case. So the entire world did not implode as a result of that ruling.

Millhiser explains just how misbegotten this argument is -- particularly since the Supreme Court, in overturning the rulings that enabled child labor in the first place, was unanimous about the right of the federal government to be involved in these matters.

But as Steve Benen adroitly observes, this whole episode is deeply emblematic of the important point that Paul Krugman made today -- namely, that the Right's embrace of this kind of ideology really reflects a significant divide in American politics, between people who simply believe people should want to return to the "good old days" before FDR and the New Deal, and people who believe that the incredible economic and cultural powerhouse that era produced was the product of a desirable balancing act between governmental power and individual rights.

As Krugman puts it:

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care. The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

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For two years conservatives indulged themselves in unheard-of dogwhistle campaigns against this young African-American President while enlightened liberals pointed it out in a mild, somewhat derisive fashion but with little outrage. Now, in the aftermath of the midterm 'shellacking', a New Confederacy is rising with the assistance of the tea party and John Birchers, and it's getting enough traction in Congress to do real damage.The scary part? It's working.

Fact: We are NOT living in a post-racial society. Not on the liberal side, and not on the conservative side.

As nice as it is to think that we've transcended race now that we have a smart, well-educated mixed-race President, we haven't at all. Racial divides are bigger and nastier than ever. The right exploits them; the left tries to ignore them. But they exist. Dave and John wrote about this in their book "Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane". The chapter on Mad Hatters and March Hares describes the series of dog whistles that birthed today's Tea party. It's not news to anyone paying attention, but it carries a subliminal and destructive message to those who are not.

Will Bunch hit on the same themes in his latest book, "The Backlash", too. When I asked him directly about race as a motivating factor, he answered with this:

Race is a huge motivator. There's been a lot of talk in the early reviews about ways in which "The Backlash" is perhaps understanding of the right-wing rank and file, but I want to be clear -- racism of various stripes is a huge motivator, which I find disturbing and not excusable.

A big driver of the movement is cultural factors -- people are worried about a future in which America is a "non-white majority" nation, and media and pols are exploiting that fear. Barack Obama was the exclamation mark -- that change was here in 2008 and not in 2050 when whites are predicted to be a minority.

Race issues are doing great harm to Democrats and the progressive movement

So far I've addressed the right wing racists. But let's look at what race is doing on the left. The Atlantic reports a disturbing trend:

From every angle, the exit-poll results reveal a new color line: a consistent chasm between the attitudes of whites and minorities. The gap begins with preferences in the election.

After two years of a punishing recession, minority support for House Democrats sagged in this election to the lowest level recorded by exit polls in the past two decades, according to calculations that Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, provided to National Journal.

Despite a drop in minority voters' support for Democrats, it still averaged 73% across the board. However, white voters fled the Democratic party in droves.

Meanwhile, Republicans, with their 60 percent showing, notched the party's best congressional result among white voters in the history of modern polling. Media exit polls conducted by Edison Research and its predecessors have been tracking congressional elections for about three decades. In no previous exit poll had Republicans reached 60 percent of the white vote in House races.

There were specific reasons for the exodus, too.

First among those was Obama's performance. Exactly 75 percent of minority voters said they approved; only 22 percent said they disapproved. Among white voters, just 35 percent approved of the president's performance, while 65 percent disapproved; a head-turning 49 percent of whites said they strongly disapproved. (Those whites voted Republican last fall by a ratio of 18-to-1.)

So white voters cut and ran for the Republican party not because Obama wasn't liberal enough, but because he was perceived as too liberal for so-called liberal white voters. Why is that? Here are some answers, and they all draw upon racial divides and fears.

The racial gulf was similar when voters were asked whether they believed that Obama's policies would help the nation in the long run. By 70 percent to 22 percent, minorities said yes; by 61 percent to 34 percent, whites said no. On election night, much attention focused on the exit-poll result that showed voters divided almost exactly in half on whether Congress should repeal the comprehensive health care reform legislation that Obama signed last year or should preserve or even expand it. But that convergence obscured a profound racial contrast. The vast majority of minority voters said they wanted lawmakers to expand the health care law (54 percent) or maintain it in its current form (16 percent), while only 24 percent said they wanted Congress to repeal it. Among white voters, the sentiments were almost inverted: 56 percent said that lawmakers should repeal the law, while much smaller groups wanted them to expand it (23 percent) or leave it alone (just 16 percent).

When you hear Republicans going on about how voters litigated health care reform repeal in November, they're really saying white voters litigated health care reform repeal. And white voters are the only ones who count in their eyes. But wait, there's more:

Minorities were almost exactly twice as likely as whites to say that life would be better for the next generation than for their own; whites were considerably more likely to say that it would be more difficult. And on a question measuring bedrock beliefs about the role of government, the two racial groups again registered almost mirror-image preferences. Sixty percent of minorities said that government should be doing more to solve problems; 63 percent of whites said that government is doing too many things that would be better left to businesses and individuals.

And which white voters are they losing? Blue collar workers, in droves.

Democrats have been losing support among blue-collar white voters since the 1960s, but in this election, they hit one of their lowest points ever. In House campaigns, the exit poll found, noncollege whites preferred Republicans by nearly 2-to-1 with virtually no gender gap: White working-class women--the so-called waitress moms--gave Republicans almost exactly as many of their votes as blue-collar men did.

These blue-collar whites expressed profound resistance to Obama and his agenda. Just 30 percent of them said they approved of the president's job performance (compared with 69 percent who disapproved). Two-thirds of them said that government is doing too many things. An approximately equal number said that Obama's agenda will hurt the country over the long term. Only about one-fifth of these voters said that the stimulus had helped the economy, and 57 percent wanted to repeal the health care law--even though they are uninsured at much higher rates than whites with more advanced education.

While I'm certain that the crummy economy and Fox News had something to do with this, there is an inescapable race theme running through these numbers that cannot and should not be ignored.

The Constitution and the New Confederacy

The US Constitution will continue to be what conservatives use as their bedrock for every bad thing they do to this country. However, even for conservatives, it's an imperfect document. Conservatives want desperately to defeat the equal protection clause, the general welfare clause, and anything that promotes equality between people of color and the white (whether blue-collar or white-collar) aristocracy. The Conservative US Constitution looks remarkably like the Confederate States Constitution drawn up in 1861.

The Confederate States' Constitution is quite similar to the US Constitution, except that it contains no reference to the "general welfare" of citizens, includes a reference to the "almighty God", has some slight differences with regard to impeachment, term limits and carries a far deeper emphasis on states' rights. Some interesting language additions:

Amended Article 1 Sec. 1 Clause 1 to prohibit persons "of foreign birth" who were "not a citizen of the Confederate States" from voting "for any officer, civil or political, State or Federal."[1]

And, of course, the explicit allowance for slave ownership:

No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed [by Congress]

There are other provisions relating to slave ownership and limiting the importation of slaves to those slaves already in the Confederate states. A side-by-side comparison of the two documents reads a lot like today's Tea Party manifestos.

If today's conservatives had an opportunity to rewrite the US Constitution in their own ideal, it would look much like the constitution drafted by Southern slave states in 1861 when they seceded.

Race issues aren't going away. Will progressives address them in time?

Our big-tent Progressive/Liberal/Democratic Party movement has always been a coalition of competing interests, but race should be one we can deal with and coalesce around. I can't imagine us being less passionate about equal rights based on race than we are passionate about gay or women's rights. So why are we losing the message here?

In then-candidate Obama's March, 2008 race speech, he said this:

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution - a Constitution that had at is very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

How will we struggle against the rise of the New Confederacy? We're seeing it in action every day on the floor of the House. The Senate is yet to come. I see this time as pivotal not only politically, but historically. We either fight for equality for all while rejecting and identifying racism in our media, politics and lives, or else we're surrendering control to the power brokers who not only wish to separate us into haves and have-nots, but also by color and ethnicity until we're so fractured we're rendered ineffective.