Now Republicans Control the Courts, Too | Alternet · more than $60 billion â€” used fake names and Social Security numbers to secretly rehire about 1,000 locked-out workers

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C I V I L L I B E R T I E S TomPaine.com / By Peter Dreier, Kelly Candaele COMMENT NOW!

July 12, 2006 |

Now Republicans Control the Courts, TooProgressives are boasting that three recent Supreme Courtdecisions have stopped GOP tactics dead in their tracks -- butnothing could be further from the truth.

News reports about three recent court decisions -- Texas

gerrymandering, labor violations by Ralphs supermarket chain and President

George W. Bush's treatment of prisoners at GuantÃ¡namo -- make it appear that

justice prevailed and the wrong-doers got their comeuppance. But the opposite is

true.

Instead, these rulings

reveal why the

Republican Congress, the

Bush administration and

big business are so

effective at getting what

they want. They have an

â€œobey when

convenientâ€ approach to

our laws and judicial

system. They break them

when it suits their

purposes, hoping that

either they won't get caught or, if they do, that the punishment will be a slap on

the wrist. In other words, they don't ask for permission. They ask for forgiveness.

On June 28, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Texas legislature had illegally

gerrymandered a Texas congressional district by removing 100,000 Latinos from

it to guarantee a safe Republican seat. The court told the Texas legislature to go

back and redo the district. Republican Congressman Tom DeLay, the former

House Majority Leader, set the stage for this redistricting by illegally raising

corporate money which he funneled into the campaigns of Republican candidates

for the state legislature in 2002. Thanks in large measure to these illegal

campaign contributions, the GOP captured control of the Texas legislature and in

2003 redrew the map of the state's congressional districts. As a result, in the

2004 elections, the Republicans gained six Texas congressional seats that had

previously been held by Democrats. Under the old map, Texas Republicans held

Now Republicans Control the Courts, Too | Alternet http://www.alternet.org/story/38839/now_republicans_control_...

1 of 8 7/1/13 7:31 PM

only 15 of the state's 32 seats in Congress. After DeLay redrew the map,

Republicans held 21 seats. This helped solidify the GOP's majority in Congress.

It is now clear that DeLay's redistricting chicanery was part of a web of corruption,

linked to his friend and lobbyist Jack Abramoff, his congressional staffers-turned-

lobbyists, and other sordid influence peddlers. Last year, a Texas judge ruled that

DeLay's Texans for a Republican Majority Political Action Committee (TRMPAC)

had violated state law by not disclosing over $600,000 worth of fundraising

money and a federal grand jury indicted TRMPAC for accepting illegal political

contributions. A federal grand jury also indicted two DeLay aides for illegal

acceptance of corporate political contributions.

For their misdeeds, Abramoff is facing jail time, and DeLay was forced to resign

his congressional seat and may, too, spend time behind bars. But the fruit of all

this corruption is that, even if DeLay and his buddies wind up in the slammer, the

Texas congressional delegation now has a substantial Republican majority,

making it extremely difficult for the Democrats to take back the House. The

Supreme Court ruled that one of the six gerrymandered congressional districts

violated the Voting Rights Act, but failed to toss out the others that had been

crafted by DeLay. In truth, none of them would have been created in the first

place without DeLay's illegal use of corporate contributions. While DeLay never

planned to quit the House or go to jail, many Republicans and their corporate

allies view him as a martyr â€” or at least a sacrificial lamb â€” in the larger cause

of controlling Congress. DeLay's demise, and last week's Supreme Court

decision, doesn't undo the original sin: illegally soliciting corporate money to

reverse the partisan make-up of Texas' congressional delegation.

In another recent case, the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles ruled that Ralphs,

the giant supermarket chain, has to pay a $70 million fine for illegally hiring

employees during a grocery workersâ€™ strike in 2003 and 2004. Ralphs agreed

to plead guilty to five felony charges included in the 53-count grand jury

indictment against the corporation. Ralphs â€” which is owned by the

Cincinnati-based Kroger Co., the nation's 21st largest company, with revenues of

more than $60 billion â€” used fake names and Social Security numbers to

secretly rehire about 1,000 locked-out workers during the longest and largest

supermarket strike in U.S. history.

The strike cost Ralphs and two other national grocery corporations (Vons and

Albertsons) about $1.5 billion in sales. But the business giants were able to

outlast the United Food & Commercial Workers union, whose members lost four

months of pay, health insurance, and in some cases, their homes during the

dispute.

Although the workers Ralphs hired illegally represented a small fraction of the

60,000 strikers throughout Southern California, the company's misdeeds served

its purpose. It helped keep the stores open with experienced employees,

contributing to the company's ability to beat the strikers. Now, two years after the

strike ended in defeat for the union, Ralphs has been called on the carpet for its

law-breaking.

Analysts have interpreted the court-imposed fine as a setback to Ralphs and a

major warning to big business to avoid engaging in such illegal activities. In


2 of 8 7/1/13 7:31 PM

reality, the $70 million fine should be viewed as a small slap on the wrist, a cost of

doing business, even an investment in Ralphsâ€™ longer-range effort to

undermine the union's influence on labor-management relations. And the few

thousand dollars that will be paid to the strikers as restitution will not begin to

make up for what they have lost in wages, lower salaries, disrupted lives and

psychological damage.

Ralphs' behavior is typical of how many businesses view lawbreaking acts â€”

such as defying pollution standards, violating workplace safety laws, or hiring

undocumented immigrants. For example, it is against federal law for companies

to fire workers for union activities, but the practice is widespread. Corporations

facing union campaigns typically fire labor leaders illegally, knowing that they may

eventually have to rehire them and pay fines and back wages, but only years

later, after the union campaign has been thwarted. Under Bush, the understaffed

and ideologically conservative National Labor Relations Board has shown no

willingness to halt these illegal activities when they have the biggest impact. In

this way, Ralphs (and its sister grocery chains) acted rationally during the

supermarket strike. It is part of a broader strategy on the part of big business â€”

with the support of the Bush administration and Republican Congress â€” to

weaken the labor movement as a viable voice for America's working people.

The third judicial case viewed as a conservative setback was the Supreme

Courtâ€™s rebuke of President Bushâ€™s attempt to go around Congress by

establishing special military trials for detainees at GuantÃ¡namo Bay. Bush and

his advisers had attempted to undermine the statutes of the Geneva Convention

by creating their own rules for how prisoners were legally treated. Many legal

experts, including Bush supporters, are outraged by the president's willingness to

ignore the Constitution in order to expand the authority of the White House in the

name of the â€œwar on terror.â€

But far from being unusual, such lawbreaking has become a pattern in the

corporate world, the right-wing forces in Congress, and in the Bush White House.

They live by the credo that what is important is what you can get away with. The

Texas re-districting Ralphâ€™s labor violations, and Bush's GuantÃ¡namo cases

are the fruits of that arrogance.

The common theme that unites corporate America, congressional Republicans,

and the Bush administration is their willingness to act first â€” often illegally â€” to

consolidate important political, economic and legal changes. In many cases, the

powerful perpetrators never get caught. In other cases â€” as with Bush's

GuantÃ¡namo prisons, DeLay's corporate-sponsored redistricting, and

Ralphâ€™s union-busting â€” the criminal justice system eventually catches up to

such misdeeds. What is unfortunate about all of this is that Democrats in Texas,

Ralphâ€™s workers, and the inmates of GuantÃ¡namo Bay have already paid a

steep price for the injustice inflicted upon them by powerful people.

Kelly Candaele is a trustee of the Los Angeles Community College District. Peter Dreier is

professor of public policy at Occidental College in Los Angeles.


3 of 8 7/1/13 7:31 PM

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Now Republicans Control the Courts, Too | Alternet · more than $60 billion â€” used fake names and Social Security numbers to secretly rehire about 1,000 locked-out workers