Senator Ron Johnson Lets Numbers Illustrate His Views in “On the Issues” Visit

US Senator Ron Johnson let the numbers tell a lot of the story Tuesday during an “On the Issues with Mike Gousha” session at Marquette University Law School.

Numbers showing how the percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) that comes from federal spending, which has risen a lot with projections that it will keep rising. Numbers showing how the gap between projected federal revenue and spending has grown and is forecast to become much bigger. Numbers showing how, in the history of Social Security, the amount collected exceeded the amount spent every year until 2010 but now we’re at the start of a projected long run in which payments are greater than revenue. Numbers showing how steps such as increasing taxes on rich people would do very little to close the gaps in upcoming federal budgets if we stay on the course we’re on. He showed these and other matters as graphs on two large screens in Eckstein Hall’s Appellate Courtroom.

But Johnson also included numbers on some non-economic issues. A chart on the dramatic long-term climb of “births out of wedlock” appeared to spark the most reaction in the audience of about 200. The single-mother birth rate was 6.9% in 1964 and 41% in recent years, Johnson’s chart showed. He called the rise “a very graphic, very harmful unintended consequence of all of our good intentions” in the national War on Poverty, started in the 1960s. Among the factors Johnson said were behind the increase: Public benefits policies that provided unintended incentives for mothers not to get married. As “a compassionate society,” he said, government wanted to help those in need.

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The Boden Lecture: The Reconstruction Era Birth of Our Concept of Citizenship

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – as great as the first two were, it was the third that put in place the concepts of American citizenship and the civil rights of all Americans that are part of the bedrock of American life, prominent historian Eric Foner said in a lecture at Eckstein Hall.

Delivering Marquette Law School’s 2012 Robert F. Boden Lecture last week, Foner focused on the origins in American law of birthright citizenship, the principle that (with immaterial exceptions) anyone born in the United States is a citizen and has basic rights that go with citizenship.

Foner, DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, said many people assume that the principle of “equality under the law” dates back to the origins of the United States – or, as he put it humorously, that the nation was born perfect and has gotten better ever since.

In reality, he said, the nation was definitely not premised on equality under the law in its early stages. For one thing, the Constitution itself did not give citizenship to even free black people, much less to slaves. And, Foner said, citizenship issues were controlled by individual states, rather than the federal government. Every state in the nation had laws that treated black people worse than white people, he noted.

The great changes that declared all men (women’s issues came later) born in America to have basic rights, such as the right to own property and take disputes to court, came with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, put into law by Congress over President Andrew Johnson’s veto, and the subsequent adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

The rights extended by those federal enactments and others in the Reconstruction Era were violated with impunity for many decades. But the rights they embraced eventually took hold and came alive in the Civil Rights Era of the mid-twentieth century, Foner said.

Foner said the history of America is a tale of ups and downs, of rights granted and lost. The right to citizenship extended to anyone born in the United States has become controversial in recent years as immigration issues have heated up, he observed. It is a right that arose from the “titanic struggle” of the era of the Civil War and its aftermath, and it was one of the nation’s ways of addressing the legacy of slavery and the pervasive denial of rights to black people. Given how birthright citizenship has served the country, Foner said, “we should think long and hard before changing it.”

A version of Foner’s Boden Lecture will appear in 2013, in the next Marquette Lawyer.

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Presidential, Senate Races in Wisconsin Are Tied, New Poll Results Show

Changing opinions, particularly among voters who label themselves independents, and the impact of campaign events – especially the first presidential debate – have brought both the presidential and US Senate races in Wisconsin to dead ties, according to results of a new round of the Marquette Law School Poll released Wednesday.

Both races are now pure toss-ups, said Professor Charles Franklin, director of the poll and visiting professor of law and public policy at the Law School.

In poll results four weeks ago, Democratic President Barack Obama led by 14 points over Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Two weeks ago, Obama was up by 11 points. But in polling done Oct. 11 to 14 – just ahead of the second presidential debate – Obama was favored by 49% and Romney by 48%, effectively a tie.

Franklin pointed to the impact of the presidential debate in Denver as a central factor. Obama’s performance in that debate was widely panned. “Rarely has a debate produced such a large movement in the polls,” Franklin said.

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