It is also hard to see the church couch its anti-abortion position in the context of caring for women when it continues to keep women in subservient roles in the church. But it’s hard for me to watch the church trying to control women’s sexuality after a shocking number of its own priests sexually assaulted children and teenagers for decades, and got recycled into other parishes, as the church covered up the whole scandal. I come from a family that hews to the Catholic dictates on abortion, and I respect the views of my relatives. There is a corona of religious fervor around the court, a churchly ethos that threatens to turn our whole country upside down. Still, this Catholic feels an intense disquiet that Catholic doctrine may be shaping (or misshaping) the freedom and the future of millions of women, and men. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Catholic, has expressed support for Roe, and Chief Justice John Roberts, a conservative Catholic, may be working for a compromise decision that can uphold Roe. Wade decision and another was in the court majority that upheld it in Planned Parenthood v. had to defend themselves against scurrilous charges that, if they got to the White House, they would take their orders from the pope. My father was furious that Catholic presidential candidates Al Smith and J.F.K. There is an astonishing preponderance of Catholics on the Supreme Court - six out of the nine justices, and a seventh, Neil Gorsuch, was raised as a Catholic and went to the same Jesuit boys’ high school in a Maryland suburb that Brett Kavanaugh and my nephews did, Georgetown Prep. There are prior worldviews at work in this upheaval.Īs a Catholic whose father lived through the Irish Catholics “need not apply” era, I’m happy to see Catholics do well in the world. While they will certainly provide the legal casuistry for their opinion, let’s not be played for fools: The Supreme Court’s impending repeal of Roe will be owed to more than judicial argumentation. Given what this country has been through with Covid, given all the corrupt bankers who got off scot-free after the economic collapse, and given how hard it is to earn a buck, this new glimpse into inequities is genuinely disgusting.It’s outrageous that five or six people in lifelong unaccountable jobs are about to impose their personal views on the rest of the country. Forgive me if I don’t want to celebrate Jeff Bezos’ midlife crisis rocket ride. Look, rolling around in gobs of dough and displays of obscene consumption is a tradition as American as apple pie. They’ll have to raise the corporate tax rate, which began to plunge during the Reagan years, to an equitable level and stop corporations from tax-shopping to find countries with the lowest rates. Republicans talk a good game about adopting the winning parts of Trumpism, but you can’t be populists if you shield the rich and stick it to everybody else.Įven if they make the rich pay their fair share, it likely won’t be enough to fund most of what President Biden needs to do. “The rich have money, the rich have power, the rich have lobbyists, and the rich do not pay their fair share of taxes,” he said in a peak-Bernie moment. In 2019, during a campaign debate, Sanders lamented the outrageous fact that three people own more wealth in America than the bottom half of society, and he railed against the “billionaire class whose greed and corruption has been at war with the working families in this country for 45 years.” The revelations may renew calls for the wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders have long pushed. The Times story noted that ProPublica shed light on the fact that “the superrich earn virtually all their wealth from the constantly rising value of their assets, particularly in the stock market, and that the sales of those assets are taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income from a paycheck.” And while the value of those assets grows by the billion, untaxed, these rich folks can borrow against them, deducting the interest. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat and the chairman of the Finance Committee, said he was working on a bunch of proposals to force billionaires to pay their fair share, including some sort of minimum tax. “I believe dividends and capital gains should be taxed at a lower rate, but certainly not zero.” “My intention as the author of the 2017 tax reform was not that multibillionaires ought to pay no taxes,” he said. Senator Patrick Toomey, Republican of Pennsylvania, who was one of the architects of the law that cut taxes by more than a trillion dollars, defended tax rates for “high income people” at a town hall, but in an interview with The Times sounded a more critical note.
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