Reason.com
Arizona Secretary of State Asks Hawaii to Verify President Obama’s Birth, Hawaii Asks Arizona Secretary of State to Verify Himself
Though Arizona’s Secretary of State says he’s not
a birther, he sure sounds like one: “I’m not a birther; I believe
the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was,” Ken
Bennett said in a radio interview this week.
Apparently, that’s why he asked
Hawaii two months ago to provide “verification” that Barack Obama
was born there. Hawaii’s response? Go verify yourself! From
TPM:
In the weeks since then, Bennett said, Hawaii officials have forced him to provide proof that he is who he says he is. They asked him to send them copies of the Arizona laws that prove the secretary of state really is the person in charge of handling the ballots. Admittedly, Bennett said they told him they were “tired of all the requests.” But he is continuing anyway.
Looks like someone in Hawaii has a sense of humor. Seriously though, while Bennett claims he’s not playing to birthers, it’s hard to see why Bennett would waste his time, not to mention taxpayers’ money, on these theatrics if he wasn’t using the opportunity to build his support up ahead of the 2014 Arizona gubernatorial election in which he’s expected to compete. The birther issue is a popular one there.
Read Nick Gillespie’s take on the latest fodder for the birthers, the Obama bio from his literary agency that mistakenly said he was born in Kenya.
The End of a Libertarian Era: Freedom Communications Selling Off in Chunks
As Warren Buffett expands his media holdings by buying 63 small newspapers this week (shouldn’t he be giving that money to the government?), a much more liberty-oriented media empire is dismantling.
Freedom Communications Inc., founded by irascible
libertarian pontificator R.C. Hoiles as
Freedom Newspapers in the 1930s, announced the sale of its Midwest
newspapers on Thursday and Texas
newspapers today. This follows the sale of all its television
stations in April as well as a few individual papers in smaller
deals. Aside from the company’s two metro newspapers – The
Orange County Register (Calif.) and The Gazette
(Colorado Springs) – the sales leave the media company with a
handful of community dailies and weeklies in California, North
Carolina and Florida.
Hoiles was considered radical for his time and would still be considered radical were he still alive (probably even moreso now). As Reason’s Brian Doherty documented in his book, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement (go buy it!), Hoiles was a vocal opponent of unions and forced public schooling. He believed in voluntary contributions for public services rather than coercive taxation, even for police. He was fined for violating wage control laws during World War II for giving out a raise. He also opposed the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and believed in open immigration.
As His Anti-Detainment Amendment to the NDAA Loses in the House, Justin Amash Reminds the Floor That the Constitution Protects People, Not Just Citizens
After a midnight debate on the
House floor, the Smith-Amash anti-indefinite detainment amendment
(sponsored by Reps. Adam Smith and Justin Amash and supported by
other congresskids) to the 2013 National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA) failed.
The final vote was 182-237, with a mere 19 Republicans joined
the unsurprisingly crashed anti-detainment party.
(The GOP's toothless pro-Habeas Corpus Amendment passed, but that, as Mother Jones notes, is not the point of contention. The point is that accusations of terrorism are a catch-all for completely destroying civil liberties.) So, hello $640 billion NDAA 2013! Detainment powers intact! And always with increased military spending. (Four billion more!)
So, what now? We're doomed to choke on our own empire-buildig, right?
Unless U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest's blocking of the worst bits of the NDAA holds up, that is. And her judgement that plaintiff and journalist Chris Hedges had the standing to actually challenge the NDAA definitely bodes well, but the death of the Smith-Amash amendment is not good.
Still, to grasp at further straws of optimism, last night Amash actually managed to sneak onto the House floor a bracing reminder that even with all the (righteous) panic over American citizens being detained most people forgot that non-citizens within the borders of the country are supposed to have protections, too. Constitutional protections apply to "persons" not just "citizens" railed Amash. Check it out.
Amash expresses a Ron Paul-like opposition to unconstitutional wars. He has also raised the very Paul-like point about how gosh, we think it's just a little intervention with a few airstrikes in instances like Libya, but a couple of foreign planes over America would make everyone agree that this is a war.
Meanwhile, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs/Now Heritage Foundation expert Charles Stimson helped draft a letter which objected to the failed amendment. Stimson claimed on Fox News earlier this week that the Amash-Smith amendment would "encourage terrorists" to come to the U.S. Also, "we're still at war" and it's bad to "take any options off the table." Others folks, such as Congressman Tom Rooney, are of the opinion that that Amash is interested in "coddling terrorists."
No. Amash is just that disturbingly rare creature (especially among politicians) who remembers two oft-forgotten facts. In the orgy of murderous self-absorption that is foreign policy, it helps to recall that people who weren't lucky enough to be born Americans are in fact still people; And to defend suspected terrorists is not to defend terrorism. The government doesn't exactly have a flawless record in grabbing the right people. And to defend the rights of non-citizens from detainment without charge is not to defend the guy caught flying over Detroit with a lit fuse in his underwear. It's to defend the the hundreds of thousands of other, grayer cases than that.
And really, since the war on terror has no end, how long do people like Stimson think "we are still at war" will hold up as an excuse? (Forever. The answer is forever.)
He also argued the old standby that the NDAA "simply codifies" what was already law. (U.S. District Judge Forrest disagrees with this Obama-friendly argument.) But laws that were once envelope-pushing outrage become more and more just precedent upon precedent. And then Americans (and people all over the world) lose more and more freedom. I've already just about accepted the NDAA. I'm waiting for the next government thing now.
Reason on the NDAA, on Justin Amash, and on the war on terror
Phonehenge Architect Sentenced to Pay For Demolition, "See Dead People"
Kim Fahey, the retired phone company repairman
who built a fantastic and whimsical fort known as "Phonehenge" out of old
telephone poles in the middle of the Mojave Desert, has been
sentenced to repay the $83,488 it cost the county to demolish his
creation,
reports the Washington Post:
Superior Court Judge Daviann L. Mitchell told Fahey that he must pay $50 a month in restitution. He ordered a July 27 progress report.
The 59-year-old retired phone company technician was convicted of a dozen misdemeanor building code violations. Fahey never got building permits for the structures, which included a 70-foot tower, and authorities said the compound was a danger.
In a more bizarre turn, the judge is also requiring Fahey to work for five days in the coroner's office. According to Fahey's defense attorney Jerry Lennon, the judge wanted to teach him a lesson about the potential deadly consequences of building unpermitted structures in the middle of the desert:
“The judge thought it was an extreme fire danger and I guess she just wanted him to see dead people,” Lennon said.
Reason.tv highlighted Fahey's case in a video produced with LA Weekly's Mars Melnicoff, which examined Los Angeles County's code enforcement policies, particularly the seemingly arbitrary deployment of so-called Nuisance Abatement Teams (NATs) against citizens of the barren Antelope Valley.
Ed Krayewski on This Weekend's NATO Summit in Chicago
The
NATO summit set to start Sunday in Chicago will be the first such
gathering in the United States since the alliance met in Washington
for its 50th anniversary in 1999. Atop the agenda this weekend will
be Afghanistan, where America is embroiled in its eleventh year of
war. Lip service to austerity, in the form of “smart defense” and
“burden sharing,” will also be given at the summit, which is
expected to cost the city of Chicago about $55 million. Just don’t
expect NATO officials to do any soul-searching while they’re in
town. Instead, writes Ed Krayewski, the summit will be heavy on
self-aggrandizement and feature plenty of flimsy justifications for
future “humanitarian interventions.”
NDAA Reform Fails, Minnesota GOP Gets Libertarianized, Schumer Shuns Tax Refugees: P.M. Links
Saying, "the plaintiffs have in fact lost
certain First Amendment freedoms as a result of the enactment" of
Section 1021 of the NDAA, letting the military detain anyone it
suspects "substantially supported" accused terrorist groups, Judge
Katherine Forrest issued a
preliminary injunction against those provisions.
Meanwhile, Rep. Tom Rooney
smeared Rep. Justin Amash's efforts to eliminate the military's
authority to detain individuals without due process as trying to
"coddle foreign enemy combatants," setting the tone as the House
voted down the amendment.- Under fire for "drone strike" assassinations performed without due process, sometimes on U.S. citizens, with known innocent casualties, government officials are considering sharing more information in hopes of winning support for the program.
- Americans Elect, the establishment-backed effort to groom a high-profile centrist, "problem-solving" presidential candidate, admitted defeat after nobody interested in the nomination raised sufficient support. (HT Eduard van Haalen) The Washington Post painted the failure of the bloodless, "non-ideological" effort as the death-knell for third parties in general.
- Chen Guangcheng's nephew, accused of attempted murder for defending himself against Chinese officials who stormed his house seeking his activist uncle, won't be permitted representation by a human rights attorney.
- The Minnesota Republican Party is on the verge of a takeover by young, political-newbie libertarians. They challenge not only the old-guard's ideology, but its financial-management skills.
- Sen. Charles Schumer thinks that people who flee America's tax collectors are, nevertheless, desperate to drop in for a visit, and should be denied U.S. hospitality unless they cough up lots of cash. It's sort of like extortion, but it's not, because ...
- In advance of the NATO summit in Chicago, lawyers say police preemptively and illegally raided an apartment where activists planning protests are staying, and arrested nine of the occupants.
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The TSA Can't Say Whether Full-Body Scanners Work, Because Its Failures Are Classified
You can thank Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his fizzled
underwear bomb for the big rollout of full-body airport scanners
that began in 2010, shortly after the Nigerian terrorist tried to
bring down a flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day in
2009. But it might make more sense to blame the 
Transportation Security Administration (TSA),
since it seems quite unlikely that the machines would have detected
the explosive powder sewn into his briefs. In a March 2010 report, the
Government Accountability Office (GAO) said "it remains unclear
whether the AIT [advanced imaging technology] would have been
able to detect the weapon Mr. Abdulmutallab used in his
attempted attack." Things became clearer this month
following another
aborted underwear bombing, this one involving a double
agent working for Saudi intelligence. After all, why would Al Qaeda
try the same technique again, now that we have all those expensive
machines peering through passengers' clothing, looking for just
this sort of device?
"Quite frankly," an unnamed but "high-ranking" Department of Homeland Security official told The New York Times last week, "I think the likelihood is high that he or she or whatever the device was would have been picked up through the screening abroad at the last point of departure, based on what we have in place in those locations and the partnerships we have." Notably, this official did not say the explosives would have shown up on a full-body scanner. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, pressed this point at a May 9 congressional hearing:
"Just yesterday," Mr. Issa began, "Janet Napolitano — Secretary Napolitano — said there is a high likelihood that Advanced Imaging Technology would have detected the new sophisticated underwear bomb used in the recent or attempted to be used in the recent plot in Yemen. Do you agree that there is a high likelihood that advanced imaging would have caught the new bomb?" he asked [a GAO] auditor who had worked on an examination of the T.S.A.
"That's a very interesting question," said Stephen Lord, the director of homeland security and justice issues for the Government Accountability Office. "I would have great difficulty answering that in open sessions, sir. We've done a classified report."
Mr. Issa said: “We'll take that, and I'm going to predict that it's going to be no, they couldn't. But the actual answer will remain classified."
Well, not really. Issa presumably has seen the full report, so he knows the answer is no. Likewise Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who recently told The New York Times, "The latest device, which was designed specifically to thwart what we’ve got in place, probably would've gotten through rather easily." TSA Administrator John Pistole conceded that "no one knows without equivocation whether that kind of device would get through until we test it." A report issued last week by Issa's committee and Mica's committee calls the AIT scanners "ineffective." Pistole says "we're working with the manufacturers to improve the technology." He emphasizes that the scanners are just "one of the layers of defense against potential bombs." Ah, the layers! Even if none of them works on its own, together they achieve a security synergy that stops underwear bombers. Notice how former TSA Administrator Kip Hawley dances around the effectiveness of full-body scanners in his comments to the Times:
The screening is vastly improved since 2009. The question is whether the person would have gotten the bomb on, and would the bomb have worked. On both of those I would say no.
No, the question is whether these expensive, privacy-invading machines can detect a form-fitting underwear bomb, which was the justification for installing so many of them and for using them as a primary screening tool. Hawley's evasiveness is reminiscent of the TSA's response to the dude who posted a video in March explaining "How to Get Anything Through TSA Nude Body Scanners." As Mike Riggs noted, a TSA blogger replied that "for obvious security reasons, we can't discuss our technology's detection capability in detail," while assuring the flying public that "imaging technology has been extremely effective in the field" but cautioning that AIT scanners are just "one layer of our 20 layers of security." Two of the other layers he mentioned: "behavior detection," which Mica points out has never been validated, and "federal air marshals," which Ohio State University political scientist John Mueller and University of Newcastle engineering professor Mark Newcastle deem "not worth the money" in their 2011 book on anti-terrorism measures.
In a 2010 column, I noted the short-lived passenger rebellion against full-body scanners. For additional examples of fighting terrorism with invasive incompetence, see J.D. Tuccille's recent piece telling "The Terrible Truth About the TSA" and James Bovard's classic 2004 exposé "Dominate. Intimidate. Control." More on the TSA here.
Mitt Romney, Servant of the Radical Right?
The
liberal line about Mitt Romney these days is that he is a
closet radical who has managed to convince people that he’s
actually a mushy moderate.
At The American Prospect, Jamelle Bouie makes the best possible version of this case: that although Mitt Romney may not be a true-believing radical at his core, he is nonetheless functionally an extreme conservative — not because of some preexisting ideological or policy commitments, but because he is, as the piece’s title says, “a servant of the right.” Romney, the logic goes, allows his outlook to be shaped by those around him, and will be a conservative radical because he’ll be serving conservative radicals.
The problem with this argument is that it requires the existence of a dedicated class of conservative radicals in Congress. And while Republicans on Capitol Hill are certainly more conservative than Bouie would like, I’m not sure they’re nearly as radical as he suggests in his piece.
The modern Republican party, Bouie writes, aims to “gut government” and “revive the age of Calvin Coolidge,” decimating the welfare state in the process:
When Romney and Obama cast this election as a choice between two competing visions, they’re right. The 2012 campaign isn’t a case of overblown rhetoric and minor differences; the winner of this battle will either protect the future American welfare state or set it on a path to destruction.
But today’s welfare state owes no small debt to Republican governance and policy ideas: ObamaCare was based closely on an idea developed by conservative think tankers and first passed at the state level by Mitt Romney. Medicare’s prescription drug benefit — the biggest single federal health benefit expansion since the program began — was passed by a Republican Congress and signed into law by a Republican President. The Medicare hospital and physician payment controls that liberal health wonks now spend so much time trying to tweak were passed and implemented under GOP administrations.
Nor is there much evidence that Republicans now aim to set the existing welfare state on a “path to destruction.” This year's GOP House budget plan made almost no changes to Social Security. Despite the GOP’s objections to the president’s health law, reports this week suggest that Republicans legislators are, at minimum, deeply squeamish about repealing many of its policy goodies.
Yes, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposed Medicare overhaul would slowly transition the program to a premium support system, but that’s an idea originally developed by Henry Aaron, a prominent liberal health wonk. And while it’s true that Aaron no longer supports converting Medicare to premium support (at least for now), former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin and Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who for years was one of Congress’ most outspoken advocates of universal coverage, have both expressed support for versions of Ryan's plan. Supporting Ryan’s Medicare overhaul, in other words, does not require one to be a fire breathing anti-entitlement radical.
As for
gutting government, Republican legislators may talk a big game
about federal spending, but that doesn’t mean they vote
accordingly. Even amongst the most recent class of House freshmen —
the supposed “Tea Party radicals” swept into office in 2010 —
seemingly obvious votes against spending cuts, program closures,
and corporate welfare boondoggles are far from sure things. As
Cato’s Ted DeHaven
notes, last week gave House members three opportunities to vote
against federal spending. Yet only 26 and 87 House GOP freshman
actually voted against spending cuts in all three cases. The
freshman radicals are, for all practical purposes, no different
from their conventional, free-spending Republican elders. As
The Washington Post
reported on Tuesday, GOP “freshmen voted with the fiscally
conservative point of view an average of 71 percent of the time —
only slightly higher than other incumbent Republicans, who toed the
line 69 percent of the time.” When it comes to the practical
reality of federal spending, the GOP hasn't changed all that
much.
Like Bouie, I don’t believe that Romney is someone with strong personal ideological convictions. As I argued in my March cover story on the former Massachusetts governor , Romney is best viewed as a sort of consultant candidate: Rather than lead on policies and issues, he reflects a slicker version his clients back to themselves. But I see little sustained evidence that the Republican party is quite as radical as Bouie seems to think.
What’s more, I suspect that as the campaign continues, Romney will soften his positions even further, subtly shifting toward the center. During the primary, the GOP base was his only client, and he courted them by playing to their biases. But the party faithful won't always dominate Romney's campaign. As the general election approaches, Romney’s potential client base will expand and moderate. And if history is any indication, so will Romney's rhetoric and policy positions.
Judge Won't Open the Water Tap in Tombstone's Battle With the Feds
Those of us interested in
western-style battles over water rights and land use (and who among
us isn't?) or just intrigued by doings in small towns where
historic gunfights are reenacted every day at 2 p.m., should be
interested to know that Tombstone, Arizona, is on the verge of
going dry. That's no-water-dry, since last summer's Monument Fire
torched the town's 1880s-era waterlines to springs in the Huachuca
Mountains, and left the town dependent on a few inadequate wells.
The U.S. Forest Service has thrown up physical and legal roadblocks
to repairs, and now a federal judge has thumbs-downed a request for
an emergency injunction against the feds to allow work to go
ahead.
Tension between westerners and federal officials over land use is nothing new, with D.C.-based control-freakery often arrayed against an authentic, old-fashioned desire to use stuff without paying for it, but Tombstone would seem to have an expecially strong case. Its waterlines were constructed by the forward-thinking Huachuca Water Company long before wilderness designation was applied to the route — a designation that bans the the use of motorized or mechanized devices. The Forest Service sees no need to grandfather the town's claim to the water route, or to ease restrictions, which leaves town workers stuck using picks and shovels to get the water flowing again. Rangers threatened city workers with arrest when they brought in an excavator. Even the use of wheelbarrows had to be negotiated. CNN has a nice description of what this means:
If uncovering the springs was hard, hooking them up to the pipeline was even more challenging. Rudd's team dug trenches by hand in some places, ran PVC pipe along the top of the ground in others, laying down about 10,000 feet. Except for the one time they drove an excavator up in October, Tombstone's workers have done the work by hand, just as it was in the late 1870s.
On the day of CNN's visit, about 20 prison inmates worked the pipeline. For three days, they carried sections of pipe up the mountain on their shoulders and dug trenches. Tombstone showed its gratitude with pizza.
"I can't thank you guys enough," Rudd said. He estimates the inmates saved him and his small crew about six weeks' worth of work.
A few days later, Rudd was able to connect two of the biggest springs and direct the water into a makeshift basin downstream. Since the beginning of March, work has slowed because the Mexican spotted owl, an endangered species, is said to be nesting in the peaks above the pipeline.
Rudd doubts there are any owls up there.
The Goldwater Institute represents
Tombstone in its legal battle against 
the Forest Service, saying it "seeks to
uphold the principle that the 10th Amendment protects states and
their subdivisions from federal regulations that prevent them from
using and enjoying their property in order to fulfill the essential
functions of protecting public health and safety." But Goldwater
and Tombstone were dealt a setback this week when Judge Frank
Zapata of the United States District Court for the District of
Arizona ruled that there is
no justification for an emergency injunction. He claimed the
city failed to provide enough information to allow the Forest
Service to issue permits, the better part of a year into the
process.
With a Tenth Amendment argument in hand, the Goldwater Institute is headed for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, and vows to go to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.
Before then, Tombstone is assembling a volunteer "shovel brigade" on June 8 and 9 to repair the line and protest the Forest Service's heavy hand.
Of course, don't miss my comic-adventure novel High Desert Barbecue, which features wildfires, western-style land disputes and a cast of odd heroes and perversely inept (ineptly perverse?) villains.
It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! No, It’s… a Drone, or a Hoax
A YouTube video purporting to show a drone in the skies outside Chicago a week before the NATO Summit has made it all across the internet and even to a local CBS affiliate.
The video, below, hasn’t been confirmed by anyone, and the military says it doesn’t recognize the markings. Only a few years ago, the best a video like that could hope for is to be picked up for a documentary on UFOs or something. It shares many of the same elements as countless hoax UFO videos on YouTube. It’s likely a hoax too, but because the idea that drones are indeed coming to American airspace isn’t, this video’s caught the imagination of bloggers and reporters alike.
Read Judge Napolitano lament the coming of drones to America here, and watch the video below to judge for yourself:
UPDATE: Via Commenter Jingles, what looks very much like the source image for the drone "in" the video.
The Trillion Dollar Sure Thing, Or Business Consultants Say the Darnedest Things
Over at
the Harvard Business Review, Washington University in St.
Louis professor of strategy
Anne Marie Knott has published, The
Trillion Dollar R&D Fix, in which she claims that by
short-sightedly under-investing in R&D American business
executives are leaving trillions of dollars on the table. She comes
to her conclusions by running a regression analysis aiming to
uncover the effectiveness of R&D spending using data from 610
publicly traded companies from 1981 to 2006. Professor Knott
finds:
A new metric for R&D productivity—which I call RQ, short for research quotient—can change all that. RQ allows you to estimate the effectiveness of your R&D investment relative to the competition and to see how changes in your R&D expenditure affect the bottom line and, most important, your company’s market value. My research—which includes a comprehensive analysis of all publicly traded companies in the U.S.—suggests that if the top 20 firms traded on U.S. exchanges had optimized their 2010 R&D spending using the RQ method, the collective increase in market cap would have been an astonishing $1 trillion.
Amazing if true. However, over at The Atlantic Monthly blog, Jim Manzi, founder and Chairman of Applied Predictive Technologies, argues that Professor Knott's analysis is largely bunk. Manzi is the author of the insightful new book, Uncontrolled: The Surprising Payoff of Trial-and-Error for Business, Politics and Society (which I review in an upcoming issue of The American Conservative.) Manzi explains:
For example, Knott claims that she knows that Apple would have maximized its market value by spending $9.5 billion on R&D in 2010 They actually spent $1.8 billion. That's a fairly incredible claim. She thinks that what is generally conceded to be a management team that is pretty savvy about innovation underspent on R&D by more than 400 percent -- Apple ought to have quintupled its R&D spending in 2010. As another example, Knott claims that Dow Chemical could have roughly doubled its total market capitalization by increasing its R&D spending by 10 percent. That's a lot of money for them to leave on the table. And a very easy fix.
Knott claims that if just the top 20 American corporations had followed her recommendations, they would have collectively increased their market capitalization by more than $1 trillion. Consider this assertion for a moment The current total market capitalization of the top 20 U.S. public companies is a little over $4 trillion. Knott claims that she has outsmarted the entire system of management teams, investors, equity analysts, hedge funds, large-scale private equity firms and everyone else who is trying to change management practices to increase share price, and knows how to increase the total value of the most-closely followed companies in the world by almost 25 percent....by building a regression model using publicly-available data.
If you could rely on Knott's predictions, you could raise capital, buy these companies, change R&D spending in line with her model, and then sell them again at an enormous profit. You could start with Dow, because you know how to double its share price.
Maybe Knott has discovered an incredible, remediable market inefficiency, and somebody is about to get very, very rich. Or maybe there's a problem with her model.
Manzi shows that there is a problem with her model. It is no doubt the case that some companies do under-invest in R&D and that some over-invest, but can a one-size-fits-all formula really capture the information needed by a business executive to navigate his company through the competitive marketplace? In his new book, Manzi persuasively shows why everyone should be highly skeptical of results emanating from regression analyses of truly complicated social phenomena. The whole Atlantic Monthly Manzi post, There is no Easy Button for R&D, is well worth reading.
A. Barton Hinkle on the Case for a Romney-Paul Ticket
Picking Paul as his running mate would enable
Romney to draft the Texas congressman’s revolutionary
army—or at least a good portion of it. It also would give the
ticket something else it has lacked up to this point: spine. Romney
is notorious for changing his positions on the issues, writes A.
Barton Hinkle, while Paul is widely admired for sticking to his
(mostly) libertarian principles.
Ron Paul Roundup: Taking Minnesota, Backed by a Still-Dedicated Revolution
Ron Paul moves into Minnesota this weekend on his continued quest to come into Tampa with as many Paul delegates as possible.
*How Ron Paul people are shaking up the state GOP in Minnesota, where Paul may well walk out after this weekend's state convention controlling its delegation to the national convention in Tampa in August. You are wondering: what does T-Paw think?
Former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a Republican, said this week that he thinks the GOP establishment should welcome Paul supporters with open arms and embrace their energy instead of view it as a negative.
"You have to tip your cap to them. They show up. They're working hard," Pawlenty said of the Paul faction after delivering a policy speech Monday at the University of Minnesota Humphrey School of Public Affairs. "So we want them to be part of the Republican team."
*The Star-Tribune focuses on the conflict between Paulites and other Republicans in Minnesota:
Paul supporters have already flexed their might in the state's Republican Party. They claim 20 of the 24 national delegates already selected at local Republican gatherings. They ousted a GOP insider from the party's ruling body and thwarted some sitting lawmakers' attempts at party positions....The 12-term Texas congressman will address the convention Friday night. It's a privilege he was denied four years ago and supporters have stewed about the slight ever since.
"Starting with the Minnesota State Convention this weekend, our movement has an opportunity to secure more delegates, take control of more local and state parties ... to achieve lasting victory in the years to come," said John Tate, Paul's campaign manager.
That promise to "take control" is making some longtime Republicans queasy. Republicans who have labored in the party trenches for years consider the Paul supporters upstarts who refuse to see the difference between Democratic President Obama and Romney.
"The hideous Ron Paul invasion of the Minnesota Republican Party is not quite over ... but enough evidence is in hand to draw some grim conclusions for those who are not enamored of a ... fringe cult political figure who speaks to alienated, fairly ignorant and frequently unwashed lost souls," said longtime Republican activist John Gilmore on his blog this week.
Gilmore said he has no doubt that Paul's support will overflow during this year's Republican state convention.
On Saturday, state delegates are scheduled to select delegates to the party's national convention in August in Tampa, Fla.
Behind the scenes, party officials have worked frantically to keep the antipathy between the pro-Romney folks and Paul supporters at bay during the two-day state convention.
State Republican Party Chairman Pat Shortridge said he hopes that in exchange for Paul being welcomed, his supporters will allow the convention to proceed without conflict.
"Everybody is happy as far as I can tell," said Shortridge, who was picked as a state delegate by the Paul-friendly "Liberty Caucus."
Paul will be allowed to speak at the convention only after delegates finish endorsing a U.S. Senate candidate, but his voice may be heard even before he appears. In the three-way Senate contest, Paul and many of his Minnesota supporters are backing the bid of first-term state Rep. Kurt Bills.
*NPR on Paul in Minnesota, which points out it seems near certain he'll come out of it controlling the delegation--that is, having "won Minnesota."
*The Paul folks efforts to win delegates in the Michigan convention also this weekend, from Detroit News.
*With Paul people controlling the state Party in Nevada, Atlantic reports on Romney's people starting their own "shadow party" to do the pro-Romney things they fear the real Party won't.
*Ed Morrissey says that in his long game of Party influence, Ron Paul has already won.
*Talking Points Memo on fear of Paul-fan generated tumult in Tampa, inside and outside.
*At the Ron Paul Forums, Paul partisans say: No Romney. And also, that they are still trying to make sure Paul wins.
*New Paulite SuperPAC Liberty For All, spending over half a million to promote Kentucky federal congressional candidate Thomas Massie.
*Although the campaign itself says it has no problem with apparent efforts on the part of the party openly supporting the candidate who is not yet its official nominee, Paul partisans in Clark County, Nevada, called for the resignation of RNC chief Reince Priebus for that.
*Mark Hendrickson at Forbes with the wild idea that Romney might be able to appeal to Paul people by promising an actual hard halt to spending no more than $3 trillion a year.
*He still says he has "no plans" to make a third party run. Deadlines to get on the presidential ballot in most states is looming, though they stretch from June to August depending on the state in question.
*W. James Antle on the Paul strategy post "no more active campaigning in primary states" announcement, from American Conservative.
*Time with a history of online comments from Paul fans.
*Business Insider on my new book, Ron Paul's Revolution: The Man and the Movement He Inspired.
Is Meat Male?, Asks New Study
Duh. This terrific new insight about guys is
reported in a
study published in the current issue of
the Journal of Consumer Research (sub required).
These findings come out just in time to kick off the summer
grilling season. ScienceDaily notes:
"We examined whether people in Western cultures have a metaphoric link between meat and men," write authors Paul Rozin (University of Pennsylvania), Julia M. Hormes (Louisiana State University), Myles S. Faith (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), and Brian Wansink (Cornell University). The answer, they found, was a strong connection between eating meat -- especially muscle meat, like steak -- and masculinity.
In a number of experiments that looked at metaphors and certain foods, like meat and milk, the authors found that people rated meat as more masculine than vegetables. They also found that meat generated more masculine words when people discussed it, and that people viewed male meat eaters as being more masculine than non-meat eaters.
Most of the studies took place in the United States and Britain, but the authors also analyzed 23 languages that use gendered pronouns. They discovered that across most languages, meat was related to the male gender.
No doubt paleoanthropologists who have been going on for years about the sexual division of labor among primitive peoples, you know all that stuff about hunting vs. gathering, will be relieved to have their research further bolstered by these insights from modern marketers.
Oddly, ScienceDaily wonders why male consumers avoid vegetarian options. It is possible that men choose steaks, bacon, and burgers over veggies because they taste better?
Steven Greenhut on Jerry Brown’s Broken Budget
Gov. Jerry Brown promised California an honest
budget. But as Steven Greenhut observes, Brown failed to keep his
word. Just like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gray Davis before him,
Brown didn’t have the courage or political skill to bring state
spending in line with revenues, so he relied on overly aggressive
economic forecasts to paper over the enduring mess. In reality,
Greenhut writes, Brown has no interest in cutting government, even
though the state’s still-huge budget is filled with waste,
inefficiency, and redundancy. The state government meddles in just
about every aspect of its residents’ lives. California’s cost to
provide services is far higher than most other states, thanks
largely to the enormous overhead exacted from a public sector that
enjoys the most lush pension and health care benefits in the
nation. And while a growing economy could surely bring in new
revenues, Brown and other state leaders are too busy punishing the
private sector to understand any economic common sense.
Jacob Sullum Discusses the Right to Record Cops on RT
Yesterday Senior Editor Jacob Sullum appeared on RT to discuss the right to record police officers, in light of a recent ruling by a federal appeals court suggesting that the Illinois Eavesdropping Act violates the First Amendment.
What is an Astronaut's Life Worth?: An Interview with Robert Zubrin
"You're saying that you're going to give up four billion dollars to avoid a one in seven chance of killing an astronaut, you're basically saying an astronaut's life is worth twenty-eight billion dollars," says astronautical engineer and author Dr. Robert Zubrin.
Zubrin, the author of a popular and controversial article in Reason's space-centric February 2012 Special Issue, argues that the risk of losing one of the seven astronauts who repaired and rescued the Hubble Space Telescope was well worth it. "If you put this extreme value on the life of an astronaut...then you never fly, and you get a space agency which costs seventeen billion dollars a year and accomplishes nothing."
NASA's role, according to Zubrin, should be in the pursuit of ambitious missions such as "opening Mars to humanity," rather than a bloated, safety-obsessed bureaucracy. "The mission has to come first."
Runs about 3.50 minutes.
Produced by Anthony L. Fisher. Camera by Meredith Bragg and Josh Swain.
Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe to ReasonTV's YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new material goes live.
We Had to Kill the Villagers to Save Americans From the Cocaine They Want
Lucio Baquedano, the mayor of
Ahuas, Honduras,
says a U.S.-assisted anti-drug operation there last week left
four innocent people dead, including two pregnant women. He says
police mistook a fishing canoe for a boat carrying cocaine
traffickers and fired on it from a helicopter. Villagers rioted in
protest, burning down government buildings and demanding that
agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), who
participated in the operation as part of a commando-style
Foreign-deployed Advisory Support Team (FAST), leave the area and
stay out. An unnamed "U.S. official"
said the DEA agents did not fire any rounds during the
raid, which seized about 1,000 pounds of cocaine, and he questioned
Baquedano's account:
The US official briefed on the matter expressed doubts that villagers would be out fishing in the middle of the night, near where helicopters carrying armed police had landed nearly an hour earlier. The large number of people unloading the plane in the video, the official said, was evidence that many members of the impoverished community of Ahuas were involved in lucrative narcotics trafficking.
“There is nothing in the local village that was unknown, a surprise, or a mystery about this,"’ the official said. "What happened was that, for the first time in the history of Ahuas, Honduran law enforcement interfered with narcotics smuggling."
The logic here seems to be that everyone in the town was complicit in the cocaine trade, so there is no such thing as an innocent victim. Even if Honduran police, who said they were returning fire from a boat that arrived as they were seizing the cocaine, did kill some villagers who were out fishing, they and their unborn children pretty much had it coming. Thus the literalized War on Drugs takes a step beyond regrettable "collateral damage" with the argument that anyone close enough to the action to get hurt probably was aiding the enemy.
As Drug Policy Alliance Executive Director Ethan Nadelmann notes, even the concept of collateral damage is inappropriate in this situation:
The basic distinction between the criminal justice system and a war is that the former does not tolerate "collateral casualties," whereas the latter regards them as an inevitable cost of military conflict. DEA agents are never permitted to be involved in the killing of innocent people, whether or not they are in pursuit of criminal suspects. What happened in Honduras appears to have crossed the line...
Neither the drug czar nor anyone else in the Obama administration, or even in the Bush administration before that, likes to use the phrase "the war on drugs." But what happened in Honduras last week suggests that U.S. drug policy abroad—and often in the U.S.—increasingly resembles a real war, despite U.S. officials’ efforts to abandon that rhetoric.
Worse, it is a never-ending war with the unattainable (and undesirable) goal of achieving "a drug-free society." Even in this context, measures like last week's raid stand out as worse than futile. Seizing those 1,000 pounds of cocaine was not worth risking a single person's life, since it accomplished absolutely nothing of consequence, even as measured by the drug warriors' goal of reducing the supply of cocaine or raising its price. Governments can create black markets by fiat, but they cannot control the ever-adaptable operation of those markets, which will always override attempts to disrupt production or block supply routes. Is it any wonder that Latin American leaders are increasingly angry about arrogant U.S. demands that they participate in the vain crusade to stop Americans from getting the drugs they want?
Addendum: Mike Riggs noted the allegations about the Honduras raid yesterday.
Drilling for Dollars, In Your Kid's Mouth
Over at Bloomberg.com, a disturbing story describes health care management services companies doing unnecessary dental work on unwilling patients. "Some of them have been riding a boom in Medicaid outlays on dentistry, which rose 63 percent to $7.4 billion between 2007 and 2010, outstripping the 4.9 percent growth in other dental spending," Bloomberg reports. While taxpayers provide the funds, school systems provide lots of patients, sometimes without their families' consent. For example:
In August 2010, [dentist Ralph] Green's lawyer appeared before the Arizona dental board to answer a complaint that ReachOut did unnecessary drilling on a Phoenix student's teeth -- even after the student's mother, Valerie Davila, told the company she was seeing a family dentist and didn't need any work.
The 6-year-old, Sabrina Martinez, suffered "unnecessary pain," Davila said. "Imagine if it was your child."
There were two children with the same name at the school, and the work was done on the wrong Sabrina Martinez, Green's lawyer, Jeff Tonner, told the dental board.
Then there's this allegation:
In San Diego, Tina Richardson's third grader, Alexander Henry, came home in March with four baby teeth missing after a school session with a ReachOut-affiliated dentist that was so painful he "waved his arms frantically," "pushed everyone off him" and "bled so badly that they had to send him to the nurse's office," according to her complaint with the state dental board. Among other things, Richardson said the consent process wasn't valid.
Richardson said Alexander had seen a dentist nine days earlier who didn't recommend any teeth pulling. Although she signed a consent form in September covering many procedures including extractions, she said she didn't sign another one that came in November seeking permission to take out three teeth. No one from ReachOut called to discuss the proposed procedures, she said.
The reporter approaches the story from a number of angles, some more compelling than others. There's less than I'd like about what was going on in the schools that allowed such abuses to occur, more than I'd like about legislation aimed at the companies' business model rather than their access to public money and to the schools' captive clientele. (A North Carolina bill backed by the incumbent dental industry, for example, "would subject agreements between dentists and the companies to state approval.") The article meanders a lot as well, as big Bloomberg exposés often do. But caveats aside, it's a disquieting tour through the perverse incentives created by public spending, the disregard some school systems apparently have for informed consent, and the sleazy operations eager to take advantage of the situation.
Elsewhere in Reason: Peter Suderman on Medicare fraud.
Walter Olson on Nicholas Kristof's Bogus Anti-Beer Crusade
Is there a New York Times columnist as
insufferably moralistic as Nicholas Kristof? Last week Kristof
mounted yet another of his high-horse save-the-children campaigns,
this time against beermasters Anheuser-Busch. Kristof asks readers
to join his boycott of the leading brewer for (he says) improperly
permitting its output to be sold in large volumes in tiny
Whiteclay, Neb., just across the state line from the Oglala Sioux's
Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Though notionally dry, the
reservation is in practice wracked with alcoholism. Yet as Olson
reports, Kristof’s sloppy and biased attack fails to mention a
number of facts that contradict his argument.
Reason Writers at the Movies: Peter Suderman Reviews Battleship
Blockbuster parody or blockbuster disaster?
Reviewing Battleship, a megabudget sci-fi spectacular
based on a classic board game, Reason Senior Editor Peter
Suderman argues that it's hard to tell:
The only reasonable way to explain “Battleship” is that it is actually a deft and subtle satire of the big-budget Hollywood action blockbuster, an exaggerated reflection of the form’s worst tendencies and a sly test of its theoretical limits. How else to justify its lazy conceptual gimmickry, cynical deployment of meaningless cliches, spastic narrative, visual incoherence and indifferent boredom with itself?
I say that this is the only reasonable interpretation of the movie because the alternative — that director Peter Berg is not kidding, that this cannon blast of formulaic ineptitude is in fact meant to be enjoyed straightforwardly as entertainment — is simply too depressing to ponder.
Taken as satire, however, “Battleship” is a work of subversive sophistication that exposes the emptiness of the modern summer action film.
There’s the kitschy clunkiness of the dialogue, a brain-melting blend of substance-free sloganeering and impenetrable expository technobabble, and the hyperactive editing and camera work that might have future medical use as a migraine simulator. There’s also the story, which appears to have been duct-taped together from the unused leftovers of a slew of older blockbusters, and the drooling fetishization of military hardware, which makes “Transformers” and “Armaggedon” director Michael Bay’s oeuvre look positively anti-war.
And there’s the movie’s subtle, self-referencing symbolism.
Read the whole thing at The Washington Times.
"Non-White" Births Outstrip "White" Births for First Time, Says Census Bureau
Yesterday, the Census Bureau issued a
press release announcing that for the first time the percentage
of babies born to "minority" parents was greater than those born to
"majority" parents. From the press release:
The U.S. Census Bureau today released a set of estimates showing that 50.4 percent of our nation's population younger than age 1 were minorities as of July 1, 2011. This is up from 49.5 percent from the 2010 Census taken April 1, 2010. A minority is anyone who is not single-race white and not Hispanic.
The population younger than age 5 was 49.7 percent minority in 2011, up from 49.0 percent in 2010. A population greater than 50 percent minority is considered “majority-minority.”
These are the first set of population estimates by race, Hispanic origin, age and sex since the 2010 Census. They examine population change for these groups nationally, as well as within all states and counties, between Census Day (April 1, 2010) and July 1, 2011. Also released were population estimates for Puerto Rico and its municipios by age and sex.
There were 114 million minorities in 2011, or 36.6 percent of the U.S. population. In 2010, it stood at 36.1 percent.
There were five majority-minority states or equivalents in 2011: Hawaii (77.1 percent minority), the District of Columbia (64.7 percent), California (60.3 percent), New Mexico (59.8 percent) and Texas (55.2 percent). No other state had a minority population greater than 46.4 percent of the total.
More than 11 percent (348) of the nation's 3,143 counties were majority-minority as of July 1, 2011, with nine of these counties achieving this status since April 1, 2010. Maverick, Texas, had the largest share (96.8 percent) of its population in minority groups, followed by Webb, Texas (96.4 percent) and Wade Hampton Census Area, Alaska (96.2 percent).
The first question should be, who cares? The categories of the ethinc groups constituting what counts as minority and majority are arbitrarily defined by Federal law. In my earlier column, The Silly Panic Over a Minority White Nation, I pointed out that for many early 20th Century nativists lots of other ethnic groups did not qualify as "white." I specifically noted:
...the classic 1922 anti-immigration screed by Saturday Evening Post correspondent Kenneth Roberts, Why Europe Leaves Home: A True Account of the Reasons which Cause Central Europeans to Overrun America. “The American nation was founded and developed by the Nordic race,” asserted Roberts. “If a few more million members of the Alpine, Mediterranean and Semitic races are poured among us, the result must inevitably be a hybrid race of people as worthless and futile as the good-for-nothing mongrels of Central America and Southeastern Europe.”
Nativists like Roberts did not think that Italians, Jews, and Slavs, etc. were "white." So I did some rough calculations looking at percentages of Americans who are descended from those earlier "minority" groups, and I found:
...adding up all of the “non-white” groups, one finds that they and their descendants now total 184 million out of 313 million citizens, constituting nearly 60 percent of the country’s current population. But how can that be? After all, the Census Bureau notes, “In the 2010 Census, just over one-third of the U.S. population reported their race and ethnicity as something other than non-Hispanic white alone (i.e. "minority").” The answer to this conundrum is that Italians, Poles, Jews, and the Irish are now considered “white.”
It is this fact that renders silly and nearly meaningless the pronouncement that “whites” will be a minority in this country by 2050. By 2050, just as the earlier waves of Irish, Italian, Jewish, and Polish immigrants were assimilated, so too will today’s Hispanic immigrants and their descendants be. For all intents and purposes, Hispanics will become as “white” as Irish, Italians, Jews, and Poles.
Meanwhile Roberts’ worst fear of the “mongrelization” of the races in America is being realized. The rising intermarriage rate between members of the arbitrarily defined and federally recognized ethnic groups demonstrates ever-lessening concern by Americans about this issue. It is my hope and belief that Americans of whatever ancestry living in 2050 will look back and wonder why ever did anyone care about the ethnic makeup of the American population. America is an ideal, not a tribe.
In the 1950s the Census Bureau could have issued a press release proclaiming the advent of the new "majority minority" nation based on the growing percentage of births from Italian-Americans, Irish-Americans, Polish-Americans, etc. And yet, the Census Bureau's non-story made the front pages of nearly every major newspaper, yesterday. I guess tribalism sells.
About the Book Agency Entry Saying Obama Was Born in Kenya...
Breitbart.com has released a
1991 catalog from a book agency representing Barack Obama. In the
agency's bio of the future president, it says he was born
in...Kenya. The book project mentioned in the copy never
saw the light of day, though Obama did go on to pen the
best-selling and highly (and rightly, in my opinion) acclaimed
Dreams From My Father.
Breitbart's Joel Pollak underscores that he (like Andrew Breitbart) is not a birther:
The errant Obama biography in the Acton & Dystel booklet does not contradict the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. Moreover, several contemporaneous accounts of Obama’s background describe Obama as having been born in Hawaii.
But the site released the booklet at part of what it's calling "The Vetting," or an in-depth look at Obama it says the mainstream media failed to do during the 2008 campaign. The relevance of the document, says Pollak,
The biography does, however, fit a pattern in which Obama--or the people representing and supporting him--manipulate his public persona.
David Maraniss's forthcoming biography of Obama has reportedly confirmed, for example, that a girlfriend Obama described in Dreams from My Father was, in fact, an amalgam of several separate individuals....
Obama has been known frequently to fictionalize aspects of his own life. During his 2008 campaign, for instance, Obama claimed that his dying mother had fought with insurance companies over coverage for her cancer treatments.
That turned out to be untrue, but Obama has repeated the story--which even the Washington Post called "misleading"--in a campaign video for the 2012 election.
One of the literary agents responsible for the booklet has flatly said she made a mistake in the copy:
Miriam Goderich edited the text of the bio; she is now a partner at the Dystel & Goderich agency, which lists Obama as one of its current clients.
"This was nothing more than a fact checking error by me--an agency assistant at the time," Goderich wrote in an emailed statement to Yahoo News. "There was never any information given to us by Obama in any of his correspondence or other communications suggesting in any way that he was born in Kenya and not Hawaii. I hope you can communicate to your readers that this was a simple mistake and nothing more."
That's as definitive as definitive can be, even as Obama's most-ardent champions must agree this sort of thing is a pretty good catch by the Breitbart.com crew. When you're in a race that's heating up, this sort of blast from the past is the last thing with which you want to be dealing.
As I said last night on Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, if Obama's opponents cannot beat him based on his thoroughly documented and generally terrible record as president of the United States, I can't imagine how this sort of material will save them. Like George W. Bush before him, Obama has been godawful as president, overseeing a failed stimulus plan, expanded bailouts to Wall Street and automakers, increased deportations of immigrants and raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, extra-constitutionally expansions of military power and executive privilege, you name it.
There's no question that this sort of document may add to the idea that Obama is willing to edit and revise his life story depending on circumstance (the insurance company story about this mother's treatments strikes me as a more telling example, since Obama is not really implicated in the author booklet in the same way). But a willingness to recast oneself depending on circumstance is not unique to Obama. It's what politicians do. If Republicans insist on using this sort of thing - or past associations with Jeremiah Wright, or whether he hugged critical race theorists, etc. - they will not only lose in November but deserve to lose. If Democrats foreground stories of Mitt Romney putting a dog in a cage on top of his car during a family vacation or the kookiness of Joseph Smith's theology, they will lose too. Deservedly.
Whatever politicians and their handlers do to avoid talking about their actual legislative records and prescriptions for current issues, they needn't get away with it. The real "vetting" is not what Obama - or Romney, or whomever - did 20, 30, or 40 years ago as private citizens. It's what they've done in the offices that are most relevant to the office they're seeking, and what they plan to do in the future.
Kurt Loder on The Samaritan and Lovely Molly
The Samaritan stars Samuel L. Jackson as
Foley, an old grifter just out of the slam after doing 25 years on
a murder rap. Determined to go straight, he becomes involved with a
young woman half his age and begins to envision a happy,
law-abiding life that could lie ahead of them. Then, as is always
the case in this sort of by-the-numbers neo-noir, Foley’s violent
past comes calling, with inevitably unfortunate results.
Lovely Molly, meanwhile, is a familiar “found footage” style of supernatural horror thriller from director Eduardo Sánchez, who has been little heard from since 1999, when he and film-school buddy Daniel Myrick whipped up The Blair Witch Project, a micro-budget movie that went on to gross $248-million worldwide. Kurt Loder reviews both new movies.
The Misguided Anti-Filibuster Crusade of Progressives
When it comes to ending the filibuster, Ezra Klein over at the Washington Post has discovered his inner constitutionalist. Klein and his fellow liberals have been kvetching about the filibuster ever since it forced Democrats to engage in inelegant procedural calisthenics to pass ObamaCare. Thanks to it, 41 united Republicans prevented 59 Democrats from bringing the bill to the Senate floor for a straight up or down vote, forcing Democrats to go “nuclear.” This unspeakable travesty has traumatized Democrats and they’ve been champing at the bit ever since to remove this dangerous tool from the hands of evil, obstructionist Republicans.
Here’s what Michael Conan of the New America Foundation said at the peak of the ObamaCare debate in November 2009:
Reforming the way Washington operates is hardly the sexiest of topics, but from a policy and even a political perspective, there are few more important issues on which Democrats should be focusing their energy. Quite simply, the filibuster has become the single tool that is undercutting everything Obama and the Democrats were elected to achieve.
Both parties have historically used the filibuster, but its overuse by modern Republicans stands at outrageous proportions.
And to help Dems make their case for abolishing the filibuster, Klein is arguing that not only is the filibuster not in the constitution, it is actually unconstitutional.
Klein relies for his analysis on one Emmet Bondurant whom he describes as a “go-to lawyer when a business-person can’t afford to lose a lawsuit.” Klein in no doubt trumpeting Bondurant’s pro-business bona fides to imply that he is a conservative and not Klein’s bedfellow. However, trying to establish credibility by disassociation sounds fishy to me given that Bondurant has launched a lawsuit to get the Supreme Court to scrap the filibuster.
In any case, using Bondurant, Klein claims that the filibuster is the product of a historical accident. It came into existence in 1806 when (after killing Alexander Hamilton in a duel) Aaron Burr killed something called the “previous question” motion as part of his noble effort to cleanup redundant laws from the books. That was the motion that senators used to end debate. Burr, in his infinite (un)wisdom, argued that Senators were all gentlemen so they knew when to stop talking and so there was no point in having such a rule in place.
No one exploited the loophole Burr created for three decades. Even subsequently, it was an annoyance only occasionally deployed. But now Republicans are using it to effectively require a supermajority of 60 Senators to pass all major legislations, something that the Founders actively opposed, Klein claims:
The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.
In Federalist 22, Alexander Hamilton savaged the idea of a supermajority Congress, writing that “its real operation is to embarrass the administration, to destroy the energy of government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent or corrupt junta, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”
In Federalist 58, James Madison wasn’t much kinder to the concept. “In all cases where justice or the general good might require new laws to be passed, or active measures to be pursued, the fundamental principle of free government would be reversed. It would be no longer the majority that would rule; the power would be transferred to the minority.”
In the end, the Constitution prescribed six instances in which Congress would require more than a majority vote: impeaching the president, expelling members, overriding a presidential veto of a bill or order, ratifying treaties and amending the Constitution. And as Bondurant writes, “The Framers were aware of the established rule of construction, expressio unius est exclusio alterius, and that by adopting these six exceptions to the principle of majority rule, they were excluding other exceptions.” By contrast, in the Bill of Rights, the Founders were careful to state that “the enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”
What choice does a gal have when Klein quotes Hamilton and Madison but to quote…..Harry Reid, the Democratic Speaker of the Senate? Likening filibuster reform to opening a “Pandora’s Box” in his 2008 book The Good Fight, Reid wrote:
It was just a matter of time before a Senate leader who couldn’t get his way on something moved to eliminate the filibuster for regular business…And that, simply put, would be the end of the United States Senate … A filibuster is the minority’s way of not allowing the majority to shut off debate, and without robust debate, the Senate is crippled.
Amen.
Reid has since changed his tune and is saying that he is now opposed to the filibuster because of continuous Republican abuse and is even contemplating legislation to scrap it. So crippling the Senate for future generations is better than letting Republicans raise a little hell now and then? How is that for enlightened thinking?
Moving on.
Klein might well be right that a filibuster contradicts the views of the Founders (although, out of curiosity, I’d like someone to tell me what the more libertarian-minded Thomas Jefferson, had to say about it). But scrapping the filibuster won’t be good for other things that the Founders seemed to care about more deeply than majoritarian rule such as: individual liberty, limited government and checks and balances between various branches of government (not just the balance-of-power between large and small states that Klein alludes to).
There is nothing sacred about the filibuster, or any procedural rule for that matter, of course. Such rules are not ends in themselves. They are means to ends. And so the question for partisans of limited government is does the filibuster help or hurt their goal?
If, say, Democrats were trying to scrap the Patriot Act against Republican wishes, then Republicans filibuster would be bad. Conversely, if Republicans wanted to deregulate the airline industry or cut entitlement spending against Democratic wishes, then a Democratic filibuster would be bad.
But by and large those are not the kinds of issues that preoccupy our elected leaders. Neither party’s politicos are much inclined to sit around in their august offices thinking up of creative ways to cut government and give up their own powers. To the contrary. The vast bulk of Congressional business involves expanding government. In such circumstances, odds are, every time the opposition, whether Democratic or Republican, uses the filibuster, it will end up doing more good than harm.
Democrats are pissed off because filibuster rules have prevented them from enacting their grand plans even when they controlled all the branches of government. But for limited government types that precisely is its beauty.
What’s more, ending the filibuster will also mean that a president who controls Congress will have little incentive to reach out to his political opponents. This might be fine with Democrats so long as President Obama is in office. But do they really want a President Romney with the help of 51 Senate Republicans (not an impossibility in the next election) saying “bug off” to Democrats in order to, say, raise middle classes taxes to make the American military so powerful that “no one will ever think of challenging us?”
As they say, be careful what you wish for….
(Actually, I’ll wager that Democrats will drop their anti-filibuster crusade the minute President Obama hops onto the helicopter for Chicago from the White House lawn. They are only revving up it up now just in case he doesn’t and they keep control of the Senate.)
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