Pretty Surprising

I wrote earlier in the week that gerrymandering (e.g., in California) is a huge problem and we'll need federal action to fix it. Well, I'm still quite sure that's right, but it looks like Ahnold has finally (somehow, impossibly) pulled together a coalition of politicians willing to shoot themselves in the foot in the name of principle! This is a good development. Looks like Pelosi, who has been a phenomenal disappointment (FISA expansion? Farm Bill? Great steaming heaps of time wasted on "sense of Congress" resolutions?) will, unsuprisingly, try to get in the way.

Larry Craig

I have to count myself among those who are saying, in the wake of the Larry Craig scandal, "how is that a crime??" First, let me clear some fluff out of the way: Craig needs to get the hell out of office for multiple independent reasons. Chiefly, in my mind, though it hasn't gotten a lot of play in the 'sphere, is the reason the gov't used to give for monitoring its agents and officers: risk of blackmail. (This was back when there were a few shreds of competence scattered around the federal government). All it takes is one 'anonymous' partner to notice that the head frantically bobbing around his crotch is a U.S. Senator and you've got a powerful legislator literally by the balls. Other reasons include reliability: the man pled guilty and then pretended he was railroaded into it; (really? a Senator doesn't understand a citizen's rights?) and it turns out that he deliberately set himself up to back out of resigning, too! He's also a raging hypocrite etc.

But if he wasn't Larry Craig, but, say, Harry Craigson, local barber, could freedom-minded people really be comfortable with this arrest? Read the report! I don't really want to dig into the details, though I certainly will if anyone doesn't follow my reasoning. But basically Craig put out a few mild feelers to see if the officer was interested in a random encounter (in a bathroom known for such things); the officer responded with appropriate signals; and then as an only-marginally-bolder move, Craig moved his fingertips back and forth under the stall. Arrest! Misdemeanor disorderly conduct! I am not comfortable with that. Far too statist and totalitarian. There was absolutely nothing wrong with what Craig was doing per se, anymore than making eyes and suggestive poses in a bar to proposition someone is disorderly. (Note that such advances are often unwelcome, but we don't arrest people for making them unless they don't back off after being told.) Are we really such a nanny state now that we can't even expect adults to tell very mildly assertive perverts to back off??!

As a very interesting historical comparison, consider how the Navy sought out secret bottoms in its ranks around the 1920s. This is fascinating (via Aaron Belkin at WaPo, h/t Ramesh Ponnuru at the Corner):

In 1919 the Navy hired "decoys" to frequent the lobby of the YMCA in Newport, R.I. Orchestrated by officers at the local Naval Training Station, the cleanup campaign sought to eliminate gay men from the ranks. Following an introduction, decoys would accompany their suspects to a hotel room and then have sex. At least three dozen sailors and civilians were arrested, and many ended up in jail. According to conventions of the day, if men confined themselves to masculine behaviors and sex roles, they could engage in sex with other men without inviting accusations of being gay. Because perversion was seen primarily as a function of effeminate mannerisms and passive sexual tastes, government decoys could have sex with gay men with impunity as long as they assumed the active position during those encounters. Or so the Navy assumed.

When the 1919 sting operation ensnared a local minister, the Episcopal Church fought back, and what had been a local operation became a national scandal that almost ended the burgeoning political career of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was then assistant secretary of the Navy.

There were a couple reasons I wanted to post that: one, I think it's just fascinating; and two, I think it's another reminder that to convict someone of a sexual offense we usually require going pretty damn far down the road towards sex. Also compare how prostitute stings work - you need to negotiate and agree to a price for a specific sexual service before a crime is comitted.

We Need an Amendment

Nick Gillespie (editor-in-chief of Reason, a libertarian-to-left 'zine) has written a review of Matt Bai's new book "The Argument". Bai covers national politics for The New York Times Magazine. Reader(s) of this blog who trust me can take my word for it that these two are leftist thinkers of the highest regard and pedigree; but the snippets of their resumes I described above should seal the deal for those who don't.

Everyone knows that there's a groundswell in the Democratic party, a "netroots"-organized (though not equivalently "-funded") push to move the party back to its progressive roots. Gillespie assumes this as CW, though Bai does go through the trouble of exhaustively documenting the phenomenon. This is universally seen as a good thing, democratic in the positive small-'d' sense of the word. But Churchill was right and so Bai probes, with extensive reporting, the issue of whether the Democrats should become more "progressive." Bai notes that the intellectual heavy-lifting that formed the foundation of the original Progressive movement is nowhere in evidence today. Instead, the 'roots appear to believe that a political philosophy arising from the Industrial Revolution and refined during Vietnam and the Cold War can guide us well today. Bai points out that it can't, and that instead of crafting a true new philosophy for the modern Left, the 'roots have decided that no ideas since the Great Society were worth having and the only issue is which tactics and strategies should be used to elect politicians who put a 'D' after their name.

The result? Well. Gillespie highlights the farm bill passed by the current Congress. It has absolutely no intellectual justification at all. Democrats used to pass such stuff under standard Progressive justifications of supporting the common man, the farmer, the man of the soil, laboring the earth to feed and strengthen America. Then the Republicans came to power and passed the same bills, unabashedly to consolidate their political power in farm states and buy votes. Now the Democrats are back in power, and we know that:

• Farmers are prospering due to high crop prices
• Very few American workers are farmers, and practically none are working "family farms"
• Farming is environmentally harmful; and though alternatives are on the horizon, farm subsidies suppress those alternatives
• Farm subsidies are regressive, transferring wealth to the very rich

So the Democrats pass a bigger farm bill. What to make of this? Gillespie and Bai conclude (based, worry not, on lots of other evidence too) that the Democratic Party has about as much intellectual coherence as...well, as the Republican Party.

Bai has lots of juicy anecdotes, which serve to reinforce the growing belief among voters that the 'roots have an unpleasant flavor of elitism to them. (This is extremely dangerous for the Democrats, not because the elite rich are bad - I happen to think they've got a lot of good things to say - but because the Democrats open themselves to easy, demoralizing charges of hypocrisy because much of their agenda is based on the presumption that the rich are out to harm you. Republicans have always been the party of the rich, but what happens to this country when large numbers of voters realize the Democrats are too?) For example, Bai reports from a Hollywood party where "the host, the billionaire Lynda Resnick, declared from the top of her Sunset Boulevard mansion’s spiral staircase, 'We are so tired of being disenfranchised!'"

The conclusion? Actually there is a very practical conclusion. This country is very clearly in need of a powerful third party to f*k things up - not by winning outright, of course, as that's impossible, but by getting enough seats in Congress that no majority caucus exists to pass an organizing resolution and we get some quasi-parlimentary politics operating. The fact that that is also impossible given current laws should scare the s*t out of everyone. So the practical conclusion is: we must liberalize our election laws. Currently there are two major obstacles to fixing this country: and they are NOT "Democrats and Republicans," as we must not blame our problems on the inevitable presence in the political system of corruption and rent-seeking. The real obstacles are those which prevent the people from fixing things themselves; and those two obstacles are gerrymandering and ballot access laws.

Gerrymandering and ballot access laws; there is a patchwork of state laws regulating these things that has gotten to the point where we need federal constitutional action. I think a very apt analogy is the Articles of Confederation which governed the area of the 13 colonies from independence in 1783 until the new Constitution was ratified in 1790. The Confederation government could not collect revenue directly. The states were expected to collect taxes and make contributions, which sounds ridiculous but really isn't; the U.N. operates that way, for example, and seems to limp along all right. And in fact they did provide a decent amount of revenue; it was just realized that the system was unworkable and could not possibly expand to govern the growing country. We're at the same point now with regard to election law. Each of the 50 states has ceded to each of the other states the power to govern how the national representatives with power over all of us are selected. In California and Texas, for example, which send enough delegates to Congress literally to decide the course of the nation, gerrymandering and ballot signature requirements mean that it is a legal and statistical impossibility for a new party to field a candidate. My point is that this affects us all very profoundly - if California wants to rig its own legislature (as it has), let it do so, but why on earth does a tiny handful of classic smoke-filled-room politicians sitting in Sacremento get to govern this nation?

Elections for federal office should be under federal control - soup to nuts!! That means above all the lines of Congressional districts; but it also means ballot access requirements for federal office; the selection, purchase, and operation of voting machines; voter ID requirements; etc. This will require a Constitutional amendment, but I think that aside from the Bill of Rights that was basically a part of the original Constitution, no amendment other than the 14th[1] was ever so urgently needed. How would this work, exactly? I envision that the Bureau of the Census would be given authority, overseen by an independent nonpartisan panel (such things actually exist - look at the widespread respect for the Federal Reserve and the GAO), to draw the district lines (this detail wouldn't be in the amendment, which would just give the power to Congress, but there would probably quickly be a permanent law establishing the real mechanism). Envision a world without gerrymandering! This would be real, legitimate, nonpartisan, democratic reform.

[1](extra-credit assignment: wrap your head around the fact that right up into the modern era there have been serious states-rights arguments against the very passage of the 14th amendment, blissfully pretending that the little armed insurgency down Dixie way somehow had no effect on any the rights of the states busily engaged in slaughtering the duly commisioned Army of the United States)

After a long absence...

I hope the reader(s) of this blog will forgive me my long absence. In the last few months I have changed:

• My city and state of residence
• My job
• My marital status

These items have distracted me greatly, but throughout I've felt guilty about not posting to this blog. It's not like history stopped happening - although it certainly did slow down, as it always does in mid-to-late summer. I hope to keep a closer eye on it going forward.

Kirk Cameron - Evangelical

Here's a hilarious excerpt from a Slate piece that discusses the awesome tragedy that is evangelical christianity - through the lens of Kirk Cameron!

"In Cameron's introductory remarks at the debate—which can be seen at something like its full and numbing length at abcnews.go.com—he coolly claimed that "the existence of God can be proven 100 percent, absolutely without the use of faith." First, I grew excited at this promise, then began to wonder why no theologian, philosopher, or sitcom star in recorded history had done it before—Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, Tina Yothers, whoever—and realized I was in for a letdown. Comfort's cadences were not even those of a preacher but of an infomercial host, and the God Squad had but three arguments on behalf of the big guy: All things have makers; the human conscience is evidence of a higher moral power; if you read the Gospel, then Christ will be revealed to you. For reasons too stupid to type, this was not an airtight case, and the atheists made quick work of it in tones of juvenile sarcasm."