Columnist.
You probably never knew of the federal funding of museums commemorating America's long-gone whaling industry. The funding existed for nearly nine years, until fiscal 2011, *because* almost no one knew about it. A mohair subsidy continues six decades after it was deemed a military necessity in the context of the Cold War. The subsidy survives *because* its beneficiaries are too clever to call attention to it by proclaiming it necessary, which of course it isn't. To understand these two matters is to understand how American government functions. And why James Madison, whose flinty realism is often called pessimism, was too optimistic.
In every town large enough to have two traffic lights there is a bar at the back of which sits the local Donald Trump, nursing his fifth beer and innumerable delusions. Because the actual Donald Trump is wealthy, he can turn himself into an unprecedentedly and incorrigibly vulgar presidential candidate. It is his right to use his riches as he pleases. His squalid performance and its coarsening of civic life are costs of freedom that an open society must be prepared to pay. When, however, Trump decided that his next acquisition would be not another casino but the Republican presidential nomination, he tactically and quickly underwent many conversions of convenience (concerning abortion, health care, funding Democrats, etc.). His makeover demonstrates that he is a counterfeit Republican and no conservative.
History books can be historic events, making history by ending important arguments. They can make it impossible for any intellectually honest person to assert certain propositions that once enjoyed considerable currency among people purporting to care about evidence. The author of one such book, Robert Conquest, an Englishman who spent many years at Stanford's Hoover Institution, has died at 98, having outlived the Soviet Union that he helped to kill with information. Historian, poet, journalist and indefatigable controversialist, Conquest was born when Soviet Russia was, in 1917, and in early adulthood he was a communist. Then, combining a convert's zeal and a scholar's meticulousness, he demolished the doctrine that the Soviet regime was a recognizable variant of the European experience and destined to "convergence" toward Western norms.
Don Winslow, novelist and conscientious objector to America's longest "war," was skeptical when he was in Washington on a recent Sunday morning. This was shortly after news broke about the escape, from one of Mexico's "maximum security" prisons, of Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman, head of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guzman reportedly escaped through a five-foot-tall tunnel almost a mile long and built solely for his escape. Asked about this, Winslow, his fork poised over an omelet, dryly said he thinks Guzman might actually have driven away from the prison's front gate in a Lincoln Town Car. What might seem like cynicism could be Winslow's realism. Fourteen years ago, Guzman escaped from another "maximum security" prison simply by hiding in a laundry cart. With exquisite understatement, The Wall Street Journal reports that his recent escape raised "new concerns about corruption in Mexican law enforcement."
Executives of Planned Parenthood's federally subsidized meat markets — your tax dollars at work — lack the courage of their convictions. They should drop the pretense of conducting a complex moral calculus about the organs they harvest from the babies they kill. First came the video showing a salad-nibbling, wine-sipping Planned Parenthood official explaining how "I'm going to basically crush below, I'm gonna crush above" whatever organ ("heart, lung, liver") is being harvested. Then the president of a Planned Parenthood chapter explained the happy side of harvesting: "For a lot of the women participating in the fetal tissue donation program, they're having a procedure that may be a very difficult decision for them and this is a way for them to feel that something positive is coming from ... a very difficult time."
It came two days after the announcement of the nuclear agreement with Iran, yet little mention was made on July 16 of the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear explosion, near Alamogordo, New Mexico. The anniversary underscored that the agreement attempts to thwart proliferation of technology seven decades old. Nuclear-weapons technology has become markedly more sophisticated since 1945. But not so sophisticated that nations with sufficient money and determination cannot master or acquire it. Iran's determination is probably related to America's demonstration, in Iraq and Libya, of the perils of not having nuclear weapons. Critics who think more severe sanctions are achievable and would break Iran's determination must answer this: When have sanctions caused a large nation to surrender what it considers a vital national security interest? Critics have, however, amply demonstrated two things:
Today's most interesting debate about governance concerns a 110-year-old Supreme Court decision. Two participants in this debate are the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and a justice on the Supreme Court of Texas. The latter is trouncing the former. In his same-sex marriage dissent, John Roberts repeatedly denounced, with more animus than understanding, the U.S. Supreme Court's 1905 Lochner decision. In a recent opinion concerning occupational licensing in Texas, Justice Don Willett of the Texas Supreme Court demonstrates why America urgently needs many judicial decisions as wise as Lochner. An 1895 New York law limited the hours bakers could work daily and weekly. Ostensibly health and safety legislation, it actually was rent-seeking by large, unionized bakeries and their unions. They wanted to crush their small, family-owned, nonunionized competitors that depended on flexible work schedules. New York, defending the law, presented no evidence that baking wholesome bread is an especially unhealthful occupation or requires limiting workers' hours. So, the U.S. Supreme Court properly declared the law an unconstitutional "interference" with an unenumerated (by the Constitution) right of individuals to liberty of contract.
When Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras decided to call a referendum on a bailout offer from Greece's creditors — an offer that expired before Sunday's referendum — he informed the Greek nation in a televised speech. At 1 a.m. Mediterranean lifestyles are different. Greece's chosen style of living is dependent on others' choices. Tsipras is a peculiar phenomenon, a defiant mendicant. He urged voters to do what they did. In voting "no," they asserted that Greece's dignity is incompatible with loans that come with conditions attached. Tsipras' Syriza Party insists, however, that dignity is compatible with perpetual dependency on the forbearance and productivity of others.
"What chumps!" —Chief Justice John Roberts, June 29, 2015 Roberts' intellectual complexity does not prevent him from expressing himself pithily, as he did with those words when dissenting in a case from Arizona. Joined by Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, Roberts' dissent should somewhat mollify conservatives who are dismayed about his interpretive ingenuity four days earlier in writing the opinion that saved the Affordable Care Act. Furthermore, they, including this columnist, may have missed a wrinkle in Roberts' ACA opinion that will serve conservatives' long-term interests. To end gerrymanders, Arizona voters, by referendum, amended the state's constitution to strip the Legislature of its control of redistricting. They created an Independent Redistricting Commission (IRC) on which no member of the Legislature may serve.
In 1824, in retirement 37 years after serving as the Constitutional Convention's prime mover, James Madison, 73, noted that the 1787 "language of our Constitution is already undergoing interpretations unknown to its founders." He knew that the purport of the text would evolve "with the changeable meaning of the words composing it." Now, 147 years since ratification of the 14th Amendment, its guarantees of "equal protection of the laws" and "due process of law" mean that states, which hitherto controlled marriage law, must recognize same-sex marriages. Anthony Kennedy's opinion for the court said: "The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all of its dimensions, and so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty *as we learn its meaning*." (Emphasis added.)
Conservatives are dismayed about the Supreme Court's complicity in rewriting the Affordable Care Act — its ratification of the IRS' disregard of the statute's plain and purposeful language. But they have contributed to this outcome. Their decades of populist praise of judicial deference to the political branches has borne this sour fruit. The court says the ACA's stipulation that subsidies are to be administered by the IRS using exchanges "established by the state" should not be construed to mean what it says. Otherwise the law will not reach as far as it will if federal exchanges can administer subsidies in states that choose not to establish exchanges. The ACA's legislative history, however, demonstrates that the subsidies were deliberately restricted to distribution through states' exchanges in order to pressure the states into establishing their own exchanges.
Hillary Clinton's reticence is drowning out her message, which is that she is the cure for the many ailments that afflict America during a second Democratic presidential term. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has called her "the most opaque person you'll ever meet in your life," but when opacity yields to the necessity of answering questions, here are a few: Your first leadership adventure was when your husband entrusted you with health care reform. Using a process as complex as it was secretive, you produced a proposal so implausible that a Democratic-controlled Congress would not even vote on it. Your legislation was one reason that in 1994 Democrats lost control of the House for the first time in 40 years. What did you learn from this futility and repudiation?
Now come Greeks bearing the gift of confirmation that Margaret Thatcher was right about socialist governments: "They always run out of other people's money." Greece, from whose ancient playwrights Western drama descends, is in an absurdist melodrama about securing yet another cash infusion from international creditors. This would add another boulder to a mountain of debt almost twice the size of Greece's gross domestic product. This protracted dispute will result in desirable carnage if Greece defaults, thereby becoming a constructively frightening example to all democracies doling out unsustainable, growth-suppressing entitlements. In January, Greek voters gave power to the left-wing Syriza party, one third of which, The Economist reports, consists of "Maoists, Marxists and supporters of Che Guevara." Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, 40, a retired student radical, immediately denounced a European Union declaration criticizing Russia's dismemberment of Ukraine. He chose only one Cabinet member with prior government experience — a leader of Greece's Stalinist communist party. Tsipras' minister for culture and education says Greek education "should not be governed by the principle of excellence ... it is a warped ambition." Practicing what he preaches, he proposes abolishing university entrance exams.
In January, McDonald's, leaning against the winds of fashion, said kale would never replace lettuce on its burgers. In May, however, it said it will test kale in a breakfast meal (breakfast is about 25 percent of McDonald's sales). Kale might or might not cause construction workers to turn at 6 a.m. into McDonald's drive-through lines, where approximately two-thirds of McDonald's customers place their orders. McDonald's also says its milk will soon be without artificial growth hormones, and chicken (McDonald's sells more of it than of beef) will be free of human antibiotics. All these might be good business decisions and as socially responsible as can be. They certainly pertain to McDonald's new mantra about being a "modern, progressive burger company," whatever that means.
Americans should light 800 candles for the birthday of the document that began paving the meandering path to limited government. Magna Carta laid down the law about "fish weirs" on English rivers, "assizes of darrein presentment," people being "distrained to make bridges," and other "liberties ... to hold in our realm of England in perpetuity." But what King John accepted at Runnymede meadow on June 15, 1215, matters to Americans because of something that happened 588 years later in the living room of Stelle's Hotel in Washington, where the Library of Congress now sits. Although the "great charter" purported to establish certain rights in "perpetuity," almost everything in it has been repealed or otherwise superseded. Magna Carta led to parliamentary supremacy (over the sovereign — the king or queen) but not to effective limits on government. The importance of the document was its assertion that the sovereign's will could be constrained.
Before presidential politics — the game of getting to 270 electoral votes — completely eclipses governing, there is the urgent task of getting to 217 votes in the House of Representatives to pass Trade Promotion Authority (TPA). This would guarantee a vote without amendments on the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement. Without TPA, any trade agreement will be nibbled to death in Congress by persons eager to do organized labor's bidding. So, Republicans who oppose TPA are collaborating with those who oppose increasing the velocity and rationality of economic life. TPA touches two challenging problems: one economic, one constitutional. Regarding both, conservatives have special responsibilities. The economic challenge is to generate economic growth sufficient to restore vigor and upward mobility to an underemployed America, sustaining national security and entitlements as, every day, another 10,000 baby boomers become eligible for Social Security and Medicare. The constitutional problem is how to restore institutional equilibrium by bringing the presidency back within the restraints the Founders devised with the separation of powers.
Campaign finance "reformers" think America would be better governed if the government could thoroughly regulate campaign speech, which is speech about the composition and comportment of the government. Reformers scold the Supreme Court for construing the First Amendment as though it says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." Reformers say government can limit campaign money without limiting what most such money funds — political speech. And since the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision, reformers have been lamenting a predictable consequence of their success in imposing limits on contributions to candidates and campaigns. The consequence is the rise of super PACs dedicated to the support of single candidates. So now, reformers insist that super PACs' spending is not really "independent" because it is, in effect, "coordinated." Well.
Does any stricture of journalistic propriety or social etiquette require us to participate in Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' charade? Is it obligatory to take seriously his pose of being an "independent" and a "socialist"? It gives excitable Democratic activists a frisson of naughtiness to pretend that he is both. Actually, he is neither. "Independent"? He caucuses with Senate Democrats and attends their policy lunches, his committee assignments count against the Democrats' quotas, he reliably votes with Democrats and he is seeking the Democrats' presidential nomination. He is a Democrat. If he is a "socialist," who isn't? In olden days, socialism meant something robust — government ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Then, voters and reality being resistant to such socialism, the idea was diluted to mean just government ownership of an economy's "commanding heights," principally heavy industries, coal mines, railroads, etc.
Commencement season brings a respite from the sinister childishness rampant on campuses. Attacks on freedom of speech come from the professoriate, that herd of independent minds, and from the ever-thickening layer of university administrators who keep busy constricting freedom in order to fine-tune campus atmospherics. The attacks are childish because they infantilize students who flinch from the intellectual free-for-all of adult society. When Brown University's tranquility of conformity was threatened by a woman speaker skeptical about the "rape culture" on campuses, students planned a "safe space" for those who would be traumatized by exposure to skepticism. Judith Shulevitz, writing in The New York Times, reported that the space had "cookies, coloring books, bubbles, Play-Doh, calming music, pillows, blankets and a video of frolicking puppies."
A simple apology would suffice. Instead, campaign finance reformers, horrified by the predictable results of their handiwork, aspire to yet more regulatory wrinkles to limit political speech. These, too, would have consequences unintended and undesired by reformers, "requiring" a new round of reforms. But the Constitution, properly construed, requires a wall of separation between campaign and state. Reformers detest the emergence of super PACs that fund advocacy supportive of, but not "coordinated" with, particular candidates. These vast reservoirs of money are, however, inevitable, reasonable and, on balance, wholesome responses to the reformers' attempts to combat what they call "too much money" in politics. Reformers have limited the amounts that can be contributed to parties and to candidates' campaigns, thereby limiting the quantity of political advocacy — aka speech.
