The WSJ's Opinion Journal features two good Christmas articles.
First, Washington's Christmas gift to the young America [nitpick - Fleming calls the country the United States of America, although at that time it was still governed by the Articles of Confederation, not the Constitution]
Second, the history of December celebrations, from Saturnalia to the Nativity to Virginia's Santa Claus.
Happy Holidays!
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Ron Paul, Libertarians, and the Rest of America
Right now, Ron Paul is the face for libertarianism in this country (which is ironic if you think about the nature of libertarianism). But nevertheless, when Americans think about libertarianism and libertarians, Ron Paul is who they picture. So I'll admit I'm conflicted over his candidacy.
One the one hand, I think he's weak/naive on foreign policy, a little laissez-faire even for me, and more than a little crazy. And his followers definitely worry me.
One the other hand, there's just something about him. I think I have to agree with Eric N., commenting on Matthew Yglesias' recent Ron Paul posting.
One the one hand, I think he's weak/naive on foreign policy, a little laissez-faire even for me, and more than a little crazy. And his followers definitely worry me.
One the other hand, there's just something about him. I think I have to agree with Eric N., commenting on Matthew Yglesias' recent Ron Paul posting.
A More Perfect Union
While searching my papers for an essay I wrote about Alexis deTocqueville's Democracy in America and Fight Club, I found this article published in the Atlantic Monthly in April 2004. Since the Atlantic requires a subscription to read the article, I've posted it in its entirety here.
by Jonathan Rauch
.....
But same-sex marriage neither must nor should be treated as an all-or-nothing national decision. Instead individual states should be left to try gay marriage if and when they choose—no national ban, no national mandate. Not only would a decentralized approach be in keeping with the country's most venerable legal traditions; it would also improve, in three ways, the odds of making same-sex marriage work for gay and straight Americans alike.
First, it would give the whole country a chance to learn. Nothing terrible—in fact, nothing even noticeable—seems to have happened to marriage since Vermont began allowing gay civil unions, in 2000. But civil unions are not marriages. The only way to find out what would happen if same-sex couples got marriage certificates is to let some of us do it. Turning marriage into a nationwide experiment might be rash, but trying it in a few states would provide test cases on a smaller scale. Would the divorce rate rise? Would the marriage rate fall? We should get some
indications before long. Moreover, states are, as the saying goes, the laboratories of democracy. One state might opt for straightforward legalization. Another might add some special provisions (for instance, regarding child custody or adoption). A third might combine same-sex marriage with counseling or other assistance (not out of line with a growing movement to offer social-service support to so-called fragile families). Variety would help answer some important questions: Where would gay marriage work best? What kind of community support would it need? What would be the avoidable pitfalls? Either to forbid same-sex marriage nationwide or to legalize it nationwide would be to throw away a wealth of potential information.
Just as important is the social benefit of letting the states find their own way. Law is only part of what gives marriage its binding power; community support and social expectations are just as important. In a community that looked on same-sex marriage with bafflement or hostility, a gay couple's marriage certificate, while providing legal benefits, would confer no social support from the heterosexual majority. Both the couple and the community would be shortchanged. Letting states choose gay marriage wouldn't guarantee that everyone in the state recognized such marriages as legitimate, but it would pretty well ensure that gay married couples could find some communities in their state that did.
Finally, the political benefit of a state-by-state approach is not to be underestimated. This is the benefit of avoiding a national culture war.
The United States is not (thank goodness) a culturally homogeneous country. It consists of many distinct moral communities. On certain social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, people don't agree and probably never will—and the signal political advantage of the federalist system is that they don't have to. Individuals and groups who find the values or laws of one state obnoxious have the right to live somewhere else.
The nationalization of abortion policy in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision created a textbook example of what can happen when this federalist principle is ignored. If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, abortion would today be legal in most states but not all; pro-lifers would have the comfort of knowing they could live in a state whose law was compatible with their views. Instead of endlessly confronting a cultural schism that affects every Supreme Court nomination, we would see occasional local flare-ups in state legislatures or courtrooms.
America is a stronger country for the moral diversity that federalism uniquely allows. Moral law and family law govern the most intimate and, often, the most controversial spheres of life. For the sake of domestic tranquillity, domestic law is best left to a level of government that is close to home.
So well suited is the federalist system to the gay-marriage issue that it might almost have been set up to handle it. In a new land whose citizens followed different religious traditions, it would have made no sense to centralize marriage or family law. And so marriage has been the domain of local law not just since the days of the Founders but since Colonial times, before the states were states. To my knowledge, the federal government has overruled the states on marriage only twice. The first time was when it required Utah to ban polygamy as a condition for joining the Union—and note that this ruling was issued before Utah became a state. The second time was in 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down sixteen states' bans on interracial marriage. Here the Court said not that marriage should be defined by the federal government but only that states could not define marriage in ways that violated core constitutional rights. On the one occasion when Congress directly addressed same-sex marriage, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, it decreed that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages but took care not to impose that rule on the states.
Marriage laws (and, of course, divorce laws) continue to be established by the states. They differ on many points, from age of consent to who may marry whom. In Arizona, for example, first cousins are allowed to marry only if both are sixty-five or older or the couple can prove to a judge "that one of the cousins is unable to reproduce." (So much for the idea that marriage is about procreation.) Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the Constitution does not require states to recognize one another's marriages. The Full Faith and Credit clause (Article IV, Section 1) does require states to honor one another's public acts and judgments. But in 1939 and again in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled that the clause does not compel a state "to substitute the statutes of other states for its own statutes dealing with a subject matter concerning which it is competent to legislate." Dale Carpenter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, notes that the Full Faith and Credit clause "has never been interpreted to mean that every state must recognize every marriage performed in every other state." He writes, "Each state may refuse to recognize a marriage performed in another state if that marriage would violate the state's public policy." If Delaware, for example, decided to lower its age of consent to ten, no other state would be required to regard a ten-year-old as legally married. The public-policy exception, as it is called, is only common sense. If each state could legislate for all the rest, American-style federalism would be at an end.
Why, then, do the states all recognize one another's marriages? Because they choose to. Before the gay-marriage controversy arose, the country enjoyed a general consensus on the terms of marriage. Interstate differences were so small that states saw no need to split hairs, and mutual recognition was a big convenience. The issue of gay marriage, of course, changes the picture, by asking states to reconsider an accepted boundary of marriage. This is just the sort of controversy in which the Founders imagined that individual states could and often should go their separate ways.
Paradoxically, the gay left and the antigay right have found themselves working together against the center. They agree on little else, but where marriage is concerned, they both want the federal government to take over.
To many gay people, anything less than nationwide recognition of same-sex marriage seems both unjust and impractical. "Wait a minute," a gay person might protest. "How is this supposed to work? I get married in Maryland (say), but every time I cross the border into Virginia during my morning commute, I'm single? Am I married or not? Portability is one of the things that make marriage different from civil union. If it isn't portable, it isn't really marriage; it's second-class citizenship. Obviously, as soon as same-sex marriage is approved in any one state, we're going to sue in federal court to have it recognized in all the others."
"Exactly!" a conservative might reply. "Gay activists have no intention of settling for marriage in just one or two states. They will keep suing until they find some activist federal judge—and there are plenty—who agrees with them. Public-policy exception and Defense of Marriage Act notwithstanding, the courts, not least the Supreme Court, do as they please, and lately they have signed on to the gay cultural agenda. Besides, deciding on a state-by-state basis is impractical; the gay activists are right about that. The sheer inconvenience of dealing with couples who went in and out of matrimony every time they crossed state lines would drive states to the lowest common denominator, and gay marriages would wind up being recognized everywhere."
Neither of the arguments I have just sketched is without merit. But both sides are asking the country to presume that the Founders were wrong and to foreclose the possibility that seems the most likely to succeed. Both sides want something life doesn't usually offer—a guarantee. Gay-marriage supporters want a guarantee of full legal equality, and gay-marriage opponents want a guarantee that same-sex marriage will never happen at all. I can't offer any guarantees. But I can offer some reassurance.
Is a state-by-state approach impractical and unsustainable? Possibly, but the time to deal with any problems is if and when they arise. Going in, there is no reason to expect any great difficulty. There are many precedents for state-by-state action. The country currently operates under a tangle of different state banking laws. As any banker will tell you, the lack of uniformity has made interstate banking more difficult. But we do have interstate banks. Bankers long ago got used to meeting different requirements in different states. Similarly, car manufacturers have had to deal with zero-emission rules in California and a few other states. Contract law, property law, and criminal law all vary significantly from state to state. Variety is the point of federalism. Uniform national policies may be convenient, but they risk sticking us with the same wrong approach everywhere.
My guess is that if one or two states allowed gay marriage, a confusing transitional period, while state courts and legislatures worked out what to do, would quickly lead in all but a few places to routines that everyone would soon take for granted. If New Jersey adopted gay marriage, for instance, New York would have a number of options. It might refuse to recognize the marriages. It might recognize them. It might honor only certain aspects of them—say, medical power of attorney, or inheritance and tenancy rights. A state with a civil-union or domestic-partner law might automatically confer that law's benefits on any gay couple who got married in New Jersey. My fairly confident expectation is that initially most states would reject out-of-state gay marriages (as, indeed, most states have pre-emptively done), but a handful would fully accept them, and others would choose an intermediate option.
For married gay couples, this variation would be a real nuisance. If my partner and I got married in Maryland, we would need to be aware of differences in marriage laws and make arrangements—medical power of attorney, a will, and so on—for whenever we were out of state. Pesky and, yes, unfair (or at least unequal). And outside Maryland the line between being married and not being married would be blurred. In Virginia, people who saw my wedding band would be unsure whether I was "really married" or just "Maryland married."
Even so, people in Virginia who learned that I was "Maryland married" would know I had made the strongest possible commitment in my home state, and thus in the eyes of my community and its law. They would know I had gone beyond cohabitation or even domestic partnership. As a Jew, I may not recognize the spiritual authority of a Catholic priest, but I do recognize and respect the special commitment he has made to his faith and his community. In much the same way, even out-of-state gay marriages would command a significant degree of respect.
If you are starving, one or two slices of bread may not be as good as a loaf—but it is far better than no bread at all. The damage that exclusion from marriage has done to gay lives and gay culture comes not just from being unable to marry right now and right here but from knowing the law forbids us ever to marry at all. The first time a state adopted same-sex marriage, gay life would change forever. The full benefits would come only when same-sex marriage was legal everywhere. But gay people's lives would improve with the first state's announcement that in this community, marriage is open to everyone.
Building consensus takes time. The nationwide imposition of same-sex marriage by a federal court might discredit both gay marriage and the courts, and the public rancor it unleashed might be at least as intense as that surrounding abortion. My confidence in the public's decency and in its unfailing, if sometimes slow-acting, commitment to liberal principles is robust. For me personally, the pace set by a state-by-state approach would be too slow. It would be far from ideal. But it would be something much more important than ideal: it would be right.
Would a state-by-state approach inevitably lead to a nationwide court mandate anyway? Many conservatives fear that the answer is yes, and they want a federal constitutional amendment to head off the courts—an amendment banning gay marriage nationwide. These days it is a fact of life that someone will sue over anything, that some court will hear any lawsuit, and that there is no telling what a court might do. Still, I think that conservatives' fears on this score are unfounded.
Remember, all precedent leaves marriage to the states. All precedent supports the public-policy exception. The Constitution gives Congress a voice in determining which of one another's laws states must recognize, and Congress has spoken clearly: the Defense of Marriage Act explicitly decrees that no state must recognize any other state's same-sex marriages. In order to mandate interstate recognition of gay marriages, a court would thus need to burn through three different firewalls—a tall order, even for an activist court. The current Supreme Court, moreover, has proved particularly fierce in resisting federal incursions into states' rights. We typically reserve constitutional prohibitions for imminent threats to liberty, justice, or popular sovereignty. If we are going to get into the business of constitutionally banning anything that someone imagines the Supreme Court might one day mandate, we will need a Constitution the size of the Manhattan phone book.
Social conservatives have lost one cultural battle after another in the past five decades: over divorce, abortion, pornography, gambling, school prayer, homosexuality. They have seen that every federal takeover of state and local powers comes with strings attached. They have learned all too well the power of centralization to marginalize moral dissenters—including religious ones. And yet they are willing to risk federal intervention in matrimony. Why?
Not, I suspect, because they fear gay marriage would fail. Rather, because they fear it would succeed.
One of the conservative arguments against gay marriage is particularly revealing: the contention that even if federal courts don't decide the matter on a national level, convenience will cause gay marriage to spread from state to state. As noted, I don't believe questions of convenience would force the issue either way. But let me make a deeper point here.
States recognized one another's divorce reforms in the 1960s and 1970s without giving the matter much thought (which was too bad). But the likelihood that they would recognize another state's same-sex marriages without serious debate is just about zero, especially at first: the issue is simply too controversial. As time went on, states without gay marriage might get used to the idea. They might begin to wave through other states' same-sex marriages as a convenience for all concerned. If that happened, however, it could only be because gay marriage had not turned out to be a disaster. It might even be because gay marriage was working pretty well. This would not be contagion. It would be evolution—a sensible response to a successful experiment. Try something here or there. If it works, let it spread. If it fails, let it fade.
The opponents of gay marriage want to prevent the experiment altogether. If you care about finding the best way forward for gay people and for society in a changing world, that posture is hard to justify. One rationale goes something like this: "Gay marriage is so certain to be a calamity that even the smallest trial anywhere should be banned." To me, that line of argument smacks more of hysteria than of rational thought. In the 1980s and early 1990s some liberals
were sure that reforming the welfare system to emphasize work would put millions of children out on the street. Even trying welfare reform, they said, was irresponsible. Fortunately, the states didn't listen. They experimented—responsibly. The results were positive enough to spark a successful national reform.
Another objection cites not certain catastrophe but insidious decay. A conservative once said to me, "Changes in complicated institutions like marriage take years to work their way through society. They are often subtle. Social scientists will argue until the cows come home about the positive and negative effects of gay marriage. So states might adopt it before they fully understood the harm it did."
Actually, you can usually tell pretty quickly what effects a major policy change is having—at least you can get a general idea. States knew quite soon that welfare reforms were working better than the old program. That's why the idea caught on. If same-sex marriage is going to cause problems, some of them should be apparent within a few years of its legalization.
And notice how the terms of the discussion have shifted. Now the anticipated problem is not sudden, catastrophic social harm but subtle, slow damage. Well, there might be subtle and slow social benefits, too. But more important, there would be one large and immediate benefit: the benefit for gay people of being able to get married. If we are going to exclude a segment of the population from arguably the most important of all civic institutions, we need to be certain that the group's participation would cause severe disruptions. If we are going to put the burden on gay people to prove that same-sex marriage would never cause even any minor difficulty, then we are assuming that any cost to heterosexuals, however small, outweighs every benefit to homosexuals, however large. That gay people's welfare counts should, of course, be obvious and inarguable; but to some it is not.
I expect same-sex marriage to have many subtle ramifications—many of them good not just for gay people but for marriage. Same-sex marriage would dramatically reaffirm the country's preference for marriage as the gold standard for committed relationships. Of course there might be harmful and neutral effects as well. I don't expect that social science would be able to sort them all out. But the fact that the world is complicated is the very reason to run the experiment. We can never know for sure what the effects of any public policy will be, so we conduct a limited experiment if possible, and then decide how to proceed on the basis of necessarily imperfect information.
If conservatives genuinely oppose same-sex marriage because they fear it would harm straight marriage, they should be willing to let states that want to try gay marriage do so. If, on the other hand, conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because they believe that it is immoral and wrong by definition, fine—but let them have the honesty to acknowledge that they are not fighting for the good of marriage so much as they are using marriage as a weapon in their fight against gays.
A More Perfect Union
How the Founding Fathers would have handled gay marriageby Jonathan Rauch
.....
Last November the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts ruled that excluding gay couples from civil marriage violated the state constitution. The court gave the legislature six months—until May—to do something about it. Some legislators mounted efforts to amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, but as of this writing they have failed (and even if passed, a ban would not take effect until at least 2006). With unexpected urgency the country faces the possibility that marriage licenses might soon be issued to homosexual couples. To hear the opposing sides talk, a national culture war is unavoidable.
But same-sex marriage neither must nor should be treated as an all-or-nothing national decision. Instead individual states should be left to try gay marriage if and when they choose—no national ban, no national mandate. Not only would a decentralized approach be in keeping with the country's most venerable legal traditions; it would also improve, in three ways, the odds of making same-sex marriage work for gay and straight Americans alike.
First, it would give the whole country a chance to learn. Nothing terrible—in fact, nothing even noticeable—seems to have happened to marriage since Vermont began allowing gay civil unions, in 2000. But civil unions are not marriages. The only way to find out what would happen if same-sex couples got marriage certificates is to let some of us do it. Turning marriage into a nationwide experiment might be rash, but trying it in a few states would provide test cases on a smaller scale. Would the divorce rate rise? Would the marriage rate fall? We should get some
indications before long. Moreover, states are, as the saying goes, the laboratories of democracy. One state might opt for straightforward legalization. Another might add some special provisions (for instance, regarding child custody or adoption). A third might combine same-sex marriage with counseling or other assistance (not out of line with a growing movement to offer social-service support to so-called fragile families). Variety would help answer some important questions: Where would gay marriage work best? What kind of community support would it need? What would be the avoidable pitfalls? Either to forbid same-sex marriage nationwide or to legalize it nationwide would be to throw away a wealth of potential information.
Just as important is the social benefit of letting the states find their own way. Law is only part of what gives marriage its binding power; community support and social expectations are just as important. In a community that looked on same-sex marriage with bafflement or hostility, a gay couple's marriage certificate, while providing legal benefits, would confer no social support from the heterosexual majority. Both the couple and the community would be shortchanged. Letting states choose gay marriage wouldn't guarantee that everyone in the state recognized such marriages as legitimate, but it would pretty well ensure that gay married couples could find some communities in their state that did.
Finally, the political benefit of a state-by-state approach is not to be underestimated. This is the benefit of avoiding a national culture war.
The United States is not (thank goodness) a culturally homogeneous country. It consists of many distinct moral communities. On certain social issues, such as abortion and homosexuality, people don't agree and probably never will—and the signal political advantage of the federalist system is that they don't have to. Individuals and groups who find the values or laws of one state obnoxious have the right to live somewhere else.
The nationalization of abortion policy in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision created a textbook example of what can happen when this federalist principle is ignored. If the Supreme Court had not stepped in, abortion would today be legal in most states but not all; pro-lifers would have the comfort of knowing they could live in a state whose law was compatible with their views. Instead of endlessly confronting a cultural schism that affects every Supreme Court nomination, we would see occasional local flare-ups in state legislatures or courtrooms.
America is a stronger country for the moral diversity that federalism uniquely allows. Moral law and family law govern the most intimate and, often, the most controversial spheres of life. For the sake of domestic tranquillity, domestic law is best left to a level of government that is close to home.
So well suited is the federalist system to the gay-marriage issue that it might almost have been set up to handle it. In a new land whose citizens followed different religious traditions, it would have made no sense to centralize marriage or family law. And so marriage has been the domain of local law not just since the days of the Founders but since Colonial times, before the states were states. To my knowledge, the federal government has overruled the states on marriage only twice. The first time was when it required Utah to ban polygamy as a condition for joining the Union—and note that this ruling was issued before Utah became a state. The second time was in 1967, when the Supreme Court, in Loving v. Virginia, struck down sixteen states' bans on interracial marriage. Here the Court said not that marriage should be defined by the federal government but only that states could not define marriage in ways that violated core constitutional rights. On the one occasion when Congress directly addressed same-sex marriage, in the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, it decreed that the federal government would not recognize same-sex marriages but took care not to impose that rule on the states.
Marriage laws (and, of course, divorce laws) continue to be established by the states. They differ on many points, from age of consent to who may marry whom. In Arizona, for example, first cousins are allowed to marry only if both are sixty-five or older or the couple can prove to a judge "that one of the cousins is unable to reproduce." (So much for the idea that marriage is about procreation.) Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, the Constitution does not require states to recognize one another's marriages. The Full Faith and Credit clause (Article IV, Section 1) does require states to honor one another's public acts and judgments. But in 1939 and again in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled that the clause does not compel a state "to substitute the statutes of other states for its own statutes dealing with a subject matter concerning which it is competent to legislate." Dale Carpenter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota, notes that the Full Faith and Credit clause "has never been interpreted to mean that every state must recognize every marriage performed in every other state." He writes, "Each state may refuse to recognize a marriage performed in another state if that marriage would violate the state's public policy." If Delaware, for example, decided to lower its age of consent to ten, no other state would be required to regard a ten-year-old as legally married. The public-policy exception, as it is called, is only common sense. If each state could legislate for all the rest, American-style federalism would be at an end.
Why, then, do the states all recognize one another's marriages? Because they choose to. Before the gay-marriage controversy arose, the country enjoyed a general consensus on the terms of marriage. Interstate differences were so small that states saw no need to split hairs, and mutual recognition was a big convenience. The issue of gay marriage, of course, changes the picture, by asking states to reconsider an accepted boundary of marriage. This is just the sort of controversy in which the Founders imagined that individual states could and often should go their separate ways.
Paradoxically, the gay left and the antigay right have found themselves working together against the center. They agree on little else, but where marriage is concerned, they both want the federal government to take over.
To many gay people, anything less than nationwide recognition of same-sex marriage seems both unjust and impractical. "Wait a minute," a gay person might protest. "How is this supposed to work? I get married in Maryland (say), but every time I cross the border into Virginia during my morning commute, I'm single? Am I married or not? Portability is one of the things that make marriage different from civil union. If it isn't portable, it isn't really marriage; it's second-class citizenship. Obviously, as soon as same-sex marriage is approved in any one state, we're going to sue in federal court to have it recognized in all the others."
"Exactly!" a conservative might reply. "Gay activists have no intention of settling for marriage in just one or two states. They will keep suing until they find some activist federal judge—and there are plenty—who agrees with them. Public-policy exception and Defense of Marriage Act notwithstanding, the courts, not least the Supreme Court, do as they please, and lately they have signed on to the gay cultural agenda. Besides, deciding on a state-by-state basis is impractical; the gay activists are right about that. The sheer inconvenience of dealing with couples who went in and out of matrimony every time they crossed state lines would drive states to the lowest common denominator, and gay marriages would wind up being recognized everywhere."
Neither of the arguments I have just sketched is without merit. But both sides are asking the country to presume that the Founders were wrong and to foreclose the possibility that seems the most likely to succeed. Both sides want something life doesn't usually offer—a guarantee. Gay-marriage supporters want a guarantee of full legal equality, and gay-marriage opponents want a guarantee that same-sex marriage will never happen at all. I can't offer any guarantees. But I can offer some reassurance.
Is a state-by-state approach impractical and unsustainable? Possibly, but the time to deal with any problems is if and when they arise. Going in, there is no reason to expect any great difficulty. There are many precedents for state-by-state action. The country currently operates under a tangle of different state banking laws. As any banker will tell you, the lack of uniformity has made interstate banking more difficult. But we do have interstate banks. Bankers long ago got used to meeting different requirements in different states. Similarly, car manufacturers have had to deal with zero-emission rules in California and a few other states. Contract law, property law, and criminal law all vary significantly from state to state. Variety is the point of federalism. Uniform national policies may be convenient, but they risk sticking us with the same wrong approach everywhere.
My guess is that if one or two states allowed gay marriage, a confusing transitional period, while state courts and legislatures worked out what to do, would quickly lead in all but a few places to routines that everyone would soon take for granted. If New Jersey adopted gay marriage, for instance, New York would have a number of options. It might refuse to recognize the marriages. It might recognize them. It might honor only certain aspects of them—say, medical power of attorney, or inheritance and tenancy rights. A state with a civil-union or domestic-partner law might automatically confer that law's benefits on any gay couple who got married in New Jersey. My fairly confident expectation is that initially most states would reject out-of-state gay marriages (as, indeed, most states have pre-emptively done), but a handful would fully accept them, and others would choose an intermediate option.
For married gay couples, this variation would be a real nuisance. If my partner and I got married in Maryland, we would need to be aware of differences in marriage laws and make arrangements—medical power of attorney, a will, and so on—for whenever we were out of state. Pesky and, yes, unfair (or at least unequal). And outside Maryland the line between being married and not being married would be blurred. In Virginia, people who saw my wedding band would be unsure whether I was "really married" or just "Maryland married."
Even so, people in Virginia who learned that I was "Maryland married" would know I had made the strongest possible commitment in my home state, and thus in the eyes of my community and its law. They would know I had gone beyond cohabitation or even domestic partnership. As a Jew, I may not recognize the spiritual authority of a Catholic priest, but I do recognize and respect the special commitment he has made to his faith and his community. In much the same way, even out-of-state gay marriages would command a significant degree of respect.
If you are starving, one or two slices of bread may not be as good as a loaf—but it is far better than no bread at all. The damage that exclusion from marriage has done to gay lives and gay culture comes not just from being unable to marry right now and right here but from knowing the law forbids us ever to marry at all. The first time a state adopted same-sex marriage, gay life would change forever. The full benefits would come only when same-sex marriage was legal everywhere. But gay people's lives would improve with the first state's announcement that in this community, marriage is open to everyone.
Building consensus takes time. The nationwide imposition of same-sex marriage by a federal court might discredit both gay marriage and the courts, and the public rancor it unleashed might be at least as intense as that surrounding abortion. My confidence in the public's decency and in its unfailing, if sometimes slow-acting, commitment to liberal principles is robust. For me personally, the pace set by a state-by-state approach would be too slow. It would be far from ideal. But it would be something much more important than ideal: it would be right.
Would a state-by-state approach inevitably lead to a nationwide court mandate anyway? Many conservatives fear that the answer is yes, and they want a federal constitutional amendment to head off the courts—an amendment banning gay marriage nationwide. These days it is a fact of life that someone will sue over anything, that some court will hear any lawsuit, and that there is no telling what a court might do. Still, I think that conservatives' fears on this score are unfounded.
Remember, all precedent leaves marriage to the states. All precedent supports the public-policy exception. The Constitution gives Congress a voice in determining which of one another's laws states must recognize, and Congress has spoken clearly: the Defense of Marriage Act explicitly decrees that no state must recognize any other state's same-sex marriages. In order to mandate interstate recognition of gay marriages, a court would thus need to burn through three different firewalls—a tall order, even for an activist court. The current Supreme Court, moreover, has proved particularly fierce in resisting federal incursions into states' rights. We typically reserve constitutional prohibitions for imminent threats to liberty, justice, or popular sovereignty. If we are going to get into the business of constitutionally banning anything that someone imagines the Supreme Court might one day mandate, we will need a Constitution the size of the Manhattan phone book.
Social conservatives have lost one cultural battle after another in the past five decades: over divorce, abortion, pornography, gambling, school prayer, homosexuality. They have seen that every federal takeover of state and local powers comes with strings attached. They have learned all too well the power of centralization to marginalize moral dissenters—including religious ones. And yet they are willing to risk federal intervention in matrimony. Why?
Not, I suspect, because they fear gay marriage would fail. Rather, because they fear it would succeed.
One of the conservative arguments against gay marriage is particularly revealing: the contention that even if federal courts don't decide the matter on a national level, convenience will cause gay marriage to spread from state to state. As noted, I don't believe questions of convenience would force the issue either way. But let me make a deeper point here.
States recognized one another's divorce reforms in the 1960s and 1970s without giving the matter much thought (which was too bad). But the likelihood that they would recognize another state's same-sex marriages without serious debate is just about zero, especially at first: the issue is simply too controversial. As time went on, states without gay marriage might get used to the idea. They might begin to wave through other states' same-sex marriages as a convenience for all concerned. If that happened, however, it could only be because gay marriage had not turned out to be a disaster. It might even be because gay marriage was working pretty well. This would not be contagion. It would be evolution—a sensible response to a successful experiment. Try something here or there. If it works, let it spread. If it fails, let it fade.
The opponents of gay marriage want to prevent the experiment altogether. If you care about finding the best way forward for gay people and for society in a changing world, that posture is hard to justify. One rationale goes something like this: "Gay marriage is so certain to be a calamity that even the smallest trial anywhere should be banned." To me, that line of argument smacks more of hysteria than of rational thought. In the 1980s and early 1990s some liberals
were sure that reforming the welfare system to emphasize work would put millions of children out on the street. Even trying welfare reform, they said, was irresponsible. Fortunately, the states didn't listen. They experimented—responsibly. The results were positive enough to spark a successful national reform.
Another objection cites not certain catastrophe but insidious decay. A conservative once said to me, "Changes in complicated institutions like marriage take years to work their way through society. They are often subtle. Social scientists will argue until the cows come home about the positive and negative effects of gay marriage. So states might adopt it before they fully understood the harm it did."
Actually, you can usually tell pretty quickly what effects a major policy change is having—at least you can get a general idea. States knew quite soon that welfare reforms were working better than the old program. That's why the idea caught on. If same-sex marriage is going to cause problems, some of them should be apparent within a few years of its legalization.
And notice how the terms of the discussion have shifted. Now the anticipated problem is not sudden, catastrophic social harm but subtle, slow damage. Well, there might be subtle and slow social benefits, too. But more important, there would be one large and immediate benefit: the benefit for gay people of being able to get married. If we are going to exclude a segment of the population from arguably the most important of all civic institutions, we need to be certain that the group's participation would cause severe disruptions. If we are going to put the burden on gay people to prove that same-sex marriage would never cause even any minor difficulty, then we are assuming that any cost to heterosexuals, however small, outweighs every benefit to homosexuals, however large. That gay people's welfare counts should, of course, be obvious and inarguable; but to some it is not.
I expect same-sex marriage to have many subtle ramifications—many of them good not just for gay people but for marriage. Same-sex marriage would dramatically reaffirm the country's preference for marriage as the gold standard for committed relationships. Of course there might be harmful and neutral effects as well. I don't expect that social science would be able to sort them all out. But the fact that the world is complicated is the very reason to run the experiment. We can never know for sure what the effects of any public policy will be, so we conduct a limited experiment if possible, and then decide how to proceed on the basis of necessarily imperfect information.
If conservatives genuinely oppose same-sex marriage because they fear it would harm straight marriage, they should be willing to let states that want to try gay marriage do so. If, on the other hand, conservatives oppose same-sex marriage because they believe that it is immoral and wrong by definition, fine—but let them have the honesty to acknowledge that they are not fighting for the good of marriage so much as they are using marriage as a weapon in their fight against gays.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
Federalist Paper No. 6
Hamilton begins his second Federalist Paper with a brief review of the “innumerable” ‘causes of hostility among nations’. He also makes the rather snarky comment that
In other words, the idea of peace between separate or confederated states is a pipe dream.
I have to say, Hamilton was not the most optimistic guy. He had an unfailing lack of faith in people (and apparently, especially in women: ‘The influence which the bigotry of one female, the petulance of another, and the cabals of a third, had in the contemporary policy, ferments, and pacifications, of a considerable part of Europe, are topics that have been too often descanted upon not to be generally known.’). So, with this in mind, it’s not really surprising that he spends most of this Paper detailing historical evidence for the greed, vagaries and perfidies of people and states throughout history. He also rightly points out that it is not only statesmen who may determine a state’s peace, but the average citizen as well. He invokes recent (for him) history: Daniel Shays and his Regulators, noting, ‘If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.’
I should also probably note that despite Hamilton’s misgivings about statesmen, he concluded the ideal form of government had represented all the interest groups, but maintained a hereditary monarch to decide policy. In Hamilton's opinion, this was impractical in the United States; nevertheless, the country should mimic this form of government as closely as possible. He proposed, therefore, to have a President and elected Senators for life (surprising, really, that TJ and Madison couldn’t stand him).
I confess that I misread the seventh and eighth paragraphs the first three times. I thought that Hamilton was arguing that despite all of this, however, there is still hope! (which should have been my first clue that I was mistaken). In actuality, he says that visionary men ‘stand ready to advocated the paradox of perpetual peace between the States’ (written eight years before Kant’s Perpetual Peace). They argue that ‘Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other’: the Enlightenment Era version of the ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.’
Hamilton counters that republics, even commercial republics, are still just as likely to get into wars. Commerce, instead of eliminating causes of war, simply provides other incentives: war as commerce by other means. As evidence, he cites Sparta, Athens, Rome, Carthage – ‘the aggressor in the very war that ended in her destruction’, Venice, Holland, Britain, Austria, Bourbon, France, England and France involved in Austria vs. Bourbon, etc. In essence, if separate, composed as neighbors, states will fight. Here, he doesn’t offer any explicit evidence that states won’t fight even if they are united (and in fact his mentions of North Carolina’s revolt, the ‘late menacing disturbances in Pennsylvania’ and the insurrections and rebellions in Massachusetts makes me wonder that states will become embroiled in violence no matter what), except to quote Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, l’Abbé de Mably:
A man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.
In other words, the idea of peace between separate or confederated states is a pipe dream.
I have to say, Hamilton was not the most optimistic guy. He had an unfailing lack of faith in people (and apparently, especially in women: ‘The influence which the bigotry of one female, the petulance of another, and the cabals of a third, had in the contemporary policy, ferments, and pacifications, of a considerable part of Europe, are topics that have been too often descanted upon not to be generally known.’). So, with this in mind, it’s not really surprising that he spends most of this Paper detailing historical evidence for the greed, vagaries and perfidies of people and states throughout history. He also rightly points out that it is not only statesmen who may determine a state’s peace, but the average citizen as well. He invokes recent (for him) history: Daniel Shays and his Regulators, noting, ‘If Shays had not been a DESPERATE DEBTOR, it is much to be doubted whether Massachusetts would have been plunged into a civil war.’
I should also probably note that despite Hamilton’s misgivings about statesmen, he concluded the ideal form of government had represented all the interest groups, but maintained a hereditary monarch to decide policy. In Hamilton's opinion, this was impractical in the United States; nevertheless, the country should mimic this form of government as closely as possible. He proposed, therefore, to have a President and elected Senators for life (surprising, really, that TJ and Madison couldn’t stand him).
I confess that I misread the seventh and eighth paragraphs the first three times. I thought that Hamilton was arguing that despite all of this, however, there is still hope! (which should have been my first clue that I was mistaken). In actuality, he says that visionary men ‘stand ready to advocated the paradox of perpetual peace between the States’ (written eight years before Kant’s Perpetual Peace). They argue that ‘Commercial republics, like ours, will never be disposed to waste themselves in ruinous contentions with each other’: the Enlightenment Era version of the ‘Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention.’
Hamilton counters that republics, even commercial republics, are still just as likely to get into wars. Commerce, instead of eliminating causes of war, simply provides other incentives: war as commerce by other means. As evidence, he cites Sparta, Athens, Rome, Carthage – ‘the aggressor in the very war that ended in her destruction’, Venice, Holland, Britain, Austria, Bourbon, France, England and France involved in Austria vs. Bourbon, etc. In essence, if separate, composed as neighbors, states will fight. Here, he doesn’t offer any explicit evidence that states won’t fight even if they are united (and in fact his mentions of North Carolina’s revolt, the ‘late menacing disturbances in Pennsylvania’ and the insurrections and rebellions in Massachusetts makes me wonder that states will become embroiled in violence no matter what), except to quote Gabriel Bonnot de Mably, l’Abbé de Mably:
NEIGHBORING NATIONS (says he) are naturally enemies of each other unless their common weakness forces them to league in a CONFEDERATE REPUBLIC, and their constitution prevents the differences that neighborhood occasions, extinguishing that secret jealousy which disposes all states to aggrandize themselves at the expense of their neighbors.The quote sums up the Paper nicely, as Hamilton notes with his final line: “This passage, at the same time, points out the EVIL and suggests the REMEDY,” which I must assume he addresses in the next Paper, as there are only the two on Dissensions between the States.
Friday, December 21, 2007
Number Weirdness
While looking over the set up of the blog last night, I realized my posting has taken on a weird Fibonacci-type sequence: 4, 5, 9. This will make 14. I doubt this will be the last post of December (as I still have several entries in the works), so the pattern will be broken. But I thought it odd enough to be cool enough to point out (remember the WM entry? Yes, the geekiness extends beyond politics).
Thursday, December 20, 2007
Keep It Clean!
While it's fairly obvious I care deeply about the state of American politics, and I hold definite views on policies, and now, candidates, I've tried to keep Publius fairly apolitical. It's not that I mind a good partisan debate, but the point of my blog isn't to try to persuade anyone to my political camp, but merely to get them to pay attention.
I'm also aware that there is a certain amount of mudslinging involved in political campaigns. It drives me crazy, but for the most part I can ignore it. And again, I try not to discuss it here, or if I do, it's based on some extraordinary merits and issued with a caveat, such as I did on Tuesday. But this just bothered me. The following email was forwarded to me this morning (I believe in it's entirety - I don't think the person who forwarded it actually wrote the introduction, since that's not how she writes. In other words, this is comes across as one of those pre-generated responses, like when you sign a petition onlin). Perusing articles of this type online are one thing, but when I'm assaulted by it in my own inbox, it's just too much; I finally had to respond. First, the article:
I'm also aware that there is a certain amount of mudslinging involved in political campaigns. It drives me crazy, but for the most part I can ignore it. And again, I try not to discuss it here, or if I do, it's based on some extraordinary merits and issued with a caveat, such as I did on Tuesday. But this just bothered me. The following email was forwarded to me this morning (I believe in it's entirety - I don't think the person who forwarded it actually wrote the introduction, since that's not how she writes. In other words, this is comes across as one of those pre-generated responses, like when you sign a petition onlin). Perusing articles of this type online are one thing, but when I'm assaulted by it in my own inbox, it's just too much; I finally had to respond. First, the article:
Interesting Obama history
I’ve been alerted to an interesting Boston Globe article about Barack Obama’s role, when he was in the Illinois legislature, in the attempt to get the state committed to universal health care. It turns out that the story very much prefigures the debates we’re having right now.
Obama later watered down the bill after hearing from insurers and after a legal precedent surfaced during the debate indicating that it would be unconstitutional for one legislative assembly to pass a law requiring a future legislative assembly to craft a healthcare plan.
During debate on the bill on May 19, 2004, Obama portrayed himself as a conciliatory figure. He acknowledged that he had “worked diligently with the insurance industry,” as well as Republicans, to limit the legislation’s reach and noted that the bill had undergone a “complete restructuring” after industry representatives “legitimately” raised fears that it would result in a single-payer system.
“The original presentation of the bill was the House version that we radically changed - we radically changed - and we changed in response to concerns that were raised by the insurance industry,” Obama said, according to the session transcript.
To be fair, the piece also says this:
During debate over the Health Care Justice Act, Obama also attacked the insurers, accusing the industry of “fear-mongering” by claiming, even after he made changes they wanted, that the bill would lead to a government takeover.
This story gives a lot of context to the debate over health reform now. Obama clearly sees himself playing the same role as president that he did as a state legislator — as a broker among groups, including the insurance industry, as someone who can find a compromise solution that’s acceptable to a wide range of opinion.
My thoughts: being president isn’t at all like being a state legislator, Illinois Republicans aren’t like the national Republican party, 2009 won’t be 2003, and the insurance industry’s opposition to national health reform — which must, if it is to mean anything, strike deep at the industry’s fundamental business — will be much harsher than its opposition to a basically quite mild state-level reform effort.
The point is that if national health reform is going to happen, it will be as the result of a no-holds-barred fight of an entirely different order from what Obama saw in Illinois. The president’s role will have to be far more confrontational, involve far more twisting of arms and rallying of the public against the special interests, than Obama’s role as a state legislator in the Illinois case. And it will take place against a backdrop of fierce attacks not just from the industry but from Republicans who fear, rightly, that any kind of reform will move the country in a more liberal direction.
My worries about Obama are that he doesn’t seem to understand this — that he thinks that in 2009, as president, he can broker a national health care reform the same way that as a state legislator, in 2003, he brokered a deal that mollified the insurance industry. That’s a recipe for getting nowhere.
Now, my response:
I don't usually do reply-alls, but the excess of mudslinging emails/op-eds and whatever else in this campaign (not even from the Republicans, from the Democrats!!!) is starting to get to me. And its not just about Obama - although he seems to have borne the brunt of it. I'm tired of EVERYONE getting and everyone receiving. Can we please clean this up and actually have a real debate?! I finally just had to write this:And really, why can't we? Without further discussing the faults/merits of an Obama presidency, I'm just tempted by the possible decline in all this name-calling in the guise of fair debate and the 'interests of the people'. It is entirely possible for two rational people to disagree completely on a political issue, and yet remain completely civil in their debate, as well as maintain a friendship. This past Sunday, the 18th, was the national Day of Reconciliation in South Africa. While not at all trying to compare the circumstances, couldn't the US do something like that? Or at least try it in the holiday spirit?
Ok, let’s look at this honestly. There are two issues here which are being conflated and confused.
1. Obama's health plan
2. Obama's legislative history/ties to lobbyists
The Boston Globe article (the theoretical base of the arguments in this email, actually has nothing to say about the merits of Obama's health plan, just his skills as a legislator. This is the beginning of a legitimate discussion to have, and the Globe does a fair job of presenting the facts (I'll get to the merits of the email in a minute).
But the heading of this email is “I don’t like Obama’s Health Care Plan”. Well, that may be so, but based on what faults? Certainly none with the actual policy are presented within the email or the Globe article.
So, we have an email that implies it will discuss the health care plan, but actually discusses the viability of Obama based on his conciliatory nature.
So again, point 1: the health care plan. The primary criticism Obama has been drawing from the Democrats is that his health care plan won’t cover everyone. This is true. It will only cover those who want to be covered. This is a free country. We can’t force people to have health insurance. This is not analogous to car insurance at all (which I have heard some comparisons to). We can require people to have car insurance should they decide to practice the privilege of owning and driving a car. But if they don’t, then, no insurance necessary. For health insurance, we would have to require people to have car insurance for the privilege of…. Being alive? No, thank you. Even if it is something I want (enough to pay for it myself before I was covered through my job). I’ll accept the government making it as easy as possible for me to afford it in order to increase the likelihood that I will have it and then won’t have to rely on Medicare or Medicaid when I get hit by a bus. But, it should be my decision, not the government’s. I am still an autonomous individual, ADULT. I can make these decisions for myself, thank you (requiring coverage for CHILDREN is another matter). For further discussion of Obama’s approach to healthcare, I suggest these links: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/30/opinion/30krugman.html?_r=2&n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Paul%20Krugman&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2007/12/01/obamas-false-healthcare-ad-draws-fire-from-clinton/
http://jaydiatribe.blogspot.com/2007/12/obamas-and-clintons-health-care-plans.html
To return to point 2: Obama’s skills as a legislator. The Globe article does raise questions about Obama’s honesty about working with lobbyists. I don’t think that working with lobbyists is necessarily wrong (getting insurers on board to provide healthcare does seem like a good idea, but that could just be me), and I could also be willing to accept that Obama has legitimately evolved his thinking since his time in the state legislature, and if placed in the same position today, would act differently (I’d certainly like to think I’ve changed at least a bit – and in positive ways – since 2004). But yes, now that I know that about his history, I will be more vigilante in assessing his interactions with lobbyists, as well as speeches on the subject. But the email doesn’t stop at hey, check out this bit about Obama – maybe you should pay attention. Instead, it continues on to draw conclusions about his ability to push legislation through Congress. Ok, I guess that’s fair. But I can’t say that I think the conclusions make any sense whatsoever.
The email offers two points and then a conclusion:
1. Obama didn’t just roll over to serve the needs of the insurers: he did give them a hard time:
“To be fair, the piece also says this:
During debate over the Health Care Justice Act, Obama also attacked the insurers, accusing the industry of “fear-mongering” by claiming, even after he made changes they wanted, that the bill would lead to a government takeover.”
So he CAN be tough, just not tough enough, per the second point:
2. Being president isn’t like being a state legislator, and passing health care reform nationally won’t be like passing health care reform in Illinois.
Definitely a fair point. However, this doesn’t mean that Obama won’t be capable at the presidential level.
Why must we conclude that health care reform will require a ‘no-holds-barred’ approach? Certainly, ‘special interests’ will want to have their say and get their way (by the way, AARP = special interest, especially from the perspective of anyone under the age of 40, childrens’ advocates = also a special interest group. EVERYONE uses lobbyists, not just “them”). But Congress also has to represent their constituents: old people, middle aged people, and children (in a fit of pessimism I'll say that everyone ignores 20-somethings). And polls have show that the majority of the American public wants some form of wide-spread health care coverage and reform. But who knows, it could get ugly.
To that, I would further say, and so we want a president who will make it uglier by playing partisan politics and refusing to broker a solutions so that the American people can FINALLY get the legislation we want and need?! Policy (that which politics is supposed to create) is ALWAYS a matter of compromise, at least in a democracy. Dictatorships don’t have much compromise in their policies, but don’t tend to act on the behalf of their subjects either. Compromise is a good thing – remember the adage ‘two heads are better than one’? It’s not because both immediately come to an agreement. Yes, policies can be weakened, but if the alternative is complete gridlock and policymaking by lack of progress, then I will conciliation, open-mindedness, compromise, mercy, justice, and the genuine desire to get stuff done! any day.
I obviously am on Obama's side here, as that last paragraph proves, but my broader point is this: I’m glad I was alerted to the Globe article – passing information like that around helps citizens keep candidates and politicians honest. But if we’re going to draw conclusions, let’s base them to the facts that are presented, and ACTUALLY present the facts. Campaigns and policy histories are far too complicated as it is, why make it dirty as well?
State Experimentation and the EPA
This article in the LA Times amused me.
Favorite quote: Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson's "a confusing patchwork of state rules". It's called federalism, people, and it's the point! States are SUPPOSED to experiment with policies in order to find what works best for them (keeping the national minimums/maximums in mind). California has a lot more cars and pollution than most of the rest of the county (LA tops the American Lung Association's lists for both short- and long-term particle pollution), so thats why they feel they need stricter emissions standards. Moreover, state experimentation allows the rest of the country to get a sense of which policies work and which don't, so that citizens can then push to adopt or adapt them for legislation at the state or the national level. Having done no research on this, I'm pretty sure California has long led the way on pollution standards, and is part of the reason why we have the standards in place that we do now.
Besides, as Dean Baker points out at the American Prospect, you can keep track of it with an Excel spreadsheet.
For further reading on the subject, Publius: The Journal of Federalism (we're an original lot aren't we?) is offering free access to "Environmental Policy and the Bush Era: The Collision Between the Administrative Presidency and State Experimentation", an article from their special edition, US Federalism and the Bush Administration.
Favorite quote: Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen L. Johnson's "a confusing patchwork of state rules". It's called federalism, people, and it's the point! States are SUPPOSED to experiment with policies in order to find what works best for them (keeping the national minimums/maximums in mind). California has a lot more cars and pollution than most of the rest of the county (LA tops the American Lung Association's lists for both short- and long-term particle pollution), so thats why they feel they need stricter emissions standards. Moreover, state experimentation allows the rest of the country to get a sense of which policies work and which don't, so that citizens can then push to adopt or adapt them for legislation at the state or the national level. Having done no research on this, I'm pretty sure California has long led the way on pollution standards, and is part of the reason why we have the standards in place that we do now.
Besides, as Dean Baker points out at the American Prospect, you can keep track of it with an Excel spreadsheet.
For further reading on the subject, Publius: The Journal of Federalism (we're an original lot aren't we?) is offering free access to "Environmental Policy and the Bush Era: The Collision Between the Administrative Presidency and State Experimentation", an article from their special edition, US Federalism and the Bush Administration.
Tuesday, December 18, 2007
This Is Not a Test
I'm a little hesitant to link to this essay by Christopher Hitchens in Slate yesterday, but feel that its too good to pass up. I don't really like Hitchens - I think he's too bombastic at times and too often substitutes hyperbole for substance, but he is smart and clever, and underneath it all, I enjoy the point he explores about Article VI of the Constitution.
So, ignoring his ad hominems about Gov. Huckabee, enjoy!
So, ignoring his ad hominems about Gov. Huckabee, enjoy!
Monday, December 17, 2007
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Today in Federalism
Happy Bill of Rights Day! Today is the anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Enjoy your liberties!
Friday, December 14, 2007
TGIF
It's Friday and the day of my company's holiday luncheon, so I have very little that is substantive to say. I did want to post this picture I found while looking for communication cartoons for my powerpoint presentation at work. Hopefully I won't ever really get there (although my post last night might be a good start).
Depending on the expected snow storm, I might be more productive this weekend.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
The Good Old Days
Some thoughts occurred to me while I was listening to Denis McDonough speak tonight about candidate debates in this country (YPFP sessions are off the record, but seeing as the topic of the discussion is posted on the front page, I don't think I've given anything away):
We bemoan the disappearance of the 'good old days' in politics - a time when politicians could be more candid and less partisan (forgetting, of course, the partisanship and witchhunts of the McCarthy era). The primary culprit seems to be the media - blamed for dumbing down debates to soundbites. Is this necessarily true, however? The 'old days' certainly had their moments (the bipartisanship during the Truman administration detailed in James Chace's excellent biography of Dean Acheson was astounding and makes me entirely wistful), but have those moments passed entirely?
Isn't it patronizing on the part of talking heads to assume that the public doesn't want these poll-tested, prepackaged deals? Why on earth do they assume that average Americans don't care? Its our country too- perhaps even more so, since we are the soldiers and police officers, firefighters, EMTs, teachers, shopkeepers, workers, and everyone else. We are America. Why wouldn't we want to know exactly what and where our leaders plan to drag us in to?
This will become a common theme here, but we have the power and responsibility to ask the tough questions, as do our spokespeople - the media and Congress - and our leaders - again, Congress and the President - have the responsibility to answer to us. Americans generally dislike those who ride on other's coattails. Its time we realized that's what we've been doing, assuming the media will do our job for us. I always feel like this part ends up echoing 'if you build it, they will come', but its true. If nothing else, we've learned that politicians respond to polling. So if we start demanding real answers, and stop accepting prearranged debates, then mightn't they start to give us what we want?
This is in danger of becoming a bit of a rant, so I think I'll stop here, but this is definitely a subject I feel passionately about. Americans are not dumb. We might be insular and isolated, apathetic or agnostic, but generally, present us with a reasonable argument and we'll at least hear you out. Of course we won't necessarily change our minds, but I think most of us are at least willing to consider alternatives. So present us with some! We don't care only if we have nothing worth caring about. Let's collectively agree not to let politics be one of those.
We bemoan the disappearance of the 'good old days' in politics - a time when politicians could be more candid and less partisan (forgetting, of course, the partisanship and witchhunts of the McCarthy era). The primary culprit seems to be the media - blamed for dumbing down debates to soundbites. Is this necessarily true, however? The 'old days' certainly had their moments (the bipartisanship during the Truman administration detailed in James Chace's excellent biography of Dean Acheson was astounding and makes me entirely wistful), but have those moments passed entirely?
Isn't it patronizing on the part of talking heads to assume that the public doesn't want these poll-tested, prepackaged deals? Why on earth do they assume that average Americans don't care? Its our country too- perhaps even more so, since we are the soldiers and police officers, firefighters, EMTs, teachers, shopkeepers, workers, and everyone else. We are America. Why wouldn't we want to know exactly what and where our leaders plan to drag us in to?
This will become a common theme here, but we have the power and responsibility to ask the tough questions, as do our spokespeople - the media and Congress - and our leaders - again, Congress and the President - have the responsibility to answer to us. Americans generally dislike those who ride on other's coattails. Its time we realized that's what we've been doing, assuming the media will do our job for us. I always feel like this part ends up echoing 'if you build it, they will come', but its true. If nothing else, we've learned that politicians respond to polling. So if we start demanding real answers, and stop accepting prearranged debates, then mightn't they start to give us what we want?
This is in danger of becoming a bit of a rant, so I think I'll stop here, but this is definitely a subject I feel passionately about. Americans are not dumb. We might be insular and isolated, apathetic or agnostic, but generally, present us with a reasonable argument and we'll at least hear you out. Of course we won't necessarily change our minds, but I think most of us are at least willing to consider alternatives. So present us with some! We don't care only if we have nothing worth caring about. Let's collectively agree not to let politics be one of those.
Monday, December 10, 2007
Thursday, December 6, 2007
Reading List
Really more like a reading wish list at this point, since I've been behind on my reading list since I was 13 (current list length: 30 pages, typed).
William Blake: The Complete Illuminated Books
From the Guardian.
(Hat tip: Andrew Sullivan)
The Founding Fathers, Exposed!
This was a fun article on Alexander Hamilton. It's important to remember that while the Founding Fathers were fairly impressive, they were still only human. A lot of them did things that would get a politician fired today (at least).
But of course, that's part of the brilliance of their work: they recognized their failings and those of others, and created a system of governance of the people, by the people, which mitigates the flaws of all of us. They also realized that what was acceptable to them might not be acceptable to us, and incorporated mechanisms to deal with changes in accepted practice, so that our system could carry on, despite all the bumps in the road. And now, we're just the latest incarnation of an enduring vision; not of a perfect union, but hopefully a more perfect one.
But of course, that's part of the brilliance of their work: they recognized their failings and those of others, and created a system of governance of the people, by the people, which mitigates the flaws of all of us. They also realized that what was acceptable to them might not be acceptable to us, and incorporated mechanisms to deal with changes in accepted practice, so that our system could carry on, despite all the bumps in the road. And now, we're just the latest incarnation of an enduring vision; not of a perfect union, but hopefully a more perfect one.
Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Foundations of Liberty: The Great Writ
Today the Supreme Court takes up the argument that the 2006 Military Commissions Act stripped the Guantanamo Bay detainees of the right to petition for a writ of habeas corpus.
Tom Lynch at Cato weighs in.
Tom Lynch at Cato weighs in.
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