Dispatches from District 48
Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category.
Captains Quarters suggested that Bush nominate Janice Rogers Brown for the Supreme Court. Though it will never happen, I am 100% behind this idea. I never even heard of her until I started reading statements attributed to her by her opponents that were supposed to convince me of her unfitness for the bench. And you know what, the more I read, the more I liked her. Also here.
Those on the left and the right often try to laugh off libertarians, ascribing to "paranoia" our fear of the power of government.
Well, I could argue that if this is paranoia, I share a similar phobia with men like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, whose fear of government power permeate all their writings, as well as the Constitution they helped to produce. They believed that even good men could be corrupted by the government, and they were proven correct in an incredibly short time by John Adams. Adams is by all accounts a good man, dedicated to freedom and democracy, and one of the chief intellectual architects both of the Revolution and the Constitution. But it was Adams that signed into law the Alien and Sedition Act, perhaps the worst piece of illiberal and unconstitutional legislation in the history of this country.
Or, if I didn't want to make the founding father's / original intent argument, I could just point to this (hat tip Marginal Revolution):
A federal judge in Texas, calling the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. a "corrupt
agency with corrupt influences on it," awarded a Houston financier $72 million
to cover his legal fees in a decade-long suit involving a failed savings and
loan and the government's efforts to take control of a stand of endangered
California redwood trees in the 1990s.
The FDIC, a regulatory agency that insures deposits at banks and
savings and loans, filed suit against Charles E. Hurwitz in 1995, seeking to
collect more than $800 million because Hurwitz indirectly controlled a Texas
S&L that failed in 1988. The FDIC, after a series of legal setbacks, dropped
its suit against Hurwitz in 2002....On Tuesday evening, Hughes issued a scathing, 131-page ruling. In it, he cited
evidence that the FDIC brought the case largely because of pressure from
environmental groups, members of Congress and the Clinton administration. The
reason: Hurwitz's Pacific Lumber Co. owned 3,500 acres of endangered redwoods in
Northern California. Hughes found that the FDIC, in close concert with
environmental groups, sued Hurwitz to pressure him into a "debt-for-nature"
swap, in effect giving the government his trees in exchange for his supposed
liability in the failure of the United Savings Association of Texas....
Hughes said FDIC officials and lawyers, in depositions, "ranged from
manipulative evasiveness to plain perjury." He cited records of two years of
communications, including extensive discussions of legal strategy and political
matters, between the FDIC and environmentalists over the proposal to use a
banking-practices lawsuit as pressure on Hurwitz to give up the
redwoods.
Hughes said FDIC officials "discarded the mantle of the American
Republic for the cloak of a secret society of extortionists. If the vice
president called, they responded. If a congressman called, they responded. If a
lobbyist called, they responded. They heeded every call but that of duty and
honor."
Wow. I know many people are paranoid about the lack of accountability of major corporations, and felt vindicated by the Enron case, over which the press spilled acres of ink. However, Enron is nothing compared to this. While fraud is bad, Enron at least was never able to use the coercive regulatory and police power that the government has to seek its ends.
I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls. Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:
This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.
This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets." This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.
I have written a number of times that Republicans are returning to their bad old days of the 1970's, supporting aggresive social constraints and big government pro-large-business rather than pro-free-market economic controls. Per Republican Rick Santorum, via Reason:
This whole idea of personal autonomy -- I don't think that most conservatives
hold that point of view. Some do. And they have this idea that people should be
left alone to do what they want to do, that government should keep taxes down,
keep regulation down, that we shouldn't get involved in the bedroom, that we
shouldn't be involved in cultural issues, people should do whatever they want.
Well, that is not how traditional conservatives view the world. And I think that
most conservatives understand that we can't go it alone, that there is no such
society that I'm aware of where we've had radical individualism and it has
succeeded as a culture.
This Reason Hit and Run post is a useful example to clarify the difference between "pro-business" and "pro-free-markets." This earlier post of mine also addresses this distinction.
I trash the Congress a lot, but a brief thanks to our local Congressman John Shadegg who was one of only 8 folks who managed a "no" vote against the pork-laden highway bill. Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake was also one of the eight.
Update: Flake also wins an award as the only Congressman who did not slip a special appropriation for his own district into the bill.
I had an interesting discussion with my father-in-law about the term "judicial activism" which has led me to eschew the term. Here's the reason: He made the observation, I think from a story on NPR, that though conservatives seem to complain the most about liberal activism from the bench, in fact majorities of conservative judges on the Supreme Court have struck down more laws than their liberal counterparts. It was the striking down of laws they considered "activist".
After thinking about this for a moment, it made me realize that he, and I guess NPR, used the term judicial activism differently than I do. As a fairly strong libertarian, when I have referred negatively to judicial activism, I generally am thinking about judicial decisions to create new powers for the government and/or, from the bench, to put new restrictions on individual behavior. In that sense, I think of decisions like Raich to be activist, because they sustain expansions of federal and government power. As I have listened to both liberals and conservatives now, I realize that my usage of judicial activism is, ahem, out of the mainstream, and therefore confusing. My personal concern is how the courts have ignored the 9th amendment and thrown the commerce clause out the window.
I have decided that, as most people use the term, I am neutral to positive on what the majority refer to as judicial activism. I think a lot more laws should be thrown out as unconstitutional, and if
this is the accepted definition of activist, them I like activism. For example, I wish they had been more active in striking down laws and government activities in Raich and Kelo.
Until I come up with a better term, I now describe myself as being against judicial expansion of federal power. Maybe I can coin the term "judicial expansionism"?
If you thought the idiots who ran Orange County's finances into the ground were bad, wait until you meet these jokers:
Two months ago, reports emerged that $300,000 in rare coins was missing from a
collection in which the state Bureau of Workers' Compensation (BWC) began
investing in 1998 as a peculiar form of stock hedge. That was bad enough. But
last week, word came that between $10 million and $12 million in coins had
disappeared. That caused BWC director Jim Conrad to announce his resignation,
and launched a flurry of accusations and calls for legal action.
As if my workers comp. rates weren't already too high. There goes my idea to invest Social Security funds in beanie babies and 60's lunch boxes. Apparently most of the major lawmakers in the state got large campaign donations from several large coin dealers, and they returned the favor by investing public funds in coins through these dealers. I often make the argument not to let the government have control of large equity investment funds -- I did not even occur to me to include coins. One of the things about coins - you have to hold them for a long, long time to make money, in part because commissions markups are so high vis a vis other investments (which explains why coin dealers so readily donated large sums of money for government business).
Reason has a good roundup. Unfortunately, I am sure this will all lead to more restrictions on spending and speech in campaigns, though it appears the system is working fine - full disclosure of funding sources certainly has everyone running for their lives.
The real solution is to make elected officials take a real fiduciary interest in the state's investment funds (pensions probably being the largest). What they would prefer to do is to legislate a set of rules and then leave managers to follow these rules, giving them plausible deniability. What they should do is sit down once a quarter and review portfolio investment performance and asset allocations.
In my earlier post, I lamented the fact that "progressives" who criticize Bush for being undemocratic, illiberal, overly dependent on the military, and theocratic are proposing alternatives that are much, much worse. In that post, they were championing Hugo Chavez of Venezuela as their savior. Now, they seem to be latching on to Muslim countries like Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran as their champions of liberal values. In this interview of George Galloway, recently feted by liberals and progressives on both sides of the Atlantic:
M.B.H.S.: You often call for uniting Muslim and progressive forces globally.
How far is it possible under current situation?
Galloway: Not only do I think it's possible but I think it is vitally necessary
and I think it is happening already. It is possible because the progressive
movement around the world and the Muslims have the same enemies.
*Their enemies are the Zionist occupation, American occupation, British
occupation of poor countries mainly Muslim countries. * * *
*They have the same interest in opposing savage capitalist globalization which
is intent upon homogenizing the entire world turning us basically into factory
chickens which can be forced fed the American diet of everything from food to
Coca-Cola to movies and TV culture*. And *whose only role in life is to consume
the things produced endlessly by the multinational corporations.* And the
progressive organizations & movements agree on that with the Muslims.
Otherwise we believe that we should all have to speak as Texan and eat McDonalds
and be ruled by Bush and Blair. So *on the very grave big issues of the
day-issues of war, occupation, justice, opposition to globalization-the Muslims
and the progressives are on the same side*.
By the way, this is the movement that calls itself "reality-based".
Can't someone today emerge as a rallying point for those of use who are classical liberals and libertarians?
For years, high school civics books have portrayed our political choices as ranging from socialism on the left to fascism on the right. These textbooks represent the statists' wet dream -- the reframing of political discussion such that all possible outcomes are defined as rigid government control of individual lives. The only difference is who is in charge, and the path they took to get there.
Think I am exaggerating? Here's an example:
The left hate George Bush. Fine. I have my own problems with the man. Over the last few years, the left has cast about for a person to rally around as a counterpoint to Bush. Some latched on the the French leadership, some to Saddam Hussein, some even recently to George Gallway. I think you can see the problem here, and the mistake Michael Moore made. Forcing voters to choose between Saddam Hussein and George Bush is practically begging them to vote Republican.
After the last election, I had hoped that the left had gotten wiser. I guess not. Apparently the "progressive" community is rallying around Hugo Chavez as their next model leader:
Of the top oil producing countries in the world, only one is a democracy with a
president who was elected on a platform of using his nation's oil revenue to
benefit the poor. The country is Venezuela. The President is Hugo Chavez. Call
him "the Anti-Bush."...Instead of using government to help the rich and the corporate, as Bush does,
Chavez is using the resources and oil revenue of his government to help the poor
in Venezuela. A country with so much oil wealth shouldn't have 60 percent of its
people living in poverty, earning less than $2 per day. With a mass movement
behind him, Chavez is confronting poverty in Venezuela. That's why large
majorities have consistently backed him in democratic elections. And why the
Bush administration supported an attempted military coup in 2002 that sought to
overthrow Chavez.
And this is the group that calls themselves "reality-based"? Does anyone really believe that poverty results solely from not handing oil revenue to the poor? The US doesn't do this (well, except in Alaska), yet despite this our poor in this country are wealthier than the middle class in Venezuela, and its because we have a stable government that protects property rights and individual freedoms and provides a stable environment for investment. Prosperity comes from building a healthy and growing economy, not looting a particular industry. (By the way, I am sure that the previous regime was looting the oil industry as well, so I am certainly not defending them.)
However, this point is worth repeating: Progressives consider Venezuela to have a better policy for helping the poor than the US, but the poorest 20% in the US still make more money and live better and longer than at least 80% of Venezuelans. A person in the middle of the "poor" quintile in the US would be upper middle class in Venezuela. And I will bet anyone that after 10 years of Chavez rule, this will be more, not less, true.
Chavez is a totalitarian thug. Human Rights Watch has plenty to say about his miserable record of trashing freedoms. In particular, you can compare the supreme court shenanigans of the "anti-Bush" with ridiculously mild controversy in this country (at least by comparison) over judicial nominations. More background on Chavez here.
So there you are. We are given the choice of Bush or Chavez. Statism or statism. Thanks a lot.
Again, small government libertarians like myself, who held their nose and voted Republican in the last election, have been used. From the NY Post today:
THE Republican promise of smaller,
less-intrusive government is getting harder and harder to believe.
Especially when a more plausible plot line is unfolding every day: that
the GOP has put aside the ideals of Reagan and Goldwater in order to
pursue a political strategy based on big spending.For the latest, check out a report just released by the
libertarian Cato Institute that tells a striking story about just how
out-of-control spending has gotten under President Bush.Cato finds that:
* Bush has presided over the largest increase in federal spending since Lyndon Johnson.
* Even excluding defense and homeland security spending, Bush is the biggest-spending president in 30 years.
* The federal budget grew from 18.5 percent of the Gross
Domestic Product on President Bill Clinton's last day in office to 20.3
percent at the end of Bush's first term.Add to that Bush's massive Medicare prescription-drug
benefit, expected to cost $720 billion-plus over the next 10 years.
(The money for that new entitlement, the first created by a president
in a generation, will start flowing this year.)
It is not in the least bit comforting to have my suspicions confirmed by Cato, whose whole report is here. Bring back divided government! I will take Reagan-Democrat Congress or Clinton-Republican Congress over this any day.
I have not really had the time to do the research to form an opinion about Bush's judicial nominees, and the MSM is not very helpful in its coverage on the issue. I wrote here that the judiciary has started to overreach of late, legislating from the bench to advance an agenda generally supported by the Democrats. I don't know the candidates well enough to decide if these proposed judges are conservative activists who want to legislate from the bench but for conservative ends, or if they represent a first shot at reversing extra-constitutional judicial activism (which I would support).
However, I may have started to develop an favorable opinion on a couple of judges, based on what I have learned from their detractors.
Take this example, from a NY Times editorial, March 6, 2005. In disparaging how extremist Bush judge nominees are, they use the example of:
Janice
Rogers Brown, who has disparaged the New Deal as ''our socialist
revolution.''
Woe is me, I must be an extremist. First, the New Deal was clearly a "revolution", in that it was one of two events (the other being the Civil War) in the last 200 years that fundamentally changed the role of the federal government in what was a massive reinterpretation of the Constitution. But was it socialist? We can argue about whether the New Deal legacy that reaches us today is socialist or not- many quite normal non-extremist folks would argue yes and many similarly rational folks would argue no.
However, arguing the nature of the New Deal from what programs reach us today leaves out a lot of the picture. Much of the New Deal was voided by the Supreme Court. While some was re-passed later once FDR had a chance to remold the court with his own (for the time) extremist ideologues, some of the most socialist-statist-fascist legislation never was reinstituted.
The most dramatic of these institutions that fortunately were left on the cutting room floor was the National Industrial Recovery Act, or NRA. Roosevelt actually modeled the NRA on Mussolini's fascism in Italy, so I guess it might be more correct to call it fascist rather than socialist but in practice, I can't ever tell those two apart.*
The image of a strong
leader taking direct charge of an economy during hard times fascinated
observers abroad. Italy was one of the places that Franklin Roosevelt
looked to for ideas in 1933. Roosevelt's National Recovery Act (NRA)
attempted to cartelize the American economy just as Mussolini had
cartelized Italy's. Under the NRA Roosevelt established industry-wide
boards with the power to set and enforce prices, wages, and other terms
of employment, production, and distribution for all companies in an
industry. Through the Agricultural Adjustment Act the government
exercised similar control over farmers. Interestingly, Mussolini viewed
Roosevelt's New Deal as "boldly... interventionist in the field of
economics." Hitler's nazism also shared many features with Italian
fascism, including the syndicalist front. Nazism, too, featured
complete government control of industry, agriculture, finance, and
investment.
If you are not familiar with the NRA, you need to be if you are going to come to a conclusion about the New Deal and just how statist FDR's aspirations were. The actual text of the act is here. Henry Hazlitt has a long evaluation here. In the end, the NRA was scrapped in large part because it was a disaster for the economy. Many blame the NRA for strangling the recovery that began in 1933-34 and thus extending the depression. Parts of the law (collective bargaining, minimum wage) were incorporated in other later legislation, but the core concept of organizing industrial cartels with government backing to run industries and set prices, wages, and production levels died, fortunately.
Update: More here. Mr. Gregory quotes John Flynn's The Roosevelt Myth:
[Mussolini] organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state-supervised trade association. He called it a corporative. These corporatives operated under state supervision and
could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards,
etc. The NRA provided that in America each industry should be organized
into a federally supervised trade association. It was not called a
corporative. It was called a Code Authority. But it was essentially the
same thing. These code authorities could regulate production,
quantities, qualities, prices, distribution methods, etc., under the
supervision of the NRA. This was fascism. The anti-trust laws forbade
such organizations. Roosevelt had denounced Hoover for not enforcing
these laws sufficiently. Now he suspended them and compelled men to
combine.
* I disagree with people who want to argue that socialism is freedom but without property rights while fascism is property rights without other freedoms. Neither of these conditions are stable, and both converge to the same destination of suffocating statism, just with different starting points and different people in charge. One of the things that drive libertarians nuts is being presented with a grade school civics book that has a linear political spectrum with fascism on one end and communism on the other. Are those really my only two choices?
Many people of late have suspected that Republicans, now that they have power in the central government, have abandoned federalism (federalism being the philosophy of government that legislative power for as many issues as possible be devolved to the most local unit of government possible). The recent abortion bill passed by the House seems to confirm this:
The House passed a bill yesterday that would make it a federal
crime for any adult to transport an under-age girl across state lines to have an
abortion without the consent of her parents.
When selling federalism in the past, Republicans have argued that federalism better protects individuals and their rights, because it creates competition among states. Individuals and businesses fed up with bad legislation in one state can move to a more favorable climate. Now, however, the Congress is stepping in to limit free movement between states to prevent individuals, in this case teenage girls, from shopping for a better regulatory climate. What's next? Preventing businesses from moving across state lines to a state with lower taxes?
By the way, there is a lot of sloppy thinking in the debate on parental notification for teenage abortions. In this debate, the legal or moral status of abortion is nearly irrelevant. Underage children are special class of citizen who are not yet acknowledged by the law as being able to make certain adult decisions. Already we regulate and restrict underage decision-making on driving, drinking, smoking, voting, etc. All of these are perfectly legal activities that we don't let teenagers do at all. So even if abortion is entirely legal and Constitutionally protected, it can still be both legal and ethical to place restrictions on it for minors -- remember that voting, and to some extent drinking due to the 21st amendment, are Constitutionally guaranteed activities we legally deny teenagers). Heck, most states have parental permission laws for teenagers to use tanning salons, which is certainly a much more trivial activity than getting an abortion.
I am not an expert on abortion law, but my memory is that the Supreme Court ruled that abortion parental notification and permission laws are Constitutional if the law includes an option for the girl to override her parents veto through the judiciary. I have always argued that we should place an additional proviso in the parental permission laws, one I think both sides of the abortion debate might accept -- if a parent refuses to allow their daughter to have an abortion, then the girl's parents must adopt the baby and be ready to raise it themselves.
I am about at the end of my rope on listening to the current filibuster debate, all the more so because whatever side some Senator is on today, you can bet a pile of money that they were on exactly the opposite side 10 years ago, when the majority-minority positions of the two major parties was reversed. Senators from both sides can argue all day that their current stand is "on principle", but this is crap. If all these people's stands were "on principle", then about 100 Senators have completely changed their principles in the last 10 years.
Before I take my shot at truly coming up with a solution "on principle", here is but one example of this switch of sides. I will use the NY Times as an example, mainly because they are so much fun to criticize. Thanks to Powerline for pointers to some of these editorials.
In their editorial titled "Senate on the Brink", dated March 6, 2005 the Times stated:
To block the nominees, the Democrats' weapon of choice has been the
filibuster, a time-honored Senate procedure that prevents a bare
majority of senators from running roughshod.
and further:
Now [the White House] threatens to do grave harm to the Senate. If Republicans fulfill
their threat to overturn the historic role of the filibuster in order
to ram the Bush administration's nominees through, they will be
inviting all-out warfare and perhaps an effective shutdown of Congress.
Wow! Its sure good that we have this filibuster thingie to protect our way of life. And its great to have champions like the NY Times who are stalwart defenders of this procedure.
Except when they are not. Back when the majorities were reversed almost exactly a decade ago, on January 1, 1995 the NY times editorialized:
The U.S. Senate likes to call itself the world's greatest deliberative body. The
greatest obstructive body is more like it. In the last season of Congress, the
Republican minority invoked an endless string of filibusters to frustrate the
will of the majority. This relentless abuse of a time-honored Senate tradition
so disgusted Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, that he is now willing to
forgo easy retribution and drastically limit the filibuster. Hooray for him.For years Senate filibusters--when they weren't conjuring up romantic images
of Jimmy Stewart as Mr. Smith, passing out from exhaustion on the Senate
floor--consisted mainly of negative feats of endurance. Senator Sam Ervin once
spoke for 22 hours straight. Outrage over these tactics and their ability to
bring Senate business to a halt led to the current so-called two-track system,
whereby a senator can hold up one piece of legislation while other business goes
on as usual.
and further (note the Senators who are players in this quote 10 years ago):
Mr. Harkin, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut Democrat, now
proposes to make such obstruction harder. Mr. Harkin says reasonably that there
must come a point in the process where the majority rules. This may not sit well
with some of his Democratic colleagues. They are now perfectly positioned to
exact revenge by frustrating the Republican agenda as efficiently as Republicans
frustrated Democrats in 1994.Admirably, Mr. Harkin says he does not want to do that. He proposes to change
the rules so that if a vote for cloture fails to attract the necessary 60 votes,
the number of votes needed to close off debate would be reduced by three in each
subsequent vote. By the time the measure came to a fourth vote--with votes
occurring no more frequently than every second day--cloture could be invoked
with only a simple majority. Under the Harkin plan, minority members who feel
passionately about a given measure could still hold it up, but not indefinitely....The Harkin plan, along with some of Mr. Mitchell's proposals, would go a long
way toward making the Senate a more productive place to conduct the nation's
business. Republicans surely dread the kind of obstructionism they themselves
practiced during the last Congress. Now is the perfect moment for them to unite
with like-minded Democrats to get rid of an archaic rule that frustrates
democracy and serves no useful purpose.
Gee, now I'm starting to think this filibuster thingie might not be so good. I kindof get confused as to which principled stand by the NY Times I should get behind.
My Plan
First, recognize that I am not a lawyer, nor a constitutional scholar, nor do I play one on TV. But seeing as the "experts" are tripping over themselves in their hypocrisy, there is not reason I can't jump in the fray too.
My idea for this started when I found out something about filibuster rules -- there are already certain votes that by Senate rules have been made immune to filibuster. Thank God for blogs, because you won't find this anywhere in the MSM, though its apparently common knowledge. Everyone treats a change in filibuster rules for judge confirmations as "a break in the dam" or a "slippery slope" which will wipe out the entire filibuster rule. However, such exceptions have already been made. The most used one is for budget votes - neither party may filibuster certain budget votes. The logic for this is obvious - no one want to let 41 people shut down the government. The majority party should be able to pass their budget. This exemption is why Senate leaders often bury controversial provisions (recent example: ANWR drilling) in the budget -- so they can't get filibustered. Other votes exempt from filibuster include votes under the War Power Act and a number of really trivial things that I can't remember right now - I am looking for a link and would appreciate help.
This leads me to what seems like a fairly obvious, moderately principled position on filibuster: Change the Senate rules to allow filibuster on new legislation, but exempt votes from filibuster that are required to keep the basic functions of government running. This latter exempt category would include things like approving budgets, raising the debt ceiling, and voting on nominees of all types.
Postscript: By the way, as a libertarian, I am generally all for seeing the government shut down, and don't shed many tears when the Senate does nothing. However, I think my proposal is pretty true to the intentions of the Constitution. In particular, of all the functions that are currently being shut down by the filibuster, it is galling that it is the court system that is being ground to a halt, since the courts are one of the few institutions where even a hard core libertarian like myself accepts a strong role for government. Which is not to say that I am happy with the power courts and judges have been taking on themselves of late.
Update: Here is a further good proposal that I am not sure why no one is talking about - if they are going to filibuster, lets make them actually filibuster, i.e. keep talking and talking:
However, I think that these Princeton students have the right idea: If you are going to filibuster, then you should have to filibuster.
Filibusters should come at some personal and political cost. We should
abolish the candy-ass filibusters of modern times, and require that if
debate is not closed it must therefore happen.The
prospect of John Kerry, Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy bloviating for
hours on C-SPAN would deter filibusters except when the stakes are
dire, if for no other reason than the risk that long debate would
create a huge amount of fodder for negative advertising. If Frist were
to enact the "reform" of the filibuster instead of its repeal, he would
sieze the high ground. He could take the position that the Republicans
are merely rolling back the "worst excesses" of the long period of
Democratic majority in the Congress, and that filibusters will still be
possible if Senators are willing to lay it all on the line. Indeed,
even the students at Princeton would be hard-pressed to argue against
such a reform of the filibuster, since extended speechifying is
precisely the means they have used to make their point.
Okay, how could you resist that title for a post. My thoughts on this subject were spurred by an article by Fox News about pirates that won election to the NC State student government:
By an overwhelming majority, the Raleigh school last week elected a candidate
called "The Pirate Captain" student body president, giving the old sea dog 58
percent of the vote.
"We're quickly goin' to bae getting our plank started, get the simple things
out of the way," The Pirate Captain (), real name Whil
(or maybe "Will") Piavis, a junior, told supporters after election results were
unveiled Wednesday night.
Many outlets have reported this story with incredulity that such an unserious person could be elected to so lofty an office. Several student government weenies at NC State agreed:
More sober student-government types seemed appalled that a character straight
from "SpongeBob SquarePants" had crashed their party.
I was not surprised in the least, for two reasons. First, I think many Americans in general are fed up with the self-importance of most legislators. This goes double for students and the student government. In fact, I think it is nearly a law of nature that the more trivial the government post, the more self-important the occupants of that post are.
The second reason I was not surprised was that we had a similar event twenty years ago at Princeton where the student government was taken over by the Antarctic Liberation Front:
Back when I was an undergrad
at Princeton, one of my fondest memories was of a bizarre Student Body
Governing Council (USG) election. The previous USG administration,
headed by none other than fellow Princetonian Eliot Spitzer, had so
irritated the student body that, for the first time in memory, the
usually apathetic voting population who generally couldn't care less
who their class president was actually produced an energetic opposition
party. Even in his formative years, Spitzer was expert in using his
office to generate publicity, in this case frequent mentions in the
student newspaper that finally drove several students over the edge.The result was the incredibly funny and entertaining Antarctic
Liberation Front. I wish I had saved their brochures, but their
proposals included things like imposing a dawn to dusk curfew on the
school and funding school parties by annexing the mineral rights
between the double yellow lines of the US highways. All of this was
under the banner of starting jihad to free Antarctica. The ALF swept
the USG election. This immensely annoyed Spitzer and other USG
stalwarts, who decried the trivialization of such an august body. The
pained and pompous wailing from the traditional student council weenies
(sounding actually a lot like liberals after the last presidential
election) only amused the general student population even further.
After a few student-council-meetings-as-performance-art, the ALF
resigned en mass and life went back to being just a little bit more
boring.
Yes, that Eliot Spitzer, the overreaching Aspiring Governor of New York. He is STILL mad about getting dissed in this student election, and whined about it twenty years later in print. And don't miss fellow Princetonian Virginia Postrel's reflections on the ALF and Eliot Spitzer.
My post on libertarians and Republicans, and ones like it on other sites, has generated a lot of response from folks arguing about whether there is a true schism emerging in the Republican Party. I am not a Republican, so I am not on the inside. Strong libertarians like me (read this if you want to know what that means) can pretty safely be treated as a fringe, so I haven't really been in a position to argue that the Republicans mights truly be in trouble.
However, yesterday I had the chance to interact with a number of family friends. Included were a number of men, many in their 60's-80's, who have been lifelong classic Chamber of Commerce Republicans, including two that ran Fortune 100 companies. These were classic red state Republicans, many of whom had been active in the party at some point in their lives. And, almost to a man, they were disenchanted with the Republicans. They cited trade protectionism, profligate spending, and Tom-DeLay-type capture by the system. These men, all who would call themselves religious, were frustrated at the apparent capture of the Party by religious interests.
Several of these folks pointed me to this editorial by John Danforth as representing what is frustrating them about the Administration and the Party.
During the 18 years I served in the Senate, Republicans often disagreed with
each other. But there was much that held us together. We believed in limited
government, in keeping light the burden of taxation and regulation. We encouraged
the private sector, so that a free economy might thrive. We believed that judges
should interpret the law, not legislate. We were internationalists who supported
an engaged foreign policy, a strong national defense and free trade. These were
principles shared by virtually all Republicans.But in recent times, we Republicans have allowed this shared agenda to become
secondary to the agenda of Christian conservatives. As a senator, I worried
every day about the size of the federal deficit. I did not spend a single minute
worrying about the effect of gays on the institution of marriage. Today it seems
to be the other way around.The historic principles of the Republican Party offer America its best hope
for a prosperous and secure future. Our current fixation on a religious agenda
has turned us in the wrong direction. It is time for Republicans to rediscover our roots.
For those of you who don't know and might mistake Mr. Danforth for some rampaging secularist, former Senator Danforth, beyond having gone to the greatest undergraduate institution in the world, is a pro-life .
I encourage you to read it all.
Over the last year or so, ad hominem political arguments have really begun to drive me crazy. I don't think that they are any more prevalent, but since I have begun blogging and tried to really get underneath the factual underpinnings of certain issues, these ad hominem arguments have become more irritating.
What do I mean by ad hominem arguments? Here are several examples:
Ad Hominem Classic
The classic Ad Hominem attack is one that substitutes a (mostly) irrelevant personal attack on the author of an argument instead of logically or factually disputing the argument itself. I could pick from about a thousand examples a week from the blogosphere, but a good recent example were conservative attacks on Robert Byrd's admittedly over-the-top defense of allowing filibusters for judicial nominees. Almost every response I saw to Byrd was careful to remind readers that Bird was a KKK leader forty plus years ago. Though certainly unsavory, it is unclear how being a KKK member is relevant to the argument about the filibuster rule (the only real connection, though irrelevant to refuting Byrd's arguments, is that Byrd used a filibuster rather famously to try to head off passage of the Civil Rights Act in the early 60's). If anything, one might argue that Byrd's historic white supremacist activities might make him more rather than less favorable to judicial nominees. If anything, the one relevant fact about Byrd that might have some bearing on the argument is that he is often considered a constitutional expert, and has been cited as such a number of times by Republicans when it suited his purpose.
Ad Hominem Shorthand
This is a staple of Blog comments. Examples include "Bush is a Fascist", "Bush is a Liar", "They're Moonbats" etc. These arguments usually do nothing to enhance an online argument.
Ad Hominem Motivation / bias
A good example is "of course you oppose abortion - you're Catholic". While bias or group affiliation may be a pointer to potential weaknesses in a person's argument, they are not weaknesses in and of themselves, and pointing out these biases or affiliations does not constitute refutation of an argument.
Ad Hominem Protected Group Status
This is the reverse of the one above. Rather than trying to refute the argument by pointing out the group affiliation of the other person, you are instead trying to short-circuit the argument by taking advantage of your own group affiliation. A good example is of those in "protected" groups (blacks, women, etc) responding to arguments by saying you are just being racist / sexist. This is a very popular tactic on campus's, where members of protected groups use campus speech codes to try to declare certain arguments illegal "hate speech", thereby eliminating the necessity of actually having to respond to or refute the argument.
Ad Hominem Source of Funding
This charge is increasingly prevalent in the blogosphere, as both liberals and conservatives accuse the other of "astroturfing", or offering political opinions for payola. While source of funds for writing and research are important points of disclosure, the fact that an argument has been subsidized by this or that group does not automatically negate the argument. For example, global warming activists love to point to studies that refute warming claims by claiming the study was paid for by the power industry, or the oil industry, or whoever. While this should make one skeptical, it does not constitute sufficient refutation of logic and data, though it is often used that way.
Ad hominem guilt by association
This is perhaps the weakest of all ad hominem attacks. It attempts to undermine an argument not by pointing out flaws in the person making the argument, but by pointing out flaws in other people making the argument. For example, conservatives like to dispose of anti-war arguments by pointing the the wackiest of anti-war protesters, and saying "see, you are just one of these moonbats". More recently, liberals have tried to undermine reasonable people arguing for not removing Terri Shiavo's feeding tube by pointing to how unsavory and unreasonable other people have been in the same cause. Can't we just admit that for any argument one wants to make, there is someone out there who agrees but who one would not want to be associated with.
* * *
Anyway, I probably left a few out. I don't know if it is still the case, but in British legal arguments there used to be a distinction between hard evidence directly refuting an argument and "pointers", or items that might cause one to be suspicious of the opposite party's arguments, but which don't actually constitute proof. In this context, ad hominem arguments can be thought to sometimes provide a useful pointer, but they should never be mistaken for a true refutation of the facts.
For more, Wikipedia has a good article.
As a libertarian that voted rather unenthusiastically Republican in the last election, I am right here with Ryan Sager:
While
some libertarian types may have been upset with President Reagan's
deficits, he was at least singing from their hymn book: Government is
the problem, not the solution. George W. Bush on the other hand has
never even gone to the trouble of aping a small-government posture.
Instead, Bush has adopted one of Reagan's other famous lines, sans
irony: I'm from the government, and I'm here to help.
This
represents a fundamental shift in the direction of the Republican Party
and a threat to its traditional alliances. The shift is self-evident.
Instead of being the party that tries to rein in entitlement spending,
the Republican Party is now the party of the $1.2 trillion Medicare
prescription-drug benefit. Instead of being the party that is opposed
to even having a federal Department of Education, the Republican Party
is now the party of extensive intrusion into local schoolhouses by Washington.
And instead of being the party of the rule of law and state's rights,
the Republican Party is now the party of Congressional intervention
into the thoroughly adjudicated medical decisions of an individual
family.
A few weeks ago I wrote here that about the high-stakes battle over judicial nominations. When Republicans were out of power, they could be trusted to support non-activist judges against liberal activist alternatives. Now, however, my fear is that Republicans may have shifted their stand, seeking to nominate activist conservative judges. Leaving no one at all in Washington to support a constitutional separation of powers.
Its never surprising to see Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake or Texas Congressman Ron Paul voting against pork, they are pretty consistent libertarians in their vote. However, I have only just begun to follow my own Phoenix-area Congressman John Shadegg. I was pleased to see that he stood up to considerable pressure and opposed the recent pork-filled Highway bill.
Of late, I have felt used by the Republican party, who put on small-government clothes to entice libertarians like me but who have generally abandoned all spending restraint now that they are in the majority.
The Arizona Republic noted today:
In a historic move, the Citizens Clean Elections Commission voted
Thursday to oust state Rep. David Burnell Smith from office for
overspending his public campaign limits by more than $6,000.
The 5-0 vote marks the first time in the United States that a
legislator has been ordered to forfeit his office for violating a
publicly financed election system.
I don't know anything about Mr. Smith, so I don't know if I would agree with any of his politics or not -- I suspect though that he and I would not see eye to eye on a number of issues. This case nevertheless leaves me with mixed feelings.
On one side, Mr. Smith signed on to the clean elections program (he doesn't have to) and accepted public funding, and thereby accepted spending limits. He was obviously sloppy (as a minimum) in his accounting, or at worst flaunted the restrictions.
However, on the opposite side, I hate this type of campaign law. I don't like any restrictions on spending, which equate to limitations on first amendment speech rights. I don't even like voluntary programs like this, because they use public money - read that as MY money - to finance candidates and viewpoints that I don't necessarily agree with. In these voluntary programs, candidates are effectively being offered a publicly funded bribe to waive their first amendment rights, as argued in this suit. I don't like seeing this next step in the arms race to limit political speech. The ability of an unelected commision of busybodies and nitpickers to actually invalidate free elections and toss out elected officials merely because they used $6000 too much free speech is scary. Would anyone in their right mind wish to grant this power to the FEC?
By the way, the language in the Republic article is funny, and shows their bias in this. Note this line, emphasis added:
The commission's vote comes after three months of scrutiny in what has
been billed as the biggest test for Arizona's popular but controversial
system of taxpayer-funded political campaigns.
Here is a hint: whenever a reporter calls a program "popular", it means that it is a program that the reporter or the paper's editorial staff supports. It does not mean that they have polling data backing up this claim. Don't believe me? Then note this line from the same article:
Some commissioners admitted they were reluctant to attempt to overturn
the wishes of voters in a legislative district but said it was more
important to uphold the wishes of the state's voters, who narrowly
approved the Clean Elections initiative in 1998.
Ahh, so this "popular" program was only "narrowly approved". In fact, I looked it up. Smith won his election by a far larger margin of victory than did the Clean Elections initiative. Should the AZ Republic be calling him the "popular" legislator?
Ryan Sager has interesting revelations in the NY Post about who supported Campaign Finance "Reform". There is not a lot of confirmation yet on his story, though he has transcripts from some interesting insider speeches linked.
I bet every one of the groups who financed this effort and that Mr. Sager lists would piously swear that they are supporters of civil rights and the first amendment. It is interesting to see the hypocrisy in their assault on political speech.
Over the last 10 years, it certainly appears that the stakes have been raised substantially in judicial nominations, to the point that the approval of federal judges seems to be the number one issue in front of the Senate, even ahead of matters like Social Security reform or tax policy. Sure, in the 80's we had some high-profile confirmation battles (e.g. Bork, Thomas), but those were for the Supreme Court and might be narrowly interpreted as revolving around issues of abortion and perhaps affirmative action. Certainly both sides of the abortion debate are gearing up to duke it out over Supreme Court nominations, but most of the current brouhaha in the Senate is over lower level appointments that can't reasonably be interpreted as having much influence on abortion. So something else must be going on.
To understand what this "something else" is, I want to digress a bit into the analogy of campaign finance (yes, its analogous). I won't conceal the fact that I think that the most recent round of campaign finance "reform" has been a disastrous infringement on first amendment rights, the implications of which are only just coming to the surface. However, my opinion of it is irrelevant to the analogy. While proponents of campaign spending restrictions point to the "corrupting influence" of large sums of money in the election process, what no one ever mentions, though, is why such large sums of money are being spent in the first place. It is this latter issue on which I want to focus.
The reason that politics have become so high-stakes, at least in dollar terms, is because the government controls so much more of the economy and our lives. A century ago, the federal government had the power to raise and lower tariffs, and some limited control of the money supply, and occasionally gave out land grants to new railroads, and that was about it. Today the government can tax an individual or corporation six or seven different ways, determines how much you must pay your employees, controls much of the health care system, holds product design or pricing approval authority for many industries, controls access to critical raw materials, etc etc. If the government decides it does not like a particular person or industry, it can charge it with billions in extra costs in taxes -- or if it finds an industry politically expedient, it can pump it up with billions in subsidies. Every year, the government takes literally trillions of dollars from one unfavored class of citizen and gives it to a more politically favored class.
With stakes this high, it is no wonder that more and more people are willing to pay more and more money to let their voice be heard in the political process. Greater amounts of money flowing into politics is not a sign of a broken democracy, but just its opposite. More political spending means more money spent on speech, which in turn results from more people trying to add their voice to the political process more intensely. Rather than deal with the root cause, the growing power of government to arbitrarily transfer wealth, the country instead lurches from one half-assed attempt at political speech control to another.
So here is where I am going with this analogy. Today, it increasingly appears to people that the process for approving Presidential judge nominations in the Senate is broken. The opposition party, first with some tentative steps by Republicans under Clinton and then with wholesale defiance by Democrats under Bush, are increasingly making the appointment of judges tremendously contentious. I would argue though, as with campaign finance, that the problem is not with the process, but with the changing power of judges. Over the last 30 years, judges have increasingly gone beyond interpreting and applying law to creating new law on their own, a power that is as constitutionally unjustified as it is unchecked.
To understand this, lets first start with an example of what I would consider appropriately constitutional behavior by judges. This is an example from a case brought against the Bush Administration, demanding the release of terrorist suspects the administration has held indefinitely. The Bush administration argued that the war on terrorism was different from other crimes, and that it required an enhanced ability to indefinitely intern suspects. The US District judge in the case disagreed, and note particularly the language he uses (emphasis added):
U.S. District Judge Henry F. Floyd ruled Monday that the president of the United States does not have the authority to order Jose Padilla to be held indefinitely without being charged.
"If the law in its current state is found by the president to be insufficient to protect this country from terrorist plots, such as the one alleged here, then the president should prevail upon Congress to remedy the problem," he wrote.
I can find no more perfect example of a judge appropriately fulfilling his constitutional role. For him, the necessity or merit of being able to hold terrorist suspects without charges is IRRELEVANT to him. Judge Sweet might well consider holding suspects without charges in these cases to be the most necessary thing in the world, or alternately the most reprehensible. But his job is not to decide if such a power SHOULD exist, his job is to decide if such a power DOES exist. And he says it does not -- and to call the legislature if you want one, because it is their job to create new law.
Unfortunately, there is a growing theory of jurisprudence that creates an expanded role for judges. In this theory, judges are empowered to act sort-of as the institutional Dali lama, the wise person who descends from the mountain from time to time to correct moral lapses made by legislatures. If you are a Star Trek fan, think of this theory placing judges in the role of the Organians, parachuting into human affairs from time to time to correct moral problems. As Justice Scalia put it in a recent decision:
The Court thus proclaims itself sole arbiter of our Nation's moral standards, and in the course of discharging that awesome responsibility purports to take guidance from the views of foreign courts and legislatures.
The problem with this theory is two-fold. First, it calls for making judges the rulers in a benevolent dictatorship, for there really are no checks on judges elected for life who suddenly have the power to create new law. Sure, the notion of a benevolent dictatorship of people with strong moral compasses has been a compelling notion to some through the centuries, but it never works and always ends up getting abused. Which leads us to the second problem with the theory, which is that there is no constitutional basis for judges creating new law, nor would the power-paranoid writers of our Constitution ever have allowed it.
Now, you may be thinking me paranoid to think of judges as taking on the power to write law. I offer proof in two parts. First, doesn't the exponentially higher stakes and greater attention today in approving judge appointments point to the fact that judges somehow have more power than they had a few decades ago? Second, lets look at an example.
I covered this one in this post on media privilege, and quoted from the NY Time editorial:
[Judge Robert Sweet] explained that the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York recognized a qualified First Amendment privilege that protects reporters from being compelled to disclose their confidential sources
Judge Sweet defended the existence of this privilege by saying:
he took note of the important role of confidential sources in news investigations of the Watergate, Iran-contra, Monica Lewinsky and Abu Ghraib scandals
Do you see the difference from Judge Floyd's opinion above. In this case, the Judge does express his opinion, that confidential sourcing has played an "important role" in unwinding a number of political scandals. He uses this as a justification to create a privilege for reporters to conceal evidence and ignore subpoenas from a federal investigation. Recognize, as background, that whatever shield law for reporters that may exist in your state, there is NO press shield law allowing concealment of sources at the Federal level. And, the First Amendment itself only says:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I don't see anything in that text that implies that the press can legally get away with obstructing justice while other citizens not in the press, like Martha Stewart, go to jail for obstructing justice. Now, you might think that the press should have such a privilege. Heck, I might in fact support some type of privilege. But the fact is that right now, it does not exist under the law and judge Sweet should have given judge Floyd's answer, which I can't resist paraphrasing:
If the law in its current state is found to be insufficient to protect the media in doing valuable work, then the press should prevail upon Congress to remedy the problem
Now I am sure that I am vulnerable here to Constitutional scholars saying that I am a neophyte to Constitutional Law and I don't understand the chain of court decisions that lead to, in the case above, the press privilege precedent. I have two responses to this. First, I am tired of Constitutional Law being made into this arcane specialty where only a few experts can participate in the discussion, like Jesuits arguing about some arcana of a papal encyclical. The Constitution is a very short and straight-forward document. Anyone can understand it, and should. I don't need 10 years of legal training and a piece of paper from the state bar to tell me that I see nothing about hiding information from police investigations in the First Amendment (heck, there are only 50 words there - where can it be hiding?)
My second response is specifically aimed at the chain-of-precedent reasoning for so many of the new rights and privileges that seem to be created nowadays. Of course, precedent is critical in making law work - Common Law is all precedent and even in our constitutional system, relying on precedent saves a lot of rework (e.g. the Supreme court already decided this case X way so until they revisit it, we will follow that precedent).
However, something else seems to happen in this chain. Have you ever taken an original document, and Xeroxed it, and then made a copy of the copy, and then a copy of the copy of the copy, etc. through 10-20 generations? What happens? Typically somewhere along the way, some small flaw or spot on the machine causes a spot to appear on the copy. As the copy is copied through successive generations, the spot grows and begins to stand out, until it is just as much a part of the document as the original text. The spot, however, is an artifact that is reinforced through generations, like kids repeating a mistake in the game telephone. That is what some of these court decisions feel like to me. How did the NY circuit court find a press privilege - well, someone found a very very limited privilege out of thin air years ago, and then another judge used that as a precedent for expanding the privilege, until it is set in concrete today. Just like the document experts in the CBS memo fraud want to get hold of originals of the documents to remove all the artifacts of copying to make the best decision on authenticity, so I in turn wish that courts would sometimes set aside all those intervening layers of other judges' decisions and just go back to the original damn document and work straight from the Constitution.
Liberals and some libertarians support have supported this theory of jurisprudence to date because to a large extent many of their causes have been net beneficiaries. And, if history teaches anything, trashing constitutional controls to achieve near-term policy goals nearly always comes back to haunt those who do it. I understand the temptation -- for example, I oppose the death penalty for minors, and left the recent Supreme Court decision on the death penalty out of this post because I thought it a reasonable role for the Court to reinterpret "cruel and unusual". But others, including Professor Bainbridge whose work I like a lot, and Justice Scalia whom he quotes, would argue that I am letting a favorable outcome blind me to the same problem of courts writing law.
Postscript: You may have noticed I did not mention Roe v. Wade. In fact, I tend to avoid abortion issues like the plague. In part this is because I have friends that are strongly, perhaps even radically pro-choice and friends who are strongly, perhaps even radically ant-abortion. Like a lot of Americans, I believe that a fetus is not a human life at conception plus one day and it is very definitely a human life to be protected at birth minus one day, and I worry a lot where the dividing line is in the middle between life and non-life. However, I will make two comments in the context of this post about Roe v. Wade that I think are fairly belief-neutral:
As a long-time student of the marketing craft, it is interesting for me to look at politics sometimes as a marketplace of ideas, and running for office as a marketing activity. Though I don't want to overplay the notion of packaging over content in politics, you can find a number of historical examples where good communication helped turn the ideological tide.
Also, being a libertarian sometimes gives me the ability to sit on the sidelines and see the left-right struggles in this country from the outside, possibly with a bit of perspective, since my team isn't really even on the field.
From this perspective, conservatives have really been running up the score on liberals of late. This is an outcome I cheer when it leads to freer markets and lament when it leads to broadcast censorship.
A lot of ink and electrons have been used up of late trying to diagnose the reason for this success and what the Left can do to even the score. Rather than comment on this, I will offer the following as a marketing case study. Forget whether you agree with everything that is said, but think of each piece as marketing for the left or the right. I was struck by the contrast of these two articles in part because they came from the same publication, and in part because they touch on many similar themes but in totally different ways:
Which product is more compelling to the average American? Of course, neither can represent the diversity of either side of the spectrum, but through all the political noise in this country, I think each represents the tone and message that is actually filtering through to voters. If one side want to claim "but that's not fair... that's not the message we intended for voters to hear" --- well, welcome to marketing.
By the way, I wrote a piece based on Mr. Morford's here.
Steven Malanga has a fascinating analysis of electoral politics in big cities (via reason):
The electoral activism of this New New Left coalition--public-employee unions, hospitals and health-care worker unions, and social-services agencies--has reshaped the politics of many cities. As the country's national political scene has edged rightward, thwarting their ambitions in Washington, these groups have turned their attention to urban America, where they still have the power to influence public policy.
In New York, this public employee coalition makes up a third of the work force and an even larger portion of the voters in the last election.
An exit poll conducted by City Journal of the 2001 New York mayoral election found that private-sector workers heavily backed Michael Bloomberg, the businessman candidate who had been endorsed by Rudy Giuliani and had run on a pledge of no new taxes (which he broke after his first year in office), while those who worked in the public/health-care/social-services sectors favored his Democratic opponent, who ran on a promise of raising taxes to fund further services. In the race, Bloomberg won among private-sector voters by 17 percentage points, while the Democrat won by 15 points among those who worked in the public/nonprofit sectors
Read it all.
Several months ago in this post, I pointed out that the income tax system has become so "progressive" that:
Half of the people in this country pay more than 100% of the personal income taxes. The other half get, as a group, a free ride (though there are individuals in this group that pay paxes, net, as a group, they do not). We are basically at the point in this country where 51% of voters could vote themselves all kinds of new programs and benefits knowing that the other 49% have to pay for them.
Malanga's article points out the other side of the coin. We are also increasingly approaching the point where, at last in certain urban centers, half the workers can vote themselves government jobs (and pay raises, pensions, etc) at the expense of the other part of the population.
Arizona has a history of producing some fairly libertarian politicians, and our Congressman Jeff Flake fits that mold. Via the Club for Growth, Flake points out some more egregious pork:
Washington, D.C. - Arizona Congressman Jeff Flake, who represents the state's Sixth District, today highlighted another pork project contained in the massive omnibus spending bill that Congress passed late last year. This week's egregious earmark: $1.5 million for a demonstration project to transport naturally chilled water from Lake Ontario to Lake Onondaga.
Perhaps, as reported here at Arizona Watch. Symington would certainly make politics more interesting around here for a while.
