Political Design

❄ re Corporations Are People

2011-12-17T06:08:00.000-08:00

US Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent-Vermont) proposes an amendment to the US Constitution to reverse effects of the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the Citizen’s United case. Sander’s remarks to the Senate and the full text of proposed Amendment are at

http://sanders.senate.gov/petition/?uid=f1c2660f-54b9-4193-86a4-ec2c39342c6c

NOTES

[Political Design 2011.12.17. Post A35 Preliminary [To be expanded]. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ Democracy Vouchers

2011-11-20T12:09:00.001-08:00

Lawrence Lessig proposes [Note 1] addressing the problem of money in US politics by instituting ‘democracy vouchers’. Here’s how they would work:

“ ... we could adopt a system of small-dollar public funding for Congress.
“Here’s just one way: almost every voter pays at least $50 in some form of federal taxes. So imagine a system that gave a rebate of that first $50 in the form of a ‘democracy voucher.’ That voucher could then be given to any candidate for Congress who agreed to one simple condition: the only money that candidate would accept to finance his or her campaign would be either ‘democracy vouchers’ or contributions from citizens capped at $100. ... ”

The Question

Lessig’s option addresses the supply question. [Candidates declining the terms for ‘democracy vouchers’ risk being penalized at the polls.] But it doesn’t deal with the demand problem. Candidates would still need money—and loophole-exploiting ‘friends’ or ‘issue-focused’ fronts—to compete. So: good as far as it goes. The next question. How could we, following Lessig’s spirit, wholly suppress big money?

NOTES

[Note 1]: Lawrence Lessig, “More Money Can Beat Big Money,” The New York Times, 17 November 2011.

[Political Design 2011.11.20. Post A34. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ What We Know [II]:

2011-08-10T08:22:00.000-07:00

❄ The Republican Party’s Nullification Project

Bruce D. Larkin

❄ PART 1: INTRODUCTION

Links in this note:

[1] This introduction
[2] A reprise of my post in 2004
[3] Between 2004 and 2011
[4] Links to the eight PLAIN TALK posts of 2011; and
[5] Concluding Remarks.
Footnotes

The Republican Party, over the last twenty years, has fallen on hard times, been captured by garage bands, become a dissonant orchestra, led by mad conductors. John McCain, the Republican standard-bearer of 2008, in 2011 described the right-wing ideological stand during the debt ceiling negotiations as ‘bizarro’. But if you listen carefully, behind the cacophony you can discern some common rhythms. Republican strategy appears orchestrated. To what end?

The Republican aim is nothing less than to capture—and whenever in the minority, to undermine, obstruct and diminish—the US Constitutional system of governance. It is a nullification project. It amounts to an attempted coup d’etat, albeit in the guise of normal politics. In some respects it is a ‘soft coup’, a ‘quiet coup’, in that no physical violence, no military seizure, is contemplated. This is not Seven Days in May. But the object is as thoroughgoing dismantlement of civic politics as was achieved by the once-upon-a-time militaries of banana republics, overthrowing democratic governance by force.

A nullification project. Unlike the lawyerly calls for nullification—states’ declaring Federal laws unconstitutional—in the decades before and after the Civil War, this nullification project takes the form of political war against Federal political institutions. Citizens are the losers. The model for this nullification project is urban guerrilla war. More colorfully (even if the underlying story is apocryphal) it calls to mind workers’ throwing their wooden shoes, their sabots, into the machines of job-threatening industrialisation. Sabotage.

Of course, Republican Party voices would insist that this charge is outrageous. They would point to electoral successes, at the state and federal levels; to the historical legacy of their name; to the American commitment to a two-party system; to their professed dedication to the Constitution; and to declared policy objectives around which they have woven cloaks of plausibility.

Is calling this ‘nullification’ outrageous? In 1998 Hillary Clinton, prompted by tactics used to entangle Bill Clinton in what became an impeachment effort, famously declared that there was a “vast right-wing conspiracy” afoot. [Note 1] A favorite of the Republican Party, Grover Norquist, champion of the policy of ‘No New Taxes!’, said of government that “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.”[Note 2] Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick: “the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless.”[Note 3] And as the Great Extortion unfolded in the summer of 2011, Paul Krugman assessed that “In the long run, however, Democrats won’t be the only losers. What Republicans have just gotten away with calls our whole system of government into question. After all, how can American democracy work if whichever party is most prepared to be ruthless, to threaten the nation’s economic security, gets to dictate policy? And the answer is, maybe it can’t.”[Note 4] The New York Times came to a similarly pessimistic view, concluding editorially that “this episode demonstrates the effectiveness of extortion. Reasonable people are forced to give in to those willing to endanger the national interest.”[Note 5]

Let me be clear what I am not charging. I don’t believe that there is a secret cabal, meeting in some darkened room or in a boat offshore on one of the Great Lakes. I dislike conspiracy theories, which are almost always far from the mark. To repeat my contention: “The Republican aim is nothing less than to capture—and whenever in the minority, to undermine, obstruct and diminish—the US Constitutional system of governance. It is a nullification project.” Distill Republican initiatives, obstructions, false premises and lies: what is left is an assault on the Republic and on civic politics. That is the sense in which I speak of coup d’etat. They have declared Government the enemy, neglecting that it is the people’s government that they denounce. They seek nullification in a new guise but on a grand scale.

Unfortunately, Republican actions have practical consequences. The Tea Republicans can act in ignorance, recklessly, as their 2011 abuse of the debt ceiling, threatening the stability of both US and global economic performance, keenly illustrates.

Links:

[1] Introduction
[2] A reprise of my post in 2004
[3] Between 2004 and 2011
[4] Links to the eight PLAIN TALK posts of 2011; and
[5] Concluding Remarks.
Footnotes

It is only to keep this note short that I have not incorporated the full texts of the PLAIN TALK posts. Please exercise the links when you come to them in Part 4.

After Writing the Introduction I Saw This New York Times Editorial:

EDITORIAL
Race to the Right
Published: August 6, 2011

It is far too simplistic to blame the loose coalition of Republicans known as the Tea Party for the debt-limit debacle. It was not the Tea Party fringe of the Republican Party that dragged the economy to the brink — it was its center. The party has moved so far to the right that there is little difference between fringe and mainstream.

Through a combination of fear and fervor, Republican leaders in Congress and in the presidential campaign have lined up behind a radical new strategy in which all major decisions are made under threat — to shut the government in April, to implode the economy in July, to cut off money for the Federal Aviation Administration in August. Party leaders have said they will do this again and again, in perpetuity.

The Tea Party did not come up with this strategy. Although several of its elected members said they would never vote to raise the debt ceiling, it was John Boehner, the House speaker, who in May devised the fatal formula that President Obama would have to agree to cut more from spending than the amount of the debt-limit increase. This nonsense finally won the day. (Mr. Boehner was pilloried by Tea Party branches for raising the debt limit at all.)

In the House, there are only 60 members of the Tea Party caucus, and they were hardly a monolithic bloc. Last Monday, 32 of them supported the final debt deal and 28 voted against. To understand the Republican Party in the House, it is better to consider the Republican Study Committee, 176 fiscal hard-liners who make up two-thirds of the entire caucus (including many of the Tea Party members). Its chairman, Jim Jordan of Ohio, was one of the biggest obstacles to a deal and refused to support it.

It is this larger group that Mr. Boehner and his lieutenants fear the most. The Tea Party alone could not topple the speaker. But the Republican core could.

This rightward flood tide has also picked up most of the Republican presidential field. Considering what a clear triumph the final bill was for the Republicans, cutting $2.4 trillion in spending without a dime of new tax revenue, at least a few candidates would logically have supported it. Only Jon Huntsman, however, has spoken up for it. The rest said they found it insufficiently ruthless, fearing a primary loss if they seemed the slightest bit soft.

Mitt Romney took a stand, against the bill, only after it was adopted. He complained that it requires a committee that might possibly cut defense spending and recommend higher taxes, though the latter is very unlikely. He did not deny the possibility of a catastrophic default, as Michele Bachmann did, but had no ideas to offer about averting it without this deal. That is what it means to stand at the center of a party that would rather exploit threats than worry about their consequences. [Note 6]

PART 2:
❄ A REPRISE OF POSTS OF 2004

Imagine: It is 2004 and GW Bush is Running for Reelection

In September 2004 I posted an entry on this blog titled “What We Know.”[Note 7] Regrettably, it is prelude to this post. A good way to approach today’s entry would be to click on “What We Know” and read those comments. Many concern the Iraq War, because it was at the heart of Cheney-Bush policy but never convincingly explained. For convenience I’ll recapitulate the headings of “What We Know” here, but only the headings:

❶ 9.11 took place on GW Bush’s watch.

❷
GW Bush has squandered America’s reputation for law, decency, and collaboration with allies, and squandered the sympathetic good will which flowed to America after 9.11.

❸ Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere, the White House practiced torture—and may still.

❹; GW Bush won Congress’s 10-11 October 2002 Iraq war authorization by claiming there were threats to the United States which did not exist.

❺ The White House deliberately prevented the UN inspectors from finishing their work in Iraq.

❻ The 19 March 2003 attack on Iraq launched a ‘war of choice’, not a war of necessity.

❼ The GW Bush war on Iraq is an illegal war.

❽ Then—unsound ‘necessity’ and illegality aside—the war launched on 19 March 2003 was misconceived, a grotesque blunder of imagination, driven by senior officials now shown to have had no sense of Iraqi society, no sense how an invader and occupier would be greeted. In short, this was the work of ignorant men, and women, striving to impose their illusions on others in the name of desire.

❾ GW Bush and Cheney-Rumsfeld policies [with respect to Israel and the Middle East] are in salient respects similar to those of Israeli Likudists, crippling any chance that the United States be a credible voice for democracy in the Middle East.

❿ The White House is drawn magnetically to coercion and intimidation and secrecy, in ways and to degrees that threaten American constitutional freedoms and liberties.

These 10 points of 2004 reflect America’s preoccupation at that time with 9.11 and the Iraq War. Five months before “What We Know [I]” was posted the country was rocked by the Abu Ghraib disclosures and the revelation that on 6 August 2001—five weeks before 9.11—GW Bush was shown his Presidential Daily Brief prominently warning of Al Qaeda’s intention to attack US interests [Note 9] ... and did nothing. In this “What We Know [II]” I begin by pointing out that the Republican Party has failed to acknowledge the calamity of its policies under ‘Dick’ Cheney and GW Bush, the effects of which remain as threats to reasoned and accountable governance. The Republican Party machinery—policies and persons—were discredited by their own actions, but Republicans, largely the same figures who offered pablum and lies during the Cheney-Bush era, would now have us believe that they should be serious contenders for national office and the governance of America.

PART 3:
❄ BETWEEN 2004 AND 2011

The Unrenounced Legacies of ‘Dick’ Cheney and GW Bush

So what has become of the understandings of our circumstances in 2004, understandings that dominated our judgment of the Republican Party? In this section I will thicken our sense of what we know today.

❶ The 9.11 attacks.

Since the morning of September 11th, 2001, neither the Cheney-Bush administration nor the Republican Party have acknowledged any responsibility for the failure to prevent the 9.11 attacks. But it was a failure ‘on their watch’. And there are at least three good reasons to believe that they could, and should, have been more alert, alert to the possibility of an outrage emanating from Al Qaeda, and alert to the specific possibility of the seizure of aircraft.

First: In December 2000, during the transition from the Clinton to the Cheney-Bush presidency, Condoleezza Rice was vividly introduced to the threat of terrorism, and by reports took in the seriousness of the threat.[Note 8] Second: We have the 6 August 2001 President’s Daily Brief, with its headline “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”[Note 9]

Why should the White House have known of the possibility that aircraft would be seized? Any person charged with responsibility for counter-terrorism or preventing an attack on US interests would be keenly and intimately familiar with the details of the Manila air plot (‘Bojinka’ plot).[Note 10]

❷ Iraq War.

I’ve posted a chronological survey, with key cite and text references, as the page ‘The United States and the Iraq War 2003’ reachable via http://www.gcdd.net/.[Note 11] Here I’ll just remind ourselves of key Republican Party gifts to the American people.

[1] The Iraq War, an illegal war, was a ‘war of choice’. Iraq posed no threat to the United States. It was a ‘war of aggression’. Within the domain of the ‘legalist paradigm’, as Michael Walzer has explained it,[Note 12] the Iraq war was neither a response to attack nor otherwise justified. Asked by the BBC whether the Iraq War was “illegal”, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said “I have indicated it is not in conformity with the UN Charter, from our point of view, and from the Charter point of view it was illegal.”[Note 13]

[2] The Cheney-Bush administration won approval for the war on three grounds: [a] that Iraqi WMD posed a threat to the United States, [b] that Iraq was somehow complicit in the 9.11 attacks, and [c] that the Saddam Hussein government, because it was evil, should be removed (‘regime change’). There was uncertainty and speculation but no evidence of WMD, and no evidence of 9.11 complicity. All the king’s horses could not put this together into UN Security Council assent to war.

[3] Israeli leaders publicly urged the United States to war against Iraq.[Note 14]

[4] The White House obtained Congressional authorization to war against Iraq more than five months before beginning the war. That means that there was five months in which to demand evidence anchoring White House claims, but evidence—as distinguished from unprovable claims—was neither required nor supplied.[Note 15]

[5] Cheney-Bush refused to permit UNSCOM and the IAEA to complete their inspections, which would have shown that the claim of a WMD threat was unfounded.

[6] The war was extraordinarily costly, in lives, in US monies, and to Iraqi society.

❸ Guantanamo.

Holding prisoners in Guantanamo not as prisoners of war, without charges, subject to harassment and interrogation that many judge to have been torture, and for some indefinite duration, contradicted America’s commitment to the rule of law.

Guantanamo was chosen, as it is outside the United States, so that prisoners could not avail themselves of US courts and due process.

Has Guantanamo been ‘unrenounced’ by the Republican leadership? Although they cornered Democrats in Congress by forcing a vote on the issue before the 2008 election, so that opposition to closure has a bipartisan veneer, blocking closure and so denying Obama a political victory is written on Republican cue cards. In the colorful argot of the day the Republican Party ‘owns’ Guantanamo and all it stands for.[Note 16]

❹ Torture, unacknowledged ‘black prisons’ abroad, ‘extraordinary rendition’, extrajudicial assassination.

And the most horrific enormity symbolized by Guantanamo is torture.

Under the euphemism ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ Cheney-Bush authorized what is widely understood as torture (although that characterization is rejected by Republican Party apologists), some means used at Guantanamo, some elsewhere. Techniques included waterboarding, subjecting prisoners to painful positions, cold, sleep deprivation, threatening with dogs, and strange sexual insults. That US personnel were practicing these measures on prisoners was revealed in spring 2004, as photographs taken by US guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were made public.[Note 17]

More facts have come out over time, but the classic articles on black prisons and ‘extraordinary rendition’ are those of the journalists who first exposed the practices, especially Dana Priest in the Washington Post.[Note 18] I won’t recapitulate their reports; they make out gruesome practices; and although one might think it an easy and uncomplicated moral choice to regret those practices, those with ties to the Cheney-Bush world have, with few exceptions, failed to make themselves heard.[Note 19] As late as November 2007 Republican presidential candidates Giuliani, Romney and Thompson “embraced some of the more controversial policies on the treatment of those suspected of supporting terrorism, backing harsh interrogation methods and refusing to rule out the use of waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, on detainees.”[Note 20]

❺ The ‘War on Terrorism’, Al Qaeda, and Afghanistan.

Cheney-Bush seem to have been bent on the ‘War on Terrorism’, which established Bush as a war president and was used to justify any number of extraordinary measures. It did not matter to the Republican Party that it isn’t possible to conduct a war against a tactic, or a disposition to use force.

Few objected to finding the perpetrators of 9.11 and preventing them from undertaking any further outrage. Oddly, Cheney-Bush chose to shift resources from Afghanistan to Iraq. Iraq was unrelated to the 9.11 attacks. Cheney-Bush had had their eyes on the prospect of war in Iraq from the time they took office in January 2001.

Both wars have seared the 2000s, with malign effects on the US economy, military, and standing.

❻ The Great Recession:

Failure to exercise regulatory authority, leading to near-collapse of the housing market and banking, economic distress, and large-scale unemployment.

A number of economists and financial journalists have already published accounts to explain the onset of the Great Recession. After cutting through the underbrush I find four practices which might not have endangered the system if undertaken on a small scale, but which were instead pursued relentlessly and on a widening scale. Mortgages were written, for sums and on terms that promised growing default. Mortgages were ‘bundled’ into ‘collateralised debt obligations’ (CDOs) (and chancy loans were in many cases described as of high quality. New types of bonds were devised, called ‘synthetic CDOs’, of exotic underlying collateral, about which there was limited understanding. Then the buyers of CDOs protected themselves by buying insurance (‘credit default swaps’)—many of which were sold by financial institutions that never expected to be called to make up losses. In short, overextension, ignorance, hidden weakness, speculation, trip-levers and inability to meet obligations when called combined to threaten the entire imaginary structure.

Both Democrats and Republicans must share blame for dismantling the Glass-Steagall barriers to economic breakdown, barriers instituted in response to the Depression of the 1930s [Note 21] and abandoned for ‘deregulation’ in the 1990s. But there remained a regulatory regime, including the Securities and Exchange Commission. Were its powers employed effectively during the Cheney-Bush administration? Evidently not. The gravity of the Great Recession became clear when Lehman Brothers collapsed on 15 September 2008, but its signs had been growing through GW Bush’s last two years. The Great Recession has proven the most consequential of the Cheney-Bush legacies to Barack Obama. By the time the Cheney-Bush White House died, on 20 January 2009, its accounts were deeply in arrears, its house in disorder, and desperate economic futures in store for tens of millions of Americans.

❼ Surveillance and abuse of Fourth Amendment protections against ‘unreasonable search and seizure’.

During the Cheney-Bush residence there was unprecedented expansion of White House power to intercept communications, revealing people’s actions and expressed thoughts. Exactly how far these capabilities were extended, and to what extent they have been carried on or even grown during the Obama Administration, we do not know: there has been no public admission just what is done.

First, recall ‘national security letters’. One among the many provisions of the ‘Patriot Act’ of 2001, passed in Congress in response to 9.11 but bundling law enforcement wish-lists of the previous decade, established ‘national security letters’ enabling the FBI to compel access to ‘papers’ without judicial review, and incorporating (in its initial form) the power to forbid persons to whom the ‘letter’ was directed not to reveal, not to their lawyer, or even to the owner of those papers, that they had been obtained. Subsequent revisions, responding to criticism, have modified the original texts but both ‘national security letters’ and a nondisclosure provision (which critics call a ‘gag order’) remain.

Second, prompted by the language of the Fourth Amendment, is about the test of ‘reasonableness’ in listening to, or reading, the communications of specific targeted individuals. Arguments in this strand often take the form of claiming that a target’s membership in some designated group—non-citizen, being abroad, ‘suspected of terrorism’—exempts the US government from Fourth Amendment obligations, or permits them to be met by some ‘reasonable’ method.

The Fourth Amendment states: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Third—the least well understood—is to what extent domestic telephone and Net traffic is subject to routing through US intelligence agencies and, to the extent it is, just what is collected, how it is associated with individuals, to what extent it is shared, and whether and subject to what controls it may be retained. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau’s 2005 article title implies what was not known, though some suspected: “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts.”[Note 22] Risen later summed it up: “For the first time since the Watergate-era abuses, the N.S.A. is spying on Americans again, and on a large scale. The Bush administration has swept aside nearly 30 years of rules and regulations and has secretly brought the N.S.A. back into the business of domestic espionage.”[Note 23]

The horrors of 9.11 made it difficult for any advocates of the Constitutional protection against unreasonable search and seizure to successfully resist extensions of authority, which were championed by the White House and the Republican Party.

❽ Refusal to address—or even acknowledge—the threat of climate change. And, more generally, dismissal of evidence and disrespect for scientific method and judgment.

We now know that the Cheney-Bush administration suppressed science-based judgments that were out of tune with its ideological dispositions. How do we know that? See Seth Shulman’s Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration, which draws these threads together with great respect for evidence.[Note 24]

❾ Attempt to shrink Social Security.

The Great Recession had two profound effects for savings—and therefore for the income on which retirees planned to depend. Monies in cash deposits, to earn perhaps 4% or 5% interest, saw interest rates fall toward zero. Monies invested in the stock market vanished: values fell, and in some cases fell precipitately.[Note 25] Retirees’ Social Security and ‘defined benefit’ pensions were largely intact; but retirees dependent on their investments, or on ‘defined contribution’ pensions, were hurt, and if they had made unwise or unlucky investments were savaged. [A ‘defined contribution pension’ is actually just a set-aside, though resultant income may benefit from favorable tax provisions, and the monies could be conservatively invested.] For retirees the consequences were dashed expectations and, for some, financial tragedy.

It’s in this context that Republican efforts to shift retirees’ money from Social Security into privately-held investments must be remembered. Do not forget these claims:

27 February 2001:

[Social Security] must offer personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them.

Social Security now offers workers a return of less than 2 percent on the money they pay into the system. To save the system, we must increase that by allowing younger workers to make safe, sound investments at a higher rate of return.”[Note 26]

28 February 2001:

Personal retirement accounts, which would be voluntary, would enable individuals to build financial wealth and security in a way that the current Social Security system does not. Personal accounts invested in safe private financial markets will earn higher rates of return than the traditional system and help workers enhance their personal savings and their freedom to retire. Ownership of a real financial asset without the political risk of future changes would mean more security for working Americans to build their own retirement assets, and to pass those assets on to their children.

A balanced portfolio of stocks and bonds can, in the long run, yield almost a 5.5 percent real rate of return. Even a portfolio of inflation-adjusted Government bonds yields a 3.0 percent real rate of return. Both are significantly better investments than those implicit in the current Social Security system, which, for many younger workers, could ultimately result in a negative rate of return.

This higher rate of return, through individually controlled investments in private debt and equity markets, is the key to the success of personal accounts.[Note 27]

2 May 2001:

Third, Social Security reform must offer personal savings accounts to younger workers who want them. Today, young workers who pay into Social Security might as well be saving their money in their mattresses. That's how low the return is on their contributions. And the return will only decline further -- maybe even below zero -- if we do not proceed with reform.

Personal savings accounts will transform Social Security from a government IOU into personal property and real assets; property that workers will own in their own names and that they can pass along to their children.[Note 28]

GW Bush pushed for privatization even after his reelection in 2004:

11 December 2004:

A crisis in Social Security can be averted ... we must tap into the power of compound interest, by giving younger workers the option to save some of their payroll taxes in a personal account, a nest egg they can call their own, which government cannot take away.[Note 29]

In 2008 candidate John McCain continued to flog the notion of ‘personal savings accounts’ as part of Social Security reform.[Note 30]

A site noted for non-partisan fact-checking rejected as untrue characterizing the call for ‘personal savings accounts’ as a proposal for privatization, suggesting that the fact-checker would not recognize a camel’s nose if he saw one.[Note 31]

❿ Sarah Palin.

Had Sarah Palin been elected in 2008 and had McCain then become unable to serve, the Oval Office—the entire Executive Branch—would have been in the hands of an anonymous Republican Regency.

If Reader considers Sarah Palin to be qualified to be President of the United States, I probably cannot help you.

There are more than 233,000,000 adults in the United States.[Note 32] From among how many better-qualified than Sarah Palin could the Republican Party have chosen instead?

And what does choosing Sarah Palin tell us about John McCain’s judgment? And the judgment of the Republican Party cadres? Why do they take Michelle Bachman or Tim Pawlenty seriously? How do they conceive the Presidency and the nature of problems and opportunities that a President must confront?

I’ve previously posted, in my design blog, on ways in which the Republican Party threatens civil governance in the United States.[Note 33]

PART 4:
❄ PLAIN TALK [I-VIII]

[You are now at my rant blog: http://blog.learnworld.com/ The PLAIN TALK posts are in my Political Design blog: http://design.learnworld.com If you open it in another tab of your browser, you will have the complete text of “What We Know [II]” at your fingertips.]

For complete access to the Political Design blog, click on this: http://design.learnworld.com

To go to PLAIN TALK sections, select from the following list. Use your back button to return to the list:

all PLAIN TALK from most recent [VIII] to [I]
PLAIN TALK [I]. OBSTRUCT THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [II]. SUPPRESS THE VOTE
PLAIN TALK [III]. STARVE THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [IV]. PRIVATIZE THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [V]. BUY THE REPUBLIC
PLAIN TALK [VI]. SURVEILL THE PEOPLE?
IPLAIN TALK [VII]. IMPOVERISH THE PEOPLE?
PLAIN TALK [VIII]. THE GREAT EXTORTION

PART 5:
❄ CONCLUDING COMMENT

How Do I View the Republican Party?
Tea Party, War Party, Grand Old Party

The War Party centers on those who were Party operatives before and during the Cheney-Bush era, or were shaped by that experience. Rove. Cheney himself, or his umbra. Those who succeeded in the 5-4 capture of the Supreme Court: the Federalist Society. Today this is where we could locate Beohner and McConnell.

So they are a War Party in two senses. They were advocates or go-alongs with the Iraq War and Afghanistan War of the Cheney-Bush period. They would cultivate identification with ‘national security’. But they are also at war with the Democratic Party, its base, and all those who benefit from its policies. They are at war with Nancy Pelosi and Elizabeth Warren. Some advocates for women’s issues charge them with a War on Women, and advocates for the poor with a War on the Poor. They are exclusionists: with cosmetic exceptions, their policies exclude women, African-Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, those born abroad, and every person in America who is growing a year older with each passing year.

The New York Times editorial quoted in Part 1 puts its eyes on the Republican Study Committee. The Times observed that

In the House, there are only 60 members of the Tea Party caucus, and they were hardly a monolithic bloc. Last Monday, 32 of them supported the final debt deal and 28 voted against. To understand the Republican Party in the House, it is better to consider the Republican Study Committee, 176 fiscal hard-liners who make up two-thirds of the entire caucus (including many of the Tea Party members).[Note 34]

Those who are not Tea Party members are the group I have in mind when I think of the War Party.[Note 35] But when one looks at the declared purposes of the RSC,[Note 36] it is hard to see where the line lies separating the Tea Party from the other hundred-plus RSC members—if they actually test the bills before them by the criteria the RSC presents. What I see when I read their charter documents is a view of the world devoid of any sense of community, intrusive on the freedom of the individual to work together with friends and neighbors to enhance their own prospects and the life of their their towns and cities, repelled by ‘government’ which they mischaracterize and do not understand, and dedicated to the isolation of individuals and their families in ways which leave them unprotected from economic and institutional predators. Their vague commitment to a “strong national defense” does not tell us much about how they would make hard, realistic choices. They seem to wish a calculated anarchy, one in which the military and the corporations—and perhaps the churches—are the main social forces, and government their servant.

Perhaps they believe that they and their sources of ‘Party capital’ can better capture revenue streams if the citizenry is forced to make payments to private-sector corporations—for insurance, health care, education, transportation, financial transactions, pensions—than to support public goods and public resources. How else can one explain their systematic hostility to Social Security, a system that works and is not hostage to the vagaries of manipulation by financial houses? How else can one explain their rejection of efforts to provide 30,000,000 Americans with affordable health care? Calculated anarchy is not the Republic of free men and women, building community through mutual respect, that I have thought the American adventure was undertaken to pursue.

The Republican Study Committee is a group of 175 House Republicans organized for the purpose of advancing a conservative social and economic agenda in the House of Representatives. The Republican Study Committee is dedicated to:

• a limited and Constitutional role for the federal government,
• a strong national defense,
• the protection of individual and property rights,
• and the preservation of traditional family values.

The RSC reviews each piece of legislation under consideration on the House floor using six guiding principles, printed on our "Conservative Check Card" and listed below:

1.   Less Government - Does the bill tend to reduce government regulations, size of government, or eliminate entitlements or unnecessary programs?
2. nbsp;Lower Taxes - Does the bill promote individual responsibility in spending, or reduce taxes or fees?
3.  Personal Responsibility - Does the bill encourage responsible behavior by individuals and families and encourage them to provide for their own health, safety, education, moral fortitude, or general welfare?
4.  Individual Freedom - Does the bill increase opportunities for individuals or families to decide, without hindrance or coercion from government, how to conduct their own lives and make personal choices?
5.  Stronger Families - Does the bill enhance the traditional American family and its power to rear children without excessive interference from the government?
6.  Domestic Tranquility, National Defense - Does the bill enhance American security without unduly burdening civil liberty?

The group has played a major role in key policy areas including budget, appropriations, taxes, education, Social Security reform, defense, deregulation, and general government reform. The Republican Study Committee is an independent research arm for House Republicans.[Note 37]

Perhaps the War Party consists of most of the Republicans in the House who are not member of the RSC, and a few who are. The remainder—what is left of the Grand Old Party—could be just a few dozen. Of the Senate, eight Republican senators are seeking reelection in 2012, none a Tea Party adherent; two are retiring. The others—37 by today’s count—will be closely watching whether the Tea Party’s ideology makes for winners or losers. Only three Republican senators attended the first Senate Tea Party caucus: DeMint (South Carolina), Lee (Utah), and libertarian Rand Paul (Kentucky).[Note 38]

The Tea Party draw, its appeal to people’s insecurities and inexperience, their uncertainties about their futures, rests on fear. “The bogeyman’ll get ya, if ya don’t watch out.” The seemingly bland planks of the Tea Party program—personal responsibility, individual freedom, stronger families, domestic tranquility, security—imply that government, ‘big government’, is the enemy. And it is true that unaccountable government can launch monsters, as the Iraq War and claims for the ‘unitary executive’ testify. But the government actions against which the Tea Party inveighs do not threaten to cause the harms they imply. Public schools do not make for weak families, domestic disorder, irresponsibility, or unambitious youths, nor does the Clean Air Act or the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. What the everyday Tea Party supporter may be grappling with is that it is, in fact, ‘hard to build’: that the real ‘enemy’ they are confronting in their lives is the fact that building families, households, neighborhoods, communities, and complex public and private ventures is hard work, requiring initiative and judgment, and tolerating risk, ambiguity, and failure.

And as James Fallows’ observations, quoted below, make clear as glass: you cannot, in the same breath, argue against both public debt and public revenue, unless you are an anarchist, deliberately mischievous or seriously confused. Anyone inclined to the Tea Party has an obligation to the rest of us to understand that those two aims are incompatible, irreconcilable, contradictory. The rest of the world understands this. What they cannot understand is how so many Americans have been mesmerized by Tea Party populism.

Exclusion v. Inclusion

Exclusion A dark theme runs through the Republican Party project. I don’t want to leave this note without mentioning it, though it deserves more than these few lines.

One of the most revealing questions to ask about any human project is “does this make for inclusion, or exclusion?” Inclusion in US politics and society would mean: reducing unemployment, welcoming visitors, building an accessible and affordable health care system, granting status and security to immigrants, ensuring access to education, gender equality, respecting people without regard to ‘race’, ‘ethnicity’, age, or culture, and—in the longer term—trending to less inequality of income and wealth. The Gates Foundation motto—that “every person deserves the chance to lead a healthy, productive life”[Note 39]—is a well-composed ethical stance.

So we must ask again: what does opposition to Social Security, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act mean? What does branding immigrants without status as ‘illegal immigrants’ mean? What do harsh and costly US visa requirements telegraph? What does it mean that the Tea Party and Republican Party fail to clearly reject racist and anti-foreign talk, including thinly-veiled renunciation of Barack Obama (birthplace, madrasa)?

And On a Positive Note

This note has drawn a blunt sketch of the ‘quiet coup d’etat’ being undertaken by the Republican Party. It’s a dismal picture, one which, as I noted at the outset, will be deemed outrageous by Republican agents and those with a romantic attachment to the Republican Party of once-upon-a-time. But how would I respond to the objection that this is ‘just politics’? That political parties always struggle with one another? That I have no alternative to offer?

I would respond that there is an alternative, one practiced day after day in legislative bodies around the world, in towns and villages, inside businesses large and small, and in every successful household in America. It is the alternative that, without romanticising, can be discerned in US politics of previous times. Think of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Carter. Certainly the Republican Eisenhower and the Democrat Kennedy were not gentle men. Their tactics were often tough and they fought party fights. But we can learn from them and from the Congressional legislators of their times.

How would I do it differently? Here are a few rules of thumb, maxims or guidelines for a fluid and capable political system:

¶  It is hard to build, and easy to destroy.

¶   The central term of politics is negotiation.

¶  The object of political negotiations is to find complementary projects that enable you, and your counterpart, to accomplish aims that each of you could not accomplish alone (as efficiently, as inexpensively, as quickly, as well, or at all).

¶  Quality matters. It is hard to build, and even harder to build well.

¶  Complexity demands collaboration. Big jobs, and modern skills, require working with others.

¶  Purpose matters. Finding others ready to take up a conversation about collaborating will be much easier when your purpose makes sense to them.

¶  If you use a position of advantage to force or induce your counterpart to incorporate, into his project, performances that he would not freely undertake if he were free and able to do so as part of a ‘fair deal’, you are engaged in coercive bargaining, not political negotiation.

¶  You can walk away from a proposal. But if the circumstances require that you and your counterpart come to some agreement—neither of you can simply walk away—then if you cannot come to joint language yourselves you must find an arbitrator and commit to the arbitrator’s judgment.

Afterword

This is not a ‘paper’ in an academic sense. Instead, this documents how and why I consider the Republican Party’s apparent aims and strategies to be a threat to the Republic. It is not my aim to persuade Reader that this is so, but to explain what I have seen as I come to this conclusion, and to suggest that Reader compose his or her own characterization of Republican Party dispositions and strategies. For example, Reader might say that what disturbs Larkin is nothing more than the usual ambition for power, what we should expect from politicians, ‘just politics’.

Why am I interested in this? Certainly I have a liberal interest in participation, purpose, and accountability. I prefer the ‘civic script’, as against the ‘war script’.[Note 40] Since beginning college in 1950 I’ve been a student of the war question, and in the last 30 years have been increasingly focused on the project that nuclear weapons can and should be abolished.[Note 41] There are many within the Republican Party who understand that issue much as I do—they are typically flag-bearers of the Grand Old Party—but the Republican Party as an institution has been captured by others, who by and large do not share my concern that the risks of nuclear weapons in the armories of nations are far too great to be accepted as ‘necessary’. I see their penchant for slogans and ignorance to be dangerous impediments to the denuclearization project and, therefore, a threat to the most fundamental of ‘national interests’.

As I was writing this I was sharply reminded how much some Republicans prize, and seek to protect, retention of nuclear weapons. In the immediate aftermath of the ‘debt ceiling’ crisis at the beginning of August 2011, Michael Turner (R-Ohio), chairman of the Strategic Forces Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee, speaking about the supercommittee that was tasked to find further cuts, said

I am deeply concerned about the debt panel’s ability to make unrestricted cuts. These members will be under intense pressure to find savings in areas other than entitlements. During that process, they may make cuts to essential national security programs … Any additional cuts to [the National Nuclear Security Administration] would jeopardize our nuclear deterrent, and our defense posture.[Note 42]

Addendum: White House Infographic “US National Debt”

The White House issued a chart presenting its view how the national debt had grown since 2001,[Note 43] prompting James Fallows to comment: [Note 44]

Yesterday I mentioned the New York Times chart on sources of the budget deficit, which dramatized the contradiction many House Republicans prefer not to face. As the figures demonstrated, the Bush-era tax cuts, extended last year under Obama, were the biggest single policy source of deficit increase over the past ten years. Therefore you can be for reducing deficits, or you can be for preserving the tax cuts, but you cannot rationally be for both. Even though, as I pointed out, insisting on both is the current House Republican view.

Here is another chart to the same effect, released this afternoon by the White House. It is a more comprehensive accounting of the forces that turned the large projected federal surplus as of 2001 into the large structural deficits that are dominating our politics as of 2011. Thus it attempts to explain a $12.7 trillion negative swing in public finance -- from the $2.3 trillion surplus forecast by Bill Clinton ten years ago, to the $10.4 trillion total debt Barack Obama encounters now.

The chart is more comprehensive in including not just policy changes -- deliberate adoption and extension of tax cuts, spending on TARP and other programs -- but also the effects of external pressures and shocks, mainly the recession starting in 2008. See for yourself, and click for a more detailed view.
]

----

NOTES to PART 1:

1 David Maraniss, First Lady Launches Counter-Attack,” The Washington Post, 28 January 1998.
2 This quote is widely attributed to Norquist and not, to my knowledge, denied. For example, Robert Dreyfuss, Grover Norquist: ‘Field Marshall’ of the Bush Plan,” The Nation, 14 May 2001.
3 Deval Patrick, “How Grover Norquist hypnotized the GOP,” The Washington Post, 30 June 2011. On Norquist’s pledge, see Americans for Tax Reform, “What is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge?”.
4 Paul Krugman, “The President Surrenders” The New York Times, 1 August 2011 [online 31 July 2011].
5 Editorial, “To Escape Chaos, a Terrible Deal,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011 (online 31 July 2011).
6 Editorial, The New York Times, 7 August 2011 (online 6 August 2011).

NOTES to PART 2:
7 http://blog.learnworld.com/2004_09_01_archive.html
8 Barton Gellman, “A Strategy’s Cautious Evolution—Before Sept. 11, the Bush Anti-Terror Effort Was Mostly Ambition,” The Washington Post, 20 January 2002.
9 Declassified and approved for release, 10 April 2004. See full text, below. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf

NOTES to PART 3:

9 Declassified and approved for release, 10 April 2004. See full text, below. http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/pdb8-6-2001.pdf
10 United States. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The 9/11 Commission Report.

“In 1994, KSM accompanied Yousef to the Philippines, and the two of them began planning what is now known as the Manila air or ‘Bojinka’ plot—the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jumbo jets over the Pacific during a two-day span. This marked the first time KSM took part in the actual planning of a terrorist operation.While sharing an apartment in Manila during the summer of 1994, he and Yousef acquired chemicals and other materials necessary to construct bombs and timers.They also cased target flights to Hong Kong and Seoul that would have onward legs to the United States. During this same period, KSM and Yousef also developed plans to assassinate President Clinton during his November 1994 trip to Manila, and to bomb U.S.-bound cargo carriers by smuggling jackets containing nitrocellulose on board. [Footnote 7 of original details sources. Pp. 488-489.]

“KSM left the Philippines in September 1994 and met up with Yousef in Karachi following their casing flights. There they enlisted Wali Khan Amin Shah, also known as Usama Asmurai, in the Manila air plot. During the fall of 1994,Yousef returned to Manila and successfully tested the digital watch timer he had invented, bombing a movie theater and a Philippine Airlines flight en route to Tokyo.The plot unraveled after the Philippine authorities discovered Yousef ’s bomb-making operation in Manila;”

Report, p. 147. http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report.pdf

11 http://www.gcdd.net/COURSES/DD.Doc&Study.02.US-IraqWar.pdf The survey contains key phrases and arguments and hot links to full texts.
12 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars (New York: Basic Books, 1977).
13 16 September 2004. UN News Centre. http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=11953&Cr=iraq&Cr1
14 Evidence on this point: “The Iraq War of 2003 and the Politics of Denulearization,” version of 21 October 2002, pp. 14-15. http://www.gcdd.net/TX=2003/TX.028=2003.11.11.IraqWar.pdf
15 The most elaborate display of claims to justify war was made by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in a ballyhooed appearance before the UN Security Council on 5 February 2003. After evidence came forward casting doubt on many elements of that speech, Powell was interviewed by Barbara Walters. ABC reported that “He told Walters that he feels ‘terrible’ about the claims he made in that now-infamous address—assertions that later proved to be false. When asked if he feels it has tarnished his reputation, he said, ‘Of course it will. It’s a blot. I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world, and [it] will always be a part of my record. It was painful. It’s painful now.’ ” ”Colin Powell on Iraq, Race, and Hurricane Relief,” 20/20 (ABC News). 8 September 2005. http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Politics/story?id=1105979&page=1
16 For a detailed account, see David D. Kirkpatrick and David M. Herszenhorn, “Guantánamo Closing Hands Republicans a Wedge Issue, The New York Times, 23 May 2009. Excerpts:

“Senate Democrats, who last week broke with their president to join a 90-to-6 vote against funds to close Guantánamo, faulted the White House for failing to provide political cover by reassuring the public that he had a clear plan for the prisoners. The Democrats left open the possibility of authorizing the money later this year, once Mr. Obama provides a detailed plan. …

“In July 2007, Mr. McConnell forced a vote in which even the fiercest Senate critics sided with Republicans in a 94-to-3 vote to declare that detainees should not be “transferred stateside into facilities in American communities and neighborhoods.” …

“Congressional Republican leaders, many of whom opposed closing Guantánamo all along, began strategizing about how to defeat Mr. Obama on the issue almost as soon as the campaign came to a close.”
17 A big part of the credit for bringing Abu Ghraib to public attention goes to Seymour Hersh. Seymour M. Hersh, “Torture at Abu Ghraib,“ The New Yorker, 10 May 2004. Hersh had twenty years earlier revealed the My Lai massacre, a shameful action by US personnel in Vietnam.
18 Dana Priest, “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons,” The Washington Post, 2 November 2005. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/01/AR2005110101644.html Priest won a 2006 Pulitzer Prize for her reporting on secret prisons and related issues. See also Alan Brinkley, “Black Sites,” The New York Times, 3 August 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/books/review/Brinkley-t.html , reviewing Jane Mayer, The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals (New York: Doubleday, 2008), and Jane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture: The Secret History of America’s ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ Program, The New Yorker, Feb. 14 & 21, 2005. On ‘extraordinary rendition’, see Dan Bilefsky et al, “European Inquiry Says C.I.A. Flew 1,000 Flights in Secret,” The New York Times, 27 April 2006; and Raymond Bonner, “The CIA’s Secret Torture,” New York Review of Books, 11 January 2007.
19 On exceptions that testify to the rule, see Alan Brinkley, above, who writes: “Among the most courageous opponents of the use of torture was a small group of lawyers working within the Bush administration—conservative men, loyal Republicans, who in the face of enormous pressure to go along attempted to use the law to stop what they considered a series of policies that were both illegal and immoral: Alberto Mora, the Navy general counsel, who tried to work within the system to stop what he believed were renegade actions; Jack Goldsmith, who became the head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 and sought to revoke the Yoo memo of 2002, convinced that it had violated the law in authorizing what he believed was clearly torture; and Matthew Waxman, a Defense Department lawyer overseeing detainee issues, who sought ways to stop what he believed to be illegal and dangerous policies.”
20 Marc Santora, “3 Top Republican Candidates Take a Hard Line on the Interrogation of Detainees,” The New York Times, 3 November 2007. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/03/us/politics/03torture.html “The only leading Republican candidate to condemn each of the practices outright has been Senator John McCain, a former prisoner of war who was tortured in a North Vietnamese prison.”
21 The Glass-Steagal Act (properly, the Banking Act of 1933) instituted the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and other legal measures against bank speculation and instability.
22 James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, “Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, The New York Times, 16 December 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/washington/16program.html Risen and Lichtblau were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on this subject.
23 James Bamford, quoting James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006).
24 Seth Shulman, Undermining Science: Suppression and Distortion in the Bush Administration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).
25 “It has been 513 calendar days since the stock market peaked on Oct. 9, 2007. Since then, the S.&P. 500 is down 56 percent and the Dow is off 53 percent.” Floyd Norris, Plunging Markets, Then and Now,” The New York Times, 5 March 2009. http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/05/plunging-markets-then-and-now/
26 GW Bush, address before a joint session of the Congress, 27 February 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
27 President’s Budget Plan: “A Blueprint for New Beginnings.” February 28, 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
28 GW Bush, Remarks by the President in Social Security Announcement, 2 May 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
29 GW Bush, President’s Radio Address, 11 December 2001. http://www.ssa.gov/history/gwbushstmts.html
30 Perry Bacon, Jr., “Candidates Diverge on How to Save Social Security”, The Washington Post, 8 July 2008: “McCain’s aides said he favors a bipartisan approach and is open to working with Congress on finding a solution to the long-term solvency of the New Deal-era program, indicating he could support an array of ideas such as raising the retirement age, reducing scheduled increases in benefits and allowing younger workers to put money they currently pay for Social Security taxes into personal savings accounts. President Bush floated a similar idea for private accounts in 2005, but polls found it had little public support.”
31FactCheck.org. Scaring Seniors”. 19 & 20 September 2008. “The ad also says McCain voted ‘in favor of privatizing Social Security.’ The term ‘privatizing’ could give the wrong impression. McCain does support creating government-managed accounts that would allow individuals to invest some portion of their Social Security payroll taxes in widely diversified stock or bond funds.” http://factcheck.org/2008/09/scaring-seniors/
32 US. Bureau of the Census. 2010 Census. Population 308,745,538 of which 24.3% were under 18. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
33 My blog on Political Design is at http://design.learnworld.com. Each of the posts PLAIN TALK [I] thru [VIII] linked here begins with this notice: ❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

NOTES to PART 5:

34 see [Note 6]
35 The RSC members are listed at http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/AboutRSC/Members/
36 Republican Study Committee. http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/AboutRSC/WhatIsRSC.htm
37 Ibid
38 David M. Herszenhorn, “THE TEA PARTY. Table Is Set for Three Senators,”The New York Times, 28 January 2011.
39 Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. http://www.gatesfoundation.org/about/Documents/brochure-bill-and-melinda-gates-foundation.pdf
40 Bruce D. Larkin, War Stories (Bern and New York: Peter Lang, 2001).
41 Designing Denuclearization (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008).
42 Nuclear Threat Initiative. Global Security Newswire. Martin Matishak, “Lawmakers Warn Against Cutting Nuclear Arms Modernization Fund,” 5 August 2011. A spokesman for Senator Jon Kyl (R-Arizona) replied to a question from GSN that “Senator Kyl believes that modernization of our nuclear detrrenct should be fully funded.” http://gsn.nti.org/gsn/nw_20110805_9870.php
43 White House infographic: http://www.whitehouse.gov/infographics/us-national-debt
44 James Fallows, “Another Chart That Should Accompany All Debt-Ceiling Discussions,” The Atlantic [online], 27 July 2011.

❄ PLAIN TALK [VIII]: THE GREAT EXTORTION

2011-08-07T09:14:00.001-07:00

SUNDAY, AUGUST 07, 2011
❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

There have been three major Republican initiatives since January 2010 to hold Congressional action hostage to Republican extremism. Each concerns steps Congress had to take to fund the government. The first arose from the need to complete budget enactment for Fiscal Year 2011 (1 October 2010 to 30 September 2011). The second sprang from an end-2010 deadline in tax law under which tax cuts would expire. Before Congress had adjourned for the 2010 elections stop-gap approval of spending had been approved, with an expiry date requiring action in January 2011. The third turned on the need to raise the ‘debt ceiling’, the total amount of debt that the US Government is permitted to have outstanding, to fund the deficit and roll over prior debt. As all Readers are well aware, the debt ceiling fiasco culminated in Congressional and Presidential approval of a ‘compromise’ on 2 August 2011.

(1) The FY2011 ‘Continuing Resolution’ Standoff

The FY2011 budget was to have been enacted by 30 September 2010. Between September 2010 and April 2011 the Congress passed, and the President signed, seven successive ‘continuing resolutions’. Each granted spending at roughly the rate of the FY2010 budget and contained an expiry date. The Republican House leadership called for cuts in the budget, as the price Democrats would have to pay to avoid ‘shutting down the government’ by failing to enact a further grant of time by the deadline. The Perils of Pauline. The standoff did not end until 15 April 2011, when President Obama signed legislation providing funds through the end of September. There had been sharp conflicts right up to the end:

After nightlong negotiations that ended before dawn on Friday yielded no agreement, Senator Reid went on the offensive. He told reporters and said on the Senate floor that Mr. Boehner, the Senate Democrats and Mr. Obama had essentially settled on $38 billion in cuts from current spending, a figure that represented a substantial concession for Democrats.

But he said that Republicans were refusing to abandon a policy provision that would withhold federal financing for family planning and other health services for poor women from Planned Parenthood and other providers.

“This is indefensible, and everyone should be outraged,” Mr. Reid said on the Senate floor. “The Republican House leadership have only a couple of hours to look in the mirror, snap out of it and realize how truly shameful they have been.”

In a terse statement of his own to reporters, Mr. Boehner said there was “only one reason we do not have an agreement yet, and that is spending.” He asked, “When will the White House and when will Senate Democrats get serious about cutting spending?” [Note 1]

(2) Tax Relief Expiry: ‘Bush tax cuts for the wealthy’ and ‘middle-class tax cuts’

In a nutshell, Obama wanted extension of unemployment benefits and the ‘middle-class tax cuts’; Republicans were not anxious to extend unemployment benefits, but wanted both tax cuts extended and a more generous position on estate tax. Obama was speaking to a broad constituency in financial distress. The Republicans portrayed failure to extend as a ‘new tax’, as in ‘No New Taxes!” The differences were deep, as CBS News captured in this despatch by Brian Montopoli:

The tax cut package angered liberals in the president’s party due to the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts for the roughly two percent of highest-earning Americans, which comes at a cost of $120 billion over two years. They were also incensed at the level at which the estate tax was set in the measure, which exempts estates under $10 million for couples and taxes subsequent income at 35 percent.

But the bill passed overwhelmingly in the Senate and also got through the House, where angry Democrats eventually accepted what came to be seen as inevitable. Still, many complained that the bill was an expensive giveaway to the richest Americans at a time when America could not afford it. Some fiscally conservative Republicans also expressed concerns about the cost of bill, though most GOP lawmakers supported it.

Had Congress not acted to address the expiring Bush-era tax cuts, all Americans would have seen a tax increase on January 1st. (The average tax increase per family, the White House said, would have been $3,000.) Mr. Obama, who had long opposed extending the Bush tax cuts for America’s highest-earners, has argued he had no choice but to agree to GOP demands to do so in order to avoid a tax increase on the middle class.  
In his remarks Friday, however, he cast the agreement as evidence that both parties can work together.

“Now, candidly speaking, there are some elements of this legislation that I don't like,” he said. “There are some elements that members of my party don't like. There are some elements that Republicans here today don't like. That's the nature of compromise. Yielding on something each of us cares about to move forward on what all of us care about.” [Note 2]

(3) The ‘Debt Ceiling’: Holding the Economy Hostage

‘Debt ceiling’ holdups are so much a part of Washington’s political mythology that ‘debt ceiling’ provided the stuff of a West Wing episode, long before 2011. [Note 3] But 2011 has been and—as this is written only in August—may remain the most brutal and the most dangerous holdup that has taken place. What makes this different is its severity, Republican implacability, and the use of a threat to wreak economic havoc. Among the Republicans are some who—if their words are to be taken at face value—would bring government to a halt, and to an end.

How much leverage did the Republicans have? Quite a bit, but neither they nor the White House nor the Congressional Democrats wanted to win the prize for defaulting on US debt. All were under pressure to find some agreement. On its face the deal agreed appears to favor Republicans: they won big spending cuts, and agreed to ‘no new taxes’. However, Nate Silver makes a closely reasoned argument that “[t]he fine print is not quite as bad for Democrats as the headline number of $2.5 trillion in spending cuts.”[Note 4] We need to keep in mind that these are speculative cuts over ten years.

So what do we know? We know that threats of US default have an unsettling effect on global markets, and that American political parties playing chicken on the economic highway appears juvenile in foreign capitals. We know there is another way—agreeing to exempt debt ceiling bills from extraneous preconditions and amendments. Barack Obama seemed to understand that, for he called for a ‘clean’ debt ceiling bill—but was refused:

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), fresh off the budget talks, told donors this weekend that if Obama wants an up or down vote on the debt ceiling he’s not going to get it.   “The president says I want you to send me a clean bill,” Boehner said. “Well guess what, Mr. President, not a chance you’re going to get a clean bill.”   “There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it,” he continued in a clip of his remarks at a fundraiser that was played during “Face the Nation.”[Note 5]

Boehner’s big stick was that he held enough seats in the House to craft a Republican bill … and the threat to reject any Democratic bill that came from the Senate. But behind him sat, or stood, the Tea Party freshman class. As the final vote in August showed, the Tea Party was substantial but not monolithic. The vote in the House was 269-151. Of 60 Tea Party caucus members, 32 voted ‘yes’ and 28 ‘no’. Altogether, 66 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted ‘no’. Even the deal that Boehner negotiated with Reid was not enough to satisfy all the Tea Partiers, but without their intransigence he would have had a tougher time communicating obstinacy and insistence. Norman Ornstein captured the affair succinctly: “If you hold one-half of one-third of the reins of power in Washington and are willing to use and maintain that kind of discipline even if you will bring the entire temple down around your own head, there is a pretty good chance that you are going to get your way.” [Note 6]

Why is the situation presented by debt ceiling exigencies different from party-to-party trading as substantive bills are negotiated within and between the major parties and between the House and Senate? Because the debt is not—despite Republican efforts to blame it on Democrats—the consequence of one party’s policies or initiatives, but instead the result of Congressional bills enacted into law and signed by presidents of both major parties. It’s a joint responsibility. A polemical but cute graphic was circulated as the immediate crisis reached climax, making the point that all recent presidents have grown the national debt.[Note 7]

Many commentators read the result this way: Republican tactics worked and gave them a victory, giving them budget cuts and wounding President Obama. The most extreme Republicans lamented that they had caved in by accepting only $2.4 trillion in cuts, rather than the $4 trillion they had sought. As we’ve seen, 28 in the House voted ‘no’.

The New York Times published an even more telling graphic [“Policy Changes Under Two Presidents”], showing how much more GW Bush increased the debt, and with what spending, by comparison to Barack Obama’s so far relatively modest use of borrowing.

A most pungent afterview of this episode was offered by New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, whose likening the Republicans to “terrorists” and writing of the “Tea Party Republicans” now able to “put aside their suicide vests,” led him to issue an apology a few days later. What else was it that Nocera had written, and how did he locate his apology? His views are salient as he has proven one of the best-informed students of the Great Recession and its continuing effects. “You know what they say,” Nocera began, “Never negotiate with terrorists. It only encourages them.” He continued:

These last few months, much of the country has watched in horror as the Tea Party Republicans have waged jihad on the American people. Their intransigent demands for deep spending cuts, coupled with their almost gleeful willingness to destroy one of America’s most invaluable assets, its full faith and credit, were incredibly irresponsible. But they didn’t care. Their goal, they believed, was worth blowing up the country for, if that’s what it took.

Like ideologues everywhere, they scorned compromise. When John Boehner, the House speaker, tried to cut a deal with President Obama that included some modest revenue increases, they humiliated him. …

America’s real crisis is not a debt crisis. It’s an unemployment crisis. Yet this agreement not only doesn’t address unemployment, it’s guaranteed to make it worse. (Incredibly, the Democrats even abandoned their demand for extended unemployment benefits as part of the deal.) ...

Inflicting more pain on their countrymen doesn’t much bother the Tea Party Republicans, as they’ve repeatedly proved.[Note 8]

Then, called on to apologize (for pungent language? for colorful but apt figures of speech? for speaking the truth? because anger is forbidden?) Nocera lodged it this way:

Once the Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives, they began to systemically [sic] undermine the Dodd-Frank reform law, pushing back against new, and mostly sensible, regulations designed to prevent another meltdown. The worst was the way Republicans took a hatchet to Elizabeth Warren as she tried to set up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Such an agency, had it been in existence prior to 2008, might have prevented millions of Americans, many of them poor and financially unsophisticated, from being gouged by mortgage companies. Watching it all unfold made me angry.

That anger reached its apex on Tuesday, when I wrote a column comparing the Tea Party Republicans to terrorists. The words I chose were intemperate and offensive to many, and I’ve been roundly criticized. I was a hypocrite, the critics said, for using such language when on other occasions I’ve called for a more civil politics. In the cool light of day, I agree with them. I apologize.

I still think it was terribly wrong for the Republicans to use the threat of default to insist on massive spending cuts, though President Obama also deserves blame for playing his hand so poorly. Putting on my pragmatist hat again, I also think Congress could not have chosen a worse time to rein in spending. Yes, the country’s enormous debt — and the entitlement programs that are driving the federal deficit — needs to be brought under control. [Note 9]

As Reader must appreciate by now, I think some plain talk is needed to sustain and foster the Republic.

The Next Effort: A Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution

The dust had barely settled on the August 2011 debt ceiling when Speaker Boehner called his troops together for the next campaign: to pass a ‘balanced budget’ amendment.[Note 10]

In a meeting with his conference Monday, Speaker John A. Boehner told members that the best thing they could do during the August recess was to sell their constituents on the idea that the amendment — which essentially stipulates that government cannot spend more than it takes in — is necessary and good.

Republican leaders on the Hill have pivoted from railing against Democrats about tax increases to pressing for the amendment, which would require the acquiescence of two-thirds of each chamber of Congress, and three quarters of state legislatures.[Note 11]

The connection to political extortion is this: will the Republicans connect Congress’ passing a ‘balanced budget’ amendment to another must-pass bill, as they linked ‘no new taxes’ to the August 2011 debt ceiling increase? Will they begin pressing for a more draconian measure, but then ‘compromise’ by agreeing to text that contains one or more of the features they have proposed? Will they occupy the Congress and the White House with this issue, a distraction from real tasks?

Of course, there already exist mechanisms by which the Republic can have a ‘balanced budget’ or ‘pay-go’, legislating only as much expenditure as non-partisan referees anticipate from ongoing revenue. Revenue bills must be agreed by the House and Senate, and are subject to Presidential veto.

But ‘balanced budget’ has a homey ring to it. The problem lies in the La Brea tar pit of abused categories, in this case ‘spending’ that does not distinguish smart from dumb. Some ‘government spending’ goes for purposes that have both short-term and longer-term benefits, enhancing people’s lives and building for future economic activity. Other ‘government spending’ goes for naught, for illusions, or is just dumped in the trash. The most difficult budgetary problem for US politics is to distinguish spending for ‘national security’ that begins from a prudent understanding of risks in the world, on the one hand, from illusory or unnecessary increments to military capability that neither enhance lives nor secure the future, on the other. Examples of ‘security’ dollars to the trash are abundant: high-cost procurement, the Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and ten thousand ‘minor’ domestic and overseas programs that simply make no sense.[Note 12] Chanting ‘balanced budget’ threatens spending for sound purposes and fails to insist on political judgment.

The Question

How can the Congress, in future, avoid deadline-driven extortion?

Approaches

The simple answer is ‘don’t do it’. At present, the only restraints are voluntary forbearance, and its less altruistic version, being deterred (recognizing that the other guy will retaliate, sometime in future, given the chance). These are both good reasons to forego extortion. A variation may be better: that both major parties agree that any future debt ceiling bill will be kept ‘clean’, free of amendments and poisonous baggage: the House and Senate would vote on the one question whether to raise the ceiling to a stipulated amount.

It would be harder to extend a ‘clean bill’ agreement to other deadline-driven bills, which include all appropriations bills. The Government’s only source of money is Congressional approval. The President may veto a money bill, but cannot create one. The Constitution directly, explicitly requires that “No money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law;”[Note 13] The threat to ‘shut down the government’, like the threat of ‘default’, is credible only if they are reckless, or prepared to suffer opprobrium. While in politics the present usually trumps the future, career operatives know that they can’t be sure of the future, when the stakes, what they could lose, could be more compelling.

The New York Times proposes editorially [Note 14] that the President should enlist figures ready to educate the public that the ‘debt ceiling’ should be done away with. “If Democrats continuously remind the country how dangerous this path is, Republicans may think twice about repeating it.” Failing that, Obama should invoke the 14th Amendment and declare the ‘debt ceiling’ practice invalid. “President Obama should use every power at his disposal to fend off Republicans’ irresponsible threats and invite them to meet him in court if they want to resist.” Unfortunately, it is in Court that the Republican surge has won unusual victories, from GW Bush’s election to Citizens United, but the courts have been loath to take on issues better left in the political arena. The14th Amendment route should be studied and made ready.[Note 15]

NOTES

1 Carl Hulse, “Budget Deal to Cut $38 Billion Averts Shutdown” The New York Times, 8 April 2011.

2 Brian Montopoli, “Obama Signs Bill To Extend Bush Tax Cuts,” CBS News, 17 December 2010. http://www.cbsnews.com/8300-503544_162-503544.html?tag=hdr

3 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5igKuNF1rI

4 Nate Silver, “The Fine Print on the Debt Deal,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011. His column FiveThirtyEight.

5 Politico Live, “GOP Rules Out ‘Clean’ Debt Ceiling Bill,” 10 April 2011.

6 Quoted in Jennifer Steinhauer, “Debt Bill is Signed, Ending a Fractious Battle,“The New York Times, 2 August 2011.

7 Of course, GHW Bush served only one term, and Barack Obama is in the third year of his first term.

8 Joe Nocera, “The Tea Party’s War on America,” The New York Times, 1 August 2011. He explains: “As Mohamed El-Erian, the chief executive of the bond investment firm Pimco, told me, fiscal policy includes both a numerator and a denominator. “The numerator is debt,” he said. “But the denominator is growth.” He added, “What we have done is accelerate forward, in a self-inflicted manner, the numerator. And, in the process, we have undermined the denominator.” Economic growth could have gone a long way toward shrinking the deficit, while helping put people to work. The spending cuts will shrink growth and raise the likelihood of pushing the country back into recession.”

9 Joe Nocera, “The Tea Party, Take Two,” The New York Times, 5 August 2011.

10 Jennifer Steinhauer, “Republicans Set Sights on Balanced Budget Amendment,” The New York Times, 4 August 2011. She describes two plans: One would ban spending (not including interest on the national debt) more than revenues in a fiscal year (except by Congressional three-fifths votes in both houses). Under another proposal, tax increases would require a 2/3 vote in each house, and federal spending could exceed 18% of GDP only with the consent of 2/3 in House and Senate. Under both proposals, the debt ceiling could be raised only by vote of 3/5 in House and Senate.

11 Ibid.

12 Who should take responsibility for deciding that the State Police needed to install concrete bollards outside rural state police headquarters? What are the risks that someone would drive a car to or through the front door, laden with explosives? And if there were such a person, is there any reason to believe the building could not be thoroughly destroyed by bringing the explosive-filled panel truck just up to the bollards? Hysteria. And, in all likelihood, Federal money, scattered across the country. And who is paying to equip local police with tasers, and why?

13 Constitution of the United States, Article I, § 9.7.

14 Editorial, “End the Debt Limit,” The New York Times, 4 August 2011. See an op-ed by Michael D. Schear, “Can the Debt Ceiling Genie Be Put Back in the Bottle,” The New York Times, 3 August 2011.

15 See Adam Liptak, “The 14th Amendment, the Debt Ceiling, and a Way Out,” The New York Times, 24 July 2011. Liptak reports Bill Clinton’s “saying he would unilaterally invoke it ‘without hesitation’ to raise the debt ceiling, ‘and force the courts to stop me.’ ”

[Political Design 2011.08.07. Post A33. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [VII]: IMPOVERISH THE PEOPLE?

2011-08-04T06:49:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods. In this post I observe the growing US inequalities in wealth and income, and their especial severity among vulnerable sectors. And I wonder how it can be that Republican policies seem so poorly designed to prevent such effects. ❄

If a political party’s dispositions lead to effects, if preoccupations lead to neglects, if a sense of ‘how the world works’ brings favoring friends and denying resources to the others, if imperatives of electoral strategy exclude the people’s interests, if ends overwhelm means, is that party responsible and accountable for the consequences of its strategy?

Please come back a step with me. What I have just written implies questions about cause and intention. Can we attribute to a political party’s strategy outcomes that it would vocally and emphatically deny? Consider jobs and joblessness. The formal unemployment rate—and even more the index of those wishing jobs, and wishing full-time jobs, they cannot find—remains high. Republicans repeatedly point to unemployment, denounce Democratic policy initiatives as ‘job-killing’, and invoke ‘the private sector’ as the only job creator. Strategy implies deliberate purpose. Is it thinkable that ‘joblessness’ could be a Republican Party aim, and therefore part of its strategy? Or should we take Republican proffers at face value? To deny them credence means to accuse them of deceit.

But consider ‘what we know’. We know that the Republican chief in the Senate has declared his first political aim to be to oust Obama in the 2012 elections. We know—and Republican strategists know—that there has been a strong correlation between voter satisfaction with the country’s economic performance and their readiness to support an incumbent president: hence “that once-famous vulgarism of James Carvill’s, ‘it’s the economy, stupid.’” [Note 1] We know that Republicans have opposed, delayed, or at best reluctantly supported, White House policies to counter the effects of joblessness, including unemployment extension and public works. And we know that the Republican emphasis on ‘savings’ and refusal to tax translates to public job losses, Federal and state, in large numbers.

Polite talk would have it, then, that Republican policies appear to be inconsistent in their expressed concern for jobs. Plain talk would put it differently: that Republicans cynically turn a blind eye to the effects of their policies, bent on Obama’s ouster. Or perhaps Republican strategists take comfort in knowing that the Lord moves in mysterious ways, and that He may so value a Republican White House in 2013 that He permits the suffering of His people to grow and harden.

It is tempting to argue backward from measurable facts, in the following way: if there have been large-scale (and therefore more evident, less disputable) changes in social facts, and if the evidence of these social facts has been displayed over a number of years, they will at least pose problems that invite causal accounts, and may additionally give us reasons for judging some accounts to be more sound than others. We can also ask whether Republicans share the view that these facts point to problems, to be addressed and ameliorated, or only to simple realities, neither requiring nor amenable to deliberate action by the State.

Recent studies of the United States have shown that inequalities in distribution of income and wealth have grown in recent decades, with greater wealth concentrated in relatively fewer hands. Studies of the effects of the Great Recession in the United States show that economic losses among Hispanics and African-Americans have been much greater than among others.
Savings have evaporated and houses have been lost. The number affected, and the degree of loss, is high. Given current joblessness even more, almost certainly, will be affected.

Edward N. Wolff summarizes his study of US household inequalities:

The percentage increase in net worth (also that of non-home wealth and income) from 1983 to 2007 was much greater for the top wealth (and income) groups than for those lower in the distribution. Moreover, the average wealth of the poorest 40 percent declined by 63 percent between 1983 and 2007 and, by 2007, had fallen to only $2,200. All in all, the greatest gains in wealth and income were enjoyed by the upper 20 percent, particularly the top 1 percent, of the respective distributions. Between 1983 and 2007, the top 1 percent received 35 percent of the total growth in net worth, 43 percent of the total growth in non-home wealth, and 44 percent of the total increase in income. The figures for the top 20 percent are 89 percent, 94 percent, and 87 percent, respectively. [Note 2]

And for the Great Recession:

I also updated the wealth figures to July 1, 2009 on the basis of changes in house and stock prices. My estimates indicate that while mean wealth (in 2007 dollars) fell by 17.3 percent between 2007 and 2009, median wealth plunged by 36.1 percent. The results show a fairly steep rise in wealth inequality, with the Gini coefficient swelling from 0.834 to 0.865 and the share of the top 1 percent advancing from 34.6 to 37.1 percent. I also estimate that 16.6 percent of homeowners were “underwater” with greater mortgage debt than the value of their homes. [Note 3] >

A Pew Research Center study issued in mid-2011 reported that

[I]n percentage terms, the bursting of the housing market bubble in 2006 and the recession that followed from late 2007 to mid-2009 took a far greater toll on the wealth of minorities than whites. From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households.

As a result of these declines, the typical black household had just $5,677 in wealth (assets minus debts) in 2009; the typical Hispanic household had $6,325 in wealth; and the typical white household had $113,149. [Note 4]

Bob Herbert wrote repeatedly in The New York Times opinion page calling attention to unemployment rates by race and wealth. For example, he quotes from a report on US household income and employment in 2009 Q4 (divided into deciles by annual household income) by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University:

The highest group, with household incomes of $150,000 or more, had an unemployment rate during that quarter of 3.2 percent. The next highest, with incomes of $100,000 to 149,999, had an unemployment rate of 4 percent.

Contrast those figures with the unemployment rate of the lowest group, which had annual household incomes of $12,499 or less. The unemployment rate of that group during the fourth quarter of last year was a staggering 30.8 percent. That’s more than five points higher than the overall jobless rate at the height of the Depression.

The next lowest group, with incomes of $12,500 to $20,000, had an unemployment rate of 19.1 percent.

These are the kinds of jobless rates that push families already struggling on meager incomes into destitution. [Note 5]

When underemployment is taken into account, the differences are even more keen:

[Source: Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University. February 2010. Footnote below. [Note 6]]

We return to the beginning. It is one thing to argue that the Great Recession was caused in major part by Republican failure to watch and regulate economic policy during the Cheney-Bush years, an argument that is wholly sound, and something quite different to argue that the Republican Party, during and after Cheney-Bush, intentionally aimed to impoverish the most vulnerable in American society. I do not go there. I have no smoking gun, and the charge is so severe that a smoking gun would be needed to make such an assertion. (By contrast, the evidence that Republicans in many jurisdictions are creating impediments to voting by constituencies which strongly overlap the most vulnerable is strong, as I’ve argued elsewhere. Since their argument about ‘fraud’ is so specious I have no problem, in that context, shouting ‘Smoking gun!’)

On the other hand, impoverishment of the most vulnerable is a tracable consequence of Republican policies, even if those policies may have been undertaken for quite different reasons. Perhaps deregulation, favoring corporations, tax relief for the wealthy, following corporate lobbyists on the environment and climate change, privatization, disbelief in the economic arguments for education and social guarantees, inexplicable war-making, resistance to counter-cyclical policies in times of recession and depression, and unreadiness to extend unemployment benefits are just a consequence of ignorance, or habit, or the persuasiveness of right-wing ideology, or an expression of self-interest. None of those explanations is flattering, but they are certainly less of an indictment than to charge that class disdain and implacable meanness are engines of Republican political strategy.

NOTES

[Note 1]:   as the expression was described by Christopher Hitchens. http://www.zeitgeistproject.org/impact/node/137

[Note 2]:  Edward N. Wolff, “Recent Trends in Household Wealth in the United States: Rising Debt and the Middle-Class Squeeze—an Update to 2007,” Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, Working Paper No. 589. March 2010. http://www.levyinstitute.org/pubs/wp_589.pdf

[Note 3]:  Ibid.

[Note 4]:  “Twenty-to-One: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics,” Pew Research Center: Social and Demographic Trends, 26 July 2011. http://pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics/

[Note 5]:  Bob Herbert, “The Worst of the Pain,” The New York Times, 8 February 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/opinion/09herbert.html , citing Northeastern University. Center for Labor Market Studies, Northeastern University, “Labor Underutilization Problems of U.S. Workers Across Household Income Groups at the End of the Great Recession: A Truly Great Depression Among the Nation’s Low Income Workers Amidst Full Employment Among the Most Affluent.” February 2010. See also http://www.clms.neu.edu/publication documentsLabor_Underutilization_Problems_of_U.pdf “The ‘Jobless and Wageless’ Recovery from the Great Recession of 2007- 2009: The Magnitude and Sources of Economic Growth Through 2011 I and Their Impacts on Workers, Profits, and Stock Values, Center for Labor Market Studies.” May 2011.

[Note 6]:  Ibid., February 2010. Table 3.

[Political Design 2011.08.05. Post A32. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [VI]: SURVEILL THE PEOPLE?

2011-08-01T07:01:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods. In this case the consequence—intentional or not—of ready Republican support for more invasive ‘intelligence gathering’ is to place surveillance alongside other features of the Republican program.

This blog entry concerns Congressional oversight of US surveillance—wiretaps, intercepts, tracking, recording, mining public, government, and corporate records. But I begin by returning to a entry I posted to my parallel blog [http://blog.learnworld.com] in 2006. The distinctions developed there illustrate why the tension between Constitutional guarantees and State surveillance are so vexed, and why the recent initiatives of Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, initiatives I illustrate and follow later in this blog post, are so central to the question of maintaining an effective Republic.

My blog of 6 May 2006: ❄ MICHAEL V. HAYDEN: ‘REASONABLE’ SURVEILLANCE?

General Michael V. Hayden has been identified by unnamed newspaper sources as a frontrunner to be named Director of Central Intelligence in place of Porter Goss, whose resignation was announced today.

In January 2006 General Hayden advanced a remarkable theory to vitiate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution and justify unwarranted interception and use of communications to and from “U.S. persons,” principally US citizens. In a speech at the National Press Club [Note 1] General Hayden said, in part:

“Inherent foreign intelligence value is one of the metrics we must use. Let me repeat that: Inherent foreign intelligence value is one of the metrics we must use to ensure that we conform to the Fourth Amendment’s reasonable standard when it comes to protecting the privacy of these kinds of people. ... [T]he standard of what was relevant and valuable, and therefore, what was reasonable, would understandably change, I think, as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field. And we acted accordingly.”

The Fourth Amendment states: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

After General Hayden had delivered his remarks the floor was opened for questions. The following exchange took place between Hayden and Jonathan Landay of Knight-Ridder:

QUESTION: Jonathan Landay with Knight Ridder. I’d like to stay on the same issue, and that had to do with the standard by which you use to target your wiretaps. I’m no lawyer, but my understanding is that the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution specifies that you must have probable cause to be able to do a search that does not violate an American’s right against unlawful searches and seizures. Do you use —

GEN. HAYDEN: No, actually — the Fourth Amendment actually protects all of us against unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But the —

GEN. HAYDEN: That’s what it says.

QUESTION: But the measure is probable cause, I believe.

GEN. HAYDEN: The amendment says unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: But does it not say probable —

GEN. HAYDEN: No. The amendment says —

QUESTION: The court standard, the legal standard —

GEN. HAYDEN: — unreasonable search and seizure.

QUESTION: The legal standard is probable cause, General. You used the terms just a few minutes ago, “We reasonably believe.” And a FISA court, my understanding is, would not give you a warrant if you went before them and say “we reasonably believe”; you have to go to the FISA court, or the attorney general has to go to the FISA court and say, “we have probable cause.” And so what many people believe — and I’d like you to respond to this — is that what you’ve actually done is crafted a detour around the FISA court by creating a new standard of “reasonably believe” in place of probable cause because the FISA court will not give you a warrant based on reasonable belief, you have to show probable cause. Could you respond to that, please?

GEN. HAYDEN: Sure. I didn’t craft the authorization. I am responding to a lawful order. All right? The attorney general has averred to the lawfulness of the order. Just to be very clear — and believe me, if there’s any amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it’s the Fourth. And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. And so what you’ve raised to me —and I’m not a lawyer, and don’t want to become one — what you’ve raised to me is, in terms of quoting the Fourth Amendment, is an issue of the Constitution. The constitutional standard is “reasonable.” And we believe — I am convinced that we are lawful because what it is we’re doing is reasonable.

From General Hayden’s reading of the Fourth Amendment it follows that the State must seek a search warrant only when it proposes an unreasonable search. Reductio ad absurdum.

Or we could ask how ‘reasonableness’ is established, and how the issue is resolved if the State’s claim to ‘reasonableness’ of a specific search—here a program of interceptions—is contested. General Hayden’s position is that he, as Director of NSA, determined ‘reasonableness’; that the program was and ought to have remained secret; and that therefore only those who were properly privy to the secret could have contested it, and then only within the limited circle of those entitled to the secret. Hence Congressional oversight or appeal to the Courts is precluded, unless someone who has learned about the secret intercept program goes public.

General Hayden’s position also neglects the fact that there is law—an Act of Congress—which expressly prohibits what he chose to do as Director of the NSA and defended in January as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence.

USC Title 50 § 1802(a)(1) authorizes warrantless electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information, subject to some conditions, provided “there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of the communication to which a United States person is a party;” [Note 2] [This distinguishes “content” from facts that might be gathered about a transaction.] Note that one US person is enough. Title 18 § 2511 (2)(f) states in part that “the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 shall be the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance ... and the interception of domestic wire, oral, and electronic communications may be conducted.” One term, setting scope, is domestic. For domestic surveillance FISA provides the “exclusive means”. If domestic surveillance does not follow the terms of the FISA Act it is illegal. Of course, as everyone including the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee has said, we don’t know exactly what NSA did, because they won’t say. Secret.

We can, however, work General Hayden’s language a bit further. Not every person in the United States is a “United States person”, despite General Hayden’s attempt to convince his audience that any terrorist who stepped across the border would become protected from surveillance. In General Hayden’s words “And by the way, ‘U.S. person’ routinely includes anyone in the United States, citizen or not.” But 50 USC § 1801(i) defines a “United States person” as “a citizen of the United States, an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence (as defined in section 1101(a)(20) of Title 8)” and further defined associations and corporations. [Note 3] “So, for example,” Hayden continues, “because they were in the United States—and we did not know anything more—Mohamed Atta and his fellow 18 hijackers would have been presumed to have been protected person, U.S. persons, by NSA prior to 9/11.” But not thereafter? What General Hayden does not put on the table is that the law does not ban intercepts but distinguishes those intercepts which may be made without warrant, with Executive approval from those which may only be undertaken pursuant to court-issued warrant, subject to the conditions stipulated in law. The plain meaning of General Hayden’s subsequent lines is that the communications of US persons are intercepted and judged, despite the law. “If the U.S. person information isn’t relevant, the data is suppressed.”

Whether General Hayden is actually nominated to succeed Porter Goss as CIA Director or not, the claim that the Executive can undertake warrantless interception whenever it says that doing so is ‘reasonable’ is pernicious and should be confronted head on. Hayden’s remaining as Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence after his January 23rd remarks is further evidence of problems which few Congressional Republicans, and no one in the White House, seems inclined or ready to address.

With some Libertarian exceptions, Republicans rarely challenge extension of Federal authority to intrude on privacy rights or Fourth Amendment protections against ‘unreasonable search and seizure’. Having championed broader powers of interception and surveillance, they remain largely silent even when their Democratic colleagues in Congress press for an understanding of what is done and under what authority.

Consider this exchange, prompted by a letter two Democratic senators, Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Mark Udall (Colorado), had written to James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, asking “whether the NSA and CIA have the authority to collect the geolocation information of American citizens for intelligence purposes.” At a Senate hearing the general counsel of the CIA, asked this, replied that “[t]here are certain circumstances where that authority may exist” and said the intelligence community was readying a reply.[Note 4] Senator Wyden in May 2011 warned senators against unconsidered extension of Patriot Act provisions. [Note 5] He very carefully framed his remarks around the public and the Congress’ right to know the law and how the intelligence community interpreted it, and not as a subject of partisan difference. He suspects that there could be secret interpretations of the laws governing surveillance. But I am free to say that the Republican Party’s silence is consistent with it’s long-standing effort to be identified with ‘national security’ and to bash Democrats, whatever the facts, as inadequately attentive to national security. [Note 6] The NSA reply, while giving every appearance of cooperation, concludes that “it is not reasonably possible to identify the number of people located in the United States whose communications may have been reviewed under the authority of the [FISA Amendments Act].” [Note 7]

Excerpt from Senator Wyden’s remarks to the Senate [Note 8] on 26 May 2011:

[T]he law itself must always be public. Government officials must not be allowed to fall into the trap of secretly reinterpreting the law in a way that creates a gap between what the public thinks the law says and what the government secretly claims that it says. Any time that they do so they are violating the public’s trust. Furthermore, allowing a gap of this nature to develop is extremely short-sighted. Both history and logic should make it clear that secret interpretations of the law will not stay secret forever. And as the historical examples that I cited earlier show, when the public eventually finds out that government agencies have been rewriting surveillance laws in secret, the result is invariably a backlash and an erosion of public confidence in these government agencies.

Let me be clear: I think that is a big problem. ...

American laws shouldn’t be public only when government officials think it’s convenient. They should be public all the time, and every American citizen should be able to find out what their government thinks those laws mean.

Earlier this week I filed an amendment, along with my colleague from the Intelligence Committee, Senator Mark Udall, that would require the Attorney General to publicly disclose the United States Government’s official interpretation of the USA Patriot Act. Our amendment specifically states that the Attorney General should not describe any particular intelligence collection programs or activities, but that he should “fully describe the legal interpretation and analysis necessary to understand the United States Government’s official interpretation” of the law. This morning we reached an agreement with the Chair of the Intelligence Committee, Senator Feinstein, who has committed to hold a hearing on this issue next month. Senator Udall and I will work to address this secret law problem in the committee hearing and subsequent deliberations, and if we don’t get results there then we will return to the floor and offer this amendment again on different legislation.

But while we intend to keep fighting for openness and honesty, as of today the government’s official interpretation of the law is still secret, and the final vote on reauthorizing the Patriot Act is fast approaching. I plan to vote no, because I do not support enacting a long-term reauthorization without significant reforms. And I believe that when more of my colleagues and the American public come to understand how the Patriot Act has actually been interpreted in secret, they will insist on significant reforms too.

Design Problem

How would you free the Congress from the maze within which it is confounded? Some Senators believe that the Congress and public should be told enough about the aims and controls governing surveillance to judge whether guarantees of privacy and security from ‘unreasonable search and seizure’ are observed. But successive Executive Branch policy has been that very little can be told to the public. Can you reconcile this tension?

The Installed Solutions

Several devices are used to try to square this circle. Members of the Select Committee on Intelligence are told, subject to their binding commitment not to reveal what they learn to the unauthorised, including most members of Congress, what the NSA deems sharable and sufficient. So Congress, in the form of a handful of members, is ‘informed and consulted’. A second device is to say—and it has been legislated and written into the US Code—that if NSA happens to stumble across communications it ought not to be reading, then ‘minimization’ measures will be taken to achieve something akin to never having seen the communication at all.

NOTES

[Note 1]:  Remarks by General Michael V. Hayden, Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence and Former Director of the National Security Agency, Address to the National Press Club, “What American Intelligence & Especially the NSA Have Been Doing to Defend the Nation,” Natonal Press Club, Washington, D. C., January 23 2006. http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2006/01/hayden012306.pdf

[Note 2]:   http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001802----000-.html. [Note this corrects an error in the original 2006 post, which referred to §1809. The correct section is §1802.]

[Note 3]:  And the Congressional Research Service called attention to this definition in Elizabeth B. Basan, “The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: An Overview of the Statutory Framework and Recent Judicial Decisions,” 22 September 2004, CRS Report RL30465, p. 11 note.

[Note 4]:  Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, “Lawyer Questioned Over Cellphone Location Tracking of Americans,” The Wall Street Journal, 26 July 2011. General counsel Matthew Olsen, appearing before a hearing by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on his confirmation to be head of the National Terrorism Center, had been asked repeatedly by Senator Wyden whether the government had authority to “use cell site data to track the location of Americans inside the country.”

[Note 5]:  2. Stephen Schwartz brought to my attention this press release from Senator Wyden’s office. http://wyden.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=34eddcdb-2541-42f5-8f1d-19234030d91e , which contains the text of Senator Wyden’s speech, as prepared, on the Senate floor, 26 May 2011.

[Note 6]:  Remarks by the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee, Michael Turner, on 26 July 2011, cast Obama’s push to put nuclear weapon abolition on the agenda in just that negative light. Turner said “it seems a misguided priority to focus on disarmament, and U.S. disarmament in particular, when the conditions that might permit it don’t exist.”  Jack Torry, “Rep. Turner warns against cuts in nuclear arsenal:
Congressman backs $85 billion upgrade to weapons system,” Dayton Daily News, 27 July 2011. http://www.daytondailynews.com/news/politics/rep-turner-warns-against-cuts-in-nuclear-arsenal-1216267.html

[Note 7:]  Associated Press, “US Cannot Say How Many Had Communications Watched,” The New York Times online, 28 July 2011. Full text of NSA reply: http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/dniletter07272011.pdf

[Note 8]:  http://wyden.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/?id=34eddcdb-2541-42f5-8f1d-19234030d91e , which contains the text of Senator Wyden’s speech, as prepared, on the Senate floor, 26 May 2011.

❄ List of Blog Entries

2011-07-03T15:29:00.000-07:00

I’ve just posted a list of blog entries at http://www.brucelarkin.net/blogs.pdf and at http://www.brucelarkin.net/blogs.html , with hot links to each post. This is more readable.

If the pdf version hot links do not work, try the html version.

To see the most recent posts you may go directly to

my rant blog: http://blog.learnworld.com/ , since 2003.
my design blog: http://design.learnworld.com/, since 2005.

And I've recently posted several indictments of Republican Party dogma on the Political Design blog. There I try to be temperate. More will come on the rant blog.

Enjoy!

[Bruce‘s Blog. 2011.07.04. [Blog BB01]. Revised 2011.07.06 with addition of html version. Revised 2011.08.06 with new web locations and corresponding URLs. Serial BB01. [http://www.learnworld.com/blog/blog.html]

❄ PLAIN TALK [V]: BUY THE REPUBLIC

2011-07-01T14:48:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

Presidents and legislators—and in some states, judges—require vast and growing sums to run for elective office. The link binding candidates to donors appears to be yet stronger in the wake of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling, which has the effect of freeing corporate donations to political purposes.

The Question

Can Members of Congress be bought? Can control of the US government be bought? And if so, what can be done to prevent its being for sale?

Approaches

I’ve discussed this issue, first in a posting in 2005:

THURSDAY, AUGUST 11, 2005
❄ End the Plutocracy?
“Money is the mother’s milk of politics.”
“The United States is not a representative democracy, but a plutocracy.”

At that time I wrote: “I’m drawn to the ‘pull-only’ rule: rather than candidates’ buying vast advertising time, telephone banks, and lapel pins, why not confine them to their web sites and let each citizen decide whether to look at their messages or ignore them? ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ ”

And on reflection I’m even more intrigued by putting an end to competitive spending on elections. Locally-financed personal appearances could be archived to web sites, extensive and elaborate but not costly. Anyone, any group, could recommend, interpret, counter, or otherwise voice it’s views about candidate sites.

Does Citizens United [Note 1] create a new imperative? On 21 January 2010, to great controversy, the US Supreme Court issued its decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. Citizens United argues that §441b of the US Code, which restricts specified corporate “electioneering communication,” is unconstitutional as applied to a documentary film critical of primary candidate Hillary Clinton.

What is important in this decision, then, is not the narrow circumstance around which Citizens United composed its case, but the Court’s removing a key precedent in its several-decades’ commitment to the constitutionality of specific legal limits on corporate political giving.

Nor is it an accident that this case came forward, and was argued before the Court by a well-known partisan of conservative interests, GW Bush’s first Solicitor General, Theodore Olson. The case can be traced directly to the work of a Terre Haute, Indiana attorney, James Bopp, Jr., who told an interviewer that

“We had a 10-year plan to take all this down. And if we do it right, I think we can pretty well dismantle the entire regulatory regime that is called campaign finance law. We have been awfully successful and we are not done yet.” [Note 2]

This opponent of campaign finance law targets not only barriers to giving but also disclosure of donor names and sums. While the decision in Citizens United is only one move, which leaves many regulatory measures in place, the aim is further dismantlement. The end would be a system of legal protection for unlimited secret corporate financing of political candidates and initiatives. Every member of Congress, and Presidents themselves, could be secretly in thrall to hidden manipulators, doing behind the veil of secrecy what figures such as Scaife and Koch have undertaken, with the lesser aid of obscurity and public inattention, in recent years.

In a vigorous dissent to the majority decision in Citizens United Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for four members of the Court, declared that

“The Court’s ruling threatens to undermine the integrity of elected institutions across the Nation.” [Note 3.]

The decision in Citizens United prompted an unusual statement by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union speech to the combined houses of Congress.

“With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. (Applause.) I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. (Applause.) They should be decided by the American people. And I’d urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems.” [Note 4]

But in an even more unusual reaction, Associate Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., seated a few feet away, facing the President, was seen to be shaking his head ‘no’, and to mouth words variously reported as “that’s not true” or “not true.” [Note 5]

But we have to ask: are Justice Stevens and President Obama wrong, or exaggerating the effects of Citizens United? A few days after Obama’s State of the Union message a group of Republicans led by former senator ‘Norm’ Coleman and a senior policy adviser to John McCain’s presidential campaign, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, told the New York Times about the forthcoming launch of an advocacy body they call the ‘American Action Network’. The Times reporter wrote that

“ … the Supreme Court’s decision last month in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission potentially will allow the organization to take unlimited contributions from corporations and individuals to use to advertise for or against political candidates.

“‘This administration as well as Citizens United — when you combine the two the prospects for funding these types of efforts are greatly enhanced,‘ Mr. Coleman said. [Note 6]

So at least one experienced Republican battler believes Citizens United hands them an edge … and is ready to say so publicly.

And on 27 June 2011 the Supreme Court struck down an Arizona law providing public matching funds under specified circumstances. Critics of the court’s decision charged that rather than promoting free speech, as the court’s majority contended, the court enabled money to overwhelm those without funds. The Chief Justice wrote for the majority that “Leveling the playing field can sound like a good thing. But in a democracy, campaigning for office is not a game.”[Note 7]

Drafting Problem

Would a system like that outlined above—candidates confined to personal appearances and web sites—meet the First Amendment requirement of ‘freedom of speech’? Would it end, or significantly reduce, money‘s influence on politics? Are there other approaches?

NOTES

[Note 1]:  http://www.supremecourtus.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-205.pdf
[Note 2]:  Quoted in David D. Kirkpatrick, “A Quest to End Spending Rules for Campaigns,” The New York Times, 24 January 2010.
[Note 3]:  Citizens United, Appellant v. Federal Election Commission. Justice Stevens was joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor “concurring in part and dissenting in part.”
[Note 4]:  Barack Obama, State of the Union remarks. Washington, D.C. 27 January 2010. http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address
[Note 5]:  Robert Barnes reported Alito’s response: “ ‘Not true, not true,’ he appeared to say (other lip readers think he said, ‘That's not true’) as he shook his head and furrowed his brow. It is unclear what part of Obama’s statement he was objecting to, although he started shaking his head after the president said ‘special interests.’ ” “Reactions Split on Obama’s remark, Alito’s Response at State of the Union,” Washington Post, 29 January 2010. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/28/AR2010012802893.html
[Note 6]:  Jackie Calmes, “G.O.P. Group to Promote Conservative Ideas,” The New York Times, 3 February 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/04/us/politics/04conservative.html
[Note 7]:  Adam Liptak, “Justices Strike Down Arizona Campaign Finance Law,” The New York Times, 27 June 2011.

[Political Design 2011.07.01. Post A29. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [IV]: PRIVATIZE THE REPUBLIC

2011-07-01T14:14:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

Once upon a time we took it for granted—an historical fact—that key services, including schools, hospitals, libraries, postal delivery, municipal utilities, and meteorology, were provided either by the State or by charities (or in today’s argot, ‘non-profits’). There were major exceptions (railroads, telephone, housing, the food system) though there was also public housing and the Food Stamp system. Hybrid systems, such as health insurance sold by for-profit companies but simultaneously Medicare, had also taken shape.

Approaches

One mantra of the Republican Party is that economic life should be in private hands. Whenever there is a choice, or a choice can be created by government diktat, lodge resources and approvals in ‘the private sector’. Never speak of, never celebrate, never acknowledge ‘the public sector’. Characterize the‘public sector’ as activity marked by “waste, fraud, and abuse” and those who work in the public sector as parasites on real Americans, time-servers, incompetents. Not ‘hard workers like us’.

What are the differences between the ‘private’ and ‘public’ sectors? They appear to be these:

[1]  Access to jobs in the public sector is via the civil service, marked by objective criteria and subject to rules against nepotism and any quid pro quo (consider Blagojevich). Access to private sector jobs is unregulated, except insofar as there are legal provisions against discrimination.

[2]  Private sector corporations are legally bound to seek profit, but efficiency only insofar as it contributes to profit. The public sector is subject to spending oversight, and to strive for efficiency (if that is equivalent to ‘doing more with less’).

[3]  Activities undertaken in the public sector are those chosen by government. Some deliberation as to merits must precede the decision to ‘go’. Therefore they are subject to tests, which may be well devised: does this activity enhance the general welfare? does it make for fairness? can it be performed efficiently? does it preclude other measures that better meet agreed criteria? Of course, they may also be ill-devised (see the note below about government and ‘interests’). By contrast, the only standard required of private sector firms is that they make a profit: it does not matter whether they do so by designing life-saving pharmaceuticals, or pornographic films.

[4]  A private sector firm pays salaries, offers investors a quid pro quo, and—if it is traded and its shares rise in the market—enables shareholder participation in capital gains. The firm may sell itself, passing value to the private owners or shareholders. The ‘business plan’ of the firm shows how its leadership proposes to conduct a profitable activity. In the public sector salaries are paid, but there are no individual investors or shareholders. Start-up and operating costs required to conduct an activity are provided by government, perhaps offset in part by fees. The availability of the service performed has been deemed in the public interest. The activity, budgets, and management are subject to public scrutiny, including ongoing government audit and Congressional oversight.

[5]  A firm which consistently loses money will go out of existence. In that sense, it is dependent on maintaining its clientele. By analogy, a public service is more likely to be rendered—agreed by Congress and the Executive—if it responds to an interest which will reward the activity’s being undertaken by offering political support (such as mobilizing voters and, in today’s practices, direct campaign money).

[6]  The distinction between ‘public sector’ and ‘private sector’ is muddied whenever government adopts a measure which is (a) not in the general ‘public interest’ but (b) puts tax dollars into the coffers of private firms, directly or indirectly. The ethanol-from-corn scheme is a fine example. Many cite defense procurement as a rich source of examples. The problem is evident: we can disagree about whether a given expenditure or policy change is ‘in the public interest’ and endeavor to bring reason to a choice.

The health insurance debate points to another useful distinction. We learned that in some European countries health insurance is required, but is purchased from non-profit insurance vendors. [Note 1] The systems take many forms. For example, terms and practices may be subject to regulation.

It is frequently observed by critics of US systems that the insured are paying for administrative costs that have nothing to do with medical care. Consider an exemplary for-profit insurer. It performs best if it insures only the healthy. It tries to figure out who is ‘unhealthy’ and how to avoid insuring them. It narrowly defines what it covers, and in ambiguous cases refuses payment.The not-for-profit insurer, on the other hand, performs best by supporting the ‘best outcomes for the insured’. Its terms, conditions, payment practices and reimbursement rates may be regulated by a public or quasi-public body. These are radically different structures. In for-profit insurers, managers are guided by perverse incentives to deny insurance, and deny medical care, when they can. Managers of non-profit medical facilities, by contrast, have a positive incentive to achieve the best medical outcomes for their clients, given their funds and competing demands.

Perverse incentives can be seen at work elsewhere. There is a growing literature critical of for-profit prisons [Note 2] and, especially during the GW Bush period, growing reliance on US contractors to perform war tasks which in the past were performed by military personnel or civilian federal employees. [Note 3]

Question

Is the claim sound that ‘private sector’ for-profit companies are superior to government in supplying a service? Some services? What of hybrid systems?

Drafting Problem

Devise an experiment to compare tax-funded (government) and private (‘market’) approaches to a significant issue, such as health care, incarceration, transport, or the custody of nuclear weapons.

[Note 1]:   See Richard B. Saltman, Reinhard Busse, and Josep Figueras [eds.], Social Health Insurance Systems in Western Europe, (Maidenhead, Berkshire, England: Open University Press, 2004), and Saltman, Busse, and Elias Mossialos [eds], Regulating Entrepreneurial Behaviour in European Health Care Systems (Open University Press, 2002), both volumes in the European Observatory on Health Care Systems Series.
[Note 2]: For example, see Richard A. Oppel, Jr., “Private Prisons Found to Offer Little in Savings,” The New York Times, 18 May 2011.
[Note 3]:  Peter W. Singer, “Outsourcing the Fight”, The Brookings Institution, 5 June 2008. [Originally in Forbes.]

[Political Design 2011.07.01. Revised 2011.07.06. Post A28. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [III]: STARVE THE REPUBLIC

2011-06-29T15:37:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

It’s bizarre that the slogan ‘No New Taxes!’ became a standard declaration, and then the loyalty oath of the US Republican Party. Why bizarre? Because the purpose of government is to collect and organize society‘s resources to meet compelling needs that cannot be met, or cannot be met as well (promptly, efficiently, effectively, cheaply), by other institutions. In short, there is a perceived need for government, and if there is to be government then it must be funded.

Of course “No New Taxes!” arose precisely among agitators who were suspicious of government, and above all suspicious of large government. In California a referendum campaign (‘Prop 13’) mandated stern limits to annual increases in property taxes. Government was likened to a ‘beast’, leading to the slogan ‘Starve the Beast”.

Bruce Bartlett traces the idea of using tax cuts to starve government to an unlikely source: John Kenneth Galbraith. Learning of this unexpected contribution by Galbraith made me laugh, as he was once my teacher, and I had paid some attention to his views. Galbraith, as Reader must suspect, was warning of this possibility. In 1965 Galbraith told the Joint Economic Committee of Congress that:

“I was never as enthusiastic as many of my fellow economists over the tax reduction of last year. The case for it as an isolated action was undoubtedly good. But there was danger that conservatives, once introduced to the delights of tax reduction, would like it too much. Tax reduction would then become a substitute for increased outlays on urgent social needs. We would have a new and reactionary form of Keynesianism with which to contend.” [Note 1]

Bartlett finds the first use of the phrase ‘starve the beast’ in this sense in the 1980s.

Holding elected officials to a pledge of “No New Taxes!” has been championed most prominently by Grover Norquist, about whose campaign Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick (who was a student at Harvard with Norquist a quarter-century earlier) recently wrote that

“It is now clear that the Republican strategy is to drive America to the brink of fiscal ruin and then argue that the only way out is to cut spending for the powerless. Taxes—a dirty word thanks to Norquist’s “no new taxes” gimmick—are made to seem beyond the pale, even as the burden of paying for our society shifts disproportionately to the middle class and working poor. It is the height of fiscal folly. It is also not who we are as a country.” [Note 2]

Note that the Republican Party has no qualms about flagrant, unjustifiable spending of tax dollars, as the Iraq War (2003 - .. ) illustrates.

Can a complex modern society function if its government commits to ‘no new taxes’? Yes, but not well, and only for a time. Government performs useful functions the ‘private sector’ will not. In due course, unfunded, present functions will be reduced and new opportunities foregone.

The Question

How can the cry ‘No New Taxes!’ be discredited?

Approaches

‘No New Taxes’ is a childish slogan because it treats all taxes as alike, without regard for their use. And is there any difference between ‘new’ taxes and those already in place? Why should taxes be collected at all if no new tax can be justified? Recall Washington’s passing enchantment with ‘zero base budgeting’.

Tax critics often argue that the ‘private sector’ is good—entrepreneurial, more productive, a better source of ‘job growth’ and economic growth in general, more efficient, and via markets responsive to the people’s choices—while the ‘public sector’ performs badly. Or, in other terms, that the ‘market’ bests ‘regulation’. Again, these categories say nothing about content and quality. There is no doubt that markets can serve an allocative role, allowing individual preferences to be aggregated and ensuring that performance models are tested in competition. Efficiencies may result. Novel utilities and means to achieve them may be encouraged. It is equally true that no market can function without regulation (which needn’t be supplied by government), and that governments can use quasi-markets to explore efficiencies and innovations.

I once proposed a simple solution to funding the Iraq War (2003 - .. ). Observing that the GW Bush White House had asked Bill Clinton and GHW Bush to join forces to raise monies for relief of tsunami victims in Indonesia, I imagined funding the Iraq War from voluntary contributions. Americans would show their deep commitment to the Iraq War, by their dimes and their dollars. Banks and businesses would be generous. Children, shown on TV breaking piggy banks, would give their pennies. In short order the war would be funded without any burden on the Treasury.

Design of Maneuver Masquerading as Policy

Why ‘Starve the Beast’? Of course for some the slogan invokes the metaphor GOVERNMENT IS THE DEVIL. [Note 3] But the Republican Party employs ‘No New Taxes!’ as a cudgel to force concessions from its political opponents. [Note 4] It can do this because of the concurrence of these conditions:
[1]    Republicans have a clear majority in the House of Representatives, and
[1a]   Congress cannot pass bills, including appropriations, without approval of the House.
[1b]   the Republican majority in the House has, with few exceptions, acted as a disciplined force.
[2]   Senate rules permits cloture only by a vote of three-fifths, enabling any minority of 41 or more to threaten filibuster;
[2a]   on almost all matters the Republican minority leadership in the Senate has been able to block action if it has chosen to do so;
[2b]   Congress cannot pass bills, including appropriations, without approval of the Senate.

What this means is that the Republican leadership can demand that terms be included in legislation as a condition of its being enacted, and can threaten to preclude approval of legislation if it funds functions to which the Republicans object. As a first approximation Republican members of the House and Senate are not free to vote in accordance with their judgment, if they disagree with the Leadership. I say ‘first approximation’ because the Party recognizes that preserving a Senate seat may require allowing a sitting member to vote ‘independently’ in order to burnish his badge for reelection ... and has a sufficiently large minority in the Senate to do so.

How ‘masquerade’? To clothe ‘No New Taxes!’ in the appearance of sound policy, the Party asserts that the national economy is in dire straits and that only rejection of the ‘tax and spend policies’ of its opposition can rescue the country. This is a larger question than we can disentangle here, but there are some certainties that the Republican Party assiduously avoids: first, that something more than 40% of the substantial national debt follows from the ‘Bush era tax cuts’ and the Bush-Cheney war of choice in Iraq; second, that the financial stability of Social Security could be readily achieved by a few steps (such as requiring a contribution of income exceeding the current ceiling); third, that Republican Party hostility to the Obama Administration’s medical care initiative perpetuates, and does not address, the medical cost problem; fourth, that there are substantial military savings that could be had if there were bipartisan readiness to enact them. And fifth—about which the economic consequences are highly uncertain but the scientific evidence firm—that anthropogenic climate change is a fact for which government readiness to take actions may require some readiness to spend.

Drafting Problem

Devise a systematic, evidenced comparison of tax-funded (government) and private (‘non-governmental’) approaches to a significant issue, such as health care, incarceration, global warming, transport systems, food safety assurance, or the custody of nuclear weapons.

NOTES

[Note 1]:  Joint Economic Committee. 1965. January 1965 Economic Report of the President. 89th Cong., 1st sess. Washing- ton, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office. P. 13. Cited in Bruce Bartlett, “ ‘Starve the Beast’: Origins and Development of a Budgetary Metaphor,” The Independent Review, v. XII, n. 1, Summer 2007, pp. 5–26. http://www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_12_01_01_bartlett.pdf
[Note 2]:  Deval Patrick, “How Grover Norquist hypnotized the GOP,” The Washington Post, 30 June 2011. On Norquist’s pledge, see Americans for Tax Reform, “What is the Taxpayer Protection Pledge?”.
[Note 3]:  On similar uses of metaphor, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).
[Note 4]:  For an illustrative account of current arguments about spending and revenue, see “Anti-Tax Diehard Looms Large in Spending Showdown”, Associated Press, The New York Times, 3 July 2011.

[Political Design 2011.06.30. Revised, adding Derval Patrick quote and reference to Grover Norquist: 2011.07.03. Post A27. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [II]: SUPPRESS THE VOTE

2011-06-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

Five years ago I blogged, in “Every Citizen a Voter [I]”, on voter suppression in the United States. [Note 1] This post is subtitled EVERY CITIZEN A VOTER [II]. Far from urging all citizens to register and vote, key Republicans prefer to shape the electorate to their pleasure—by excluding those thought less likely to vote Republican.

Now, in 2011, E. J. Dionne, Jr. writes that “An attack on the right to vote is underway across the country through laws designed to make it more difficult to cast a ballot. If this were happening in an emerging democracy, we’d condemn it as election-rigging.” [Note 2] Although the title of Dionne’s article—“How states are rigging the 2012 election”—seems to say the culprits are ‘states’, the full text makes plain that the culprit is the Republican Party. “The laws in question are being enacted in states where Republicans control state governments” and the laws themselves display “rank partisanship.”

What do these laws do? Dionne: “The laws in question include requiring voter identification cards at the polls, limiting the time of early voting, ending same-day registration and making it difficult for groups to register new voters.”

The Question

Should we understand these laws, and their enactment, as ordinary, ‘just politics’, normal, and so to be expected? Or should we understand them as extraordinary, pernicious, a threat to public life, orchestrated, and a large-scale exercise in voting fraud?

Are the persons who promote these laws, and the state legislators and governors who enact them, engaged in an illegal conspiracy?

Approaches

Begin with this radical idea: US citizens have a right to vote, which no one may take away. An electoral democracy requires nothing less.

Observe, however, that states have denied the vote, or removed a registered voter from the rolls, on many grounds—or pretexts. Being a woman, failure to meet a property test, race, too short residence, failure to pay poll tax, alleged non-residence, status as felon, failure to register or re-register, failure to register by deadline, failure to vote in a recent election or elections, and so forth.

Just as previous tests have often been explained as ‘necessary’ to construct a reliable list of qualified voters, some current proposals—for example, requiring a ‘government-issued photo ID at the polls—are justified as necessary to prevent ‘voting fraud’. If not felony, at least irony!

Some would argue that this is a political matter, subject to legislative jurisdiction. On this argument, terming the several proposals to place conditions on voting ‘illicit’ sounds out of place. And, even Dionne notes, the US Supreme Court upheld in 2008 an Indiana requirement that voters produce photo ID. [Note 3] Does it follow that it is far-fetched to write of a ‘conspiracy’? A conspiracy, according to my dictionary is “A combination of persons for an evil or unlawful purpose; an agreement between two or more to do something criminal, illegal, or reprehensible; a plot.” [Note 4] If voter suppression is not unlawful, it is at least evil and reprehensible. So ‘conspiracy’ it is.

Accounts

Are there sources that might help us to characterize this ‘conspiracy’, and hence better understand how to prevent its achieving its ‘reprehensible’ or ‘evil’ purpose?

A New York Times editorial on this subject is titled “The Republican Threat to Voting”. [Note 5] According to the Times “ Many of these bills were inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a business-backed conservative group, which has circulated voter ID proposals in scores of state legislatures. ” What is this ‘ALEC’? It‘s website describes it as “non-partisan”, but critics portray it as partisan to the core, in effect a front organization for Republican Party ambitions, financed by the Koch brothers.

The squarely non-partisan League of Women Voters has long championed voter registration. In the first half of 2011 Googling on [“League of Women Voters” suppression] uncovers several League state organizations criticizing the Republican initiatives. [Note 6]

Design Proposal

See “Every Citizen a Voter [I]”.

Design Problem

There I pose this question: “ how would the transition from the world we have now to a world of presumed voting eligibility be accomplished?” And in the meantime are vigorous voter registration drives and vigilance at the polls the only available responses?

NOTES

[Note 1]:  This blog, 6 June 2006, “Every Citizen a Voter [I]”.
[Note 2]:   E. J. Dionne, Jr. “How states are rigging the 2012 election”, Washington Post, 19 June 2011.
[Note 3]:   David Stout, “Supreme Court Upholds Voter Identification Law in Indiana”, The New York Times, 29 April 2008.
[Note 4]:   The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, v. 1, p. 407.
[Note 5]:   Editorial, The New York Times, “The Republican Threat to Voting”, 26 April 2011.
[Note 6]:   [Wisconsin] “League of Women Voters Denounces Costly Voter Suppression Legislation,” http://www.lwvwi.org/Portals/0/News%20and%20Events/PDFS/LeagueDenouncesVoterSuppressionBill.pdf , 5 May 2011. [South Carolina] “League of Women Voters Denounces Voter Suppression Legislation,” The Pickens Sentinel, http://www.pickenssentinel.com/view/full_story/13396203/article-League-of-Women-Voters-denounces-passage-of-voter-suppression-legislation-Read-more--The-Easley-Progress---League-of-Women-Voters-denounces-passage-of-voter-suppression-legislation-?instance=home_news_lead , 25 May 2011. [Florida] “League of Women Voters Accuses Legislature of Voter Suppression,”, ABC Action News, 11 May 2011. http://www.abcactionnews.com/dpp/news/political/league-of-women-voters-accuses-legislature-of-voter-suppression .

[Political Design 2011.06.29. Post A26. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ PLAIN TALK [I]: OBSTRUCT THE REPUBLIC

2011-06-18T13:39:00.000-07:00

❄ This post, and other ‘PLAIN TALK’ posts on this blog, describe in plain language the current Republican Party aims and methods, which I consider a perverse exercise in political design. ❄

Consider a call to END PARALYSIS BY A SUPERMINORITY. This note returns to a subject raised earlier [Note 1], but takes a different tack than those developed in ‘Are You an Obstructionist?’  The earlier note is more elegant. This note is blunt, but it also addresses conventional arguments for the status quo.

The US Senate operates under rules [Note 2] that enable ’two-fifths plus one’ to block legislation (in that to end debate requires the votes of three-fifths of the Senators). [These provisions are the ghostly remnants of racist filibuster against civil rights in the Senate of olde.] The problem is that one Party has chosen to use Rule XXII to give it a veto on Senate action ... and so block any legislation (including those to tax and appropriate funds) that the majority judges necessary for governance. A number of US states require a ‘supermajority’ of 3/5 or 2/3 to pass some legislation (in the state legislature or by referendum), such as budgets and tax bills. This note speaks only to the US Senate practice, as state constitutions and rules are various.

The Question

What’s wrong with this? If it’s bad, how can it be fixed?

Approaches

What’s wrong is that requiring a supermajority, when more than half but not three-fifths favor a bill, effectively disenfranchises those whose votes elected that majority of the Senate. It is not far-fetched to call it vote theft.

Defenders of this rule offer two arguments. First, that the rule ensures that a majority does not trample the minority. Second, that in any case the Constitution (Article I Section 5) stipulates that “Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings ... ”.

The issue of ‘cloture’ confronts every deliberative body. When is enough talk enough? Is there some argument, not yet heard, which would sway the body if only a member were given time enough to speak it? And how can the body know it would not be swayed if it silences that member?

But ‘trampling’ conveys another fear: that the substance of a bill, if enacted, could deprive the minority of rights or precious policies ... and that if as many as two-fifths plus one judge the bill so onerous, or even dangerous, then that bill should not pass.

In a voluntary society—say, the Different Drummers’ Club—mutual respect, a readiness to listen but also a readiness to accept practices that make for decision, is sufficient. If it were not, members would leave, as they are always free to do. And the Drummers’s decisions are of modest consequence. But the US Senate must judge matters of enormous consequence, war and equity, justice and regulation, initiative and restraint, and its members are expected to serve their terms. Could reasonable men and women find a way to ensure that any Senator’s argument could be made and be available? Of course.

Now, what about substance? What of ‘the onerous, the dangerous’? The Constitution builds in two protections against bad bills: requiring approval of both House and Senate, and requiring Presidential approval. Those who insist on the Senate’s requirement of a supermajority must believe that House, Senate, and President would agree to a bill so bad, so onerous and even dangerous, that it must be stopped. And it is not impossible to imagine Congressional majorities and a President who would commit to bad policy and bad practice. Of course, as long as there is some vestige of an electoral system the customary reply is that the public will, at the next election, have the option of throwing the rascals out. But in these early 2000s it has become clear that large numbers among the US public can’t spot a rapscallion when he, or she, is in plain sight.

The argument is often made that we may rail against the opposition’s superminority today, but on a later day, after an election that transformed us into a minority, we would prize the ability to prevent a new majority from enacting its mad schemes. Shouldn’t we think more kindly of the Senate’s requirement of 60%?

No. The requirement of a supermajority introduces an asymmetry. If Party A has a reliable 60% it can pass what it will—and if it has the cooperation of the House and the White House that bill becomes law. Thereafter, Party B can reverse the law, only if it can muster a vote of 60% in the Senate, and a majority in the House, and a Presidential signature, at the same time. Party A has put a ‘lock’ on the terms of that act, which may be modified in the future in the necessary bargaining between Parties A and B but which will resist reversal if Party A remains obstinate.

Of course, the main objection to a Senate superminority is that it makes for paralysis. A majority in the Senate cannot act unless it can muster 60%, which an obstinate Opposition will deny if it can.

Design Proposal

The post “Are You An Obstructionist?” offers one approach: to call for personal pledges not to obstruct a majority.

A very different approach would be to wrench the supermajority requirement out of the rules: let a majority decide, unless the Constitution requires more. [Note 3] Apply it to getting a vote, and the vote itself, on bills, and on appointments.

It is interesting, by the way, that the drafters of the Constitution were well aware that there might be some matters for which a supermajority was desirable. Article 1 Section 5 not only refers to rules, but stipulates that a 2/3 vote is required for one particular action:

“Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings, punish its Members for disorderly Behaviour, and, with the Concurrence of two thirds, expel a Member.”

It does not say that the concurrence of two thirds is required to end debate, and it does not say that the Rules may not require two thirds.

Drafting Problem

I leave it to the Reader to wrestle with drafting suitable rules. Would you really want a ‘mere’ majority to be able to end debate? Wouldn’t these two rules (simple majority to act, and to force a matter onto the agenda) require guarantees that the text of a bill be available for some set number of days in advance of consideration and vote? How is a minority’s role to be honored and respected? Are there other issues raised by such a blunt way of addressing the filibuster?

[Note 1]:   See Are You an Obstructionist? Post A23. 7 August 2010.
[Note 2]:   Rule XXII, Precedence of Motions, §2. http://rules.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=RulesOfSenateHome.
[Note 3]:  The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority, in some cases of both Houses separately, in eight matters: expulsion of a member, veto override, Senatorial treaty ‘advice and consent’, initiating a Constitutional amendment, overriding an Amendment 14 §3 disqualification of having violated an oath to the Constitution, conviction by Senate in trial of impeachment, and to overcome Presidential insistence that he or she is not unable to perform the office. None of these is an ‘ordinary’ legislative matter.

[Political Design 2011.06.18. Minor revisions 2011.06.25. Post A25. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ US ELECTORAL REFORM [III]: DYNAMIC PRIMARIES

2010-11-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

US Congressional and Presidential elections are distorted by how candidates get on the ballot. The parties largely control choice, and the major parties largely exclude electable ‘third party’ candidates.

The Question

Is there a better way?

Approaches

In earlier posts I’ve struggled with ways to accomplish a ‘primary’. [Note 1] The results have had their merits, but are baroque and, in retrospect, don’t impress me. So here’s a new idea. It stands out because of its simplicity and resistance to exclusion.

The dynamic primary. Any citizen may ‘file’. There is no fee. A website must be associated with the candidacy. Once filing opens (say, 90 days before the election) voters may cast votes. Filing continues (say, until 30 days before the election). Voters may change their vote until the election closes. All voting is done over the Net, with appropriate protections to ensure an honest result. An appropriate number of candidates (say, 7 or 9) proceeds to the final election, conducted similarly. There is local provision for those without access to the Web.

How could this possibly work? Easily ... because it would be complemented by two types of Web-based sites: those of the candidates, and those of party, citizen, interest group, and ‘good government’ organizations urging candidates and considerations. In addition voters could see the running totals of votes hitherto cast. Any voter could gauge ‘electability’ by focusing on those with higher vote totals.

This would not bring polls to an end—since some people would still believe that they could influence the outcome if they knew voters’ answers to questions about the solidity of their vote and their intentions if they had not yet voted. Nonetheless, it would radically reduce the role of polls.

[A comprehensive reform would include additional features: (i) severing money from politics, by replacing advertising with access to candidate and group websites; (ii) where appropriate, multi-member constituencies; (iii) preferential voting (choices ranked in order); (iv) universal registration; (v) either dynamic voting (as above) or voting over a weekend; and (vi) decision in the House and Senate by majority vote, except as provided explicitly in the Constitution. Perhaps each Presidential candidate would name a vice-presidential candidate ... or some other method found.]

[Note 1] See US ELECTORAL REFORM [II] and EVERY CITIZEN A VOTER [I].

[Political Design 2010.11.12. Post A24. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com]

❄ Are You an Obstructionist?

2010-08-07T13:38:00.000-07:00

Remarkably, a Republican Party minority of 41 in the US Senate has rendered it difficult, and on some subjects impossible, for the Congress to legislate. Bills are held hostage to extortionate demands. Appointments, especially nominations to fill vacancies in the Federal Courts, are blocked, preventing courts and executive offices from performing their Constitutional functions. Blocking provisions of Senate Rule XXII and the Senate’s customary practices do not stem from the Constitution, but from the history of Southern white politicians’ efforts to prevent African-Americans from gaining effective citizenship in the wake of the Civil War. A democracy of more than 300,000,000 is paralyzed by the deliberate actions of a handful.

Abraham Lincoln said, in his First Inaugural, that

“A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” [Note 1]

Lincoln was, of course, talking about secession. In the sentence introducing the quote above, he said “Plainly, the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy.” The issue in 2010 is not that the Republican ultras seek “the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement,” but Lincoln’s remarks are square on nonetheless. What the Republicans seek is rule when in a minority, and when in a majority the unfettered exercise of dominance, including unprecedented claims for Executive authority if the White House were again in their hands. This we learned from ‘Dick’ Cheney and John Yoo.

Many familiar arguments are made on behalf of the requirement of a supermajority to effect cloture, and the practice of permitting individual senators to place ‘holds’, and various parliamentary maneuvers. Against such arguments, however, is the fact that a minority uses these instruments to prevent the will of tens of millions of citizens, expressed in elections, from their part in governance envisioned in the Constitution. Our votes are stolen.

One point. Times have changed. Every senator and representative has a web site through which he or she can express views, without limit. If there are truly new, important arguments to be made, amendments to be advanced, these can be in the hands of every House and Senate office in an instant. If a modest number of the majority were persuaded that there was need to take more time, they could simply withdraw their consent to cloture. The claim that obstructive practices are required to ensure deliberation and debate, and a voice for the minority, is groundless.

The Question

How can this deliberate effort at sabotage be stopped?

Approaches

Many ask: can’t Rule XXII’s requirement of 60 votes for cloture be amended, or set aside? And there is a plan to attempt that at the opening of the next Congressional session in January 2011.

Despite Rule XXII, if sufficient members agreed that they would respect the wish of a majority to bring a bill or appointment to a vote, then 51 Senate votes could be converted to 60. But that appears impossible, as long as the likes of McConnell and Kyl coerce Republican senators to hew to obstruction. Could some be pried loose? Or defeated, because of their destructive intransigence?

Approach I: A Political Approach Via Elections

One approach would put the question to candidates, for both House and Senate seats: “If a majority of your colleagues declare that they wish to bring a bill or Senate confirmation to a vote, will you agree not to obstruct? To refrain from parliamentary steps to delay or divert that vote? And to cast your vote for procedural motions that may be required to reach that vote?” Call this the Pledge to Cooperate.

Gradually a picture would emerge. Candidates for the 435 House seats and 37 Senate seats up for election in November 2010 would accept, reject, or ignore the pledge. We would soon know who stood on the side of obstruction and who did not.

“Senator Blank, in 2009 and 2010, has been a chronic obstructor. If we send this chronic obstructor back to Washington, he will work to paralyze the Senate and make true bipartisanship impossible. We should thank him for his honesty in refusing to sign the Pledge to Cooperate, and retire him to tend his vegetable garden ... ”

The Design Problem

Is the approach just outlined sound? Would it help in making ‘obstruction’ a key issue in 2010. Or would it simply gather the forces of those who really do want to paralyze the Democratic Senate and undermine the Obama presidency?

Does the language of the Pledge to Cooperate accomplish what it intends?

What organization and circulation of the Pledge would be required for this approach to be effective?

If Democrats found themselves in a minority in 2012 or 2014 or 2016, would this Pledge prevent them from—for example—withstanding Republican moves to place more ultras on the Courts? In practice, would Democratic candidates resist or refuse the Pledge just as much as their Republican counterparts?

Approach II: A Political Approach Via Changing the Rules

Norman Ornstein proposes to change the rules so that the blocking minority bore the inconvenience of a filibuster and so would rarely undertake it:

“For starters, the Senate could replace the majority’s responsibility to end debate with the minority’s responsibility to keep it going. It would work like this: for the first four weeks of debate, the Senate would operate under the old rules, in which the majority has to find enough senators to vote for cloture. Once that time has elapsed, the debate would automatically end unless the minority could assemble 40 senators to continue it.

“An even better step would be to return to the old ‘Mr. Smith Goes to Washington’ model — in which a filibuster means that the Senate has to stop everything and debate around the clock — by allowing a motion requiring 40 votes to continue debate every three hours while the chamber is in continuous session. That way it is the minority that has to grab cots and mattresses and be prepared to take to the floor night and day to keep their filibuster alive.

“Under such a rule, a sufficiently passionate minority could still preserve the Senate’s traditions and force an extended debate on legislation. But frivolous and obstructionist misuse of the filibuster would be a thing of the past.” [Note 2]

[Note 1] Abraham Lincoln. First Inaugural Address. 4 March 1861. http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext90/linc111h.htm Or see: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25818 I came across Lincoln’s words, in their original context, in Maury Klein, Days of Defiance: Sumter, Secession, and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 1999), p. 317.
[Note 2] Norman Ornstein, “A Filibuster Fix,” The New York Times op-ed, 27 August 2010. “Norman Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a co-author of ‘The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track.’ ”

[Political Design 2010.08.07. Revised 2010.08.10, adding the quote from Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural and my comment. Revised 2010.08.28, adding Approach II and the quotation from Norman Ornstein. Post A23. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ Gender Quota for the Dail?

2010-08-05T11:25:00.001-07:00

The Irish Times surveyed the 23 women Dáil members on the question whether “political parties should be required to adopt gender quotas in their candidate selection process.” [Note 1] About 14% of the wholly-elected legislature, the Dáil, are women.

The Question

If approximate ‘gender equality’ in the legislature would lead to a ‘better’ outcome than that at present, how could this be achieved?

Approaches

The commission which broached this subject envisioned legislation. But is that necessary?

Election to the Dáil takes place in multi-member constituencies, of three, four or five members. To be elected a candidate must achieve that number—also called a ‘quota’—equal to the number of votes cast (plus 1) divided by the number which is one more than the number of seats to be filled. Voters rank the candidates; when one who is elected has votes greater than the quota, the number in excess is distributed among the voter’s next choices; similarly, when candidates with the least votes are crossed off their second and further choices may be redistributed. [Note 2]

A very different approach would dispense altogether with need for any change in the existing electoral law. Whether it would have the effect of ‘approximate gender equality’ would depend on the depth of the electorate’s persuasion that the result is worth having. Call this ‘Voter’s Choice’.

Advocates of gender equality would put this proposition to all of the political parties. ‘In every constituency, run both a man and a woman, or two men and two women, &c. If you do not do so, we will boycott all of your candidates in that constituency.’

What effect would this have on the outcome? Because of the unusual PR-STV voting system, additional candidates of the same party do not dilute that party’s position as competitor against other parties, provided voters allocate their second and third choices to the same party. They might not, but even as practice now stands they are free to allocate second and third and further choices to other-party candidates.

It could increase campaign costs, but it would also mean two (or more) candidates would be stumping, with the possibility of winning seats at other parties’ expense.

It would not guarantee ‘approximate gender equality’ in the Dáil, but it could achieve that equality in the processes of candidate selection and election.

Note that this presents the parties with a fait accompli to which they must respond. Moreover, as no legislation would be required, no change in the electoral law, to the extent incumbents would act to preserve their advantage by delaying or watering-down any legislative moves they will find they have been ignored.

An initiative on these lines could prompt a party, especially one in search of some distinguishing move, to take the lead and declare that it would adopt the Voter’s Choice as party policy. Whatever the uncertainties about effects on the electoral outcome might be, other parties would have to consider whether they would lose seats if they failed to join. Is there a bandwagon, and do we want to be on it? I wonder how Labour and the Greens would respond, if not already declared.

The Design Problem

Is it really true, as the second approach outlined above claims, that ‘Voter’s Choice’ would work?

Notes

[1] Mary Minahan, “Most women TDs oppose idea of gender quotas,” The Irish Times, 4 August 2010.
[2] A simple explanation of the system’s intricacies is posted by the Irish government at http://www.environ.ie/en/LocalGovernment/Voting/PublicationsDocuments/FileDownLoad,1895,en.pdf See also “Ireland’s PR-STV Electoral System: A Need for Reform?”, http://www.tcd.ie/Political_Science/staff/michael_gallagher/IrishElectSys.php

[Political Design 2010.08.04. Post A22. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com/]

❄ Keeping Householders in Their Homes

2010-05-02T12:48:00.001-07:00

The full force of the Great Recession struck in September 2008, but a ‘perfect storm’ had been brewing from the onset of GW Bush’s second term. The main force of White House responses, in the last year of the GW Bush administration and first year of Barack Obama’s, was to secure those financial institutions which were so large and so unsound that their failure could have crippled the US and global economies. Only in small ways, and tardily, did Government directly address the human consequences of the Great Banks’s hubris and disregard. The Great Recession’s effects on the people were harshest in job losses and, in turn, home foreclosures. This note is focused on one aspect of the Great Recession only: foreclosures.

The Question

Imagine ‘home security’, an assurance akin to familiar ‘social security’ or ‘unemployment insurance’. How could home security be designed to meet four compelling criteria: that it be [a] practical, [b] politically acceptable, [c] fair to homeowners, acknowledging their equity in their homes, and [d] fair to those citizens who would benefit only indirectly from the assurance, not as actual mortgagees in trouble?

Approaches

As a starting-point for discussion, I’ll put on the table a design I’ll call ‘Home Security’.

The central idea of Home Security is that every person have a right to reside in a house or condo he or she is buying but that is subject to a mortgage. If for any reason he or she becomes unable to meet mortgage payments, payments will be met by the Home Security Assurance. In turn, automatically, the HSA will become co-owner of the house. If the householder's circumstances improve, she or he may buy back the HSA’s share, or any part of it. If the householder elects to sell the house, the HSA’s share must be paid to HSA and the original mortgage discharged. Any remaining value goes to the seller.

In one sense, this is a simple scheme. It institutes an intermediary between the mortgagee and the original lender. The HSB insulates the original lender from the buyer’s unexpected inability to pay on the mortgage; but in return the HSB’s share of the house becomes a superior lien on the proceeds at time of sale. The original lender also gives up the right of foreclosure.

There must be some conditions, to ensure this is a home security program, not a giveaway. These are:

[a] the HSA must appraise the house at time of purchase and may decline to guarantee if price ‘significantly exceeds’ value;
[b] buyer must make a ‘significant; down payment’, so that buyer has equity at risk;
[c] the lending bank must retain ownership, and risk, of the mortgage;
[d] at time of sale, if the sale price will not fully reimburse HSA and fully discharge the mortgage, HSA shall have the authority to prevent the sale.

It’s easy to imagine doubts, groans, and eyes rolling at this proposal. Who will fund the Home Security Assurance? Won’t householders scam the system? Won’t even sober homeowners be tempted to withhold their mortgage payment in a ‘difficult’ month and use the money instead for—say—a child’s college costs? Doesn’t this prevent ordinary banks from doing what banks ordinarily do? And what about that very hard case, which so many houses being ‘underwater’ today makes clear, in which the market value of a house has declined so that even selling it will not meet obligations? What, then, of the householder who must move to another city? What are their options?

If your assignment were to design Home Security Assurance, you might imagine an institution that was government-owned or government-guaranteed, a non-profit entity. It’s income would come from government, fees from lenders when HSA paid the mortgage, householder repurchase of ownership shares, and net increases in value of its partial ownerships paid at time of sale. It would come into existence gradually, avoiding a massive start-up cost. [Any state or city which chose to accelerate start-up could do so by contributing to the initial pool.]

Just as an exercise, imagine that 1,000,000 householders were unable to meet their mortgage in a given month, and that their monthly payments averaged $1800. HSA would need to pay banks $1,800,000,000 in that month, if the facility were universal, or $21,600,000,000 in a year. But in return HSA would become owner of housing stock of approximately equal value. In a stable market an equilibrium would be reached at which HSA’s layout to lenders equalled its income from other sources. It would be a revolving fund.

How would we calculate HSA’s ownership share? For simplicity, just take payment divided by original sale price. If the original price was $200,000, and the payment is $2000, for making the payment in one month HSA acquires 1% of the house. But if the householder contributes $1000, HSA pays only $1000 and acquires only 0.5% of the house, or 6% in a year. The householder’s incentive to protect equity ownership remains.

[For comparison to actual experience, consider that in the second quarter 2007 the number of US mortgages in default was “just over” one million.] [Note 1]

As another exercise, work out what would happen when the householder had ceded his or her entire equity to HSA, not having had a job for two or three years and having had little equity in the house to begin with. How could homelessness be prevented?

My first thought is that as equity dwindled householder would have an increased incentive to sell, conserving some portion of realized equity for rent in new quarters. The problem of rent relief in extremis is for another day.

NOTES

[Note 1] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-08-78R

[Political Design 2010.05.02. Post A21. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html or http://design.learnworld.com/]

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❄ Honourable Hostel of Commons?

2009-05-19T19:14:00.000-07:00

The Speaker of the House of Commons has announced his intention to step down. He has been berated by members of the House—some would say scapegoated—embarassed by revelations of widespread abuse of expense accounts by members of Parliament.

The Question

How could the House have managed members’ felt need to live in London, as well as in their constituencies?

Approaches

The approach of the House had been to provide an expense account from which members living outside of London could draw to house themselves in London.

I have a simple design suggestion. Provide every member with a deliberately small apartment, in one of a number of such hostels, within walking distance of the House. And rather than provide for 646 Members, the current number, reduce the number of constituencies by half, or two-thirds. The savings should pay for the accommodation.

Of course, the proposal could be more elaborate. Offer a number of larger apartments, for which those choosing would pay a fee. Offer a flat-rate cash payment to members declining the provided flat. Let your imagination run free!

[Political Design 2009.05.22. Post A20. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ A 2001-2009 Truth Commission?

2009-02-10T07:28:00.000-08:00

In a lecture delivered on February 9th, 2009 Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Senator Patrick Lahey (D-Vt.) characterized disagreement about confronting the possible illegality of actions undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration of 2001-2009:

“As to the best course of action for bringing a reckoning for the actions of the past eight years, there has been heated disagreement. There are some who resist any effort to investigate the misdeeds of the recent past. Indeed, some Republican Senators tried to extract a devil’s bargain from the Attorney General nominee in exchange for their votes, a commitment that he would not prosecute for anything that happened on President Bush’s watch. That is a pledge no prosecutor should give, and Eric Holder did not, but because he did not, it accounts for many of the partisan votes against him. [Text 1]

“There are others who say that, even if it takes all of the next eight years, divides this country, and distracts from the necessary priority of fixing the economy, we must prosecute Bush administration officials to lay down a marker. Of course, the courts are already considering congressional subpoenas that have been issued and claims of privilege and legal immunities – and they will be for some time.” [Text 1]

The Question

Would ‘truth and reconciliation’, rather than absolution or prosecution, best serve the people of the United States?

Approaches

As an alternative to the two positions Senator Lahey summarized, he suggests consideration of a middle way:

“One path to that goal would be a reconciliation process and truth commission. We could develop and authorize a person or group of people universally recognized as fair minded, and without axes to grind. Their straightforward mission would be to find the truth.” [Text 1]

He continues:

“People would be invited to come forward and share their knowledge and experiences, not for purposes of constructing criminal indictments, but to assemble the facts. If needed, such a process could involve subpoena powers, and even the authority to obtain immunity from prosecutions in order to get to the whole truth. Congress has already granted immunity, over my objection, to those who facilitated warrantless wiretaps and those who conducted cruel interrogations. It would be far better to use that authority to learn the truth.” [Text 1]

The Political Design Problem

Would the people and future governance be best-served by a ‘truth and reconciliation commission’ or by a ‘truth commission’? Then, what should its charter be? Its powers? And its membership? For example, could this be—should it be?—a bipartisan commission like the 9.11 Commission? And who should staff the commission?

Note: Full Disclosure

On 30 July 2007 I posted to my ‘political’ blog a judgment about the US role in Iraq. In the course of that entry I made this comment about assessment of the Bush-Cheney period:

“We must acknowledge that there has been, and remains, an effort to undermine the Constitution, and document what was done so that firm lines can be drawn against future assaults. Later historians, with yet more access to memories and transactions, may alter this account, but we must begin with what we can. And there will be some specialists in politics who should ask, not to punish but to expose, how it was that the Republican majority in the House and Senate, and then as a minority, and many among the Democrats, failed to exercise their obligation to ‘protect and defend’ the Constitution. All of this should be done in the clear light of day.” [Text 2]

TEXTS

[1] Remarks of Senator Patrick Leahy, The 2009 Marver Bernstein Lecture, “Restoring Trust in the Justice System: The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Agenda In The 111th Congress”, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee, United States Senate. Georgetown University, February 9, 2009. As Prepared.
[2] Bruce Larkin’s Blog. 2007.07.30 “Iraq” http://www.learnworld.com/blog/blog.html

[Political Design 2009.02.10. Post A19. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ Designing Denuclearization

2008-08-23T04:02:00.000-07:00

I’ve written a brief note on the June 2008 publication of Designing Denuclearization: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Transaction Publishers). Designing Denuclearization puts my case that nuclear weapons abolition should be the subject of focused research and policy discussion, a practical aim of governments to be pursued with urgence in the immediate future. The note includes links to other books I’ve written on war and nuclear policy, and to course materials on nuclear nonproliferation and abolition.

You can bring up the note at http://www.gcdd.net/DDBlurb.pdf
This is a key moment to place denuclearization on the agenda, for reasons you know well. Please pass this note along to any friends or colleagues to whom it might be of interest.

[Political Design 2008.08.23 Post A18. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ US ELECTORAL REFORM [II]

2007-08-24T14:29:00.000-07:00

The US political scene is in shambles as states compete to go first, or early, in the ‘primaries’ which allocate delegates to party national conventions reflecting presidential candidate preference expressed in the vote. The party conventions then choose a presidential nominee, who chooses a vice-presidential ‘running mate’.

The Question

Why is it done this way? Historical accretion. No federal law dictates how parties choose presidential nominees. In fact, nothing in the Constitution envisions ‘parties’. Regulation is accomplished by state law and party decision, state by state.

Approaches

In this section I’ll set out a way to choose presidents which [a] junks the present ‘system’, [b] ensures that every voter is on an equal footing with every other, [c] provides an important contribution by parties, but is free of party control, and [d] offers a framework which, with further legislation, could remove the role of money in determining who can be a candidate to be president, and could therefore put all prospective candidates in a position of equality with all others.

This method makes use of two simple voting procedures which are radically different from the outdated and unfair system taken for granted in the United States. By US custom, candidates run against everyone else, and the biggest vote-getter wins, even if he or she has fewer than 50% of votes cast: the threshold for election is achieving a ‘plurality’.

The first simple method is called ‘OK’ and is useful in ranking the attraction of candidates when there can be many, exactly the case of US primaries. The second method is called ‘preferential voting’; each voter ranks the candidates 1, 2, 3, ... If the voter’s preferred candidate is dropped because he or she has the lowest number of votes, that candidate’s votes are distributed among second choices, and so on. So every voter’s vote counts, though in the end (when a single position, such as the Presidency, is at stake) of course the minority loses.

So here are the steps of this approach, which we can call a   “Checkbox then Choice”   system.

[A] an Election Commission, with a narrow, specific mandate, is constituted.

[B] the Election Law would stipulate that candidates for the primary would be nominated to the Election Commission. Governors and present and past Senate members, and former Presidents and Vice-Presidents, could propose themselves; others could be proposed by designated persons or bodies; and parties with some stipulated result (‘substantial parties’) in the last election could nominate directly to the Election Commission.

[C] the Election Commission would determine [a] if nominees wished to be primary candidates, [b] whether they met the formal requirements (age, native born), and [c] whether they accepted a party endorsement or chose to run as an independent..

[D]   Checkbox  the primary ballot would list all candidates, identifying by party or as independents, who might be dozens; by a check or an X the voter would say “ok” to as many of the candidates as he or she wished.

[E] the primary election would take place on the same day throughout the United States, and no ballots would be counted until the last polling station in Alaska or Hawaii had closed.

[F] the NUMBER with the most votes—say, the top six or eight or ten—would be candidates in the general election. [NUMBER is the number of candidates set in the Election Law, plus the added ‘substantial party’ candidates if any.] In addition, the highest-ranked primary candidate of any ‘substantial party’ would go on to the general election list, even if the number of primary votes received was insufficient.

[G] each of the NUMBER would choose a vice-presidential candidate of his or her party, or an independent in the case of independents, from among the candidates in the primary.

[H] note that there might be more than one presidential candidate from major parties, who could, but need not, cross-list among themselves in designating vice-presidential candidates.

[I]   Choice   the general election ballot would list the NUMBER of candidates, their party affiliation, and the corresponding vice-presidential candidate. Voters would then rank them from 1 to NUMBER (though they would not be required to rank any further than they chose).

[J] in counting the ballots, the usual method to count a ‘Hare system’ or ‘preferential ballot’ would be used. The first choices would be tallied; the candidate with least first choices would be dropped; his or her second choices would be allocated to those remaining. This process would yield a new list of (NUMBER - 1) candidates. The one with least would be dropped. Their second or, in the case of those distributed after Round 1, third choice votes would be allocated, completing Round 2. The candidate with least votes would be dropped &c. &c. until one candidate had more than 50%.

Here are two elective features:

[C.1] all ‘electioneering’ in the weeks leading to the primary election would be done throught the Net. The Election Commission would provide access to candidate’s web sites, where candidates could promote themselves. The Election Commission would pay all bills, up to stipulated maxima, for mounting and serving from these sites, so no funds need go into the hands of the candidate. In short, low and controlled campaign costs, removing donors from the political cycle.

[H.1] similarly in the general election, except that the NUMBER would also be free to roam the hustings and hold events open fairly and without prejudice to any prospective voter. But the time between the primary and general election would be reasonably short: say, four weeks.

And here’s a further twist which you might find attractive. One could argue—though I don’t—that the fact many voters don’t go to the polls should not reduce the weight of the vote in that region. On this argument you could, for example, take the number of registered voters, or citizens of voting age, in each Congressional district, and correct the total vote from that district as if the full number had voted in the proportions of those who actually went to the polls. So if the registered voters were 300,000 but only 200,000 voted, then the vote totals would be corrected by a factor of 3/2 before being sent forward for tally. Of course, there is a strong argument that those who don’t vote should be penalized by their vote’s not counting. But this does reward those who do vote.

To summarize, if NUMBER was eight and the ballot might look like this in 2008:

Please rank the following tickets. Rank your most preferred 1, your next 2, and so on. You may rank all, or fewer than all, as you wish.

Al Gore [Green & Democrat]. VP nominee: Barbara Boxer [Democrat].
Barack Obama [Democrat]. VP nominee: Hillary Clinton [Democrat].
Fred Thompson [Republican]. VP nominee: Mitt Romney [Republican].
Hillary Clinton [Democrat]. VP nominee: Barack Obama [Democrat].
John Edwards [Democrat]. VP nominee: Nancy Pelosi [Democrat].
John McCain [Republican]. VP nominee: Joseph Lieberman [Independent].
Oprah Winfrey [Independent]. VP nominee: Martin Sheen [Independent].
Rudy Giuliani [Republican]. VP nominee: Henry M. Paulson, Jr. [Republican].

The Primary Election ballot uses checkboxes to determine the candidates with the widest favor among voters. The General Election ballot is a preferential ballot by which voters express their rank-order choice among the winners of the Primary.

The Political Design Problem

Can you do better?

Then: how would you go about getting approval for this plan or another?

REFERENCES

[1] Electoral Reform Society [UK]

[2] Californians for Electoral Reform

[3] Canadians for Electoral Reform

[Political Design 2007.08.24 Post A17. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ EVERY CITIZEN A VOTER [I]

2006-06-06T18:25:00.000-07:00

It’s clear from the 2000 and 2004 elections that groups determined to deny citizens their right to vote were active and—for example, in Florida in 2000—successful in promoting their favorite from loser to winner. On this subject The New York Times editorialized on 30 May 2006, in part, that

“In a country that spends so much time extolling the glories of democracy, it’s amazing how many elected officials go out of their way to discourage voting. States are adopting rules that make it hard, and financially perilous, for nonpartisan groups to register new voters. They have adopted new rules for maintaining voter rolls that are likely to throw off many eligible voters, and they are imposing unnecessarily tough ID requirements.

“Florida recently reached a new low when it actually bullied the League of Women Voters into stopping its voter registration efforts in the state. The Legislature did this by adopting a law that seems intended to scare away anyone who wants to run a voter registration drive. Since registration drives are particularly important for bringing poor people, minority groups and less educated voters into the process, the law appears to be designed to keep such people from voting.

“It imposes fines of $250 for every voter registration form that a group files more than 10 days after it is collected, and $5,000 for every form that is not submitted -- even if it is because of events beyond anyone’s control, like a hurricane. The Florida League of Women Voters, which is suing to block the new rules, has decided it cannot afford to keep registering new voters in the state as it has done for 67 years. If a volunteer lost just 16 forms in a flood, or handed in a stack of forms a day late, the group's entire annual budget could be put at risk.

“In Washington, a new law prevents people from voting if the secretary of state fails to match the information on their registration form with government databases. . . . Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky, introduced an amendment to require all voters to present a federally mandated photo ID. Even people who have been voting for years would need to get a new ID to vote in 2008. . . .

“These three techniques—discouraging registration drives, purging eligible voters and imposing unreasonable ID requirements—keep showing up. Colorado recently imposed criminal penalties on volunteers who slip up in registration drives. . . .” [1]

The Times returned to the subject in an editorial on 7 June 2006, citing new regulations by the Ohio Secretary of State. [2]

In a letter responding to the Times’ assertion that “the right to vote is fundamental” Representative Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. called attention to the Supreme Court ruling in Bush v. Gore that

“The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the president of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College.”

Judging that “because it’s not a fundamental constitutional right, Congress doesn’t have the authority to create a unitary national voting system,” Jackson concludes “We need to add a voting rights amendment to the Constitution. That would give Congress the power to create a unitary federal voting system ... ” [3]

The Question

What could be done to ensure that every citizen eighteen or older may exercise the right to vote?

Approaches

The 14th Amendment specifies that “No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States . . . .” The 15th Amendment forbids denying a citizen the vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude” and the 19th Amendment that the vote shall not be denied on account of gender. Similarly the 26th Amendment bars denial of the vote to anyone eighteen or older “on account of age.” [4]

A lay reader would take the 14th Amendment to provide as much protection as any person should require. The problem is that advocates of restriction cloak their aims in ostensibly reasonable purposes, even arguing—for example—that the legislation or practices they prefer are measures to ensure a fair election. Consider, for example, registration. In principle, registration increases the likelihood that there are no ‘ringers’: those voting are resident citizens. But it also requires that citizens have decided to vote and accomplished the registration procedure. There is precedent for Constitutional amendments directed explicitly at a device to prevent citizens from voting: the 24th Amendment bars “failure to pay poll tax or other tax” as a reason to deny or abridge voting in a Federal election. [4]

For a fair election three conditions must be met. The citizen eighteen or older must be identified. The voter must be associated with a location. And he or she must not be able to vote more than once. There are other desiderata: secrecy of the ballot must be assured, the vote must be tallied as cast and aggregated honestly, voters may not casually switch jurisdictions to alter results, and votes should not be for sale. There is growing appreciation that a robust, ineradicable audit trail is an absolute requirement, which any reformed system must incorporate. But we must first be sure we can do three things: identify the voter, associate voter with a jurisdiction, and permit one vote only.

Imagine that when a citizen is born or naturalized he or she is entered on a public list which shows name, date of birth, gender, a complex identifier to reduce erroneous matches, and a unique number. When the person becomes 18, or a person 18 or over is naturalized, his or her name moves automatically to the voter list. At that point every eligible citizen may vote. The citizen declares a place of residence which may, subject to some restrictions, be changed at will. To vote the citizen produces his or her unique voting number.

The Political Design Problem

It’s easy to imagine the problems and requirements which such a system would present. What are they? and how could they be addressed? Once upon a time the Social Security Number could not be used for any other purpose than Social Security identification. Look at what’s happened. How could a voting identifier be kept apart from all use for credit and tracking? And how would the transition from the world we have now to a world of presumed voting eligibility be accomplished? What about arguments concerning prior felony convictions, rules for residence, links to drivers' licenses, party identification?

Texts

[1] The New York Times, “Block the Vote.” 30 May 2006. Editorial.

[2] The New York Times, “Block the Vote, Ohio Remix.” 7 June 2006. Editorial.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/07/opinion/07wed1.html

See also Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman, “With new legislation, Ohio Republicans plan holiday burial for American Democracy,” 6 December 2005, critically telling of legislation then before the Ohio state legislature with likely profound effects on forthcoming elections. http://www.freepress.org/departments/display/19/2005/1607ln

[3] Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr., letter to the editor of The New York Times, published 5 June 2006.

[4] Amendments 11-27 to the Constitution of the United States. National Archives.

[Political Design 2006.06.06. Expanded 2006.06.07. Post A16. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ IMMIGRATION DESIGN: The Self-Enforcing Immigration System (SEISM)

2006-04-30T20:20:00.000-07:00

The United States is now locked in a policy dispute about law to govern immigration into the United States and the status of ‘undocumented’ or ‘illegal’ immigrants already in place.

The Question

What US immigration policy would make the best sense?

Approaches

A bill promoted by Representative Sensenbrenner in the House defines the problem as one of preventing evasion of entry rules (‘security’) and following the logic of defining aliens whose status is not consistent with law as ‘illegals’ subject to deportation. [1]

A proposal offered in the Senate starts from the assumption that many of those in the United States would agree to pursuing a series of steps toward regularization of their status. It also sets out procedures for workers to come to the United States and work, with the possibility of pursuing permanent status.

The problems are several: [1] there are an estimated 11-12 million ‘undocumented’ aliens already in the United States, and to contemplate mass deportations is absurd; [2] businesses depend on immigrant labor, including that of ‘undocumented’ aliens; [3] some judge that there is a ‘security’ issue in that persons entering the United States who had not been subject to vetting by counter-terrorism procedures could take part in attacks; [4] some do not welcome immigrants; but [5] there are ‘undocumented’ aliens in the United States whose children and spouses, and other relatives, are either US citizens or permanent residents, and maintaining family coherence is an appropriate aim of public policy.

Consider the following approach, which does an end run around several of the barriers to reform.

Call this the Self-enforcing Immigration System (SEISM). Here’s how it would work. Anyone could come to the United States if they met two conditions. First condition: obtaining ‘clearance’ from the United States, an intergovernmental clearance consortium, or a state with which the United States had a clearance agreement, suitably documented. The object is to exclude only those about whom there is reason to believe that their entry would pose a threat to the United States. Using the clearance requirement as a device to limit access to the United States by people with innocent intentions would be an abuse, and safeguards against abuse of the clearance procedure would be necessary. Second condition: that the entrant deposit with the United States a sum—the ‘entry guarantee’— or an equivalent bond (given by the United States, another state, or the intergovernmental clearance consortium) which would earn interest while held and could be returned to the entrant (or the bond provider) upon his or her exit from the United States. [Stipulating that entry guarantee deposits would be returned only to the individual entrant, a state, or the consortium would pose substantial disincentives to exploitation by private lenders.]

What’s interesting about this proposal is that it has no limit on numbers, no limit on length of stay, does not distinguish among purposes for coming (tourism, commercial work, study, intention to remain), and permits any who come to change their intentions while they are in the United States. Intending entrants could seek ‘clearance’ well in advance of intended departure, and there would be straightforward means to update clearances without subjecting travelers to delay. The only distinction, after entry, between citizens and entrants would be those of voting, holding public ofice, and holding sensitive jobs. It would be as if any entrant acquired upon entry the status of a permanent resident—though most would simply leave upon completing their business, study, visit, or tourism. Of course, conviction of committing a sufficiently serious crime could be grounds for deportaton and blocking subsequent entry.

Each entrant would also receive a card upon entering which he or she could use for identification, access to specified public services (such as getting a driver’s license, social security card, library card, or children’s enrolment in public schools) and access to stipulated public goods. What goods? Entrants could earn access to health insurance, unemployment benefits, and welfare benefits in proportion to their length of stay, contributions to social security, and federal tax payments: that is, they would gradually increase their entitlement. Entitlements would be federal charges, reimbursable to the US states. Seniority could be ‘banked’ if entrants chose to leave the United States but returned later.

What would prevent literally millions of people descending on the United States to take up this opportunity? Note the two barriers: clearance and deposit of an entry guarantee. The required entry guarantee would be a substantial sum; there is an expectation that visitors, and many intending immigrants, would be dependent on other sources of their guarantee deposit (their home state, travel agencies, prospective employers). The object, however, would be to modulate the cost so that entering ‘legally’—just getting on a plane and flying in—would be less expensive than meeting the fee of a people smuggler, so driving the smugglers out of business and discouraging people from sneaking across. The United States could also raise the barrier by increasing the size of the required entry guarantee. The effect would not be simply to reward the rich and disadvantage the poor, but to decentralize—for example, to prospective employers and universities competing for able students—decisions to assist entrants in meeting their entry guarantee, shifting choices about the comparative ‘quality’ of prospective entrants to communities, organizations, businesses and universities which would anticipate the closest relationship with the entrant. Note, too, that those who might be smuggled would not have card access to benefits. Of course, no amount of ‘security’ can guarantee that people intending to commit attacks will be unable to find a way to cross the borders; the object is to impose impediments to illegal entry.

I’d speculate that making it easy to come and go would encourage entrants who chose to stay and work to return to their home states. In addition to ‘banking’ seniority there might be good public policy reasons to grant easier access to social security entitlements to those who chose to depart. If the number looking for work more than met need there would be an inbuilt disincentive to come. In short, designers would look for ways to make return attractive, to both empower the individuals and control public costs.

This proposal avoids lots of costs and troubles. There’s no checking to see if employers are hiring ‘illegals’, no police time spent rounding up ‘illegals’, no vetting to determine whether a person‘s stated reasons for coming are true, no incentive for fake marriage, no forced rupture of family. The number seeking work is governed by the market. (There’s little doubt that the Internet will provide people with good information about availability or unavailability of work.) By treating immigration as a national boon, rather than a burden on states supplying education or social services, it relieves the states of uncertain costs.

Would such a sweeping reform be taken seriously? Maybe not. On the other hand, it is comprehensible, simple, and could resolve a number of tough problems. It’s consistent with the best way to resolve ‘the immigration problem’: bringing life prospects in other countries into line with prospects in the United States. There are governmental levers to ‘operate’ the system once it were in place, raising or lowering the required entry guarantee, changing rates of entitlement, altering incentives to leave. There would still be issues for the people’s representatives in Congress to consider, but they would not be about building walls, threatening honest members of our de facto society with deportation, or compelling visa officers to decide whether visa applicants would overstay.

The Political Design Problem

Does SEISM make better sense than present practice? Better sense than proposals on the table? How would it work? What could a serious simulation of SEISM show?

SOURCES

[1] “Sensenbrenner Statement on Immigration Reform Legislation,” 5 December 2005, http://releases.usnewswire.com/GetRelease.asp?id=57638. Key provisions:

“ ... to address some of the problems of our immigration system. Quite clearly, this system is broken and must be fixed. This proposal will focus on preventing illegal immigration by bolstering our border security efforts and beginning a serious interior immigration enforcement effort. This legislation will demand that people follow the law and be held accountable for their actions - whether it's an employer hiring illegal workers, a smuggler trafficking in human beings in a 21st century version of slavery, or a person who ignores the law and enters this country illegally. All will be held accountable.

“While I support establishing a guest worker program, my legislation will not include a guest worker program. I believe it is wise to move cautiously on any guest worker proposal. Currently, we do not have a clear consensus on what a guest worker program should look like. In addition, while significant progress is being made, providing legal immigrants with the timely, efficient, and professional treatment that they deserve remains unfinished business. Serious issues need to be answered, such as how a new guest worker program will impact Citizenship and Immigration Services. ... ”

[Political Design 2006.04.30 Post A15. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ North Korea [III]: Agreement?

2005-09-30T09:49:00.000-07:00

On 19 September 2005 the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks on North Korea concluded with a Joint Statement, which is grist for discussing two design problems: what would a conclusive agreement look like? and how could negotiations be designed to reach a conclusion?

There’s no substitute for a close reading of the actual text. Though it’s short, it is rather long for a blog entry. So I suggest you bring it up alongside this note, for which I’ll just pick out some key points.

The Question

What does the Joint Statement suggest for negotiation design?

Approaches

Each of the two key parties, North Korea and the United States, made key (qualified) commitments. I term these ‘qualified’ because North Korea may require ‘actions’ before IAEA Safeguards begin to operate, and because there is a difference between saying ‘we will not’ and saying ‘we have no [present] intention’. The text:

“The DPRK committed to abandoning all nuclear weapons and existing nuclear programs and returning, at an early date, to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and to IAEA safeguards.

“The United States affirmed that it has no nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula and has no intention to attack or invade the DPRK with nuclear or conventional weapons.”

In the July-August sessions of the Fourth Round, North Korea made clear it wanted a light-water reactor program. The United States found that anathema. The Joint Statement finesses this issue by stating

“The DPRK stated that it has the right to peaceful uses of nuclear energy. The other parties expressed their respect and agreed to discuss, at an appropriate time, the subject of the provision of light water reactor to the DPRK.”

The parties commit to more talks, and they establish a key principle by which fresh commitments are to be tied to performances [highlight added]:

“ 5. The Six Parties agreed to take coordinated steps to implement the afore-mentioned consensus in a phased manner in line with the principle of ‘commitment for commitment, action for action’.

“ 6. The Six Parties agreed to hold the Fifth Round of the Six-Party Talks in Beijing in early November 2005 at a date to be determined through consultations.”

The Political Design Problem

How can the terms of the Joint Statement be used to advance negotiations in the face of deep distrust between the two key parties?

Texts

[1] Joint Statement of the Fourth Round of the Six-Party Talks. Beijing,19 September 2005.

[Political Design 2005.09.30 Post A14. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]

❄ Imperial Decline

2005-08-31T04:55:00.000-07:00

In imperial China it was said that natural disasters meant withdrawal of the ‘mandate of heaven’ from the ruling dynasty.

The more modern explanation is that dynasties, in their later years, failed to give attention to the maintenance of water-control systems, lost capability to collect needed revenue, and spent monies they did collect to maintain the Imperial writ on their borders where it was challenged.

We want to learn from design failures, as well as design projects, and projects brought to completion.

The Question

Did the White House’s withholding flood-prevention funds from New Orleans lead to more serious consequences for that city in Hurricane Katrina—29 August 2005—and its aftermath?

Approaches

Will Bunch reports that a number of engineering and planning projects were refused funding, or funded at reduced levels. About a US Corps of Engineers propsal he writes:

“In early 2004, as the cost of the conflict in Iraq soared, President Bush proposed spending less than 20 percent of what the Corps said was needed for Lake Pontchartrain, according to a Feb. 16, 2004, article, in New Orleans CityBusiness.

“On June 8, 2004, Walter Maestri, emergency management chief for Jefferson Parish, Louisiana; told the Times-Picayune: ‘It appears that the money has been moved in the president’s budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq, and I suppose that’s the price we pay. Nobody locally is happy that the levees can’t be finished, and we are doing everything we can to make the case that this is a security issue for us.’ ” [1]

The Political Design Problem

Design a study, which respects scientific and engineering judgment, to assess (a) whether, and to what degree, the proposed funding could have mitigated effects of Hurricane Katrina, and (b) why the Administration made the alleged reductions and refusals.

Texts

[1] Will Bunch, “Did New Orleans Catastrophe Have to Happen? Times-Picayune Had Repeatedly Raised Federal Spending Issues”, Editor and Publisher, 30 August 2005. http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1001051313 Bunch reports for the Philadelphia Daily News, and much of his article can be seen on their website at his blog, Attotood.

[Political Design 2005.08.31 Post A13. http://www.learnworld.com/blog/design.html]