• MyLifeIsAverage
  An amusing response to FML.
• The auto industry, now run by the people who brought you the DMV
  “President Barack Obama took aim at climate-warming greenhouse gases on Tuesday and ordered the struggling auto industry to make more fuel-efficient cars under tough new national standards to cut emissions and increase gas mileage.”
• Menu labeling bill introduced by U.S. lawmakers — Los Angeles Times
  “Two federal lawmakers have introduced legislation to require fast-food and other chain restaurants to post calories on menu boards and food display tags. The chains also would have to put information about calories, fats, carbohydrates and salt on printed menus.”
• David Freddoso on the Club for Growth’s political impact
  “The Wall Street Journal tackles the the Club for Growth, some conservatives’ financial answer to the problem of overwhelming incumbent retention in Congress. The piece, in which some moderates fault the Club for shrinking the GOP caucus, misses two important points.”

Writing in the New York Times, NBC’s Tom Brokaw suggests we rethink local government in the name of efficiency. But he goes beyond common-sense suggestions for consolidation of state services and instead advocates administrative centralization.

Yet Iowa proudly maintains its grid of 99 counties, each with its own distinctive courthouse, many on the National Register of Historic Places — and some as little as 40miles away from one another. Each one houses a full complement of clerks, auditors, sheriff’s deputies, jailers and commissioners. Is there any reason beyond local pride to maintain such duplication given the economic and population pressures of our time?

Every state and every region in the country is stuck with some form of anachronistic and expensive local government structure that dates to horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience.

There is a very good reason to maintain this “duplication”: to uphold the principle of self-government and preserve liberty, such that individuals manage their own affairs as directly as possible. This is hardly a new reason. The very existence of self-governing municipalities—even if they’re inefficient or duplicate services provided elsewhere—serves to protect liberty, Alexis de Tocqueville maintained. “The townships, municipal bodies, and counties form so many concealed breakwaters, which check or part the tide of popular determination. If an oppressive law were passed, liberty would still be protected by the mode of executing that law; the majority cannot descend to the details and what may be called the puerilities of administrative tyranny.” He added that “township institutions … limit the despotism of the majority and at the same time impart to the people a taste for freedom and the art of being free.” This principle guided the Framers as they wrote the Constitution: they deliberately limited the powers of the federal government, leaving most authority at the state or local level, so the people could govern themselves as directly as possible.

Brokaw seems to hold a fundamentally different conception of government. His analysis considers government only as a provider of services, not as a guarantor of individual liberties, and he argues, in effect, that towns, cities and counties exist merely as administrative districts of the state or federal governments.  Furthermore, he advances a common folly of the Progressives: the notion that an idea is worthless simply because it is old. He forgets, however, that while our nation has seen sweeping technological, economic and social changes, one thing remains constant: human nature. And since human nature has remained unchanged since the days of “horse-drawn wagons, family farms and small-town convenience,” the principles of government remain unchanged as well.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg seems to misunderstand the proper role of the Supreme Court:

She added that the failure to engage foreign decisions had resulted in diminished influence for the United States Supreme Court.

The Canadian Supreme Court, she said, is “probably cited more widely abroad than the U.S. Supreme Court.” There is one reason for that, she said: “You will not be listened to if you don’t listen to others.”

The Supreme Court does not exist, however, so that its rulings might be influential in foreign courts or cited favorably abroad. Instead, the Constitution empowers the federal courts to judge cases, not to curry favor; Publius elaborates on these “proper objects” of the “federal judicature” in The Federalist. Furthermore, each Supreme Court justice takes an oath “that I will administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich, and that I will faithfully and impartially discharge and perform all the duties incumbent upon me as [title] under the Constitution and laws of the United States.”

In “faithfully and impartially discharg[ing] and perform[ing]” these duties, the court can serve as a model to the world. But this is a happy consequence of sound judicial decision-making, and ought not to be the justices’ aim, as Ginsburg suggests. The justices’ duty is first and foremost to uphold “the Constitution and laws of the United States,” even if this means their peers overseas disapprove of their reasoning or the results.

Justices who seek citation by foreign courts might consider a career in academia instead of on the bench. There they can focus their energies on analyzing court cases from anywhere in the world without any fear of abrogating their responsibilities to America’s Constitution and laws.

The concept of rights has been turned upside-down in recent years, as the traditional notion of natural rights inhering in the individual has been replaced with a Progressive understanding of rights emanating from the state.

The Washington Post reports, for example, that “gay groups and liberal legal scholars say they are prevailing” in lawsuits against private individuals and companies that do not offer services to homosexuals “because an individual’s religious views about homosexuality cannot be used to violate gays’ right to equal treatment under the law.” The article cites several businesses, including a psychologist and a photographer, that have been penalized in the courts for offering their services only to heterosexuals. And it accepts that there is a fundamental “right to be free from discrimination” that clashes with other, more traditional rights.

But what fundamental rights are harmed if a psychologist or photographer chooses one client over another–whether for religious reasons or more mundane reasons like his bottom line? Is there really a natural “right to counseling” that imposes on psychologists the obligation to take any patient? Is there really a God-given “right to have your picture taken” that imposes on photographers the obligation to snap pictures of all comers? And is there really a “right to be free from discrimination?”

There are, in fact, no such natural rights. As with any “right” that imposes an obligation on another individual, these are inventions of the state, more akin to entitlements than to anything described in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The “right to be free from discrimination” is more a social ideal, a goal for interpersonal interaction, than it is a description of a core characteristic of a human individual, like property ownership or speech. In fact, since these social “rights” impose obligations on others, they tend to infringe upon individual liberty, for instance the freedom of a service provider to specialize his practice. Far from securing “equal treatment under the law,” this tends to create special legal privileges for some and special legal obligations for others.

The psychologist and photographer in question were almost certainly in the wrong. In most cases it would be uncouth to turn away a customer simply because of an objection to his sexual preferences (or race or any other immutable characteristic), even if that objection is grounded in the sincerest religious or moral belief. But to do so is merely rude, not a violation of the customer’s fundamental rights as a human being. It is in fact a violation of the provider’s liberty for the government to enforce an invented right in the name of equality and prevention of discrimination. A better solution than turning to government would rely on two time-tested methods to set things straight: shame and the provider’s bottom line. If you don’t like how the provider runs his business and chooses his clients, you are free to criticize him and take your business elsewhere.

Motivated by the appointment of four Senators in the wake of the 2008 election, progressives want to amend the Constitution to require that all Senators be chosen in popular elections. This idea, put forward by Sen. Russ Feingold, would further undermine the constitutional structure devised by the Founders.

While scoring political points against disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich and his appointment of Sen. Roland Burris may be tempting, conservatives should be wary of signing on to this amendment. Instead, they should make the case for preserving and strengthening Madison’s federal structure—perhaps with the ultimate goal of repealing the 17^th Amendment altogether.

The 17^th Amendment, enacted in 1913, dealt the first blow against the Founders’ structure by maintaining that all Senators be chosen in direct popular elections instead of by the state legislators. But it also holds that in case of vacancy, “the legislature of any State may empower the executive thereof to make temporary appointments until the people fill the vacancies by election as the legislature may direct.” The New York Times carries water for Sen. Feingold’s unhelpful proposal by suggesting that allowing state governments to appoint replacement Senators without voter approval amounts to a “loophole” in the amendment.

Feingold further argues that the appointment of any Senator denies citizens their fundamental rights. “I think of it as a right-to-vote issue,” he tells the New York Times. Of course, the right to vote is nowhere abridged in any appointment scheme, since voters choose the state lawmakers who make the appointment. Now it’s true that voters are only indirectly choosing an appointed Senator, but there’s no reason to believe direct elections necessarily make for superior government.

George Will explains the strengths of the Founders’ design and how the direct election of Senators harms it:

The Senate, indirectly elected and with six-year terms, was to be more deliberative than responsive.

Furthermore, grounding the Senate in state legislatures served the structure of federalism. Giving the states an important role in determining the composition of the federal government gave the states power to resist what has happened since 1913 — the progressive (in two senses) reduction of the states to administrative extensions of the federal government…

The Framers gave the three political components of the federal government (the House, Senate and presidency) different electors (the people, the state legislatures and the electoral college as originally intended) to reinforce the principle of separation of powers, by which government is checked and balanced.

In The Federalist, Publius makes a similar argument. He maintains that the appointment of Senators by the states promotes federalism by strengthening the power of states against the federal government:  “giving to the State governments such an agency in the formation of the federal government … must secure the authority of the former, and may form a convenient link between the two systems.”

Those who favor limited government ought to think twice about Feingold’s proposed amendment, which would further enervate the federal structure and strengthen the national government, thereby hurting the cause of limited government.