Archive for June, 2010
Kagan Not a Fan of Limited Government, Natural Rights, or Even the Declaration of Independence
It’s been a long couple of days of hearings — three days, really, if you count Monday’s prepared statements (which I do because I had to read them all after a day of responding to big Court decisions) — and I’m still trying to separate in my mind the issues I care about from those less important and trying to remember some of the lighter moments that will color people’s recollections of these proceedings for decades. As I gradually sift through my notes and review key sections of testimony, here are some things that will stick with me:
- Kagan refused to identify anything the government couldn’t do under its Commerce Clause power. She recited over and over the limitations the Lopez and Morrison cases give, the power to regulate interstate commerce doesn’t extend to non-economic activity or that traditionally subject to state prerogative, but she refused to tell Senator Coburn that his hypothetical bill requiring Americans to eat fruits and vegetables was unconstitutional. “Dumb,” sure, but perhaps worthy of the deference to the political branches that she hailed again and again. Nor did she offer her own examples of unconstitutional bills.
- Not only is Aharon Barak, the philosopher-king Israeli judge, the nominee’s hero but so apparently is Oliver Wendell Holmes, whom Kagan cited several times for the proposition that broad regulations, even if unwise and infringing on individual liberty, is for the people to correct, not the courts. In response to Senator Kaufman’s questions about the pending financial market reforms, for example, she invoked Holmes and argued that while courts still have an important role in holding Congress to certain constitutional limits, they “should realize that they’re not the principal players in the game.”
- Putting together the above two points, conservatives may have hoisted themselves on their own petard by insisting for decades that “judicial activism” equates to acting without the sort of majoritarian deference Kagan full-throatedly endorses.
- The Kagan hearings were much more engaging than the Sotomayor hearings, even though they’ve gotten less press coverage in light of the continuing oil spill saga, Russian spies, Petraeus confirmation, and Senator Byrd’s death (and the World Cup!). The solicitor general is more articulate, has a better grasp of almost every area of the law (though Sotomayor probably wins on large swaths of criminal law), has a good sense of humor, and genuinely tried to answer questions. Just as Kagan admitted that judging was not a “robotic” task of applying law to facts, her presentation to the committee was anything but “robotic.”
- Still, Kagan failed the Kagan Standard set out in her classic “Confirmation Messes” article — which I’ve now read several times and am honestly struck by its perceptiveness. Her incessant repetition that all Supreme Court decisions are “well-settled law” that she would not “grade” — virtually the only parts of her responses, whether I agreed or disagreed, that annoyed me — has no principled basis. For example, she flat-out refused to answer this type of question: “Ms. Kagan, if you were on the Court in 1942, and setting aside considerations of stare decisis that may affect how you would rule in a current case presenting related issues, how would you have ruled in Wickard v. Filburn?” That to me is unacceptable. Yes, nominees should refuse legal issues that are likely to come before the Court, but asking about previous decisions is fair game.
- I’m disappointed but not surprised by Kagan’s position on use of foreign law. Yes, it’s never binding and, of course, you should use it in evaluating international treaties and conflicts of law situations, but it’s simply irrelevant to interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Yet Kagan consciously left herself plenty of breathing room to cite foreign law inappropriately.
- Finally, and I will be going over this section with a fine-toothed comb, in an instructive dialogue with Senator Coburn, Kagan disclaimed the idea of natural rights — looking pained at times to even understand what they are. “Does the Constitution give us our rights, or do they pre-exist government?” Coburn asked. Kagan evaded. “What about the discussion of the ‘inalienable rights’ in the Declaration of Independence?” he pressed. Kagan denied that the Declaration of Independence had anything to do with the role of a judge. This is sad, really, and ironic given that we’re heading into the Fourth of July weekend.
I do not yet know how I would counsel a senator to vote on Kagan’s nomination — she’s more than qualified in terms of legal knowledge, indeed better qualified in terms of temperament than to be solicitor general — but I know that I’m disturbed by much of what I’ve witnesses lo these last 48 hours. Last year at this time I suggested that the argument for Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation was “not proven”; she was fine at her hearings but did not carry her burden of persuasion. That may well be the case again.
CP at Townhall
Charters Kill Private Schools and Add to Taxpayer Burden
Tradeoffs are an incurable part of reality. Unfortunately, many school choice supporters like to believe that there are no tradeoffs between school choice policies; public and private school choice, targeted or restricted, big or small, voucher or tax credits, it’s all choice and it’s all good. But some good things are better than others. And most things have some mix of positive and negative effects.
Charter schools often provide a safer, better alternative to traditional public schools. That’s good. Charter schools also destroy private schools, decrease educational options, pull private-school students into the government education system and thereby add significant new costs to taxpayers. These are all very bad things. And they are not at all balanced by theories of long-term shifts in how citizens conceive of choice in education.
Here’s the latest on how government charter schools are killing what’s left of the private sector in education:
The number of students enrolled in these public, independently run schools has risen dramatically in this decade. Philadelphia school district officials estimate that 73 percent of the children now in charters came from district schools and 27 percent from other schools. That 27 percent amounts to about 9,000 students, and Catholic-school educators believe that most of them came from Catholic schools.
Charter schools have one distinct advantage over Catholic schools. They do not charge tuition.
Charters are NO substitute for private school choice. In fact, by destroying private schools, they seriously erode the total range of educational options.
We need to be clear-headed about this; charter school laws, in the absence of robust private school choice programs, destroy educational freedom and choice.
Absent private choice, charters are a long-term setback for education reform.
Will Specter Vote Against Kagan?
I agree with Jillian Bandes’s characterization of the Democrats’ “bottom of the order” questioning (the committee being stacked 12-7, the day began with the junior Dems) and indeed was dreading having to sit through all sorts of parochial bloviations. Even Al Franken wasn’t too exciting, just making the point Justice Kennedy was wrong not to consider in legislative history in arbitration cases and expounding at length on the theme that money in politics is bad and so therefore was Citizens United. Kagan responded that “Congress’s intent is the only thing that matters [to statutory interpretation]”—a position sure to infuriate her future would-be colleague Justice Scalia—but also that the Court “should not re-write the law,” instead allowing Congress to correct unsatisfying judgments based on flawed legislative draftsmanship. From this exchange I didn’t learn much about Kagan but did conclude that I wouldn’t ever vote for Franken for anything, except maybe the People’s Choice Awards should he ever return to show business.
The most memorable part of today’s first session of questioning (9am till after 1pm) was undoubtedly Arlen Specter pressing the nominee to answer questions about various lawsuits of special concern to him and which he detailed in several letters to Kagan about the questions he would ask. One was a Holocaust survivors’ suit, one was by families of the victims of 9/11, and one regarded the Bush-era Terrorist Surveillance Program. The first is at the cert petition stage before the Supreme Court, in the second Kagan as SG recommended that the Court deny review, and the third eventually will be seeking review of the lower court’s dismissal on standing grounds. Kagan agreed that standing and other jurisdictional doctrines are important but would not discuss whether she would vote that the Court hear the cases or reverse the lower-court decisions. Kagan pushed back repeatedly, saying “you wouldn’t want a judge who says she will reverse a decision without reading the briefs and hearing argument.” Specter was extremely dissatisfied, to the point where his vote is legitimately in doubt. Indeed, I would say now that Lindsey Graham is much more likely to vote for Kagan than Specter is. Of course, Specter had voted against Kagan when she was nominated to be solicitor general last year—but he was a Republican at the time.
CP at Townhall
How Come We Didn’t See This One Coming?
La Nación of Argentina reports today [in Spanish] that—shocker!—the Argentine government used funds from the nationalized pension funds to finance its current spending.
Let’s remember that over a year and a half ago, the administration of Cristina Fernández announced the nationalization of the private pension funds—$30 billion worth of assets—under the claim that the international financial crisis threatened to wash away the retirement savings of Argentine workers. However, it was clear from the beginning what the government’s real intentions were, especially since a surtax imposed on farmers had just been repealed by the courts and defeated in Congress.
Even Argentina’s populist hero, Juan Domingo Perón, warned 35 years earlier about a similar move from the government as Ian Vásquez pointed out in late 2008.
Fiscal Commission Testimony
I testified to President Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform today on Capitol Hill. The Commission is tasked with creating a package of specific budget reforms by December to be considered by the House and Senate.
I suggested that the Commission propose cuts to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, farm subsidies, transportation subsidies, education subsidies, aid to the states, and many other activities.
Fiscal responsibility is pretty easy really–you just need to cut programs. I advised Commission members to study the recommendations on www.downsizinggovernment.org.
And I said that other countries have ditched farm subsidies and privatized Social Security, so why the heck can’t we?
My written testimony is here. The hearings are on CSPAN and being streamed at the White House website.
U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda
Thomas L. Norman’s Risk Analysis and Security Countermeasure Selection is a relentlessly practical book intended to aid security consultants, of which Norman is one. There are literally dozens of codes, standards, and risk assessment methodologies that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accepts for different institutions and infrastructures.
As he details the excruciating process of assessing the risks from all “threat actors,” including economic criminals, nonterrorist violent criminals, “subversives,” and petty criminals, he gets around to saying some important things about terrorists.
[T]errorists are not necessarily interested in taking out a facility but are very interested in communicating through the use of violence. . . . Terrorists use violence as language. The language of violence causes a public debate, not only about the terrorist act, but also about the causes of it and what can be done about it. Terrorists speak through violence to the public directly, past the national leadership. (page 167)
This is not a strategy book nor a counterterrorism book, but it touches on counterterrorism strategy in a similar, sensible way.
Deterrence occurs when potential threat actors evaluate the risks and rewards of an attack and determine that the risk is not worth the reward. . . . For terrorists, this could mean that an attack is not likely to succeed, that their attack would not capture the media’s attention, or that they could be perceived negatively by their own constituency. (page 252)
The success or failure of a given attack matters some to terrorists, but perceptions—the salience of their menace, and interpretations of events among key audiences—matter just as much.
These ideas—common sense among security professionals—seem not yet to have taken hold among policymakers and opinion leaders. This is why Joshua Alexander Geltzer’s U.S. Counter-Terrorism Strategy and al-Qaeda: Signaling and the Terrorist World View is such an important book.
Joe Biden Is No Friend of Tech, So Tech Should Give to Joe Biden
Politics and extortion share a similar logic: Give to the one who can hurt you the most.
RomneyCare Unleashed Adverse Selection, As Will ObamaCare
The Massachusetts health care law that Gov. Mitt Romney signed in 2006, and the nearly identical federal law that President Obama signed this year, create perverse incentives that are causing health insurance costs to rise and could eventually cause health insurance markets to collapse. A report released yesterday by the Massachusetts Division of Insurance shows that process is well underway.
Massachusetts requires health insurance companies to sell to all applicants, and imposes price controls that require insurers to charge all applicants the same premium, regardless of their health status. ObamaCare would do the same.
Those price controls have two principal effects on healthy people. First, they increase the premiums that insurers charge healthy people (the additional premium goes to reduce premiums for sick people). Second, they enable healthy people to wait until they are sick to purchase coverage. Since insurers must take all applicants, and charge them the same premium, there is little or no downside to waiting until one gets sick to purchase coverage.
Those price controls also guarantee that when healthy people drop out of insurance pools, premiums rise for everyone who remains, which causes more healthy people to drop out, and do on. Economists and actuaries call this an “adverse selection death spiral.”
The Boston Globe reports that the Massachusetts Division of Insurance found that in the wake of RomneyCare, many more healthy residents are purchasing coverage only when they need it:
The number of people who appear to be gaming the state’s health insurance system by purchasing coverage only when they are sick quadrupled from 2006 to 2008, according to a long-awaited report released yesterday from the Massachusetts Division of Insurance.
The result is that insured residents of Massachusetts wind up paying more for health care…
The number of people engaging in this phenomenon — dumping their coverage within six months — jumped from 3,508 in 2006, when the law was passed, to 17,177 in 2008, the most recent year for which data are available.
In the hope of preventing this sort of gaming behavior, RomneyCare requires Massachusetts residents to purchase health insurance. Yet that “individual mandate” appears not to be working, probably because the penalties for non-compliance are far less than the cost of the mandatory coverage. Thus many residents decline to purchase health insurance, pay the penalty (or misrepresent their coverage status), and purchase health insurance only when they need medical care.
ObamaCare contains similar price controls and requires nearly all Americans to purchase health insurance by 2014. Yet ObamaCare’s penalties for non-compliance are also far less than the cost of the required coverage for most people.
As goes Massachusetts, so goes the nation.
“The Only Place Innovation Will Come From”
Yesterday, Bill Gates addressed 4,100 charter school leaders and activists and told them that their movement “is the only place innovation will come from.”
Certainly there are innovative charter schools–and others that deploy traditional methods with such skill and dedication as to achieve results far above the norm (think Ben Chavis’ American Indian Charter Schools in Oakland). But of course charters are not the only source of educational innovation, and, much more importantly, they are unlikely to drive the process of mass replication and scale-up of innovations responsible for the stunning economic progress of the past several hundred years.
Pick any field in which a brilliant innovation has been capitalized on and brought to the masses and you will likely find that it is capitalist–part of the profit-and-loss, free enterprise system.
There are occasional exceptions. The Jesuits introduced performance-based grouping in 1599, promoting students to the next grade whenever they had mastered the material of the current one, and managed to scale-up that policy internationally. But only free markets have created an ever-repeating cycle of innovation, replication, and dissemination that continues decade after decade, seldom pausing or reversing except due to some external calamity.
There are efforts afoot by business and financial leaders to emulate that cycle within the charter school framework. We should wish them well, but it’s a daunting task. As Friedrich Hayek explains in The Fatal Conceit, the web of freedoms, customs, and incentives we call free markets was not designed by earlier generations, but rather evolved inexorably over time. It is not a product of human planning, but of human nature.
Trying to reproduce the innovation, replication, dissemination cycle outside the free market system is like trying to make a wheel more round by increasing or decreasing the value of pi–and it’s just as unnecessary. We already have a system for accomplishing what Gates and the American public desire, why not use it? Why don’t we simply ensure that all children, regardless of family wealth, can afford access to a free education marketplace? The innovation and dissemination process will then take care of itself, as it does in every other field.
The Pension Tsunami
That’s the name of the website of Jack Dean, who is interviewed in this new Reason.tv video about how excessive pension promises to bureaucrats are creating a fiscal nightmare for state and local governments.
Filed under: General; Government and Politics; Health Care; Tax and Budget Policy
ObamaCare Is Undermining Economic Recovery, Job Growth
In a recent Wall Street Journal oped, Carnegie-Mellon economist Allan Meltzer explains how ObamaCare is delaying economic recovery:
Two overarching reasons explain the failure of Obamanomics. First, administration economists and their outside supporters neglected the longer-term costs and consequences of their actions. Second, the administration and Congress have through their deeds and words heightened uncertainty about the economic future. High uncertainty is the enemy of investment and growth…
Mr. Obama has denied the cost burden on business from his health-care program, but business is aware that it is likely to be large. How large? That’s part of the uncertainty that employers face if they hire additional labor…
Then there is Medicaid, the medical program for those with lower incomes. In the past, states paid about half of the cost, and they are responsible for 20% of the additional cost imposed by the program’s expansion. But almost all the states must balance their budgets, and the new Medicaid spending mandated by ObamaCare comes at a time when states face large deficits and even larger unfunded liabilities for pensions. All this only adds to uncertainty about taxes and spending.
Meltzer concludes that the Obama administration is making the same mistake as FDR: “President Roosevelt slowed recovery in 1938-40 until the war by creating uncertainty about his objectives. It was harmful then, and it’s harmful now.”
For more on the harm caused by government-created uncertainty, read my colleague Tad DeHaven’s recent posts.
Kagan May Well Become “The Liberal Scalia”
More highlights from Day 2 of the Kagan confirmation hearings:
• In addition to backing away from President Obama’s empathy standard, Elena Kagan, under questioning by Senator Grassley, backs away from her “judicial hero” Aharon Barak, saying that she does not share his judicial philosophy, which involves judges making policy decisions and affirmatively shaping society. This is an important concession. Grassley also elicits the statement that only the president and Congress should worry about American influence in the world.
• The wily Arlen Specter, in his last Supreme Court hearing (unless Justice Ginsburg retires over the summer), treats his questioning as a prosecutor would. Technical questions and cutting off responses when Kagan begins to expound on the current state of the law, when what he really wants to know is what she thinks about the law. Unfortunately, Specter accepts Kagan’s statements that she respects Congress but does not press her right when the next question would demand an actual opinion on Citizens United or on Morrison (an important case in which the Court struck down the Violence Against Women Act as beyond Congress’s powers to regulate interstate commerce). Kagan admits that Citizens United was a “jolt to the system” because states had relied on the pre-existing campaign finance regime. Unfortunately, this is again an empirical statement rather than a normative one.
• Kagan does express a firm opinion in favor of televising Supreme Court proceedings (this is one of Specter’s bugaboos). “I guess I’ll have to have my hair done more often,” she says.
• Lindsey Graham is definitely worth the price of admission. First he prompts Kagan to admit that “my political views are generally progressive” after she declined to characterize herself in anyway in response to previous senators’ queries. Then he gets her to endorse her classmate Miguel Estrada for the Supreme Court (which may be of interest to General Petraeus, who testified before another Senate committee today). Finally, in questioning regarding the Christmas Day bomber, he provokes an ethnic love-in after his question about where Kagan was on Christmas Day elicits the response, “well, like all Jews, I was probably at a Chinese restaurant.” As he did with Sotomayor, Graham makes clear that he is likely to disagree with many of Kagan’s judicial decisions, but will vote for her regardless.
• John Cornyn is the first senator to push the size and scope of government as a major line of questioning. He asks her one of my pet questions: What limits are there on government?” Kagan replies by reciting the Commerce Clause standards set forth in existing precedent, that Congress cannot touch activity that is not economic or that is left traditionally to state power. Well, that’s progress, but of course it raises the question of whether forcing someone to buy health insurance involves regulating economic activity and whether health care regulation is a traditional state responsibility.
• Tom Coburn picks up where Cornyn left off, proposing a hypothetical bill requiring everyone to eat three fruits and three vegetables per day. Kagan considers that a “dumb law” but says that “courts would be wrong to strike down laws simply because they are senseless.” Well, ok, but is that particular senseless law unconstitutional? Kagan seems pained (in real psychic discomfort) but Coburn lets her off the hook in reading from the Federalist Papers—a nice edition that should make for a good picture in the Oklahoma papers—and talking about the explosive growth of government. Kagan shrugs off this discursion by citing Marbury v. Madison—“the role of the courts is to say what the law is”—and concluding that deficits aren’t a problem courts can resolve, at which point Coburn’s time runs out. We will revisit this issue.
In short, Kagan is without doubt smarter, wittier, and more collegial than Sonia Sotomayor. Unfortunately, that means she is likely to be more dangerous, a true “liberal Scalia.” We now know that two of the catchphrases from these hearings will be that “I’m not going to grade cases”—why not?—and that everything the Court has ever decided is “well-settled law.” In my mind, Kagan has not yet met the burden of persuasion regarding constitutional limits on government, which is my focus at these hearings. I would look for Senators Sessions, Cornyn, and Coburn to hit this issue hard on the next go-around.
CP at Townhall
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