Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton

Tonight at the Democratic Convention is, as I understand it, Bill Clinton Night. Despite persistent reports that the two men are not much enamored of each other, former President Clinton has decided to go Full Bubba in support of President Obama's re-election. That's not surprising. I rather doubt that Mitt Romney is a personal favorite of Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum either. Parties pull together.

The Clintonian move is to claim that Obama is doing - or will do - the same things that Clinton did. These things supposedly led to a strong economy in the mid to late 90s – at least until the tech bubble burst. We've seen the commercials in which Clinton argues that we need to adhere to some unspecified Obama policies that are supposedly just like his own.

Details are not provided.So I guess we'll have to figure it out.  Let's pull up some Nirvana from Paul Ryan's playlist and review federal economic policies in the 90s.

Tax rates were a little higher and, to be sure, President Obama says he wants to return to Clinton era rates for high earners.  But actually, as Michael Tanner of the Cato Institute points out, Obama wants these rates to be significantly higher - about a point higher on ordinary income and a staggering 40% higher on investment income. 

Is that the answer? We know that these rates won't put a ding in the federal deficit.They may, in an economy as weak as ours, be counterproductive. That's about the range of possibility - meaningless to harmful.

In fact, after Clinton raised taxes in 1993, he cut them in 1997. Not only did he cut them - he cut them on rich people. He reduced the capital gains rate by almost 50%. Revenues rose sharply.
So - no - that's not the Clinton magic that Obama has or will or might bring back.
We did have balanced budgets back in the 90s. These were largely a product of the "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War, the tech boom and, note this carefully, divided government. But maybe it is the Clinton record of fiscal restraint that our current President has sought to emulate - or might seek to emulate - or is thinking about.

No, that's not it either. If there is anything that we can be sure that President Obama is about - it's a larger federal government that does more things. Clinton said that the era of Big Government is over. For our current President, it's just getting started.

As Tanner points out, during the Clinton years, the federal govenment spent an average of 19.8% of GDP. During Obama's Presidency, it's been 24.4%. While government spending as a percentage of GDP will tend to be higher during a poor economy, the President's proposed budgets - his "plan" - never brings it below 22%. On this issue, Paul Ryan may be closer to Clinton than Obama.

Maybe it's the relative position of the middle class. Maybe Clinton's Presidency brought about greater income equality. Although it's a complicated picture, the "decline of the middle class" story has been oversold. The average American family is much better off today than it was 30 years ago. But we have seen a long term increase in the share of income going to the very wealthy. I question how much government policy has to do with it, but, whatever the cause, rising inequality was a fact of life during the Clinton years In fact, by one commonly used measure, inequality - as measured by income - went up during the Clinton years and not during the George W. Bush presidency. 

Of course, you can slice the numbers any which way to get the result you want. And, as I have written before, I don't think one can assume that the state of the economy is caused by Presidential policies. The point is that we can't point to anything in the Clinton administration and say “this is what we need to do now.” And, to the extent, that we could - say fiscal restraint - the current President is not on board.

There is one huge similarity between Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. After putting both in office, voters came down with a violent case of buyer's remorse and swept Democrats out of Congress in the off year election.

Ironically, it is that similarity that shows how different they are. Clinton's response was to make the best of it and move to the right. He declared the Era of Big Government to be over and signed welfare reform into law. Growth in federal spending was, at least, tempered. He even flirted with entitlement reform and the partial privatization of social security - an effort that fell apart when he was caught perjuring himself in the Lewinsky affair. Again, Bill Clinton even cut taxes on rich people.

It may well be that Clinton did not want to do any of this. I suspect he didn't. But it's what happened.

Obama's response is almost the polar opposite. After his own massive losses, he has doubled down on his commitment to traditional liberalism. In a number of areas - emission regulation, immigration policy, labor policy - he has attempted to do administratively what he cannot do legislatively. Indeed, he has attempted to substantially modify - I'd say abandon - the core of Clinton's signal legislative accomplishment, the work requirements embedded in welfare reform.

For President Obama, the era of big government it not over. It's on hold.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin

Ryan did not "lie" about Janesville GM plant

The argument that Paul Ryan "lied' or "misrepresented" the closing of the Janesville GM plant is not even colorable.

Here is what the President said:
 

"And I believe that if our government is there to support you, and give you the assistance you need to re-tool and make this transition, that this plant will be here for another hundred years. The question is not whether a clean energy economy is in our future, it’s where it will thrive. I want it to thrive right here in the United States of America; right here in Wisconsin; and that’s the future I’ll fight for as your president." (emphasis supplied.)

Here is what Ryan said:

"My home state voted for President Obama. When he talked about change, many people liked the sound of it, especially in Janesville, where we were about to lose a major factory.
"A lot of guys I went to high school with worked at that GM plant. Right there at that plant, candidate Obama said: 'I believe that if our government is there to support you … this plant will be here for another hundred years.' That’s what he said in 2008. Well, as it turned out, that plant didn’t last another year. It is locked up and empty to this day. And that’s how it is in so many towns today, where the recovery that was promised is nowhere in sight." (emphasis supplied.)

Let's make a few observations that seem to have eluded Ryan's critics.

First, Ryan does not "characterize" or "insinuate" anything about what the President said. He quoted him.


Second, while Ryan did not say that this constituted a "promise" to keep the plant open, the workers in Janesville might have reasonably understood it that way. The clear implication of Obama's words is that he would bring the government's resources to bear to retool plants like Janesville and that this would keep such plants - including this particular one - open.

Ryan's critics want to argue that the workers should have understand a jesuitical distinction. The President, they argue, only said that "if the government provided resources to the plant, then it would be open for a hundred years.'" He never said that he actually would do what he said he could do.

It was just a law professor's hypothetical, you see, an academic discussion with a group of people about to lost their jobs. Obama was saying that "we can help you" but bot that "you can expect that we will."

If that's what candidate Obama meant, then he is the one who misrepresented his intentions and mislead the Janesville workers. To suggest that Obama did not intend to imply anything about the Janesville plant beggars reality. That he has now been hoisted on his own petard is a product of his own doing.

But let's give him the benefit of what seems to be a rather infinitesimal doubt. Ryan did not say that Obama "promised" to keep the plant open, but only that he told voters that the resources of government could be used to keep plants like Janesville and keep them open. In Ryan's view (and he's got the numbers), that hasn't happened. The President has not brought those resources to bear or, if he has, it hasn't worked. The Janesville plant is closed as are many similarly situated plants across the country.

But what about the fact that this plant closure was announced before Obama took office? That is not relevant to Ryan's critique. Obama was arguing that government could retool plants and keep them operational. That didn't happen.

Beyond that, this criticism of Ryan's remarks is cynical and deceptive. Obama knew - everyone knew - the the Janesville plant was on the chopping block. That's why Obama made his remarks. If he thought it was too late to save this plant and keep it open for "a hundred years," why say anything at all?

The plant closed in April 2009. When that happened and for 18 months thereafter, the President of the United States, not only had strong majorities in the Congress. Not only that,  the federal govenment run by the President, also soon came to own a controlling interest in GM. Couldn't the government have retooled the shuttered plant that it now owned as the candidate told the people of Janesville it could do?

Maybe not. Maybe it is unreasonable to think that the President should have worried about a GM plant in little Janesville, Wisconsin or recall the hope he tried to give its embattled workers. After all, someone who is causing the waters to recede and the sick to heal can't be bothered with the pedestrian problems of a small town in Wisconsin.

But even if you believe that, it doesn't undercut Ryan's argument. It was fair for him to use Janesville as a metaphor for a promise that unequivocally was made (the President did promise - many time and in many places - that he could use government resources to turn the economy around) and not kept.

Of course, you can argue that the President ought to be excused from the consequences of presiding over the weakest recovery in the post-WWII era. You can join him in what seems to be the theme of his campaign: It's not my fault, America. You can even believe that the only problem with the President's policies is that we haven't had enough of them.

But the fact that you disagree with the implications of Ryan's remarks - theat the President's policies have failed - doesn't make them false.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

It's Wisconsin's world, the rest of you just live in it.

Wisconsin continues to be the “it” state of American politics.

Vice presidential candidates don’t normally have much impact on a ticket. It is generally more important to select someone who will not hurt the ticket than it is possible to select someone who can help it.  

I may be turned by Badger pride, but this time may be different.

If so, it won’t be so much be because of Ryan himself (although I think he’ll be a hit). It will be because of what his selection says about the campaign that Romney intends to run and how Ryan will help him run it.

Like him or not, Paul Ryan is one of the more serious politicians in America. People my age – and I am not young – have known for our entire adult life that an entitlement crack-up was on the way. Ryan has been one of the few national leaders who have taken that issue seriously and offered proposals to address it. He is one of the only politicians to have articulated a vision of limited government and an America that remains a place where government serves, rather than manages, its population. More fundamentally, he is willing to make the numbers of that vision – what the government takes in and sends out - add up.

He has been, frankly, an adult among children. He has repeatedly demonstrated, as he said this morning, “the courage to tell you the truth.” The fact that he has risen to prominence is one of the more encouraging things about the current political environment.

So it speaks well of Romney that he has selected Ryan. It tells us that he does not simply expect the voters to reject President Obama’s re-election, but to make a case for another view of our national government – one that recognizes that you do, in fact, “build it” and the government’s job is to create the conditions under which you can do so – and not to build it for you.

Ryan will not only help Romney make that case, but is an embodiment of Romney’s willingness to make it. This is a momentous selection.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

A tragic Sunday

Last week, my wife and I had to go to one of those awful funerals. Funerals are never a good thing, but when someone dies too early or in a way that defies the uneasy accommodations we make with our own mortality, you don't know what to say or to do. I am not going to say more to respect the privacy of the family, but it was a bad one. A very good person taken too soon.

I have come to the view - schooled by loved ones who have experienced things far worse than I ever have or, please God, will ever have to - is that the worst thing that you can do is try to explain or look for "the bright side." The best thing you can do - and it is so frustrating - is to say that I am sorry and I will help you in any way that I can.

Early yesterday afternoon, I left the birthday party of one on my grandsons. Llittle Caleb Richard Esenberg turned 4 on Saturday and it was just another of those nice little milestones on a beautiful Sunday. Then I turned on the radio.

I can't think of anything to say to the families of those who have been lost and wounded other than that we are sorry and to ask how we can help. I can't think to offer any more than that suggested by my Purple Wisconsin colleague, Jim Rowen, “prayers for the victims and the community."

No more. But no less,

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

President Obama stumbles

Back when he was a Senator from Illinois, Barack Obama said that ““I was a constitutional law professor, which means unlike the current president I actually respect the Constitution.”

Fair enough, but I think he missed an opportunity to show that respect.

You may be familiar with the story. A number of big city mayors, including the Mayor of Chicago, former Obama aide Rahm Emmanuel, have suggested that they would place legal obstacles in the way of Chick fil-A’s entry into or expansion in their cities. The stated reason is the opposition of the restaurant chain's President, Don Cary, to same sex marriage.

State action aimed at a business because of its speech or that of its owners or officers would be – and there is really no question about this – blatantly unconstitutional. Numerous legal commentators on the left and right – as well as the American Civil Liberties Union – have pointed that out.

But not our Constitutional Law Professor in Chief.

Why not? It can’t be because he doesn’t have time to get involved in local controversies. He found ample time, for example, to inject himself (inaccurately and inappropriately in the view of many) into the arrest of Henry Louis Gates and the shooting of Trayvon Martin.  It shouldn't be because he opposes Mr. Cary's views on same sex marriage and human sexuality (Chick fil-A has apparently contributed to an organization that seeks to modify same sex orientation.) First amendment rights aren't lost because we disagree with the views expressed by those who exercise them.

This could have been the occasion for Barack Obama to have his first ever Sister Soulja moment – a chance to stand for principle against the excesses of his base.

But I guess not. 

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Climate convert remains in sin

One of the things that has frustrated me about the debate over global warming is the extent to which it has taken on the aspects of a religious dispute. This is reflected in the common formulation of the question. "Do you believe in global warming?" It has manifested itself in the outrageously dishonest conduct of some of the leading scientific proponents of warming.

And, if you do believe, it appears that you must accept the entire catechism. Global warming exists and proceeds from Man. It is a sin that threatens our existence and requires expiation through the renunciation of fossil fuels and the human flourishing that these have made possible.

And therein lies the problem. One can admit the theoretical possibility that greenhouse emissions could raise average temperatures. There seems to be a sound scientific basis for supposing this to be possible although determining whether it has happened -  given the complexity of the issue and the relative recency of direct temperature measurements - seems very difficult.

But let's put that aside. One can acknowledge the likelihood that man-made global warming has occurred and may continue to occur. Many scientists have so concluded althought there are significant dissenters.

But even that conclusion does not bring us to the Inconvenient World of world of Al Gore. (Actually, its been quite convenient for him.) Doomsday scenarios do not automatically follow from a "belief in" global warming.

Let's use a recent example from this very website. My Purple Wisconsin Jim Rowen wrote a post about a former warming skeptic, William Muller, who has come, praise Gaia, to believe. Dr. Muller came to the altar in a recent column in the New York Times.

In fact, Jim tells us, Muller, with all the fervor of a convert, believes the UN "hadn't raised the climate change alarm loud enough."

That's true in a limited sense. Muller claims to have found a stronger correlation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and less evidence for the contribution of solar activity than a 2007 report by the  Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

But,  in an another sense, it's not true at all. Alas, Dr. Muller persists in heresy. He continues to question, writing that "[t]hese facts don’t prove causality and they shouldn’t end skepticism" although they do raise the bar for alternative explanations.

More significantly, Dr. Muller continues to deny fundamental doctrine. Here is how he concluded his piece:

It’s a scientist’s duty to be properly skeptical. I still find that much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I’ve analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn’t changed.

Hurricane Katrina cannot be attributed to global warming. The number of hurricanes hitting the United States has been going down, not up; likewise for intense tornadoes. Polar bears aren’t dying from receding ice, and the Himalayan glaciers aren’t going to melt by 2035. And it’s possible that we are currently no warmer than we were a thousand years ago, during the “Medieval Warm Period” or “Medieval Optimum,” an interval of warm conditions known from historical records and indirect evidence like tree rings. And the recent warm spell in the United States happens to be more than offset by cooling elsewhere in the world, so its link to “global” warming is weaker than tenuous.(Emphasis supplied.)

Just so you know. I guess Gaia is not through with Dr. Muller.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

A customer is not providing a subsidy

In today's paper, Dan Bice reports that Obama critic Ken Dragotta has obtained government contracts. I suppose that some will believe that this is ironic or revealing.
Sorry. I can't see it. 

Here's the story. Dragotta has been publicly critical of President Obama's now infamous "you didn't build that" speech. Dragotta seems to believe that he and his colleagues - and not the federal government - built his business, Systems Engineering and Automation Corporation.
But, it turns out, that Dragotta's company has gotten contracts to provide machine parts for the Department of Defense. Hasn't he benefited from government largess? Isn't he a hypocrite?
No, he hasn't. No, he isn't. At least not because he got some government contracts.

The import of the President's remarks - no matter how you read them - is that people benefit from government and that this somehow obligates them to the state and gives it a form of "claim" on their success.

On one level, this is, as others have pointed out, banal and uncontroversial. No one disputes that there are goods and services - national defense would be one - that are best provided by the government. It is well and meet that people pay taxes to pay for them.

If that is all the President meant, his comments are completely irrelevant to any issue in the Presidential campaign. No one is calling for the abolition of government or the elimination of taxes. Paul Ryan's budget, for example, does no more than seek to return federal spending to a level that is more in keeping with its recent historical average.

The reason that the remarks have drawn fire is that - even when taken in context and given a forgiving reading - they do three things. First, they express disdain for success in business, mocking those who believe that their success came from working hard or being smart. Second, they misunderstand the role that public goods play in individual success. We all go to school and use roads. We don't all build thriving businesses. Finally, they suggest that someone who builds a successful business got something that he or she didn't "pay for" and, therefore, owes the state something - something even more than his or her share of the costs of roads, schools and other public goods. In other words, the claim of the state is open ended and limited only be the sufferance of the majority.

Whether that the last contention is true, government contracts are certainly not an example of government larges. Mr. Dragotta' business presumably received those contracts because he offered the best deal on the parts that the military required. He got those contracts because he earned them.
I have purchased an iPod, iPhone and iPad. I download music from iTunes. But I didn't build Apple and Apple doesn't owe me anything. I did it no favors. I paid for products that I thought were worth the price.

As did the Department of Defense when it purchased parts from Systems Engineering and Automation Corporation.
If Mr. Dragotta was arguing that the government ought not to exist or that it shouldn't build the submarines for which his parts are required, he's have some explaining to do. But, as far as I know, that was not his point. The fact that he was able to provide a product that the government wanted at a price it was willing to pay does not mean that the government "built" or has a claim on his business anymore than Apple owes me some free stock.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

In favor of saving taxpayer's money

In last Sunday's Crossroads section, Steve Walters wrote an article about decreases in state and local employment. I was struck by the following statement attributed to Laura Dresser, a labor economist with _ I'm sorry but its true - a left wing think tank embedded in the University of Wisconsin. (As always, I say this by way of description. Knowing that a speaker has a perspective doesn't meant that we ought to dismiss what they say.)

Asked about the impact of losing 18,800 government jobs in Wisconsin, Dresser said, "That's shrinking the economy."

Really?

What struck me is the use of the transitive verb, i.e., the notion that by reducing government employment we have "shrunk" the economy from some state that it would otherwise have occupied.

That could be true but  doesn't determining whether it is so require knowing a lot more than government employment levels?

Here's the problem. The state is not like the federal government. It can't borrow money from China to finance current operations. While politicians have gotten good at accounting tricks that balance the day of reckoning, it must balance the budget. Whatever level of employment it maintains must be paid for. Paying for government jobs requires - you guessed it - taking money out of other parts of the state economy - in this case, from taxpayers.

Now, that might be a good thing to do. It might even lead to economic growth. The efficient provision of needed roads, education, fire protection, etc. can be essential to a healthy economy. There are even people who might argue that, under certain circumstances (not all), public employees would spend more money than taxpayers and this will boost economic demand. (Count me as skeptical about the how often this is true and whether we can even know when it is true or have the state "manage" demand in this way.)

But to simply say that reducing government employment and allowing taxpayers to keep the money that would have gone to pay them 'shrinks" the economy strikes me as wrong. As I have written before, saving the taxpayers money is not a bad thing.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

So it begins

At about 5 this morning, my wife told me about the Colorado shootings. (She gets up earlier.) She told me of reports, perhaps unconfirmed, that the gunman shot a three month old baby. I really don't have the vocabulary to describe how horrible this is.
But eventually it dawned on me. Someone is going to try to make political hay out of this.
Sure enough, ABC News' Brian Ross rushed to the forefront reporting that someone with the shooter's name seemed to be a member of the Colorado Tea Party. Although the network admitted that it did not know if if the tea party member was the same guy arrested for the shooting, George Stephanopoulos gasped. This, he said, may be "significant."
Turns out that the report was incorrect. Ross and ABC News have retracted the suggestion and apologized.  Bbut here's the thing. Whether James Holmes turns out to be a right wing psychopath, a left wing psychopath or an apolitical psychopath doesn't matter. The operative term is psychopath. How he chose to justify his murderous impulse is of no great moment. The rationalizations serve the impulse; they don't create it.
I appreciate the Grey Pomposities of the Commentariat may not choose to understand that. But it doesn't matter if he's a tea partier or a member of the Occupy movement. Someone does not decide to gun down a theater of people because they hear intemperate rhetoric - something, incidentally, that seems to be spread among all political groupings. A violent nut does not reason from false premises to the conclusion that he should murder a bunch of people.

Reason has nothing to do with it. The kind of pathology that leads to mass murder has deeper roots. The environmental movement doesn't own the Unabomber. The political right is not responsible for Timothy McVeigh. The left isn't to blame for Charlie Manson or Lee Harvey Oswald
I could go on. It wouldn't matter if - as appears not to be the case - the shooter was an illegal immigrant. While it's too early to know for sure,  the incident probably tells us little about, on the one hand, gun control or, on the other,  concealed carry in public places. It is a tragic event, but it's not a political event.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Bound for nothin'

Over at National Review Online, Lee Habeeb reflects on the centennial of folk singer Woody Guthrie. Woody, alas, was something of a  communist who performed and his signature song, This Land is Your Land, was intended as a diatribe against private property. Guthrie wrote it as a response to Irving Berlin's God Bless America. Woody, apparently unable to endorse its sentiment, was enraged by Berlins' anthem.

History's verdict appears to be with Berlin. I can't recall singing "This Land is Your Land, during a seventh inning stretch.

Habeeb writes about a verse of the song - often omitted although I have heard it a number of times - that is a direct attack on property rights.

There was a big high wall there that tried to stop me,
A great big sign there said, “private property”;
But on the back side, it didn’t say nothin’;
That side was made for you and me.

Pete Seeger - who has sung that verse for years - croaked it out with Bruce Springsteen at President Obama's inauguration. But that simply reinforces the notion that history has been unkind to Woody.
Today's tribunal of the proletariat, the aforementioned Boss, has a net worth of $ 200 million. You can be sure that the signs around his estate down the Jersey shore or 200 acre farm don't "say nothin'."

Whatever frisson the Boss got by singing Truth to Power apparently doesn't extend to off stage life. Woody's socialism has become something of a period piece - trotted out as nostalgia by people who couldn't imagine having to live by it. To quote the prophet, Bono, "don't believe in riches, but you should see where I live."

Of course, as recent history tells us, even discredited ideas can come back. This Land is Your Land  is a catchy little sing along. It's animating philosophy is not a tune we can dance to.

No, actually, we spend quite a bit on schools

One of my guilty pleasures is Sunday evening on my deck with a glass of wine and the New York Times. I don't agree with everything I read (that's the point) but sometimes there is a truly astonishing statement.

For example, there was this piece by Shamus Kahn, a sociology professor at Columbia. In the course of arguing against the notion of meritocracy, he writes the following:

The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. 

Dude, really?

He means more than the cost of education (more on that later), but he  means that as well. The notion that we "underfund" education is a staple of the Amreican left. But it is hard to square with the facts.

The US is at or near the top of the developed world in per capita spending on education. Even as a percentage of GDP, we are at or above the OECD average. (Needless to say, we don't achieve results commensurate with our investment.)

What we spend has been steadily increasing. Relying on government sources, the Heritage Foundation reports that:

Between 1994 and 2004, average per-pupil expenditures in American public schools have increased by 23.5 percent (adjusted for inflation). Between 1984 and 2004, real expenditures per pupil increased by 49 percent.[11] These increases follow the historical trend of ever-increasing real per-student expenditures in the nation's public schools. In fact, the per-pupil expenditures in 1970-1971 ($4,060) were less than half of per-pupil expenditures in 2005-2006 ($9,266) after adjusting for inflation.[12

Again, increased spending has not resulted in increased learning.


We appear to socialize the bejesus out of "these costs." Kahn, perhaps hedging against the truth, goes on to say that the development of human potential requires more than a well-supported school. One needs a "a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self."

Apparently, we must socialize everything.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

The Obama economy?

One of the most maddening things in our political discourse is the indeterminacy of macro-economic arguments, i.e., the nature and extent of government policy on the economy. One of the dumbest things we do is to assume that the President (or a Governor) has the ability to control - and, therefore, to "run" the economy.

This doesn't mean that public policy doesn't affect the economy, only that the impact is more attenuated and confounded than we think.

So what are we to make of this chart, posted by Harvard economist Greg Manikw, showing labor force participation?

One thing we can say is that there seems to be little support for the notion that Bush era tax cuts tanked the economy. The onset of the recession seems to have been well after they went into effect and, in fact, the years following their implementation were marked by rising employment. Maybe you can argue that the recession was the result of cumulative deficits caused by lower tax rates and increased spending (Bush 43 was a spender), but you'd need to find your support elsewhere.

But conservatives and liberals will read the chart differently with respect to Obama administration policies. Conservatives - and I admit this is my view - will find evidence that Obaman stimuli didn't work. The recovery has been historically anemic and it looks like Obama spent huge sums of money for shovel ready projects that did not exist and stimuli that did not stimulate.

Defenders of the President can take two approaches. The first is to say that it stopped the decline. The chart provides some superficial evidence for that but there are at least two problems. One is that it would be necessary to know how much of the 2009 stimulus package was spent in that year - before the decline abated. The other is that downturns inevitably bottom out. The administration did not expect the package to stabilize employment but to increase it. That did not happen to any material degree.

The second ploy is to criticize the President from the left - an attack that is unlikely to drive voters into the arms of Romney. On this view, the problem is that the stimulus - as humongous as it was - needed to be larger. The only problem with what didn't work is that we needed more of it.

If both of these arguments seem like matters of faith - susceptible of neither proof or disproof - it's because they are. Both seem implausible to me but I don't think I could prove them to be wrong.

What I do know is that - fairly or not - this is a tough record on which to run for re-election. If Obama is re-elected, it will be historic. Presidents tend not to be re-elected with numbers that look like this.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin

ObamaCare - it whirls - it twirls - it hops - or not.

I was intrigued by Guy Boulton's article on what appear to be wildly conflicting characterizations of what ObamaCare "will do." He reports on various explanations for this, including claims by some that the administration has "failed to sell" the plan and others who blame our contentious political environment.

The argument that "we just haven't explained things well" is a time-honored dodge in American politics. It is almost always wrong. The number of speeches given by the President in support of the new law is exceeded only by the number of rounds of golf he has played. He's selling. The public is not buying.

It is certainly true that our political environment is fraught with contention, although I'm less certain that this is anymore true today than it has been at many times in our history.
I'd suggest that one of the reasons that we can't agree on what ObamaCare "does" is because no one really knows.


The Affordable Health Care Act is - and I date myself here - a Rube Goldberg machine on steroids. For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, Goldberg was a cartoonist who drew far fetched and complicated devices that would accomplish simple things - say peeling a potato - in convoluted ways.

ObamaCare is an enormously complex contraption built on a series of assumptions and deferred decisions. It assumes that one can force insurance companies to cover everyone at a price largely unrelated to the risk presented by an insured -  if only everyone would buy insurance. It presumes that everyone will buy insurance if only we can impose a penalty - no, a tax - that is not as high as the policy will cost. It gambles that more employers will provide health insurance and that the cost of a health insurance policy can be lowered if only we mandate that polices must cover more with less cost sharing and if only we can penalize - er, tax - employers who fail to provide these more expensive policies - again, at a level that is less than the cost of purchasing the policies.

It asks us to assume that Medicare costs can be reduced by appointing a panel of experts who will "do stuff" that won't involve rationing care. What is that stuff? No one knows.

As Mona Charen recently wrote, ObamaCare is a 2700 page law that creates  "159 new boards and commissions; more than $500 billion in new taxes (and counting); the Independent Payment Advisory Board, a rationing board whose decisions are unreviewable by the courts and practically untouchable by Congress itself; restrictions on religious liberty; Medicare cuts; affirmative-action mandates for medical and dental schools; huge new authority over one-seventh of the U.S. economy for the secretary of health and human services, and open-ended regulations of the way doctors and others perform their jobs."

In her book, The Truth About Obama Care, Sally Pipes writes that the Affordable Health Care Act contains "a dizzying array of rapidly moving parts. Some whirl clockwise, others twirl counter-clockwise and even more leap up and down like pogo sticks." Putting aside how we might attribute which movement to which provision, the point is that the law contains numerous provisions that could prove disastrous if they don't go together "just so" and others designed to do contradictory things that it is hoped will come out "just right."


But it's worse than that. Writing in the Claremont Review of Books, Charles Kesler writes that Nancy Pelosi's infamous statement that we must "pass the bill, so that we know what is in the bill" is a misnomer. Reading the bill tells you precious little about what will actually be done.Most of that is left to subsequent rule making.


And it gets even worse. The Affordable Health Care Act was passed in 2010. Almost all of its provisions were designed not to go into effect until after the President runs for re-election this year - in 2012.
When does that ever happen? Here we have what we are told is the biggest and bestest reform ever. It is so good that we better not let the public experience its many blessings until after President Obama is safely re-elected.

Why do you suppose that is? Here's a hint. It wasn't because the Obama administration thought that a more rapid implementation of ObamaCare goodness would make the 2012 campaign too easy. It isn't because they wanted to give the Republicans a break so as to make the election more "sporting."

In light of all this, is it any wonder no one can agree on what ObamaCare "will do?"

Cross posted at sharkandshepherd.blogspot.com.

Recusal and the individual Justice.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court is in the news again, splitting evenly in its review of an order by Justice Michael Gableman declining to recuse himself in a case in which a law firm (but not the individual lawyers) which represented him in a disciplinary proceeding represented one of the parties. He also declined to recuse in another case in which his individual lawyer was involved but which arose well after the representation concluded.
In both cases, the argument for recusal was based, at least in part, on the fact that the firm provided its services on a contingency basis. It did not charge Justice Gableman and could be paid only if it prevailed and was awarded fees pursuant to a seldom used fee shifting statute. It is likely that the fee award would have required legislative approval.

So what did the Court split over? I think its fair to say that the division was over one serious issue - albeit one that was resolved prior to this case - and one that is not as serious.

Let's start with the latter first. In cases such as this, an individual Justice must  decide whether he  believes that he can decide the case impartially. Everyone agrees that the full Court can review that determination for the limited purpose of determining that it happened, i.e., that the Justice involved  considered the issues and decided he could proceed. In this review, however, the full Court does not "second guess" the Justice, i.e., it does not decide whether or not his decision was right, only that it was made.


Three Justices decided that Justice Gableman did so. The other three said, essentially, that they could not tell. With all due respect, their argument isn't very persuasive. It rests on the following.

The motion to recuse Justice Gableman was based, as I wrote, on the nature of his fee arrangement with the firm representing him. In his order denying the motion to recuse, Justice Gableman, in reciting the basis for the motion,  characterizes it as an predicated upon the fact that "Michael Best &
Friedrich firm was involved in the cases and had previously represented me.”

Chief Justice Abrahamson, writing for Justices Bradley and Crooks, thinks this a fatal flaw because the actual basis for the motion was that Justice Gableman " received allegedly free legal
services from Michael Best." Thus, according to this group, Justice Gableman "deliberately or accidentally" mischaracterized the basis for the motion and may not have considered the actual arguments made by the party seeking recusal.

One might say that "free legal services' is - deliberately or accidentally - not a complete and accurate description of the free arrangement at issue. But I am sure  that no omission was intended. I am also confident that Justice Gableman understood the nature of the arguments being made for his recusal and, in fact, made clear that he based his decision on "the circumstances of the case ... and the submissions of the parties."

To be sure, he did not expressly address the particulars of the fee arrangement, but no one thinks he was obligated to do so. In fact, the Chief Justice herself writes that "somewhat ironically, Justice Gableman’s Order might have passed muster had he referred to Adams’s allegations generically as “the allegations stated by the petitioner.”

In other words, he would have been OK had he not said anything about why he was asked to recuse himself and simply said that he had considered the request and denied it.

And that's just what he did.

To my eye, reading Justice Gableman's broad and generic description of the basis for the party's recusal motion as reflecting - or even suggesting - a failure to understand them or to consider the party's arguments is cutting the loaf too thin. I think he got the point. He just didn't think he ought to recuse.

Should the Court have decided whether he was he right? This gets us to the second - and more serious, albeit settled - issue. A majority of our state Supreme Court is committed to the position taken by the United States Supreme Court. They do not believe that a majority of the Court has the power to order a brother or sister Justice to recuse. On this view, it does not matter whether he was right - only that he made a subjective determination of whether he should or should not proceed.

There are strong arguments in favor of such a position. I think it is right about 99%of the time. I may, however, disagree with the majority when there is an argument that the failure to recuse amounts to a violation of litigants' due process rights. But that is, as the United States Supreme Court recently made clear, a very rare circumstance - one that was certainly not involved here.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin

Nothing "great" about Roberts' opinion

Yesterday we returned from a family trip to Disney World. Hadn't been down there since I took my son in the early '90s. Now we took him, his wife and two of my grandsons. I'm afraid I've changed more than the Magic Kingdom. Something in that is humbling.

On the plane down to the Happiest Place on Earth, I wrote this op-ed for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. One morning, before trekking the Animal Kingdom, I wrote more about the need - and potential - for a limiting principle at the Federalist Society's newly launched SCOTUSreport blog where I have been asked to contribute.  The point is this. If the limited view of the Commerce power endorsed by the Chief Justice and four other members of the Court has any meaning, it cannot be so readily undercut by  a capacious view of the taxing authority. The latter needs a limiting principle that the Chief Justice did not articulate but did suggest.

It is for this reason that the op-ed in Monday's paper by law professors Vikrim and Akhil Amar is unpersuasive. I appreciate that it sets forth the conventional 'liberal" view, i.e., that the Chief Justice was somehow "wise" in deferring to a piece of legislation in which the President had invested "substantial capital." The authors suggest that he has done something like Chief Justice Marshall  in Marbury v. Madison, asserting the Court's authority to say what the law is while avoiding a confrontation with the executive by giving the latter what it wants - for now.

But there are two problems with this view. The first is that it is not clear that Roberts has protected the Court's interest. He was able to avoid a confrontation only by adopting a view of the taxing power that threatens to undercut his view of the commerce authority and the constitutional scheme it reflects.

The second is that Marbury was decided in 1803 and this is 2012. We are well beyond the time in which the Court's authority to say what the law is was controversial. Rather than strike a blow for judicial independence, Roberts - in at least giving the appearance that he took a dive - undercut it. This was not a step forward for the Court, it was a step back.

Having said that, I do think it's a step too far to castigate Roberts' as a "liberal." I think he got too cute by half but I don't expect him to suddenly become something that he has never been.

Thank God for that.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Less to leaks than is claimed

As a legal matter, the information concerning "leaks" in papers filed by the District Attorney's office in response to certain motions made by Tim Russell are interesting, but not all that illuminating. (I express no opinion on the merits of the legal issue which the DA was addressing to which, strictly speaking, the issue of these leaks may not be all that pertinent.)

The most interesting is an e-mail from one of Russell's attorneys to talk show host Charlie Sykes from Michael Maistelman, one of Russell's attorneys. The e-mail says that he has "heard" that charges are about to be filed against Darlene Wink and Kelly Rindfleisch. Does this show that Maistelman was a source of improper leaks concerning the John Doe?

In a word, no.

Maistelman, as an attorney for another defendant, was presumably uninvolved in the decision to charge Rindfleisch and Wink. He apparently "heard" about the pending charges from someone else. (Indeed, he has said that the e-mail was based on "gossip.')

This would make him a recipient of a leak - not its source.  There is no evidence that that he was under any legal obligation not to pass it along. Who the initial source was - and whether there was a leak that violated a secrecy order - remains unknown. And that is the more critical question.

Nor does the e-mail establish that Sykes was being “hypocritical” for complaining of leaks from the Doe. To the contrary, it substantiated his complaints, even as it did not reveal the original source.

The September 26, 2010 e-mail from John Hiller to then County Executive Walker is no more illuminating. Apparently Hiller found out that Dan Bice was writing a story, talked with him about the story and reported on the conversation to Walker. In the course of the e-mail, Hiller says that Bice told him that he got "much" of his "information" from one of Darlene Wink's attorneys who send him an e-mail defending her. But what that "information" was and whether revealing it would have violated a secrecy order is not revealed. (Indeed, if the lawyer had breached secrecy, he would have almost certainly asked Bice for confidentiality which he obviously did not. If he had, Bice would hardly have identified him to Hiller.)

Nor does the e-mail establish, as at least one blogger has maintained, that Walker "knew" what was going on in the John Doe. It establishes that Walker knew a reporter was about to write a story.

Finally, the e-mails discuss a small portion of what has leaked from the Doe. They do not establish anything approaching a conclusion that the "defense attorneys" did it. I don't know who the source of these leaks were and neither does anyone else based on what is in the public record.

Of course, these details will be ignored by partisans in their rush to place "blame" for the leaks and advance whatever other speculation and innuendo meets today's political agenda.


Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin

I offer the following observations on yesterday's Supreme Court decision on Arizona's immigration law.
First, it tells us nothing about the pending ObamaCare decision on the individual mandate. The question if the Affordable Care Act cases has to do with Congressional authority. There was no doubt that Congress could legislate in the area of immigration and naturalization. The question in the Arizona case was the impact of what Congressional legislation on supplementary (or conflicting) state legislation.
Second, one can't ascribe victory to either Arizona or the Obama administration. The administration lost quite a few of its challenges to the law in lower courts and these issues were not addressed by the Supreme Court. On the other hand, the provision of the law that was not stricken by the Supreme Court yesterday may well have to substantially narrowed by state and lower courts to ultimately survive.
Finally, the controversy reflects the incoherence of our immigration debate. The left tends to frame the debate about unlawful entry into the country in racial terms. If you want to do anything to stem the flow of foreign nationals across the border or place restrictions on those who have illegally entered or remained in the country, you are "racist."
This is nonsense on stilts. A sovereign nation has the right to control its borders and it is hardly racist to worry that a large influx of low income and low skilled workers will stress social programs and place downward pressure on wages. People who turn opposition to unfettered immigration into a racial issue are not serious people.
I appreciate the insights of some of my libertarian friends on the value of a more lassiez faire approach to immigration but such an approach is not politically feasible and does not adequately consider the impact of illiberal nations.
On the other hand, conservatives on the issue (and this is not synonymous with Republicans who hold a variety of positions on immigration) see it as a matter or law and order. If you are not here illegally, you ought to go back. But that is not realistic. We don't have the capacity to accomplish that and, even if we did, there would be countless stories of sympathetic individuals and families who the majority of us don't want to send back.
Personally, I think the way out of this mess is for the left to stop playing the race  card and recognize that the borders have to be secured. Conservatives have to concede that millions of people who have been working and paying taxes and having children aren't going to be sent back.
Because neither side trusts the other, a compromise must involve addressing the legitimate concern immediately. A "path to citizenship", for example, must be combined with immediate and vigorous enforcement.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Enough about Title IX

 
I'm going to play grumpy old man this morning. Here is is. If I hear another creepy paen to Title IX, I may never watch the WNBA again.

This would, of course, be a symbolic boycott because I have never watched it to begin with, but you get the point.

It's not that I am "against" women in athletics. When my niece's soccer team at Homestead High School won the state championship a few years back (she scored the winning goal in the semis!), it was about the neatest thing ever. One of our greatest national athletic accomplishments was the victory of the American women in the World Cup. We rightly remember Kerri Strug's courageous performance to put the Magnicent Seven over the top at the 1996 Olympics as one of those moments that represents what is ennobling about sports. (Hint: This is why I am only offering to boycott a women's sport that I have never watched.)

I may even concede that a law like Title IX was necessary. I remember 1972. It was a difference place.

But does anyone think that today's colleges and universities - those hotbeds of diversity mongering and celebration of the "other" (at least as defined by Progressive Orthodoxy) - would not provide equal opportunity to women? Does anyone believe that the parents who turn the logistics of girls soccer and softball into something resembling a weekly invasion of Normandy would sit by while their daughters are forced to the sideline? We see things differently in 2012.

Maybe Title IX contributed to this shift in attitudes, but I wouldn't assume it. In my opinion, evolving social attitudes create legal obligations and not the other way around.

Today, Title IX seems both unnecessary and potentially harmful. harmful. As a case in point, take UWM Athletic Director Andy Geiger. He says he's a great fan of Title IX but here's the thing. He doesn't need the federal government to force him to provide equal opportunity to women athletes. He can do it on his own and I suspect, if left to his own devices, he would do just that with the full support of the university.

And it is Geiger himself who illustrates why Title IX can be harmful. Federal enforcement of the law (as opposed to the language of the law itself) has insisted that women participate in the same proportion as their representation in the student body. Why anyone believes this would "naturally" be the case is beyond me. There is a a difference between recognizing that individual men and women ought to be free to make their own choices and the assumption that men and women, in the aggregate, will actually make the same choices. In the real world, this is often not the case.

But getting the numbers right is pretty much the only way to stay out of legal trouble.

This is why, according to Geiger, college football is off the table at UWM. I suspect that folks over at Marquette would say the same thing.

Whether or not UWM should have a football program is unclear. On the positive side, a football program is attractive to applicants and might arguably contribute to  a stronger "collegiate" atmosphere than is currently present there. It would raise the profile of an institution that has traditionally not had much of a profile. On the other hand, there would be a number of challenges  that might be beyond the capacity of the university to overcome. There is no place to play and UWM students do not have a tradition of strong loyalty towards or affection for the institution. In fact, it is the absence of such affiniity that a football program would be designed to overcome.

But the one thing that ought not to bear upon the decision to start such a program is whether or not there will be some formal equality between the number of male and female athletes. Devoting additional resources to a football program is unlikely to decrease opportunities for women who would otherwise participate in intercollegiate athletics.

We all believe that women should have the opportunity to participate in interscholastic sports. But, at least in 2012, Title IX no longer has much to do with providing that opportunity and the mechanistic way in which it is enforced does more harm than good.

So please. ESPN. Go back to showing the games and shouting "booyah" when someone makes a great play. Editorial is not your strength.

Cross posted at Shark and Shepherd home page.

The elusiveness of reform, part 1.

Jay Heck made a few reform proposals in an op-ed in today's Crossroads. Two of them interest me. I am far less enamored with then than Jay is. Let's start with the suggestion that Wisconsin establish a "non-partisan" redistricting commission.

First, let me say that I am generally skeptical of "non-partisan" and selflessly "civic-minded" commissions. If you ask a group of people to do something that is inherently partisan and political, the group will tend to become partisan and political. Those who are intensely interested in the process will attempt to capture the "non-partisan" agency and they will often succeed. When they do, the only thing that has been accomplished is that the politics will have been driven underground and out of view.

Me? I'd rather have it out in the open. 

Jay cites Iowa. I'll cite California where a "non-partisan" commission has been met with lawsuits and repeal referenda. 

The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, when it comes to redistricting, there are not a set of agreed upon and non-contradictory criteria for drawing district lines that are, as Jay puts, "according to community interests. 

For example, Jay wants to avoid oddly shaped districts in favor of those that are "contiguous and compact." But there are, in any redistricting year, countless ways to do draw such districts. And, contrary to Jay's implication, the GOP plan was not full of oddly shaped districts. There will always, in the give and take of drawing a plan, be a few oddities. But I show my Election Law students numerous examples of Rorschach blot districts - all of which have been upheld. In comparison, the GOP plan looked like a checkerboard. 

Even contiguous and compact districts can run afoul of other redistricting goals. They may, for example, be less competitive and even weighted toward the GOP. Nationally and in Wisconsin, Democratic voters are far more likely to be highly concentrated. Many experts believe that a”checkerboard" district will tend to "pack" Democratic voters and favor Republicans. 

What about promoting competitive districts? Well, that may require dividing natural communities of interest, i.e., communities of voters facing similar issues who will often vote the same way. For example, critics of the GOP plan objected to its division of Racine and Kenosha counties. But the result - combining rural and suburban voters into one district while placing urban voters in another would seem more consistent with preserving communities of interest - which are not necessarily - or even likely - to follow municipal boundaries. 

It is because there is no way to define what is a "non-partisan" and "public spirited plans" that courts are reluctant to entertain claims of a partisan gerrymander. That is why I told the legislature last July that the plan would not be susceptible to challenge as a partisan gerrymander. 

It is unclear that a supposedly "non-partisan" commission would do any better or that we would even have a standard by which to assess that question. Politics would still be there. We'd just have a harder time seeing it.

 Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Faster and More Furious

President Obama's invocation of executive privilege to resist producing documents subpoenaed by Congress in connection with the investigation of Fast and Furious may turn out to be a rather large deal.

At first blush, these seems to be an extraordinary assertion of executive privilege which is most decidedly not a blanket warrant to assert confidentiality and is generally applicable to communications concerning " military, diplomatic, or sensitive national security secrets."

It is hard to see how the documents for which privilege is being asserted could qualify. They are, as reflected in this morning's letter from Deputy Attorney General David Cole, documents generated after February 4, 2011 related to the Department of Justice's response to Congress and whistleblower allegations.

February 4, 2011 is significant because it is the date of a letter in which the Justice Department misrepresented Fast and Furious to Congress. On that day, DOJ sent a letter in which it said that guns were not deliberately permitted to cross the border. They were. Attorney General Holder later described the letter as "inaccurate" but refused to agree that it was "false."

So it is far from clear that the documents requested could have involved Presidential communications (Holder says that he never discussed the matter with the President) or even any high level government official. It seems unlikely that they could have involved the type of military, diplomatic or sensitive national security matters normally thought to justify a claim of executive privilege. It looks like we have nothing beyond a generalized claim of confidentiality ot the type that the Supreme Court rejected in United States v. Nixon, 418 U.S. 683 (1974).

In fact, it seems as if the claim is that the DOJ, having misrepresented the matter to a Congressional oversight committee, is arguing that Congress is not entitled to conduct its own investigation as to  how and why that misrepresentation occurred. Instead, in today's letter, Deputy Attorney General offers to provide a "briefing" on how Congress was misled with "some" documents while others will be withheld but explained in some way.

That is, to put it mildly, a counter-intuitive proposition and a rather weak proposal. Given the lack of candor in the Department's response to date (we are, after all, discussing an "inaccurate/false" letter) and Attorney General Holder's dissembling before the committee, no reasonable person could expect a "trust us" briefing to be acceptable.

Beyond that, the President has, for whatever reason, decided to own a scandal that he presumably could have avoided. Why would we have done that?

This bears watching.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that you aren't making stuff up

I've got a few more posts on the recall aftermath. Over at the Marquette University Law School Faculty blog and this blog's home page, I add a little more legal detail to what others have written about the "we got outspent" narrative offered by some Democrats. The shorter version, for this general purpose audience, is that 1) the margin wasn't as large as is generally reported, 2) the margin had nothing to do with Citizens United unless it was to help the forces supporting Barrett close the gap and 3) the margin doesn't seem to have made much difference.

In general, I think it is a mistake for the side that loses an important election to look for scapegoats. Blaming everyone but yourself is a good way to stay a perennial loser.  But at least talking about money and politics is a serious response. There is a narrative bopping around some of the left-leaning blogs that is beyond silly.

Someone is messing with the votes! The exit polls showed that the race was much closer but then the networks called the race for Walker. Exit polls are accurate. What gives? Who stole the strawberries? 

This turns out to be a common meme on the far left, beginning with a really bad article by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. on the 2004 exits in Rolling Stone. The argument begins with the premise that exit polls can;'t be wrong. They survey only actual voters who report how they have voted as opposed to how they will vote. Exit polls have been used to detect fraud in the counting of votes in other countries. They tend to show more support for Democrats than the actual numbers. The difference is cheating. Toss in a reference to Diebold.

This is moonbattery. Exit polls have their own difficulties. Charles Franklin, Director of the Marquette University Law School Poll, directed to me a good discussion of the issues here. While the discussion relates to exit polling in the 2004 Presidential elections, the issues are the same.
Exit polls must predict the extent of early voting and try to account for it by a telephone survey. They are not, strictly speaking random, in that the polling organizations must identify certain precincts  and then figure out what weight to assign precincts. They must attempt to sample the voters at each precinct randomly - which can be a challenge when the pollster must stand where she is told to stand and voters may try to be polled - or to avoid being polled. Like all polls, they must adjust their numbers to reflect what the actual composition of the electorate is (or is presumed to be).

One significant problem is that exit polls cane be plagued by a large refusal rate. The extant evidence says that there can be nonresponse bias. As noted above, Democrats tend to exit poll better than they actually poll. In the 2008 Democratic primary, Barack Obama did better in exit polls than in his actual match-up with Hillary Clinton.

Exit polls used to verify election results in other countries are often different animals than media polls used to predict the results. They generally involve far more extensive - and often more concentrated polling - to reduce some of the problems described here.

Complaining about the exit polls is black helicopter stuff.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin.

Cats and Dogs, Libertarians and Social Conservatives

There's been an interesting exchange among libertarians in response to the Catholic Church's kick-off of a campaign against application of the HHS mandate on contraception and "morning after" pills to certain religious institutions.

Tim Carney, writing in the Washington Examiner, began the conversation by suggesting that social conservatives recognize big government as an enemy of religion and calling on libertarians to reassess their political alliances. Walter Olson of Cato responds, observing that libertarians have been out front in opposing state impositions on religion, but pointing out that there are limitations to co-operation between libertarians and social conservatives to the extent that the latter support state intervention as an instrument of the culture war.  Walter's Cato colleague, David Boaz, argues that social conservatives have often called for impositions on liberty to advance a particular moral view, citing a number of historic examples.

Two things. First, it is always heartening to see libertarians understand that freedom requires resistance to impositions on voluntary associations as well as restrictions of individuals. It is a common mistake to see the freedom movement as entirely individualistic and unconcerned with communities. People often choose to exercise their liberties in association. Defending the right of a voluntary association to defend the principles around which their members come together is also vital.

Second, there are often paradigm shifts in politics and public life. For years, traditional Catholics, Evangelicals and Orthodox Jews clashed over theological differences. More recently, they have come to see the state and secular culture as a common and more immediate threat. They have formed alliances that once would have been thought impossible.

I can't say that libertarians and social conservatives are at the point of such a shift, but the thought is intriguing. Might it not make sense for social conservatives to understand that the enlisting the state as an ally in fostering the traditional morality they support is both theologically suspect and politically implausible? Might not libertarians come to recognize (although Walter would argue that they have) that a state powerful enough to enforce sweeping dictates of life style freedom against private individuals and organizations will always do so selectively and contingently?

Someone suggested that this may be one of the differences between the Moral Majority and the Tea Party. At some point, people recognize that the best offense can be a good defense.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin and Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog.

Money and the recall

Paul Secunda, as a labor law professor, weighs in on the aftermath of the recall. He makes some good points. But as (I think) one of two people in Wisconsin who teach Election Law (Mike Wittenwyler, an adjunct at UW, is the other), I would like to revise and extend his remarks.
Paul complains of the "8 to 1" spending advantage said to have been enjoyed by Scott Walker and suggests that this somehow can be attributed to the the results of the Supreme Court's decision in Citizens United v. FEC. This advantage, while overstated, is the result of a law. But that law has nothing to do with Citizens United.

First, a caveat on the "8 to 1" figure.
As my colleague, Tom Kamenick, pointed out (and not at my direction, I was off in DC), this metric doesn't reflect the situation on the ground. Paul's numbers - a mantra on the left over the past week - reflect only the amounts raised by the campaigns during the recall election (and excluded amounts spent by independents and the recall effort itself). It also ignores everything spent in last summer's recalls. When you take all of that into account, the GOP advantage is much less pronounced.

But this is a law school blog so let's focus on the law on contributions to a campaign.
Citizens United had nothing to do with contributions to Governor Walker's campaign. Citizens United had nothing to do with campaign contributions at all.
The constitutional treatment of campaign finance regulation has long distinguished between contributions and independent expenditures. The former have been held to be subject to more stringent regulation because, according to the Court, contributions are far more likely to risk actual or apparent corruption. That distinction is controversial but it has been consistent over the past forty years.

For many years, all independent expenditures that were not express advocacy for the election or defeat of a candidate - so called "issue advocacy" -  were, for the most part, constitutionally protected in a way that permitted anyone to spend what he wished to speak on issues.  This was so even when the ad was crafted in a way that could reasonably (even evidently) be interpreted as criticism of a candidate for office during an election. The McCain-Feingold Act briefly changed the rules (although it proved to be easily evaded) for certain forms of spending in federal elections. But the Supreme Court, in FEC v. Wisconsin Right to Life (WRTL II), effectively made clear that restrictions on the source of funding for independent issue advocacy (which it defined as any communication susceptible of no other reasonable interpretation than as a call for the election or defeat of a candidate) were unconstitutional. This included communications funded by corporate or union treasury funds.
Citizens United held only that the First Amendment also protects the use of corporate (and, by implication, union) treasury funds for express advocacy, i.e., advocacy calling for the election or defeat of a candidate. How significant that change was is unclear. Prior to the decision, corporations and unions could use their treasury funds to exhort voters to call Scott Walker or Tom Barrett and express their outrage over some ill-begotten position that the candidate had taken. After Citizens United, they could add a call to vote for or against a candidate. Since only a moron could have failed to cast an ad critical of a candidate as an issue ad, one might question just how significant that change was.
But corporate and union campaign contributions  - dollars that go to the campaign - can be - and still are - restricted. While one could use some of the reasoning in Citizens United to attack limits on corporate contributions, that hasn't happened yet. Both the 8th and 9th Circuits have held that limitations on corporate contributions survive Citizens United. (A district court in the 4th Circuit held otherwise in the context of a criminal prosecution. Oral argument in the Court of Appeals was held last month.)
So none of the "8 to 1 advantage" in contributions came from corporations other than as might otherwise be permitted by state law (e.g., corporations may establish PACs to make contributions, but that money can't come from the corporate treasury). None of it is attributable to Citizens United.
Walker was aided by a provision of state campaign finance law related to recall elections. Because recall organizers are free to raise and spend as much money as they can, the law permits a candidate subject to recall - from the moment the recall drive begins to the moment a recall is ordered - to raise money without regard to the normal contribution limits for the purpose of resisting the effort to obtain a recall order. Citizens United had nothing to with that either.
Citizens United may have had an impact on the money raised by for independent expenditures. It permitted union and corporate treasury funds to be used for express, as well as, issue advocacy. Moreover, in a subsequent decision, called Speechnow.org v. FEC, the DC Circuit held that corporations and unions could make unlimited contributions to organizations engaging in independent advocacy. The FEC did not seek Supreme Court review. Speechnow.org lead to the creation of so-called SuperPACs which also do not contribute to candidates, although they spend to support them.
Who did this help? It's unclear. As others have noted, there seems to have been more independent efforts for Barrett than for Walker. As Professor Michael McConnell pointed out in the Wall Street Journal, much of this was union money. The largest spenders on Walker's behalf seem to have been individuals. Citizens United may have actually helped unions close the gap in the Wisconsin recall election.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. There are all sorts of institutional obstacles to corporate political spending. The extent to which current law requires such spending to be disclosed is currently unclear, although the Citizens United court broadly endorsed the constitutionality of disclosure requirements.
Beyond that, it is dangerous to place too much emphasis on who spent more money in an election. I would not say - and I assume Paul would not say - that the substantial financial advantage that Barack Obama held over John McCain in 2008 was the cause of his victory. While the winning candidate usually raises more money, the causation probably runs the other way. Political money follows the polls.
In the Wisconsin recall, exit polls suggest that over 90% of voters made up their minds over a month before the election. Indeed, one of the most astonishing things about the Battle of Wisconsin is that millions and millions of dollars, wall to wall organizing, demonstrations of a type rarely seen in this country since I was about ten and almost nonstop political disputation changed almost no one's mind.

Cross posted at Marquette University Law School Faculty Blog.

Crony capitalism and health care

I have a friend - a spectacularly successful business person - who once told me that "when a guy you are doing business with wants to pray with you, watch your wallet."
Now, that's funny (it turns what seems to be a good thing on its hear) and probably unfair. Here is something that is neither.
Beware of public-private partnerships. Two theoretical insights tell us to be wary of the idea that government can facilitate the success of selected private companies. One is the notion that, in the absence of a market and the price signals it provides, it is virtually impossible to know which business or technology ought to be a winner.
The second is that, as public choice theory tells us, political processes are likely to be dominated by those whose interest is in the outcome is much greater than the public as a whole. In particular, there is a danger that the regulated will "capture" the regulators.
The Wall Street Journal is telling a scary story about this in the context of the passage of President's Obama health care reform. Pharmaceutical companies came to see the passage of the new law as both a risk and an opportunity. There were things that wished to avoid, e.g., permitted the re-importation of drugs, but also things that they wanted. Expansion of government subsidies for the purchase of their products - as well as a mandate that people buy insurance that would pay for their products - would be great for business.
There is an interesting twist to the story related to concerns on the left about money in politics. Apparently one of the prices of - or inducements for - favorable treatment was the expenditure by the drug companies' trade association of $ 150 million in advertising to be coordinated with the White House to promote a "consensus" on health care reform. This puts concerns about Citizens United in perspective, no?
Did things like this happen during the Bush administration? Apparently so. Shame on that as well.
Government does best when it sticks to government work., e.g. providing genuinely public goods and, as the Wall Street Journal put it, creating a fair and free market free of the type of micromanagement that is the essence of ObamaCare. Gore too many oxes and the ranchers start to get interested.

Cross posted at Purple Wisconsin