Bob Pollin fields the question: are the very rich hunkering down for a long recession and to protect their assets, are more concerned about debt than high unemployment … Read More
Do Republicans Need a Conservative Version of the Welfare State to Win?
My friend Matthew Continetti has an
interesting piece in the Weekly Standard explicating
the “double bind” that Republicans face in trying to become
electorally competitive again. He explains:
The domestic proposals that have the greatest chance of making
the Republican party attractive to the “coalition of the
ascendant”—immigrants, members of the millennial generation,
single white women—involve far more government intervention in
the economy than the GOP coalition—married white people, Wall
Street, the Tea Party—will allow. And we haven’t even mentioned
changing the GOP approach to social issues, which would drive the
Republican base of religious conservatives out of the party.
Pursuing such proposals would break the coalition that puts
Republicans close to a majority.
Continetti is not the first conservative to argue — falsely as
I note in an upcoming piece for Reason magazine — that courting
new constituencies such as Hispanics, Asian Americans and other
minorities will require the party to give up even its pretense of
limited government. Still, Continetti’s basic point that the GOP
does not have a coherent ideology that will allow it to court new
constituencies while hanging on to its old ones is well taken.
After all, how does the party appeal to the “millennial generation”
that includes gays, young foodies and indie-music listening
hipsters without losing the meat-and-potato social conservatives
in, say, Charleston, South Carolina?
Continetti’s answer, dusted off from a 1975 essay by Irving
Kristol, is that what the GOP needs is an authentically
conservative version of the liberal welfare state. To fashion such
a state, Continetti argues, would require:
Republicans to revisit some of the assumptions they have held
since the end of the Cold War. Maybe the foremost concern of most
Americans is not the top marginal income tax rate. Maybe
you can’t seriously lower health care costs without radically
overhauling the way we pay for health care. Maybe a political party
can’t address adequately such middle-class concerns as school
quality and transportation without using the power of government.
Maybe the globalization of capital and products and labor hasn’t
been an unimpeachable good.
I am all for rethinking post-Cold War assumptions, but do we
have to throw globalization and trade liberalization under the bus
in the process? After all, hostility to trade has become passé even
among Third World anti-trade activists such as Vandana Shiva — the
last ones holding their finger in the dyke to stop globalization.
This is in no small part due to the debunking done by economists
such as Jagdish Bhagwati who have
shown that even the immediate losers of trade liberalization
win in the long run. So what is the point of reviving this animus
especially since Continetti offers no new (or even old) evidence of
trade’s downside?
;The point is to win “taxpaying married adults with
families” over to the Republican side and make them the objects of
a conservative welfare state (just as presumably liberals have made
blue-collar, working class people the objects of a liberal welfare
state). These people, Continetti claims, “tend to have been
ill-served by the last couple of decades of American government,
which has promised them the bounty of a global economy but left
them paying the tab for the mistakes of Republican and Democratic
elites, bankers, and bobos.”
This is all very elliptical but Continetti’s underlying project
seems clear: He wants to coopt legitimate concerns about crony
capitalism to craft a special, conservative brand of class warfare
in order to pave the way for a conservative welfare state targeted
at suburban middle-class families. ;“Liberal welfare state
could be said to benefit liberals, a conservative welfare state
presumably would benefit conservatives.” So much for looking out
for the common good!
Setting aside whether the country that is going broke could even
afford such a state, what would it look like?
The conservative welfare state of our dreams would be, well, a
state. That is, it would be an effective federal government. And it
would be a community. Human beings are not faceless monads choosing
identities at will from a universal menu of options. Human beings
are born into families, faiths, and nations.
The security of all three of these pre-liberal forms of
association is important. For families, that means growing incomes
while lessening the costs of child-rearing, and giving parents
blocking gear against the offenses of a hazardous popular culture.
For faiths, that means protecting ministerial exceptions and
religious liberty. For the nation, that means borders that are
secure, a trade policy that puts the interests of American laborers
over the interests of multinational corporations, a sound currency,
and a fearsome military.
In short, the ideal conservative welfare state would be a
libertarian dystopia of even bigger proportions than the liberal
welfare state. There is less welfare and more state in it.
But what is deeply ironic is that a magazine that accuses
libertarians of isolationism because they oppose American military
interventionism has no qualms about recommending a restrictionist
immigration policy to keep foreigners out and a protectionist trade
policy to keep foreign goods out. If I had to pick a term for this
foreign policy, I’d call it neo-isolationism. And maybe I lack
imagination, but it is hard to see how a party that wants to engage
the world through its “fearsome military” — rather than through
voluntary exchange and mutual cooperation — could gain enough
moral high ground to craft a winning political message, especially
in a war-weary country.
One last point: Continetti deeply opposes comprehensive
immigration reform that includes “amnesty” for illegals not only
because it would create new Democratic voters –but because it
would also allegedly provoke another round of border jumping.
That’s what happened after Reagan granted amnesty in 1986, he
claims.
This is seriously mistaken, not just on political grounds but
factual ones as well. Reagan’s amnesty did not encourage illegal
border crossings. His failure to create any options for Mexicans to
legally work in the country did. Had Reagan’s amnesty been
accompanied with a guest worker program that made it easy for poor
Mexicans to come and go as per the availability of jobs in America,
the problem of illegal immigration would have long ago disappeared.
Instead the issue has become a humanitarian nightmare and an oozing
political wound for the GOP. Far from opposing amnesty, Republicans
should insist on including a guest worker program as part of a
comprehensive immigration reform.
Or we’ll be having the exact same conversation again in 10 years
– with the GOP having become even more of a rump party than it
already is. … Read More
Why is the U.S. media ignoring rape in Syria?
The past several weeks have been filled with news reports about the catastrophic proportions of the Syrian refugee crisis. One news report after another describes disintegrating communities, lack of water and electricity, and the multidimensional hardships refugees face as they struggle to survive. With very few exceptions, however, these reports ignore rape and sexualized violence as a component of the crisis.An International Rescue Committee report issued in January included surveys of Syrians in Lebanon and Jordan identifying “rape as a primary reason their families fled the country.” Less than two weeks ago, Erika Feller, assistant high commissioner for protection of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, explained while reporting to the Human Rights Council in Geneva, “This displacement is not only about loss of homes and economic security. It is also accompanied by gender-based crimes, deliberate victimization of women and children, and a frightening array of assaults on human dignity.” She specifically added, “Reports are revealing that the conflict in Syria is increasingly marked by rape and sexual violence employed as a weapon of war to intimidate parties to the conflict destroying identity, dignity and the social fabrics of families and communities.”Continue Reading… … Read More
Ninth Circuit Rules Government Agents Need Reasonable Suspicion to Search Laptops, Other Property at Border Checkpoints
The Ninth Circuit Court’s handed down
a ruling limiting the power of government agents to search your
property at border checkpoints. Lawfare
explains:
The Ninth Circuit sitting ;en
banc ;has decided ;US
v. Cotterman, a case involving the search of a computer laptop
by DHS agents at the border. ; Traditionally, the law has been
that searches at the border are plenary and require no suspicion at
all — they are reasonable because they occur at the ; border
and because a sovereign has control over goods and people who enter
or exit its territory.
Cotterman ;rejects that general rule. ; It
concludes that given the comprehensive and intrusive nature of
searches into the contents of laptops the government must
articulate a “reasonable suspicion” before it may search the
contents of a computer system.
Michael Price, counsel for the Brennan Center for Justice, which
filed an amicus brief in the case, made the following
statement:
“We applaud the Ninth Circuit for recognizing the need
to limit the government’s authority to search electronic devices at
the border. Until now, the government had free reign to search
travelers’ personal data at the border, to keep it, copy it, and
browse through every line without any reason to suspect criminal
activity. But in today’s watershed ruling, the Court drew a line in
the sand and recognized that the vast amount of personal
information and sensitive data on laptops, cell phones, and other
electronic devices is worthy of Fourth Amendment
protection.”
One of the judges on the Ninth Circuit Court, Alex Kozinski, a
self-described libertarian, recently sat down to talk to Matt Welch
for Reason TV. Watch here:
; … Read More
Ronald Bailey Defends Biotech Seed Patents
“Why in the world would anybody spend any money
to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one
anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they
want?,” asked Chief Justice John Roberts in February during oral
argument the case of Bowman v. Monsanto. In that case an
Indiana farmer saved seeds from Monsanto’s herbicide resistant soy
beans and replanted them without paying the company any royalties.
Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey looks at the
implications of the case for patent protection of future
self-replicating technologies. View this article.
… Read More
Rand Paul vs. Robert Bork
During the second hour of his nearly 13-hour Senate filibuster
this week, Kentucky Republican Rand Paul
invoked the Supreme Court’s 1905 decision in Lochner v. New
York as a positive example of the judiciary rejecting majority
rule and standing up for unenumerated individual rights. In
Lochner, the Supreme Court struck down the maximum working
hours provision of New York’s 1895 Bakeshop Act because it violated
the right to liberty of contract protected by the Due Process
Clause of the 14th Amendment. “The powers given to the government
are few and defined,” Paul said in his extended riff on the case.
“The freedoms left to you are many and undefined. And that’s
important.” These comments came as part of a larger discussion by
Paul about getting the government to stop trampling on the
Constitution.
Writing for the left-wing Center for American Progress, Ian
Millhiser
attacked Paul for praising the “horrendous Supreme Court
decision,” noting that “even Robert Bork, the failed, right-wing
Supreme Court nominee…called Lochner an ‘abomination’
that ‘lives in the law as the symbol, indeed the quintessence of
judicial usurpation of power.’”
It’s true that Robert Bork was no fan of Lochner, but
that’s not really much of an argument to use against Rand Paul.
Bork was a majoritarian who thought the courts should show
extraordinary deference to the elected branches of government and
therefore uphold most laws and executive actions. “In wide areas of
life,” Bork once wrote, “majorities are entitled to rule, if they
wish, simply because they are majorities.”
So of course Bork opposed Lochner, which stood for the
idea that the courts should protect
individuals against overreaching government officials. On this
matter, Bork took his cues from Progressive hero Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, who dissented in Lochner, routinely
preached the virtues of judicial deference, and once summarized his
philosophy as a judge as, “if my fellow citizens want to go to Hell
I will help them. It’s my job.”
Rand Paul, on the hand, was filibustering this week in support
of the idea that every American is entitled to due process while on
American soil, a position that necessarily includes judicial review
of executive actions and judicial nullification of overreaching
laws. That’s the opposite of the judicial deference championed by
Bork and Holmes.
The fact that Rand Paul and Robert Bork are on opposite sides of
the Lochner debate provides further evidence that Sen.
Paul is offering a genuine libertarian alternative when it comes to
some very fundamental issues. That’s a good thing.
For more on the arguments over Lochner, majority rule,
and judicial deference, see “Conservatives
v. Libertarians: The debate over judicial activism divides
former allies.” … Read More
John Yoo, Author of the Bush Torture Memos, Criticizes Rand Paul For Taking an Extreme Position on Drones
As a senator, Obama
stated that he ;rejected
the Bush Justice Department’s view that the president “may do
whatever he deems necessary to protect national security.” But the
connecting thread in virtually all of the Obama administration’s
explanations of its drone policy is a refusal to set any limits on
its own national security powers.
As Jacob Sullum
pointed out
last month, the leaked Department of Justice white paper
explaining the White House’s legal rationale for drone killings
lays out conditions that would be sufficient to kill someone with a
drone. But it doesn’t say what conditions would be necessary. The
paper argues that the president has the authority to order the
death of anyone who presents an “imminent” threat to the United
States, which is not much of a standard given that paper also
argues for expanding the definition of imminence to the point where
it has no longer has any useful meaning. The only thing that
matters in determining whether someone is an imminent threat is
that the administration has deemed the person to be an imminent
threat. It is essentially a justification for using drones to kill
anyone the administration deems worthy of killing.
The Obama administration is hardly the first administration to
resist putting limits on its own power. The Bush administration was
similarly disinclined to spell out the extent of its own power,
much less clearly define its endpoint. Its efforts to assert
unbounded executive authority were ;blessed ;by John
Yoo, ;at the time an attorney in the Justice Department’s
Office of Legal Counsel. ;
So it’s hardly surprising to see Yoo, ;who is now a
University of California at Berkeley law professor, join the chorus
of hawkish Rand Paul critics who have dismissed the
Kentucky ;senator’s lengthy, drone-focused filibuster
yesterday. ;”I admire libertarians,” Yoo ;said
earlier today, according to ;Mother
Jones ;reporter ;Adam Serwer, “but I think Rand Paul’s
filibuster in many ways is very much what
libertarians ;do, ;they ;make these very symbolic
gestures, standing for some extreme position.”
Extreme is in the eye of the beholder. As Serwer notes, Yoo
once
suggested during a defense of the Bush administration’s torture
program that it might be legally permissible for the president to
order that an interrogator crush the testicles of a subject’s
child. It would depend, Yoo said, “on why the president thinks he
needs to do that.” I’m sure that President Obama is delighted to
have Yoo’s moral and legal authority on his side.
Granted, Yoo is not totally on board with the Obama
administration’s drone policy: His primary complaint
is that the Obama administration thinks drone killings should be
governed by due process (never mind that the White House apparently
believes that secretly
designating someone to be an imminent threat may be all the
process that a target is due). But the differences are less
important that where the two administrations converge: The Obama
administration’s drone policy and Yoo’s defenses of Bush’s torture
regime stem from a shared reluctance to
acknowledge ;any ;limits, real or hypothetical, on
executive authority ;in the area of national security. … Read More
