Author Page for Scott Lemieux

Slow-Motion Repeal

Several bloggers have noted the extremely important change in practices with respect to civil rights enforcement at the DOJ. To repeat a point I made before, for the most part it’s true that the major programs of the New Deal and Great Society are safe even under single-party Republican rule. When it comes to Social Security, where the government just sends out checks, this is enough. But legislation like the Civil Rights Act (and the Clean Air Act) requires significant resources and mobilization to enforce. The executive branch has a huge impact on how such legislation is applied on the ground, and it is possible to gut the legislation without actually repealing it.

And, of course, this is what’s important about Alito’s hostility to plaintiffs in civil rights and other discrimination cases. Conservertarians have a perfect pincer movement that allows progressive legislation to stay on the books, but 1)doesn’t provide the resources to enforce it, and 2)makes it harder for individuals to mobilize the laws themselves. It’s very important to be clear about what’s at stake, in both elections and Supreme Court appointments.

Dowd and the Kneecapping of Gore

Professor B has a very thoughtful partial defense of Maureen Dowd, and raises a lot of good points. I certainly don’t want to deny that internalized sexism could have affected the content and tone of my arguments. And certainly I agree that to the extent that criticisms of Dowd are criticisms of using personal narratives as part of a political analysis, this is quite wrong.

I should, however, make clear that the superficial and sloppy cultural analysis that I admittedly couldn’t resist making fun of isn’t why I think her column is so pernicious. If that was all she wrote, she would be annoying but harmless, a non-libertarian Tierney who can actually write. The problem with her column is much bigger. You may recall that the 2000 election was quite important, resulting in a ruinous war, massive deficits that will hamstring progressive initiatives for decades, widening inequality, and the federal courts packed with Neoconfederate cranks (among many other things.) You may also recall that, remarkably enough, at the time this monumentally important election was generally portrayed as essentially meaningless, a contest between “Gush and Bore” hahaha. And you may remember that Al Gore was relentlessly portrayed in negative terms, and many of the stories spread about him were not, in fact, true. It is remarkable that with possibility of a thoroughly incompetent reactionary taking office, the media was having interminable discussions about “earth tones” and terrible Ali McGraw movies, but that’s what happened.

Well, you know who was one of the most egregious offenders, from the base of the liberalNewYorkTimes? Maureen Dowd. Oh, yes, she’s turned her vacuous snark on Bush now. But when he was busy being elected, Dowd was lying about Gore’s fundraising, peddling the “invented the internet” and “summer chores” lies, accusing Gore of flip-flopping with no evidence, writing idiotic pop-psych nonsense including the “earth tones” crap, discussing Hillary Clinton’s haircuts, spreading the “Alpha Male” meme, attacking Gore for having the temerity to discuss actual issues in a Presidential campaign, and on and on and on. (And any feminist defense of Dowd should explain her attacks of Gore in re Naomi Wolf’s salary. Anybody think she would comment on the salary of a political consultant if said consultant had a penis?) And she didn’t just repeat the empty cliches and lies of others. She actually created some: Dowd invented the bullshit Love Story smear. The Bush presidency that Dowd started decrying when it was too late to do anything about it came about in no small part because large parts of the media covered an election for President of the United States in a manner that might be appropriate for a junior high student council election. And Dowd was one of the worst offenders. Making the personal into the political is a valuable form of analysis. But for Dowd, the “personal” consists of crude cliches, and there’s essentially no “politics” at all. While her colleague Paul Krugman was pointing out little details like the fact that Bush was outright lying about his fiscal policies during the debates, Dowd was repeating a bunch of memes that were 1)generally made up out of whole cloth, and 2)would be utterly irrelevant to anything if they were true.

So when it comes to my dislike for Dowd’s column, whatever else I’m wrong about I stand behind it. I wouldn’t give her a pass for her egregious hackwork in the 2000 campaign any more than I would give one to Chris Matthews, and I don’t think her columns are any better now that her substance-free hackwork is directed against the administration she did her best to help put in office.

…welcome new readers! My most substantive post on the underlying debate can be found here.

Democrats For Arbitrary Power

As Jane says, a special hall of infamy should be erected to house the five “Democrats” who voted to strip habeas corpus rights, preferably in shackles:

Kent Conrad – North Dakota
Joe Lieberman – William F. Buckley
Mary Landrieu – Louisiana
Ben Nelson – Nebraska
Ron Wyden – Oregon

A very familiar group of names. We have 3 Senators from reactionary states. Then we have Joe Lieberman, whose representation in the Senate from a state that could actually elect someone who doesn’t frequently cast abominable votes remains intolerable. And then we have Ron Wyden, who I would not necessarily expect this from, which is the most dismaying of all.

…and remember that it’s not just non-citizens–the Judiciary Committee as about to hold its second hearings on the gutting habeas corpus Streamlined Procedures Act.

McCarthyism Writ Small

In a post with rather more protein than wisdom, Jeff Goldstein accuses Kevin Drum of “lying by omission” because while Drum claimed that Reynolds was attacking the patriotism of “Democrats” Reynolds was just resorting to the first refuge of the wanker where “Democratic politicians” are concerned. As Drum says, this is silly (particularly since given Reynolds’ logic, in which criticizing the President’s selling of the war is ipso facto unpatriotic, his argument would not in any way seem to be confined to Democratic politicians.) It’s also hilarious to see Goldstein accusing people of “begging the question,” given that, of course, his claim that people who criticize Bush’s claims that Iraq was a serious threat to give biological or nuclear weapons [it was nowhere close to acquiring] to terrorists [it had no working relationship with] must be arguing in bad faith is a rather definitive example of begging the question (I take no position, however, on whether this question-begging is”writ large.”) Goldstein’s projections of bad faith require the assumptions that 1)available intelligence unambiguously suggested that Iraq had this kind of weapons capacity (which is utterly false) and 2)The central claim of Bush’s speech, that Democratic politicians had access to the same intelligence to Bush (also utterly false.) Bush’s claims that Iraq presented a significant security threat were, in fact, highly contestable as of March 2003, and in fact many people did contest them in real time. Goldstein is welcome to disagree with this assessment, but to smear the patriotism of people who believe that Bush was not presenting the evidence accurately (a claim that, of course, been proven right in retrospect) is disgraceful.

And moreover, there is no reason to interpret Reynolds charitably. Goldstein lies by omission by leaving out the fact that Reynolds is on the record as believing that large numbers of American liberals are anti-American traitors. He has, of course, claimed that an obscure college professor of no discernible influence who called 9/11 victims “Little Eichmanns” represents “the very image” of the “Left,” which is a “seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy.” (Also note that he calls a speech by Ted Kennedy “borderline-traitorous,” which blows his assertion that he only uses McCarthyite smears against politicians who changed positions about the wisdom of the war right out of the water.) He has claimed that many Democrats “are actively rooting for the other side,” based on an ad placed by something called the “St. Petersburg Democratic Club” (as opposed to, say, some official apparatus of the Democratic Party, or something or somebody that might reflect the views of anybody but the tiny number of cranks involved.) He has also claimed that preserving Saddam Hussein is the “top priority of the left.” The last quote is particularly telling, because it reflects his belief, consistently expressed, that opposition to the war could not possibly have been based on a conception of the American national interest, or on a cost-benefit analysis in terms of democracy promotion, but reflected some latent sympathy for a brutal dictator. And this claim is, of course, appalling nonsense.

I guess I can’t really blame Reynolds for engaging in these McCarthyite smears; he’ll get hooted on by people like Goldstein, and if I were him I wouldn’t want to defend the claim that the evidence that Iraq was a security threat to the United States in 2003 was as unambiguous as Bush said on the merits either. But these smears are reprehensible, Drum was entirely correct to call him out on it, and (perhaps optimistically) I expect better of Goldstein than to applaud them while attributing bad faith to people who disagree with him.

…UPDATE: Josh Marshall has an excellent summary of Bush’s false claims, large and small, about the war.

…Brian Linse nails it.

Oh, If Only Bush Were A Scoundrel More Often…

In light of the latest manifestation of Glenn Reynolds’ demagogic hackery, I think we need to be reminded of how Kevin Drum‘s title should probably be modified along the lines suggested by Ambrose Bierce:

In Dr. Johnson’s famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of a scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first.

I also notice that in the adjoining strawman-demolition in which he attempts to buttess his claim that since Bill Clinton thought that Iraq had WMDs in 1998 then the Bush administration couldn’t have been dishonest when they claimed that Iraq was a serious nuclear threat in 2003 and really this war was all about freedom and ponies in any case, he claims the opposing position starts with the premise that “We only went to war because of WMDs — that was the only reason ever given,” which leads him to link to several equally bad previous posts. I guess we need to return to Julian Sanchez:

…Glenn’s reminding everyone of his “link-rich refutation” of the “revisionist” claim that democracy promotion wasn’t part of the rationale for invading Iraq.

Since most of his readers presumably were, like, alive and paying attention in the run-up to the war, I can only assume that this is a case of self deception, in which case it’s a fairly heroic instance of the phenomenon. The argument appears to be this: Since the value of ousting a despot and incubating a democracy was mentioned as a fringe benefit of removing this dire and immediate threat to American national security, anyone who regards the emphasis placed on it now as an ex-post rationalization for a mistaken policy is engaged in “revisionist history.” Look at all the speeches we can link to where Bush used the words “democracy” and “Iraq” in the same sentence!

Seriously now. We all know that this was advanced as a benefit of the invasion, but gimme a break. If someone sells you “a Porche with a nice stereo system” and you then discover you’ve actually bought a Dodge Dart, are you supposed to be mollified because it actually has had a nice stereo system installed? Democratization was supposed to be a happy side effect of eliminating the WMDs—that was why we had to do this right the fuck now before the “smoking gun” came in the form of a “mushroom cloud,” why we couldn’t keep pushing for a diplomatic solution. Anyone else remember that?

There were, of course, a few bloggers who thought that creating a democracy in the region was the best reason to go to war. But they all acknowledged at the time, at least, that this wasn’t how the war was being sold, though they acknowleded that clever folk like them could get the message by reading between the lines.

Here’s what I’d call “revisionism”: Pretending that the imminent danger of some kind of WMD attack-by-terrorist-proxy hatched in Iraq wasn’t, by an overwhelming margin, the major prong of the case for the war and a necessary condition of building public support for it. Saddam Hussein had been an evil fucker for a long, long time. How many people outside the neocon clique were clamoring for his ouster until the scare scenarios started being floated?

…And as a commenter reminds me, of course, we effectively offered all along to do nothing military if Saddam “disarmed.” How does that square with democratization being a significant reason (as opposed to a fringe benefit) for the invasion? Our own government was pretty explicit about it not being a good enough reason on its own: No WMD meant no invasion.

Why do logic and empirical evidence hate America and Glenn Reynolds (which, of course, are effectively the same thing)?

GOP: The "Doubling Down On 19" Party

When you think about it, it’s amazing how many aspects of Republican economic and foreign policy Homer’s reasoning can account for. (“This time, huge-tax-cuts-with-increased-spending-except-for-food-stamps program is sure to work!”)

If Only The Democrats Would Start Supporting Social Security and Reproductive Rights, I Might Vote For Them

Shorter Glenn Reynolds: If only the Democrats would abandon the confiscatory tax rates and stagnant economic growth of the Clinton years and embrace the booming growth and lush surpluses of the fiscally sensible Bush years, I wouldn’t really consider voting for them anyway but I’m sure some random emailer might.

This–for lack of a better word–analysis gets a thumbs-up from our good friends at Donklephant, who claim that if the Democrats get fiscally responsible they may have a shot in 2008. I don’t even know what to say about that. The Instawankery he quotes says the emailer votes GOP “because of their stance on money and taxes, but that he agrees with the Democrats on a lot of other issues.” Unless he’s just talking about cultural issues, this would seem to mean that this voter supports middle-class entitlements but not raising taxes in order to pay for them. In other words, it seems that his support for Republicans is perfectly rational. If, on the other hand, you think that the state should actually raise sufficient revenue to fund what most people want it to do, you should vote Democratic. But there’s nothing the Democrats need to “get”; you may recall a presidential candidate who argued that the enormously successful fiscal policies of the Democratic administration–under which, although Glenn Reynolds missed it, many people even got rich–should be continued and the revenues for the largest entitlement be put in the “lockbox,” while his opponent proposed a program of spending and massive upper-class tax cuts that didn’t add up even given the most optimistic assumptions. But that lockbox guy was such a grind! That give away the surplus feller, you could have a beer with, even if you were rich. And like the Instawife says, the only good measure of fiscal policy is whether it immediately saves affluent people money, and since Milton Friedman says that tax cuts don’t decrease revenues that must be what’s happened the last 5 years.

Good Grief!

I figured that Linus was a strong possibility, but I guess this isn’t surprising in retrospect…

You are Charlie Brown!

Which Peanuts Character are You?
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(Via Lance.)

The Myth of the Radical Ginsburg

I see Stuart Taylor is again trying to sell the “Alito is a harmless moderate” line with a lot of diversion and pretty much no evidence. I’ll probably have more on that latter. The punchline, however, is something we’re hearing a lot:

It should also explore liberal analysts’ concerns that in split decisions, Alito has taken the conservative side so consistently as to suggest ideological rigidity. The Senate should figure out whether Alito has been more consistently conservative than, say, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has been consistently liberal.

We also see this in John Manning’s (far better) op-ed, which I was planning to discuss but Balkin said pretty much everything I wanted to say. (My short version would be that Manning is right that “balance” is impossible and the President is perfectly within his rights to try to change the balance, but the next point that therefore only qualifications matter is a non-sequitur. In fact, the President takes constitutional philosophy and outcomes into account–indeed, this is what constitutes a shift in balance–and the Senate can too.) But you hear this a lot: if the GOP was willing to let a radical liberal like Ginsburg onto the Court, then Democrats are therefore obliged to let Alito on the Court.

The problem is, the idea that Ginsburg is an ultraliberal is just false; she’s far less liberal than Brennan or Douglas or Marshall. From Baum’s The Supreme Court, here’s the Segal/Spaeth data on liberal voting from the 2000-2001 terms on the Court:

1. Stevens 64.2
2T. Souter 60.2
2T. Ginsburg 60.2
4. Breyer 57.9
5. O’Connor 42.6
6. Kennedy 39.2
7. Rehnquist 31.3
8. Thomas 30.7
9. Scalia 27.3

As it happens, Stevens–the most liberal member of the current court–served for a fair period of time with Brennan and Marshall. On the Burger Court, however, Stevens generally ranked 3rd or 4th in liberalism; always behind the first two, sometimes behind Blackmun, and on federalism behind White and Powell as well. And often the differences were huge; Stevens, like today, was generally between 50%-70% (none higher than 69.9%) depending on the category, Marshall and Brennan were in the high 80s or low 90s in criminal procedure, civil rights, and the 1st Amendment. (And, of course, nobody thinks Stevens was nearly as liberal as Brennan or Marshall; this is hardly controversial.) And yet Ginsburg is no more liberal than Stevens. [All data from SCAM I, 250-1.)

And, of course, the Republicans knew this too. She had a moderate record on the appeals court–unlike Alito–and that’s why Hatch recommended her. The GOP expected her to be a solid but moderate liberal, upholding existing precedents but not boldly creating new rights in the manner of a Brennan or Marshall, and that’s exactly what she’s turned out to be. And this is what the argument that if-Ginsburg-then-Alito leaves out; Hatch proposed Ginsburg, while Reid said that the Dems wouldn’t approve Alito. There’s just no analogy there.

So, in other words, Taylor’s argument is just more question-begging. The analogy to Ginsburg simply assumes that he’s a moderate-to-solid conservative, in between O’Connor and Scalia (like Roberts, who was easily confirmed) the way Ginsburg is between O’Connor and Brennan. Which brings us back to the point that Taylor still doesn’t have any evidence that Alito is more moderate than Scalia, and in fact since Alito doesn’t have a libertarian streak on criminal procedure there’s if anything more evidence that he’s more conservative than Scalia. The fact that the Republicans approved Ginsburg requires Dems to do exactly nothing about Alito.

The Problem With Initiatives

Ezra sez:

At this point, virtually the only initiative I’d vote for is one to get rid of initiatives. It’s not that the voters are bad folks, but they’re not trained or experienced legislators, so some of what they approve on face value ends up have subtle and negative impacts down the road. Happily, they seem to have figured this out, and are now rejecting the whole process as a tool of special interests. It’s a shame, because legitimate initiative drives are a positive option, but this sort of cynical overuse is killing the whole medium.

I am even more negative about referenda than Ezra, but it’s for a slightly different reason. It’s not so much that the voters are ignorant, although that’s part of it (and they’re quite right to have seen that initiatives are generally extensions of special interest politics.) The problem is that they’re too rational. Initiatives tend to undermine effective governance because they individuate the issues, which allows voters to get goodies without making the tradeoffs. The reason that California is ungovernable has little to do with bad faith on the part of politicians or “special interests” or whatever. It’s because voters have voted for tax cuts and various mechanisms that make it extremely difficult to raise revenues, and have simultaneously voted to lock in spending for all kinds of pet projects. And when you see the issues in isolation, that’s perfectly rational; looked at on its own terms without specifying what you have to give up, it always seems good to vote for any tax cut or spending increase. But in toto, you get what Michael Kinsley calls the “big babies” syndrome; voters want Swedish level of social services and Mississippi levels of taxation, and if that can’t happen “it’s those damned bureaucrats down in Sacramento with their fraud and waste!” And then you end up with stuff like California going from one of the best education systems in the country to one of the worst to ensure that wealthy homeowners pay fewer taxes.

So to the extent that anti-initiative sentiment is growing, I’m all for it. Representative democracy, which requires officials to make at least some of the necessary tradeoffs, is much better. (And nor are initiatives particularly good at generating nonpartisan reform; as was the case in California, “process” initiatives tend to be badly drafted and/or partisan, and it’s tough to sell process changes.) Nice to see the gas tax repeal–an intrastate version of red state parasitism–get voted down in WA too…

I would say he has quite a few problems. His energy seems to go in the wrong places.

Shorter Stanley Kurtz: Let me tell you something. You’re in a hell, and you’re gonna die in a hell, just like the rest of ‘em!

I think it all has its roots in a failed relationship with Kathryn Lopez. He was so initially smitten (“She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, she is alone. They. Cannot. Touch. Her.”) But then there was that unpleasant incident at the Pioneer Fund fundraiser…the final scene must have been very awkward for all involved.

Kurtz (forlornly holds out copy of The Bell Curve): “But I bought it for you, K-Lo.”
K-Lo: “I’ve already got it.” (Slams door.)

Sad, really.

Solipsism Is Not A Free Speech Principle

Given my effusive praise for the terrific cover story (buy it at your local newstand!) , I am obligated to note that this article by Jeffrey Rosen about the Fitzgerald indictment is, um, not good. There are a lot of bad parts, culminating in the absurd comparison of Fitzgerald’s indictment with the Starr Inquisition’s prosecution of Julie Hiatt Steele. But it does do one thing that Miller’s defenders generally haven’t: articulate an actual shield law. And, amazingly, he’s proposing one that would indeed protect Miller:

It’s a sign of the declining political clout of the traditional media that Congress is in no rush to pass a version of a federal shield law that would protect professional reporters from having to reveal their sources in federal investigations (except in cases where the disclosure is necessary to prevent imminent harm to national security). Thirty-one states and the District of Columbia have shield laws, as do a number of European countries. But a bipartisan shield law bill is moving slowly through the House and Senate, in part because of the opposition of the Justice Department and in part because of opposition from bloggers.

Such a law would, of course, be terrible public policy: a journalist can’t reveal a source, to provide information about a serious felony, even if the public interest is minor? That’s absurd. And it also creates the bizarre idea that this protection should be given to identities (“professional reporters”) rather than an action (“journalism”). This is silly, but also inevitable given the near-absolute shield, which requires it be available to a small number of people. A more rational law, that would balance interests more reasonably, would allow us to focus on the activity, not the identity of the person doing it. But would this uphold the principles that Judy Miller stood for? Which brings us to Respected Small-Circulation Journal With Good Taste in Guest Authors Matt:

The right of journalists to protect their sources? But Libby wasn’t a source for any article Miller wrote or was planning on writing. Nor was the fact that Libby had spoken to Miller on the day in question a secret, Libby had already said as much to the prosecutors. Miller was protecting not the identity of her “source” but the content of what the source told her. There’s no journalistic principle saying reporters shouldn’t disclose what their sources tell them. It would be very hard to write articles on the basis of that principle. Reporters are in the business of disclosing what their sources tell them. They’re not, ordinarily, in the business of saying who their sources were, if their sources don’t want to be identified. But, again, Libby had already identified himself.

There was no principle here. Miller was refusing to testify in order to protect a friend from a perjury charge. That’s an understandable thing to do. People like to protect their friends. The New York Times by agreeing to assist Miller in her quest and drag the first amendment into it managed to delay the investigation by a year. There’s a non-trivial chance the paper, and Miller, thereby got George W. Bush re-elected. Good work.

This is quite right. And I think the implication here is that, as fun as it is to make fun of the Queen of All Iraq the Times should really take the most heat. Miller was trying to save a friend, had good reason to use the First Amendment instrumentally, and was willing to go to jail. Nothing admirable, but nothing awful (unlike her actual Iraq reporting.) But to have invested its capital to defend her despite the utter lack of any free speech principle being involved was a horrible decision by Keller, and more than anyone else reflects badly on him.