Never say the Republicans don’t learn from their adversaries. On NPR, historian Timothy Naftali discusses responses to State of the Union speeches. He notes a tough response by House Republican leader Robert Michel to President Clinton in 1993, in which Michel complains about the way the “Clinton spin doctors” are changing the meaning of words. In particular, he grumbles, “Patriotism now means agreeing with the Clinton program.” That’s certainly a definition that (with the change of one word) the Bush spin doctors and their conservative supporters have endorsed wholeheartedly.
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How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict
For many Americans, it is an article of faith that public schooling is the key the nation’s unity. However, in a new study, “Why We Fight: How Public Schools Cause Social Conflict,” Cato scholar Neal McCluskey demonstrates that far from uniting diverse peoples, public schooling forces them into constant conflict over schools for which they all must pay, but only the most politically powerful can control. “To end the fighting caused by state-run schooling, we should transform our system from one in which government establishes and controls schools, to one in which individual parents are empowered to select schools that share their moral values and educational goals for their children,” says McCluskey.
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Supreme Court Sentencing Ruling
As usual, NYT Supreme Court reporter, Linda Greenhouse, has a good report about yesterday’s sentencing decision from the Supreme Court.
Excerpt:
The Supreme Court invalidated California’s criminal sentencing law on Monday, ruling that the 30-year-old statute gave judges authority that the Constitution places with juries.
The 6‑to‑3 decision will require the California courts to reconsider thousands of sentences as the Legislature contemplates its options for amending the statute to meet the justices’ objections.While no other state is directly affected, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s forcefully worded majority opinion demonstrated that the Roberts court is committed to carrying out the full implications of the revolution in criminal sentencing that the court began seven years ago in Apprendi v. New Jersey.
In fact, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the majority, the court planted its stake more firmly than ever in what criminal law scholars and practitioners have taken to referring to as Apprendi-land.
Round-up of coverage here.
Ruling here.
I have argued that this legal trend is a positive development [.pdf] and the ruling will indeed impact the sentences of thousands of prisoners in California. Still, some of the “revolutionary” rhetoric is overblown. For more Cato work on sentencing, go here.
The State of the State of the Union
It’s time once again for the State of the Union, that annual ritual of outsized promises and insincere, if thunderous, applause. As I recount here, thanks to a custom initiated by President Jefferson, for 112 years presidents delivered their annual messages to Congress in writing. With each passing year, that custom looks better and better. Would that they’d go back to mailing it in.
As the presidency has grown more powerful over the course of American history, the content and style of the State of the Union has changed accordingly, as Elvin T. Lim documents in “Five Trends in Presidential Rhetoric,” a very interesting article [.pdf] in the journal Presidential Studies Quarterly.
Over time, presidential rhetoric has become less humble, more assertive, less intellectual, less republican (in the small-‘r’ sense of the word) and more populist. And the promises have grown ever grander and less credible. In his half-dozen SOTUs, for example, President Bush has promised, among other things to teach our children well, heal the sick, defend the sanctity of marriage, and bring democracy to the world. Last year the president pledged that, with fedgov’s help, we would “change how we power our automobiles.” (“Wood chips, stalks,” and “switch grass” may be the answer.) And this year, he’ll confirm once again that, as he put it last year, “we are on the offensive in Iraq, with a clear plan for victory.”
Here are a couple of neat SOTU-related links that you can use to track changes in presidential rhetoric over time.
First is the “US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud,” which “shows the popularity, frequency, and trends in the usages of words within speeches, official documents, declarations, and letters written by the Presidents of the US between 1776 — 2006.” Click and drag through the ages and watch as the word “Constitution” becomes less and less prevalent.
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Debate: Does Anybody Want the Libertarian Vote?
This Thursday Brink Lindsey and I will participate in a panel discussion sponsored by America’s Future Foundation on “The Future of Fusionism.” It’s sort of an odd format: I will discuss the libertarian vote and how the Republicans are losing it, and Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review will say “we don’t need no stinkin’ libertarians.” Then Brink will talk about his proposed tactical alliance between liberals and libertarians, and Jonathan Chait of the New Republic will say — well, pretty much the same thing Ramesh says. Then we’ll all debate whether either Democrats or Republicans can win consistently if they leave the libertarian center on the table.
AFF says you must sign up in advance.
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Trade is Much Bigger Than the Doha Round
There have been whispers of late regarding prospects for a last minute resurrection of the WTO’s Doha Round of multilateral trade talks. My colleague Sallie James does a great job discussing those prospects with polite skepticism in a recent Cato podcast. Let me be a little more direct: Doha’s dead, yadda yadda yadda, now let’s move on!
Ok, that sounds a bit cavalier. So please allow me to clarify. To be more precise, Doha is not dead permanently; it is in a cryogenic state, available for resuscitation under different circumstances.
Of the Government, By the Government, For the Government
Members of Congress who represent federal employees are demanding higher pay for their constituents. In particular, they want “parity” in the raises for the civil service and the military. The Bush administration is thought to believe that sometimes military employees, especially in certain fields, should get higher raises, although both civilian and military raises were 2.2 percent this year.
As Chris Edwards wrote in the Washington Post last August:
The Bureau of Economic Analysis released data this month showing that the average compensation for the 1.8 million federal civilian workers in 2005 was $106,579 — exactly twice the average compensation paid in the U.S. private sector: $53,289.…
Since 1990 average compensation for federal workers has increased by 129 percent, the BEA data show, compared with 74 percent for private-sector workers.
If federal employees were underpaid in our strong economy, presumably it would be hard to hire them, and current employees would be quitting. Yet in fact the “quit rate” among federal employees is far lower than in the private sector. Even during the Great Depression, when employees thought very carefully before leaving an unsatisfying job, the quit rate in manufacturing was higher than it is among federal employees today. Federal employees are paid handsomely. Indeed, when they talk about “pay parity,” one could only wish that Congress would legislate parity between the pay of private-sector employees and that of federal employees. If it did, decades would pass before federal employees got another raise.
We might note that this effort is being pushed by eight House members representing Virginia and Maryland, plus District of Columbia delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton. The Founders put the seat of government in a special district, outside any state, so that the government wouldn’t be unduly influenced by local pressures. And they denied the vote to residents of the district because the government shouldn’t be influencing itself.
Now, though, we have 1.8 million civil service employees (plus about 800,000 in the post office and more than a million in the military). That’s a large voting bloc, especially in the states surrounding Washington, D.C. And so members of Congress from Virginia and Maryland, especially the Washington suburbs, have become in effect representatives of the bureaucracy in Congress.