Getting past all the politics and rhetoric, Chief Justice Roberts zeroed in on the heart of the case when he noted that the state with the worst ratio of black-to-white turnout and registration is Massachusetts and the best is Mississippi (third-best in registration). This case is not about whether racial discrimination still exists in America or even whether it is disproportionately found in the South (which it isn’t). It simply asks whether the “exceptional conditions” that the Supreme Court found to justify the “extraordinary remedy” of federal intrusion on state election administration in 1965 still exist today. By any measure, they do not — and if they did, Congress didn’t do its homework in 2006 to tailor the application of Section 5’s burdensome requirements to jurisdictions that allegedly engage in this systemic discrimination that is somehow Jim Crow’s equivalent. The justices were starkly divided today, but this case should be much easier than that.
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Chuck Hagel to the Pentagon: Rough Passage, Welcome Result
President Barack Obama’s nomination of former Republican senator Chuck Hagel as defense secretary forced the GOP to choose between the past—especially a discredited president who blundered disastrously in Iraq—and the future, represented by a Republican who felt more loyalty to his country than his party. Unfortunately, the GOP chose the past.
Ironically, a group of Republicans wrote the president urging him to withdraw the nomination, contending that Hagel’s lackluster performance at his confirmation hearing raised “serious doubts about his basic competence to meet the substantial demands of the office.” Yet it is his critics who failed to demonstrate even a basic interest in military policy and to justify the trust placed in them by voters.
For instance, the hearings on Hagel’s nomination amounted to a poor imitation of Kabuki Theater, with Republicans more interested in scoring cheap political points than in discussing substantive issues. While GOP members complained that Hagel was ill-prepared for the challenges facing the Pentagon, they failed to ask him serious questions about serious issues—coping with budget cuts, simultaneously engaging and constraining China, dealing with a fading NATO.
That’s too bad, because Hagel probably had answers. Far better answers than would come from the GOP’s permanent war caucus. In fact, Republican senators like Lindsey Graham (R‑SC) are traditional tax, borrow, and spend liberals when it comes to the military: bigger and more expensive is always better. They have no idea how to cope with the coming end of Washington’s wild debt party.
Hagel offers a sharp contrast that embarrasses his former partisan colleagues. Wrote Michael Hirsh in National Journal: “what has gone largely unnoticed by the punditocracy is that, over the past decade or so, the former Republican senator from Nebraska has distinguished himself with subtle, well-thought-out, and accurate analyses of some of America’s greatest strategic challenges of the 21st century—especially the response to 9/11—while many of his harshest critics got these issues quite wrong.”
Hagel’s tough confirmation battle was but the first of the many troubles he is likely to face in his new job. Recalibrating America’s role in the world to reflect greater foreign influences and fewer domestic resources may pose difficulties nearly as vexing as coping with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
However, Chuck Hagel has the ability to rise to the challenge. Unfortunately, he isn’t likely to get much help from Capitol Hill. Certainly not from his old GOP colleagues, who appear to be locked in the past. Secretary Hagel will need to look elsewhere to find support for the necessary transformation of America’s foreign and military policies.
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Secret Spying and the Supreme Court’s Constitutional Catch-22
The memory of the abuses perpetrated by colonial officials wielding “general warrants” inspired the framers of our Constitution’s Fourth Amendment to constrain the government’s power to invade citizens’ privacy. With today’s 5–4 ruling in Clapper v. Amnesty International, the Supreme Court has announced that the modern equivalent of those general warrants—dragnet surveillance “authorizations” under the FISA Amendments Act—will be effectively immune from Fourth Amendment challenge.
The FAA permits the government to secretly vacuum up Americans’ international communications on a massive scale, without any individualized suspicion—and at least some of that surveillance has already been determined to have violated the constitution by a secret intelligence court. Yet today’s majority has all but guaranteed no court will be able to review the constitutionality of the law as a whole by imposing a perverse Catch-22: Even citizens at the highest risk of being wiretapped may not bring a challenge without proof they’re in the government’s vast database. The only problem is the government is never required to reveal who has been spied on.
In essence, the Court has said that even if the law is unconstitutional, even if it has violated the Fourth Amendment rights of thousands of Americans, there’s no realistic way to get a court to say so.
Precisely when secrecy shields the government from public political accountability, the Clapper ruling announces, the Constitution is powerless to protect us as well.
I’ll have a more detailed analysis of the ruling (and dissent) tomorrow.
Sequestration: Governors Are a Special Interest Too
The president made an appearance at the National Governors Association’s winter meeting to drum up support for his position that the sequestration spending cuts should be mitigated with tax hikes. The president understands that state politicians are dependent on federal handouts (see chart below), which makes them ideal candidates to help him convince the citizenry that spending cuts would usher in the apocalypse.
In the battle with congressional Republicans over sequestration, it would be particularly helpful to the president to have Republican governors fan the flames. The post-appearance coverage that I’ve read indicates that some GOP governors took the bait and others did not. For instance, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal dismissed the president’s position as “just trying to scare the American people.” On the other hand, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell expressed dissatisfaction with congressional Republicans (and the president’s) inability to come to an agreement to avoid sequestration.
If an article in Politico is accurate, however, Republican governors are working behind the scenes to get congressional Republicans to acquiesce:
The new rumblings match what’s been going on behind the scenes for months. Governors have publicly signed on to letters bashing Obama and praising House Republicans’ efforts, but privately their offices have been urging lawmakers to work harder to avoid potentially devastating cuts — particularly those that could hit local programs.
Having worked for a Republican governor who made it a mission for his state to grab as many federal dollars as possible, I have zero reason to doubt that this is the case. The reason is simple: every federal dollar that a state politician can spend is a dollar that he or she doesn’t have to ask his or her voters to part with. Thus, state politicians love the “free” money from the feds and expend great effort (and additional taxpayer money) trying to obtain it.
Of course, it isn’t really free.
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The Sequestration Immigration Scare
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has released several hundred unauthorized immigrants from detention in Texas, Florida, Arizona, and Louisiana in preparation for budget cuts as part of the sequestration. The administration has noted that cuts would effectively reduce Border Patrol by about 5,000 agents—down to about 2007 levels of staffing if all of the cuts occur on the Southwest border.
This reduction in Border Patrol will not unleash a tidal wave of unauthorized immigrants like many claim. Since 1989 the Border Patrol’s appropriations have increased by 750 percent and there are six times more staff today than in 1989.
Apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants on the border are also near 40 year lows because fewer unauthorized immigrants are trying to enter illegally due to the poor economy. Decreasing the size of the Border Patrol will not do much to increase unauthorized immigration because many would-be immigrants are repelled by high unemployment rates.
Unauthorized immigration has slowed dramatically because of a lack of economic opportunity in the United States, not because border patrol is larger or more effective. Cuts to Border Patrol, even those that would return its size to the 2007 levels, will not much affect unauthorized immigration.
American unemployment rates and demand for immigrant workers drive unauthorized immigration. Look at this graph relating border apprehensions and the national unemployment rate:
The higher the rate of unemployment, the fewer unauthorized immigrants try to enter, and the fewer apprehensions are made.
Perhaps if you had looked at this graph, you might have thought that the size of the Border Patrol could deter unauthorized immigration:
But if Border Patrol deterred unauthorized immigration, it would probably also deter other illegal activity—like cross border drug seizures. Consider this graph:
Drug seizures have increased along with the size of the Border Patrol. Americans still demand marijuana so increased security results in more marijuana seizures (and more marijuana entering the black market). In contrast, unauthorized immigration is down because there is less American economic demand for their labor. Decreasing the size of the Border Patrol down to 2007 levels will not result in a flood of unauthorized immigration because not as many people want to come here as they did during the housing boom.
Whip Illegitimacy Now (WIN)!
You just know a David Brooks column featuring the refrain, “my dream Obama would…” is going to be exasperating. And it is: especially when he suggests that his “dream Obama” could and should:
… talk obsessively about family structure and social repair. Every week we get another statistic showing how social and income inequality is dividing the nation. .… while childhood obesity is falling among kids whose parents graduated from college, it is still rising among kids whose parents have a high school degree or less.
Because of his upbringing, President Obama is uniquely qualified to talk about family structures. Traditional values are an investment in the young, and he could do what he can to restitch the social fabric.
It’ll be tough to “restitch the social fabric” when you need at least one hand free to bend the arc of history, but no doubt President Obama believes he’s up to the task. Still, why does David Brooks think it would help to have the president “talk obsessively about family structure and social repair”?
Barack Obama has been talking obsessively about capital-‘h’ Hope for nearly a decade, and during his administration, as with his predecessor’s, many more Americans think the country’s on the “wrong track” than think it’s moving in the “right direction.” (.pdf).
The evidence that the presidential “bully pulpit” reliably sways the public’s policy preferences is weak enough, as Ezra Klein documents here. What evidence is there that presidential jawboning about family structures changes anyone’s behavior? Birth rates for unmarried women went down in the era of Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers, resuming their upward trend under family values president George W. Bush. Do people really make their choices about marriage and family under the influence of presidential rhetoric or with an eye toward the example he sets?
The campaign Brooks envisions would be about as effective as Gerald Ford’s little Whip Inflation Now (WIN) buttons. Maybe it’s time for a little less magical thinking about our presidents.
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It’s Plane Pork
The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold has identified another budget zombie. This time it’s an obscure grant program administered by the Federal Aviation Administration that dumps money on tiny airports with scant activity.
From the article:
Along a country road in southern Oklahoma, there is a place that doesn’t make sense. It is an airport without passengers.
Or, for that matter, planes.
This is Lake Murray State Park Airport, one of the least busy of the nation’s 3,300-plus public airfields. In an entire week here, there might be one landing and one takeoff — often so pilots can use the bathroom. Or none at all. Visiting pilots are warned to watch out for deer on the runway.
So why is it still open? Mostly, because the U.S. government insists on sending it money.
Every year, Oklahoma is allotted $150,000 in federal funding because of this place, the result of a grant program established 13 years ago, in Congress’s golden age of pork. The same amount goes to hundreds of other tiny airfields across the country — including more than 80 like this one, with no paying customers and no planes based at the field.
And why does the federal government insist on sending Lake Murray—and other seldom used airports—money?
In the years since 2000, pork has gone far out of fashion in American politics. But this program has remained strikingly difficult for anyone — from Washington to Oklahoma City — to kill.
President George W. Bush, more than once, proposed budget cuts that would have ended the program. In 2011, Coburn suggested making states share more of the costs. Instead, last February, Congress kept the program in place when it reauthorized the FAA.
Budget watchdog groups say these airport entitlements are in a league with the Essential Air Service program — which subsidizes commercial flights to small places — and Amtrak. Their services are spread wide enough to give them a strong base in Congress.
One constantly hears the cries that the federal government (i.e., taxpayers) isn’t “investing” enough money on “our crumbling infrastructure.” Yet this is precisely what happens when you put politicians in charge of allocating resources: decisions are largely made on the basis of political and parochial concerns rather than sound economic and financial considerations.
(See this Cato essay for more on federal involvement in airports and air traffic control.)
Addendum: Fahrenthold notes that former House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee chairman Bud Shuster (R‑PA) engineered the “carpet-bombing” of money from this program to congressional districts far and wide. His son, Bill Shuster, now heads the same committee and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. So don’t expect this zombie to finally be put down anytime soon.