Need something to read during the shutdown? You’re in luck, because Students for Liberty and the Atlas Network have released a new book of original essays on the question, “Why Liberty?” It includes a piece on the humble case for liberty by yours truly, and is packed with great stuff. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s the book’s editor, Cato senior fellow Tom G. Palmer:
You can order a copy online or snag a free PDF.
Eric Holder has been busy playing his racial games. Not only did his Justice Department issue a joint guidance with the Education Department on how best to ignore the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action ruling, but yesterday the attorney general announced a new lawsuit challenging North Carolina’s new election laws, which include voter-identification requirements. This action follows on the heels of lawsuits already filed against the Tarheel State by such groups as the ACLU and NAACP.
Never mind that the Supreme Court approved the constitutionality of voter-ID as recently as 2008 in the case of Crawford v. Marion County (Indiana) Election Board — in a 6–3 opinion written by the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens — but just last year Holder had to back off a similar suit in South Carolina. The formula for valid voter-ID laws is clear: don’t put obstacles (be they monetary or geographical) in the way of someone’s ability to get an approved form of identification and you’ll sail through the courts.
These regulations simply shouldn’t be a partisan issue. Requirements to show proof of identity before voting have been around for decades in all parts of the country. There’s no constitutional right to early voting — many states, including blue ones like New York, don’t have it at all — and North Carolina kept total hours constant anyway, just reducing the number of days of early voting.
And forget partisan divides; the DOJ’s argument that voter-ID laws and other attempts at orderly election administration disproportionately hurt minorities — on top of being offensive — don’t even seem to make sense to those they purport to support. For example, a Washington Post poll last year found that 65 percent of blacks and 64 percent of Latinos support voter-ID.
In our TSA-NSA-show-ID-to-get-into-an-Eric-Holder-speech world, shouldn’t we have the most basic safeguards for the machinery of democracy? And even if most voter fraud comes in through absentee and other mail-in ballots rather than in-person, shouldn’t we at least put in simple measures that demonstrably increase confidence in elections?
While too many so-called civil rights leaders are stuck in the 196Os — memo to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson: Jim Crow is dead and he ain’t coming back — government officials should know better. It’s shameful to fan the flames of racial division for personal and political gain.
Two months ago I wrote about the University of Texas’s attempts to delay the final reckoning from the Supreme Court’s near-unanimous ruling in the Fisher case that public institutions must overcome a high constitutional bar when they use race in admissions decisions. Courts must make “a careful judicial inquiry into whether a university could achieve sufficient diversity without using racial classifications.”
“The university must prove,” Justice Kennedy wrote for the 7‑justice majority, “that the means chosen by the university to attain diversity are narrowly tailored.” Far from attempting to prove that, however, UT-Austin is playing lawyer games and trying to re-litigate previously decided procedural issues.
But at least UT-Austin recognizes that its back is against the wall. The Obama administration, for its part, is pretending that nothing has changed, that colleges can continue discriminating based on skin color to achieve their elusive “diversity.”
On Friday, the federal Justice and Education Departments issued a joint “guidance” on the meaning of Fisher v. UT-Austin. This advice, consisting of a platitudinal cover letter and a superficial Q & A. The government’s position, remarkably, is that Fisher simply reaffirmed 2003’s ruling in Grutter v. Bollinger, which held that educational diversity could be a compelling interest that justified racial preferences at the University of Michigan. “Run along, nothing to see here,” the various civil-rights-division bureaucrats seem to say, “the Supreme Court just vacated the lower court’s decision because it didn’t check all the procedural boxes.
To say that the government is being disingenuous here would be like saying that Ted Cruz has a mild distaste for Obamacare. As Richard Kahlenberg comments at the blog of The Chronicle of Higher Education:
This reading of the two Supreme Court cases as essentially identical would presumably be surprising to the justices of the court. Five Supreme Court justices participated in both Grutter and Fisher, yet four of them switched sides in the two cases. Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas dissented in Grutter, in part because universities were not made to demonstrate that race-neutral strategies were insufficient to produce racial diversity, yet those justices were in the majority in Fisher.
Meanwhile, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg switched in the other direction, from the majority in Grutter to the dissent in Fisher. Her dissent complained that the majority would push universities to adopt race-neutral strategies like Texas’ top 10-percent plan, which she viewed as disingenuous. (Justice Stephen G. Breyer, alone, was in the majority in both cases.)
Moreover, the government is green-lighting any and all diversity initiatives rather than giving actual guidance about how to survive the legal minefield that administrators now inhabit. As Roger Clegg put it at National Review Online:
The fact is that this guidance is designed not to help schools follow the law, but to push them to adopt dubious race-based policies that the Supreme Court has warned against, and that have prompted lawsuits in the past, but that the Obama administration and its political allies stubbornly support. The whole tone of the new guidance is to offer encouragement to schools that want to engage in racial and ethnic discrimination: The administration promises that it “will continue to be a resource” for such schools.
It is as if the FBI offered eager encouragement to state and local police that wanted to engage in racial profiling without violating the law. Whether such discrimination may sometimes be legally permissible or not, why should the federal government issue a document the tone of which is not a stern warning about the many legal pitfalls, but cheerful encouragement to the police to do as much of it as they can get away with? Why urge schools to get as close to the legal line as they can, when it is unnecessary and bad policy for them to approach it at all?
In short, the government not only pretends that the Supreme Court didn’t mean what it said, but is encouraging college officials in their massive resistance to yet another Supreme Court ruling on civil rights. These actions enable the type of “holistic” racial balancing that results in greater racial-achievement gaps than illegal quotas ever did. Racial preferences today, racial preferences tomorrow, racial preferences forever.
It would be comical if it weren’t so sad — and if it weren’t backed by the full force of the nation’s chief law enforcement officers.
All eyes are on the government shutdown battle over Obamacare. Here are a few thoughts:
Lyrics:
What’s hated by unions
has businesses wary
and dropping coverage
like the ‘Skins secondary?
Causing thousands of layoffs
taking it’s toll?
What’s so good for people
that they’re forced to enroll?
What’s a law that’s so good
folks who passed and defended it
see it and got waivers
to be exempted? It’s
like Olestra, at first
it sounded hip
but we quickly found ourselves
dealing with a whole lot of sh…
Obamacare, Obamacare
Unions and businesses both in despair
So to recap, young people,
your hours get cut
and your income goes down
and your premium’s up
and the taxes you pay
with the cash you have left
go to pay for a stupid
video contest, touting
Obamacare, Obamacare
Unions and businesses both in despair
It’s hated by doctors and unions are mad.
Not since Billy Ray Cyrus
has someone made something this bad.
The UN Office on Drugs and Crime announced last week that the production of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, has shifted away from Colombia toward Peru. Observers of the war on drugs are not surprised by that development. During the early and mid-1990s, drug warriors hailed the decline of coca production in Peru and neighboring Bolivia, thanks to a crackdown that Washington heavily funded through aid programs to Lima and La Paz, as a great victory in the crusade against illegal drugs. They ignored the inconvenient fact that cultivation and production had merely moved from Peru and Bolivia into Colombia–and to a lesser extent into nearby countries such as Ecuador, Venezuela, and Brazil.
That phenomenon is known as the “balloon” or “push down, pop up” effect. Strenuous efforts to dampen the supply of illicit drugs in one locale simply cause traffickers to move their production to other locations where the pressure is weaker for the moment. When Washington and Bogotá launched Plan Colombia in 2000, the multi-billion-dollar, multi-year program to attack the coca industry in that country, cultivation and production gradually began to shift back to Peru and Bolivia. The latest UN report confirms that trend. As Ricardo Soberón, the former heard of Peru’s drug policy office, put it: “The carousel has come full circle.” Adam Isacson, an expert on Latin American drug issues with the Washington Office on Latin America, noted that the new map of coca production “looks an awful lot like the old” map from the early 1990s.
The latest development underscores how proclamations of victory in the international war on drugs invariably prove to be ephemeral. Trying to suppress the supply of a product that is in high demand is a classic case of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. The illegal drug trade is conservatively estimated to be a $350 billion per year industry, and global consumer demand is growing. Even if a new crackdown in Peru causes a temporary disruption of the supply coming out of that country, all that we will see is a new “balloon” episode in neighboring states. Indeed, there are indications that Brazil and Argentina already are becoming far more prominent participants in drug trafficking, in part because they are convenient transshipment points for sending drugs to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, where consumption is on the rise.
We have ample evidence over the course of many decades that drug prohibition does not work; a prohibition policy merely guarantees that violent criminal elements instead of legitimate business enterprises will control the trade. Focusing on which countries are supplying most of the drugs at a particular moment, and cheering about a temporary victory in one arena, is an exercise in futility.
John Cochrane, who is an adjunct scholar at Cato as well as a professor at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, had a nice post on the evolving nature of modern regulation earlier this month. He starts by quoting a Wall Street Journal account:
Your No. 1 client is the government,” John J. Mack, Morgan Stanley’s chairman and chief executive from 2005 to 2009, told current CEO James Gorman in a recent phone call. Mr. Gorman, who was visiting Washington that day, agreed…
.…regulators prowl the office floor looking for land mines, and Mr. Gorman phones Washington before making major decisions…
About 50 full-time government regulators are now stationed at Morgan Stanley. There were none before 2008, when it was regulated as a brokerage firm instead of a bank.
Cochrane adds that this is “a useful anecdote to remind people what ‘regulation’ means.” People often imagine, he says, that it means something like enacting a knowable, impartial equivalent of a speed limit and enforcing it by putting more cops on the road.
No, we put 50 cops in your car. And how long can this possibly go on before the cops start asking where you’re going and why? How long can 50 regulators sit in the bank approving every decision, before “you know, you haven’t made any green energy loans in a long time” starts coming up? But contrariwise, how long before those 50 regulators come to the view that Morgan Stanley’s survival and prosperity is their job? 50 full-time government employees calling the shots on every deal at a supposedly private bank is a good picture to keep in mind of what “regulation” means.
And it isn’t just banking. On-site government inspectors are becoming more common in other lines of business, especially when a company has copped a deal to some earlier charge of regulatory violations — and few big companies have not been hit with charges of that sort. Notre Dame law professor Veronica Root explains what happens next:
…the corporation and the government often enter into an agreement stating that the corporation will retain a “monitor.” … A monitor, unlike the probation officer, is not solely charged with ensuring that the corporation complies with a previously determined set of requirements. Instead, a corporate compliance monitor is responsible for (i) investigating the extent of the wrongdoing already detected and reported to the government, (ii) discovering the cause of the corporation’s compliance failure, and (iii) analyzing the corporation’s business needs against the appropriate legal and regulatory requirements. A monitor then provides recommendations to the corporation and the government meant to assist the corporation in its efforts to improve its legal and regulatory compliance — the monitor engages in legal counseling.
Something to keep in mind next time you wonder why government officials and the leadership of big business so often seem to be working in harness, on issues where you might expect them to oppose each other.