A little bit of errant security information made its way into the Supreme Court’s oral argument in U.S. v. Jones this week. Justices Ginsburg, Kagan, and Breyer were testing the fairly narrow limits of the position advocated by Jones’ counsel. He focused on invasion of Jones’ “possessory interest” in his car when the government placed a GPS device on it.

If the Court were to find that attachment of a device invaded Jones’ Fourth Amendment interests, this wouldn’t protect him from a system of cameras that developed much the same information, noted Justice Ginsburg. Justice Kagan continued:

What is the difference really? I’m told — maybe this is wrong, but I’m told that if somebody goes to London, almost every place that person goes there is a camera taking pictures, so that the police can put together snapshots of where everybody is all the time. So why is this different from that.

Justice Breyer continued down this line:

And in fact, those cameras in London actually enabled them, if you watched them, I got the impression, to track the bomber who was going to blow up the airport in Glasgow and to stop him before he did. So there are many people who will say that that kind of surveillance is worthwhile, and there are others like you who will say, no, that’s a bad thing.

I’ve spent a lot of time examining terrorism incidents, and the scenario described by Justice Breyer does not sound familiar to me. There was an attack on the Glasgow airport in 2007. That attack was a qualified success—heavily qualified: one of the attackers incinerated himself in the course of causing minor injuries to a few standers-by and only modestly damaging the airport. I’ve found no report that surveillance cameras were involved in monitoring or apprehending the attackers—much less stopping the attack—or in stopping any similar-sounding attack.

Security cameras and surveillance generally are over-rated as preventives of crime and terrorism. They are some help in discovering information about crime after the fact. No help is needed when a major incident turns the eyes of an entire city or nation toward discovering what happened.

I doubt that the case will turn on Justice Breyer’s apparent error, but it clearly influences his thinking, and he shared it with other members of the Court. The people he counts as saying surveillance is worthwhile do not have prevention of an airport bombing in Glasgow to back them up.

Persons familiar with my writings on monetary reform know that, far from being anyone’s idea of a gold bug, and despite my conviction that those monies work best that governments govern least, I’ve always shied away from arguing that we ought to re-establish a gold standard. Instead, I’ve favored reforms aimed at preserving our existing fiat standard while eliminating the role of bureaucrats, and increasing that of competitive market forces, in regulating that standard.

I respect nonetheless those who, having given serious thought to the matter, conclude that gold remains our best hope. Alas, such people make up but a small fraction of self-described gold bugs. My standard reaction to finding myself within earshot of any of the rest is to look for a more remote and unoccupied bar stool.

But there’s one thing that’s guaranteed to bring out the gold bug in me, and that is ill-informed arguments against the gold standard. No, make that stupid arguments, because the ones I have in mind aren’t merely ill-informed. They are ill-informed in a way that suggests that the persons who make them don’t even think about what they’re saying.

An example of the sorts of arguments I have in mind is this opinion piece from yesterday’s New York Times, in which Eduardo Porter responds to recent pro-gold testimonials of various Republican presidential candidates and conservative talking heads. Such persons aren’t exactly heavyweights when it comes to making good arguments for returning to gold. Yet in trying to show just what lightweights they really are, Mr. Porter mainly succeeds in revealing his own featherweight grasp of monetary economics and history.

For his opening salvo Mr. Porter turns to R.A. Radford’s famous article on the employment of cigarettes as money in German P.O.W. camps, noting how, according to Radford, the prices of other goods sometimes fluctuated dramatically in response to new cigarette deliveries or to cigarettes’ gradual disappearance in the absence of such. This experience, we are assured, proves that a gold standard is a dumb idea since gold, “as money,…share’s tobacco’s basic drawback” of being a commodity.

This would be an unanswerable argument against the gold standard were it not for two minor issues: first, gold isn’t tobacco; second, P.O.W. camps aren’t ordinary economies. Those who plead for a return to gold have a right to be understood to be extolling the merits of a gold standard rather than those of a tobacco standard or a cowrie shell standard or some other commodity standard; and the instability exhibited by any standard in a P.O.W. camp might not supply an accurate indication of the same standard’s likely performance in a more usual economic setting. I would bet, for example, that the real price of cigarettes was subject to more violent changes within the confines of Stalag Luft III than in the surrounding German economy; and after the war the real price of a pack of cigarettes net of taxes, in the U.S. at least, was more-or-less constant until the early ’80s, when it started to rise gradually. (It is now about twice what it was then). Finally, there isn’t even any good reason for supposing that cigarettes were a poor monetary medium for P.O.W. camps, given the available options. Indeed, having often assigned Radford’s article myself in teaching monetary economics, I have always understood its lesson to be, not that cigarettes make crummy money, but that markets are remarkably clever when it comes to expediting exchange. The logical implication of Mr. Porter’s argument, on the other hand, seems to be that by relying on the market the P.O.W.s blew it: it would have been wiser, according to his point of view, for them to have invited their captors to supply, in exchange for some of their precious Red-Cross parcel contents, fiat money especially designed for their use, and backed by a solemn promise to manage the stuff scientifically, so as to best provide for the prisoners’ macroeconomic well-being.

And gold itself? Is its supply in fact subject to the sort of shocks to which P.O.W. camps’ cigarette endowments were exposed? Though Mr. Porter seems to assume so, he offers no proof. Had he bothered to inquire into actual facts he might have learned that by far the most notorious of all precious metal “supply shocks”–the one following Spain’s conquest of the New World–led to the sixfold increase in European prices that has since come to be known as the great European “Price Revolution.” Q.E.D. for Mr. Porter? Well, not quite, because that sixfold increase occurred over an interval of over 150 years, which translates into a continuous rate of inflation of just 1.1 percent–a rate that would have Ben Bernanke and many other modern central bankers squawking about being on the brink of a deflationary crisis.

And what about that other famous gold supply shock started by a lucky discovery at Sutter’s Mill? Well, have a look if you will at a chart showing the progress of the U.S. CPI since 1800 or so, and see if you can pick out the rise in prices this discovery caused. Unless you happen to be on drugs, you can’t, because it isn’t there: there are price jumps, sure enough–in or around 1812, 1862, and 1918–but they all mark moments when the U.S. temporarily abandoned the gold standard, which is to say moments when it embraced the sort of paper standard Mr. Porter thinks so obviously superior to gold. (During WWI, although the U.S. didn’t suspend the gold standard outright, it limited gold exports.) Wars are exceptional, of course. But then what about the CPI lift-off after 1971, when the dollar’s last link to gold was severed once and for all? Is the CPI a Republican plot?

If not, are we not entitled to wonder why Mr. Porter, in assuring us that “the Fed can print dollars at will to meet the growing demand for money as the economy grows,” does not seem to realize that it can, and often does, “print” too many dollars? Are we not entitled to wonder why, in making a case against gold and in favor of paper money, he supplies us with an almost perfectly irrelevant story about tobacco-plus-paper inflation, without so much as hinting at the many far more serious inflations fueled by paper alone? Is “Zimbabwean” inflation to him nothing other than a bogeyman invented by some right-wing talking head? Perhaps Mr. Porter was so absorbed by his vision of P.O.W.s struggling to carry on despite occasional cigarette windfalls that he managed to overlook the damage irredeemable paper monies have done at one time or another to the entire populations of Angola, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Bulgaria, China, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Israel, Mexico, North Korea, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia, and Zaire–to offer but a very incomplete list.

But why harp on inflation? After all, fiat money at least has the virtue of hardly ever being in short supply, so that economies need not fear being unable to grow for want of it. In contrast under a gold standard, Mr. Porter assures us, “the economy couldn’t grow faster than the supply of gold.” Evidently Mr. Porter here overlooks another relevant episode in economic history. This episode is known as “the 19th century.”

It’s hardly surprising under the circumstances that Mr. Porter should share the very widespread opinion that the gold standard was to blame for the United States Great Depression. Yet even by his own telling it wasn’t the gold standard as such, but the particular rules by which the Fed administered that standard, that led to the Fed’s failure to prevent the post-1930 collapse of the U.S. money stock. In fact the Federal Reserve’s requirement of a 40 (not 60) percent gold cover for its outstanding notes was not a necessary part of the gold standard but a regulation based on naive ca. 1840 British Currency-School thinking. (In Scotland’s free-banking based gold standard, in contrast, banks managed quite well with specie reserve ratios that varied little from one or two percent.)

The stipulated gold minimum was, moreover, something that the Fed itself had statutory authority to lower, had it considered doing so worthwhile. In fact, it didn’t, because (as Dick Timberlake points out) the Fed never ran up against the 40 percent limit during the crucial, early years of the depression: in August 1931 the Fed’s gold holdings of $3.5 billion were over twice what it needed to meet that requirement; and even at the time of the Bank Holiday in March 1933, despite having endured a run on gold triggered by fear of an impending devaluation, the Fed was sitting on more that $1 billion in excess gold reserves. What the Fed was short of wasn’t gold but what clueless Fed officials, subscribing to the bogus “real-bills doctrine,” considered good private securities, which until 1932 were the only assets eligible for backing its notes other than gold. If Mr. Porter knew his Friedman and Schwartz, he’d know that those authors, among several others, conclude on the basis of such facts that the gold standard was not the cause of the Fed’s failure to combat the Great Depression. Since Christina Romer is among the authors in question, I trust that Mr. Porter will not be tempted to declare that they must all be Republicans.

While the general thrust of Mr. Porter’s essay is that one has to be daft to say nice things about the gold standard, he is generous enough to allow that this might not be the only reason for Ron Paul’s defense of gold. After all, Porter informs us, “much of his [Paul’s] wealth is tied up in gold-mining stocks.” Consequently, Porter reasons, Paul “would certainly benefit if even more American’s caught the gold bug.” But would he? Have a look at any plot of the real price of gold, and ask yourself whether, if you had “much of your wealth” in gold mining, you would be pleading for a return to the gold standard, or pulling hard for a continuation of the fiat-money status quo. Besides not making sense, and being nasty, Porter’s argumentum ad hominem is profoundly silly. Would he have us conclude that Paul is pro-life only because he’s a pediatrician an obstetrician, or that, since he favors drug legalization, he must be long on marijuana, coca, and poppies?

What I find most obnoxious about Mr. Porter’s arguments isn’t that they are arguments against reviving the gold standard (for I recognize good arguments for not attempting such) or even that they are bad arguments. It is that they are both bad and smug; indeed they are bad because they are smug. Starting from the premise that only idiots can favor a gold standard, Mr. Porter imagines that no great effort is required to prove that such a standard is deeply flawed. He then cobbles up his proof, by plucking up a fistful of old anti-gold canards from the murky bottom of google​.com, by recalling an old article describing inflation that wasn’t the fault of some central bank, and by simply asserting his own a priori beliefs. After all, he reasons, why bother to use a tower or ram or even a ladder to assail something that mere wind ought to topple? In fine, Mr. Porter falls victim to the tempting but evidently mistaken assumption that he surely knows more about money than the average right-wing nut.

As Jim Harper noted yesterday, the questioning during yesterday’s oral arguments in United States v. Antoine Jones suggested to most observers that the Supreme Court is acutely concerned about the dangers of leaving police use of location tracking technology completely unregulated by the Fourth Amendment. “If you win this case,” Justice Stephen Breyer told the government’s lawyer, “then there is nothing to prevent the police or government from monitoring, 24 hours a day, the public movement of every citizen of the United States.… You produce what sounds like Nineteen Eighty-Four.” Yet, as I observed in a previous post, the Court has a wide array of rationales to choose from if it decides to rule in favor of Antoine Jones, and each has different implications for the larger question of how the Constitution will limit a whole array of location tracking technologies.

The simplest and narrowest ruling against the government here — one that seemed to appeal to Justice Scalia — would focus not on the monitoring, but only on the physical intrusion on property involved in the installation of the tracking device. That is, I think, absolutely right as far as it goes, but would only prolong the deeper questions, since there are many high-tech ways to track someone without physically attaching anything to their property, from the cell-phone tracking already in widespread use, to robotic surveillance insects in the foreseeable future. Many on the Court would seemingly prefer to avoid a game of technological whack-a-mole, and find a principle to regulate location monitoring itself. The appeals court in this case relied on what’s come to be called the Mosaic Theory, which holds that prolonged monitoring may invade privacy, even if all the specific journeys — all the tiles in the “mosaic” — are public when considered in isolation.

The virtue of the Mosaic Theory is that it captures a deep underlying truth about our complex, socially embedded “reasonable expectations of privacy.” The defect is that courts and police need clear rules: Any principle that requires ad hoc assessment of complex and contextual social facts is a nonstarter. That’s why, after roasting the government’s attorney, the Court tried to force Jones’ lawyer to articulate some kind of bright line test that would distinguish permissible from impermissible monitoring. If tracking someone 24/7 for a month violates people’s expectation of privacy, but following them on a single trip doesn’t, how do you draw the line? Really, this is just a special case of the notoriously difficult “Sorites Problem” in philosophy: Sometimes you confront a gradient or continuum where things on one end obviously do have some property (like “being a privacy violation”), things on the other end don’t, but you can move in arbitrarily tiny steps from one end to the other, and it seems absurd to pick any particular point as a binary boundary.

But this doesn’t seem like it ought to be a problem if we’re thinking clearly — and the Court has already found a perfectly satisfactory way of dealing with it in another famous case: Kyllo v. United States. In ruling that the use of thermal imaging scanners to detect marijuana-growing lamps in a home violated the Fourth Amendment, Justice Scalia considered the objection that (much like GPS trackers), the scanners would often reveal only information that could have been obtained by ordinary observation from a public space:

The fact that equivalent information could sometimes be obtained by other means does not make lawful the use of means that violate the Fourth Amendment. The police might, for example, learn how many people are in a particular house by setting up year-round surveillance; but that does not make breaking and entering to find out the same information lawful.

The key point here is that there’s a difference between the information exposed by an investigative method, and the investigative method itself. The Court in Kyllo did not say that police may use thermal imaging scanners just to the extent that they reveal information about the home that could also, in principle, be obtained by some other legitimate method (though perhaps with greater difficulty or expense); they opted to regulate the technology categorically. It may be that people knowingly expose their movements to the public, but that’s not what’s initially being monitored here. What police who use GPS tracking are monitoring is signals emitted by a surreptitiously installed tracking device. And that information was certainly not knowingly exposed to the public by Antoine Jones, or most drivers.

It’s an interesting question whether even ordinary visual surveillance in public — whether by a “tail” or by technologies in general public use, like video cameras — could become so prolonged and invasive as to trigger Fourth Amendment protection, but this isn’t ordinary visual surveillance, which relieves the Court of the need to answer that question here. They can regulate the technological method categorically, even if we can envision uses that would be practically equivalent to other, permissible methods in terms of the type and quantity of information obtained. In those cases, of course, police are welcome to simply use those other methods. The main appeal of GPS tracking, of course, is that it provides far more information than is feasible for most police departments to obtain by visual observation — and in those cases, a magistrate judge can make the specific decision about a “reasonable” duration of surveillance. Since the officers in this case actually did get a judicial warrant before installing their tracker — they just failed to install it before the warrant expired—there’s no reason to think that this constitutes some unreasonable burden.

The apparent problem with this approach is that the Court’s opinion in Knotts seems to have rejected such categorical regulation. But, as no less an authority than the inventor of GPS himself stressed in an amicus brief filed by the Center for Democracy and Technology, the tracking “beepers” at issue in Knotts are a fundamentally different technology from GPS trackers. Though they actually monitor radio signals rather than visual impressions — just as GPS does — they are best thought of as augmenting ordinary visual observation by officers who are physically present in a nearby car or aircraft. It might be true in a particular case that police could not effectively tail a suspect without risking detection but for the beeper, because they’d have to follow too closely, but the central method of surveillance here is still ordinary visual observation. The beeper, in this case, is more like a flashlight than a thermal imager. GPS does not augment visual observation; it replaces visual observation. That, I think, means that there’s just no need to puzzle over the permissible quantity of information that can be obtained as though we were still talking about a physical tail with a little technological boost. We’re not. It’s an utterly different method that can be regulated categorically, and without regard to whether some different and unregulated method might yield some of the same information. It’s true that the reason you want to regulate this method is that it has the capability to gather more information, more easily and cheaply, in a way that exceeds people’s reasonable expectations. But that doesn’t mean you have to solve the Sorites Problem and pick some particular marginal quantum of information as the boundary, where monitoring below that level is consistent with social expectations of privacy, and monitoring above that level is not. Rather, you can say that because of its capacity for such intrusive monitoring, people reasonably expect not to be subject to that method at all. The Fourth Amendment, recall, does not just protect against unreasonable searches, but the right to be “secure” against unreasonable searches—and that security would hardly be protected if a method intrinsically capable of “unreasonable” intrusiveness were permitted without a warrant, and all of us had to trust police to determine the point at which its application in each particular case crossed into “unreasonableness.”

The fuzziness of the boundary here, in other words, is no argument at all for deference. It’s an argument for imposing a categorical warrant requirement on a class of technologies and letting the issuing magistrate evaluate the bounds of reasonableness in the instance. As in Kyllo, you draw the bright constitutional line by looking at the capabilities of a technological type, not by trying to craft an impossible rule that permits specific uses of the type that are informationally equivalent to other, permissible methods. It is the capability of the technology to reveal an intrusive “mosaic” that justifies its categorical treatment as a search, and as long as it’s clear that many typical uses of that technology would fall on the wrong side of “reasonable,” the tough question of “exactly how many tiles does it take?” is one the Court can happily decline to answer.

The Drudge Report’s headlining of a Heritage Foundation story titled “Obama Couldn’t Wait: His New Christmas Tree Tax” has created quite a stir. In fact, it is being reported that the administration is now going to delay its implementation due to the outcry. Conservatives and Republicans are particularly incensed. However, it appears that they might want to rethink their Obama-as-Grinch narrative.

The National Taxpayer Union’s Demian Brady posted a link on his Facebook page to the 1996 bill that enabled the U.S. Department of Agriculture to implement a “Christmas Tree Tax.” As it turns out, the legislation was sponsored by then Rep. Pat Roberts – a Kansas Republican. John Boehner, the current Republican Speaker of the House, was one of the bill’s co-sponsors. The vote in the House was 318 to 89 with most of the “no” votes coming from Democrats. In the Senate, the vote was 74 to 26. Sen. John McCain was the only Republican to vote “no.”

As for the “Christmas Tree Tax” itself, my colleague Jim Harper is correct that it is indeed a tax (see also Ilya Shapiro’s post). It’s another example of how special interests – in this case, the Christmas tree lobby (!) – dominate policymaking in Washington, regardless of which party is in control. I would argue that there is no good practical, moral, or constitutional justification for the federal government to be involved in the marketing campaigns of business interests. Unfortunately, certain people saw the “Christmas Tree Tax” as an opportunity to further partisan aims rather than provoke a discussion and debate on the proper role of the federal government.

There has been much written recently about the so-called shallow loss proposals to provide subsidies for farms in cases when farm revenues fall slightly below the record high levels of the past few years. The proposals come from a bi-partisan collection of influential farm state legislators, such as Rep. Collin Peterson (D., MN) and Senator Richard Lugar (R, IN) et al., and commodity groups such as the National Cotton Council. (The Congressional Research Service has prepared a helpful summary of the proposals). All suggest that new and expanded subsidy programs are needed to help farmers manage untoward risks of farming. These ideas have even gotten support from some long time advocates for farm policy reform such as the distinguished former Agriculture Secretary and U.S. Trade Representative Clayton Yeutter.

Let us take a step back and put these proposed programs in context. First, since the middle of the last decade farm prices for the major grains, oil seeds and cotton have doubled or more than doubled and are expected to remain elevated. This has meant that the long-standing support programs with their fixed congressionally mandated support prices no longer trigger payments. Projections for the next decade suggest that prices are unlikely to drop back to below the established support prices. Since there is no support for simply raising the government set minimum prices, and simply paying farmers and farmland owners based on their history of having political clout (as was established in 1996) now seems infeasible, commodity groups needed another formulation to continue to receive significant government payments.

One way to ratchet up supports and lock in high revenues is to tie payments not to price per se, but to revenue. Hence the new proposals each include variants of the idea that when revenue declines by 5 or ten percent below what farmers of a particular commodity have come to expect, the taxpayer would make payments to fill the gap. Thus, this year, with harvest time price of soybeans about 10 percent below the futures price established last winter, government payments would kick in under some proposals. Even now under subsidized crop insurance programs, farms or county yields as little as 5 percent below average would be enough to trigger crop insurance payments in some cases. Notice this would happen with a price of soybeans of more than $12 per bushel when the average farm price from 2004 to 2006 (not a particularly low-price period) was below $6.00 per bushel. In other words, historically high prices have become the new “benchmark” for support. Talk about a ratchet effect.

We can use insurance information to get a sense of how much the proposed programs are designed to satisfy farmers latent demand for “risk management.” Under the current crop insurance program with more than 50% premium subsidies, additional subsidies for program delivery, and subsidies to cover losses of insurance companies, relatively few farmers buy insurance to cover losses above 20 percent. And, as premium subsidies decline farmers abandon insurance altogether. Farmers employ many risk management strategies from diversification and crop rotation to storage and use of forward contracts. Given these options, they do not choose to buy more risk management when asked to pay a major share of the costs. The opportunity to lock in high revenues with expected payoffs likely to be in the billions of dollars is not about risk but about higher returns, and no operation can afford to turn down higher returns with little or no risk.

Finally, there are two further problems with the argument that farming is especially risky and therefore taxpayers must continue to provide payments whenever revenue targets are not met.

First, notice that this idea only seems to apply to that subset of farm commodities that have received the traditional farm subsidies since the 1930s. There are no proposals for massive “shallow loss” subsidies for industries such as fruits, vegetables, tree nuts, broilers, hay, hogs, beef cattle, greenhouse and nursery products, eggs or seeds. These industries are at least as risky as corn and soybeans, but they have not traditionally been subsidized to the degree to which some crops have become accustomed. (As an aside, there is no evidence that the long term prosperity or productivity of the heavily subsidized industries is higher than the less subsidized farm commodity industries.)

Second, the debt to equity ratio of the subsidized farm sectors does not make them particularly vulnerable. In fact farm debt is well below 15 percent of equity. Moreover, most farms have substantial non-farm income and most farmers work off the farm or get retirement income from non-farm occupations. The farmers that are least likely to work off the farm operate the largest farms and practice a number of risk management strategies. Thus, relatively few farms are in danger going under. Farming is a risky business, but, given how they are organized, there is nothing particularly risky about farming compared to other businesses.

Under the new “risk management” proposals, any individual farm would gain from access to government payments when market revenue falls below some recent average or pre-set target. That said, there is simply no evidence or consistent reasoning for subsidies whether rationalized by “risk management” or one of the other dozen or so common claims (see page 12 of this book by Stanford University’s Woods Institute). Furthermore, there is no evidence that the long term prosperity of agriculture is enhanced by government subsidies or that U.S. farming is more productive or that Americans eat better because we have spent trillions of dollars on farm subsidies over the past seven decades. The best argument for farm subsidies is that we have always had them and change is hard. But, that argument has been stretched a bit thin and this period of record farm profits and record government budget deficits is an ideal time to finally cut the cord.

(Other papers critical of recent “risk management” proposals and well worth your time are a piece written by Bruce Babcock for the Environmental Working Group and one by Barry Goodwin and Vince Smith for AEI. For a recent broader evaluation of farm subsidies visit my paper written jointly with Barry and Vince and published by AEI).

Forced to cut its budget, the Agriculture Department has decided to eliminate dozens of reports, including the annual goat census (current population: three million), and the number of catfish on the nation’s fish farms (177 million, not counting the small fry).

[New York Times, Business Day section]

Last year sometime, when the Arizona immigration law S.B. 1070 was big news, I was preceded on a cable TV talk show by an Arizona state senator who had sponsored the legislation. As I sat in a remote studio in Washington, I could hear the senator in another studio rattle off what seemed an unending list of people in his state who had allegedly been killed by illegal immigrants. Knowing that the state’s violent crime rate has actually been declining and is the lowest it has been in 40 years, I thought to myself, “This guy is a first-class demagogue.”

Apparently his constituents agree. The state senator was Russell Pearce, main sponsor of Arizona’s tough anti-illegal-immigrant law. Yesterday his constituents removed him from office in a recall election spurred largely by his obsession with rooting out low-skilled, undocumented immigrants from his state.

Pearce tried to blame the recall on liberals soft on illegal immigration, but the opposition in his conservative district was fueled mainly by other Republicans tired of the damage he was inflicting on the state’s reputation. After passage of S.B. 1070, Pearce had then tried to deny state-issued birth certificates to children born in the state to an illegal immigrant parent despite more than a century of settled constitutional doctrine on birthright citizenship. That effort was stopped by business leaders in the state who saw no upside but plenty of downside in Pearce’s single-minded efforts that did nothing to address the state’s depressed economy.

Defeating Pearce was another Republican, Jerry Lewis, who carried 54 percent of the vote despite being outspent 3–1. After his victory last night, Lewis said,

Certainly the immigration issue is important to many people including myself. We need to bring a civil tone to that discussion, a professional approach to solving it, an approach that is reasonable and won’t be … in the courts for years to come.

Perhaps there is a lesson here for the GOP presidential candidates who have been competing with each other in recent debates to prove who can sound the most like Russell Pearce on immigration.