Month: August 2007

The Mitt’s kids meme Eric brought to our attention earlier today is making my friend Hugh Hewitt mad:

The AP, with lefty bloggers in tow, is trying to make an issue out of an ambush question at a Romney campaign forum today.

Lefty bloggers? Me? Liz Mair, who called it just plain stupid? James Joyner, who said it might "be the dumbest answer ever by a presidential candidate" and also rejected the Romney camp’s spin by explaining that "the longer version is more harmful to Romney than the AP story"? Steve Benen, who quotes the Romney spin and then says "Romney still believes driving a Winnebago and writing for a campaign blog is “showing support for our,” on par with serving in the military"? Jim Geraghty, who says "Romney seems a little off-key" and says the Romney spin "leaves me a little cold"? Sorry, but trying to spin this as a lefty tempest in a teapot simply won’t work.

You can discuss the Romney’s kids meme over at my blog, where I’ve cross posted this. Right of center bloggers who agree that Romney put his foot in it (again) are encouraged to send a TrackBack ping, so we can get a sense of whether Liz, James, Steve, Jim and I are aberrational.

Not to turn this into a one-liner heavy, libertarian/gay-friendly version of The Corner, but to offer my two sense on Eric’s post about Charlatans, I’d absolutely rather vote for Fred Thompson than Mitt Romney.  Fred Thompson may have a bit of a conjured image and a thin record, but I don’t believe that he was 100% produced in a factory, specifically for consumption by whatever conservative Republican primary voters  don’t have access to Google, the ability to distinguish between black and white, or a memory that extends beyond two weeks ago.

Since Andrew was kind enough to tell us to feel free to use this forum to promote our blogs and books, allow me to plug a post on ProfessorBainbridge.com, Last Year’s Biggest M&A Case, in which I analyze In re PNB Holding Co. Shareholders Litigation. It’s a fairly typical example of the sort of corporate governance wonkery regular readers get.

Coming soon to PB.com, by the way, will be a site redesign. I’ve long wanted to redo the front page into a landing page that serves as a planet (a.k.a. hub) site for three content blogs: one on corporate law/governance, one on food and wine, and one for punditry of the sort I’ve been doing here this week.

My assumption – based on lots of conversations with members of my target audience – is that a professional blog focusing solely on technical legal analysis, without requiring the reader to wade through political opinions, wine reviews, and so on, will be more effective in reaching this target audience. These readers can bookmark that site and/or subscribe exclusively to that site’s feed. As such, I’ll be able to use this corner of my section of the blogosphere more effectively as an adjunct to my vocation.

Conversely, I also no longer have to worry that my generalist readers will get bored. After all, there was always something incongruous about going from a post that used the jargon of Oliver Williamson’s New Institutional Economics to analyze some aspect of corporate governance to a post about the comparative merits of white and black truffles.

I tried a DIY version of this project last year. It didn’t work out very well. But now I’ve got a professional web designer who seems to get "it." So please keep checking PB.com for the new design; hopefully, we’ll roll it out next month.

I’m afraid Andrew Jackson just isn’t much of a citation for me, Stephen. I have too much of a fondness for central banks, and too much of an aversion against ethnic cleansing.

But let’s look at the idea on the merits. Jackson argued, “Each public officer who takes an oath to support the Constitution swears that he will support it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others … The authority of the Supreme Court must not, therefore, be permitted to control the Congress or the Executive when acting in their legislative capacities, but to have only such influence as the force of their reasoning may deserve.”

Under what rationale, then, were the Southern politicians wrong in refusing to recognize the validity of the Brown decision? Since any politician who loses a court case probably thought his position had some legal soundness, then why should they honor any decision at all under the sun? What does a court opinion actually decide, then?

What this amounts to is that everybody becomes their own final arbiter of the Constitution, a state of legal anarchy. And this is wrong for the very simple reason that the Constitution has already made the judiciary into that arbiter.

And it’s the judiciary’s job to be the final arbiter of constitutionality for a very simple reason: the politicians have too many motives and opportunities to lie and cheat about it. If the politicians can declare that any court decision they didn’t like was a product of bad reasoning and then ignore it, how is the judiciary actually providing any check upon the political system?

The other branches place checks upon the judiciary, through appointing the judges and also by being able to amend the Constitution in an extreme circumstance. But under Jackson’s idea, what power does the judiciary have for itself as the third branch of the government? How can any minority’s rights be protected if the majority can summarily call the decision illegitimate?

What this all came down to in the end, of course, was the apocryphal reaction Jackson is said to have had when the Supreme Court ruled against his policies of mistreating the Native Americans, and even if he never said it, it nevertheless accurately describes what he and Van Buren did: “John Marshall made his decision — let him enforce it.”

As you concluded, “How do we decide which cases are like Brown and which cases are ones like Roe, which we all seem to agree decided an issue that should have been left to politics? I think that’s a very difficult question.”

Under Jackson’s doctrine, why does that decision even matter once you’ve made it? Someone else has a different opinion, and we’ve just declared that the Supreme Court, or really any court, does not actually have any final jurisdiction in the matter.

There will always be decisions we don’t agree with. But encouraging people to question or even deny the legal legitimacy of those decisions is simply not the answer. It only creates many more problems.

There’s a good comment on my earlier post by Bret Swanson of the Discovery Institute here. He references two interesting commentaries by Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell that are also saguine about the prospects for the Chinese dumping the dollar. They can be found here and here.

The other day, Drudge had some screaming headline about how a bill in Congress on global warming would reduce the gross domestic product by over $500 billion. Even in a $13 trillion economy, this is real money.

When I clicked on Drudge’s link, it took me, as usual, to a wire story that offered little additional detail. The actual study, however, was easily available online–in this instance, the Energy Department’s web site, where Drudge could have found it himself if he had bothered to take another couple of seconds to look.

I don’t mean to pick on Drudge. Almost every blogger does the same thing and I find it frustrating because so often the wire copy is inaccurate or misleading. I suspect that in such cases the blogger doesn’t really want to know the truth because that might spoil the story.

The Energy Department study is a good example. It is true that it projects GDP will be lower by $533 billion if the bill in question passes. But this is a total reduction over a 21-year period (2009-2030). Since the study indicates that this is 0.22 percent of GDP over this time, we can calculate that total GDP will equal more than $242 trillion over this period. Obviously, $533 billion isn’t so much in this context.

DOE says the size of the economy in 2030 would only be lower by between 0.3 percent and 0.5 percent. Considering that GDP will be about $40 trillion in 2030, according to the latest report from Social Security’s actuaries, this doesn’t seem like much to worry about–the equivalent of rounding error.

This doesn’t mean I support the particular bill. It just means that perhaps the economic cost is not unreasonable, as Drudge implied. I would strongly urge bloggers to make an extra effort to find the actual studies they refer to and not rely solely on news reports or wire copy that may be misleading or innacurate.

Stephen wrote in response to my quasi-defense/explanation of Romney’s gaffe:

“It doesn’t change the fact that Romney’s a flip-flopping, dog abusing opportunist whose favorite novel is Battlefield Earth…”

I think the only way Mitt Romney could be any more of a phony is if he were Fred Thompson.

That’s right, the GOP can do worse than Mitt.

Politico has an interesting piece up today making the point that endorsement of a candidate by a gay-rights group is likely to be seen as a reason to vote against, not for, a candidate– at least if those voters like in OH, PA or FL. And not just by Republicans, but by independents, too, and men more than women.

In addition, “being the candidate endorsed by business groups is viewed as a big negative — almost as much as being the gay rights lobby’s candidate — while labor support is a big positive for a candidate.”

Wow. I guess where OH, PA and FL are concerned, we’ve re-entered the world of old-school populism, where there’s a tendency towards the traditional on social issues, and a favoring of groups that prefer protectionist economic policies. Or that’s my crude interpretation, anyway.

In any event, it certainly reinforces the view that I’ve been developing for some time, partly in conjunction with a new project I’m working on, partly in relation to research I’ve been doing for a (hopefully) forthcoming book, that suggests that OH and PA, in any event, seem to be culturally and politically more geared towards electing Bobby Casey types than they are Barry Goldwaters…

www.lizmair.com

The Intrade items that Stephen posted earlier, relating to GOP chances in 2008, were interesting. But, with news that Fred Thompson has hired yet another campaign manager (and it seems got rid of the now-deemed-stand-ins that preceded him), I’ve got to think that they should be downgrading the odds on Fred being the nominee.

Don’t get me wrong, I like Fred, too (not quite as much as Rudy, but I can’t think of anything that would put me off voting for him, unlike Romney, as has been pointed out). But I have a bad feeling about his campaign– he keeps delaying announcing, he keeps shifting his staff, he is still not regarded as being very enthusiastic by a lot of people who come into contact with him, and so on. I’m left wondering whether he’ll feature in this race as much as people are hoping.

And on a separate note, I entirely agree with the sentiments voiced that Romney’s sons campaigning for him is not the same as Iraq– and that him suggesting it is, is just plain stupid.

It takes a certain arrogance to view your candidacy as as important a national struggle as winning an actual war. But then, of course, Romney wouldn’t know anything about that– hell, back in 1994, he was happy to admit that it was not his “desire to go off and serve in Vietnam,” although he later said he “felt guilty about the draft deferment he would get for it [completing his mission], when other young men his age were heading for Vietnam” (which I somehow doubt– this sounds a lot like stuff Bill Clinton used to come up with, if I’m remembering 1992 at all).

www.lizmair.com

Coming back to Stephen, who’s picked up the gay marriage thread again, I want to say first of all that this whole argument that the "full faith and credit" clause will mean that if a gay marriage is recognized in Massachusetts, it will have to be recognized in Utah, is totally off-base, in my view. 

Here’s the example I always use to refute that.  Nevada allows prostitution.  So, one could enter into a prostitution contract in Nevada and, hypothetically, seek to enforce it in Utah, were the "full faith and credit" clause deemed to work this way.  Yet the ability of a prostitution contract to be enforced in Utah, on any grounds, isn’t considered to be likely or really even possible– if it were, in fact, wouldn’t we have an amendment to the Constitution specifying that prostitution contracts are not enforceable in states not recognizing prostitution as a legal activity? 

I can understand where some of the initial concern about "full faith and credit" and what that would do, were gay marriage legalized, came from.  But frankly, I think it’s wheeled out more as a plain, old canard by those who just want to stop gay marriage, full stop, for other reasons (like, say, they’re religious conservatives who see the legal recognition of gay marriage or civil unions anywhere as a precursor to the downfall of Western civilization as we know it– and yes, before anyone says it, I know I’m being a little hyperbolic for illustration and vivid description purposes, but I bet Rick Santorum would regard it as such).

www.lizmair.com