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In Search of a Unified F***-Up Theory

July 9, 2012 – 12:37 pm

The biggest mystery of recent years is: Why are all our institutions failing at the same time? Think about it:

  • We just had a banking crisis that required trillions of dollars of bailouts and interest-free loans to the very people who caused it and profited from it. No one went to jail, in spite of massive evidence of criminality. More-or-less nothing has been done to prevent the same thing happening again.
  • Our election campaigns have become open bidding wars. As a result, Congress is largely unresponsive to the desires of anybody who’s not rich, and the number of people who rate the “honesty and ethical standards” of congressmen as high or very high is an anemic 7% — the same rating lobbyists get.
  • The public distrusts scientists. Among scientists who study climate, 97% believe in man-made global warming. But only about half of the public does, and that’s a recovery to 2009 levels after a considerable dip.
  • The Catholic Church has been rocked by its pedophilia scandal. And the worst of it is this: When bishops found out, they uniformly protected the guilty priests rather than the innocent children. That part of the scandal goes all the way to the Pope, and there’s been no house-cleaning of implicated bishops.
  • Public expectations of presidential candidates have plummeted. In 2000, Al Gore was tagged with being a “serial exaggerator” after saying a few mostly true things. This year, much of Mitt Romney’s stump speech consists of publicly debunked lies, and it’s not an issue. Voters shrug and say that all politicians lie.
  • The Supreme Court has become partisan. People have always complained that the Court’s legal philosophy was too liberal or too conservative. But only since John Roberts and Sam Alito replaced David Souter and Sandra Day O’Connor have major cases routinely been decided on 5-4 party-line votes. Today, if the president who appointed you was Republican or Democrat, that’s the side you take. The shock of Roberts’ ObamaCare decision wasn’t his legal reasoning, it’s that he crossed party lines.
  • In discussions about baseball’s Hall of Fame, the main topic isn’t how good players were, it’s whether they cheated or not. It’s very possible that the biggest stars of the 1990s — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa — won’t be in the Hall.
  • Both Presidents Bush and Obama embraced the doctrine that the president can rain death on countries we are not at war with. If Americans get killed in the process, too bad. American citizens might even be the target.
  • Trust in journalism has collapsed. Again and again, the press has been the watch-dog that didn’t bark: Iraq’s non-existent WMDs, the housing bubble, and so on. Plus, they’ve increasingly practiced he-said/she-said journalism that punts the question of what is true. Newspapers are closing, reporters are being laid off — and yet, at the top, the marquee journalists remain the same no matter how many stories they screw up. The marquee pundits keep their jobs no matter how often they are proven wrong.

It goes on and on. All eras experience some institutional failure, but usually when one institution fails, you can take refuge in another: When Al Capone had city government in his pocket, the feds took him down. When the political process denied justice to blacks, the courts provided it. When Nixon’s White House was corrupt, Congress, the judiciary, and the press performed well.

What’s bizarre and unsettling about our era is that there seems to be nowhere to turn. Why is that? What’s making all our institutions suspect at the same time?

Devil theories. If you’re a certain breed of conservative Christian, what’s going on is obvious: The Devil and his minions are stepping up their malignant activities in preparation for the End of the World. And various secular subcultures have their own devil theories: the Koch Brothers, the worldwide socialist conspiracy, and so on.

While I’m no fan of the Kochs, all these one-big-conspiracy theories seem nutty to me. (I’ll bet lots of eras had evil billionaires.) But I do have to give them this: A devil theory is an answer on the scale of the problem. 

Conspiracy theorists respond to our attempts to be rational with: “What? You think this is all a coincidence?”

They’ve got a point. This situation begs for a UFT (Unified Failure Theory, or, as I sometimes call it, Unified Fuck-Up Theory), something that pulls it all together. But could we get a non-crazy one?

The meritocracy did it. If you read classic mysteries, you’ve seen this situation before: The clues link up here and there, but don’t make sense when you put them all together. Usually that means that the murderer is somebody who is off your radar completely, either because you’re trained not to see them (the butler) or you trust them implicitly (the vicar or the victim’s loyal-but-mousy sister).

That’s the approach Chris Hayes takes in Twilight of the Elites. Whatever ties these failures together must be something we’re incapable of doubting. Otherwise we’d have seen the connection by now.

What is it that all our smartest people believe in implicitly? The meritocracy. The principle that the most talented, hardest working people should rise to the top.

And while belief in the meritocracy is self-serving for those who do make it to the top, it’s more than that: All the social progress of the last half-century — civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights — justified itself in meritocratic terms: If you are good at what you do, you should rise, even if you don’t look like the people currently on top.

But what if elite failure — bankers who can’t bank, representatives who can’t represent, immoral moral leaders, and so on — is the dark side of the meritocracy?

What is meritocracy? Hayes says meritocracy depends on two principles: inequality and mobility. There is a top to rise to, and nothing but your own limitations can stop you from rising.

The problem is that the combination is unstable: When inequality passes a certain point, the people on top become powerful enough to screw up mobility. Eventually, no matter where they came from originally, the meritocratic elite comes to look on itself as a class and pursue its own interests.

The first example Hayes gives is the best: his alma mater, Hunter College High School in Manhattan.

Entrance to Hunter rests on a single “objective” measure: one three-hour test. If you clear the bar, you’re in; if not, you’re out. There are no legacy admissions, and there are no strings to pull for the well connected.

Hunter’s racial/ethnic composition never matched New York City’s, but the gap has widened in recent years. The entering class was 18% black/Hispanic in 1995, but just 4% in 2009.

Why? The test-prep industry. If you’re almost Hunter quality but have money, you can train to pass the test. If you’re just barely Hunter quality and you don’t have money, you’ll get aced out.

New York’s wealthy elite has figured out how to game the system for its children. And Hunter’s selection process has not kept up because … why would it? People powerful enough to make the system ungameable are precisely the ones who want to game the system.

Entitlement. What happens when a meritocracy gets corrupted like this? The appearance of rigorous competition remains, leaving the elite with an undeserved sense of entitlement: We are the ones who passed the test, so we deserve the cookies.

Such a ruling class would have all the competitive ferocity inculcated by the ceaseless jockeying within the institutions that produce meritocratic elites, but face no actual sanctions for failing at their duties or succumbing to the temptations of corruption. It would reflexively protect its worst members, it would operate with a wide gulf between performance and reward, and would be shot through with corruption, rule-breaking, and self-dealing as those on top pursued the outsize rewards promised for superstars.

But such a ruling class would also not be as smart as it thinks it is. It might, for example, think it has come up with a totally new and foolproof way to handle financial risk — and screw it up.

It would also see success as its own justification, an attitude that Hayes connects to Enron and the mortgage bubble. The people making the most money must be the smartest, and anyone who tries to tear them down is just jealous.

Co-opting Obama. Newcomers to the ruling class really did have to jump some hurdles, and as a result they have undue faith in the class they have entered into. President Obama, for example, cannot shake his faith in the experts. Surely the bankers must be the right people to fix the banking system. The businessmen must be the right people to revitalize business. If they weren’t the smartest people in the room, they wouldn’t have made it to the top, right?

Fractal inequality. This is my favorite phrase from the book. No matter how high you rise — the 1%, the 0.1%, the 0.001% — there always seems to be a higher level where the real action is. Again, Hayes uses his own experience well: When he finally got an invitation to the Davos meetings, it seemed like evidence that he had really made it. But once there

you realize that in the context of Davos attendees, you are a member of the unwashed masses

And the people you look up at are the unwashed masses of an even higher level.

As a result of this fractal inequality, everybody is constantly struggling to rise higher, grasping for whatever advantage they can get, and no one reaches a position where they can relax and turn a beneficent eye to the people below.

Distance. Representative democracy was supposed to close the distance between the rulers and the ruled. Leaders were supposed to spring up from among the people, and then go off to represent them in Congress.

Again, that’s been circumvented. No one who isn’t already well connected can hope to raise the money necessary to run for Congress or just about any other major office. And so we have a huge social distance between the leaders and the led.

That distance leads to disasters like New Orleans. The evacuation worked very well, Hayes points out, for people with cars. The leadership just underestimated the number of people without cars or what they would be likely to do, even though that information was available if anyone had thought to look for it.

So that’s the picture in failure after failure: A entrenched and entitled elite, hyper-competitive within itself, but distant from the people their actions affect.

What to do? It’s a basic part of our political rhetoric that we want equal opportunity, but want the government not to try to equalize outcomes. Hayes thinks that position is naive. With sufficient inequality of outcome, equality of opportunity is impossible. Meritocracy needs some inequality (or there’s nothing to win). But too much inequality destroys the meritocracy itself. So Hayes’ solutions are all about seeking more equality of outcome.

A second approach is something I’ll explore next week: moving towards a more anarchic system, where less responsibility is delegated and less is expected or demanded of elites. The text for that discussion will be The Leaderless Revolution by Carne Ross.

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The Economics of Leviticus

July 9, 2012 – 11:59 am

Culture war conversations often end with a verse from Leviticus, the old testament book of laws. After the verse has been quoted, it does no good to point out that the implied solution is impractical or unfair or causes needless suffering. God has given his command and we should be carrying it out, whether it makes sense to us or not.

Strangely, though, the economic parts of Leviticus aren’t quoted with the same air of ultimate authority. If they were, Biblical literalists might have to become radicals rather than reactionaries.

For example, when vulture capitalists ruin towns by closing factories and shipping jobs overseas, someone might quote Leviticus 19:9-10, which clearly denounces business practices that wring out every last dime of profit.

When you reap the harvest of your land, do not reap to the very edges of your field or gather the gleanings of your harvest. Do not go over your vineyard a second time or pick up the grapes that have fallen. Leave them for the poor and the foreigner.

The foreigner? You mean, like, illegal aliens? Could be. Leviticus 19:33-34 says:

When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.

It doesn’t say anything about a green card, it just says “resides among you in your land”. (Don’t argue with me, argue with God. I’m just reading literally.)

But by far the most radical part of the book is Leviticus 25, the chapter that institutes the Jubilee Year.

Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you; each of you is to return to your family property and to your own clan. The fiftieth year shall be a jubilee for you; do not sow and do not reap what grows of itself or harvest the untended vines. For it is a jubilee and is to be holy for you; eat only what is taken directly from the fields. In this Year of Jubilee everyone is to return to their own property.

“Their own property” includes anything that has been sold or repossessed:

If one of your fellow Israelites becomes poor and sells some of their property … [and] if they do not acquire the means to repay, what was sold will remain in the possession of the buyer until the Year of Jubilee. It will be returned in the Jubilee, and they can then go back to their property.

Basically, every 50th year all mortgages and foreclosures are cancelled and land goes back to its original owners. Anybody whose debts forced them into slavery is freed.

I know what you’re thinking: “That would never work.” And you’re absolutely right: It would never work with our modern capitalist notion of private property. But guess what? Leviticus has a completely different understanding of property:

The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers. Throughout the land that you hold as a possession, you must provide for the redemption of the land.

So the Earth itself belongs to God, while human deed-holders only own what the land produces.

If you sell land to any of your own people or buy land from them, do not take advantage of each other. You are to buy from your own people on the basis of the number of years since the Jubilee. And they are to sell to you on the basis of the number of years left for harvesting crops. When the years are many, you are to increase the price, and when the years are few, you are to decrease the price, because what is really being sold to you is the number of crops.

Leviticus was talking about an agrarian economy. If you wanted to apply this today, you might generalize to something like this: The Bible does not support private ownership of the means of production. The owner owns the product, not the means of production.

Taking Leviticus 25 seriously would force a sweeping re-visioning of the economic system. That would be a lot of work, and cause a certain amount of distress for the people who own property under our more free-trading definition. Why go to all that trouble? Unless you think this the Word of God or something.

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What the Court Decided About ObamaCare

July 2, 2012 – 1:05 pm

Thursday, the Supreme Court announced its decision that the individual healthcare mandate, and hence the Affordable Care Act as a whole, is constitutional. It was a 5-4 decision, with Chief Justice Roberts siding with the Court’s four liberals and Justice Kennedy (the usual swing vote) joining the other three conservatives.

I was thrilled. Yes, Roberts got to that decision in an odd way (more on that later), and states were given the option to opt out of the Medicaid expansion. (I expect Republican governors to posture a lot about this, but I have a hard time believing they’ll actually refuse.) But the alternative was stark: We’d be back to square one on health care, stuck with 50 million uninsured Americans, spiraling healthcare costs that are already the highest in the world, and no plan on the table to fix any of it.

So we should all take a moment to do a happy dance.

Done? OK, now let’s look at this in a wider perspective.

History. Democrats have been trying to get some form of national health insurance since Truman. LBJ got Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 60s. Clinton tried and failed to get universal health care in the 90s.

Fear that Democrats might someday succeed in passing a Medicare-for-everybody plan that put private health insurance companies out of business caused the conservative Heritage Foundation to propose an individual mandate in the 1989 report Assuring Affordable Health Care for All Americans. The Republican alternatives to HillaryCare in the 90s usually claimed not to have mandates, but tax credits were jiggered to produce the same result: If you chose not to have insurance, you paid more to the federal government.

And of course, an individual mandate is a key and necessary provision of RomneyCare in Massachusetts, which Mitt explained here:

The interesting detail in all of this conservative campaigning for an individual mandate was that its constitutionality was never addressed as a problem. As long as it was a conservative alternative to Democratic proposals, no one challenged the mandate’s constitutionality.

In May, Salon’s Andrew Koppelman asked the question: When did the individual mandate become a constitutional issue?

The first exploration of Congress’s authority to enact a mandate was a paper by Mark Hall, which he posted on SSRN in February, 2009. (I have not been able to find even a hint of the constitutional objection before Obama’s election, even though mandates have been proposed, mainly by Republicans, since the early 1990s.) He concluded that the mandate easily followed from existing commerce clause jurisprudence. … The first published claim of unconstitutionality that I have been able to find is a July 10, 2009, Federalist Society paper by Peter Urbanowicz and Dennis G. Smith. They created the now notorious action/inaction distinction, declaring that “Congress would have to explain how not doing something – not buying insurance and not seeking health care services – implicated interstate commerce.”

Before that, nothing. Crickets.

What Roberts Said. So this is where we are: I did a happy dance because the Court’s partisan Republican majority only managed four votes to shoot down a Republican healthcare idea that Democrats finally managed to pass. Their constitutional objection was based on an ad hoc legal theory that simply did not exist until a few months before Congress passed the law.

Worse, in giving his OK to ObamaCare, Roberts still signed off on the ad hoc action/inaction theory and rejected the Commerce Clause justification that seemed obvious to everybody only two years ago. Instead, he re-interpreted the mandate as a tax and found justification for it in Congress’ constitutional power to tax:

The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance. Section 5000A  would therefore be unconstitutional if read as a command.  The Federal Government does have the power to impose a tax on those without health insurance. Section 5000A is therefore constitutional, because it can reasonably be read as a tax.

Now, I can’t complain too much about this, because I’ve been lamenting for months that the mandate would obviously be constitutional if Congress had just replaced the word penalty with tax. Of course, if they had done that, it’s possible that conservatives would have trumped up some novel legal theory that limited the Taxing Clause. Who knows? If you want to throw out a law badly enough, you can always come up with something.

The Ginsburg Dissent. If you want to see what would have been a 9-0 decision in the 1990s, and probably even an 8-1 or 7-2 decision two years ago, scroll past the 59 pages of Roberts’ decision and read the dissent by Justice Ginsburg. (She dissents from Roberts’ reasoning, but not his conclusion that ObamaCare is constitutional. So she is also technically part of the majority that Roberts is writing for.)

There is a very striking difference in tone between Ginsburg’s opinion and both Roberts’ opinion and the joint dissent by the four conservative justices. Ginsburg consistently talks about reality, giving examples and statistics about what is happening here and now in the healthcare market. Meanwhile, Roberts and the conservative bloc mainly discuss bizarre fantasies in which Congress might force everybody to buy broccoli.

At the root of the conservative rejection of the Commerce Clause justification is the idea that Congress’ power to regulate commerce does not include the ability to “create” commerce by forcing people to buy a product (health insurance) they otherwise would not. The objection rests on two points:

  • Individuals should be able to escape Congress’ commerce-regulating power by not participating in the regulated markets.
  • Individuals can choose not to participate in the healthcare market by not buying insurance, not going to the doctor, etc.

The first point sounds reasonable, but has no real basis in legal precedent. And Ginsburg correctly observes that because accident and illness strike even young and apparently healthy people without warning, and because emergency rooms are obligated to treat first and ask for payment later, the second point is just false. Individuals actually cannot avoid adding risk to the health-care system.

Insurance companies and health-care providers know that some percentage of healthy, uninsured people will suffer sickness or injury each year and will receive medical care despite their ina­bility to pay. In anticipation of this uncompensated care, health-care companies raise their prices, and insurers their premiums. In other words, because any uninsured person may need medical care at any moment and because health-care companies must account for that risk, every uninsured person impacts the market price of medical care and medical insurance.

This is also inherently a national problem, precisely the kind of thing that the Founders wanted Congress to have the power to solve.

States cannot resolve the problem of the uninsured on their own. Like Social Security benefits, a universal health-care system, if adopted by an individual State, would be “bait to the needy and dependent elsewhere, encouraging them to migrate and seek a haven of repose.” Helvering v. Davis, 301 U. S. 619, 644 (1937).

In normal times, that would be that. As a unanimous Court wrote in Katzenbach v. McClung (1964)

Where we find that the legislators, in the light of the testimony and facts before them, have a rational basis for finding a chosen regulatory scheme necessary to the protection of commerce, our investigation is at an end.

But these aren’t normal times, so Ginsburg has to attack Roberts’ examples directly.

An individual “is not ‘active in the car market,’” the Chief Justice observes, simply because he or she may someday buy a car. The analogy is inapt. The inevitable yet unpredictable need for medi­cal care and the guarantee that emergency care will be provided when required are conditions nonexistent in other markets. That is so of the market for cars, and of the market for broccoli as well. Although an individual might buy a car or a crown of broccoli one day, there is no certainty she will ever do so. And if she eventually wants a car or has a craving for broccoli, she will be obliged to pay at the counter before receiving the vehicle or nour­ishment. She will get no free ride or food, at the expense of another consumer forced to pay an inflated price.

So no, it doesn’t follow that Congress can make us eat broccoli if the Commerce Clause allows an individual mandate.

The Medicaid expansion. One of the ways ObamaCare increases the number of people with coverage is that it expands eligibility for Medicaid. Everybody under 65 with a household income less than 133% of the poverty line becomes eligible.

Medicaid is a federal/state partnership, so the expansion can only happen if the states go along. The ACA tries to make it painless for the states to cooperate by covering 100% of the cost of the expansion for the first two years, and 90% thereafter. It tries to make the expansion painful to turn down by saying that Medicaid is a take-it-or-leave-it deal. States can go along or lose the Medicaid funding they already get.

Roberts found that this was too coercive, though he didn’t specify what makes a non-cooperation penalty too high. Ginsburg finds that the Medicaid expansion is within the normal power of Congress to offer funding with conditions, and does not see the take-it-or-leave-it part as a penalty at all, since each year is a new appropriation, subject to its own conditions.

Future Congresses are not bound by their predecessors’ dispositions; they have authority to spend federal revenue as they see fit. The Federal Gov­ernment, therefore, is not, as the Chief Justice charges, threatening States with the loss of “existing” funds from one spending program in order to induce them to opt into another program. Congress is simply requiring States to do what States have long been required to do to receive Medicaid funding: comply with the conditions Congress prescribes for participation.

As I said above, I doubt the states will opt out anyway. If they do, then ObamaCare will cover somewhat less than 30 million new people, and the opting-out victims will be poor and near-poor people.

The conservative dissent. Justices Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy combine in a dissent that is both radical and polemic, full of scary quotes about the Commerce Clause turning into “a font of unlimited power” or “a general authority to direct the economy”.

Its conclusion is that the ACA must be thrown out in its entirety.

Think about that: Based on a legal theory that did not exist two years ago, and whose advocates are almost entirely in conservative think tanks, the Court came within one vote of striking down the biggest piece of social legislation in half a century.

Salon’s Paul Campo has an even scarier theory: Looking at internal evidence in the text, Campo speculates that the conservative dissent was originally written to be the majority opinion, and that Roberts changed his mind late in the game.

So we dodged a bullet, and the country gets to have RomneyCare. Unless it elects Romney. Then the Happy Dance will be over.

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What the Court Decided About Immigration

July 2, 2012 – 11:55 am

Last Monday, the Supreme Court struck down three of the four challenged sections of Arizona’s anti-immigrant law, S.B. 1070. As usual, the media covered the event as if it were nothing but a pivotal game in a partisan play-off series, and went back and forth on whether this was victory or defeat for the Obama administration.

Don’t be distracted or confused. If you read the decision, the outcome is pretty clear: It’s a victory for people who want to see immigrants (documented or undocumented) treated fairly. It’s a defeat for anybody who wants the police to hound Hispanics out of Arizona.

S. B. 1070 was passed by the Arizona legislature and signed by Governor Jan Brewer in April, 2010. The Obama administration challenged the law in court before it could take effect, and a federal injunction has prevented Arizona from enforcing it until the case was settled.

Well, now it’s settled. Three of the four challenged provisions were struck down immediately:

  • Section 3 made it a state crime for a non-citizen to fail to carry documentation authorizing their presence in the country.
  • Section 5C made it a state crime for an undocumented alien to seek or accept employment.
  • Section 6 authorizes Arizona state police to arrest without a warrant any non-citizen who they have reason to believe has committed an offense that would make them deportable.

Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, with Chief Justice Roberts and three justices from the Court’s liberal wing (Breyer, Ginsburg, and Sotomayor) concurring. Justice Kagan recused herself because she was in the Obama administration when the case was being prepared, and so might appear to have a conflict of interest. (Recusal decisions are up to the justices themselves. Liberal justices take these decisions seriously. Conservatives like Thomas and Scalia do not, even when money is involved.)

The reason Governor Brewer claimed victory and some liberals complained of defeat was that the Court did not strike down the fourth provision, 2B, which Justice Kennedy summarized like this:

Section 2(B) of S. B. 1070 requires state officers to make a “reasonable attempt . . . to determine the immigration status” of any person they stop, detain, or arrest on some other legitimate basis if “reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States.” Ariz. Rev. Stat. Ann. §11–1051(B) (West 2012). The law also provides that “[a]ny person who is arrested shall have the person’s immigration status de­termined before the person is released.”

This section is why S.B. 1070 became known as the “papers please” law. It conjures up visions of police harassing anybody with brown skin or an accent, and locking them up until they can prove they’re in the country legally. (You always go swimming with your passport, don’t you?) Such behavior is certainly in line with the expressed purpose of the law, which is to pressure undocumented immigrants until they “self-deport”. And I’m projecting here, but I’d guess that many S.B. 1070 supporters will consider it a bonus if legal Hispanic immigrants leave the state too.

So why didn’t the Court strike 2B down? Justice Kennedy’s reasoning shouldn’t give any comfort to the people who want to harass Mexicans. It all hangs on the timing of the case and on that phrase “reasonable attempt”.

The administration sued before the law went into effect, before Arizona police came up with enforcement guidelines, and before the state courts had a chance to rule on whether those guidelines follow the state constitution. Kennedy doesn’t want to assume that those people won’t do their jobs properly.

At this stage, without the benefit of a definitive interpretation from the state courts, it would be inappropriate to assume §2(B) will be construed in a way that creates a conflict with federal law.

Justice Kennedy could imagine state courts toning 2B’s interpretation down to something like this: As long as we’re holding you for something else already, we might as well check with ICE to see if you’re in the country legally, and if not, see what they want us to do with you.

However, Kennedy also envisioned an interpretation where police would hold brown-skinned jaywalkers (rather than just ticketing them as usual) or extend the detention of other suspects while waiting for immigration information, which (since the rest of the ruling established that immigration is federal territory) is none of their business anyway. Kennedy left little doubt that this would be seen as an unreasonable attempt to determine a person’s immigration status.

So the Court didn’t endorse 2B, it just let Arizona off with a warning. If 2B comes back to the Court as a racial profiling case with actual victims, it will get struck down then.

If you doubt that reading of the Court’s decision, think about this: None of the liberal justices felt the need to write a dissenting opinion. That should tell you who won.

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I Was Undocumented in Arizona

July 2, 2012 – 11:06 am

Real Americans carry ID

When I turned 50 a few years ago, I started doing something sort of paranoid: I always jog with my driver’s license and medical card, in case I have a heart attack. So far it’s never come in handy, but I keep doing it.

Paranoia has its costs, though. Almost two weeks ago, I was at Logan Airport in Boston when I flipped my wallet open and stared at an empty plastic window. My driver’s license was in a t-shirt pocket in my laundry hamper. I had no other photo ID.

My first thought was to change my flight and come back tomorrow, but that would mean missing a whole day of the conference I was going to – the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly in Phoenix – so I went with my second thought: See what happens.

I got a boarding pass from a machine that didn’t care what I looked like, then waited in line with everybody else and apologetically told my story to the TSA guy. He called over a supervisor, who looked at what I did have: two credit cards and prescription bottle. Making no promises about what would happen when I tried to come home, he let me through.

Eight days later, TSA in Phoenix was more thorough. They scoffed at my credit cards and pill bottle, as well as at my business card (which has a photo), and the ID the conference had given me. They asked about my health-insurance card, which of course was keeping my driver’s license company in the laundry hamper. They would have liked to have seen some mail with my address on it or maybe a utility bill, which I might have packed if I had known I was going to forget all my other ID.

So they called up a government database and started asking me questions about myself: my address and phone number, my wife’s maiden name, other towns I had lived in, and so on. Some of the stuff I didn’t know, like the names of the neighbors in my apartment building. Eventually they did an explosives-residue test on my hands, and then let me through.

At no time was I treated with anything other than respect. No one implied that I was a criminal or that I was trying to get away with something.

While I was undocumented, I learned two things of political significance:

First, those advocates of voter-ID laws who claim it’s no big deal because you already need a photo ID to do absolutely everything else in this society – they’re just wrong. A lot of people will ask for a photo ID, but if you don’t have one they work around it. For example, some places took my credit card without asking. When someone did ask, nobody batted an eye when I said, “Oh, never mind, I’ll pay cash” or called my wife over to charge it on her card. They may have had other work-arounds, but I didn’t ask.

TSA definitely will work with what you have, because they’re just trying to verify your identity, not stop you from traveling. On the other hand, when you try to vote in a Republican state, you run into a process that absolutely won’t work if you don’t have an official state-issued photo ID, and even a state-university ID isn’t good enough. That’s unusual, and you have to wonder if that’s because the purpose is to stop you from voting.

Second, it was ironic that I was on my way to Phoenix, and that one of the things I would do there was protest the Arizona immigration law, S.B. 1070, which is sometimes known as the papers-please law.

I wandered around Arizona for a week with no proof that I’m a US citizen other than my white skin, my Illinois accent, and a nice pair of khakis. Nobody cared. I never had to explain myself and I never had cause to be afraid.

Everybody who heard my license-in-the-hamper anecdote thought it was funny and wanted to know how I got through TSA. But if I’d been brown, poor, and speaking with a heavy Hispanic accent, the story might not have been so entertaining.

So I was undocumented in Arizona and nothing happened. No drama, no excitement.

That’s how white privilege usually shows up: Nothing happens. Think about that the next time you’re out in public and nothing is happening.

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If Not ObamaCare, What?

June 18, 2012 – 12:36 pm

One way or another — either by decree of an activist Supreme Court or by winning in November and repealing the Affordable Care Act — Republicans are aiming for a post-ObamaCare world. What would they do then?

Despite the rhetoric against it, ObamaCare has never been just an extension of federal power for its own sake. It is an attempt to solve a serious problem: When President Obama took office, something like 50 million Americans did not have health insurance. Millions more had hollow health insurance: Their most likely health problems were labeled “pre-existing conditions” and not covered. Also, yearly or lifetime caps on what the insurance company had to spend meant that people were only covered if they didn’t get too sick. In short, millions of Americans with some kind of insurance still faced bankruptcy if they had major health problems.

The ACA is not a perfect solution. Some people will still fall through its cracks, but ObamaCare imposes federal standards that do away with hollow insurance, and (when it fully takes effect in 2014) it will considerably shrink the pool of uninsured Americans.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether this was the best we could do, or whether the same or better results might have been achieved more efficiently with either more or less government intervention. But reasonable people can’t argue with this: If ObamaCare gets repealed, we’ll then face the same serious health-care problem that President Obama faced when he took office.

What would President Romney do about it?

The Romney campaign web site has a page about that. At first glance, it looks like a serious plan: It has 15 bullet points, each of which looks like a link to some detailed position paper. However, they aren’t links; they’re just bullet points formatted in blue.

That’s all you get.

Blanks, not bullets. A few of the 15 are standard conservative talking points that sound good but are basically empty, like capping malpractice awards. (I’ve explained before why I think this will accomplish very little. Short version: Malpractice awards themselves are a trivial part of the overall healthcare budget, and claims about “defensive medicine” don’t hold up when put to the test. States that cap malpractice awards don’t suddenly see their healthcare costs drop.)

Another empty bullet: “Prevent discrimination against individuals with pre-existing conditions who maintain continuous coverage.” Good as that sounds, it just restates what the HIPA Act established in 1996. People who spend their 20s in some Starbucks-barista type job could still be out in the cold when they finally do try to get insurance later on.

And yes, it would be nice to have “IT interoperability”, “non-litigation alternatives to dispute resolution”, and “Consumer Reports-type ratings of alternative insurance plans”, but none of that is going to help you much if you get cancer. And actually guaranteeing such stuff would be too much government intervention anyway, so Romney just pledges to “encourage” and “facilitate” these changes.

States and individuals lose power to corporations. Romney’s website highlights this quote:

I believe the better course is to empower the states to determine their own health care futures.

And yes, the substantive parts of the Romney plan do appear to move responsibility and decision-making from the federal government to states and individuals. However, when you assemble the bigger picture the bullet-points paint, the real story is that power moves to the insurance companies.

Here’s how: The federal government gets out of the standards-making business, apparently returning that power to the states. However, the bullet “Allow consumers to purchase insurance across state lines” undoes all that state power. If consumers can purchase insurance in any state, then states can’t regulate the health insurance sold to their citizens. If Vermont has high consumer-protection standards and New Hampshire low ones, then health insurance companies will only offer Vermonters policies written in New Hampshire.

You could argue that the market will provide whatever consumers demand, but we’ve seen this scenario play out before, when interstate banking was deregulated in 1999. If you have a Citicorp credit card, you send your payments to South Dakota. Bank of America payments go to Texas. That’s because those states have low consumer-protection standards. Would you like to have a Visa protected by the more consumer-friendly laws of, say, Massachusetts? Good luck with that; you won’t find one.

The same thing happened 100 years ago with corporate charters. Half of all U.S. corporations are chartered in Delaware, because Delaware won the race to the bottom.

So we know pretty well what will happen to health insurance if there are no federal standards and insurance companies can sell across state lines: States will race to the bottom until a few states say that health-insurance companies can do whatever they want. Then all policies will be written in those states. There won’t be anything you can do about it, because nobody you can vote for will have any control.

Block grants. Romney’s first bullet reads “Block grant Medicaid and other payments to states”. The cost of Medicaid is currently shared between the states and the federal government. (This article says the feds pay 60% in Texas.) For its contribution, the federal government gets to establish standards.

A block-grant approach would have the federal government say, “Here’s some money for Medicaid; spend it however you want.” By writing that check, the federal government would completely discharge its responsibility for providing health care to poor people.

The assumption behind this approach is that federal standards are inefficient. Left to its own devices, a state might get more out of the money than it does with the feds looking its shoulder. That may or may not be true, and it can work in either a conservative or a liberal direction. (Vermont is hoping for some kind of no-strings arrangement as it moves towards a single-payer system.)

But something else happens when you move the federal government out of the picture: You break the link between poor people’s health care and the Federal Reserve.

As we have seen since 2007, the federal government can borrow money in large quantities even during a financial crisis. And since dollars are created by the Federal Reserve, it is literally impossible for the federal government to go bankrupt as long as it owes dollars.

But states can go bankrupt, and the threat of bankruptcy can force them to do otherwise unthinkable things. Since 2007, states have been canceling projects and laying people off in droves — not because they wanted to destroy jobs and not because they suddenly discovered they didn’t really need teachers or firefighters or highways. But tax receipts were down, needs were up, and something had to give.

If there were no federal standards and federal money involved, Medicaid would be the obvious place to cut during a  crisis. (Texas keeps looking at abandoning the Medicaid system anyway,  even if it means losing the federal money.) Sure, some people would die, but they’re poor and don’t have press agents, so who would notice? (When did you last see a headline like “Sick homeless man dies in alley”? Do you think it never happens?) And if the poor decided to move to a more compassionate state, so much the better. Win/win.

In short, a state Medicaid program can’t provide the same security as the current system. States can promise whatever they want, but in a crisis those benefits would vanish.

And even in good times, states would feel pressure to race to the bottom. Be hard on poor people and maybe they’ll go somewhere else.

Responsibility. Everybody looks with horror at the upward-sloping trend in healthcare spending. But there are two ways to deal that trend: Figure out how to deliver care to everyone more efficiently, as most European countries do. Or push the responsibility off on somebody else, with the ultimate result that federal government won’t be held responsible when there’s no money to take care of people.

Romney wants to go in the second direction. Under President Romney, we could expect more and more people to have hollow insurance policies (written in whichever state allows the hollowest insurance). More and more people will either go bankrupt when they get sick, or will depend on state programs that go unfunded in hard times.

Stacked up against that future, ObamaCare looks pretty good.

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What Senate Candidates Deserve Your Support?

June 18, 2012 – 10:53 am

Last week a Sift-reading friend told me she had set aside some money to contribute to Senate candidates, and wondered where I thought it would be best spent.

We agreed that this is a good time to contribute. In general, early money is more valuable than late money, but (if you’re like me) you’d usually rather see your money spent in the general election than during the primary. So one of best times to contribute is right after the primaries bring the race down to a Democrat vs a Republican.

There are 33 Senate races this year, but a few simple criteria will narrow down the candidates worth contributing to or volunteering for.

I’ve never claimed to be non-partisan. (I try hard to keep the Sift honest, but I’m not trying to be neutral. I write what I believe, not just what I want you to believe.) So it shouldn’t surprise anybody that my first criterion is that I’m only considering candidates who will caucus with the Democrats. (That would include independents like Bernie Sanders of Vermont and probably Angus King of Maine.) Anybody committed to vote for Mitch McConnell as majority leader is off my list.

Second, the race should be close. I love Bernie Sanders, but I expect him to win with or without me. Real Clear Politics currently rates 8 races as toss-ups: Florida, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, North Dakota, Virginia, and Wisconsin.

Whether that’s your serious-support list or not depends on how optimistic/pessimistic you are about what will happen between now and November. If you expect a big Democratic surge that isn’t showing up in the polls yet, then you might want to reach for one of RCP’s “leans Republican” seats, like Arizona, where Richard Carmona currently trails by about 11%. If you expect the opposite, you might want to defend one of the “leans Democratic” candidates, like Sherrod Brown in Ohio, ahead by 8%.

I don’t really have a hunch about the trend, so I’ll stick with the toss-ups. Next, I want strong progressive voices in the Senate. I want somebody who’s going to make me proud, not just be slightly better than a Republican. That takes Bill Nelson of Florida (not to be confused with Ben Nelson of Nebraska, who is worse) off my list. He has a history of joining Republicans on issues like eliminating the estate tax, and he’s generally one of the last Democrats to get on board for things like raising the debt ceiling. So, Bill, I’ll be rooting for you on election night, but I can think of people more deserving of my time and money.

Elizabeth Warren

Two candidates that jump right out at me are Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. Both of them will face an avalanche of out-of-state money, Warren from the financial industry and Baldwin from the religious right.

Elizabeth Warren. Warren you’ve probably heard of, even if you’re not from Massachusetts. I first noticed her when she was chair of the Senate’s TARP Oversight Committee. She did several very plain-spoken, hard-hitting interviews on Rachel Maddow’s show where she laid out exactly how opaque the program was and how few of the underlying problems were being fixed.

The best argument for putting Warren in the Senate was the Jamie Dimon testimony to the Senate Banking Committee. (More about that in the Nuggets.) Warren is exactly the person who should have been in that room.

She’s a Harvard law professor, so her opponent Sen. Scott Brown is trying to tar her with the Harvard elitist label. But she wasn’t born into the Harvard strata of society, she started in the working class and climbed the ladder. She understands ordinary people and wants to be in a position to watch their backs.

Current polls are about as close as polls can be: Brown 43.8%, Warren 43.5%. I expect Warren to win a close race for three reasons: Undecideds have a tendency to break against the incumbent, Massachusetts is a blue state, and Warren’s supporters are genuinely enthusiastic about her. But Wall Street really hates Warren, so Brown will have a lot of money to spend.

Tammy Baldwin. Unless you live in Wisconsin, you may not know much about Tammy Baldwin. She’s been in Congress for 14 years, and is the only openly lesbian congresswoman. (She was already out of the closet when she ran in 1998. Up until that time, the only gay representatives had come out while in office.) In 2010, National Journal’s ratings had her tied for being the most liberal member of the House.

Now, my first thought on hearing those facts would be: She’s going to get crushed. But so far that’s not happening. The Republican primary isn’t until August, and the RCP average has her trailing former Governor Tommy Thompson by 8.7%. But that average is skewed by a Rasmussen poll with a huge Republican bias (Thompson ahead 52%-36%).  The other two polls have her behind Thompson by manageable numbers: 4% and 6%, which could just be name recognition. Marquette University’s poll has her ahead of the other two likely Republican candidates.

There’s also no guarantee Thompson wins the primary, or gets through unscathed with the Club for Growth gunning for him. Chuck Todd sums up the race and interviews Baldwin:

Other toss-up Democrats. Claire McCaskill isn’t exactly an inspiring progressive voice. (National Journal rates her exactly in the middle as the 50th most liberal senator.) But this is Missouri we’re talking about; what did you expect? I think she’s doing as much as the voters will allow, and that holding this seat is key to holding the Senate. Polls: Rasmussen has her behind by double digits, but PPP says the race is tied.

Jon Tester in Montana is another incumbent Democrat in a Republican state. Don’t expect his support on, say, gun control. But his heart is in the right place when it comes to keeping Wall Street in check. PPP and Rasmussen disagree about who is ahead.

Immigration is likely to be a huge issue in the Nevada race. Shelley Berkley is challenging the incumbent Dean Heller, who was appointed when John Ensign resigned in disgrace. Nevada is a swing state that’s been trending blue as the Hispanic vote increases, but Republicans keep offering far-right candidates. Heller is a typical senate Republican, rated the 73rd most liberal senator. Berkley supports the DREAM Act; Heller wants to build a bigger border fence. The non-Rasmussen polls have this as a neck-and-neck race.

In Virginia, Tim Kaine vs. George Allen is a marquee match-up. Kaine has been governor and Allen senator. (Allen famously lost to Jim Webb in 2006 after the Macaca gaffe.) So far, I haven’t found anything thrilling on Kaine’s web site, and he seems to be running a vague I-was-a-good-governor campaign. But he’s narrowly ahead in the swingiest of swing states.

I confess I had never heard of North Dakota candidate Heidi Heitkamp until this morning. She’s running in a red state as a former state attorney general who fights for the people. Her web site is focused on local North Dakota issues, and I really have no idea how progressive she’d be. (She favors the Keystone Pipeline that environmentalists oppose.) Polls have her neck-and-neck with Rep. Rick Berg.

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What Happened in Wisconsin?

June 11, 2012 – 11:56 am

Short version: The long anticipated recall of Governor Scott Walker fizzled. Walker won the rematch against Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett by almost exactly the same margin (53%-46%) as their 2010 race.

Longer version: Split decision. The Democrats appear to have won one of the four state senate recall elections. The Republican hasn’t conceded and a recount seems likely, but if the 779-vote margin holds up, Democrats will control the Wisconsin senate.

So the upshot is that the union-busting Walker has already done will stand for another two years, as will his education cuts and the voter suppression law (if it ultimately survives its court challenge). But Walker won’t get any new shenanigans through the legislature until at least 2013, if then. That’s a big improvement on the way things were when the demonstrations started in February, 2011. Then Walker had solid majorities in both houses and could do pretty much whatever he wanted.

What it means. Everybody has been working hard to spin the result. Republicans want it to be a vindication of Walker’s policies and a sign that Romney can win Wisconsin in the fall. Democrats want to read it either as a rejection of the recall process itself, with little meaning for President Obama or even for Walker’s re-election in 2014, or as a sign of the Citizens United apocalypse, in which massive contributions from the very wealthy can buy a result.

Exit polls. The big reason to doubt Obama is in trouble in Wisconsin is Tuesday’s exit poll: Obama over Romney 51%-44%.

Republicans spin this by claiming the poll had a Democratic bias:

Considering the exit polls the media relied on showed a razor-thin difference between Walker and his Democratic opponent, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett, the logic behind some huge lead for Obama, produced by the same exit polls, melts away. Walker defeated Barrett by a 7-point margin.

Apply that same analysis to Obama’s 7-point lead in the same exit polls and the race in Wisconsin is actually closer to being dead even.

This point is bogus. The early exit poll, reflecting only people who voted in the morning, showed a neck-and-neck race between Walker and Barrett. But Obama’s 7-point lead comes from the final exit poll, which shows Walker winning by about the right margin. (Atlantic’s Molly Ball describes how exit polls work.)

Doubting the process. Walker got 53% of the vote. But according to the exit poll, 70% of the voters were dubious about whether a recall was appropriate at all. Of the 10% who said a recall was “never” appropriate, 94% voted for Walker. 60% believe in recalls “only for official misconduct”; Walker got 68% of their votes.

I think the wording of the choices skewed this result a little. The only other option — that a recall is appropriate “for any reason” — is too loose.  The actual justification for the recall — that compared to Walker’s radical policies, his vaguely conservative 2010 campaign amounted to fraud — might have gotten more than 27% agreement.

Still, it does seem that many voters set Walker a lower bar than he’d face in a regular election. For them, the question wasn’t whether Walker or Barrett would be a better governor, but whether Walker had done anything so egregious that the 2010 election should be overturned.

A good comparison here was the Clinton impeachment. Many people who disliked Clinton’s policies and thought his sexual escapades were shameful nonetheless believed that impeachment was unwarranted.

Not like Ohio. Another instructive comparison is Ohio, where Governor Kasich’s similarly vague cut-spending/create-jobs 2010 campaign led to a similarly radical ALEC agenda after the election. As in Wisconsin, Kasich’s attack on workers’ rights led to a popular backlash.

But Ohio’s constitution allows the voters to go after laws directly. So last November Ohio repealed Kasich’s anti-union S.B. 5 in a referendum by a 61%-39% margin.

In Wisconsin, the voters’ only recourse was to recall the people it had just elected, and the recall couldn’t begin until the officials had served a year in office. As a result, Tuesday’s recall was the culmination of more than a year of political turmoil: Democratic senators escaping to Illinois to deny Walker a quorum, the April 2011 Supreme Court election, and the state senate recall elections of last summer.

So it’s not surprising that some fed-up voters would be angry the recall itself. As one questioner at Netroots Nation’s Wisconsin post-mortem panel commented Friday: “If Wisconsin had had the same mechanism as Ohio, if we’d been able to go directly after the law, we would have gotten the same result.” (I watched the session’s livestream and haven’t re-watched the tape, so my quotations are only approximate. The fuzzily-sourced quotes below are due to my sketchy notes.)

Madison was the first Occupation

The message disconnect. The massive demonstrations in Madison in 2011 were the prototype for Occupy Wall Street. The Wisconsin protests had the same grass-roots, horizontally organized structure and the same independence from parties and candidates. As Harry Waisbren put it at Netroots Nation:

This movement is not about electing Democrats, it’s about ending the corporate subversion of our democracy.

But that led to a problem: The Occupy-style grass-roots movement was great at collecting one million signatures for the recall-Walker petition. But as soon as that petition was filed, the focus of the process necessarily shifted to electing Democrats — precisely what the movement is not about. Election campaigns continue to be top-down political-consultant-driven operations.

Things got worse after the primary, which was won by the centrist Barrett rather than the activists’ favorite candidate, Kathleen Falk. So rather than a referendum to restore workers’ rights, public education, and environmental protections, the campaign became a generic do-over of the 2010 Walker/Barrett race. As one Netroots Nation panelist put it:

Barrett never really focused on the messages that were coming up from the grass roots.

Now, maybe Barrett looked at his polling and decided those issues were losers. Who knows? But as a result, the logic of the recall slipped away. “The narrative was lost,” Waisbren commented. That led directly to the sense of the recall’s illegitimacy that was expressed in the exit poll.

Walker’s money advantage. This was the most expensive campaign in Wisconsin history, and Walker had an overwhelming money advantage. Mother Jones provides this chart:

In addition to these millions, millions more were spent by outside groups like the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity on “issue ads” that couldn’t directly say “Vote for Walker”, but left little doubt who you should support. All told, the Center for Public Integrity estimates that $63.5 million was spent. Walker’s ads started appearing back in November. As one Netroots Nation panelist said:

No one who lives in Wisconsin could doubt that Walker owned the airwaves.

What money can do. A lot of people are skeptical that it’s possible to buy an election. History is full of well-financed candidates who went nowhere, like Rudy Giuliani in 2008 or Phil Gramm in 1996. As Giulani now says:

Campaign spending doesn’t mean anything because you can spend it incorrectly.

Similarly, Rudy could say that being seven feet tall doesn’t mean anything in basketball, because you might be clumsy. But what if you’re not? What can you do with a cash advantage like Walker’s if you spend it correctly?

Obviously, nobody’s going to vote for Walker just because they’ve heard “Vote for Walker” 100 times and “Vote for Barrett” only 10-15 times. Where Walker-level money comes into play isn’t just in repetition, it’s in re-defining reality.

The jobs issue was a key example. The slogan of Walker’s controversial 2011 budget was “Wisconsin is Open for Business“. His agenda’s whole point was that industry would create jobs if the state cut corporate taxes, broke unions, and stopped protecting workers and the environment.

It hasn’t worked. The Wisconsin Budget Project looked at statistics from the Federal Reserve and concluded:

If we use December 2010 as our baseline for analysis, the newly released data indicate that only one other state (Alaska) has experienced slower growth than Wisconsin.

And Bloomberg News — hardly a left-wing outfit — reported:

Wisconsin was ranked last among states and the District of Columbia in economic health in 2011, the first year of Walker’s tenure, according to the Bloomberg Economic Evaluation of States.

Walker didn’t like those numbers, so he made up his own. The Bureau of Labor Statistics said Wisconsin had lost 33,900 jobs. But Walker’s re-analysis said that Wisconsin had gained 23,321 jobs. And then he blanketed the airwaves with this ad:

As Netroots Nation panelist Emily Mills pointed out, any state could adjust its numbers in the same way:

Whatever metric you use on jobs, if you apply the same metric to every state, Wisconsin is still dead last.

But nobody had millions of dollars to spread that message across the state, so Walker’s message stood.

That’s Wisconsin’s lesson for the post-Citizens-United era: The best use of money in politics is to define reality. Don’t just tell citizens to vote for you, create a virtual world in which voting for you makes sense.

What it means for November. Mitt Romney has a lot of disadvantages: He’s not very likeable. He’s a bad campaigner who has a habit of saying things like “I like to be able to fire people” and “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He’s a wooden debater who has yet to appear outside the conservative bubble. He has taken a lot of radical right-wing positions that he’ll have a hard time running away from. And he’s the poster boy for income inequality and financiers run amok.

But you have to give Romney this: He knows how to raise vast amounts of money and bury his opponents with it. And he has no scruples about redefining reality.

Limitless amounts of money are going to be spent in the fall. And while Obama is no slouch as a fund-raiser, he’s going to be outspent by a wide margin, especially if you count the corporate-funded outside groups like the Chamber of Commerce and Karl Rove’s Crossroads, whose ads I’ve already seen repeatedly during the NBA playoffs.

The bulk of that money isn’t going to be spent saying “Vote for Romney”. It’s going to be used to redefine reality. Millions already believe (falsely) that Obama raised their taxes, that he cut defense, that he isn’t really an American citizen, that he’s secretly Muslim, that the stimulus didn’t create jobs, and on and on and on. By November, millions more will believe other false things that make it logical to support Romney over Obama.

In Wisconsin, Obama currently benefits a little from Walker’s redefinition of reality: If the Wisconsin economy is getting better, maybe Obama isn’t so bad.

But now that Walker is safe until 2014, the up-is-down campaign will reverse itself. Wisconsinites can expect to start hearing that they’re in a depression, that things were never this bad under President Bush, and so on. It will make a difference.

A 7% difference? Too soon to tell.

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Challenging the Inquisition

June 4, 2012 – 1:40 pm

In April I linked to a Religious News Service article about the Vatican’s attempt to rein in American nuns. Boiled down, Rome’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (or, as it was called in its glory days, the Inquisition) complained that the nuns were thinking for themselves rather than letting the bishops think for them, and letting human suffering distract them from fighting the culture wars.

Rome’s solution was to put a man in charge of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious*, which represents 45,000 American nuns. Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, will (in his own words) “review, guide and approve, where necessary, the work of the L.C.W.R.”

Picking up the gauntlet. Apparently, LCWR will not take this meekly. After a three-day meeting, LCWR’s board released a statement saying (more or less) that the Inquisitors don’t know what the Hell they’re talking about:

[LCWR] board members raised concerns about both the content of the doctrinal assessment and the process by which it was prepared. Board members concluded that the assessment was based on unsubstantiated accusations and the result of a flawed process that lacked transparency. Moreover, the sanctions imposed were disproportionate to the concerns raised and could compromise their ability to fulfill their mission. The report has furthermore caused scandal and pain throughout the church community, and created greater polarization.

Unsubstantiated accusations, lack of transparency, and a flawed process, leading to disproportionate sanctions that cause scandal and pain … who would expect this from the Inquisition, given its sterling historical reputation?

LCWR’s president and executive director plan to go to Rome on June 12 to “raise and discuss the board’s concerns” with Sartain and his boss, Prefect (or, as the office used to be called, Grand Inquisitor) Cardinal William Levada.

Even after meeting the Grand Inquisitor face-to-face, the LCWR does not promise to obey, but only to “gather its members both in regional meetings and in its August assembly to determine its response”.

Conscience vs. obedience. So far, the Inquisition show no signs of being worried about the nuns’ response. Sartain’s recent article in the Catholic weekly America reads like the kind of flattery you shower on subordinates you expect to have no trouble with. (“That’s a good girl. Daddy’s proud of you.”**) He refers only obliquely and abstractly to his new role and mission, while effusively praising the obedient nuns of the past.

But in spite of having all the institutional power on its side, perhaps the Inquisition should be worried. A responding America article from Fordham University ethics professor Christine Firer Hines (not a nun) paints a more challenging picture:

Catholics sometimes compare the church to a corporation or a military organization, with clergy, religious, and laity answerable to bishops and pope as their top executives and CEO. From this (ecclesiologically dubious) vantagepoint, “wayward” behavior of L.C.W.R. members or their affiliates endangers the church’s discipline, and requires firm correction …

As Vatican II affirms, the episcopal office uniquely serves the revealed truth of the gospel. But that truth resides in and with the whole church. Beholden to military or business organizational models, pundits who deride L.C.W.R. sisters for posturing falsely as a “magisterium of nuns” disrespect the authentic authority not only of religious communities, but of the laity in their various charisms and vocations. Because the official magisterium does not have a monopoly on gospel truth, office-holders must constantly listen for that truth in the whole church …

From this point of view, the Vatican intervention, intended to “assist the L.C.W.R. in implementing necessary reforms” to bring it more fully in line with “an ecclesiology of communion,” cannot be properly understood as a one-way street. The very meaning of “communion” forbids this. … If bridges toward communion are to be strengthened in this process, what John Paul II calls the “dialogue that leads to repentance” must work in both directions.

In addition to implying that Rome’s treatment of women might have left it with something to repent, Hines’ implicit framing (“the magisterium” vs. “the whole church”) invites lay Catholics to interpret the hierarchy’s disrespect for the nuns as disrespect for them as well: Only the conscience of a bishop is valid; all others must simply get in line.

On the blog Catholic Moral Theology, St. John’s University theology professor Christopher Vogt uses similar framing:

It seems to me that one of the questions at the heart of this controversy is whether acting in conscience is primarily about being obedient to authority or about conscientious discernment.

He quotes the Inquisition’s assessment of LCWR:

Some speakers claim that dissent from the doctrine of the Church is justified as an exercise of the prophetic office.  But this is based upon a mistaken understanding of the dynamic of prophecy in the Church: it justifies dissent by positing the possibility of divergence between the Church’s magisterium and a ‘legitimate’ theological intuition of some of the faithful.

The assessment denies that possibility, leading Vogt to comment:

According to this framework, there is no possibility for the bishops ever to learn anything from the laity.  The bishops are never wrong; they don’t need any help.  Such a view collapses the tension we find in the [Second Vatican] Council documents which try to balance an affirmation of the importance and legitimacy of magisterial authority with the recognition that sometimes the Holy Spirit speaks authentically to the faithful in a manner that doesn’t pass through Rome – in the depths of their hearts.

It’s not just lay Catholic intellectuals who have taken up the nuns cause. The NYT reports:

Catholics in more than 50 cities held vigils and more than 52,000 have signed a petition in support of the sisters, organized by the Nun Justice Project, a coalition of liberal Catholic groups. The project is telling Catholics to withhold their donations to Peter’s Pence, a special collection sent to the Vatican, and give the money instead to local nuns’ groups.

Whose religious freedom? This argument comes at a time when the hierarchy is invoking “religious freedom” against the contraception provisions of Obamacare. But they defend an odd kind of religious freedom that America’s Founders would barely recognize: the freedom of religious institutions, a right virtually unrelated to (and sometimes at odds with) the consciences of individuals who are not bishops.

Meanwhile, Sister Carol Keehan, head of the Catholic Health Association — a consortium of organizations more directly affected by the contraception mandate — was happy with the compromise the Obama administration offered:

We are pleased and grateful that the religious liberty and conscience protection needs of so many ministries that serve our country were appreciated enough that an early resolution of this issue was accomplished.

Commonweal, a left-leaning Catholic political journal, described the bishops’ argument as “hyperbolic” and warned:

If defending religious freedom becomes a partisan issue or, worse, an electoral ploy, it will engender enormous cynicism in an electorate in which a significant majority of voters already think religion is too politicized. … In their simplistic rhetoric, the bishops sound more like politicians than pastors.

Catholic Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne commented: “Many bishops seem to want this fight.” And on the NYT Opinionator blog, Notre Dame philosophy professor Gary Gutting first dissects the bishops’ arguments, then says:

their often demagogic reaction suggests political rather than religious concerns. There is, first, the internal politics of the Church, where the bishops find themselves, especially on matters of sexuality, increasingly isolated from most Church members; they seem desperate to rally at least a fervid core of supporters around their fading authority. But the timing of their outbursts also suggests a grasp for secular political power.

The wider issue. The Commonweal editorial quotes research from sociologists David Campbell and Robert Putnam showing that the politicization of churches is causing young adults to disengage from organized religion, a message similar to the one David Kinnaman (president of the evangelical Protestant research organization the Barna Group) put forward in the 2007 book unChristian. 

A similar message based on personal experience was in the blog post “How to win a culture war and lose a generation” I linked to two weeks ago, in which Rachel Held Evans described her 20-something generation as “ready to stop waging war and start washing feet”.

This is an issue that crosses denominational lines. In one sense, it is Christianity’s perennial doctrinal purity vs. good works conflict. But it seems to be striking this generation with particular force. More and more young adults want to know not which religion is winning or even which religion is right, but whether any religion does any good.

Through their lives of service, the nuns are showing one way to answer that question. The bishops seem deaf to it.***

* Translation from the Catholic: religious in this context comes from the Latin religata, meaning bound. In other words, these are not just women who have “got religion”, but women bound by their vows to the Church; i.e., nuns.

** Not a direct quote.

*** Probably you’ve already run into the story of Cardinal Dolan’s threat that Catholic organizations will halt their charitable work rather than comply with the contraception mandate. I’m not linking to that claim because I still haven’t found an unedited tape or transcript of enough of Dolan’s remarks to convince me he wasn’t taken out of context.

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Who Can Obama Kill?

June 4, 2012 – 1:24 pm

Anwar al-Awlaki

The most talked-about story of the week was the NYT’s report of President Obama’s “kill list” of presumed Al Qaeda members who can become the targets of drone strikes.

In some sense we already knew the basics: The United States launches drone attacks that kill people in countries where we are not officially at war. There must be some process that chooses those people, and since it doesn’t include any judicial or legislative process, everyone involved must ultimately report to one person, the President.

Being an American citizen is no protection from this kind of death. We’ve known that since Kamal Derwish was killed in Yemen in 2002 because he was in a car with Qaed Salim Sinana al-Harethi, the suspected planner of the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. President Obama ratified that part of the Bush worldview when he ordered the death of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Islamic cleric who supported Al Qaeda ideologically, and was alleged to have become active in planning operations against America.

What was new in the article was, on the surface, the amount of detail we got about the process and how personally involved in it President Obama is. No one goes on the list without his personal approval, and he does not simply sign off on the recommendations of his subordinates.

But the subtext of the story was, in some ways, even more disturbing: The only way such a story could be written was with the cooperation of the White House. Numerous current and former administration sources are quoted; they didn’t all go rogue simultaneously. So the White House wanted us to know this stuff.

It’s an election year, so you have to assume the purpose is political. Presumably, the Obama campaign believes that ordering people’s deaths looks presidential. Presumably, getting a more detailed picture of Obama ordering deaths will assuage independent voters who might worry that Obama isn’t tough enough to defend the country.

Possibly, people like me are supposed to be comforted by the seriousness of the process. Actually, I’m not. I had always assumed the process was serious, at least in this administration. I’m sure they go to great lengths to make sure we’re not firing missiles at just anybody.

The problem, which is unchanged from the Bush years, is the lack of checks and balances. Maybe we’ll be lucky, and all future presidents will use this power conscientiously. But as long as the process is secret and unchecked, we are depending on the virtue of the president. All it will take to abuse this power is for one man to become corrupt or sloppy. Any secret executive-branch process that can be established by a president can be disestablished just as easily, without public notice.

President Obama owes us something better than this.

I recognize that the situation is not simple. If all these people were on a battlefield wearing the uniform of an enemy, ordering someone or something to shoot at them would be a normal part of war. The fact that Al Qaeda scatters its members across many countries and mixes with the civilian population does not make them less of an enemy or less deadly.

Yes, the battlefield could be anywhere and the enemy could be anyone. But the Bush formula, in which a battlefield commander’s prerogatives extend to all places and coalesce around the president, is a recipe for an eventual dictatorship and a reign of terror. In the long run, I am more afraid of such an omni-empowered president than I am of the terrorists.

And while I respect President Obama’s desire to take personal responsibility for these deadly decisions, if such decisions are made in the White House, eventually, in somebody’s White House, they will be made for political reasons. Dip in the polls? Let’s kill somebody.

The Founders did not envision this kind of war, and the Constitution was not written for it. But the overall principle of checks-and-balances should still apply. If you want to kill people who aren’t in a Congressionally-approved war zone, especially if they are American citizens, you ought to have to convince someone who doesn’t work for you. And ultimately, you should be held accountable for your decisions by somebody else who doesn’t work for you.

It should never be legal for one person, checked only by his subordinates, to order your death. That seems like an absolute minimum.

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