Tag Archives: law

Where Are We on Citizens United?

March 12, 2012 – 12:26 pm

So far, the 2012 election cycle has been everything the critics of the Citizens United decision expected. Mitt Romney is leading the race for the Republican nomination not because voters like him or his vision for the country, but because limitless quantities of money are available to tear down any serious rival. Newt Gingrich is able to stay in the race because one tycoon has decided that’s a good idea, and Rick Santorum has a super-rich sugar daddy as well. (Even so, a Romney-supporting hedge fund billionaire thinks the ultra-wealthy have “insufficient influence” on politics. I have a hard time picturing what would please him.)

Meanwhile, it’s been reported that the Koch brothers have pledged $60 million to defeat President Obama in the fall, and other plutocrats allied to them have offered $40 million more. Karl Rove’s Crossroads SuperPACs are planning to raise and spend $240 million, and there are many, many other such groups. That’s all in addition to whatever the Republican Party and its candidate spend.

So despite being opposed to SuperPACs in theory, President Obama has come to the conclusion that going into an election without one would be like playing in the American League without a designated hitter or refusing to take 3-point shots in the NBA; whether you think a rule is good for the game or not, you don’t have the option of moving to a fantasy world where the rule doesn’t exist.

There’s an argument about whether this is hypocrisy on Obama’s part. I agree with Kevin Drum that it isn’t. One of Drum’s examples applies to me: I claim income-tax deductions that I would do away with if I had the power. Playing by the rules and wanting to change the rules are two different things.

More money, more mud. Money equals speech, says the Supreme Court, and more speech means better democracy. But in practice, more money means more negative misleading speech.

With a little bit of money a candidate can get a positive message out and present an attractive image. But before long everyone has seen the beautiful family and its adorable dog. Everyone has heard that you want to turn Washington around and make America great again. Repeating those ads 24/7 doesn’t help you.

But carpet-bombing a state with charges that your opponent wants to strangle grandmothers, sell little girls to the Chinese, and raise taxes to subsidize terrorist training camps — that works. (It works even better if the charges come not from Candidate Smith, but from some untraceable Coalition to Save America From Everyone But Smith.) The more repetition the better. So the more SuperPAC money, the more negative the campaign.

What to do? This is the world wrought by Citizens United. Even Republicans don’t like it.

According to a new poll by pollposition.com … 68% of registered Republicans want money out of the Super PACs and only 21% said they were fine with it.

Democrats and Independents oppose this new unlimited-money politics by even larger margins. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the kind of political system where large majorities could change things?

Imagine that we do. What then? We could pass legislation to mitigate the worst effects of Citizens United. Or we could pass a constitutional amendment that undoes it completely. Or we could elect people who would appoint justices who would reverse the decision. Failing at that, we could craft legal cases carefully and hope to get the Court to change its mind.

People are trying to do all those things.

Legislation. Judge Kennedy’s decision in Citizens United imagined transparency rules that would allow intelligent voters to know where campaign money was coming from. The DISCLOSE Act would have implemented some minimal transparency rules, but Republicans filibustered it in the Senate. Democrats plan to reintroduce it in 2012.

I’ve googled “Republican alternative to DISCLOSE Act” and so far found nothing. GOP.gov says:

The proposed legislation is a punitive measure for associations of persons who choose to exercise their right to free political speech as guaranteed by the Constitution, and affirmed in the Citizens United v. FEC case.

which isn’t the kind of position that leads to compromise.

The Sunlight Foundation keeps track of this stuff. They’re also pushing the SUPERPAC (Stop Undisclosed Payments in Elections from Ruining Public Accountability in Campaigns) Act.

Constitutional Amendments. Senator Sanders of Vermont introduced the Saving American Democracy Amendment. It targets corporate personhood in general:

SECTION 1. The rights protected by the Constitution of the United States are the rights of natural persons and do not extend to for-profit corporations, limited liability companies, or other private entities established for business purposes or to promote business interests under the laws of any state, the United States, or any foreign state.

It prohibits corporate campaign contributions also allows Congress to pass laws limiting campaign spending in general.

Move to Amend has a similar proposal, which goes on to say:

The judiciary shall not construe the spending of money to influence elections to be speech under the First Amendment.

Such amendments are drawing grass-root support. Several dozen Vermont town meetings passed resolutions of support earlier this month.

Vermonters are not the first Americans to urge that the Constitution be amended to renew the century-old principle that citizens have a right to prevent corporations from buying elections. Referendums have already passed in Boulder, Colorado and Madison, Wisconsin. Cities across the country, including Los Angeles, have urged Congress to begin the amendment process. State legislatures in Hawaii and New Mexico have done the same.

Lawrence Lessig points out the Citizens United is not literally a corporate-personhood decision, but instead interprets the First Amendment to protect (in Justice Scalia’s words) “speech, not speakers”. So it’s not that Exxon has a right to speak, but that Congress has no power to limit the spread of Exxon’s message. Lessig’s proposed amendment is simpler:

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to restrict the power to limit, though not to ban, campaign expenditures of non-citizens of the United States during the last 60 days before an election.

Non-citizens in this case means both corporations and foreign individuals.

Lessig finds it hard to imagine that any such amendment will get the 2/3 majority it needs in Congress, given that infinite corporate money will rally to defeat representatives who support it. (Several elections would go by before the amendment could be ratified.) That’s why he favors a constitutional convention.

Congress hasn’t voted on any of these yet. Any amendment faces a long, slow road. But both Left (Equal Rights Amendment) and Right (Human Life Amendment) have shown that an amendment is a good long-term goal to build a movement around, even if it doesn’t get adopted.

Judicial remedies. Russ Feingold thinks Citizens United was just a mistake, and the Court needs to undo it. “The best thing to do is to get new justices, different justices, who will do the right thing.”

But the traditions of the Court itself work against such a plan. The doctrine of stare decisis requires the Court to respect the decisions of past courts unless and until they prove unworkable. “I wouldn’t have done that” is not a good enough reason to reverse a decision. That’s why major reversals (like Brown v Board of Education) are rare, and usually come after a long process of trying and failing to make the original decision work (as David Strauss explained in The Living Constitution).

The Montana Supreme Court has attempted an interesting end run around Citizens United. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion in Citizens United said:

We now conclude that independent expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

Five Montana justices said, more-or-less, “Given Montana’s unique history of corruption, things are different here.” That case has been appealed to the Supremes, and it will be interesting to see what they say. Probably they’ll overturn Montana’s decision and reaffirm Citizens United, but Justice Ginsburg might use the occasion to put the Court’s conservative majority on the spot and hold its ridiculous and unpopular reasoning up to ridicule.

Summary. At the moment, we have no immediate prospect of reversing Citizens United. But when you don’t have a bill, you have an issue. Democrats need to pound on this in 2012, because Republicans in Congress are taking positions that are out of step even with rank-and-file Republicans.

A good test case will be Scott Brown. He comes up for re-election this year, and claims to be an “Independent Voice for Massachusetts” rather than a right-wing extremist. He cited a number of reasons for voting against the DISCLOSE Act, including wanting to make it apply to unions as well as corporations, but he never put forward an alternative that he would support. (Republican moderates did the same thing on health care. Snowe, Collins, etc. — they seemed to be considering the ACA and came up with many minor objections to it, but they never said “Add this amendment and I will vote for it.”)

In the old days, the role of the moderates in each party was to craft pragmatic solutions and provide the swing votes to pass them. If they’re not doing that any more — if, instead, they’re just wringing their hands and making excuses for supporting the partisan agenda of their extremist colleagues — then there’s no reason to elect moderates.

The ball’s in your court, Scott. Do you want to do something specific about Citizens United, or are you OK with the system the way it is?

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (2)

Appeals Court: Prop 8 is Still Irrational

February 13, 2012 – 12:36 pm

If you’ve read any of my posts on previous same-sex marriage decisions — going all the way back to the 2003 ruling of the Massachusetts Supreme Court — you know the basic legal landscape. All same-sex marriage decisions revolve around two questions: How fundamental a right is a same-sex couple’s right to marry? And how much reason does the state have to deny that right?

Most pro-SSM decisions emphasize the second question, claiming that bans on SSM are not rationally related to any legitimate government purpose. And so, implicitly, the court is saying that SSM bans come from the majority acting out its spite against an unpopular minority.

A federal appeals court took that course Tuesday in upholding a lower court’s decision to strike down California’s Proposition 8. By 2-1, the judges said that Prop 8 fails the rational-basis test, the lowest legal standard.

The ruling rips one-by-one through the rationales given for taking away same-sex couples’ right to marry and finds them without any support in fact or logic: Prop 8 can’t be about the state’s interest in providing the best setting for child-raising, because it doesn’t change any of California’s rules about child-raising. Plus

It is implausible to think that denying two men or two women the right to call themselves married could somehow bolster the stability of families headed by one man and one woman.

It can’t arise out of a general prudence in deciding the definition of marriage, because it locks in a definition without further study.

Such a permanent ban cannot be rationally related to an interest in proceeding with caution.

It can’t be about protecting religious institutions from anti-discrimination laws, because Prop 8 doesn’t change those laws.

To the extent that California’s anti-discrimination laws apply to various activities of religious organizations, their protections apply in the same way as before.

It can’t be justified by what children will be taught about homosexuality in public schools, because that also didn’t change, other than the usual way that instruction changes as the world changes.

To protest the teaching of these facts is little different from protesting their very existence. … The prospect of children learning about the laws of the State and society’s assessment of the legal rights of its members does not provide an independent reason for stripping members of a disfavored group of rights they presently enjoy.

With all proposed rationales dismissed, the remaining conclusion is:

Proposition 8 is a classification of gays and lesbians undertaken for its own sake. … Proposition 8 operates with no apparent purpose but to impose on gays and lesbians, through the public law, a majority’s private disapproval of them and their relationships by taking away from them the official designation of “marriage” with its societally recognized status.

The opinion of the dissenting judge, N. R. Smith, is in some ways more damaging to Prop 8 than the court’s majority opinion, because it shows just how far you have to go to find some rational basis for the law. Atlantic’s Andrew Cohen summarizes:

Thus, as his language grew more specious and abstract, the “rational basis” test became the “rational relation to some legitimate end” test, which became the “reasonably conceivable state of facts that could provide a rational basis” test, which became the “have arguable assumptions underlying its plausible rationales” test.

This damning-with-faint-praise opinion leaves the impression that Prop 8’s rationales were not crappy enough to throw out, but just barely. Dahlia Lithwick calls Judge Smith’s dissent: “the death rattle of a movement that has no legal argument or empirical evidence.”

From here the case probably goes to the Supreme Court, where eight votes seem locked in. Justice Kennedy will make the decision.

In general, given the perspective of more than eight years, the comment that ended my analysis of the 2003 Massachusetts case is holding up pretty well:

Personally, I expect the same-sex marriage issue to follow the same course as interracial marriage. After a few years of Chicken-Little panic, the vast majority of Americans will recognize that the sky has not fallen, and that the new rights of homosexuals have come at the expense of no one.

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Escalating Bad Faith, Part I: Recess Appointments

January 9, 2012 – 1:04 pm

This week conservatives had a new reason to be outraged at President Obama: He appointed Richard Cordray head of the new Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, plus he added three members to the National Labor Relations Board.

What’s the problem with that? Well, these are recess appointments, a power that the Constitution gave the President so that vital posts wouldn’t go unfilled during the months when Congress was out of session.

In the era of cell phones and jet planes, recess appointments are an anachronism, because it’s quick and easy to call Congress back into session for anything really important. But in the last few administrations they’ve become part of an escalating power struggle between Congress and the President. As the struggle continues, the positions of both institutions (under either party) get further and further from anything the Founders wanted or should have wanted.

The point of this series (for which recess appointments are just the most timely example) is to highlight a crisis that gets very little attention in the mainstream media: escalating bad faith in government. Whoever started it (being a Democrat, I see most fault on the Republican side), these downward spirals are very hard to stop, and they’re extremely dangerous to the future of democracy.

History. The recess-appointment struggle starts with Article II Section 2 of the Constitution:

[The President] … by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law … The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

For years that clause was interpreted to mean that the two branches would work together in good faith: The President would nominate reasonably acceptable people and the Senate would approve them unless they found something seriously wrong. Just disagreeing with a nominee was generally not enough — to reject him or her you needed to find a scandal of some sort. (That’s the plot of the 1959 Pulitzer-winning political novel Advise and Consent.)

Until recent decades, rejections were rare. In 1968, the Senate filibustered President Johnson’s appointee for Chief Justice, pointing to some questionable speaking fees. (The vote was roughly bipartisan, with 19 Democratic senators voting not to end the filibuster.) In 1989, President Bush’s nomination of John Tower as Secretary of Defense was rejected because of his personal life. (Only one Republican senator voted against him.)

President Reagan and the Democratic Senate both escalated the battle in 1987: Reagan slapped the new Democratic majority in the face by nominating the extreme conservative Robert Bork to the Supreme Court, and the Senate slapped back by rejecting the nomination on ideological grounds, without finding a scandal.

Filibusters on ideological grounds, at least for judicial nominations, became standard during the Clinton and Bush Jr. administrations, but most posts within the executive branch continued to be filled with only minor friction, on the principle that the President should be able to work with people of his own choosing.

Two major non-judicial nominations the Democrats held up during the Bush years were John Bolton as UN ambassador and Steven Bradbury as head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. Bush Jr. used a series of temporary recess appointments to put them in office long-term — clearly not what the Constitution meant that power for. The Senate struck back by holding pro forma sessions — leaving a skeleton crew in Washington to open and close the Senate every week, so that it would not legally be in recess — even though it was in recess in any practical sense.

Since their numbers increased in 2010, the Senate’s Republican minority has escalated again: Nominees are filibustered (or their nominations are simply ignored) not even because of their ideology, but because of general policy issues unrelated to the nominee. Republicans don’t want the NLRB or the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau to function at all. But they don’t have the votes to abolish them, so they refuse to consider nominations for those positions. They have defended that refusal against recess appointments with the same pro-forma-session technique the Democrats used against Bush. (With this added wrinkle: The Senate’s Democratic majority can’t end the session because the Constitution won’t let it as long as the Republican-controlled House is in session.)

Now Obama has re-escalated by refusing to recognize the pro forma sessions and making recess appointments anyway. This, Republicans say, is a “tyrannical abuse of power“.

And it is, in some sense. But without it the Senate minority’s abuse of power stands unchallenged. The Founders never intended any of this.

This is part of a pattern in which all sides are acting in bad faith, and have been for decades. (And it’s not the only example, as I’ll discuss next week. Signing statements are another.) It creates a vicious cycle in which each escalation challenges the other side to either accept a defeat that seems illegitimate or to escalate further. There seems to be no obvious place for this to stop.

Next week: At the end of this road democracy unravels, because democracy depends as much on good faith as on elections and constitutions.

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Will the Court Throw Out Obamacare?

November 21, 2011 – 12:55 pm

Last Monday, the Supreme Court announced something that’s been obvious for a while now: It will rule on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, nicknamed the ACA or Obamacare. This was inevitable, because four appeals courts have ruled on the Act and disagreed: three said it was constitutional, and one said not. Since a federal law can’t be constitutional in some parts of the country but not others, the Supreme Court needs to straighten this out.

The rulings so far. At the district court level, rulings tended to be political: Judges appointed by Republican presidents invalidated the law while those appointed by Democrats upheld it. (The most polemic invalidation was Reagan appointee Judge Roger Vinson’s in the Pensacola District.) Fortunately, the appellate courts were more, well, judicious in their rulings. In particular, the D. C. appeals court ruling two weeks ago gives a good model of the two most likely ways the Supreme Court might go.

Like the Supremes, the D.C. court had a conservative majority: a Reagan appointee (Laurence Silberman), a Bush II appointee (Brett Kavanaugh), and a Carter appointee (Harry Edwards). Both the majority opinion and the dissent were written by the conservatives.

The majority opinion (by Silberman, supported by Edwards) upheld the constitutionality of the ACA. The dissent (Kavanaugh) didn’t rule on the constitutional issues, saying that the courts could not intervene until the law has fully taken effect in 2014.

Both opinions are well thought out, and I believe the Supreme Court will back one or the other of them.

The issues. The controversial part of the ACA is the individual mandate: It requires people to buy health insurance and penalizes them if they don’t. This notion was proposed by the conservative Heritage Foundation in the 1990s as an alternative to Medicare-like proposals for universal health care, because it keeps the health insurance industry private. Newt Gingrich supported the mandate then, and Mitt Romney made it the center of his Massachusetts healthcare plan.

Now, however, conservatives claim it is unconstitutional for this reason: Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution lists the powers of the federal government, and conservatives hold that none of those powers can be stretched to cover the individual mandate.

Supporters of the law claim that it is authorized by Section 8’s Commerce Clause

Congress shall have Power… To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes

plus the Necessary and Proper Clause

Congress shall have Power … To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing powers

In other words, Congress can regulate the interstate market in health care, and in carrying out that mission, Congress has found it necessary and proper to mandate that people buy health insurance.

It’s not a tax. The annoying thing about this whole debate is that Congress could have avoided it by wording the law differently. If it had called the mandate a tax instead of a penalty (in other words, we’re going to tax people who don’t have insurance) it would have fallen under the sweeping power to tax that Section 8 gives Congress:

The Congress shall have Power to lay and collect Taxes

One reason Judge Kavanaugh gives for delaying a ruling until after 2014 is that in the meantime Congress could make the whole issue moot with this minor rewrite of the law.

The who-pays-what-to-whom would be identical. The difference is purely moral: Under the ACA as it stands, an uninsured person is breaking the law, for which s/he is assessed a penalty (collectable by the IRS on the income tax form). If the mandate were a tax, an uninsured person could obey the law by paying the tax (in the same amount on the same form).

The administration has argued that this makes no practical difference, so the courts should rule the ACA constitutional under the taxing power. But judges aren’t buying it. Who’d have suspected: You can’t tell a judge that it makes no difference whether a person obeys or breaks the law.

Or maybe it is a tax. The main reason not to rule on the ACA until 2014 is the Anti-Injunction Act, which says that a judge can’t issue an injunction to prevent a tax from going into effect. If a tax is invalid for some reason, the proper process is for the government to begin collecting the tax and for the courts to get involved only after people to sue to get their money back.

The point, I think, is to keep one or two renegade judges from screwing up the whole government by shutting off its revenue.

I know what you’re thinking: If the mandate is a penalty and not a tax, what does the Anti-Injunction Act have to do with it? Well, apparently there’s a penumbra of some sort, so that if a non-tax is sufficiently tax-like, the Act applies. (You can tell from the D.C. court ruling that Silberman and Kavanaugh had a long argument about this. I confess to skimming this part of their opinions.)

Action vs. inaction. Sooner or later, though, either now or after it takes effect in 2014, the Court is going to have to rule on whether the Commerce Clause authorizes the individual mandate.

Anyone who wants to invalidate the ACA has to deal with the long history of courts interpreting the Commerce Clause loosely and expansively. Under current precedents, Congress can regulate economic activity within a state if that activity is part of a larger interstate market, and it can even regulate non-economic activity (like limiting the quantity of wheat that a farmer can grow for his own use) if some larger scheme of economic regulation depends on it. Commerce-clause justifications have only been rejected when the obvious intention of the law was to regulate local, non-economic activity (like keeping guns away from schools) on the vague justification that the activity has some eventual impact on interstate commerce.

So the basic commerce-clause justification of the ACA goes like this: Healthcare is an interstate market, so Congress has a legitimate interest in regulating it. The scheme implemented in the ACA is a legitimate attempt to regulate that market. That scheme falls apart without the individual mandate, so the mandate is necessary and proper to carry out Congress’ commerce-regulating power.

The counter-argument is that none of the precedents cover the ACA’s individual mandate, because they all concern some kind of activity, while the mandate is regulating inactivity. Simply by existing, the ACA claims, you affect the interstate healthcare market. So upholding the ACA is breaking new ground and substantially expanding the power of the government. If the ACA is upheld, what couldn’t Congress force people to do?

Judge Silberman’s ruling. Silberman agrees with the counter-argument up to a point, but not all the way to its conclusion. The precedents don’t cover inactivity, but the whole activity/inactivity distinction is itself new. It’s not in the Constitution, and it’s not implied by the precedents. So it’s not exactly conservative to toss the law out on these novel grounds.

What’s more, he rejects the basic conservative frame that the mandate is an individual-liberty issue:

Appellants’ view that an individual cannot be subject to Commerce Clause regulation absent voluntary, affirmative acts that enter him or her into, or affect, the interstate market expresses a concern for individual liberty that seems more redolent of Due Process Clause arguments. But it has no foundation in the Commerce Clause.

… it is irrelevant that an indeterminate number of healthy, uninsured persons will never consume health care, and will therefore never affect the interstate market. Broad regulation is an inherent feature of Congress’s constitutional authority in this area; to regulate complex, nationwide economic problems is to necessarily deal in generalities. Congress reasonably determined that as a class, the uninsured create market failures; thus, the lack of harm attributable to any particular uninsured individual, like their lack of overt participation in a market, is of no consequence.

Silberman finds no obvious place to limit Congress’ Commerce Clause power here, but notes that Congress is subject to a “political check”. In other words: This is one of many areas where Congress has the constitutional power to do all kinds of crazy things, and it’s up to the voters to see that they don’t. If Congress only had the power to do wise things, we wouldn’t need to have elections.

What will the Supreme Court do? I think that Silberman and Kavanaugh have blazed the two possible paths that an honest conservative judge can follow: Unless you want to invent some new restriction that isn’t in either the Constitution or the case law, you have to find the ACA constitutional. Your only other option is to punt the ball to 2014 or 2015 by invoking the Anti-Injunction Act.

Now, the Roberts Court has shown itself to be political. Its maneuvering around Citizens United, where it made a ruling more sweeping than either side was asking for, is a case in point. In that vein, I find it disturbing that the Court has chosen to review not just the individual mandate of the ACA, but also its Medicaid expansion, which none of the appellate courts had a problem with. That hints at another activist ruling, where the Court answers a question no one is asking.

Still, Silberman’s reasoning will be hard to reverse, particularly since his opinion quotes both Roberts and Scalia. So I believe the Court will take either the Silberman or the Kavanaugh route.

But the choice between them will be based on politics, not law. The Court’s decision, which may not come out until June, will frame the healthcare issue for the fall election. (Kavanaugh already hints at this by suggesting that a future president could decide not to enforce the mandate if he believes it to be unconstitutional.)

The decision will be determined by the Republicans’ electoral prospects: Will it be better for them to have the issue hanging, or to know that the ACA will take effect unless a new Congress reverses it or a new president refuses to enforce it?

So I’m taking the moderately cynical view of the Roberts Court. I don’t think they’ll throw the ACA out just because they dislike it politically, but which of the valid legal options they’ll take will be determined by politics.

By weeklysift | Posted in Articles | Also tagged | Comments (3)

ConConCon: Can the Grass Roots Find Common Ground?

October 3, 2011 – 12:58 pm

I think the fundamental problem in American politics is the corruption of our political system. It’s a corruption that makes it impossible for the Left to get what the Left wants and the Right to get what the Right wants. — Lawrence Lessig to Cenk Uygur at the ConConCon

Left and Right alike have proposals that poll well, but never make it through Congress: taxing the rich and a public option for health care on the Left, a balanced budget amendment and (in some polls) harsher immigration policies on the Right. The grass roots on both sides object to corporate personhood (79% in one survey) and were appalled when their government responded to the 2008 financial collapse by dishing out money to the same bankers who had screwed things up.

Originally designed to be the People’s voice, Congress has become a bottleneck controlled by special interests. Consequently, Left/Right political competition has only a limited amount of meaning. No matter how many seats either party wins, we won’t see single-payer healthcare (Left) or a flat tax (Right).

On the other hand, some ideas with little-to-no public support get through Congress easily. Lessig’s favorite example is the Sonny Bono Copyright Act of 1998, which extended the life of copyrights issued since 1923 — keeping valuable characters like Mickey Mouse and Superman out of the public domain. Copyright is a temporary monopoly that the government grants to encourage creativity, but extending the copyright of works that already exist serves no public purpose whatsoever. (“No matter what the US Congress does with current law,” Lessig observes, “George Gershwin is not going to produce anything more.”) The extension, amounted to a gift from Congress to Disney and Time Warner, who lobbied for it like 10-year-olds in December.

So who gets what they want out of Congress? Lessig calls them “the Funders” — the entities that finance political campaigns. And how can the People change the system to regain control of their government? By getting Congress to pass new laws or Constitutional amendments?

Good luck with that.

That’s the origin of this idea: Without minimizing the significance of their philosophical differences, can grass roots from the Left and Right come together in a campaign to make democracy meaningful again?

Tea Party? Lessig’s Rootstrikers organization explored this idea by getting together with Mark Meckler’s right-wing Tea Party Patriots to co-sponsor a discussion of a way to end-run Congress and fix the system another way: via a constitutional convention called by the States. Hence the Conference on the Constitutional Convention held in late September at Harvard Law School. (I “attended” via the live feed on the Web. I had hoped video of the sessions would be posted by now, but they aren’t. Consequently, all quotes are from memory or my hastily scribbled notes.)

I find that whenever I mention this co-sponsorship, people jump to the conclusion that the goal must be to generate some kind of homogenized, centrist agenda. To explain, I came up with this metaphor: Imagine two swordsmen dueling over a great prize. While they swashbuckle their way around the arena, focused on each other, somebody else walks past them, calmly stuffs the prize into a sack, and walks out.

The duel is real, but it becomes pointless if the swordsmen can’t ally to protect the prize.

The Civics of Article V. The possibility of a constitutional convention is embedded in the Constitution itself.

on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, [Congress] shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments

Once proposed by the convention, amendments would follow the same ratification path as constitutional amendments approved by Congress: They’d have to be ratified by 3/4ths of the states — 38 of the current 50. So any 13 states could block any of the convention’s amendments.

Because this would be an orderly process authorized by the current Constitution, speakers began referring to it as an “Article V convention” rather than a general constitutional convention that could spring from nowhere and make up its own rules. (The hallowed convention that produced our current constitution was unauthorized by the Articles of Confederation that it replaced. In particular, the Articles said that any change had to be approved by all 13 states. But the new constitution wrote its own rules and said it would go into effect if only 9 states ratified it.)

Article V is about as vague as the rest of the Constitution. But since no such convention has ever been called, Article V has two centuries of rust on it rather than the reams of precedent and case law that interprets most constitutional provisions. So there are a lot of open questions, which the ConConCon’s legal panel spelled out:

  • How do 2/3rds of the states “apply” for a convention? Every now and then, some legislature passes a call for a convention to consider such-and-such an amendment. If you total all those up, we’ve already had calls from more than 2/3rds of the states. But the general opinion is that the state’s applications have to be similar in some way; they have to be calling for the same convention, not just a convention. How similar do they need to be? Lessig proposes that states pass similar wordings that call for a convention in general, and then (in a second clause) urge the convention to consider the particular amendments popular in that state.
  • What if Congress ignores the applications? A lot of the Constitution assumes that people will act in good faith, and doesn’t specify what happens if they don’t. For example, the 12th Amendment specifies that (in the presence of Congress) the President of the Senate counts the votes of the Electoral College — the final step in electing a president. What if Senate President counts the votes wrong and declares himself president? All Hell breaks loose, I think.
    Similarly, what if Congress looks at the States’ applications for a constitutional convention and says, “Not gonna happen”? Or calls a convention under rules that make it unworkable? It’s not clear that anything other than public furor keeps Congress in line.
  • How do the conventioneers get chosen? Maybe that’s defined in Congress’ call. If not, nobody knows.
  • What if the convention breaks the rules set out in Congress’ call? Again, we’ve got a good-faith issue. Probably nothing happens; if 3/4ths of the states go ahead and ratify the amendments anyway, they become part of the Constitution.

Runaway conventions. The big question everybody asks is: What if a “runaway” convention goes wild and designs some whole new country for us? What it declares a socialist republic or a Christian theocracy or something?

The simple answer is that 13 states refuse to ratify it and the whole plan goes into the dustbin of history. There are at least 13 blue states and 13 red states, so nothing could pass without bipartisan support.

This only gets tricky if the convention does what the original convention did: writes new ratification rules for itself. (Example: What if the new constitution says it will be ratified by majority vote in a national referendum?) Then you get into the fuzzier question of legitimacy: At some point the country just ignores the process and the old government continues.

What a convention could do. The consensus of the legal panel was that constitutional amendments should be about the mechanics of government, and that more specific proposals (like Prohibition) are better left to legislation that can be easily repealed if it doesn’t work.

But the Supreme Court has boxed us into a situation where the corruption of our system can’t be rooted out without constitutional changes. So we should be looking for structural changes that make legislative change possible.

In particular, Lessig wants public funding of campaigns, through a voucher system similar to the one Ackerman and Ayres proposed in Voting With Dollars.

Fear of democracy. Lessig argues that the fear of a runaway convention results from an underlying fear of democracy and fear of each other, which the Powers That Be encourage and profit from. This is backwards, he argues: The Powers That Be (and not our fellow citizens) have proven that they’re not to be trusted.

We are used to a managed democracy, where the People only choose after the options have been very tightly scripted. (As Cake put it: “Some people drink Pepsi, some people drink Coke. The wacky morning DJ says democracy’s a joke.”) A constitutional convention would be deliberative, not managed. The conventioneers would have real responsibility, and a chance to shape the questions rather than choose from a prepared list of answers.

Lessig has faith in the deliberative powers of ordinary people, and supports Sandy Levinson‘s idea that the best way to choose conventioneers would be randomly, as juries are chosen. (The one jury I’ve served on supports his case; we rose to the occasion and did a good job.)

You got a better idea? Even Lessig is not wild about a ConCon. He’s been driven to it by the failure of everything else. Would it work? Or would it be taken over the same forces that distort the rest of our political system? Would it all come to nothing or produce some crisis of legitimacy?

He doesn’t know. But he doesn’t think we can keep doing what we’re doing.

Lessig’s keynote address was one of the most inspiring speeches I’ve ever seen. Unfortunately, the most inspiring part was in the question session, which that link doesn’t include. I’ll try to fill in from my notes and from a similar talk elsewhere.

This is how he answered the will-this-work question. First, he admitted that it probably wouldn’t. But then he asked:

If a doctor told you that your child had terminal brain cancer and there was nothing you could do, would you really do nothing? Just look at the doctor and say OK?

No you wouldn’t do nothing, because that’s what it means to love: to have the willingness to act compassionately for something, even if it seems impossible.

I am acting on the faith that all over America there are people who have this kind of love of country.

It is very rare to hear a liberal grab hold of the patriotism theme like this, and to attach it to having the courage to trust each other rather than the vicarious “courage” to send soldiers into somebody else’s country. I got shivers. It’s a powerful emotional argument.

But it also makes sense. If we can’t trust each other, then we can’t be a democracy. Where does that kind of thinking lead?

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Secret Laws

March 9, 2009 – 2:50 pm
I call on all governments to join with the United States and the community of law-abiding nations in prohibiting, investigating, and prosecuting all acts of torture and in undertaking to prevent other cruel and unusual punishment. — George W. Bush, June 26, 2003.
Ninety-nine percent of what we do is legal. — Scooter Libby, quoted by Jane Mayer in Chapter 12 of The Dark Side.

In This Week’s Sift:

  • Secret Laws: Nine Bush Memos Declassified. If the Bush administration had really believed in its theory of presidential power, it wouldn’t have been classified.
  • The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore … look for Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. It’s the best summary of the Bush administration war-on-terror story.
  • Tigerhawk. I develop sympathy for a maligned conservative blogger.
  • Short Notes. A couple scoops from the Onion. Thomas Friedman’s biggest mistakes. Atlas Shrugged as prophesy. Is Tim Geithner starting to sound like Donald Rumsfeld? Jon Stewart vs. CNBC. And more.
Secret Law: Nine Bush Memos Declassified

By now you’ve probably heard of the nine Bush administration memos that got declassified and released by the Obama Justice Department last Monday. I’ve skimmed a couple of these memos, but haven’t gone through them all in detail, so I am relying on people who have: Scott Horton, Glenn Greenwald, and Jack Balkin. (Back in April, I went through the Yoo torture memos line-by-line, so I’m not surprised by anything I’m reading now.)

The memos, prepared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) shortly after 9/11, say that the president can order military operations within the United States, and that the Bill of Rights would not apply to these operations. Also, according to the NYT:

the president could unilaterally abrogate foreign treaties, ignore any guidance from Congress in dealing with detainees suspected of terrorism, and conduct a program of domestic eavesdropping without warrants.

The newly released memos have gotten a lot of coverage in the press, but I think one point is so basic that it’s in danger of being missed: Why on Earth should legal opinions be classified in the first place?

In my previous life as a mathematician for the MITRE Corporation, I had a clearance and occasionally ran into classified documents. Usually, the classified pages in a document were very specific and technical — the exact specifications for some radar or communications system, for example. But you wouldn’t classify an abstract discussion of radar or communications. Those theories are in textbooks.

These secret memos, by contrast, don’t reveal detailed government plans that would be useful to our enemies. They put forward an abstract legal theory that Jack Balkin sums up like this:

The President, because he is President, may do whatever he thinks is necessary, even in the domestic context, if he acts for military and national security reasons in his capacity as Commander in Chief. This theory of presidential power argues, in essence, that when the President acts in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief, he may make his own rules and cannot be bound by Congressional laws to the contrary.

If that theory is true, then it shouldn’t be classified, it should be in Civics textbooks. We should proudly teach our children that our rights exist by sufferance of the president, who could revoke them all if he so decided.

Secret law — and when an “interpretation” stands the written law on its head, in essence it becomes a new law — runs against our entire legal tradition. As far back as the Roman Republic, the West has believed that laws should be written down and displayed in clear view.

Why did these memos have to be classified? Because they’re absurd. You never need to classify the fact that 2+2=4. But if you want the government to operate under the assumption that 2+2=5, then you do have to classify it, because your government will be a laughing stock otherwise.

Background. If you’ve been reading the Sift for a while, you have run into the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) before. It is the highest legal authority inside the executive branch of government. Unless and until the courts directly contradict it, the OLC’s interpretation of the law is official. So if lawyers from the Navy disagree with lawyers from the State Department, an OLC opinion settles the matter in the same way that a Supreme Court opinion settles disagreements between lesser courts

Like the Supreme Court, the OLC can be extremely powerful if it falls into the wrong hands. It can declare that black is white, and (so long as the issue stays out of the courts), the rest of the government is forced to go along with the assumption that black is white.

Bush defenders frequently ask some version of this legitimate question: Shouldn’t the president be able to respond to whatever comes up, even if the law or the Constitution didn’t foresee this exact situation? If you get into one of those ticking-nuclear-bomb scenarios, you don’t want the president waiting for an act of Congress before he does anything about it.

In such a situation, the president should act more-or-less the way Lincoln did: Do what you need to do, then go confess your sins to Congress. At that point Congress can either retroactively approve your actions or start impeachment proceedings. Instead, the Bush administration made up bogus legal theories about why they didn’t need anybody’s permission or approval. Consequently, we (and Congress) still don’t know most of what they did.

The Obama administration doesn’t want former enemy combatant Jose Padilla to be able to sue John Yoo for his mistreatment.

Glenn Greenwald looks at Britain’s reaction to the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, a British resident recently released from Guantanamo, was tortured there with the knowledge and assistance of the British government. He finds their public discussion strikingly different from ours.

the tacit premise of the discussion is that credible allegations of criminality — even if committed by high government officials, perhaps especially then — compel serious criminal investigations. Imagine that. How shrill and radical.

The Next Time You’re in the Bookstore …

… look for The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Mayer.

Mayer has been covering civil-liberties issues for the New Yorker all through the Bush administration. I find I agree with the WaPo review by Andrew Bacevich: This book’s “achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces.”

I’ve read a lot of the Bush administration books and articles, and reviewed some of them here on the Sift, so few of the specific events in the book were new to me. But seeing them all laid out in order from 9/11 to last April provided a new depth and perspective. If you’ve been reading reviews of the various war-on-terror books and thinking you should get around to reading one someday, put those aside and read this one.

Seeing the whole story in one place deepened my feel for the characters. Mayer’s Dick Cheney, for example, is not a one-dimensional Dr. Evil. Instead, he seems like a man afraid to admit that he’s out of his depth. Cheney came to office with no background in terrorism, the Muslim world, counter-insurgency, interrogation, constitutional law, or any of the other issues that instantly became central after 9/11. Suddenly, the country needed a strong vision from its leadership, and no one else was in a position to provide one — certainly not President Bush, who hated briefings longer than five minutes.

The emergency post-9/11 mentality was in part an overreaction to the administration’s neglect of terrorism pre-9/11, coupled with an administration-wide character flaw that didn’t allow them to admit or learn from their mistakes. The true story of 9/11 is that collectively the government had all the information it needed to prevent the attack, it just didn’t route those bits of information to people who could have put them together and acted on them. 9/11 was a failure of management, not of power. But the administration was congenitally incapable of telling the story that way, even to itself. Instead, 9/11 was always invoked to support the government’s push for more power: the power to spy, to torture, to invade.

Much of the book follows the lawyers of what became known as “the War Council” — essentially a shadow government consisting of the major players’ legal counterparts: David Addington (Cheney), Alberto Gonzales (Bush), Jim Haynes (Rumsfeld), and John Yoo (who technically was under Ashcroft, but was really a loose cannon). Addington (like Cheney) dominated the group, while Gonzales (like Bush) was a lightweight who never really wielded the power he had on paper. It’s doubly interesting who was left out of the group: Ashcroft, as well as the top lawyers of the FBI, the State Department, or the military judge advocate generals (JAGs).

this insular, unelected, self-reinforcing group, with virtually no experience in law enforcement, military service, counterterrorism, or the Muslim world, was in position to make many of the most fateful legal decisions in the post-9/11 era. … “Addington spoke authoritatively about what the President decided in 2002, but he wrote the document, and it was probably his decision,” a former White House official said later.

The War Council’s lack of relevant experience led to some major mistakes. For example, the original Guantanamo military tribunals were based on tribunals convened by FDR — ignoring the subsequent Uniform Code of Military Justice established in 1951. Any military lawyer could have told the War Council that the JAGs would consider this a return to the Bad Old Days — but no military lawyers were present when the decision was made.

The torture policy was based on a similar lack of experience. This story is worth repeating in its entirety:

The FBI had an embarrassing firsthand reminder of why such tactics are illegal when, immediately after September 11, they coerced an Egyptian national who had been staying at a hotel near the World Trade Center into falsely confessing to a role in the attacks. Abdallah Higazy, like the other hotel guests, fled when the hijacked planes smashed into the towers. Soon after, the hotel told the FBI it had found in his closet a radio communication system for air pilots. The FBI took Higazy into custody. According to Higazy, an FBI agent told him that if he didn’t confess that the equipment was his, and that it connected him to the Al Qaeda attacks, his family in Egypt would be tortured. After first denying the charges, Higazy confessed under the pressure. Luckily for him, an airline pilot who had also been a guest at the same hotel soon returned to ask for his radio back.

Again and again, torture led to false testimony. (Colin Powell was convinced to make his famous presentation to the UN after he was unknowingly given false testimony produced under torture.) That was entirely predictable: The enhanced interrogation techniques came from the SERE school whose purpose was to train American soldiers who might face torture if captured. Ultimately their techniques were copied from the KGB, who intended to produce false confessions.

The program and their claims were never subjected to any independent analysis. They always went back to the same people who were running the program at the Agency to ask if it was working, and they always said it was.

My takeaway from The Dark Side is to be more convinced than ever that President Bush himself needs to be put on trial. The only motivation lawyers have to tell their clients things they don’t want to hear is to keep those clients out of jail. If presidents can’t go to jail, no matter what they do, no one will ever tell them No.

I haven’t gotten around to reading David Kilcullen’s new book about counter-insurgency yet, but Andrew Bacevich has.

Tigerhawk

Sometimes I don’t understand my own liberal-blogger tribe. A minor conservative blogger named Tigerhawk put up a video explaining that well-to-do professionals like him (the over-$250,000 folks whose taxes Obama wants to raise) work extremely hard and are not the villains of this financial crisis. He recommends that Obama come to them with more of a your-country-needs-your-help message than a you-haven’t-been-paying-your-fair-share message.

Reasonable stuff, as far as it goes. (I’m sure lots of minimum-wage people work hard too, when you lump their three part-time jobs together.) But I wouldn’t have found this video at all if the liberal blog Sadly, No! hadn’t picked it out as an example of rich people’s whining arrogance. I didn’t react that way at all. In fact, wandering around Tigerhawk’s blog, I realized this was gold as far as I’m concerned: a conservative blogger who seems to have some standards about facts and logic. No ranting about Obama’s birth certificate or how we need to have an armed insurrection to keep the country from going Communist. (I think it helps that we’re both Big Ten fans raised in the Midwest. The “hawk” part of his name comes from the Iowa Hawkeyes.)

I’ve recommended a lot of liberal blogs, but I think it’s important that we not become an echo chamber. So I’m adding Tigerhawk to my bookmarks and I’ll drop in now and then to see how things look from the other side. Catching up a little: Tigerhawk’s take on the financial crisis is pretty interesting. It’s reassuring to know that a (self-described) conservative CFO from a medical device company tells the story pretty much the same way I do. And his questions for health care reformers are pretty good, if somewhat affected by the whole medical-device-company thing.

Short Notes

If you needed any more proof that pundits don’t belong to a meritocracy, Vanity Fair summarizes the most outrageous predictions of Thomas Friedman.

The Onion reports that American blacks are being “creeped out” by all the positive responses they’re getting from white strangers now that Barack Obama is president: smiles, pats on the back, offers to fist-bump or high-five. “To be honest, you people are kind of terrifying when you’re happy,” says one. And another adds: “I know you mean well and all, but seriously, knock it off. You’re giving my children nightmares.”

Another Onion scoop: A school-board member in Arkham, MA wants the curriculum to reflect a really old-time religion, preparing students for the apocalyptic return of the Elder Gods.

This one isn’t from the Onion, it just sounds that way. Republican Congressman John Campbell:

we’re living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged, The achievers, the people who create all the things that benefit rest of us, are going on strike. I’m seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs, the people who create wealth, who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they’ll be punished for them.”

Speaking as somebody who was a huge Ayn Rand fan in my misguided youth, this is deeply weird. Picture it: Somewhere there’s a guy who has the next Google or Microsoft in his head, but when he sees the capital gains tax going up to 20% he thinks: “Why bother? I’d only get to keep 80% of those billions. I’m not going to take that kind of punishment.” How likely is that?

Tigerhawk provides an interesting datum: On March 3, Atlas Shrugged was up to #38 on Amazon’s sales list. I just checked, and it’s still at #54. Not bad for a book published in 1957.

California’s Proposition 8 saga continues. The ballot initiative to make same-sex marriage illegal again (and give involuntary divorces to thousands of same-sex couples) passed in November. Now the state’s Supreme Court is hearing a case challenging Prop 8’s legitimacy.

The issue here sounds technical: Is Prop 8 a constitutional “amendment” (as it claims to be) or a “revision”? Amendments are narrow and can be passed by majority vote, while revisions are more sweeping and require either 2/3rds of the legislature or a constitutional convention. It’s an important distinction, because California’s amend-the-constitution-by-majority-vote provision is insane without some strict limitations. Otherwise, a simple majority could proclaim Schwartzenegger dictator-for-life.

Congress may become a branch of government again: It looks like Karl Rove and Harriet Myers are finally going to have to testify about the US atttorneys scandal.

Al Rodgers on DailyKos collects a few Daily Show clips that prove a point: Jon Stewart is more on top of the financial crisis than the so-called “serious” reporters are. My favorite moment comes during his conversation with NYT financial reporter Joe Nocera (about the 4:25 mark in the third clip), when Jon nails CNBC’s fawning interviews with the very people who turned out to be at the center of the disaster.

It’d be like the Weather Channel interviewing Hurricane Katrina and saying “You know, there’s a report that you have high winds and flooding.” And Katrina’s like, “No, no, no — I’m sunny.” And they’re like “All right” and they walk away.

This clip from Tim Geithner’s testimony to the Senate is disturbing, because he doesn’t answer Senator Cantwell’s question about the AIG bailout. In essence AIG is a conduit: It insured bad debts for other financial institutions, so as the debtors default, the federal bailout money is flowing through AIG to those other institutions. Cantwell is trying to get Geithner to say who the insured institutions are and how much they’re getting, but he provides no specifics.

The worrisome thing is that Geithner seems to be taking the same attitude towards Congress and the bailouts as Donald Rumsfeld took towards Congress and Iraq: Your job is to keep writing the checks. We’ll decide what you need to know about where the money is going.

It started out as one of the more bizarre stories that the Republicans made up about the stimulus bill: Harry Reid was setting aside $8 billion to build a mag-lev train from Disneyland to Las Vegas. Now the story is getting even better, as stories unconstrained by reality often do. In the new version, the train goes from Disneyland to a particular Nevada brothel, which in the real world is nowhere near Las Vegas. And Fox News is reporting it all as fact.

The New Yorker’s Atul Gawande has an interesting take on the health care system: We should build on what we have. I was skeptical, but then he retells the history of how other countries got their health care systems.

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