Monthly Archives: June 2014

Do Liberals Object to Our Constitution Being Taught?

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It seems so, even if the fix to a problem might be a bit much.

The South Carolina legislature has rankled liberal groups after requiring that a pair of public schools use state funds to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents….

…amount be spent “for instruction in the provisions and principles of the United States Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Federalist Papers, including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.”

Of course, this has angrified the Liberals.

The National Coalition Against Censorship, ACLU of South Carolina, and other groups said in a statement earlier this week that the new bill is a “symbolic penalty….”

“It represents unwarranted political interference with academic freedom and undermines the integrity of the higher education system in South Carolina,” the groups said.

Never mind that not teaching our founding documents, the core documents of our social compact, the documents of our debate over them (aside: the Anti-Federalist Papers should have been on that list, too) doesn’t at all undermine the integrity of South Carolina’s higher education system. Not teaching these doesn’t at all politicize the classrooms.

Not a bit of it.

Our Economic Future

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James Pethokoukis, at AEIdeas, has some thoughts. Oddly, so do I.

Pethokoukis first. He paraphrases Binyamin Appelbaum in New York Times:

…economist accept slower growth is partly the result of long-term trends…. [Y]ou have (a) the demographically-driven decline in labor force participation and (b) an apparent productivity slowdown starting in the mid-2000s as the pace of technological innovation and diffusion has slowed.

But these two are easily corrected. The “demographically-driven decline in labor force participation” is largely, if not primarily, the retirement of us Baby Boomers without associated replacement from births into existing and new families, much less an increase in that rate. (The long-term departure from the labor force by those who’ve given up finding work in this economy is a separate matter that policy corrections will resolve.)

The US, though, always has relied on high immigration rates, as well as yesterday’s higher birth rates, for our supply of workers at all levels of a company from the janitor/mailroom clerk (no dating me here…) to the President/CEO/Bossman. We don’t have high immigration rates today, so we’re not getting the influx into our labor force that we need. The illegal entry rates don’t make up for much of that at all, and the illegality of their entry serves only to hold them back from full contribution. That dearth is only exacerbated by our lower birth rates; it’s not caused by it.

The productivity slowdown and tech innovation rate is a function of the lack of new ideas, new approaches to old problems, creative approaches to new problems, etc from an entrenched population that’s used to doing things in the business world in a certain way (and that staidness is a fact of human nature). Here, too, immigration has played a major role in our economic vibrancy. Immigrants bring those new ideas, new approaches, new etc. And immigrants start new businesses—become those CEOs/Presidents/Bossmen—all out of proportion to their numbers.

All of which suggests a solution to that “slower growth” bit.

The Courts Get Another One Right

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Quartavius Davis was convicted of robbing, in 2010, seven stores in and around Miami and sentenced to roughly 162 years in prison. His prosecutors based their case, in large part, on cellphone records that placed Davis near the scene.

The evidence included records of the cell towers to which their phones were connected when they placed and received calls, according to court documents.

These data were obtained solely on the basis of a claim “that the records were relevant and material to an ongoing investigation.”

The 11th Circuit demurred. Writing for a unanimous court, Judge David Sentelle wrote in part

[I]t cannot be denied that the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures shields the people from the warrantless interception of electronic data or sound waves carrying communications. The next step of analysis, then, is to inquire whether that protection covers not only content, but also the transmission itself when it reveals information about the personal source of the transmission, specifically his location.

And [emphasis added]

One’s cell phone, unlike an automobile, can accompany its owner anywhere. Thus, the exposure of the cell site location information can convert what would otherwise be a private event into a public one. When one’s whereabouts are not public, then one may have a reasonable expectation of privacy in those whereabouts.
…
There is a reasonable privacy interest in being near the home of a lover, or a dispensary of medication, or a place of worship, or a house of ill repute. [W]e do not see…Davis’s location outside his expectation of privacy.

And ultimately,

Cell site location information is within the subscriber’s reasonable expectation of privacy. The obtaining of that data without a warrant is a Fourth Amendment violation.

Yewbetcha.

A 4th Amendment warrant requires a showing of probable cause, a rather stricter standard than just the government claiming an interest. However, the matter isn’t closed with this ruling; the 5th and 6th Circuits have ruled that warrants are not needed in such cases. This points to an eventual Supreme Court case.

The 11th Circuit’s opinion can be read here.

There Is No Clear Picture

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…because of two things: all politics is local (that Evil Democrat Tip O’Neill was right about that), and this is a party that actually lives its Big Tent philosophy, even if it can’t communicate worth a hoot.

The trigger for this is House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s (R, VA) loss in Virginia’s primary last Tuesday and all the journalistic hand-wringing (in their finest Marlon Brando fashion) about the deep meaning that.

David Payne, Senior Vice President for Vox Global, a public affairs and strategic communications consulting agency, is on the right track, though:

It’s way too soon to tell. You have establishment candidates winning and Tea Party candidates winning. How do you generalize? But it seems very obvious to me that different things are happening in different places.

That different things, different places bit is the local politics bit. Keep in mind that Cantor lost because of his stance on immigration and “amnesty,” while just two states away, Senator Lindsey Graham (R, SC) easily won his primary after having actually voted for immigration and “amnesty.” But that’s the Big Tent bit.

Contrary to the hand-wringing, which is of little practical value beyond being a mechanism for peddling a story (another local (if only to his editor) effect), Cantor’s loss is illustrative of a great strength of the Republican Party, and a benefit to it that would seem to match, if not outweigh, the loss of Cantor’s experience and ability to talk honestly with both establishment and conservative Republicans.

Last things first: David Brat’s win, and especially if he wins again in the fall (as seems likely), is another impetus pulling the party to the right. Certainly the party can go too far, but today, despite its win in 2010 as confirmed by 2012, the party is still a bit too far to the Left.

The larger demonstration of the value of Brat’s win, though, is the Big Tent bit. One party brags about its representing the people, about its being all about democracy, but it reaches its “consensus” secretively, behind closed doors, and with the application of its famed party discipline. The Republican Party lives is democracy beliefs, its limited government beliefs, it view that Americans speak for themselves and that the Party does not speak for them. There’s room for only one kind of Democrat in the Democratic Party; there’s room for all kinds of Republicans in the Republican Party.

Oh, that limited government bit I brought up late? Refer to Speaker John Boehner’s (R, OH) style of governance of the House of Representatives. He and his fellow senior House leaders, far from being unable to impose discipline on a raucous conservative section of their House members, deliberately stepped back from that sort of leadership. They have actively sought out the opinions of the conservative members, Tea Party members, et al. as they form legislation. And they began it in 2011 with their conservative-developed policy of posting proposed legislation publicly for a period of time so that all Congressmen—especially including Democrat Congressmen—and all Americans—including Liberal Americans—could see the proposals and get onto their Representatives before the votes were cast.

There is no clear picture of the meaning of Cantor’s loss/Brat’s victory to pundits. But the meaning really is quite clear. And it’s encouraging.

Iraqi Drama Catches US Off Guard

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That’s the headline of a Wall Street Journal article, and I stole it. It’s here, too, because the headline says it all.

The quickly unfolding drama prompted a White House meeting Wednesday of top policy makers and military leaders who were caught off guard by the swift collapse of Iraqi security forces, officials acknowledged.

And

US military leaders said they had thought that Iraqi security forces’ efforts would be enough to slow ISIS’s advance. But those assumptions were proven wrong when Iraqi troops largely abandoned their posts.

Yet it’s not just about establishing ISIS in Sunni Iraq. Having moved to within a few 10s of miles of Baghdad, ISIS has announced its intent to move on and seize Shia Karbala and Najaf, hosts of two of the holiest shrines for Shiite Muslims, for the humiliation of the Shia in Iraq. And for the added fertile agricultural territory.

Why was the US caught off guard by this Iraqi collapse in the wake of the collapse going on in next-door Syria? Because no one in this administration has any clue at all concerning what’s going on—and why—outside the little choir of “advisors” President Barack Obama maintains in his coterie.