Archive for category PPC
Ghosts of Constitutional Debates Past
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Constitution, General, History, PPC on December 23rd, 2010
I’ve been working my way (slowly) through the Library of America’s Debate on the Constitution, a two-volume set. While the Federalist is a – the – American political philosophy, it represents the thoughts of only three authors, and can’t possibly answer all of the concerns that people had about the Constitution at the time. The entire debate is a much more complete document, all the more valuable because it preserves the dissenting opinions. We do that in judicial cases because the reasoning itself may be important to future decisors. It puts the defenses in context, perhaps anticipates future arguments.
One of the first arguments against the Constitution comes in a letter from “Centinel” (they had plenty of variant spellings back then), one Samuel Bryan, in a letter to the Independent Gazetteer, dated October 5, 1787, less than a month after the Convention adjourned. While we consider the Constitution to be brilliant applied political philosophy designed to protect our God-given natural rights, the opponents were often concerned that it would prove to be a path to despotism, that is, that the Constitution itself contained the means to undermine liberty. Since the Independent Gazetteer didn’t survive long enough to sign a deal with Righthaven, I’ll quote at length.
He is skeptical of John Adams’s claim that a balance of powers at the federal level is even achievable:
This hypothesis supposes human wisdom competent to the task of instituting three co-equal orders in government, and a corresponding weight in the community to enable them respectively to exercise their several parts, and whose views and interests should be so distinct as to prevent a coalition of any two of them for the destruction of the third.
One could reasonably argue that the executive, with the collaboration of the Court and the capitulation of the Congress, has been progressively acquiring legislative powers.
Bryan anticipates the misreading of the Progressives of Article I Section 8:
“the Congress are to have the power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense, and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises, shall be uniform throughout the United States.” Now what can be more comprehensive than these words; … to grant… the absolute controul over the commerce of the United States….The Congress may construe every purpose for which the state legislatures now lay taxes, to be for the general welfare, and thereby seize upon every object of revenue.
He’s focusing on taxes, but the abuse of the general welfare clause is indisputable, and he anticipates the erasure of the proper reading of the Commerce Clause.
Bryan also predicts the hegemony of the courts, in particular, the hegemony of the federal courts over state courts, and of the erosion of state power at the hands of the federal government in general.
…it is more probable that the state judicatories would be wholly superceded; for in contests about jurisdiction, the federal court, as the most powerful, would every prevail.
To put the omnipotency of Congress over the state government and the judicatories out of all doubt, the 6th article ordains that, “this Constitution and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof, and all treaties made, or which shall be made under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land…”
By these section, the all-prevailing power of taxation, and such extensive legislative and judicial powers are vested in the general government, as must in their operation, necessarily absorb the state legislatures and judicatories, and that such was in the contemplation of the framers of it…
Now to be fair, in order to reach these conclusions, he has to ignore other sections of the Constitution, distort the Framers’ clear intent, and claim that later rebuttals are in bad faith. Congress is explicitly limited in the types of taxes it may levy. The Commerce Clause is not as expansive as he reads it. The General Welfare Clause is not blanket permission to enact any sort of law Congress wants to. Some of them would later be explicitly rectified by the Bill of Rights. Others would indeed be exploited by judges looking to change the system. But for him, these failings he claims to have discovered are a bug; for the Progressives, they’re a feature.
While we consider Madison, Hamilton, and Jay to be the heroes of the piece, that Centinel predicted so many of the distortions later introduced by the Progressives lends his arguments relevance.
More Lefty Back to the Future
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Budget, Colorado Politics, Denver, PPC, Transportation on December 22nd, 2010
Of all the ideas for public transportation, one of the nuttiest to take hold in recent years is to revive streetcars. They have all the disadvantages of light rail, on a small scale. These include inflexibility and large capital costs. They carry a few more people than buses, but no faster, and are more expensive to build and maintain. They offer virtually unlimited opportunities for graft in the form of routing and station location. They offer the additional benefit of being anti-car while not replacing enough bus service to reduce traffic. In short, they’re a bureaucrat’s dream, a union’s gravy train, a taxpayer’s nightmare, and a commuter’s inconvenience. No wonder the Left loves them. (See the numbers here, pages 19 & 20.)
The Federal government has awarded Denver $2 million to continue to study such a boondoggle from the State Capitol out to the Fitzsimmons campus. Of course, for the Feds this is chump change, seeing as they’ve already funded over $300 million of your money for other cities to build these things (p. 48 & 51). That same presentation has several different proposals for lines east of Civic Center, costing between $100 million and $175 million.
For that, we won’t replace buses, but will allow politicians and political appointees to collect their share in graft. We won’t make traffic and better, and will likely make it worse. When neighborhoods change, we’ll have to lay more track instead of just re-routing bus lines. All in all, the $2,000,000 alone would pave a lot of roads, but the $175,000,000 of the largest project would pave a lot more, and repair a fair number of bridges as well.
If after all that, for some reason, you’re still nostalgic for streetcars, you shouldn’t go away empty-handed:
Did Colorado Republicans Really Outperform Democrats?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Colorado Politics, PPC on December 21st, 2010
Since the election, Colorado Republican Chairman Dick Wadhams, who has still officially not announced for re-election, has been regularly sending out emails defending his and the state party’s performance during the campaign season. In particular, he has addressed two issues that are not always clearly understood: vetting, and the role of the party’s turnout operations. I’ll save vetting for another post, because there are some worrisome signs that the Old Bulls of the party have learned nothing from this cycle, and it deserves a separate treatment. For the moment, let’s talk about turnout operations.
Now, before I start, I want to make it clear that I’m not here to defend or attack Dick’s overall performance as party chairman. Dick was personally very supportive during my 2008 run, and financially supportive at the beginning of the 2010 campaign. It’s for that reason among others that I want to stay clear of personalities. He’s more than capable of speaking for himself and defending his own record with its considerable accomplishment. He doesn’t need me to do that.
Now Dick’s answer to the question I pose in the title is a resounding, “Yes!” He points to the large edge that Republicans had in turnout. In a state with about as many registered Dems as Republicans, many more Republicans turned out to vote. Dick would argue that that turnout edge may not have been enough to save Ken Buck, but did provide the edge in the other statewide races, and took back the State House of Representatives. He draws a line – traditionally correct – between the party’s job to turn out its voters and the candidate’s job to persuade unaffiliated voters.
And by that standard, the party succeeded and the candidates – all of them, except for John Suthers – failed. Because the only way you get a 100,000 vote edge in turnout and win by substantially less than that is if the unaffiliated voters turn against you. In this case, they turn against you radically and decisively in a way that’s not predicted in any poll leading up to the election.
I believe that the Democrat turnout effort was focused not only on registered Democrats, but also on Democrat-voting unaffiliated voters. That the Left – not just the Democrat party – has done a better job of identifying, contacting, engaging, and recruiting those unaffiliated voters who lean their way than we have, while we are content with robocalls to right-leanings U’s in the weeks leading up to the election. I believe that their focus on social networking and social media, both on their own sites and on larger social networking sites, has helped them identify these voters.
It is also true that, for the moment, the Democrats can call on the foot soldiers of the labor unions to go walk precincts on Election Day, which provides them with an advantage in that regard. But this is not new, and there is no reason we can’t develop our own sources of manpower.
What I am seeing from the State party is a lack of constructive self-criticism, instead focusing on what went well, rather than on how the game has changed and what the proper responses to it are. The Republicans are playing checkers, and the Democrats are playing three-dimensional chess, and we had better hope that the answer to the above question is a decisive, “No.” Otherwise, we have pretty much lost the middle permanently, and are looking not at the middle of a comeback, but at a high-water mark. I don’t believe that’s true; there’s almost no polling that supports that thesis. But we’ve probably come as far as we can with the old model of how things work.
Colorado Misses Out On Another Wave
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Business, Colorado Politics, Energy, PPC on December 20th, 2010
The Wall Street Journal reports that resource-rich states are recovering quite well from the recession:
Wages of workers in 10 states and the District of Columbia have more than regained ground lost during the recession, with the recovery concentrated in regions benefitting from the commodities boom and federal spending.
Many of the laggards, meanwhile, are states where the housing bust hit hard or where the collapse of the auto industry and other old-line manufacturing pulled down wages during the slump, according to a Commerce Department figures released Friday.
That Colorado is a resource-rich state can hardly be doubted. We have coal and natural gas in abundance, minor metals like molybdenum, potentially uranium. While real estate has suffered, we never had the kind of overbuilding seen in Florida, Arizona, or southern California, so we never had the kind of collapse, and manufacturing hasn’t been a mainstay of the Colorado economy for a while.
So why aren’t we recovering? Why is the state’s unemployment up to 8.8%, with only modest improvements projected (for whatever that’s worth)? Well it’s true that, unlike DC, northern Virginia, and suburban Maryland, we lack the ability to coerce the rest of the country to pay for our standard of living. But more importantly, the outgoing Ritter administration and its Democrat allies have waged an ongoing war against the exploitation of our natural resources.
I don’t want to see the state return to the boom-bust cycle that characterizes an economy overwhelmingly dependent on drilling and mining. But Colorado is clearly suffering from a national policy -seemingly unique in the industrialized world, and reinforced by state government – of refusing to exploit natural resources that our economy actually depends on.
I Guess It Depends on Who’s “Troubled”
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Media Bias, PPC on December 1st, 2010
hen I read a television column, I want to see reviews of shows. I’ll even read reviews of one-time shows like the Academy Awards, if the column is entertaining enough. But Tom Shales’s long slide down to irrelevance started, I think, when he began turning his reviews into political columns.
Nobody’s going to confuse Joanne Ostrow with Tom Shales, but she’s following his lead in turning her TV column into political commentary. First, there was the snark-filled review of Sarah Palin’s Alaska, where she finds the show more “troubling” than just about every other reality genre including “numerous shows about families with 19 kids, hoarders, polygamists and JonBenet look-alikes.” Like her or not, there are plenty of people out there willing to make fun of Bristol’s formerly delicate condition, without Ostrow’s needing to join the fun. It’s not worth refuting her point-by-point, of course, but we don’t come away knowing if the show’s any good.
Then, yesterday, Ms. Ostrow decided that the public’s distaste for self-pornification and borderline sexual assault was little more than a media fiction, getting far more attention than it deserved.
Those lascivious X-ray eyes. Those groping hands. What a perfectly titillating story. The American Civil Liberties Union, the Libertarian Party and the Tea Partiers were in rare agreement.…Only later did we learn (via a CBS poll) that 81 percent of those surveyed had no objections to the new screenings.
I don’t know where Ms. Ostrow works, but this year’s big April 15 Tea Party rally, on the west side of the State Capitol, right across the street from the Denver Post building, was hosted by the then-Libertarian candidate for CD-6, and featured more libertarians, small- and large-L, than Republicans. Anyone who’s bothered to read more than a sentence or two about the Tea Parties knows that they’re far more small-l libertarian than anything else.
As for the CBS poll:
On the eve of one of the nation’s busiest travel days, a poll has found that 61% of likely voters oppose the newly enhanced security measures at the country’s airports.
The poll by Zogby International of 2,032 likely voters also found that 48% said they would probably seek alternatives to flying because of the new measures.
…
The Zogby poll, taken online Nov. 19-22, seems to indicate a change in public opinion over the last few weeks. A CBS News telephone poll taken Nov. 7-10 found that 81% of Americans questioned said they approved of the use of the full-body scanners at airports. The CBS poll did not ask about the new pat-down search techniques.
Now, that LA Times story was only a week old, so the Post’s computers may not have access to it yet, but those of us on the outside have known about it for some time.
Question for Ms. Ostrow: you want to be a TV critic, or a lefty ombudsman?
Those GAO Reports
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC, Privacy on November 21st, 2010
From Holly Doodruff Lyons, those GAO reports I promised:
1.) “Systematic Planning Needed to Optimize the Deployment of Checked Baggage Screening Systems”, (GAO-05-365, March 2005)
“According to TSA’s analysis, in-line EDS would reduce by 78 percent the number of TSA baggage screeners and supervisors required to screen checked baggage at these nine airports, from 6,645 to 1,477 screeners and supervisors.” (Page 42).
2.) Classified GAO Report (April 2005), GAO reviewed the TSA’s own covert screener testing data and concluded that TSA’s data indicated that passenger checkpoint screeners at airports participating in the PP5 Program performed better overall on the tests than checkpoint screeners at the totally Federalized airports. GAO concluded that differences in these test results were statistically significant.
3.) “Screener Training and Performance Measurement Strengthened, but More Work Remains”, (GAO-05-457, May 2005)
“For the two-year period reviewed, overall failure rates for covert tests (passenger and checked baggage) conducted at airports using private-sector screeners were somewhat lower than failure rates for the same tests conducted at airports using federal screeners for the airports tested during this period.” (Page 34).
4.) “Aviation Security: TSA’s Cost and Performance Study of Private-Sector Airport Screening”, (GAO-09-27R, January 2009)
“The limitations in the design of TSA’s study comparing the cost and performance of SPP and non-SPP airports were due to several key factors related to the study’s purpose and data availability. For example, TSA officials stated that they did not include some cost elements in the study because they wanted to determine the impact of the SPP on TSA’s budget, rather than to determine the impact to the federal government as a whole. In addition, for its comparison of performance, TSA analyzed measures for which information was most complete, among other things. Because of these limitations, we [GAO] believe that TSA should not use the study as sole support for major policy decisions regarding the SPP.”
DIA and TSA – What We Can Do, and What We Can’t
Posted by Joshua Sharf in National Politics, PPC, Privacy on November 18th, 2010
I just got off the phone with Holly Woodruff Lyons, who’s a staffer with the US House Transportation Committee. She was kind enough to spend about 15 minutes with me, discussing Rep. Mica’s letter, and the opt-out program, and was extremely helpful given that she didn’t know me from Adam.
It turns out that private contractors, while quite popular in the places where they are used, still have to obey TSA screening policies, and if TSA decides to put electronic strip-searchers at DIA, there’s no mechanism for DIA to resist. TSA is responsible for security, not DIA. This also means that the private contractors almost always are contracted to TSA, not to the local airport authority. The airport applies for an opt-out, after which the Feds put out an RFP and go through the normal contracting processes. There are some other models, where the private contractors work for the airports, but they still have to operates federal processes under federal supervision.
The innovations that Mica refers to are operational, not policy, but Mrs. Lyons did note that (not surprisingly) the private companies tend to be more responsive, more willing to open new lines, and more concerned about their public perception that the TSA. For instance, the handling of heavy bags has led to a higher rate of injury for security workers, and many have subcontracted out baggage-handing to cut down on injuries. In other instances, the turnover rate at private companies is far lower, further reducing operating costs.
When the TSA tried to run through a study comparing itself to its competition, and – surprise! – found that the competition was less efficient and more expensive, the GAO called them out on it, showing that the cost savings generally resulted from not counting federal pensions, and that sort of thing. In fact, there’s every reason to believe that operationally, contractors do save money. Mrs. Lyons has promised to pass along the relevant GAO reports and the studies that validate Rep. Mica’s statements.
We need to remember that the opt-out is a program that was written into the original TSA law, but that Rep. Mica is obviously a strong supporter of it. Rep. Rogers, who currently heads the Transportation subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee, and it challenging earmark baron Jerry “The Minority-Maker” Lewis (R-CA) for the chairmanship of the whole committee, is also a strong supporter.
Remember, Rep. Mica’s letter was sent before these procedures starting causing a public sensation, so he’s really not referring to them in his letter. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can’t use the opt-out to reduce the number of TSA employees, and thus its budget, and therefore its bureaucratic position. Bureaucrats never like to be on the defensive, never like to be in the public eye, and their employees certainly don’t like being The Enemy.
Whether or not this is enough to get them to stop treating us as The Enemy remains to be seen.
The Opt-Out Letter
Posted by Joshua Sharf in PPC on November 18th, 2010
It’s rare to see anyone in the federal government actively trying to devolve power back to any sort of state or local authority, but Rep. John Mica (R-FL), is doing exactly that. Rep. Mica was the ranking member of the House’s Transportation Committee, and is likely to become its new chairman in a couple of months. He’s also one of the authors of the original TSA legislation. Mica has sent a letter to about 150 airport administrators around the country asking them to opt out of TSA’s screeners and hire private screeners instead.
I’ll post the full letter later, but two points are worth commenting on.
Under this program, TSA continues to set standards, pay all costs, and conduct performance oversight.
It’s unclear if this means that TSA has the authority to require private contractors to conduct the problematic scans, or whether those can remain up to the screeners’ discretion. Much of the momentum for opting out won’t come so much from reducing federal bureaucracy as much as from opting out of these procedures. It’s possible that the push to have airports opt out is a political tool designed to reduce TSA bureaucratic empire, or to create the threat of doing so, in order to push TSA to drop the procedures.
Rep. Mica also makes a couple of claims that, on the surface, make sense: that private screeners’ performance is better, and that they have been responsible for the “positive innovations” (his quotes) that TSA has adopted. Both of these are believable, but a citation for those past studies, and examples of those positive innovations would go a long way toward building the case for an opt-out.
DIA is the fourth-busiest airport in the country; such an opt-out here would be a major development and perhaps set the pace for other airports to follow suit.
UPDATE: The letter is embedded below:
Can We Spare Denver Passengers TSA?
Posted by Joshua Sharf in Denver, PPC, Privacy on November 17th, 2010
By now, pretty much everyone has heard about John Tyner, the Oceanside, CA man who reasserted his individual dignity by refusing to submit to either the option of groping or self-pornification in the service of what Reason‘s Matt Welch (and now, Rep. John Mica (R-FL) calls, “security theater.” You know, the fellow that TSA has decided to make an example of for us all.
In addition to being large, impersonal, and top-heavy, what really worries critics is that the TSA has become dangerously ineffective. Its specialty is what those critics call “security theater” — that is, a show of what appear to be stringent security measures designed to make passengers feel more secure without providing real security. “That’s exactly what it is,” says Mica. “It’s a big Kabuki dance.”
It’s good to see that someone – one of the authors of the original TSA legislation, no less – is telling us that yes, indeed, all this stuff is to make us feel better, not actually to make us safer. I’ll grant that there is something to the operational theory that ever-changing rules and oddly intrusive regulations keep the bad guys off-balance and force them to take risks that make failure and detection more likely. Except that the underwear bombers and the ink toner bomber weren’t really stopped because the system worked, were they?
It’s not often I disagree with Dennis Prager outright, but this morning, he and guest Michael Fumento were seeking to defuse the panic over the scanners. Now, Fumento has a creditable history of taking on irrational public fear – see last year’s swine flu plague that swept away civilization, for instance. But in this case, they’re not taking into account that the TSA has dealt with us in bad faith over these scanners from the beginning. We were assured, for instance, that pictures could not be stored or shared. Which is why they’re all over the Net.
The fact is that these options are insulting, intrusive, humiliating, and demeaning, and the sort of thing that a free people should never have to put up with simply to get from point A to point B. The argument from Big Sis that they’re absolutely necessary, that nothing else will do, that no other solution short of Amtrak or Greyhound is possible, is pretty rich coming from a Lilliputian government that routinely ties down its citizens and businesses with regulations, and then excuses the extra cost on the grounds that they can always find a work-around.
It’s time for Big Sis to find a work-around. And not the current SPOT program.
In a May 2010 letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Mica noted that the GAO “discovered that since the program’s inception, at least 17 known terrorists … have flown on 24 different occasions, passing through security at eight SPOT airports.” One of those known terrorists was Faisal Shahzad, who made it past SPOT monitors onto a Dubai-bound plane at New York’s JFK International Airport not long after trying to set off a car bomb in Times Square. Federal agents nabbed him just before departure.
Now, Mica has written another letter to over 150 airport administrators reminding them that they can opt out of TSA, and hire private contractors for screening instead. At one point, this seemed to be an attractive option for many airports. In 2004, Mica tried to remind them of the option, but Peter DiFazio (D-Public Employees Unions) suspected a nefarious Bush plot to continue reducing the size of government.
Since the rules actually state that security screeners have the right to use their judgment in determining which screening methods to use, presumably passengers at private security wouldn’t feel it necessary bring a wad of one-dollar bills to get them through security.
In most places, citizens lack the means to force their local airports to do this. The good news is that we do. DIA is owned and operated by the City and County of Denver. With Denver’s municipal elections coming up in May, there’s no reason we couldn’t place a ballot measure requiring DIA to transition to private, non-union, security contractors within a year.
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