Cato Institute
1000 Massachusetts Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20001-5403
Phone (202) 842 0200
Fax (202) 842 3490
 Contact Us
Support Cato

Cato Daily Dispatch for July 31, 2003

Subscribe to the Daily Dispatch via email

(Links to outside sources were active as of the date of this dispatch; however, not all news sources maintain links to current stories indefinitely. Some links also may require registration.)

Judicial Filibusters Continue
China Designs Weapons for Use against U.S. Forces
N.Y.C. Schools 'Pushing Out' Struggling Students

Judicial Filibusters Continue

"U.S. Senate Democrats sustained a procedural roadblock against a second conservative judicial nominee in as many days on Wednesday, and vowed to stop two more later this week," according to Reuters.

"On a 55-43 vote, Republicans fell five short of the needed 60 votes to end a 5-month-old filibuster against Miguel Estrada and clear the way for a confirmation vote on Bush's bid to put the Washington attorney on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. On Tuesday, Democrats sustained another filibuster, also dating back to early this year, against Bush's effort to put Texas Supreme Court Justice Priscilla Owen on the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans."

In "Minority Rules: Filibustering the Constitution," Cato Senior Fellow James Swanson writes that "in the cases of Estrada and Owen, when the filibuster is being used not to debate, but to kill their nominations by denying the majority its right to consent to them, serious constitutional issues arise."

"Yes, the Constitution permits the Senate to set its own rules," writes Swanson. "But that is hardly a blank check entitling the Senate to amend the Appointments Clause by raising the confirmation bar from simple majority to super majority, to aggrandize power by upsetting the balance between the congressional and the executive branches, and to threaten the independence of the third branch, the federal judiciary. The conclusion is inescapable. Whenever Senate Democrats, a minority of the body, filibuster judicial nominations, obstruct an up or down vote, and deny the majority its right to consent to the appointments, they subvert the Constitution."

China Designs Weapons for Use against U.S. Forces

"The Chinese are working on a medium-range missile that will give Beijing the ability to launch attacks against the 25,000 U.S. troops deployed on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa," according to the Pentagon and reported in The Washington Times. "The new missiles also will be able to hit Taiwan from bases farther inland from the Chinese coast, the report said."

"Beijing has adopted a new strategy of what Beijing military planners call 'assassin's mace' arms--advanced weapons designed for use against U.S. forces."

In "Old Wine in New Bottles: The Pentagon's East Asia Security Strategy Report," Cato Senior Fellow Doug Bandow argues that "the end of the Cold War has eliminated any justification for a dominant U.S. military role in East Asia."

"Washington should instead phase out its military presence in East Asia, transferring to its Cold War era allies responsibility for dealing with local security problems," says Bandow. "Washington should maintain a mid-Pacific military presence and cooperate with friendly states but intervene directly only if a potential hegemon arises that cannot be otherwise contained."

"Acting as the balancer of last resort rather than the meddler of first resort, however, would make America more secure by insulating it from such strategically and economically marginal disorders."

N.Y.C. Schools 'Pushing Out' Struggling Students

"Growing numbers of students--most of them struggling academically--are being pushed out of New York City's school system and classified under bureaucratic categories that hide their failure to graduate," reports The New York Times.

"Those students represent the unintended consequence of the effort to hold schools accountable for raising standards: As students are being spurred to new levels of academic achievement and required to pass stringent Regents exams to get their high school diplomas, many schools are trying to get rid of those who may tarnish the schools' statistics by failing to graduate on time."

In a statement released this morning, David Salisbury, director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom, said:

"The steadily increasing number of students being 'pushed out' of public high schools is another indication of the intellectual bankruptcy of our public educational system. Apparently, some bureaucrats would rather ruin a child's life in the name of improving self-serving statistics than admit that their schools deserve a failing grade.

"The problem of 'push outs' is not new, as admitted in the article, but has grown as public attention on school failure has increased. Rather than an indictment of the No Child Left Behind act, which requires that schools show results, this is an indictment of a bureaucratic and inflexible public school system that forces children to stay in bad schools for far too long. The solution would be to give families greater choices of schools right from the start, including private schools, through vouchers or tax credits. That way, if a child isn't learning, he or she can switch to a school that offers a different approach.

"Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld vouchers as a constitutional means of giving families school choice, citizens and politicians should embrace school choice as a way to provide greater educational options and opportunities for all children."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org