• SUPPORT CATO
• FOR STUDENTS
• FOR MEDIA
• FREE NEWSLETTERS

• HOME

• ABOUT

• BLOG

• BOOKSTORE

• EVENTS

• EXPERTS

• MULTIMEDIA

• PUBLICATIONS

Books

Reviews & Journals

Public Filings

Policy Studies

Opinion & Commentary

• RESEARCH AREAS

• SPEAKERS BUREAU

• SUPPORT CATO

• CATO UNBOUND

• DOWNSIZING
  GOVERNMENT.ORG

• ELCATO.ORG

Cato Daily Dispatch for August 9, 2002

Only 59 Percent of Bush Judicial Nominees Confirmed So Far

While the Senate acted on nearly all of the judicial nominations of former Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Clinton during their first two years in office, President George W. Bush has seen only 59 percent of his 123 nominees confirmed so far. And it's much worse if you look just at appellate court nominations. According to an editorial in today's edition of The Washington Post, the situation is not getting any better. "More disturbing, the pernicious practice of letting nominees hang indefinitely is not improving."

In a new policy analysis, "How Constitutional Corruption Has Led to Ideological Litmus Tests for Judicial Nominees", released this week, Roger Pilon, Cato's vice president for legal affairs and director of Cato's Center for Constitutional Studies, argues that as the stall in confirming Bush's nominees continues, the root of the logjam is constitutional corruption and the decision by Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee to impose an ideological litmus test on nominees.

"Judges today do set national policy far more than they used to -- and far more than the Constitution contemplates," Pilon writes. "In fact, it is because the original design has been corrupted, especially as it relates to the constraints the Constitution places on politics, that we have come to ideological litmus tests for judges."

New York City Mayor Wants to Ban Smoking in All Restaurants and Bars

The Bloomberg administration will ask the City Council to amend New York City's antismoking law to include all restaurants and bars, making it one of the toughest in the nation, The New York Times reported.

The current law, passed in 1995, forbids smoking in all restaurants with more than 35 seats, and excludes stand-alone bars and the bar areas of all restaurants. The proposed amendment would add roughly 13,000 establishments that would be forced to ban smoking entirely.

Robert A. Levy, Cato's senior fellow in constitutional studies and an expert on tobacco litigation, argues that smoking bans represent meddling, snooping, busybody government at its worst. He says bans are dismissive of the rights of an unpopular minority -- namely smokers -- without any basis in the Constitution, science or logic.

"Ordinarily, we rely on common courtesy and mutual respect when individuals relate to one another," Levy says. "But nosy, intrusive government has polarized the dispute between smokers and nonsmokers. As a result, venom has replaced respect and obstinate behavior has replaced common courtesy. It is government, not secondhand smoke, that has poisoned the atmosphere."

WorldCom Discloses $3.3 Billion in Additional Accounting Errors

WorldCom said yesterday that it improperly accounted for an additional $3.3 billion, mostly from 2000 and some from 1999, threatening to impair the company's plans to emerge from bankruptcy, according to USA Today.

Though additional discrepancies were expected, the amount stunned WorldCom's creditors. Wednesday, they met with WorldCom CEO John Sidgmore, who told them WorldCom could be restructured within nine months.

Last month, Cato Chairman William A. Niskanen wrote about the major policy lessons from the Enron collapse in "A Preliminary Perspective on the Major Policy Lessons from the Collapse of Enron."

Cato also has a Web site dedicated to corporate governance at http://www.cato.org/current/corporate-governance/index.html.