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Cato Daily Dispatch for September 4, 2003

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(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.)

Estrada Gives Up Confirmation Fight

"Attorney Miguel Estrada, whose appointment to a federal appellate court judgeship was blocked by Democrats in a protracted fight with the Bush White House, asked Thursday that he be removed from consideration," according to The Associated Press.

"Estrada was one of a handful of federal judicial nominees named by Bush who became lightning rods during the Senate confirmation process, where Democrats argued they were too conservative to serve on the nation's second highest court. Republicans countered that the Democrats were biased, noting that Estrada is Hispanic."

Cato Vice President for Legal Affairs Roger Pilon says Estrada's decision is understandable and calls it a blow to the rule of law and political civility. "But the deeper problem," Pilon said, "is that Democrats are poisoning the confirmation process by insisting that nominees declare their views on highly charged political issues of the day as a condition of being confirmed. That politicizes and corrupts the rule of law by breaking down the fundamental distinction between politics and law. It undermines the civility that is essential to the confirmation process. And it discourages those with any regard for their integrity from accepting nominations to high office. The time has come for Senate Republicans to revisit the filibuster rule. It has no place in the Constitution's confirmation process."

In "How Constitutional Corruption Has Led to Ideological Litmus Tests for Judicial Nominees," Pilon writes: "[I]n the end it is nothing less than the rule of law that is at stake as nominees are increasingly being asked not whether they will apply the law, nor even what the law is, but whether their views are consistent with the purported views of the American people."

Court Delays FCC's Media Ownership Rules

"An appeals court yesterday blocked a change in federal rules that would have loosened restrictions on media consolidation beginning today, granting at least a temporary victory to those who argue that the new regulations would give television networks too much power and reduce local programming," reports The Washington Post.

Adam D. Thierer, Cato's director of telecommunications studies, calls the decision by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals "merely the first in a long line of legal headaches we can expect in upcoming months and years."

In "The Media Ownership Debate: Who Are the Real Media Masters?" in the June 16 edition of Cato's techknowledge newsletter, Thierer and Cato Director of Technology Studies Clyde Wayne Crews Jr. argue in favor of the slightly relaxed rules. They write: "Media monopoly is not a legitimate threat in a free society because citizens are always free to establish new media outlets, and investors are free to fund them. The scale and scope of private media organizations is not an appropriate target of coercive public policy, because such policy violates free speech. Government restrictions on ownership are themselves censorship and represent the real threat to democracy. Diversity, independence of voice, and democracy do not spring from government control of the means of speech, but from a separation between government and media."

Other troublesome FCC media regulations are examined in the Cato Policy Analyses, "Chilling the Internet? Lessons from FCC Regulation of Radio Broadcasting," by Thomas W. Hazlett and David W. Sosa and "Regulation in Newspeak: The FCC Children Television Rules," by Robert Corn-Revere.

China Might Dump Fixed Exchange-Rate Currency, Some Day

"Senior Chinese officials stopped short yesterday of making concessions to John Snow, U.S. Treasury secretary, that may satisfy U.S. manufacturers' demands for a sharp revaluation of the Chinese currency, but reaffirmed Beijing's plans eventually to abandon its fixed exchange-rate regime," reports the Financial Times.

"Foreign diplomats said the results of Mr. Snow's visit would probably disappoint U.S. manufacturers, some of whom have argued that the renminbi is undervalued by as much as 40 percent against the U.S. dollar. The manufacturers have been calling on the administration of President George W. Bush to press China into revaluing to avert the further loss of American jobs to the booming factories along China's east and south coasts. China's trade surplus with the U.S. reached $103 billion last year, surpassing for the first time that of Japan."

In "Free China, Float the Yuan," an article in yesterday's Wall Street Journal Europe, James Dorn, editor of the Cato Journal and the book China in the New Millennium: Market Reforms and Social Development , writes: "Rather than discussing the size of the yuan's trading band with the dollar, or how far to move the upper limit of that band, attention should focus on normalizing China's capital markets and abandoning the peg altogether.

"The right to freely hold and invest foreign exchange is an important component of economic and personal freedom. If the Chinese Communist Party were to end capital controls and make the yuan fully convertible, the ossified system of state investment planning would end and China could move steadily toward a modern, market-based financial architecture."

Wyatt Dubois, editor, wdubois@cato.org