Cato Daily Dispatch for December 13, 2004
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Judicial Nominee Filibusters Targeted by RepublicansEconomic Summit to Focus on Tax Reform and Entitlement Programs
Delegates Gather in Argentina for Climate Conference
Judicial Nominee Filibusters Targeted by Republicans
"As speculation mounts that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist will step down from the Supreme Court soon because of thyroid cancer, Senate Republican leaders are preparing for a showdown to keep Democrats from blocking President Bush's judicial nominations, including a replacement for Rehnquist," the Washington Post reports.
"Republicans say that Democrats have abused the filibuster by blocking 10 of the president's 229 judicial nominees in his first term -- although confirmation of Bush nominees exceeds in most cases the first-term experience of presidents dating to Ronald Reagan. Describing the filibusters as intolerable, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) has hinted he may resort to an unusual parliamentary maneuver, dubbed the 'nuclear option,' to thwart such filibusters."
In "How Constitutional Corruption Has Led to Ideological Litmus Tests for Judicial Nominees," Roger Pilon, Cato vice president for legal affairs, writes: "The battle between politics and law takes place at many points in the American system of government, but in recent years it has become especially intense over judicial nominations. That is because judges today set national policy far more than they used to -- and far more than the Constitution contemplates. Because the original constitutional design has been corrupted, especially as it relates to the constraints the Constitution places on politics, we have come to ideological litmus tests for judges.
"... That will not change until we come to grips with the first principles of the matter -- with the true foundations of our constitutional system. Yet neither party today seems willing to do that. Democrats have an activist agenda that a politicized Constitution well serves. Republicans have their own agenda and their own reasons for avoiding the basic issues. Thus, it may fall to the nominees themselves to take a stand for law over politics, the better to restore the Constitution and the rule of law it was meant to secure."
Economic Summit to Focus on Tax Reform and Entitlement Programs
"U.S. business has little appetite for fundamental tax reform, seeing deficit reduction andgovernment entitlement programs as priorities for President George W. Bush's second-term agenda," the Financial Times reports.
"Changes to the tax code, fiscal policy and regulation of entitlements, such as those offered by Social Security and Medicare, have been tabled for discussion at a White House economic summit this week."
In "Simplifying Federal Taxes: The Advantages of Consumption-Based Taxation," Chris Edwards, director of tax policy studies, writes: "The complexity and inefficiency of the individual and corporate income taxes have led to great interest in replacing them with a consumption-based tax. The leading consumption-based tax proposals, including the national retail sales tax and the Hall-Rabushka flat tax, could dramatically simplify federal taxation. Those tax systems would eliminate many of the most complex aspects of federal taxation, including depreciation accounting and capital gains taxation."
Delegates Gather in Argentina for Climate Conference
"With the United States keeping to the sidelines, delegates from more than 190 countries have gathered in Buenos Aires both to celebrate the enactment of the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty requiring cuts in greenhouse gases linked to global warming, and to look beyond 2012, when its terms expire," the New York Times reports.
"Many delegates and experts concede that the pact, negotiated in 1997, is deeply flawed and that years of delays in finishing its rulebook mean that many adherents may have trouble meeting their targets for emissions cuts."
In the Cato book Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, Cato senior fellow Patrick J. Michaels explains why all the news we hear about global warming is bad. He argues that when issues compete with each other for monopoly funding by the federal government, a culture of exaggeration is created and the political community then takes credit for having saved us from certain doom.
Jonathan Block, editor, jblock@cato.org
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