The Pacific Legal Foundation is the lead counsel in one of the biggest cases of the Supreme Court’s current term: Rapanos v. United States, a case involving egregious interference with private development by federal and state environmental regulators. In anticipation of the Court’s decision, PLF has started a blog on the case, which you can access here. For more Rapanos fun, read a short Wall Street Journal write-up about the story behind the case here. You can read the Cato Institute’s amicus brief in the case (written by yours truly) here.
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The Left vs. Conservation
I was on NPR’s “News & Notes with Ed Gordon” today to discuss gasoline prices with Julianne Malveaux. It was a rather bizarre experience. Apparently, the Left is of many, many minds when it comes to energy conservation—and all of those minds seem to coexist in the same head.
On the one hand, Dr. Malveaux was quite adamant that we need to “incentivize people” (her phrase) to use mass transit. But, on the other hand, she was equally adamant that gasoline prices were too high and had to be brought down by hook or crook.
Question 1: Wouldn’t increasing the marginal cost of driving provide the most powerful incentive for people to use mass transit?
Question 2: Wouldn’t decreases in marginal driving costs reduce the incentive people would have to use mass transit?
I tried to press her on those points but couldn’t get a straight or even understandable answer out of her.
When I tried to point out that how much people spend on gasoline is largely under their control and that high gasoline costs will do more to encourage conservation than anything government could do, I was treated to a rather loud rant about why most people had no option but to keep buying gas and that only ivory tower, doctrinaire Cato types would ever believe to the contrary.
Now, this is really something. Up until recently, environmentalists and conservationists have gone on at quite some length about how people can and should conserve energy. When I took a page from that book and suggested that people could sell their SUVs, pickups, and luxury sedans for more fuel efficient cars, I was told that this would be too expensive for working Americans to even consider (huh?). When I suggested that people could move closer to work or to mass transit hubs if they wanted to cut their commute costs, I was accused of crazy talk. When I suggested that car-pooling is always possible for those who don’t want to pick up stakes, I was informed that this is yet more crazy talk. When I suggested that people may want to rethink how often and how far they drive around town on errands or the nature of their summertime vacations, I was accused of peddling nonsense. When I argued that high gasoline prices are actually something that conservationists and environmentalists should embrace, I was dismissed as a nutcase.
Apparently, all that talk about conservation from the Left was smoke. It’s actually an impossible task, quite beyond the capabilities of mere mortals.
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Reflexive Militarism
Some have charged that President Bush’s plan to deploy 6,000 National Guardsmen to support roles along our border with Mexico constitutes “militarizing the border.” Well, sort of. But “security theater” is probably a better term. It’s a highly visible move designed to provide the appearance of increased security without actually increasing it, much like the use of guardsmen at the airports following September 11th.
In this case, the troops will be “operating surveillance systems, analyzing intelligence, installing fences and vehicle barriers, building patrol roads, and providing training,” according to the president’s speech Monday night. They will be under the command of the state governors, they will not have arrest authority, and they will not be involved in direct law enforcement activities, which means that there’s no objection based on the Posse Comitatus Act, the longstanding federal statute that restricts use of federal troops to “execute the laws.” On the whole, this is a far cry from some of the proposals for hard-core border militarization floating around on the right.
Yet the Bush administration does have a tendency, when faced with political trouble, to reach for the military. Trying to look decisive in the wake of Katrina last fall, the president asked for major revisions to Posse Comitatus twice in the space of a month, once to fight hurricanes and once to order military quarantines for Avian flu. Monday’s proposal is merely the latest iteration of the administration’s reflexive militarism, and it’s a comparatively mild one at that.
But here’s something a little more troubling than the upcoming exercise in security theater at the border. In the administration’s internal legal analysis, the Posse Comitatus Act may be vulnerable to going “poof,” as yet another statute touched by the Magic Scepter of Inherent Authority. There are a lot of bad ideas floating around about domestic militarization of the war on terror. If there’s another serious terror attack, that legal theory could be used to make some of those bad ideas happen.
GOP Proposes $1.7b More for Medicare Rx
A couple of days ago, I blogged that Republicans are thinking about eliminating the late enrollment penalty for Medicare Part D. Reneging on that penalty would (1) defeat the only sensible aspect of Part D, (2) increase the tax burden of Part D by $1.7 billion over five years, and (3) ruin the credibility of future cost-containment efforts that hinge on changing seniors’ behavior.
Lo and behold, the drive to eliminate the late enrollment penalty has begun. Front and center is the Republican chairman of the Senate Finance Committee—Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Co-sponsors of Grassley’s bill include such conservatives as Jon Kyl (R‑AZ) and Rick Santorum (R‑PA).
And the Republican campaign to expand the federal government marches on…
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Are Three Federalist Society Lawyers Threatening the Supreme Court?
In a monograph released yesterday—but not-quite-technically-endorsed by—the Federalist Society, leading NSA defenders Andrew McCarthy, David Rivkin and Lee Casey appear, Sopranos style, to issue veiled threats to the Supreme Court, warning the justices not put their dirty mitts on the NSA surveillance program, or else.
Here’s some of the evidence:
Republicans Need to Relearn How to Govern; Democrats Need New Policy Ideas
Harold Meyerson (Washington Post, May 10) was wrong to conclude that “The emerging Republican game plan for 2006…(reflects) their bankruptcy of ideas.” The Republican problem is not their lack of ideas but that the Bush administration has confused the politics of governing with the politics of campaigning. In 2005, President Bush proposed or endorsed major reforms of social security, taxes, immigration, and tort law. Most of these proposed reforms have not yet been addressed because the Bush administration would not work with Democrats to find a common ground, and the Democratic leadership would not even acknowledge the problems of current law that these proposed reforms would address. The prospect for comprehensive immigration reform is better only because of substantial support among the Democrats.
For all that, it is the Democratic Party that has been bankrupt of appealing policy ideas for the past 30 years. Marty Peretz, the editor of the New Republic, recently remarked that
It is liberalism that is now bookless and dying. Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? There’s no one, really. What’s left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs…that Republicans aren’t funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.
The policy proposals that are now bubbling up from the congressional Democratic leadership are a grab-bag of old ideas, some of which are remarkably dumb. An increase in the minimum wage is dumb because it reduces the employment of the least-skilled members of the labor force with most of the benefits accruing to secondary workers in non-poor families. An increase in the fuel economy standards is dumb because it reduces the cost of driving and applies only to new vehicles. One proposal that merits serious bipartisan attention is to revive the pay-as-you-go rules on federal spending and taxation that expired in 2002.
In summary, the Bush administration needs to learn how to govern, and the Democrats need to generate some appealing new policy ideas.
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Republican Lunacy on Energy
My colleague Peter Van Doren and I wrote an op-ed that was published this morning at National Review Online that rips the GOP for their ideas regarding energy policy. Just when you think the Republicans can’t get any worse, they manage to surprise.
For those tired of all the populist hysteria surrounding gasoline prices, we’ve also got a piece in the Investor’s Business Daily today (subscription only) that presents data on what we term “the hardship price” of fuel. We looked at gasoline prices from 1949 to the present and adjusted for inflation and changes in per capita disposable income. In essence, we ask: How long would a person have to work to pay for a gallon of gasoline today compared to any other year over the past 57? Turns out that gasoline at the moment is less expensive by that metric than it has been during most years over that time. A very nice graphic is provided with the piece.
We’ll have the IBD piece on the Cato website soon.