How to end the corruption

Thinking along institutional lines, you quickly hit the various dead ends that people have already noted. It all boils down to a bootstrap problem. The rules we want changed are the very ones that prevent the election of any sizable number of legislators who aren’t beholden to big money.

Stop thinking along institutional lines. Stop thinking along the line of adding a law or two to the current de jure regime to deal with this problem. We already have laws against bribery, and such laws are much more broad-spectrum and effective at dealing with this problem than anything you might want to add.

We don’t enforce the laws against bribery for the same reason we stopped enforcing anti-trust laws (just enforcing those laws and breaking up the cartels in health care and health insurance would be for more radical and effective a reform than even Single Payer). We stopped being able to see any sort of crime in rich people running things. The Golden Rule, “Them that have the money make the rules.”, holds sway in our political system because most of us believe that the ability to make gobs of money is proof, and the only proof possible, of competence at public policy.

Now, that’s obviously untrue, both as to competence and, more fundamentally, as to what somebody will do with their competencies once in office. You dont have to be very talented to make gobs of money under crony capitalism — you just need a knack for asserting alpha status in small cliques of fellow alpha wannabes. And you don’t really want to give power to even competent people who want to benefit anything or anybody but the common good. Even if you still needed to be competent to make gobs of money for yourself, that ability wouldn’t say much, at least not much good, about your ability to perceive, and willingness to pursue, the common good.

But you don’t hear much about the common good, or collective interests, or the interests of society, in American politics. Too damned Communist, or at least, damned Socialist. But until and unless we can get people to start thinking in those terms, they will continue to believe that people smart enough to make loads of money are exactly who we need running things in this country. If you change their beliefs, they would tend to vote against candidates who spend loads of money on TV commercials, for no other reason than the conspicuous consumption of money that has to have come from some paymaster other than the public. On juries, they would be willing to convict politicians and businesscritters of bribery. We wouldn’t need new laws. Even if we had new laws, they would languish as unenforced as the laws we already have against bribery, until and unless we change the climate of opinion that keeps the very idea of the common good out of our politics.

This lawsuit is ridiculous. The filibuster is a Senate rule. As such, it can be set aside at any time by the same simple majority of the Senate that put it in place as a rule in the first place. For that reason, it does not, at all, actually prevent majority rule in the Senate.

There might be a legitimate Constitutional issue here if the filibuster were based on some law passed by the Senate and House and signed by the president. You could argue that a mere statute cannot set aside a Constitutional provision, that such a filibuster law would constrain the Senate and keep a simple majority of its members from their right and duty to pass on all measures for which the Constitution does not require a super-majority. You might even be able to make a case that if the Senate was unable to change rules once the session had begun, if they had to operate by the rules they had passed when organizing the Senate at the beginning of each Congress, that the simple majority at orgaqnization should not be allowed to usurp the rights and duties of any future simple majority down the line during that Congress.

But rules of the Senate can be set aside at any time by a simple majority of just the Senate. Those rules were put in place to establish good order in the Senate’s deliberations, and any time any of thse rules becomes destructive of that purpose, any Senator has both the right and duty to object to a particular use of that rule he or she feels is abusive. If the chair agrees, that forces a simple majority vote on the rule in question, supporting the chair or voting to instead keep the rule. If the rule loses, it is gone, period.

The filibuster has all the force of a 5-year old’s resolution to not step on any cracks, for fear of breaking his mother’s back. That five year old doesn’t need anyone to give him permission to start stepping on cracks. He will resume normal ambulation as soon as he is ready to stop constraining his actions by pointless rules he made up for himself to constrain his own behavior inside of a little fantasy world of his own making. This sort of thing can get out of hand even with a five year old, and lead to obsessive-compulsive behavior. But with the Senate, it lacks even the quality of cuteness it might enjoy coming from a five-year old. It’s just sad and pathetic when adults act this way.

If Reid actually believed that the reformers were right, he would implement the reform. It can be done any time that any of the maneuvers he believes need reform are tried. Any member just has to question the application of the rule, question whether the application of the rule leads to sound and orderly conduct of the Senate, and then a simple majority can find that, no, the rule in question does not lead to sound and orderly conduct of the Senate.

Maybe he doesn’t have the votes to carry this through to successful reform now, because he does not have even a simple majority of his fellow Seantors in agreement with him that the reformers were right. But he can still be that one Senator who objects the next time any of these rules is used unsoundly to create disorder. And he would so object if he actually did believe the reformers were right.

He was always either a bit manic or a bit depressive, and he did not deny himself the use of the Demon Rum for a ling time before he finally cracked up. But he maintained a pretty high level of functioning until his last term was ending. The campaign rhetoric (“stink like a man”, and the even more famous “known thespian”) was from earlier, and was generally high functioning, Earl still in control, using his common-man-as-buffoon-to-the-elites schtick instead of being used by it. The final breakdown may have just been his manic depression (if that was the right diagnosis), and/or the alcoholism, following its own timetable, but people sympathetic to him blame it on the inability of any decent person to keep a grip on both his own sanity and the LA electorate at a time when the latter required going all in for segregation.

Stink like a man

Back in the day, the fundies actually managed to find some time, left over from their main pursuit of worrying about other people’s morals, to devote to actually being self-critical and worrying about their own state of grace. The results were often unfortunate, but at least less destructive than the pogroms they currently go at full time.

Southern Baptists, for example, used to deny themselves drinking (well, at least theoretically), smoking, dancing, and deodorant.

Earl Long ran for governor of Louisiana one year against the mayor of New Orleans, one Salvatore (“Sal”, of ocurse) DeLesseps Morrison. Morrison, or Della Soups, as Long invariably called him when campaigning upstate, was about as sophisticated a person as you could get away with in LA politics at the time. Or, as Earl would put it in every speech delivered among fellow Southern Baptists —

“I hear that this Della Soups fella uses this fancy French de-o-dor-ant that some folks in the big city use in weather like we’re having here today in this great state of ours. Well. Like you folks here today, I am a god-fearing man. I am not afraid that sophisticated people will sniff disapprovingly at me. I prefer to stink like a man!”

It is not in Trump’s favor that he doesn’t prefer to stink like a man.

The other side figured out decades ago that the only way around gridlock is by way of the judiciary. Our system has gradually accepted the idea, so that it is by now not subject to dispute, that the courts have judicial review over any dispute they care to decide. They are limited only by their own self-restraint. Of course the Movement is characterized mainly by its lack of any self-restraint, so of course we are in for a period of rule by a Nonemvirate, or rather, rule by the five who hold the majority

The repeated reference to this guy as a Neighborhood Watch captain, as his mental stability becomes ever more questionable, makes me wonder why no one reacted to the earlier signs that such a loose cannon might not be an ideal person to have wandering around the neighborhood armed.

The early sign that is always mentioned is the numerous calls to the local 911. I have always heard that people could get in trouble for excessive unwarranted use of 911. How many false alarms do you get with the 911 in Sanford before someone thinks to do something — if not something legally punitive, then maybe something along the lines of a psych evaluation?

And what sort of Neighborhood Watch doesn’t have some level of supervision and acountability for people it has out watching the neighborhood? Was Zimmerman really a member of an actual organization, or is the media just passing on his self-charactetrization of ongoing vigilante activities that were actually just totally free-lance? This guys is some sort of “captain”? How does one get to be a “captain” of this Neighborhood Watch? If he actually was an officer of some organization, shouldn’t that organization be held accountable now for not holding him accountable, for having an officer of the organization making dozens of false alarm calls to 911, and not looking into that? Did they know he carried a gun while watching the neighborhood? Do they have rules condoning or forbidding carrying a gun while watching the neighborhood? Does this Neighborhood Watch have any sort of liaison with the local police department, and do they condone carrying weapons while neighborhood watching, or excessive false alarm calls to 911?

The fundamental problem

The basic conflict inherent in any sort of Mormon/Christian fundy alliance is not any particular doctrinal incompatilbility — though God knows those are legion. The really basic problem is that Joseph Smith up and added The Book Of Mormon to the Bible.

The whole point of fundamentalism, and the allied concepts of Scriptural literalism and inerrancy, is that we don’t get to add or subtract so much as a jot or a tittle from the received Word. This move is basic to their whole approach, which is to deflect any possible personal responsibiity for stands that would be hard to defend, such as homophobia, with the appeal to eternal and unalterable Truth that requires them to hate gay people. They can’t very well let folks go around adding whole new books. If Mormons can add a book that describes Jesus ministering to people in the Americas, what’t to keep gays from coming up with a new gospel that describes Jesus returned to found a gay minsaty and denounce the homophobes?

All that non-fundamentalists want is an openness to interpretation of the existing text that questions whether homophobia is really there at all, and if it is, whether other parts of the text might supercede an earlier homophobia. That’s quite modest compared to just adding text.

It’s completely irrelevant anyway what Obama, the DoJ, or anyone but judges, thinks about judicial review. It’s a legal doctrine. It’s validity depends on the words and actions of nobody but judges deciding cases.

Somebody quiz Smith on where he stands with stare decisis. His view of that actually is both relevant and in doubt.

It’s time for progressives, in a spirit of bipartisan generosity, to yield to the other side our agreement that they can have their states’ rights on this one point — jurisdiction over their upcoming convention in Tampa.

The Secret Service now has control over security within the convention itself, which is the only reason FL law doesn’t apply there, the only reason guns can be banned on the floor of the convention.

Now, to you and me, not having firearms on the floor of a political convention probably seems elementary and obvious common sense. But that’s because we’re socialist pacifists. We probably don’t think guns belong in churches, bars or classrooms either. To a Republican and movement conservative, folks who believe that open and concealed carry enhance security, such a prohibition should seem just wrong.

Let’s let them have their way on this. Let’s set them free of the tyranny of a situatiion in which jack-booted Secret Service agents, agents of that Mooslim Socialist Kenyan Usurper, are the only people allowed to have firearms on the floor of the convention. Withdraw the Secret Service and let the convention floor in Tampa be one big laboratory in which that most precious freedom, the Right to Bear Arms, provides all the security convention goers will be getting.

But let’s give them just that one concession, and otherwise remain true to our nanny-state ways. We need to mandate that they buy funeral insurance if they are going to attend.

The problem with amending the Constitution to put in some such “pre-probate” judicial review, would be that doing so would require defining exactly what judicial review powers the federal bench is going to have. The Founders punted on that, and didn’t put in any defined power of judicial review. The judicial review we have arises partly from a common sense entailment of having courts enforce the law (they have to have some means of resolving situations in which different laws, including provisions of the Constitution, place contradictory requirements on parties), partly from the traditional practice of England’s unwritten constitution, and largely from what the Court has been able to get away with.

At present, SCOTUS is pretty much a 9-person despotism. There is no limit on the power of judicial review except what they decide to limit themselves to. They could insert themselves into just about any question anyone in the US might care to dispute, and probably get away with getting their decision respected. Sure, they can get away with this only because over two centuries of caution and circumspection on their part has lulled people into believing implicitly in their objectivity, in the possibility of there being some mystical level of judiciating that will only interpret the Law, not write it, even as the Court has most definitely written the Law time and time again.

They’ve recently abandoned that self-limitation in taking on whatever disputes, however inherently non-judicial, they care to in order to assert their power, and are likely to thereby force people to think carefully about the incredible deference they have unthinkingly granted SCOTUS. What it will come down to is that we either accept formally a literal nonemvirate, or we cut the Court back down to size. We could start by simply ignoring whatever they have to say about the mandate. Mr. Justice Roberts has made his decision, now let him enforce it. That’s how we used to do it.

So great, let’s sit down to plan exactly what judicial review we are going to give the courts, so that we can put in this pre-probate feature. But if we make an absolutely supreme and unlimited judicial review the formal standard, how do we keep what will amount to a despotic power from people who will one day want to control and use that power? We are already at a point at which no D Senator should ever again vote for anyone appointed by an R president, and vice versa, because that apple has been bitten, and at least one party I could name has clearly been engaged in a generation-long plan to capture the nonemvirate in order to rule from above.

We don’t know what to do with the judical review we already have in order to reduce it to a recognizably limited judicial function. There can be no innovation that wouldn’t make things worse until and unless we figure out what limits we want on judicial review.

“Prediction: if the Affordable Care Act gets struck down, this won’t happen. In fact, pretty much nothing will change. And nobody at the federal level will want to touch health care for another 15-20 years.”

Well, that’s an unassailable prediction, in the sense that no one at the federal level, except the Teahadist wreckers and destroyers, ever want to touch any actual public policy issue. Too many opportunites to alienate some voter somewhere, or worse and more likely, some campaign donor somewhere. But, if nothing is done, healthcare financing in this country will fall off a cliff in a much shorter time frame than 15-20 years. Either reasonable people at the federal level will learn a willingness to touch this issue pronto, or they will be replaced in short order by those who are so willing.

Look, we didn’t have this last go at healthcare financing reform out of any sort of concern for the uninsured or underinsured. There was absolutely nothing at all new about the fact of millions of Americans being uninsured or underinsured. We did the ACA because something had to be done to keep our current non-system from falling off a cliff. If that somehting is undone by the court, and maybe even if they leave it be, the wagon continues unimpeded to and then over the cliff.

The cliff here is the simple fact that health insurance, driven by unregulatd market forces, has priced itself out of the market. The individual market has reached the point where buying insurance is not a good bet for anyone without pre-existing conditions — these people would be far better off going naked/self-insuring and risking making it to Medicare age before they need medical services. Even the rates employers are able to get are killing competitiveness. But the insurers can’t go back, they can’t halt the impetus to the cliff, because each individually profits by ever more ruthlessly limiting its beneficiaries to those unlikely to need medical services before age 65. They have to make up the loss of numbers of beneficiaries — and the best performers in this market are those shedding beneficiaries — by raising premiums, premiums which already so high as to make no sense for the non-sick to take on.

Too many people on the progressive side oversimplify the big corporations as both malignant and all-powerful. They aren’t really malignant — just following thier fiduciary duty to maxiomize profits — however malignant the results of that are in an unregulated market. But we make a much bigger error in imagining them to be all-knowing and all-powerful, just because they have gone from public policy victory to victory. Sometimes, nothing fails like success, and that last thin wafer makes the glutton explode. The industry got the regulators off its back, but that has led to competition with a lack of the restraint that would have kept them from going over the cliff. They really can’t think two moves ahead, because their is no “they” to do any thinking. The direction has all been left to Capital, and Capital is a vengeful god who wants us all over the cliff and dead.

Presumably, at some point the humans take charge again, and we get some sort of Newer Deal. Or not. In either case, the crisis comes long before 15-20 years have gone by.

If you walk down a public street, there is some possibility that you will be hit by a car, mugged, or just collapse of some sort of internal malady. Extend consideration to your entire life and all of your activities, and the probability approaches certainty that you will generate a need for health care services at some point. All of us are already in the market for health care services merely by virtue of drawing breath.

If you’re in the market for health care, you’re in the market for health care insurance. You will get health care services at some point. Even if your intent is not to pay for such, and not allow others to pay for you, your highest probability of receiving health care will come in circumstances in which you are not conscious, and you will receive these services as a matter of course — unless you withdraw from society to the point that no one will notice that you’ve collapsed. You very often will not be able to pay for these servces out of pocket, unless you possess Bill Gates level wealth. Should they be provided to you because you are unconscious and everyone assumes you would value your life over your credit rating, or if you are like most of us and value your life over your credit rating and you therefore want medical services you can’t poay for out of pocket, then someone has to pay for those services. You and I, all of us, are walking insurance liabilities. We cannot choose to not be in the market for health care insurance. Medical sevice providers cannot choose to deny services to people who cannot pay.

Whatever its arguable public policy and political folly, this mandate will not change the above realities by even a little bit. We are all, providers and potential patients alike, aready in the market, like it or not. The mandate is simply a means of attempting to regulate this market, which is clearly a troubled market. It is actualy much less coercive a way of achieving such regulation than alternatives already in use (such as payroll deductions for Medicare). But it is simly a means of regulating a market — it does not at all create any market.

Oh, please!

Please don’t speak gobbledygook. You demean yourself and the people you are speaking to.

Lord knows there are all sorts of reasons to think that this mandate is a bad idea. I think that it is both bad policy and bad politics. But unconstitutional because the Commerce Clause does not authorize the federal legislature to “create commerce”, which it supposedly does by requiring people to buy insurance or pay higher taxes? Please explain to me how charging toll on a turnpike does not “create commerce” in the sense of a market in using roads? The payroll tax you fork over to support Medicare doesn’t “create commerce”? What does that phrase “create commerce” even mean? Does anything the govt does or fails to do not create some sort of exchange of money, which exchange is what we generally think of as “commerce”? How is the govt not “creating commerce” by failing to have a mandate?

Of course the phrase means nothing at all. It’s the creation of mooks who know they have packed the Court with fellow Federalist Society mooks who will do whatever benefits their Revolt of the Mooks. This “create commerce” line is just a meaningless phrase they have invented as cover for their judicial coup.

By all means support Single Payer. I’m for a National Health Service myself. But, please, don’t feed the mooks. There ae sound policy and political reasons to be for Single Payer or a National Health Service. Argue on the basis of those sound principles. Don’t lend crediblity to the mooks by reaching unthinkingy for their false principals.

The basic flaw with the argument here is the assumption that the 5-man conservative junta on the Court are engaged in a good faith, if wrong-headed, attempt to change legal principles. We may not agree wth the principles they want to throut, and the ones they will substitute, but the thinking here is that whatever they do will be logically consistent.

This seems unlikely. Their stated underlying, methodlogical, principle is original intent. That has a very strong analogy to literalism in interpreting the Bible, in that both methodologies allow their practitioners to abandon logic and consistency and substitute their own prejudices freely for that of God or the Founders, who are not available to object to whatever logical and practical atrocities their latter-day enthusiasts foist on their authority. We have already seen their ad hoccery at work in Bush v Gore, which they arbitrarily made completely ad hoc, denying their own reasoning any precedent-creating authority.

People willing to ignore common sense and logic to the point of declaring that the Commerce Clause doesn’t allow this mandate they dont like will have absolutely no problem whatever deciding that any future other mandate that they like absolutely is consistent with the Commerce Clause.

One item to add to our agenda

Right now all we can do is oppose these laws one by one as they come up in some of our wonderful “laboratories of democracy”.

But should we get the trifecta this coming election (and opposing all these laws could contribute to turning swing voters away from these fanatics enough to swing that result), very near the top of our agenda should be federal law pre-empting all of this dangerous, destructive nonsense. Medical care these days is clearly interstate commerce, Congress has the right and duty to regulate medical care, and these dangeous and destructive laws make clear the need to regulate the states completely out of the business of having any control whatsoever over medical care of any sort.

We have long needed federal medical licensure anyway. Take that function away from the states, and have the legislation that does that forbid states from passing laws that in any way impose any sort of requirements on medical care, period.

Should this turkey unaccountably (well, not really unaccountably — the other side has been packing the courts for a generation, time for that effort to start paying back for them) not be held unconstitutional, they would see your suggestion about surveillance and raise it.

They would grant couples who are trying to have children a by on unintended implantation failure. Any such failures that do occur while trying to have children would be, by their thinking, simply an unavoidable vicissitude of pre-term life for which the paretns wuld no more be heald legally culpable than if their post-term child were to die by one f the innumerable vicissitudes putting life in that time period at risk. The standard in both cases would be contributory negligence. Let your post-term kid play in traffic, and you may be guilty of some sort of homicide just from negligence. Expose the pre-implanted “child” to unnecessary risk, and ditto.

They would use this reasoning to impose on the users of contraception the requirement to get frequent transvaginal ultrasounds to insure that their contraception was working by means of suppressing ovulation, rather than by means of rendeirng the uterus inhospitable to implantation, or the whole path inhospitable to transit of the conceptus. The idea would be that, whatever the risk of implantation failure in sex without contraception, that’s the standard, natural risk, which, even if higher than the risk of implantation failure in sex protcted by ocntraception, is legally acceptable where even a small magnitude man-made risk is not.

It is absolutely wrong to imagine that this theater of the absurd performance piece was without a point.

As Voltaire put it, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” The political consensus in this country right now seems to be that our atrocity-committing potential needs to be shored up.

They obviously haven’t thought this one through. Understatement of the year, but not at all surprising considering the source.

But this law wouldn’t just criminalize miscarriage, it also criminalizes all sex that might result in conception. The conceptus will not infrequently fail to implant and thus die. People who make that happen, by having unprotecte sex, could be guilty of some sort of homicide.

Implantation failure happens a lot as a consequence of any sort of unprotected sex. Take this breathtakingly literal law literally, and the only way to have sex without putting yourself at risk for manslaughter or negligent homicide would be to insure, absolutely, that it does not result in conception.

In effect, this law would make it illegal to have sex for the purpose of procreation. Wow.