Washington Post says, “No more Senate appointments!”

The Washington Post editorial team wisely comes out against filling Senate vacancies through appointments, and endorses special elections as an appropriate means of dealing with a vacancy.

Special elections are probably the most politically viable solution, but I’m not entirely convinced that they’re the best solution, or even the one with the least attendant problems.  For starters, it’s not clear as to how state governments would account for the cost of a special election, especially considering that running a statewide election is considerably more expensive than an election in a single district.  On a political level, there are no guarantees that a special election would be free from the influence of special interests.  In fact, my guess is that special elections are more prone to influence by outside actors, because far fewer people are interested in the outcome of a special election.

If I were designing a method to replace Senate vacancies, I would – as I’ve said earlier – institute something modeled on the 25th Amendment, whereby a Senate vacancy would be automatically filled by a ranking state legislator of the respective party.  At the end of the term, said replacement would be required to give up the seat, and she would have to win the respective party’s primary election if she were interested in keeping the seat.  This solution (to me at least) seems to capture the advantages of an appointment and a special election.  Unlike a special election, it is relatively quick and designed to provide immediate representation for a state which has lost one of its representatives, and more importantly, the fact that the replacement would be an elected lawmaker of the same party gives the process a bit more democratic legitimacy.  Not to mention the fact that the replacement would have a non-trivial amount of legislative experience, which considerably eases the transition period.

It seems to me that something along these lines is preferable to a special election or an appointment, but there is the very real chance that I might simply be missing something.

Scary Trivia of the Day

According to my textbook:

If the world population continues to grow at the current (2005) rate through 2025, grain production must increase by 80% to meet the increased need for food.

Malthusian thoughts, anyone?  I know we can’t reasonably expect another agricultural revolution (like the Haber process that gave us the oil —> fertilizer equation we know and love) to happen, and with oil as alarming as it’s been over the past year, things like this tend to set off concomitant alarms in my mind.  Then again, if Americans would stop wasting between 14 and 50% of their food, that alone would already go a long way towards ensuring that there’s enough to go around.

They aren’t even very good at being evil

I’ve always assumed that the Bush Administration’s competency extended as far as their priorities and interests.  Disaster recovery, for instance, wasn’t terribly high on George W. Bush’s “to-do” list, and as such, the administration didn’t do much to prepare for a minor disaster, much less a catastrophe like Katrina.  Since the Bush folks seemed pretty intent on violating the Constitution and our various treaty obligations, I sort of just assumed that they did a pretty decent job of it.  As it turns out though, the Bush Administration’s incompetency extended to everything, including their twisted enthusiasm for torture and indefinite detention (via the Washington Post):

President Obama’s plans to expeditiously determine the fates of about 245 terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and quickly close the military prison there were set back last week when incoming legal and national security officials — barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees — discovered that there were no comprehensive case files on many of them.

Instead, they found that information on individual prisoners is “scattered throughout the executive branch,” a senior administration official said. The executive order Obama signed Thursday orders the prison closed within one year, and a Cabinet-level panel named to review each case separately will have to spend its initial weeks and perhaps months scouring the corners of the federal government in search of relevant material.

It is – literally – Monty Python meets Franscisco Franco: stunning incompetence combined with an almost casual disregard for decency.  But, this is exactly what happens when you entrust government to a collection of small-minded, petty authoritarians.

Sen. Obenshain has dreams of Gilead, apparently

And in the wonderful world of Virginia politics comes news (via Waldo Jaquith) that Virginia Sen. Mark Obenshain (R-Harrisonburg) has introduced a bill which would effectively criminalize miscarriages:

Requires that when a fetal death occurs without medical attendance upon the mother at or after the delivery or abortion, the mother or someone acting on her behalf, within 24 hours, report the fetal death, location of the remains, and identity of the mother to the local or state police or sheriff’s department of the city or county where the fetal death occurred. The bill also specifies that no one shall remove, destroy, or otherwise dispose of any remains without the express authorization of law-enforcement officials or the medical examiner, and that a violation of this section is a Class 1 misdemeanor.

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Sen. Obenshain clearly sees women as little more than babymaking machines fit for harassment and imprisonment if they shirk their (presumably) divinely mandated duties, I wonder how Sen. Obenshain intends to enforce this deeply misguided/offensive law.  After all, “thirty-one percent of all conceptions end in miscarriage“, the vast majority of which occur before the woman is even aware that she is pregnant.  And while I don’t presume to speak for Sen. Obenshain, I can’t help but think that he would be a little uncomfortable with a legal regime which was empowered to violate the privacy rights of each and every woman of childbearing age in the Commonwealth of Virginia.

On the other hand, Sen. Mark Obenshain obviously has very little regard for the agency and privacy of women in his district and Virginia at large, so it wouldn’t surprise me too much if sees nothing wrong with routinely violating their privacy in an effort to ensure that no miscarriage goes unpunished.  But, of course, we all know that pro-choicers are the unreasonable party in the abortion debate.  Yes.  Exactly.

Assignment Desk

What do you have for me?

“Glass ceiling” doesn’t mean what you think it does

Via Cogitamus’ Sir Charles is the Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut citing the “glass ceiling” as the chief factor explaining the failure of Caroline Kennedy to be appointed to the Senate:

With her abrupt exit this week from consideration for the Senate, Caroline Kennedy added her name to a growing list: women who have sought the nation’s highest offices only to face insurmountable hurdles.

Like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sarah Palin before her, Kennedy illustrated what some say is an enduring double standard in the handling of ambitious female office-seekers. Even as more women step forward as contenders for premier political jobs, observers say, few seem able to get there.

Sir Charles notes correctly that “this is one of those instances where a genuine problem (the overall and undeniable underrepresentation of women in electoral politics) is trivialized by use of bad examples.”  Not only are Caroline Kennedy, Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton terrible examples, but – to extend the metaphor a bit – Kornblut is raising the glass ceiling a little too high.  That is, outside of anecdote, there isn’t much to suggest that women have trouble winning elections; research suggests that in the case of open seats, women are just as likely as men to win.  The problem of women in politics has less to do with winning than it does with access.

Earlier last year, political scientists Jennifer Lawless and Richard Fox (Brown University and Loyola Marymount University, respectively) published a paper entitled “Why are Women Still Not Running for Office?“  Drawing on data collected through a seven year national study of political attitudes, Lawless and Fox found that there is a significant gender gap in political ambition.  This graph, for example, shows that women are significantly less likely than men to aspire to high offices:

The gap in political ambition is represented on almost every level of political involvement: women are less likely than men to have positive attitudes about engaging in political activities, are less likely to feel qualified to run for political office, are more likely to feel constrained by familial obligations, and are more likely to believe that the electoral system is hostile to women.  What’s more, women with political ambitions are significantly less likely than men to receive support and encouragement from political and non-political actors (party activists, friends and family).

To put it another way, if there are barriers to women in politics, they are – pace Kornblut – barriers of perception, entry and access rather than barriers to electoral achievement.  Which means, to me at least, that we should spend less time kvetching about Caroline Kennedy, and more time doing the difficult work of recruiting more women candidates,  and encouraging women’s political ambition.

From here on out, I am going to assume that congressional Republicans are pathological liars

Why?  If we can’t trust congressional Republicans to be truthful about the stimulus package and our ailing economy, then what exactly can you trust them with (via Huffington Post):

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won’t be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.

Funny thing is, there is no such report.

“We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study,” a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.

Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score — how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they’re not an official CBO product.

[...]

A Republican aide for the House Appropriations Committee denied involvement, saying that her staff did not see the CBO numbers until after the AP reported them. The Washington Post followed the AP and reported that aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) provided the report. [Emphasis mine]

Obama ends torture, takes advantage of unprecedented executive power

Commenting on Barack Obama’s first week in the Oval Office, Salon’s Mike Madden noted that “with a few strokes of a pen…President Obama undid years of policy that was the cornerstone of George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”  Similarly, Ezra Klein remarked on Thursday that “It’s amazing how much evil can be undone with the stroke of the executive’s pen.”

While I’m certainly pleased to see President Obama repudiate the worst, most immoral aspects of Bush’s presidency, I’m also troubled (and a little scared) by the fact that at present, any given president can (essentially) unilaterally change the direction of the nation’s intelligence agencies to his/her liking.  I’ve noted before that structural incentives will push the president towards embracing increasing executive power (or at least, consolidating gains).  And we’re seeing it in action.  Indeed, with the same stroke of the pen, President Obama could have “doubled Guantanamo” (to borrow Mitt Romney’s formulation) or vastly expanded the scope of our “enhanced interrogations” and “extraordinary renditions.”  To put it another way, the only reason why neither of those things happened is because we happen to have a considerably more benevolent executive.

Imagine if John McCain were elected in November?  Or worse, imagine if Rudy Giuliani had won the Republican nomination and gone on to win the election?  Absent any meaningful safeguards or checks on executive power, a President McCain or President Giuliani could dramatically increase the executive’s police power, with very little (if any) trouble (and if the Bush years are any indication, very little Congressional opposition).

George W. Bush’s legacy (if we can even call it that) is that we now live in the shadow of an executive with unprecedented (and arguably near-dictatorial) powers.  This frightens me, and if you’re truly interested in maintaining some sense of Constitutional balance, it should frighten you too.  With regards to fixing our safety net, repairing our economy, and strengthening our international relationships, liberals have their work more than cut out for them.  In the midst of these problems, it is easy to forget about (or disregard) the severe imbalance of power between our three branches of government.  But we should take care not to; while President Obama might take the Constitution seriously, there is absolutely no guarantee that his successor will.  And if we’re really interested in preventing a repeat of the Bush administration’s utter disregard for the rule of law, then we need to find ways to restrain and restrict the executive branch.

Teh Service Here

No comment.

Why I am Pro-Choice

As I’m sure most of you know, today is the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.  And to mark this occasion, I thought it would be worth taking the effort to explain why I’m pro-choice.  Except, “effort” isn’t a totally accurate modifier.  Don’t get me wrong, I could provide a fairly comprehensive explanation of why I support full reproductive health, it’s just  that it’s not really necessary, since I can sum up my reasons with one, simple, straightforward fact:

The choice isn’t between abortions, and no abortions: it’s between abortions, and dead women.  Abortions are a fact of human life, indeed, it’s by no means a stretch to say that abortion is one of the oldest known medical procedures. Rescinding Roe v. Wade – or outlawing abortion services more generally – won’t change that.  In fact, the only thing that changes, frankly, is the number of women who die trying to self-abort.

I’m pro-choice less for deep-seated ideological reasons (and like I said, I have those too) and more because I’m not terribly interested in living in a world where women die for the “crime” of trying to control their own futures.