On the minimum wage, the right to unionize, and Walmart

I stumbled across a fruitful blog post that touched on the relationship between minimum wages - along with the wages of low income workers in general - and the ability of workers to collect their strength under the heading of a union.

Perhaps the problems faced by low income workers are better served by allowing them to unionize than to simply increase the minimum wage. Something for M3's to consider as you put your papers together.

I'll post a few separate items based on the links in the story above.

From the Fiscal Times: Why Raising the Minimum Wage Is a Fantasy

A sobering read - something to consider for your paper, and maybe your career:

In a recent “60 Minutes” piece, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos proudly displayed his company’s next delivery vehicles: drones. It’s only a matter of time, according to Bezos, before Amazon’s faux-pelicans will be dropping packages at your door (and hopefully not on your head), speeding up deliveries and bringing instant gratification one step closer. No one thought to ask the obvious – what happens to all those redundant delivery folks?

The constant replacement of humans by machines presents policy makers with a looming crisis — not enough jobs to go around. It also destroys the easy confidence with which many on the left argue for higher minimum wages. Incomes aren’t stuck because employers are hard-hearted so-and-sos, which is the recurring accusation of those who, like Paul Krugman, have never actually had to compete in the real world. Wages are stuck because so many individuals can be replaced by competitors overseas who earn far less or by machines, which earn nothing.. . . . The retail industry is just one in which workers are at risk. It’s hard to find many jobs that are not threatened by automation, by Internet expansion or by overseas competition. That includes people working in the fast food industry — where union organizers are currently pushing for a big jump in minimum pay. They should not assume that burger joints won’t eventually automate. Last year, Momentum Machines in San Francisco previewed an apparatus that created 360 burgers an hour. Noting that the fast food industry spends $9 billion a year on wages, the company predicted a lively reception for its space- and cost-saving machine.

Companies and workers successfully competing against all these forces must rely on the right combination of productivity and price. Purposefully jeopardizing workers’ livelihoods by driving wage costs higher is risky and in the end unproductive. Add to the mix uber-low interest rates, which tilts investment towards capital and away from labor, and those urging a higher minimum wage are not on the side of workers.

"Do you ever have one of those days when everything seems unconstitutional?"

The FDA issues draft rule on anti-bacterial soap

Wired Magazine reports on the rule. This story is an example of rule-making by the executive branch, which is perhaps its principle power.

Click here for the proposed rule.

Click here for a primer on the rule making process in the FDA.

From the story:

More news today out of the Food and Drug Administration — so while I’m still writing my follow-up to last week’s news on growth promoters, I want to toss this up first. The latest: The FDA has announced that it is formally reconsidering “antibacterial” soaps and other personal-care products, charging that the antibacterial ingredients confer no benefit over regular soap and water while carrying extra risks.

In a draft rule that will be published Tuesday in the Federal Register, the agency calls for manufacturers of consumer antibacterial products to begin providing data that shows the ingredients are both safe for daily use, and also more effective than plain soap and water. Deep in the 137-page rule, it also raises the issue that’s most interesting to me: whether the routine use of these products causes bacteria to develop resistance against the active ingredients, and against antibiotics as an unintended side effect.

Antibacterial products are a vast market; according to the FDA there are more than 2,000 currently for sale to consumers.

Obama grants 13 pardons and 8 commutations

This is both an example of presidential checks on the judiciary as well as a year end tradition. This year it seems like the president is trying to make a point about sentencing also since the 8 commutations concerned sentences for crack cocaine possession - which tend to be more harsh than sentences for powder cocaine.

Here is a list of the persons affected.

Charlie Savage reports:

It was the first time retroactive relief was provided to a group of inmates who would most likely have received significantly shorter terms if they had been sentenced under current drug laws, sentencing rules and charging policies. Most will be released in 120 days. The commutations opened a major new front in the administration’s efforts to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and to help correct what it has portrayed as inequality in the justice system.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said that each of the eight men and women had been sentenced under what is now recognized as an “unfair system,” including a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses that was significantly reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”

The commutations have come during a pendulum swing away from tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted a generation ago amid the crack epidemic. The policies fueled an 800 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the United States. They also carried a racial charge: Offenses involving crack, which was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities, carried far more severe penalties than those for powder cocaine, favored by affluent white users.

Click here for a full list of persons pardoned by presidents.

From Atlantic Cities: Why Cities Can't Win in State Government

Richard Florida discusses a recent paper which points out that large cities have done poorly in state legislatures recently - proposed legislation often fails - and attempt to figure out why:

Despite having overwhelming advantage in terms of the size of their populations, the nation's biggest cities are typically hamstrung by their state legislatures. The study, by political scientists Gerald Gammof University of Rochester and Thad Kousser of University of California San Diego, tracks how much worse big-city legislators have been historically at getting their way in state politics. Published in November’s American Political Science Review, the study draws from the authors' unique database of more than 1,700 “district bills” – those that refer to a specific city or county – in state legislatures from 1881 to 2000 in 13 states. Nearly 750 of these bills (747 to be exact) cover the largest city in each state.

The findings are astounding. Comparing the success rates for legislation that affected cities of different sizes, they found “a large, stable gap in passage rates” between bills that affected cities with populations of at least 100,000 and those that dealt with smaller cities and towns. Bills from legislators from small or medium-sized cities were overall twice as likely to pass as ones that originated in big cities like Chicago or New York, the authors found. Over the last century, the passage rates have been 24 to 34 percent lower for big-city legislation.

The drop has been remarkable since the 1940s:



Why? The size the of large city delegations apparently:

. . . the authors found that big-city delegations were just too big. Beginning in the 1960s – during Mailer’s era, not coincidentally – urban political reformers campaigned for a reapportionment of seats in state legislatures across the country, hoping to get urban residents the “one person, one vote” that they deserved. But the ballooning size of city delegations, rather than having a “snowball” effect on their efforts in state legislative contests, may in fact have had unintended consequences. Larger delegations leave far more room for internal disputes, sending unclear messages to potential allies from other parts of the state and, as a result, splintering their ability to get anything done for their urban constituents.

The authors write that “scale exerts its most dramatic effect through the size of big-city delegations. Larger delegations are more likely to be divided along partisan lines and to split over roll-call votes on their own district bills.” The add, “It appears that legislators from the rest of the state follow the cues of the big-city delegation and split when its members divide, often dooming bills.”

The larger the delegation, the more difficult it is to pass bills:

Four posts from the Dish on the minimum wage

Andrew Sullivan has a series of blog posts - with input form his readers - on various aspects associated with the minimum wage.

These might be worth a look.

Click here, and here, and here, and here.

From the Hill: Five major NSA recommendations

Here's a close up look at the basic proposals made to change the NSA's surveillance program:

The basics:

1- End the government’s bulk data collection
2 - Give public advocates a voice on surveillance court
3 - Prevent agencies from forcing disclosure of information
4 - Put a civilian in charge of the NSA
5 - Clamp down on leaks

Liberty and Security in a Changing World

That's the title of the recently released report from the task force assembled by President Obama to make proposals for how NSA should adjust its surveillance operations.

Click here for the report.

For commentary click here:
- NYT.
- National Journal.
- Washington Post.

These are the members of the commission:

- Richard A. Clarke 
- Michael J. Morell
- Geoffrey R. Stone
- Cass R. Sunstein
- Peter Swire

From the Fiscal Times: Why the Income Gap is Widening

The gap has become more pronounced since the housing crash of 2008.

Here's a look at why - which might help determine whether raising the minimum wage might be an effective way to address this problem.

This growing inequality is being exacerbated by policy failures – more specifically, by decreasingly progressive tax, transfer, regulatory, and full-employment policies in recent decades.

Financial deregulation has contributed to the rising share of national income going to investment income and compensation of financial professionals — with the latter being a significant driver of rising income share of the top 1 percent, as analyzed in a recent paper by Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute.

There is also compelling evidence that reductions in top marginal tax have exacerbated the growth in market-based income inequality. Essentially, a lower top tax rate makes efforts by executives to demand greater compensation more rewarding. Successful such efforts will come out of workers’ paychecks, not shareholders’ portfolios.

Political inaction, or “political drift,” on the minimum wage — allowing the real minimum wage to be eroded by inflation — or unionization policy is certainly part of the story. Globalization and international trade have exerted downward domestic wage pressure while increasing returns to wealth, with pressures on inequality growth stemming both from irreversible market forces and certain trade policy choices.

Inequality would have risen sharply absent these influences of budget policy. But while market-based income inequality, as measured by the “Gini” index, rose 23 percent between 1979 and 2007, post-tax, post-transfer inequality rose 33 percent.

This means that roughly a third of the rise in post-tax, post-transfer inequality is attributable to erosions in the redistributive nature of tax and budget policy.

There are limits to how much redistributive policies can temper inequality (though we are far from those limits), but tax and budget policy should have been serving as a tempering influence rather than exacerbating market-based inequality growth.

Beyond these better-understood forces and policy levers, the disparate nature of the recovery from the Great Recession is both fueling inequality and is squarely in the hands of U.S. policymakers.

The best advice you'll get in this class

And a preview of what you'll look through in the section on civil liberties.

An Ex-Cop's Guide to Not Getting Arrested.

Dale Carson is a defense attorney in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as an alumnus of the Miami-Dade Police Department and the FBI. So he knows a thing or two about how cops determine who to hassle, and what all of us can do to not be one of those people. Carson has distilled his tips into a book titled Arrest-Proof Yourself, now in its second edition. It is a legitimately scary book—369 pages of insight on the many ways police officers profile and harass the people on their beat in an effort to rack up as many arrests as possible.

"Law enforcement officers now are part of the revenue gathering system," Carson tells me in a phone interview. "The ranks of cops are young and competitive, they’re in competition with one another and intra-departmentally. It becomes a game. Policing isn’t about keeping streets safe, it’s about statistical success. The question for them is, Who can put the most people in jail?"

Rule #1:

Be Invisible to Police

Carson has four golden rules, the first of which is, "If police can't see you, they can't arrest you." The simplest application of this concept is that if you plan on doing something illegal, you should do it in the privacy of your home. Yes, you can be arrested while at home, but you can't be profiled sitting in your living room, and profiling is what you're trying to avoid.

The best part:

If crying fails, and you're willing to do whatever it takes to not go to jail, Carson advises you to "foul yourself so that the police will consider setting you free in order not to get their cruiser nasty." Vomit on your clothes. Defecate and urinate in your pants. Then let the officers know what you've done. If they arrest you anyway, you'll get cleaned and reclothed at the jail.

From the Atlantic Cities: Minimum Wage Was Once Enough To Keep a Family of 3 Out of Poverty

From Emily Badger:

Amid protests across the country over retail and service jobs that pay little better than the minimum wage, it's easy to forget that this income benchmark once meant something slightly different. In the past, a minimum-wage job was actually one that could keep a single parent out of poverty.

Since the 1980s, the federal minimum wage has kept pace with neither inflation, nor the rise of the average worker's paycheck. That means that while a federal minimum wage in 1968 could have lifted a family of three above the poverty line, now it can't even do that for a parent with one child, working full-time, 40 hours a week and 52 weeks a year (yes, this calculation assumes that the parent takes no time off).

From the Washington Post: Judge: NSA’s collecting of phone records is probably unconstitutional

As reported by Ellen Nakashima and Ann E. Marimow:

A federal judge ruled Monday that the National Security Agency’s daily collection of virtually all Americans’ phone records is almost certainly unconstitutional.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon found that a lawsuit by Larry Klayman, a conservative legal activist, has “demonstrated a substantial likelihood of success” on the basis of Fourth Amendment privacy protections against unreasonable searches.
Leon granted the request for an injunction that blocks the collection of phone data for Klayman and a co-plaintiff and orders the government to destroy any of their records that have been gathered. But the judge stayed action on his ruling pending a government appeal, recognizing in his 68-page opinion the “significant national security interests at stake in this case and the novelty of the constitutional issues.”

“I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every single citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,” said Leon, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”

The strongly worded decision stands in contrast to the secret deliberations of 15 judges on the nation’s surveillance court, which hears only the government’s side of cases and since 2006 has held in a series of classified rulings that the program is lawful. It marks the first time a federal judge in open court has opined on the collection of lawfulness in a case not involving a criminal defendant.

A Justice Department spokesman, Andrew Ames, said Monday that the government was reviewing Leon’s decision. “We believe the program is constitutional as previous judges have found,” he said.

From the Fiscal Times: Will the Pope Overthrow Neoliberal Economics?

I'll like 3 week mini classes to read this article carefully. I'll be opening some new material on ideology - I'll try to beyond what I normally do in class - and this uses a lot of the terms we will try to come to terms with. Aside from the broad - and unhelpful - terms liberal and conservative, these include progressive, neoliberalism, economic populism, moderate conservative and a few others.

Bruce Bartlett is one of my favorite writers - so I'm prejudiced - but here he wonders whether Pope Francis' recent statements on inequities in society means that progressive economics has a spokesman it has lacked for many years. He also provides a good look at the recent ideological history - at least in terms of the economy - in the US: 

Until the 1970s, the economics profession was largely dominated by progressives. Almost all economists supported the idea that government spending on public works was the best policy in an economic recession, that tax policy ought to equalize incomes and reduce inequality, and that the Federal Reserve should use monetary policy to reduce unemployment. -

But in the inflationary 1970s, these progressive ideas came under fierce attack from economists associated with supply-side economics, the Chicago School and others on the right who argued that government fine-tuning made recessions worse, that tax policy should eschew redistribution and concentrate only on increasing growth, and that the Fed should stick to maintaining price stability and ignore unemployment in the conduct of monetary policy.

Eventually, this conservative view was even adopted by Democrats, who called it neoliberalism. So widespread is the neoliberal view today that even those who claim to be on the political left, such as the group Third Way, attack “economic populism” and demand cuts in Social Security benefits.

One reason for the success of neoliberalism is that progressive economic thought has lacked an effective and articulate spokesman. Bill Clinton famously declared that the era of big government was over and worked with Republicans to abolish the entitlement to welfare and slash the capital gains tax. He also reappointed Republican Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Federal Reserve. On balance, Clinton governed as an Eisenhower Republican.

Barack Obama is little better. Objective analysts have known for years that he has governed as a moderate conservative who has consistently rejected progressive demands to reduce unemployment, who adopted a health reform designed by Republicans and conservatives, and reappointed Republican Ben Bernanke as chairman of the Fed. Like Clinton, he has pursued free trade and done nothing to halt the outsourcing of American jobs to China.

Those on the left know that Clinton and Obama were not progressive presidents, but were forced to circle the wagons around them because the alternative of right-wing Republican control was worse. And conservative attacks on Clinton and Obama for being radical socialists fooled some progressives into thinking they were men of the left rather than, as was actually the case, moderate conservatives.

As a consequence, true progressivism has withered almost to the point of death, with most political debate in the U.S. taking place between moderate conservatives and those on the far right. In fact, many people have simply forgotten what a true progressive even sounds like.

Into this policy vacuum, Pope Francis has breathed new life into the progressive tradition.

The NAACP, the Supreme Court, and the modern civil rights movement

A section within the article mentioned in the previous post - The Decay of American Political Institutions - deserves a separate mention.

It has to do with the forces driving the decision the Supreme Court made in Brown v Board of Education. The authors argues that this marked a turning point where an interest group could use the courts to change policy - something that no other liberal democracy allows. Changes in public policy that interest groups are able to achieve by going around the legislature, straight to the court:

One of the great turning points in 20th-century American history was the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which overturned on constitutional grounds the 19th-century Plessy v. Ferguson case that had upheld legal segregation. This decision was the starting point for the civil rights movement, which, over the following decade, succeeded in dismantling the formal barriers to racial equality and guaranteed the rights of African Americans and other minorities. The courts had cut their teeth earlier over union organizing rights; new social rules based on those rights provided a model for subsequent social movements in the late 20thcentury, from environmental protection to women’s rights to consumer safety to gay marriage.

So familiar is this heroic narrative to Americans that they seldom realize how peculiar it is. The primary mover in the Brown case was the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a private voluntary association. The initiative had to come from private groups, of course, because state governments in the South were controlled by pro-segregation forces. The NAACP pressed the case on appeal all the way to the Supreme Court. What was arguably one of the most important changes in American public policy thus came about not because Congress, as the representative of the American people, voted for it but because private individuals litigated through the court system to change the rules. Later developments, like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, were the result of congressional action, but even in these cases enforcement was carried out by courts at the behest of private parties.

No other liberal democracy proceeds in this fashion. All European countries have gone through similar changes to the legal status of racial and ethnic minorities, and women and gays in the second half of the 20th century. But in Britain, France or Germany, the same results have been achieved through a national justice ministry acting on behalf of a parliamentary majority. The legislative rule changes might well have been driven by public pressure, but they would have been carried out by the government itself, not by private parties acting in conjunction with the judiciary.

This something to file away and think about more when we cover both civil rights and interest groups later this 3 week term.

From The American Interest: The Decay of American Political Institutions

Via The Dish, Francis Fukuyama tries to get at the root of dysfunction in the American governing system. This adds to a handful of writing linked to in previous posts that try to get to heart of it - or - argue that we're being a bit too pessimistic.

Fukuyama thinks American governing and political institutions are decaying - this should be applicable to the material in 2305 because we spend a lot of time looking at the gradual development of these institutions over history and the importance of maintaining them. Is the politicized environment we are now in undermining the stability these institutions are supposed to provide?

He makes a handful of observations, each suggests a structural problem is at the root of the curretn dysfunction:

1 - He argues that the judicial and legislative institutions are growing at the expense of the executive, and that the ability of the executive branch to effectively implement the law is being undermined - which undermines the effectiveness of governing institutions.

2 - He also argues that the growth of interest groups and lobbying undermines the efficient operations of government - personal relationships rather than impersonal govern decision making. This means that narrow special favors are more likely to drive policy making than the general welfare.

3 - Ideological polarization has allowed the system of checks and balances to go far beyond what it was originally intended to do - check excessive executive power - and made it unable to do what it is designed to do.

He argues that we are now a nation of "courts and parties" and that ain't good:

The decay in the quality of American government has to do directly with the American penchant for a state of “courts and parties”, which has returned to center stage in the past fifty years. The courts and legislature have increasingly usurped many of the proper functions of the executive, making the operation of the government as a whole both incoherent and inefficient. The steadily increasing judicialization of functions that in other developed democracies are handled by administrative bureaucracies has led to an explosion of costly litigation, slow decision-making and highly inconsistent enforcement of laws. The courts, instead of being constraints on government, have become alternative instruments for the expansion of government. Ironically, out of a fear of empowering “big government”, the United States has ended up with a government that is very large, but that is actually less accountable because it is largely in the hands of unelected courts.

He makes an ironic observation - two actually. The first is that efforts to democratize government - such as the passage of the Pendleton Act in the late 1800's (discussed in the section on campaign finance) have allowed wealthy interests to expand their influence over the political process. The second is that limits on the executive branch not only lead to decreases in opinion of it's performance, but to political movements that use that dissatisfaction to further place limits on the executive branch. This leads to a negative spiral that creates a less and less effective governing apparatus.

Ordinary people feel that their supposedly democratic government no longer reflects their interests but instead caters to those of a variety of shadowy elites. What is peculiar about this phenomenon is that this crisis in representativeness has occurred in large part because of reforms designed to make the system more democratic. Indeed, both phenomena—the judicialization of administration and the spread of interest-group influence—tend to undermine trust in government, which tends to perpetuate and feed on itself. Distrust of executive agencies leads demands for more legal checks on administration, which further reduces the quality and effectiveness of government by reducing bureaucratic autonomy. It may seem paradoxical, but reduced bureaucratic autonomy is what in turn leads to rigid, rule-bound, un-innovative and incoherent government. Ordinary people may blame bureaucrats for these problems (as if bureaucrats enjoy working under a host of detailed rules, court orders, earmarks and complex, underfunded mandates coming from courts and legislators over which they have no control). But they are mistaken to do so; the problem with American government is less an unaccountable bureaucracy than an overall system that allocates what should properly be administrative powers to courts and political parties.

He makes an intriguing, counter-intuitive argument for a less accountable bureaucracy in order to improve performance, and public attitudes towards government.

Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces

Here's a link to the book referred to in the previous post.

Might be worth assigning to a future class.

From Mother Jones: How Every Part of American Life Became a Police Matter

This touches on issues we raise in 2306 when we talk about criminal justice policy and the tendency of legislatures to try to solve certain problems by criminalizing them.

The author outlines the range of activities now criminalized and questions how far this has gone. Are we now, for all practical purposes, a police state?

If all you've got is a hammer, then everything starts to look like a nail. And if police and prosecutors are your only tool, sooner or later everything and everyone will be treated as criminal. This is increasingly the American way of life, a path that involves "solving" social problems (and even some non-problems) by throwing cops at them, with generally disastrous results. Wall-to-wall criminal law encroaches ever more on everyday life as police power is applied in ways that would have been unthinkable just a generation ago.

By now, the militarization of the police has advanced to the point where "the War on Crime" and "the War on Drugs" are no longer metaphors but bland understatements. There is the proliferation of heavily armed SWAT teams, even in small towns; the use of shock-and-awe tactics to bust small-time bookies; the no-knock raids to recover trace amounts of drugs that often result in the killing of family dogs, if not family members; and in communities where drug treatment programs once were key, the waging of a drug version of counterinsurgency war. (All of this is ably reported on journalist Radley Balko's blog and in his book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop.) But American over-policing involves far more than the widely reported up-armoring of your local precinct. It's also the way police power has entered the DNA of social policy, turning just about every sphere of American life into a police matter.

From the Atlantic: U.S. Income Inequality: It's Worse Today Than It Was in 1774

3 week students will be looking at the political history of the founding era beginning Monday, this might help tie the paper topic into that subject.

American income inequality may be more severe today than it was way back in 1774 — even if you factor in slavery.

That stat's not actually as crazy (or demoralizing) as it sounds, but it might upend some of the old wisdom about our country's economic heritage. The conclusion comes to us from an newly updated study by professors Peter Lindert of the University of California - Davis and Jeffrey Williamson of Harvard. Scraping together data from an array of historical resources, the duo have written a fascinating exploration of early American incomes, arguing that, on the eve of the Revolutionary War, wealth was distributed more evenly across the 13 colonies than anywhere else in the world that we have record of.

Suffice to say, times have changed.

The history of increases in the minimum wage

Here are two ways to look at it.:

1 - Graphically



2 - As a table, but you have to click here to see it.

Note that the value of the wage has fallen since the late 1960s. We will try to figure out why.

Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938

The minimum wage was established - along with a variety of other rules related to labor - in the Fair Labor Standards Act, a piece of New Deal legislation passed in 1938.

The proposal . . . adopted an eight-hour day and a forty-hour workweek and allowed workers to earn wage for an extra four hours of overtime as well. According to the act, workers must be paid minimum wage and overtime pay must be one-and-a-half times regular pay. Children under eighteen cannot do certain dangerous jobs, and children under the age of sixteen cannot work during school hours.

If I'm not mistaken, the bill was responsible for creating what we now know as a weekend.

The Kuznets Curve

In a story about rising inequality in the US - and the fact that domestic workers earn far less now than a hundred years back - this author mentions the Kuznets Curve which graphically describes the "natural forces" of economic equality.

The logic of it goes something like this:

. . . agrarian economies started out very poor but not-so-unequal. Then as they started industrializing, inequality would explode. Because rural productivity is extremely low, early industrialists can earn enormous profits paying highly productive factory workers wages that are only barely above the subsistence-level earnings of the farmers. But the very profitability of this sweatshop industrialism ensures that people will build more and more factories. That creates excess demand for industrial labor, and . . . rising wages and falling inequality.

Writing assignment for GOVT 2305 IMF3: Should the minimum wage be raised? Can the minimum wage be raised?

For your 1000 word critical essay - due January 3rd at noon - I'd like you to address the two questions posed above in a critical and objective manner. You can weigh in with your opinions at the end of your paper, but only after you fully evaluate the various arguments in favor or against the idea - as well as the practical likelihood that this might even happen.

You can approach these questions from many directions, but you will be evaluated in large part on your ability to directly answer these questions.

I'll post a few related items on this subject and also attempt to tie it into class content. The reason I want you to focus on this is because it has been topical recently. Reports pile up showing that the distribution of income and wealth is increasingly uneven. This has spiked in the past few decades. There are arguments that this has harmful consequences for the stability of the nation as well as future economic prosperity. Supporters of an increased minimum wage argue that doing so would be an effective way of reducing inequality, but opponents say it might make things worse.

I want you to - neutrally - get to the heart of their dispute, as well as discuss the practicality of its passage into law.

I'll provide links to online sources in a few follow up posts, but feel free to find your own.

Study Guide for GOVT 2305 16 Week Class

In addition to the list for 8 week students below, 16 week students should get comfortable with these topics for the final this week:

- the subject of each of the Articles of the Constitution

- the content of the Declaration of Independence
- the development of natural rights
- the development of separated powers

- the consent of the governed

- the Magna Carta and the British Bill of Rights
- the basic design of each of the institutions it creates
- the principles embedded in the original constitution

- the historical roots of the constitution
- the conflict over the Articles of Confederation

- the continued conflict over the extent of national power
- the content of the Bill of Rights

- controversies associated with the substantive and procedural liberties
- the role of the Supreme Court in clarifying constitutional language
- controversies over the interpretation of the constitution
- controversies associated with the freedoms of speech, press, assembly and petition

- consequences of the above freedoms

- sedition and seditious libel
- Fed 10 and Fed 51
- the conflict between campaign finance rules and freedom of speech
- the impact of the 14th Amendment
- the impact of the various amendments related to suffrage
- the design of elections in the US
- the consequences of the winner take all system
- the development of political parties
- party factions
- critical elections and party eras

- interest groups and iron triangles
- ideology
- the roots of conservatism and liberalism
- the role of ideology and party identification in the formation of public opinion
- tyranny, autocracy, oligarchy, democracy
- civil rights: what is it?
- controversies associated with the equal protection of the law
- the public policy process
- the dilemmas of democracy
- the role of parties in Congress
- the bill making process
- religious liberty
- the roles of the national, state and local governments
- the expansion of executive power
- controversies associated with presidential power

- changes in the presidential nomination process
- the nature of political conflict
- judicial independence
- the compromises in the US Constitution
- the committee system
- the checks and balances
- the elastic clauses
- who votes? how do they vote?
- trial and appeals
- the New Deal

- the reserved, implied, reserved and inherent powers

That's enough. Don't restrict yourself to these - but if you are thoroughly comfortable with all of these topics, you should be able to do well on the exam. No promises of course, but this should give you a handle on what to focus on.

Study Guide for GOVT 2306 16 Week Class

For 16 week students - in addition to the list for the 8 week students below - here's a list that should help you focus on the test next week. Think very broadly about these subjects.

- what parts of the US Constitution impact the role of the states?

- which have led to conflict?
- cultural and political differences with Mexico in the 1830s
- same with cultural differences between Texas and the US
- the basic structural design of the 1876 Constitution

- controversies over constitutional design
- what factors strengthen, and what factors weaken Texas government?
- be familiar with the Texas Biff of Rights
- what should the relative powers of the different level of government be?

- what are cities? basic design features of cities
- how might city governments be organized? how are area cities organized?

- what are counties? basic design features of counties

- what do different county officials do?
- which officials are elected in the state? which are appointed? why does this matter?

- how are elections organized in the state?
- who or what organizes elections in the states?

- what influence does the national government have over state elections?
- the bill making process
- the budgeting process
- how and where are funds collected in the state?
- how and where are funds spent in the state?
- constitutional issues associated with spending in the state
- have a general sense of the amount collected and spent

- the powers of legislative officials
- the organization and implementation of criminal justice in the state

- the organization and implementation of education in the state
- k-12 and higher ed

- the basic rules of primary and general elections in the state
- trial and appellate courts
- the voter registration process
- the role of political parties in the state
- change in the strength of political parties in Texas
- terms limits in Texas
- the State Board of Education
- the Railroad Commission
- the impact of the Voting Rights Act in Texas
- the role of the major executive positions in the state
- the functions of the different courts in the state
- the temporary and permanent party organizations
- limitations on state powers in the US Constitution

Don't let this be all you study - use it as a beginning. Good luck.

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

And here's another book I might assign in the future - The Dish talked it up in this post.

This fits with recent class discussions on stereotyping and how it helps build - or confirm - opinions.

The narrow point concerns beliefs about the Puritans. The broader point is our collective refusal to use available resources to determine whether our beliefs are actually true. Aside from being lazy, it leads us to make incorrect evaluations of historical events and people. Here's some text highlighted by the Dish:

Puritans are thought to have taken a lurid pleasure in the notion of hell, and certainly hell seems to have been much in their thoughts, though not more than it was in the thoughts of Dante, for example. We speak as though John Calvin invented the Fall of Man, when that was an article of faith universal in Christian culture…

Yet the way we speak and think about the Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism.

Very simply, it is a great example of our collective eagerness to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved. And it demonstrates how effectively such consensus can close off a subject from inquiry. I know from experience that if one says the Puritans were a more impressive and ingratiating culture than they are assumed to have been, one will be heard to say that one finds repressiveness and intolerance ingratiating. Unauthorized views are in effect punished by incomprehension, not intentionally and not to anyone’s benefit, but simply as a consequence of a hypertrophic instinct for consensus. This instinct is so powerful that I would suspect it had a survival value, if history or current events gave me the least encouragement to believe we are equipped to survive.

The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left

I'm going to put this on my list of books to order for future classes. I'm still unhappy with how I cover ideology in 2305 - this book promises to address that deficiency.

Here's the description from Amazon:

For more than two centuries, our political life has been divided between a party of progress and a party of conservation. In The Great Debate, Yuval Levin explores the origins of the left/right divide by examining the views of the men who best represented each side of that debate at its outset: Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. In a groundbreaking exploration of the roots of our political order, Levin shows that American partisanship originated in the debates over the French Revolution, fueled by the fiery rhetoric of these ideological titans.

Levin masterfully shows how Burke's and Paine’s differing views, a reforming conservatism and a restoring progressivism, continue to shape our current political discourse—on issues ranging from abortion to welfare, education, economics, and beyond. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand Washington’s often acrimonious rifts, The Great Debate offers a profound examination of what conservatism, liberalism, and the debate between them truly amount to.

And here's an interview with the author:

. . . . we can see how the worldviews Burke and Paine laid out still describe two broad and fundamental dispositions toward political life and political change in our liberal age.

The tension between those two dispositions comes down to some very basic questions: Should our society be made to answer to the demands of stark and abstract commitments to ideals like social equality or to the patterns of its own concrete political traditions and foundations? Should the citizen’s relationship to his society be defined above all by the individual right of free choice or by a web of obligations and conventions not entirely of our own choosing? Are great public problems best addressed through institutions designed to apply the explicit technical knowledge of experts or by those designed to channel the implicit social knowledge of the community?

Our answers will tend to shape how we think about particular political questions. Do we want to fix our health-care system by empowering expert panels armed with the latest effectiveness data to manage the system from the center or by arranging economic incentives to channel consumer knowledge and preferences and address some of the system’s discrete problems? Do we want to alleviate poverty through large national programs that use public dollars to supplement the incomes of the poor or through efforts to build on the social infrastructure of local civil-society institutions to help the poor build the skills and habits to rise? People’s answers to such questions likely fall into a pattern. And the answers depend not only on our opinion of the state of our particular society at this moment but also on our assumptions about how much knowledge and power social reformers can really expect to have, and of what sort.

These possibilities suggest two rather different sorts of liberal politics: a politics of vigorous progress toward an ideal goal or a politics of preservation and perfection of a precious inheritance. They suggest, in other words, a progressive liberalism and a conservative liberalism.

Two presidential takes on Thanksgving

The Volokh Conspiracy highlights the different approaches Washington and Jefferson took to Thanksgiving.

Washington had little problem using his authority to set aside a day of thanksgiving with explicit religious content, but Jefferson saw it as beyond his authority as president to do so.

Study Guide for GOVT 2306 8 Week Class

The final for the 8 week 2306 class will be opened on Blackboard on Thursday December 5 at noon and will close 24 hours later. As with the test for 2305, you have two hours to complete the test. Double check for specifics about the test on Blackboard.

Here are some hints about what topics to focus on for the final. Think of this as a start.

- single and general purpose governments
- the role of the states in the original constitutional order
- reserved, implied and delegated powers
- the impact of the 14th Amendment on the states
- where money is collected and where it is spent in Texas
- which parties are competitive in Texas - which are not
- the governor's powers over the legislature
- the governor's appointment powers
- education policy
- the public policy process
- conflict over the funding of education - both K-12 and higher ed - in Texas
- the budgetary process in Texas
- Texas as a pay as you go state
- the Legislative Budget Board
- the rainy day fund
- federalism and law enforcement
- the role of counties
- the role of different courts in the state
- the trial process
- the bill making process
- the influence of lobbyists
- the battle over state power during the US Constitutional Convention
- turnout in state elections
- the role of city councils
- the different governing systems on the local level
- the content of the Texas Bill of Rights
- the subject of the different articles in the Texas Constitution
- community college governance
- independent school districts
- voter qualifications in the state
- the voter registration process
- the electoral process in the state - who does what?
- political culture
- home rule and general law cities
- county elected officials
- the factors limiting governmental power in the state
- Jacksonian democracy
- committee in the Texas legislature
- power in the Texas House and Senate
- the amateur legislature
- plurality and majority elections in the state
- the content of the Texas Declaration of Independence
- Smith v Allwright
- city officials
- the role of cities in the governing process
- Dillon's Rule
- term limits
- the types of special districts in the state
- the plural executive
- the elected judiciary
- the Texas Ethics Commission
- the Texas Railroad Commission
- the various constitutions throughout Texas history
- competition between the parties in the state
- the 1876 Constitution
- the ratification process
- the districting process in the state
- education in the Texas Constitution
- the length of the Texas Constitution
- changes in Texas political orientations
- parties in the state
- mayors and city managers
- primary and general elections
- the role of the different state-wide offices in the state
- Texas parties and their relationships with national parties
- the constitutional nature of cities in the state
- the checks and balances
- direct and indirect election in the state
- the progressive movement in Texas

Study Guide for GOVT 2305 8 Week Class

The final for the 8 week 2305 class will be opened on Blackboard on Thursday December 5 at noon and will close 24 hours later. You have two hours to complete the test. Double check for specifics about the test on Blackboard.

Here are some hints about what topics to focus on for the final. Don't consider this to be complete - but it should be a reasonable start for you.

- the public policy process
- types of elections - direct v indirect
- the content of the amendments to the US Constitution
- the impact of the 14th Amendment
- the delegated powers
- what specific powers are delegated to the national government and why
- the bill making process
- the iron triangle, what binds it together?
- agency capture
- how congressional districts are drawn
- apportionment
- the definition of both civil liberties and civil rights
- how civil liberties are established and maintained
- the source of civil rights
- ideology
- limits on presidential power
- the parts of the Constitution which have led to an increase of national power
- party coalitions
- the two party system
- winner take all elections
- the growth and evolution of political parties
- the arguments in both Federalist #10 and #51
- be able to identify quotes from each
- strict and loose interpretations of the Constitution
- James Madison's thoughts on government
- the original design of the branches of government
- elections in the Constitution
- where funds are drawn and spent in the US budget
- the judicial process
- the role of the national government in expanding suffrage
- the separated powers and the checks and balances
- the content of the First Amendment
- the content of the Bill of Rights and the controversy over its need
- the source of factions
- the elastic clauses
- the role the Supreme Court has played in clarifying constitutional language
- original intent
- the living constitution
- the due process of the law
- specific conflicts over the establishment and free exercise clauses
- House and Senate elections
- the argument over ratifying the Constitution
- detail about the Federalist Papers
- the content of the articles within the Constitution
- differences between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution
- why the Federalists wanted a stronger national government
- Hamilton's thoughts on the judiciary
- the arguments for and against political parties
- the influence of the Magna Carta and the British Bill of Rights on the US Constitution
- the basic principles within the Constitution
- the relationship between the national and state governments
- slavery
- the design of the judiciary
- types of governing systems and their pros and cons
- the marketplace of ideas
- the role of the states in the national governing system
- the conflict over war powers
- how people process political information
- sedition and the freedoms of speech and the press
- the party eras
- substantive and procedural liberties
- the delegated, reserved, implied and inherent powers
- the impact of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts
- the meaning of the three "vesting clauses" in the Constitution
- the political surrounding the writing of the Constitution
- the framers attitudes towards democracy
- the free rider problem and its solutions
- the impact of interest groups on the political process
- the right to privacy
- the differences between the House and the Senate
- judicial activism and judicial restraint
- the welfare state
- the argument in the Declaration of Independence and the grievances listed
- the role of parties in Congress
- party identification
- committees and bill making
- judicial review
- rulemaking and the nature of bureaucratic power
- economic policymaking
- the budgetary process
- the equal protection clause
- the conflict between the Stuarts and Parliament and why it matters for the US Constitution
- definitions of "politics" and "government."
- John Locke's arguments regarding the proper basis of governing power
- the definition of democracy
- the types of democracy
- the nature and content of public opinion
- how public opinion polls work
- judicial independence
- trials and appeals
- compromises in the US Constitution
- the Preamble of the Constitution
- the role of education in the political process

What keeps the major networks the major networks?

According to this author from Business Insider, its the major advertisers and a process in place that gives them a special role in how ad dollars are spent:

Right now, ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, and some of the major cable channels, are holding their "upfront" buying events in Midtown New York. They do this every year: The networks put on crazy shows, featuring their big stars, trying to build as much buzz as possible.

The shows are for ad-buyers, not the public. Last year, Jimmy Kimmel did a set for ABC in which he mocked the NBC show "Animal Practice," which featured a monkey. "This is the first time that NBC has had a star that throws its own feces since Gary Busey on 'Celebrity Apprentice,'" he said. Then he added, "We know that you have 9 billion to spend this week, so don't get all cheap-o, Secret Service on us" (a reference to the scandal in which a presidential security officer short-changed a prostitute).

Once the shows are over, the buyers and the networks literally enter a secret room, or at least a room that no one else is allowed into, and do their deals. About $10 billion will get spent this month. Ad Age describes it this way:

This is the time of year when the most powerful ad execs in the nation stand in line — line! — to get into Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center to hear the pitch, see the clips and laugh along with the stars.

… after these big parties are over, possibly as few as 40 people from the networks, agencies and brands will go into backrooms and decide how $9 billion of the $62 billion U.S. TV ad market will be spent next year.

This is madness. No other billion-dollar commodity exchanges hands with this lack of transparency.

From The Dish: Democracy’s Discontents

Andrew Sullivan flags a report that says we've always complained about the quality of our government and have worried that things are falling apart.

Maybe that's to be expected in a democracy.

Here's the main article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Note that one of the causes is free speech - we are free to criticize, even if that criticism is unwarranted. Sounds like ground Madison covered in Fed #10. This might cause us to modify our opinions about whether government and/or is in fact "broken."

. . . Lamenting the failings of democracy is a permanent feature of democratic life, one that persists through governmental crises and successes alike.

There is no decade from the past century when it is not possible to find an extended debate among commentators and intellectuals in the democratic West about the inadequacies of democratic politics. This is not true of only those decades when Western democracy was clearly on the ropes, like the 1930s, when it was menaced by fascism, or the 1970s, when it was threatened by inflation and oil shock. It's also true of the prosperous and relatively stable decades as well. In the 1920s, Walter Lippmann led the charge, arguing that democratic publics were far too ill-informed and inattentive to manage their own affairs. In the 1950s, academics worried about the banality and exhaustion of democratic life. Daniel Bell took a positive stance with his claims about the end of ideology, but for the most part democracy was treated as a cumbersome, careless system of government, in permanent danger of being outwitted by the Soviets.

Even the 1980s, which we now look back on as a time of emergent democratic triumphalism, were dominated by prophecies of doom. Consider the two best-selling academic books from the end of that decade. One, Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind(1987), argued that the endemic triviality of mass democracy would destroy the minds of the young, leaving them unable to distinguish good from bad. (Bloom blamed, among other people, Mick Jagger.) The second, Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (1988), foretold American decline as the demands of sustaining a global empire would overwhelm the capacity of the American people to put up with them.

The history of modern democracy is a tale of steady success accompanied by the constant drumbeat of anticipated failure. The intellectual commentator who first spotted this distinctive feature of democratic life (and who did most to explain it) was Alexis de Tocque­ville. When he traveled to America, in 1831, Tocqueville was immediately struck by the frenetic and mindless quality of democratic politics. Citizens were always complaining, and their politicians were endlessly throwing mud at one another. The grumbling discontent was frequently interrupted by bursts of outright panic as resentments spilled over.

Yet Tocqueville noticed something else about American democracy: that underneath the chaotic surface, it was quite stable. Citizens' discontent coincided with an underlying faith that democratic politics would see them right in the end.

A political system like this creates plenty of space for writers and intellectuals to tut-tut and throw up their hands in horror. Why? First, and most obviously, democratic politics entails free speech, which must include the freedom to say that democracy doesn't work. Second, democracy is, as Tocqueville put it, an "untimely" form of government. Its strengths are revealed only in the long run, once its restless energy produces the adaptability that allows it to correct its own mistakes. At any given moment, democracy tends to look a mess: shallow, petty, and vituperative. Democracies are bad at rising to the occasion. What they are good at is chopping and changing course so that no occasion is too much for them. Finally, rationalist modern intellectuals are inherently suspicious of blind political faith. It is unnerving to encounter a political system that works only because ordinary people believe that it works. Ordinary citizens get frustrated with the workings of democracy but rarely, if ever, give up on it. The people who tend to lose faith are intellectuals who can't reconcile themselves to the mismatch between the glorious promise of democratic life and its grubby reality.

From the Atlantic: Now Abolish the Filibuster for Legislation, Too

People don't seem all that upset at the demise of the filibuster.

This guys wants to see it to further and have it repealed fro legislation also:

Much of the commentary on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rolling back the filibuster for most presidential appointees has been celebratory, even euphoric. It certainly was a step toward restoring some semblance of "majority rule" to our creaking 200-year-old republic. But commentators seem to forget that the filibuster has been used to sandbag important legislation as well, not just presidential appointments. And that's arguably where the most damage has been done. All sorts of good legislation, supported by a majority of the nation, also enjoyed majority support in the Senate, but Reid was not able to muster 60 out of 100 votes and break GOP-led filibusters.

Recent Senate filibusters of important progressive-leaning legislation include:
Firearm background checks: After the horror of Sandy Hook and other massacres, 54 senators supported legislation in April 2013 to institute background checks aimed at stopping would-be buyers who are ineligible to own guns. Polls showed that 90 percent of Americans supported the measure. Yet the bill died because its advocates could not round up the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. President Obama called it a "shameful day for Washington," but it was really a pretty typical day in this era.

Cap-and-trade: One of the top items on Obama's agenda after taking office in 2009 was to implement a cap-and-trade law to cut carbon emissions. In June 2009, the Democrat-controlled House passed a bill, but it stalled in the Senate after failing to garner enough votes to overcome a Republican-led filibuster. In July 2010, Democrats finally abandoned hope of passing legislation in the upper chamber. "In order to pass comprehensive legislation, you have to have 60 votes. To get 60 votes, you've got to have Republicans. As of today, we don't have one Republican," said then-Senator John Kerry.

American Jobs Act: A GOP-led filibuster killed this jobs-and-stimulus bill in October 2011. Fifty-one senators voted in favor of a procedural motion to begin debate on the bill—short of the required 60 votes. The bill was a mix of tax cuts and new spending aimed at spurring job creation. It included $270 billion in payroll-tax cuts and other tax relief, along with $175 billion in new spending on roads, school repairs, and other infrastructure projects, as well as an extension of unemployment benefits and aid to local governments to prevent impending teacher and police layoffs. A majority of senators representing far more than a majority of the American people supported the bill.

Paycheck Fairness Act: The Senate Republican minority blocked passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act in June 2012, with "only" 52 senators voting for the bill and 47 against. The act aimed to decrease the pay gap between women and men by increasing protections for women filing gender-discrimination lawsuits, creating a federal-grant program to improve women's salary-negotiating skills, and rewarding employers who have fair pay practices, among other steps.

Sequestration: In February 2013, a Democratic compromise budget plan would have replaced the sequester with a combination of spending cuts and new revenue from closed tax loopholes. It had Senate majority support but it was shot down by Senate Republicans, with 51 senators voting for and 49 against.

Affordable Care Act: In March 2010, Democrats had to deploy the budget maneuver called “reconciliation” to cut off a Republican filibuster of Obama’s signature healthcare legislation. Though the bill was passed, filibusters, as well as threats of filibusters and other parliamentary tricks, constricted lawmakers' flexibility and contributed to the byzantine final law—which in turn helped to create today's implementation mess.

In each of these cases, Democrats tried and failed to find 60 votes, but there are plenty of other cases where they didn't even try. The way the filibuster works today is that even the threat can stop legislation in its tracks. Because the process takes Senate floor time, the Democratic majority has in recent years preferred to avoid drawn-out confrontations by essentially giving in to threats and moving on to other business. Small wonder that the Senate—and by extension the entire government—has become so paralyzed.

Restless America

Click here for a nice interactive graphic showing which states people are moving from and to.

Here's the full static picture, and commentary.



Note that while it is true that half a million people mover to Texas in 2012 - 400,000 left.

GOVT 2305 and 2306 Review, Part Two

If you have nothing better to do right now, review the respective constitutions - whichever is relevant for you class.

I can promise you a good handful of questions about them.

See if you can commit to memory the subject of each article. What are they each about?

Breaking News from the Washington Post: Supreme Court will take up new health law dispute

It has accepted a challenge to the inclusion of contraception coverage in insurance plans based on religious objections.

The Supreme Court has agreed to referee another dispute over President Barack Obama’s health care law, whether businesses can use religious objections to escape a requirement to cover birth control for employees.

The justices said Tuesday they will take up an issue that has divided the lower courts in the face of roughly 40 lawsuits from for-profit companies asking to be spared from having to cover some or all forms of contraception.
The court will consider two cases. One involves Hobby Lobby Inc., an Oklahoma City-based arts and crafts chain with 13,000 full-time employees. Hobby Lobby won in the lower courts.

The other case is an appeal from Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp., a Pennsylvania company that employs 950 people in making wood cabinets. Lower courts rejected the company’s claims.

Copyright 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Though I pose as an expert in class, I'm really not - but it seems to me the court is going to hear the case because of the split rulings by the lower courts.

From Scotusblog:

Taking on a new constitutional dispute over the Affordable Care Act, the Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to hear challenges to the requirement that employers must provide health insurance for their workers that includes birth control and related medical services.  The Court said it would decide constitutional issues, as well as claims under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

The Court granted review of a government case (Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, 13-354) and a private business case (Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, 13-356).   Taking the Conestoga plea brought before the Court the claim that both religious owners of a business and the business itself have religious freedom rights.  The Hobby Lobby case was keyed to rights under RFRA.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia page on RFRA. In 2305 we discussed this law in the section on religious liberty. It was passed after the court ruled against the peyote using members of an Oregon tribe who were fired from the drug rehab jobs.

The court has ruled on issues related to RFRA previously:

It was held unconstitutional as applied to the states in the City of Boerne v. Flores decision in 1997, which ruled that the RFRA is not a proper exercise of Congress's enforcement power. But it continues to be applied to the federal government, for instance in Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficente Uniao do Vegetal, because Congress has broad authority to carve out exemptions from federal laws and regulations that it itself has authorized.

The Kennedy Assassination and the Rise of Television

One of the points made last week when the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination was observed was that the event marked the rise of television as a major source of information for the public, and a unique one at that.

One of the items we are looking at this week in 2305 is the media, and I like discussing the impact of technology on how the media impacts the world of government and politics.

Here's one commentator's take, he notes that most people above the age of 4 or 5 remembers where they were that day:

Each of them, I can assure you, remembers precisely what they were doing 50 years ago, and I can further assure you that a common denominator of their day was that television set.

Remember that in 1963, television was still a relatively young medium — just about 13 years old, not counting the late 40s, when schedules and networks were still in an embryonic state. TV was still a novelty, color TV an exotic luxury — true color along with shows in color would not arrive until the middle of the decade.

People watched everything on their sets in shades of gray — that was the reality of TV, as presented day after day . . . And then, this incredible moment in Dallas, in black and white, but as real, as solid, as the hand you hold in front of your face . . .

TV news by '63 was no longer subsidiary to radio — that transition had happened, at least resoundingly, by '59-60, with coverage of the political conventions — but its role remained amorphous — a young industry in search of a mission. I lay some of this out in a story in today's paper, but it can't begin to capture the role television news suddenly stumbled upon that day — partly because television itself was surprised .

I spoke with Roger Mudd the other day — Roger, then a young CBS News correspondent in Washington — who remembers coming home later that night."My wife was at home watching television and she was crying and our 5 year old son Daniel came into the room where she was and saw his mother crying, so he turned the television off. So here's this young fellow, 5 years old, not knowing why his mother was crying but all he knew was that the television was to blame."

That linkage — of grief, loss, horror, mourning, catharsis and all in real-time, and all on TV — wasn't merely novel but revolutionary. Suddenly TV was no longer a "utility" — a toaster with pictures — but an elemental part of our emotional life: Our most secret hopes and fears and desires, all bound up with the hopes and desires and fears of 200 million other people.

Some Texas Republicans are turning Democrat

Only a couple have been featured, and nothing prominent, so no way to know if this turns into a trend, but as the Republican Party in the state becomes more conservative, moderate Republicans might shift parties.

Here are the two:

- Republican turned Democrat runs for Cornyn’s Senate seat
- Texas Judge Switches to Democratic Party: "The Republican Party Left Me" 

Both say the party became too conservative for them. Perhaps they were also driven from the party by conservatives who thing they are RINOs - Republicans in Name Only. Maybe they are opportunists who think the tide might be shifting in favor of Democrats in the state and want to get in early.

Who knows, but its a trend worth following.

The Texas Republican Party benefited when the national Democratic Party became too liberal for moderates in the Texas Democratic Party. Politics is like a pendulum so there's little reason to believe that the pendulum can swing back. No telling yet whether that's whats going on now - but its worth following.

- Wikipedia: Party Switching in the United States.

Is Obama and the Democrats losing the Millennials?

From the Daily Beast:

If Obamacare never gets fixed, it might just sour the single best relationship the Democratic Party has: its love affair with the young.

To understand why, it’s important to understand the basic paradox of millennial politics. Millennials are the product of what Chris Hayes has called “the fail decade.” Because they came of age watching a Republican president fail massively in Iraq,Hurricane Katrina, and the financial crisis, millennials are predisposed to favor Democrats. Because they’ve entered adulthood in miserable economic times, they’re more likely than their elders to feel that capitalism itself has failed, which predisposes them to favor government intervention in the economy. A November 2011 Pew studyfound that young Americans were more than 20 points more likely than the middle-aged, and a whopping 30 points more likely than the elderly, to favor a bigger, more expensive government over a cheaper, smaller one.

But the same failures that have made young Americans eager for government help also have left them dubious that government can provide it. When a 2009 Center for American Progress study compared millennials to previous generations of young people, it found them significantly less likely to trust government to “do what is right most of the time.” A 2009 National Bureau of Economic Research paper suggests that this paradox is typical of people who enter adulthood during rough economic times. “Recession-stricken individuals on the one hand ask for larger involvement by the state in redistribution,” observed authors Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo, “but at the same time are more skeptical of the state institutions’ ability to intervene effectively.”

During Obama’s first term, this contradiction only grew. According to pollsters, young Americans were far more supportive of Obamacare than their elders. But between 2010 and 2013, their faith in government continued to fall.

Until a month ago, it seemed possible that when health-care reform took effect, and young Americans began to feel its positive results, the gap might close. Now it seems likely to widen further. I doubt that means young people will shift toward the GOP in significant numbers anytime soon. Among millennials, the Republican Party’s brand remains horrendous, and almost everything the party has done since Mitt Romney’s loss has made it worse. More fundamentally, few millennials embrace the right’s basic contention that a larger welfare state threatens their freedom and that an unregulated free market will solve their economic woes.

Instead of re-aligning young people, the Obamacare debacle is more likely to de-align them.

If I'm following the argument correctly, the author is implying that young voters will be increasingly likely to tune out of politics, dealign from either of the two parties, which renders them even less powerful than they already are.

The Dish complies reactions to the nuclear option

For one set of reactions click here, for the other click here.

I'll pick some to highlight in the following posts.

GOVT 2305 and 2306 Review, Part One

We started talking about the final in class this week, and will continue to do so. I'll start a series of posts with hints about what things you ought to think about while you review. These will continue until final week starts.

Here are some of the things we discussed - and some things you should review:

2305
- The basic principles embedded in the Constitution
- John Locke and his Two Treatise's on Government
- The Magna Carta and the British Bill of Rights
- The Equal Protection Clause
- Strict Scrutiny


2306
- The purpose of public education according to both the Texas Declaration of Independence and the Texas Constitution
- The impact of the 14th Amendment on the states
- The political culture of Texas
- The differences between the constitutions of 1869 and 1876

Expect more to come - I'll try to add something every day - but think about these items a bit. The more you know the better you'll do.

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rehears Fisher v UT - strict scrutiny must apply

This past summer the Supreme Court sent this case back to the fifth Circuit and asked them to apply strict scrutiny to the case.

The NYT reports:

An affirmative-action program at the University of Texas at Austin that takes applicants’ race into account was unnecessary because the campus had achieved a “critical mass” of minority students, lawyers for the white applicant who sued the university told a federal appeals court here on Wednesday in a case with high stakes for the future of race-conscious admissions policies at public colleges and universities.

University lawyers denied a critical mass of underrepresented students had been reached. They said the institution was entitled to supplement its race-neutral admissions policies with ones that take race into account to achieve diversity. But the reaction of the appeals judges, who expressed skepticism at times about the manner in which the university applied race-conscious decisions and the university’s abstract definition of “critical mass,” illustrated the complex path for the Texas flagship university, as it tries to show that its admissions program was necessary.

Bert Rein, the lawyer for the white applicant, Abigail Fisher, said the university had no numerical standards to determine when its student body was sufficiently diverse. “They have no metric,” he said. “ ‘We know it when we see it.’ That’s the university’s position.”

The lawyers for Ms. Fisher, the university and minority student groups appeared before the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Wednesday to sort through a tangle of new legal issues raised by the Supreme Court in June. The Supreme Court sent the case back to the Fifth Circuit, instructing it to apply a greater degree of scrutiny to the university’s race-conscious admissions program.

The decision, while generally upholding the use of race as a factor in the program, jeopardized the future of it at the same time, by instructing courts to use tougher standards and to verify that race-neutral alternatives were not available to the university.

The Senate Goes Nuclear

From the NYT:

The Senate voted on Thursday to eliminate the use of the filibuster against most presidential nominees, a move that will break the Republican blockade of President Obama’s picks to cabinet posts and the federal judiciary. The change is the most fundamental shift in the way the Senate functions in more than a generation.

The vote was one that members of both parties had threatened for the better part of a decade, but had always stopped short of carrying out. This time, with little left of the bipartisan spirit that helped seal compromises on filibuster rule changes in the past, there was no last-minute deal to be struck.

The vote was 52 to 48.

Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, set the change in motion on Thursday with a series of procedural steps.

“The need for change is so, so very obvious. It is clearly visible,” Mr. Reid said as the Senate convened Thursday morning. “It is time to get the Senate working.”

Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, denounced Democrats for trying to “break the rules to change the rules” as a way to distract the public from the president’s political problems over his health care law.

“You think this is in the best interest of the United States Senate and the American people?” Mr. McConnell asked, sounding incredulous. “I say to my friends on the other side of the aisle, you’ll regret this. And you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.”

The gravity of the situation was reflected in a highly unusual scene on the Senate floor: Nearly all 100 senators were in their seats, rapt as their two leaders debated.

Tensions between the two parties have reached a boiling point in the last few weeks as Republicans repeatedly filibustered Mr. Obama’s picks to the country’s most important appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate has voted on three nominees to the court in the last month. Republicans have blocked them all, saying they would allow the president no more appointments to that court.

Tensions between the two parties have reached a boiling point in the last few weeks as Republicans repeatedly filibustered Mr. Obama’s picks to the country’s most important appeals court, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The Senate has voted on three nominees to the court in the last month. Republicans have blocked them all, saying they would allow the president no more appointments to that court.

Democrats, who filibustered their own share of Republican judicial nominees before they took control of the Senate, have said that what the minority party has done is to effectively rewrite the law by requiring a 60-vote supermajority threshold for high-level presidential appointments. Once rare, filibusters of high-level nominees are now routine.

With the appeals court left with a bench of just eight full-time judges — there are 11 full-time seats — Democrats argue that Republicans are denying Mr. Obama his constitutional powers to appoint judges and reshaping the nature of the federal judiciary.

The filibuster changes, approved with just a simple majority under a procedural move so contentious it is known as the nuclear option, do not affect Supreme Court nominees.

The Dish links to commentary.