From Vox: How America became a superpower, explained in 8 minutes

A great, great video. Something here for both 2305 and 2306. Foreign policy for the former - westward expansion for the latter.

- Click here for it.

From the Houston Chronicle: Shake-up at the courthouse: Incoming DA Ogg hands pink slips to 37 top prosecutors

Harris County's new District Attorney is changing the direction of the office.

- Click here for the article.

In her first major action as Harris County's incoming district attorney, Kim Ogg announced Friday she had shown 40 prosecutors the door in a massive shake-up that eliminated a senior level of supervisors and career trial attorneys.

Ogg, who was elected in November as the county's chief prosecutor, notified 37 attorneys Friday that their services would not be needed when she takes office Jan. 1. Three others retired before Ogg's emails went out.

"Change is coming," she told reporters after news broke that more than 10 percent of the 329 lawyers in the DA's office would not be returning in the new year. "Like any good team that has suffered some under-performing seasons, we're changing management. My administration is heading in a new direction."

The terminations had been expected as Ogg - who ran on a campaign of reform - installs her own lieutenants and administrators with a new organizational structure.

. . . Under Anderson, the district attorney's office has a hierarchy that includes about six bureau chiefs, more than 20 division chiefs and dozens of trial and section chiefs who oversee staff lawyers.

Ogg got rid of a number of Anderson loyalists and some prosecutors tied to scandals that have erupted over Anderson's three-year tenure.

Ogg said the majority of her termination decisions fell on longtime employees who worked as supervisors. She declined to discuss specific employees but said her primary focus was to eliminate management positions created by her predecessor.

"It's a difficult process and one that is entirely necessary," she said. "Of the lawyers who were released or given the opportunity to resign, most are eligible to retire. Few of them handle cases on a day-to-day basis."

Some of the highest-ranking prosecutors to go include First Assistant Belinda Hill, Chief of Staff Kathy Braddock and top lieutenants Maria McAnulty, Karen Morris, Roe Wilson, Dick Bax and Jane Waters, all of whom were bureau chiefs. Craig Goodhart and Terrance Windham, who also were bureau chiefs, recently retired.

Other well-known prosecutors who were asked to leave the office include three division chiefs: Julian Ramirez over civil rights; Bill Moore over major frauds; and Lance Long over the major narcotics cases. Also notified that they will be leaving are Alison Baimbridge, who prosecuted high-profile DWI cases and other vehicular homicides; Alan Curry, an appellate chief who successfully argued before the U.S. Supreme Court; and Inger Chandler, who headed the conviction review section.

I'll hunt around for an organizational chart of the office - both old and new. It'll add useful content for 2306.

From the Texas Tribune: Lawmakers Push Back on Railroad Commission Overhaul Proposals

This is from August, but it foreshadows a series of battles that will pick up this coming legislative session when the Texas Legislature considers the proposals made to it by the Texas Sunset Commission. Along with 25 or so other agencies, the Texas Railroad Commission is being evaluated. The various stakeholders involved with the agency are locking horns already.

- Click here for the article.

One legislator said he believed the entire review was unnecessary, and the criticism mean-spirited.

"When I went through this report, I thought to myself, 'Why are you so angry at the Railroad Commission?'" Rep. Dan Flynn told Sunset commission staff.

“Oil and gas industry is the heart and soul of the state of Texas, the Canton Republican added, "And for us to go and attack an agency that’s done a pretty good job, it just doesn’t make sense to me.”

Though no lawmaker completely echoed Flynn, his spirited defense of the Railroad Commission underscored the difficulty of implementing change at the hulking agency in Texas, the nation's oil and gas king.

Sunset Commission staffers said they did not intend to be mean.

“We are not angry with the Railroad Commission,” said Ken Levine, executive director of the Sunset Commission. “We think in a lot of ways, they do a really good job. And when we spotted things where they weren’t, we brought it forward.”

From 538: ‘Shy’ Voters Probably Aren’t Why The Polls Missed Trump

I'll compile a list of articles highlighting what went wrong - and right - in the polls leading up to the 2016 presidential election. One prevailing theory was that some Trump voters did not want to tell a human on the telephone - a pollster - that they intended to vote for him.

The following analysis finds little support for that argument. Below is his first point - there was no evidence that his vote totals were higher in places where he was unpopular.

- Click here for the article.

. . . the “shy Trump” theory relies on the notion of social desirability bias — the idea that people are reluctant to reveal unpopular opinions. So if the theory is right, we would have expected to see Trump outperform his polls the most in places where he is least popular — and where the stigma against admitting support for Trump would presumably be greatest. (That stigma wouldn’t carry over to the voting booth itself, however, so it would suppress Trump’s polling numbers but not his actual results.) But actual election results indicate that the opposite happened: Trump outperformed his polls by the greatest margin in red states, where he was quite popular. The two states that had the largest polling error for Trump were Tennessee and South Dakota, where Trump won more than 60 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Trump underperformed his polls in states where the stigma against him would seem to be strongest: deep-blue states like California, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York and Washington.2We don’t have polling data for areas smaller than states, so it is possible that Trump outperformed his polls in the blue pockets of red states or underperformed them in red pockets of blue states. But there is no evidence to suggest that this happened. Overall, as my colleague Carl Bialik and I (as well as Andrew Gelman) have pointed out, there’s a very strong correlation between how Republican a state is and how much better Trump did than polling averages indicated he would.

The author offers the following graphic to support the point above. It also shows that states are increasingly polarized according to political party. What this means for the governability of the nation is worth discussing.

Kansas Supreme Court Justices survived November challenge

For 2306's look at judicial elections. A coordinated effort to remove the justices due to political opposition to their recent decisions about the death penalty, abortion and school funding has raised concerns about the ability of the courts to remain above politics.

- Click here for the article.

After roughly a million dollars in TV and radio ads plus a blizzard of postcards, the Kansas Supreme Court didn't change one bit with Tuesday's elections.

With a majority of precincts reporting, all four of the justices who had been targeted by the Republican Party, Kansans for Life and other conservative groups comfortably won retention.

“Kansans have sent a very clear message, not just to the special interest groups that Gov. Brownback has funded but to the governor himself: hands off our court,” says Ryan Wright from Kansans for Fair Courts, the organization that raised at least $400,000 to help keep the justices on the bench.

Retained were Chief Justice Lawton Nuss, Justice Dan Biles, Justice Carol Beier, Justice Marla Luckert and Justice Caleb Stegall.

No one targeted Stegall for ouster, the only justice on the high court appointed by Gov. Sam Brownback.

For a broader look at efforts to politicize state courts, look here: State Judicial Elections Become Political Battlegrounds.

A paper by John Joseph Wallis: The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American

I found this a few weeks ago and am just now getting around to posting it.

The author investigates how constitutions can help prevent the development of corruption, which he defines as the use of public institutions for personal gain. More specifically he looks at how the systemic design of a governing system can lock in place private benefits. Eliminating that type of corruption has been an ongoing goal of American government.

Whether it has been successful or not is another story.

- Click here for it.
Here's a taste - it contains a terrific look at the development of the governing systems that underlie our constitutional structure.

What I define as systematic corruption is both a concrete form of political behavior and an idea. In polities plagued with systematic corruption, a group of politicians deliberately create rents by limiting entry into valuable economic activities, through grants of monopoly, restrictive corporate charters, tariffs, quotas, regulations, and the like. These rents bind the interests of the recipients to the politicians who create them. The purpose is to build a coalition that can dominate the government. Manipulating the economy for political ends is systematic corruption. Systematic corruption occurs when politics corrupts economics.

In contrast, venal corruption denotes the pursuit of private economic interests through the political process. Venal corruption occurs when economics corrupts politics. Classical thinkers worried about venal corruption, too. They talked at great length about the moral and ethical corruption of entire peoples and societies, as well as governments. They realized, however, that venal corruption is an inevitable result of human nature. So they focused their intellectual enterprise on designing and then protecting a form of government that could resist systematic corruption. By eliminating systematic corruption, they hoped to mitigate the problems of venal corruption as well.

 
  

The Emoluments Clause

Donald Trump's international business dealings - especially those that involve foreign governments - have raised issues involving the emoluments clause of the Constitution. In the 22 years I have taught this subject, I can't recall this part of the Constitution being brought up before. So this is new to me.

I'm offering a few links below that will allow us to dig into it further over the spring.

Here's the text of the clause. It can be found in the first article of the Constitution - the one that outlines the nature of legislative powers. It is included in the section that places limits on national legislative powers:

No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.

Article I, Section 9, Clause 8

This is the definition of the word "emolument" from dictionary.com:

profit, salary, or fees from office or employment; compensation for services

In essence, no governing official can obtain private profit from public work. That obviously leads to corruption. Below are links with background - expect more in the near future.

- Heritage Foundation: Emoluments Clause.
- The Brookings Institution: THE EMOLUMENTS CLAUSE: ITS TEXT, MEANING, AND APPLICATION.
- The New York Times: Donald Trump’s Business Dealings Test a Constitutional Limit.
- The Constitution Daily: Constitution Check: Can a violation of the Emoluments Clause be proven? 

  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/11/14/drain-the-swamp/?tid=hybrid_experimentrandom_1_na

From the Urban Institute: Budget Resolution Explainer

I'll squirrel this away to explain the concept in 2305.

- Click here for the video.

Here's the official definition from the U.S. Senate's website:

Legislation in the form of a concurrent resolution setting forth the congressional budget. The budget resolution establishes various budget totals, divides spending totals into functional categories (e.g., transportation), and may include reconciliation instructions to designated House or Senate committees.

For more: Wikipedia: Budget Resolution.