Alright, took me a while to pin this down, but I’ve figured out how I feel about the debate.
First, I think Vice Pres. Biden lost tonight. It is true that, at this hour, it seems that a slim but certain majority believe he won the debate, and that would seem to settle that. But I suspect that, although Biden’s chokehold on civil discourse gave him a technical victory, his obnoxious display will actually make the electorate less likely to vote for him. We shall see how this hypothesis plays out in this week’s polls. (We will also need to keep an eye on partisan ID results, to find out whether Mr. Biden successfully re-energized his base.)
Second, I do not think that Rep. Ryan won tonight. Veep Biden’s loss was entirely at his own hands. Ryan seemed content to get out of the way, conceding the last word to Biden on many occasions and abiding by the will of the moderator like the polite young man he is. He never said the words, “Mr. Vice President, that is a bald-faced lie,” and he could have done it at least three times. Tactically speaking, that was probably wise — but it is a gamble, since he is counting on the electorate to reject Mr. Biden’s totally inappropriate display.
In Minnesota’s ongoing debate over the constitutional questions before voters this fall, opponents have occasionally raised a question that has nothing to do with the wisdom of the policies themselves. “Is it appropriate to enshrine this policy in the Minnesota state constitution?” they will ask, or, if they are in a somewhat more confrontational mood, “Aren’t you just using the referendum to bypass the legislative process” — by which they mean the governor’s veto pen — “and enact your party’s initiatives by any means necessary?”
Usually, this question is asked in the traditional civic spirit that pervades American politics, by which I mean bald-faced hypocrisy. In 2012, with a Democratic governor and Republicans in control of the entire legislature, it is Democrats angrily demanding that Republicans cease this coup d’etat against the typical legislative process. In 2008, when the power structure was reversed, so was the question: Republicans accused Democrats of abusing the amendment process to pass their agenda into law. (The 2008 “Legacy Amendment” proposal, which sought a new sales tax to fund Art and Nature, passed handily.) Every single self-styled constitutional conservator I have met in 2012 voted for the Legacy Amendment in 2008. Now they raise the very argument they ignored in 2008 to attack the amendments they don’t like. The reverse is true for those who questioned the Legacy Amendment’s legitimacy four years ago. It is difficult to take so many unserious people seriously.
But the question itself is a good one, and a sincere and inquisitive reader recently asked it of me, which always demands a thorough reply.
…but don’t come crying to me when you realize what you’ve done. If you want to increase the bitterness, brutality, and extremism of American politics, by all means, eliminate the Electoral College. Otherwise, think again.
People get all surprised when I say this out loud. Two of the least popular things in America are the bitter tone of our political discourse and the Electoral College. The people, by and large, would love to be rid of both. Moreover, I’m too lazy to go find polls to back this up, but I seem to recall reading that decrying the bitterness of politics correlates with favoring a national popular vote (and being a less informed and engaged voter, and voting for Democrats, incidentally; zing). Now that there is a plausible anti-Electoral College campaign underway that is, at this writing, a little more than halfway to its goal of a national popular vote, it’s time to discuss the relationship between the College and the health of our politics.
(1) I am glad that he said he was “humbled” by the nomination. It is a lie, of course, just as it will be a lie when President Obama says it next week, but it is the one lie politicians should — must! — keep telling. Perhaps, if they say it often enough, one day it will be true. But even when not true, it is an important concession to the authority of virtue, and places a subtle constraint on executive power.
(2) The man has a dishonest mien. I’m told by many respectable people that Mr. Romney does, in fact, believe what he is saying, and just can’t get past RomneyBot 3000. Now, I happen to think most of those respectable authorities are themselves dishonest hacks, and Mr. Romney’s record on honesty speaks for itself. But it will be the robotic demeanor, not the record, that costs him the election.
Very nearly everyone is confused about how the Ryan Medicare reform works. It’s not just you. Two-thirds of the people who are getting paid to talk about it in the news media have no idea what the plan is. I was confused this morning, and I’m still confused on some of the finer points. But I did my research, and I’d like to share it with you.
The Ryan plan has been through three versions.
First was the Path to Prosperity Prosposal, which Rep. Ryan put forward in December 2010 as an idea.
The Path to Prosperity was popular, and got picked up by the rest of the party. Some changes were made, compromises hammered out, and that became the House Budget that was passed in April 2011 (but never enacted into law).
Finally, there was the Ryan-Wyden plan. Ryan and a Democratic Congressman named Rep. Wyden came up with it as a compromise plan after the Democrats said that the Ryan Plan could leave seniors vulnerable. It was first presented in (I believe) December 2011.
The big problem for the last few days is that everyone is talking about the Ryan Plan, but nobody is talking about the correct Ryan Plan. Even on the news, people are talking about the Budget version from April, not the Wyden version from December. Ryan-Wyden is apparently not widely known, even though it ended up featuring prominently in the 2013 edition of the Path to Prosperity, completely replacing the original plan from last year. Perhaps the revision got so little attention because there was no budget battle this year. Hopefully that will change as the presidential race progresses.
Anyway, over on Reddit, they have a forum called “Explain Like I’m Five,” where people ask questions about big, complicated things, and everyone has to answer in simple, easy-to-understand terms, as if talking to a five-year-old. Today, someone asked about the Ryan plan. Here is my explanation of the Ryan-Wyden plan to reform Medicare, as I would explain it to a five-year-old (with more wonky sidebars where appropriate):
This appendix expands on my discussion, in Part IV, of the constitutionality of §939.75(2)(b)(1) of the Wisconsin Code if the Personhood Amendment passes ANDRoe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court at some future date AND abortion-rights advocates are able to have §940.04struck down on an equal protection claim under the Personhood Amendment AND it is struck down in its entirety, rather than (as the Wisconsin Legislative Bureau suggested) in part. Obviously, this appendix is highly speculative. My series on Wisconsin Personhood began in Part I.
Before we say any more about 939.75(2)(b)(1), let’s remind ourselves, for the sake those readers who did not skip directly to the appendix, how 940.04 got struck down, giving us Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s potential Nightmare Scenario. This is from the white paper, page 12:
4. If adopted, what impact would the proposed state constitutional amendment have on § 940.04?
The Personhood Amendment does not present the same obstacles to renewed enforcement as the 2006 proposal. In the context of the proposed amendment as a whole, however, the reference to all people (including children prior to birth) being “equally” free raises troublesome difficulties in this regard.
This post is a direct continuation of Part IIIof my series on Personhood Wisconsin. I am not even stopping to breathe, much less to recap the discussion for those of you just joining us. If you want to catch up from the beginning, the series began in Part I.
We were just discussing Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s claim that enacting Personhood could lead to an essentially unlimited right to abortion in Wisconsin, even after Roev. Wade is overturned. I have termed this the “Nightmare Scenario.” In my previous post, I showed why the mere possibility of the Nightmare Scenario is not dispositive for the Personhood Amendment and its supporters. In this post, I aim to show why the Nightmare Scenario is much less likely than Bopp et al. contend.
The key to the Nightmare Scenario is the white paper’s claim that, under Personhood, there is arealpossibility that 940.04 could be completely struck down in a court challenge. This is actually true: if the lawsuit is brought, there is a non-trivial chance it will succeed. But, if 940.04 is struck down, what would happen to unborn children? Bopp et al. believe the Nightmare Scenario is the unavoidable outcome. On the contrary, the Nightmare Scenario – the return of a virtually unstoppable right to abortion – is not only avoidable, but is arguably the least likely outcome of a successful lawsuit against 940.04.
If you have not read my introduction to the Wisconsin Personhood initiative, please read that first.
You might also wish to read the second article in this series, which discussed Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s public claims about the Personhood Amendment. We now move on to its non-public claims.
This third post about Personhood Wisconsin is a lot more technical than the first two. It’s also a lot longer. It has no funny pictures. I am assuming that you are, by this point, familiar with the basic terrain, and that you know my feelings about the groups involved, so I will not restate them. Instead, I will dive right in.
Here’s the TLDR: Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s lawyers rely on a peculiar combination of unlikely presumptions and studied indifferences in order to reach their conclusion opposing the Personhood Amendment. Their white paper consistently presumes all the risks of a Personhood Amendment, no matter how unlikely, and studiously ignores or dismisses both the rewards of Personhood and at least one obvious counter-argument to their major claim. For these reasons, I consider its conclusions unreasonable. Wisconsin unborn children will be best protected by passing a Personhood Amendment, rather than leaving them to an uncertain future under the vulnerable pre-Roe statute currently on the books. That’s the long and short of it. If you are not feeling up to an extensive nitpicking of a fourteen-page legal opinion, you can leave now.
If you have not read my introduction to the Wisconsin Personhood initiative, please read that first.
This post deals with Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s public claims about Personhood. For a discussion of the (substantially different) arguments employed by its legal white paper, please see the later posts in this series.
Barb Lyons, director of Wisconsin Right-to-Life. Winner of the NRLC’s annual kindly-lookingness award in 2001, 2004, and 2006-2009 inclusive.
I want to lead this post off by noting, for the record, that we are all allies in the pro-life movement, and that Wisconsin Right-to-Life is emphatically a part of that movement. The organization has, in many cases, led the battle against abortion in Wisconsin, and has some very significant victories in its cap, including the Supreme Court milestone FEC v. Wisconsin Right-to-Life. I have it on good authority that the organization remains committed to the eradication of abortion in Wisconsin, without exception, without apology (for there can be no apology in protecting the innocent). Even if I didn’t have an friend in the organization who can speak for WRtL, the organization’s record speaks for itself.
I want to make the same statement about Jim Bopp, who will be mentioned frequently in my next post, because WRtL cited him to me as the lead author of their legal white paper on Personhood. I am young, and missed the pro-life battles of the 1980s, but I’m told that Mr. Bopp was there, crusading for the pro-life movement, always finding a novel way to advance a difficult cause – no matter how humbling the strategy. I know that he himself has worked on model legislation that would have enacted Personhood at the federal level, so he can hardly be counted an enemy of the Personhood movement. That landmark Supreme Court decision I mentioned above? Bopp was the lawyer who represented Wisconsin Right-to-Life in its free speech case against the FEC. Today, he mainly shows up in my mail in connection with the many clients – including the Susan B. Anthony List – whom he is defending against rapacious lawsuits by the vanguard of abortion.
So I ask all my readers to understand that, while I have sometimes become angry while researching this series, the following post is written in a tone of bafflement, not accusation. These are not Pro-Lifers In Name Only. Indeed, they are more than friends: the rest of us, especially the young who have not yet struck many blows for the cause, are manifestly in their debt.
However, the reasons they have articulated for opposing Wisconsin Personhood are not merely strange – they are highly questionable and deeply troubling. As I described in my last post, after reading the reasons against Personhood posted on WRtL’s website, I had a lot of questions, and, eventually, WRtL sent me its full legal white paper allegedly justifying its anti-personhood position. I do not believe that it does, but I’ll get there in my next post.
Before I go through the white paper, I wish to make quick work of the Personhood information displayed on Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s website. Some of this information is grossly misleading, bearing faint resemblance to the arguments made in the organization’s legal white paper. Overall, it represents a profound disservice to the pro-life public Wisconsin Right-to-Life serves. By greatly exaggerating the risks of a Personhood Amendment, Wisconsin Right-to-Life makes it impossible for the individual pro-lifer to make a fair judgement about the initiative. The website begins by claiming:
is apparently not widely known, even though it ended up featuring prominently in the 2013 edition of the Path to Prosperity, completely replacing the original plan from last year. Perhaps the revision got so little attention because there was no budget battle this year. Hopefully that will change as the presidential race progresses.