Karl Giberson, Ph.DAuthor, Language of Science
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Is Accepting Evolution 'Optional' For Christians?
Posted: 06/ 3/11 12:53 PM ET
After years in the trenches of the creation-evolution controversy I have come to appreciate the complexity of navigating the foggy world of knowledge claims. This is something that college students start learning to do in their first critical writing course and are supposed master by the time they write a senior thesis. Students begin researching on any topic by Googling and gathering various viewpoints in that way, which they then assemble into arguments. It takes time to learn the limitations of this approach and the importance of understanding that the opinions of someone who does not know what they are talking about are of no value.
A student doing a paper on evolution, for example, needs to learn that the opinion of Michelle Bachmann is of no value, as a recent HuffPost blog argued. Bachmann knows nothing about the topic and, while her opinion would be interesting because of her celebrity status, it would not be informed. In contrast, Jerry Coyne, when he isn't venting about the horrors of religion, writes a lot about evolution and is well-informed, as a leading biologist at a major university.
A student paper examining the pros and cons of evolution versus creation that pitted Bachmann against Coyne should receive an "F" for improper use of sources.
On the other hand, Michelle Bachmann has had extraordinary experience with raising children -- five of her own and an amazing 23 foster children. Her insights into foster care and family life would most likely be of great value -- more so than Jerry Coyne's, for example. But in both cases, the consensus of bodies of experts would be a far more reliable starting point. And it would be essential to note whether any individual, regardless of their expertise, was at odds with the scholarly community on the topic of interest.
This kind of critical thinking about sources and expertise is essential in navigating the complexity of our modern scientific world and developing sensible and defensible positions on everything from the age of the earth to the real cost of Medicare.
Unfortunately, America has an uneasy relationship with experts. Many people don't like the idea of consulting some egghead at a university to get scoop on complex problems, even though that egghead might be the world's leading expert and hold a position endorsed by the National Academy of Sciences. Every night on Fox News Glenn Beck assaults expertise and education as if they are just different prejudices. He regularly pits his high school diploma against teams of Ivy League doctorates in a most amazing performance as America's leading anti-intellectual. A few hours later on Fox News, Sean Hannity hosts a "great American panel" in which he asks former beauty queens, football coaches, and country singers to comment on complex political and economic questions.
This sort of anti-intellectualism -- the religious and political roots of which are documented in Richard Hofstadter's classic work, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and examined from another perspective in my forthcoming The Anointed: Evangelical Truth in a Secular Age -- provides much of the foundation for the assaults being made today on evolution. We are regularly told that we can "make up our own minds" about evolution. The preferred educational strategy being advanced is a "two models" approach where evolution and some version of anti-evolution -- like intelligent design -- are presented and students are encouraged to make up their own minds.
This is a disastrous approach to education -- anti-intellectualism disguised as democratic egalitarianism. To expose high school students to fringe perspectives, presented as genuine alternatives, and then encourage them to "choose" the one they like best is to send the message that there is no such thing as knowledge.
This approach appeals to those who don't like the consensus of knowledge-generating communities. If global warming is forcing unwanted regulations on the smoke from your factory, then alternative ideas are most welcome. If sound economics says that taxes should go up, then please find some unsound economics that says otherwise. And, if the scientific community says evolution is true, then please find a fringe group to say otherwise. After all, this is America and Americans think for themselves.
In The Language of Science and Faith Francis Collins and I cautioned our fellow Christians against holding out hope that there is a real alternative to accepting the consensus of the scientific community, especially as we see no need for Christians to be uneasy about evolution in the first place. We argue that it is significant that the scientific community has consensus on this question and that consensus is a powerful reason to accept the truth of evolution.
This argument, of course, doesn't sit well with the anti-evolutionists who have assaulted it as a bogus "appeal to authority." In a scathing review on the Discovery Institute website blasts The Language of Science and Faith as "full of appeals to authority and attacks upon the character and competence of Darwin-doubting scientists."
Our argument is described as a "rhetorical strategy" with the following statements as illustrations:
"almost all Christian biologists accept evolution."
"in most large gatherings of scientists you would not find even one person who rejects the theory of evolution
"The scientists at the BioLogos Foundation are unaware of any biologists who have abandoned evolution in the past few years. Not one."
"we are equally unfamiliar with any premier scientists who reject evolution."
"Christians should take no comfort in the misplaced hope that the scientific community is gradually abandoning the theory of evolution."
"the validity of scientific ideas is best addressed by the leading experts."
The author concludes that "Giberson and Collins don't want people to think for themselves on topics like evolution, but to simply capitulate to those whom they deem 'the leading experts.'" And "Dr. Giberson doesn't think that the average person should be allowed to "make up their own minds" on evolution."
This argument is a frontal assault on expertise and how to evaluate it. It is correct that a small percentage of credentialed scholars reject evolution. But this is true in every field. A small percentage of climatologists reject global warming; a few historians think the founding fathers were evangelicals or the holocaust never happened; a few economists still think supply side economics actually works. We do ourselves -- and our poor high school students -- no favors when we juxtapose the conventional wisdom of an entire community of scholars with that of a few fringe voices and invite people to choose which idea they like the best.
What I want for religious believers is what freshman critical writing instructors want for their students -- proper appreciation of sources. Invoking the consensus of the scientific opinion is not restricting "thinking" at all. It is encouraging critical thinking and the pursuit of genuine knowledge.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Monday, June 6, 2011
Sarah Palin's "History"
Sarah Palin Has Her Own American History
Posted: June 6, 2011 at 10:22 AM By Amanda Marcotte
So, Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere was a Revolutionary-era NRA member whose famous ride was for a British audience, to let them know Americans were going to win the war because they believed in gun rights. Which carries with it, by the way, the implication that the British had stringent gun control laws in 1775, which they did not, not that it would matter when you're talking about British soldiers, who are still permitted, nay, expected, to carry arms to this day. When Chris Wallace corrected her on-air, correctly explaining that Revere was a night watchman who warned the American troops of the approach of the British invaders (the soldiers, not the Beatles), Palin doubled down:
“You know what? I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” she said. “Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take it."
She did not explain how she imagined Americans in 1775 were able to hear Revere, wake up, "shore up" their ammunition and firearms, and organize their resistance before the troops actually got there. Since the revolutionaries were all Tea Partiers, I guess they popped over to the 24-hour Wal-Mart in Lexington and loaded up on as many semi-automatics as they could carry. They didn't have the Brady Bill back then, you know.
Palin also grumbled that the question was a "gotcha" question, one of her favorite complaints, which she probably hopes will appeal to every American who suspects that their teachers were laughing at some of the ignorant things they wrote in essay tests in their youth. (You suspect correctly.) But honestly, the problem here is less that Palin and all the other Tea Party fools who say blatantly incorrect things don't know their history. It's that they don't know their history while wrapping themselves up in the cloak of it, and claiming to be the sole inheritors of the legacy of the American Revolution. When you do that, you should understand why the people you exclude from this inheritance are going to point it out when they actually know history better than you do.
But I think it helps to understand that, for right-wing populists, this thing we call "history" is less about real people who did real things in the real world, and more like just the Bible Part II. It's a myth that can be manipulated to suit their purpose, which is usually to establish themselves as the only Real Americans. When Palin says she got it right, I believe she believes that, because her story wasn't really about Paul Revere. Her story was a thinly veiled allegory of the Tea Party worldview, and in it, Tea Partiers are Paul Revere and the British stand in for Obama, the foreign usurper who is out to take their guns. (That Obama is a gun-snatcher is also a lie worth noting, and of course there's a bit of Birtherism going on here, too.) In a sense, Palin's mangling of history is minor compared with some of the major whoppers that have percolated through Tea Party lore, with the big ones being that the main demand of the revolutionaries was an end to taxation (in fact, the main concern was lack of representation in the government, and frankly a larger desire for independence), and that the Founding Fathers were interested in establishing a government based on Christian principles, instead of those pesky secular ones they accidentally wrote into the Constitution.
Posted: June 6, 2011 at 10:22 AM By Amanda Marcotte
So, Sarah Palin claimed that Paul Revere was a Revolutionary-era NRA member whose famous ride was for a British audience, to let them know Americans were going to win the war because they believed in gun rights. Which carries with it, by the way, the implication that the British had stringent gun control laws in 1775, which they did not, not that it would matter when you're talking about British soldiers, who are still permitted, nay, expected, to carry arms to this day. When Chris Wallace corrected her on-air, correctly explaining that Revere was a night watchman who warned the American troops of the approach of the British invaders (the soldiers, not the Beatles), Palin doubled down:
“You know what? I didn’t mess up about Paul Revere,” she said. “Here is what Paul Revere did. He warned the Americans that the British were coming, the British were coming, and they were going to try take our arms and we got to make sure that we were protecting ourselves and shoring up all of ammunitions and our firearms so that they couldn’t take it."
She did not explain how she imagined Americans in 1775 were able to hear Revere, wake up, "shore up" their ammunition and firearms, and organize their resistance before the troops actually got there. Since the revolutionaries were all Tea Partiers, I guess they popped over to the 24-hour Wal-Mart in Lexington and loaded up on as many semi-automatics as they could carry. They didn't have the Brady Bill back then, you know.
Palin also grumbled that the question was a "gotcha" question, one of her favorite complaints, which she probably hopes will appeal to every American who suspects that their teachers were laughing at some of the ignorant things they wrote in essay tests in their youth. (You suspect correctly.) But honestly, the problem here is less that Palin and all the other Tea Party fools who say blatantly incorrect things don't know their history. It's that they don't know their history while wrapping themselves up in the cloak of it, and claiming to be the sole inheritors of the legacy of the American Revolution. When you do that, you should understand why the people you exclude from this inheritance are going to point it out when they actually know history better than you do.
But I think it helps to understand that, for right-wing populists, this thing we call "history" is less about real people who did real things in the real world, and more like just the Bible Part II. It's a myth that can be manipulated to suit their purpose, which is usually to establish themselves as the only Real Americans. When Palin says she got it right, I believe she believes that, because her story wasn't really about Paul Revere. Her story was a thinly veiled allegory of the Tea Party worldview, and in it, Tea Partiers are Paul Revere and the British stand in for Obama, the foreign usurper who is out to take their guns. (That Obama is a gun-snatcher is also a lie worth noting, and of course there's a bit of Birtherism going on here, too.) In a sense, Palin's mangling of history is minor compared with some of the major whoppers that have percolated through Tea Party lore, with the big ones being that the main demand of the revolutionaries was an end to taxation (in fact, the main concern was lack of representation in the government, and frankly a larger desire for independence), and that the Founding Fathers were interested in establishing a government based on Christian principles, instead of those pesky secular ones they accidentally wrote into the Constitution.
Vouchercare is NOT Medicare
Op-Ed Columnist
Vouchercare Is Not Medicare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 5, 2011
What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”
But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.
I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.
Start with the claim that the G.O.P. plan simply reforms Medicare rather than ending it. I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program — call it Vouchercare — that would offer nothing like the coverage that the elderly now receive. (Republicans get huffy when you call their plan a voucher scheme, but that’s exactly what it is.)
Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.
And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.
By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.
So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.
But what about the claim that none of this matters, because Medicare as we know it is unsustainable? Nonsense.
Yes, Medicare has to get serious about cost control; it has to start saying no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefits, it has to change the way it pays doctors and hospitals, and so on. And a number of reforms of that kind are, in fact, included in the Affordable Care Act. But with these changes it should be entirely possible to maintain a system that provides all older Americans with guaranteed essential health care.
Consider Canada, which has a national health insurance program, actually called Medicare, that is similar to the program we have for the elderly, but less open-ended and more cost-conscious. In 1970, Canada and the United States both spent about 7 percent of their G.D.P. on health care. Since then, as United States health spending has soared to 16 percent of G.D.P., Canadian spending has risen much more modestly, to only 10.5 percent of G.D.P. And while Canadian health care isn’t perfect, it’s not bad.
Canadian Medicare, then, looks sustainable; why can’t we do the same thing here? Well, you know the answer in the case of the Republicans: They don’t want to make Medicare sustainable, they want to destroy it under the guise of saving it.
So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.
Vouchercare Is Not Medicare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: June 5, 2011
What’s in a name? A lot, the National Republican Congressional Committee obviously believes. Last week, the committee sent a letter demanding that a TV station stop running an ad declaring that the House Republican budget plan would “end Medicare.” This, the letter insisted, was a false claim: the plan would simply install a “new, sustainable version of Medicare.”
But Comcast, the station’s owner, rejected the demand — and rightly so. For Republicans are indeed seeking to dismantle Medicare as we know it, replacing it with a much worse program.
I’m seeing many attempts to shout down anyone making this obvious point, and not just from Republican politicians. For some reason, many commentators seem to believe that accurately describing what the G.O.P. is actually proposing amounts to demagoguery. But there’s nothing demagogic about telling the truth.
Start with the claim that the G.O.P. plan simply reforms Medicare rather than ending it. I’ll just quote the blogger Duncan Black, who summarizes this as saying that “when we replace the Marines with a pizza, we’ll call the pizza the Marines.” The point is that you can name the new program Medicare, but it’s an entirely different program — call it Vouchercare — that would offer nothing like the coverage that the elderly now receive. (Republicans get huffy when you call their plan a voucher scheme, but that’s exactly what it is.)
Medicare is a government-run insurance system that directly pays health-care providers. Vouchercare would cut checks to insurance companies instead. Specifically, the program would pay a fixed amount toward private health insurance — higher for the poor, lower for the rich, but not varying at all with the actual level of premiums. If you couldn’t afford a policy adequate for your needs, even with the voucher, that would be your problem.
And most seniors wouldn’t be able to afford adequate coverage. A Congressional Budget Office analysis found that to get coverage equivalent to what they have now, older Americans would have to pay vastly more out of pocket under the Paul Ryan plan than they would if Medicare as we know it was preserved. Based on the budget office estimates, the typical senior would end up paying around $6,000 more out of pocket in the plan’s first year of operation.
By the way, defenders of the G.O.P. plan often assert that it resembles other, less unpopular programs. For a while they claimed, falsely, that Vouchercare would be just like the coverage federal employees get. More recently, I’ve been seeing claims that Vouchercare would be just like the system created for Americans under 65 by last year’s health care reform — a fairly remarkable defense from a party that has denounced that reform as evil incarnate.
So let me make two points. First, Obamacare was very much a second-best plan, conditioned by perceived political realities. Most of the health reformers I know would have greatly preferred simply expanding Medicare to cover all Americans. Second, the Affordable Care Act is all about making health care, well, affordable, offering subsidies whose size is determined by the need to limit the share of their income that families spend on medical costs. Vouchercare, by contrast, would simply hand out vouchers of a fixed size, regardless of the actual cost of insurance. And these vouchers would be grossly inadequate.
But what about the claim that none of this matters, because Medicare as we know it is unsustainable? Nonsense.
Yes, Medicare has to get serious about cost control; it has to start saying no to expensive procedures with little or no medical benefits, it has to change the way it pays doctors and hospitals, and so on. And a number of reforms of that kind are, in fact, included in the Affordable Care Act. But with these changes it should be entirely possible to maintain a system that provides all older Americans with guaranteed essential health care.
Consider Canada, which has a national health insurance program, actually called Medicare, that is similar to the program we have for the elderly, but less open-ended and more cost-conscious. In 1970, Canada and the United States both spent about 7 percent of their G.D.P. on health care. Since then, as United States health spending has soared to 16 percent of G.D.P., Canadian spending has risen much more modestly, to only 10.5 percent of G.D.P. And while Canadian health care isn’t perfect, it’s not bad.
Canadian Medicare, then, looks sustainable; why can’t we do the same thing here? Well, you know the answer in the case of the Republicans: They don’t want to make Medicare sustainable, they want to destroy it under the guise of saving it.
So in voting for the House budget plan, Republicans voted to end Medicare. Saying that isn’t demagoguery, it’s just pointing out the truth.
On Orginalism--The Conservative Threat to Society
by
Geoffrey R. StoneEdward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Submit this storydigg reddit stumble The Framers of the American Constitution were visionaries. They designed our Constitution to endure. They sought not only to address the specific challenges facing the nation during their lifetimes, but also to establish the foundational principles that would sustain and guide the new nation into an uncertain future.
The text of the Constitution reflects this vision. It defines our most fundamental freedoms in general terms: "freedom of speech," "due process of law," "free exercise" of religion, "equal protection of the laws." The Constitution sets forth governmental powers in similarly general terms: Congress may regulate "commerce . . . among the several states," the president will "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," the courts are authorized to decide "cases" and "controversies."
These phrases are not self-defining. The Framers understood that they were entrusting to future generations the responsibility to draw upon their intelligence, judgment, and experience to give concrete meaning to these broad principles over time. As Chief Justice John Marshall observed almost two centuries ago, "We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."
For the last half-century, conservatives have argued that the Supreme Court went too far in the 1950s and '60s in its efforts to preserve the vitality of self-governance and protect the rights of those most in need of judicial attention. They condemned what they derided as the "judicial activism" reflected in Warren Court decisions requiring one person/one vote, protecting the rights of people suspected of crime, holding unconstitutional laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, and prohibiting state-sponsored school prayer. They therefore demanded the appointment of judges committed to judicial restraint. But although judicial restraint is surely appropriate in appropriate circumstances, its sweeping, reflexive invocation would abdicate a fundamental responsibility that the Framers entrusted to the judiciary and therefore undermine a critical element of the American constitutional system. As Alexander Hamilton observed in the Federalist Papers, constitutional protections and limitations can "be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice."
Perhaps recognizing that a theory of unbounded judicial restraint is constitutionally irresponsible, conservatives next came up with the theory of "originalism." First popularized in the 1980s, originalism presumes that courts should exercise judicial restraint unless the "original meaning" of the text clearly mandates a more activist approach. Under this theory, for example, it is appropriate for courts to invoke the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate laws that deny African Americans the right to serve on juries, but not to invalidate laws that deny women that same right, because that was not the "original meaning" of the clause.
Originalism is fundamentally flawed. First, because those who enacted the broad foundational provisions of our Constitution often did not have any precise and agreed-upon understanding of their specific meanings, it is exceedingly difficult to know with any certainty what they did or did not think about concrete constitutional issues. As a consequence, judges purporting to engage in originalist analysis often project onto the Framers their own personal and political preferences. The result is an unprincipled and often patently disingenuous jurisprudence. There is no evidence for the claims advanced by originalists, for example, that the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause prohibited affirmative action or that the original meaning of the First Amendment included the notion that corporations had a constitutional right to spend unlimited capital to influence political elections. Both of these claims, however, are central to today's conservative legal agenda.
The second problem with originalism is even more disqualifying, for it reveals the theory to be internally incoherent. Originalism asserts that those who crafted and ratified our Constitution intended the meaning and effect of their handiwork to be limited to the specific understandings of their time. But the notion that any particular moment's understanding of the meaning of the Constitution's open-ended provisions should be locked into place and taken as constitutionally definitive would have seemed completely wrongheaded to the Framers, who held a much bolder and more confident understanding of their own achievements and aspirations.
We have now entered a new and even more troubling phase of conservative constitutional jurisprudence. It is best characterized as "conservative activism." Justices who readily dismiss constitutional claims by women, political dissenters, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, but at the same time aggressively strike down restrictions on corporate political expenditures, laws regulating the sale and possession of handguns, affirmative-action programs, and the laws of Florida in the 2000 presidential election, are unmistakably using the power of judicial review in a highly selective manner that cannot credibly be justified by any principled theory of constitutional interpretation. Despite all of the conservative rhetoric about originalism, "strict construction," "judicial restraint," "applying rather than making the law," and "calling balls and strikes," this pattern of decisions raises grave questions about the considerations that actually drive the jurisprudence of our conservative justices.
Geoffrey R. StoneEdward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor of Law at the University of Chicago
Submit this storydigg reddit stumble The Framers of the American Constitution were visionaries. They designed our Constitution to endure. They sought not only to address the specific challenges facing the nation during their lifetimes, but also to establish the foundational principles that would sustain and guide the new nation into an uncertain future.
The text of the Constitution reflects this vision. It defines our most fundamental freedoms in general terms: "freedom of speech," "due process of law," "free exercise" of religion, "equal protection of the laws." The Constitution sets forth governmental powers in similarly general terms: Congress may regulate "commerce . . . among the several states," the president will "take care that the laws be faithfully executed," the courts are authorized to decide "cases" and "controversies."
These phrases are not self-defining. The Framers understood that they were entrusting to future generations the responsibility to draw upon their intelligence, judgment, and experience to give concrete meaning to these broad principles over time. As Chief Justice John Marshall observed almost two centuries ago, "We must never forget that it is a constitution we are expounding . . . intended to endure for ages to come, and consequently to be adapted to the various crises of human affairs."
For the last half-century, conservatives have argued that the Supreme Court went too far in the 1950s and '60s in its efforts to preserve the vitality of self-governance and protect the rights of those most in need of judicial attention. They condemned what they derided as the "judicial activism" reflected in Warren Court decisions requiring one person/one vote, protecting the rights of people suspected of crime, holding unconstitutional laws forbidding mixed-race marriages, and prohibiting state-sponsored school prayer. They therefore demanded the appointment of judges committed to judicial restraint. But although judicial restraint is surely appropriate in appropriate circumstances, its sweeping, reflexive invocation would abdicate a fundamental responsibility that the Framers entrusted to the judiciary and therefore undermine a critical element of the American constitutional system. As Alexander Hamilton observed in the Federalist Papers, constitutional protections and limitations can "be preserved in practice no other way than through the medium of courts of justice."
Perhaps recognizing that a theory of unbounded judicial restraint is constitutionally irresponsible, conservatives next came up with the theory of "originalism." First popularized in the 1980s, originalism presumes that courts should exercise judicial restraint unless the "original meaning" of the text clearly mandates a more activist approach. Under this theory, for example, it is appropriate for courts to invoke the Equal Protection Clause to invalidate laws that deny African Americans the right to serve on juries, but not to invalidate laws that deny women that same right, because that was not the "original meaning" of the clause.
Originalism is fundamentally flawed. First, because those who enacted the broad foundational provisions of our Constitution often did not have any precise and agreed-upon understanding of their specific meanings, it is exceedingly difficult to know with any certainty what they did or did not think about concrete constitutional issues. As a consequence, judges purporting to engage in originalist analysis often project onto the Framers their own personal and political preferences. The result is an unprincipled and often patently disingenuous jurisprudence. There is no evidence for the claims advanced by originalists, for example, that the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause prohibited affirmative action or that the original meaning of the First Amendment included the notion that corporations had a constitutional right to spend unlimited capital to influence political elections. Both of these claims, however, are central to today's conservative legal agenda.
The second problem with originalism is even more disqualifying, for it reveals the theory to be internally incoherent. Originalism asserts that those who crafted and ratified our Constitution intended the meaning and effect of their handiwork to be limited to the specific understandings of their time. But the notion that any particular moment's understanding of the meaning of the Constitution's open-ended provisions should be locked into place and taken as constitutionally definitive would have seemed completely wrongheaded to the Framers, who held a much bolder and more confident understanding of their own achievements and aspirations.
We have now entered a new and even more troubling phase of conservative constitutional jurisprudence. It is best characterized as "conservative activism." Justices who readily dismiss constitutional claims by women, political dissenters, and racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, but at the same time aggressively strike down restrictions on corporate political expenditures, laws regulating the sale and possession of handguns, affirmative-action programs, and the laws of Florida in the 2000 presidential election, are unmistakably using the power of judicial review in a highly selective manner that cannot credibly be justified by any principled theory of constitutional interpretation. Despite all of the conservative rhetoric about originalism, "strict construction," "judicial restraint," "applying rather than making the law," and "calling balls and strikes," this pattern of decisions raises grave questions about the considerations that actually drive the jurisprudence of our conservative justices.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Curtis Wilkie - Dixie
This memoir, published in 2001, reminds me of Willie Morris and "North Toward Home." Curtis Wilkie, a journalist, is a Son of the South. He grew up in Mississippi in the 50's and 60's (about 10 years older than me)during the civil rights struggles, attended Ole Miss, left Mississippi and The South in disgust, but then returned and now lives in New Orleans.
He grew up in the conservative South, but became liberal. This is the kind of person of my time that I most identify with.
Curtis Wilkie was there in Oxford in October of 1962 when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss. He gives a gripping first-hand account of the riots that resulted in injuries, property damage, and 2 deaths. In retrospect, it is hard to fathom how this came about 49 years ago. Hard to imagine.
He was a reporter in Clarkesdale in the 60's for that town's small newspaper, he went from there to Boston to work for that city's liberal paper, and he covered Jimmy Carter in his presidential run in 1976. He didn't like Carter at first, but grew to respect him later.
The book ends with the funeral of Willie Morris in 1999. Before reading "North Toward Home" last year I did not realize how big a Southern character was Willie Morris. Now I know.
This is my kind of story: the small-town Southern boy who goes to town and earns his liberal stripes.
He grew up in the conservative South, but became liberal. This is the kind of person of my time that I most identify with.
Curtis Wilkie was there in Oxford in October of 1962 when James Meredith became the first black student to enroll at Ole Miss. He gives a gripping first-hand account of the riots that resulted in injuries, property damage, and 2 deaths. In retrospect, it is hard to fathom how this came about 49 years ago. Hard to imagine.
He was a reporter in Clarkesdale in the 60's for that town's small newspaper, he went from there to Boston to work for that city's liberal paper, and he covered Jimmy Carter in his presidential run in 1976. He didn't like Carter at first, but grew to respect him later.
The book ends with the funeral of Willie Morris in 1999. Before reading "North Toward Home" last year I did not realize how big a Southern character was Willie Morris. Now I know.
This is my kind of story: the small-town Southern boy who goes to town and earns his liberal stripes.
Friday, June 3, 2011
The United States Doomed?
Friday, Jun 3, 2011 16:22 ET
How The World Works This is why the United States is doomed
The GOP response to the jobs report: The Earth is flat and two plus two equals five
By Andrew Leonard
Eric Cantor and John BoehnerThe Hill reports the House Republican response to Friday morning's distressing jobs report.
House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.
"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.
How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!
1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.
2) Over-regulating? Set aside, if you can, the fact that under-regulation clearly played a significant role in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Let's just take a look at the two sectors of the economy that we might expect to have been affected by the two biggest signature pieces of legislation signed into law by Obama -- the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform act. According to this morning's jobs report, the healthcare sector has averaged 24,000 news jobs a month over the past year -- and accounted for almost a third of May's overall 54,000 gain. Meanwhile, Wall Street had its fourth most profitable year ever in 2010. If that's over-regulation, we need more of it!
3) Private economic forecasters, the kind of profit-minded companies that make their money by analyzing economic trends for business clients, generally agree that without Obama's stimulus spending, unemployment would be higher.
We could raise other issues. We could ask: What changed between May and the previous six months in which job growth was relatively strong? But that would require examining actual facts about what is going on the world, like Japan's recession or high gas prices or declining government spending, particularly at the state level.
I know, I know, it's not worth getting agitated when Washington politicians of either party spout blatant misrepresentations of reality. But as we accelerate towards a debt ceiling budget deal that is virtually guaranteed to accelerate negative economic trends, it does matter what House Republicans say, because it gives us a pretty darn good idea of what they're going do.
How The World Works This is why the United States is doomed
The GOP response to the jobs report: The Earth is flat and two plus two equals five
By Andrew Leonard
Eric Cantor and John BoehnerThe Hill reports the House Republican response to Friday morning's distressing jobs report.
House Republicans pinned the blame for Friday's disappointing jobs report squarely on the White House, saying the Obama administration's "over-taxing, over-regulating and over-spending" has stifled economic growth.
"One look at the jobs report should be enough to show the White House it's time to get serious about cutting spending and dealing with our ailing economy," Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said.
How many blatant untruths can a Republican speaker of the House stuff into one sentence? Quite a few!
1) President Obama has cut taxes. His stimulus bill included tax cuts for 95 percent of all American working families. He signed off on the extension of the Bush tax cuts, while throwing in a new payroll tax cut for good measure.
2) Over-regulating? Set aside, if you can, the fact that under-regulation clearly played a significant role in creating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Let's just take a look at the two sectors of the economy that we might expect to have been affected by the two biggest signature pieces of legislation signed into law by Obama -- the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank bank reform act. According to this morning's jobs report, the healthcare sector has averaged 24,000 news jobs a month over the past year -- and accounted for almost a third of May's overall 54,000 gain. Meanwhile, Wall Street had its fourth most profitable year ever in 2010. If that's over-regulation, we need more of it!
3) Private economic forecasters, the kind of profit-minded companies that make their money by analyzing economic trends for business clients, generally agree that without Obama's stimulus spending, unemployment would be higher.
We could raise other issues. We could ask: What changed between May and the previous six months in which job growth was relatively strong? But that would require examining actual facts about what is going on the world, like Japan's recession or high gas prices or declining government spending, particularly at the state level.
I know, I know, it's not worth getting agitated when Washington politicians of either party spout blatant misrepresentations of reality. But as we accelerate towards a debt ceiling budget deal that is virtually guaranteed to accelerate negative economic trends, it does matter what House Republicans say, because it gives us a pretty darn good idea of what they're going do.
No Matter What Anyone Says
the Republicans are trying to destroy Medicare.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
June 3, 2011, 2:18 pm
What’s In A Name?
A lot, or at least that’s what Republicans think. Greg Sargent reports that they’re demanding that a TV station stop running ads saying that the GOP wants to end Medicare; the claim is that this is a lie, because the new program the GOP wants to impose in place of Medicare is still Medicare.
As Greg says, this is important — because if they can get away with this, it will amount to a serious infringement of free speech, preventing people from running truthful ads.
Because the fact is that Republicans are trying to end Medicare. The program we now call Medicare is one in which the government acts as your insurer, paying your major medical bills; coverage is guaranteed to all seniors. The program Republicans want gives you vouchers and tells you to go buy your own insurance, if you can. That’s not at all the same thing.
Oh, they’re also trying to stop anyone from calling it a voucher plan — but that’s what it is.
What about the claim that the Ryan plan actually does guarantee coverage, because it says that insurers can’t turn you down? That’s based on word games. What the plan says is that you can’t be turned down because of medical history — it imposes community rating. But it says nothing about requiring that insurers sell coverage at a price you can afford. And the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan plan makes it clear that it would put insurance coverage beyond the financial reach of many seniors.
So you can call the new thing Medicare; you could also call an onion a rose. But a non-rose by the same name does not smell as sweet.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
by Paul Krugman
June 3, 2011, 2:18 pm
What’s In A Name?
A lot, or at least that’s what Republicans think. Greg Sargent reports that they’re demanding that a TV station stop running ads saying that the GOP wants to end Medicare; the claim is that this is a lie, because the new program the GOP wants to impose in place of Medicare is still Medicare.
As Greg says, this is important — because if they can get away with this, it will amount to a serious infringement of free speech, preventing people from running truthful ads.
Because the fact is that Republicans are trying to end Medicare. The program we now call Medicare is one in which the government acts as your insurer, paying your major medical bills; coverage is guaranteed to all seniors. The program Republicans want gives you vouchers and tells you to go buy your own insurance, if you can. That’s not at all the same thing.
Oh, they’re also trying to stop anyone from calling it a voucher plan — but that’s what it is.
What about the claim that the Ryan plan actually does guarantee coverage, because it says that insurers can’t turn you down? That’s based on word games. What the plan says is that you can’t be turned down because of medical history — it imposes community rating. But it says nothing about requiring that insurers sell coverage at a price you can afford. And the Congressional Budget Office analysis of the Ryan plan makes it clear that it would put insurance coverage beyond the financial reach of many seniors.
So you can call the new thing Medicare; you could also call an onion a rose. But a non-rose by the same name does not smell as sweet.
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