I’ve avoided weighing in on the topic of filibusters, trying to clairfy my own thinking on the issue. Now, I personally don’t have any problem with filibusters per se; if recalcitrant legislators can’t filibuster, they’ll find some other way to gum up the process (see, for example, the members of the Texas General Assembly who have apparently fled the state to deny a quorum to the Republican majority). But I do think the cloture mechanism is slightly broken.

At present, Senate rules require a 3/5 supermajority (or 60 votes) to end a filibuster. I think this requirement substantially reduces the burden on the supporters of the filibuster, as they don’t even have to show up at the quorum call for the votes; if nothing else, a filibuster should require some minimal effort among the disaffected minority to support it, but the present rules aren’t structured that way.

What I’d do: tweak the Senate rules slightly, to require 2/5+1 to vote to continue debate upon a call for cloture, except when a unanimous consent agreement is in effect otherwise limiting the debate (this part allows for normal floor debate without gratuitous cloture votes). That would properly place the burden of sustaining the filibuster on its supporters, but not otherwise limit its use (unlike Bill Frist’s fundamentally silly “supermajority countdown” proposal).

D.C. Thornton passes on a link to a Washington Times article that suggests black leaders are lamenting their inability to recruit African immigrants. Money quote:

Many immigrants are not even aware of the “color line” that prevents minorities here from excelling, other panelists said in amazement.

May I humbly suggest that the “color line” hasn’t stopped these immigrants (by definition minorities) from succeeding. D.C.’s take is especially worth reading; just go and RTWT™.

Samizdata is on a roll today, with posts on the evolution of Georgia’s state flag and the causes of the Civil War; both posts carry intelligent, rational discussions in the comments and are worth a read.

Eugene Volokh has his typical measured response to the Bill Bennett gambling affair. I guess the thing I don’t get in this whole “scandal” is why on earth, if you had $8 million to blow, you’d play slot machines, perhaps the worst expectation game in the casino, excluding keno. As a corollary, I think anyone playing more than 25¢ on slots is insane. (That this number corresponds to the highest denomination slot I’ve ever played is only a coincidence.)

Now, admittedly, I’m something of a blackjack afficianado (although I’d have to say my play is rusty as of late), which is almost always the best bet in the casino if you know what you’re doing and have a decent bankroll. But baccarat or craps would pay off better than the slots anywhere, and most places (although perhaps not Vegas) you’d be better off playing roulette or one of those silly new-fangled games. Plus, for the most part the slots bore the crap out of me; I simply can’t imagine how anyone could blow $8 million playing slots, as they’d probably keel over from sheer boredom. Crazy.

Happy Fun Pundit explains this much better than I did.

Malcolm Hutty at Samizdata links to news today that Britain joining the euro may have a high price: it could spell the end of the country’s National Health Service, according to a report published by the European Central Bank; he views the news as a gift to the Conservative Party:

One can imagine the glee with which [Tory leader] Iain Duncan-Smith will seize upon this report: he will be able to simultaineously portray [Labour’s] Foundation Hospitals policy as unduly timid, with the full weight of the ECB as ‘independent experts‘, while also saying that the NHS is only ‘safe in Tory hands’ because of the government’s committment in principle to joining the Euro. After all the kerfuffle on IDS’ leadership in recent days, I shall be reserving my judgement on his capabilities to see whether he makes real capital out of this absolute gift from Europe.

This could be a major bombshell—and perhaps the death-knell for further British integration into the European Union.

Steven Taylor at PoliBlog takes an early look at the 2004 presidential race. An interesting, but easily-overlooked, factor to note is that, due to the decennial reapportionment, if Bush wins the states he won in 2000, he’ll pick up seven extra electoral votes due to the continuing population shift to the Sun Belt states.

Glenn Reynolds has a brief commentary and round-up of links to reactions to Bush’s speech and carrier landing. I have to say when I heard about the carrier landing, the first image that popped into my head was Mike Dukakis’ head poking out of the top of a tank, but it seems to have come off fairly well.

As for the speech itself: as a matter of personal sanity I try to avoid listening to Bush speeches, mainly so I don’t get the irresistible urge to pull an Elvis on my TV.

Why do I read How Appealing? For great paragraphs like this one:

The second case [decided by the Supreme Court on Tuesday] involved the question whether Congress could lawfully require aliens subject to deportation proceedings for having committed a crime to remain imprisoned pending the outcome of their removal proceedings. In the case under review, the Ninth Circuit ruled that it was unconstitutional to hold a lawful permanent resident awaiting the outcome of removal proceedings without the possibility of bail. Recognizing that a Ninth Circuit ruling was under review, the Supreme Court reversed, 5-4, in a decision that generated opinions totaling nearly 75-pages in length. Fortunately for me, those most interested in this ruling are in custody of the Attorney General and therefore won’t require an exhaustive rehearsal of the case here at “How Appealing.” For those readers who are aliens but are not yet in custody, my advice is don’t commit serious crimes. That goes for the rest of this blog’s readers, too. (And while you’re at it, don’t commit minor crimes, either. Why not take up blogging instead?)

Of course, to fully appreciate this paragraph, you have to recognize that the Ninth Circuit is by far the most-overturned appellate court in the nation. They apparently didn’t get the memo (I think it’s called the “Constitution,” by the way) about the Supreme Court being the principal and them being the agent.

Leave it to Jane Galt to explain, far better than I could, why I won’t be voting for any Democrats for federal office any time soon. Not that Mississippi Democrats are any better; they mostly combine the statist impulses of their federal brethren with a social conservatism apparently calculated to out-flank Pat Buchanan for the hearts and minds of voters. (In other words, it’s just like Huey Long, albeit 70 years later.)

Jane may have been inspired by this Daily Kos piece (which laughably describes the Democrats as “the party of personal liberty” — apparently, the only difference between me and Cynthia McKinney in Kos’s mind is that I like the NRA), or perhaps this Samizdata rebuttal, which includes in part this sensible summation of American politics circa 2003 (or, for that matter, circa 1938):

What we have here is a fundamental failure to understand that what separates Republicans and Democrats is mostly a matter of policies within a largely shared meta-context (the framework within which one sees the world)… that is to say the Elephants and Donkeys both pretty much agree on the fact the state exist to 'do stuff' beyond keeping the barbarians from the gate and discouraging riots. The language and emphasis may be slightly different (forms of educational conscription with the tagline "No child left behind"… media control legislation described as "Fairness"… etc.), but the congress exist to do much the same sort of thing for both parties, just that whoever is their favoured group should have their snouts deeper in the trough.

Yet almost everything the Dems or Republicans do, beyond a narrow range of legitimate functions that can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are regarded as grievous abridgements of 'personal liberty issues' by almost all libertarians. That Democrats like Daily Kos cannot see that it is at the level of axioms and meta-context that libertarians disagree with them, not mere policies is astonishing. Sure, the absurdly named 'Patriot Act' is a monstrous abridgement of civil liberty, but the idea that this Republican law should make the Democrats more attractive to libertarians indicates just how little understanding there is of what makes libertarians think the way they do.

Alec Saunders has a roundup of links about a purported effort to increase the number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal (based on a story in the Australian).

Far be it from me to speak on administration policy. However, the Los Angeles Times report (that Alec also links to) almost buries another far more plausible explanation:

Energy Department officials vehemently denied that they are actually producing nuclear weapons and said they need the capability of producing plutonium parts to ensure the reliability of the existing stockpile of U.S. weapons, which is aging and may need new components.

By the time the new production facility is online—in 15 years—it is quite possible that considerable portions of the current nuclear deterrent force will be over 60 years old. Unlike Alec, I think it would be irresponsible for the government to have nuclear weapons that simply don’t work (or, worse, could accidentally detonate due to aging components), and I don’t think complete disarmament is a realistic alternative, particularly with both China and North Korea developing their arsenals and the likelihood of more nations going nuclear in the coming decade.

James Joyner at Outside the Beltway kindly dismantles the latest ONDCP waste of taxpayer’s money, which I too witnessed while watching Special Report with Brit Hume (I TiVo it daily, mostly to watch the panel). Now the Drug Czar’s running ads that explicitly lobby for Congress not to change the drug laws using tax money. If a non-profit tried this crap, they’d have their tax exemption revoked faster than their head would spin. Truly disgusting.

Glenn Reynolds points to a post at WizBang that suggests perennial cable news also-ran MSNBC is moving to the right in a quest for ratings.

As perhaps the only American to have watched MSNBC regularly for the past few weeks (and not just to gaze into the eyes of Chris Jansing, mind you), I have to say that they’ve found a fairly winning formula of late—regular news updates every 15 minutes, coupled with decent analysis and good use of NBC’s newsgathering resources, without all the annoying sound effects that accompany Fox News’s coverage (which are downright comical when listening to the audio feed on XM). This despite the following liabilities:

1. Neither Buchanan nor Press represent any mainstream political movement in the United States (this also applies to CNN’s Bob Novak fetish).

2. Matthews is just plain annoying. I find his politics enigmatic at best.

3. Scarborough is sort of a lame ripoff of O’Reilly (he even does the “talking points” thing O’Reilly does) crossed with Fox’s weekend Kaisch show; the upside is he isn’t as annoying as O’Reilly.

On the other hand, they actually have some ethnic diversity (although my mom took some convincing that Lester Holt is black), unlike Fox’s Aryan Brotherhood approach to newscasting, and you actually get the sense that they take news seriously. (By contrast, Brit Hume and Tony Snow are the only two personalities on FNC that actually seem to act like they’re involved in a newscast. Compare that to John Gibson and Shepard Smith, who behave more like overexcited puppies than newscasters.)

Are they ripping off the Fox formula? To an extent; MSNBC feels like the “kinder, gentler” FNC in a lot of ways. And the news-watching audience is older, wealthier, and skews more male than the population at large—all conservative demographics—so it makes sense to go after that audience, especially if you can attract an audience that might agree with FNC’s ideology but dislike the Fox “attitude” approach to news.

Radley Balko’s latest FoxNews.com column celebrates a group that will make you shelve your lawyer jokes forever: Washington’s libertarian law firm, the Institute for Justice. If you’re not familiar with them, just think of IJ as our answer to the ACLU. I suspect by the time I’m old and grey, IJ will have done more to expand personal freedom and individual rights than any other organization in American history.

Radley sums it up best: “These guys are right on every issue, and deserve a little sunlight.”

James Joyner at Inside the Beltway (and possible closeted roadgeek, judging from his header graphic) links to Bill Quick’s discussion of some recent recess appointments. Bill notes the direction the screaming is coming from has shifted with the partisanship of the head of the executive branch, and James thinks the recess appointment power has outlived its usefulness:

The recess appointment power is one whose purpose has long since passed into history. In the early days of the Republic, Congress adjourned for months at a time. It was inordinately hot in DC in the summertime in the days before AC, for one. For another, the Federal government didn’t have all that much to do. Of course, all that’s changed now.

Now, granted, the Senate is abusing its constitutional authority by filibustering nominees and otherwise stalling the process. So, in that sense, it balances out. But it doesn’t make it right.

I pretty much agree with that assessment. I’d have to check out a copy of Unorthodox Lawmaking by Barbara Sinclair—a must-read if you’re interested in the contemporary legislative process—but I’m pretty sure that the incidence of filibusters is increasing of late; at some point in the not-too-distant future, I’d expect a rule change to either narrow the scope of what can be filibustered or to limit the duration of a filibuster, but that largely depends on the majority leader’s willingness to force the issue by requiring “real” filibusters rather than the costless “virtual” filibusters that take place now. Make the senators sleep on cots in the cloakroom for a few nights—or not sleep at all—and I suspect they’ll decide to sharply curtail the filibuster rule in short order.

By the way (as part of my endless quest to make this blog vaguely pedagogical), the recess appointment power is buried in Article II, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the Constitution:

The President shall have the power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions, which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Just in case you were wondering…

Kevin “CalPundit” Drum, at his spiffy new Movable Type digs (this ought to be a new trademark, a correlate to “Blogger Permalinks Aren’t Working” and “Read the Whole Thing”), favorably discusses Dick Gephardt’s almost-but-not-quite-Hillarycare plan. The nicest thing I’ll say about it is that at least it isn’t single-payer.

Universal healthcare is the lefty nirvana that won’t die, for some odd reason, even though it has no natural constituency. The dirty little secret in the health insurance debate is that most people who don’t have it are young, not poor, and healthy, and hence don’t need it. What universal healthcare is fundamentally about is dragging these people into the risk pool to further subsidize the healthcare of the old and chronically ill. Everyone gets to sleep better at night knowing we’ve cut per capita expenses on healthcare while ignoring the fact that we’ve added 30 million new payees who didn’t need to be in the system in the first place. (The more I write about it, the more I realize that this is lefty nirvana: find people to subsidize something you want, and pretend they’re getting something out of it too.)

What would I do instead? Give people access to low-cost catastrophic insurance coverage (with a high deductable) and a dollar-for-dollar AGI deduction for routine medical care and out-of-pocket expenses. Not quite as sexy, but it has the advantages of not creating perverse incentives to get higher tax credits (“we’ll just reincorporate in Delaware to get the full 100% credit”) and placing more pricing pressure in the hands of health care consumers, rather than oligopolistic HMOs and insurance companies.

One problem the left has faced in trying to prevent some of the excesses of the Ashcroft-led assault on civil liberties is their inability to get the instinctive libertarians, including libertarian-leaning Republicans, on their side. Part of the issue may be rhetorical: by framing the issue as a problem with Ashcroft, many on the right will instinctively react to it as partisan bickering rather than a serious issue that needs to be addressed; this is hardly helped by the perception that objections to Ashcroft’s policies are played up for fundraising efforts by the ACLU and other left-wing interest groups. Part of the issue may be a failure of many in the left to take seriously libertarian claims that they have a distinctly different view of the role of the state than conservatives, and thus are dismissive of the left’s ability to gain allies.

So it’s somewhat heartening to see the folks at TalkLeft talking about building coalitions with politicans and citizens outside the traditional left to defeat “Son of PATRIOT” and other Ashcroftian idiocies—and, as Glenn Reynolds points out, Ashcroft’s idiocies have plenty of willing allies on the “left” too, including Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer. It’s clear that civil liberties are a good fund-raising issue for the left, but Democrats in Congress mostly aren’t sticking their necks out for them—if they were, they’d be filibustering the RAVE act being inserted into the AMBER Alert bill in addition to a couple of relatively minor judicial nominees.

If the policies are going to be fixed, it’s going to require a full-court press, not just from the left but also from the people on the right who are more likely to be listened to by a Republican administration. That means building long-term, cross-party coalitions that care about these issues that transcend the historically “left” and “right” interest groups in Washington and can build a real pro-civil liberties caucus in Congress that isn’t hostage to a particular party.

Charles Murtaugh makes much the same point today (22 April), far more eloquently than I did:

Too often, liberal bloggers dismiss the libertarians as sleeper GOP activists, but I continue to be impressed by how much common ground there is between liberal and libertarian critics of the Bush administration's excesses. It's a shame that so many liberals allow tax cuts and tort reform to separate them from potential allies—conservatives, it's worth noting, don't let disagreements about abortion and drugs deter them from cautiously embracing the libertarians.

The blog.lordsutch.com Word of the Day: logrolling. Liberals might want to try it sometime…

The Baseball Crank pithily sums up what’s wrong with everyone’s favorite members of the left fringe of the Blogosphere. (By the way, I personally recommend Matthew Yglesias or CalPundit if you want to read liberals who aren’t divorced from reality.)

It’s amazing that Meryl Yourish would get Atrios and Hesiod confused, no?

Until this weekend, I didn’t know who Barbara Cubin was. Now I do. This is the best they could do in Cheney’s former seat?

More, of course, at your one-stop shop for Republican shoe-eating coverage. There seems to be some debate as to whether she was just making a poorly-thought-out analogy or something worse.

Mark Kleiman, rightly taking to task an effort to strengthen the already-draconian federal sentencing “guidelines,” asks:

Note to my libertarian friends: WHEN ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO WISE UP AND STOP VOTING REPUBLICAN?

Ironically, he gives the answer earlier in his own post:

This is truly horrible public policy, but if it can’t be killed quietly in conference I’m not sure I’d want the Democrats to self-immolate over it.

If the Democrats aren’t willing to have the testicular fortitude to stand up for their alleged social liberalism, why should anyone who cares about social liberalism vote for them? We had eight years of Bill Clinton, during which I dare say he advanced the frontiers of personal liberty exactly none; he went along with the War on Drugs, he frequently jumped at the opportunity to portray himself as “tough on crime,” and he acquiesced in the continuing “federalize everything” drive that the alleged states-rights Republicans and freedom-loving Democrats in Congress led. The most generous thing anyone can say about personal freedom during the Clinton administration under Janet Reno is that at least it wasn’t as bad as John Ashcroft, and it’d be a stretch even to say that with a straight face.

In short, Mark thinks Democrats need to choose their battles—but I’m not sure they’ve chosen one yet.

David Adesnik at OxBlog notes that Josh Marshall is sticking up for John Kerry’s inane statement calling for “regime change” at home, as well as abroad. (However, Adesnik’s a bit more surprised than he should be at this development, given Marshall’s partisan credentials.) For those who’ve been under a rock or hung over for the last few days, Kerry said:

What we need now is not just a regime change in Saddam Hussein [sic] and Iraq, but we need a regime change in the United States.

Now, as a political scientist, “regime change” has a fairly specific meaning: the change from one system of governance to another. For example, France had a regime change when the Fourth Republic became the Fifth in 1957, while Alberto Fujimori transmuted Peru’s democracy into a dictatorship after his “self-coup” in 1992. In normal political discourse, the government of a democracy isn’t referred to as a “regime,” although one might refer to a particularly centralized administration as a “regime” to make a political point (e.g. the “Blair regime” might be assailed by critics; however, a neutral observer would call it the “Blair government” or “Blair cabinet” instead). Webster’s Unabridged (1913) defines a regime (which still had its accent at that time, as it was imported from French) as:

Mode or system of rule or management; character of government, or of the prevailing social system.

By most definitions of “regime,” Kerry would be calling not just for the replacement of the executive, but of the entire government—a government in which he serves as a senator, and in which he has a great deal more influence than the man on the street. It’s the sort of rhetoric one would expect from a commenter at a popular lefty blog, a discontented minor foreign politician, or perhaps on a sign at an anti-war protest, rather than from a serious presidential candidate. And while it may be a cute piece of rhetoric for pandering to the Democrat base now in the nomination chase, it won’t be much help if Kerry wins the nomination, because you can bet it’ll be the centerpiece of a Bush-Cheney ad campaign in late 2004.

Pieter at Peaktalk has posted a brief overview of the political career of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch conservative-libertarian politician who was gunned down by an animal rights extremist in 2002. No excerpts; go Read The Whole Thing™.

Radley Balko today discusses campaign finance “reform”, pointing out that it’s more about incumbent protection than restoring faith in the political process. I couldn’t agree with him more.

Michele at A Small Victory quite rightly takes to task those that make an analogy between our treatment of the Gitmo detainees from Afghanistan to Hussein’s treatment of allied POWs. However, it does raise the question: what’s the long-term plan for the Afghan prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay? Some have apparently been released recently, but many others still remain in custody, apparently indefinitely.

Obviously the idea is that eventually they’ll be put in front of some sort of tribunal, but there have been no public indications of when these tribunals will come about, nor are there any suggestions of handing them over to the new Afghan authorities for trial on charges there. It seems to me that the administration has, at the very least, dropped the ball on communicating what it plans to do to resolve the situation of the detainees.

Conrad and Peaktalk ask the same question that I'd been wondering about: what happened to Chris Patten? The only conclusion I can reach is that spending too much time in Brussels has turned him into a Eurocrat drone. As Peaktalk reminds us, Patten once was relatively clueful:

There was a time when I deeply admired Chris Patten. That was when he was still Governor of Hong Kong. I met him a few times when I lived in Hong Kong, the last time when I picked up a few signed copies of his marvelous book “East and West”. You see, Patten was one of the people who promoted free markets and democracy as he so firmly believed in the theory that markets can flourish only in free societies where the rule of law guarantees freedom. That is why he set out to make some drastic changes in Hong Kong’s electoral process while that was still possible before the territory was handed back to China in 1997. He antagonized almost everyone at the time, the Hong Kong and international business community (who were afraid of missing out on deals with China), Hong Kong politicians (afraid of their new masters) and a variety of others who felt the need to be gentle with Beijing. Patten was at the time a lonely crusader supported by only a few. It was brave, it made sense and it was the right thing to do.

Meanwhile, Iain Murray thinks Patten is now eminently qualified to lead Oxford University. If so, let's hope they deprogram him when he crosses the Channel.

Colby Cosh considers the same question I considered here: is a transition to full-blown liberal democracy likely to produce a stable regime. He concludes:

If it takes an army to protect my most basic liberties, I'm comfortable with that, irrespective of what the rabble thinks. Would majoritarian democracy, free of army constraints, be the best thing for Turkey? Don't ask me: I'm not a Turk. I don't think there's much question about whether it would be good for Europe (no) or for international order generally (nope).

In a more general vein, Daniel Drezner discusses “illiberal democracy” worldwide, talking about The Economist's review of Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad.

I can't add much to either account, although I will say that generally upholding the rule of law is much more important to preserving liberty than the mechanisms of democracy. One of the sure signs of erosion of liberty in Hong Kong has been the gradual increase in arbitrary meddling from Beijing, while the undemocratic nature of the SAR government has had relatively little to do with it (for even in a democratic Hong Kong, there would still be plenty of levers for Communist Party meddling from outside the SAR).