Dan Drezner wonders aloud about the implications of French voters deciding to reject the proposed E.U. constitution; he certainly doesn’t buy the doomsday scenario advanced by former Italian prime minister Romano Prodi.

Since the referendum is likely to fail for reasons other than policy grounds* (French voters being as ignorant of policy as any other democratic public’s citizens), reworking parts of the treaty, as suggested in this Economist piece, seems to be an unlikely solution. Rather, I tend to think (as some of Dan’s commenters suggest) that France may say “no” today, but will say “yes” later; the French electorate will have its protest vote, then get back onboard in a few months, probably without any substantive concessions. Ditto for the Netherlands.

Of course, the longer-term issue is that the iterated game is much less likely to work in Britain, where the public has never really been sold on the E.U. since joining in 1973. But again it’s unlikely that any proposed constitution would pass muster with the British electorate—again, because voters’ ratification decisions on the constitution won’t be made on policy grounds.

Robert Tagorda has a link to a really interesting Christian Science Monitor piece that notes a massive collapse in voter turnout in the United Kingdom over the last decade:

With less than two weeks to the May 5 vote, the big question facing British politicians is not who votes for them, but who votes at all. Experts predict the lowest participation in a century.

Turnout that persisted above 70 percent for decades after World War II is expected to plunge to 53 percent this cycle, according to Professor Paul Whiteley of England’s Essex University. Turnout in the 2004 US presidential vote was 61 percent.

Turnout is expected to be especially dire among young people – and worse still in inner-city districts like Vauxhall. “People of my generation do feel guilty if we don’t vote, but 18— to 20-year-olds don’t,” says Mr. Whiteley. “They don’t see party politics as interesting.”

Bizarre theories are raised for this turnout collapse by some:

Some critics charge that the increasingly presidential nature of British politics is a turn-off. Martin Bell, a former independent member of Parliament, says Parliament is too subservient to the prime minister. Mr. Bell, who is now managing a campaign for a candidate running against Mr. Blair in his Sedgefield constituency, also cites the erosion of trust in politicians.

“The problem of trust is at the bottom of the distaste for public life,” he says. “The prime minister hardly ever appears in Parliament. He hardly ever votes himself” in parliament, he adds. The inference is clear: Why should the electorate vote, when the country’s leading politician doesn’t?

The imperial prime minister (or, at least, the imperial cabinet) is nothing new in British politics (Walter Bagehot wrote about it in 1867 in The English Constitution), so Bell’s explanation seems rather unlikely. Another theory seems slightly more plausible:

Then there is the dramatic shift in British political geography. A generation ago, Britain’s electoral map looked like a Piet Mondrian painting: red slab in the north for Labour, blue block in the south for Conservative – a split evoking the contrast between coast and hinterland in the last US presidential vote.

Today, the map is pixellated like a faulty computer screen.

Ms. Giddy says it’s part of a cultural shift. “You don’t have strong allegiances to communities and parties in the way you did, say, when living in a mining town meant you voted Labour as an extension of your community,” she says.

This theory—essentially, dealignment of the British electorate—makes some degree of sense; indeed, dealignment of the electorate is a common explanation for turnout decline (despite increased ideological polarization of the major parties) in the United States. Of course, dealignment would suggest a substantial reduction in the importance of social class in British politics—something I’d hesitate to argue has happened, absent a lot more evidence. Either way, it will be interesting to see if the turnout rate is as low as the 53% figure posited by some of the experts; my gut feeling is that it will be higher, but what do I know?

Bryan at Arguing with Signposts talks about the asinine Wright Amendment, a provision of federal law that prohibits Southwest Airlines from serving most of the United States for passengers headed to or from Dallas’ Love Field. There’s more details on the back-and-forth lobbying here and here (registration required for both), and background on the Wright amendment in this Virginia Postrel op-ed; I have to say it’s downright odd (for me, at least) to be in the position of agreeing with Trent Lott’s position on an issue.

The fun down in Ecuador continues after the semi-deposal of its president by at least part of Ecuador’s Congress, and it doesn’t look like the mess is going to be cleaned up any time soon.

Apropos the previous two posts, I noticed something odd in the comments on this sidebar post at the Jackson’s Next Mayor blog: two people debating incumbent mayor Harvey Johnson’s position on the abortion issue.

I’m at a loss to figure out what exactly a city mayor’s authority over abortion would be; indeed, the only elected officials I can see whose positions on abortion would be worth knowing (at least, given the current situation where the Supreme Court decides what public policy is acceptable on abortion) would be presidential candidates and U.S. senators, who are responsible for nominating and confirming appointments to the Supreme Court. Even if that weren’t the case, I don’t really know what the mayor could do for or against abortions, or—for that matter—what another candidate would do differently on abortion.

The only thing I can figure is that candidates’ positions on abortion are seen as proxies for general ideology by at least some voters, which I suppose makes sense (given that abortion is a fairly “easy” issue in Carmines and Stimson’s typology), but it’s not all that great of a shortcut.

A good David Brooks piece appeared in today’s New York Times on the hyperpoliticization of the abortion issue in the wake of Roe v. Wade. An excerpt to whet your appetite:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it.

When Blackmun wrote the Roe decision, it took the abortion issue out of the legislatures and put it into the courts. If it had remained in the legislatures, we would have seen a series of state-by-state compromises reflecting the views of the centrist majority that’s always existed on this issue. These legislative compromises wouldn’t have pleased everyone, but would have been regarded as legitimate.

Instead, Blackmun and his concurring colleagues invented a right to abortion, and imposed a solution more extreme than the policies of just about any other comparable nation.

ATSRTWT.

I meant to blog this before I went to bed last night, but the permanent link hadn’t appeared yet in the RSS feed. More here.

Normally, I’m in full agreement with TigerHawk about things, but this post on Ann Coulter will not stand:

Michelle Malkin, who certainly should concern herself with the press’s treatment of attractive conservative women, writes that it is all part of a pattern. [emphasis mine]

Of course, I don’t share my co-blogger’s apparent interest in emaciated women—not to mention his predilection in favor of Ms. Coulter’s cleavage—so I may not be an unbiased observer.

Steven Jens has posted some dummied-up figures for how the reapportionment of Congress would go if the population trends in 2004 continue through the end of the decade. It’s moderately interesting that both Alabama and Louisiana would lose a representative each; like Mississippi, one presumes they are gaining population, but not quickly enough to keep pace with the national rate.

Also: will someone explain to me why when legislative districts don’t have equal populations people use the term “malapportionment”? Reapportionment refers to the process of allocating House seats to states, while redistricting refers to the process of redrawing district boundaries to compensate for population shifts within states, so why would bad (or nonexistent) redistricting be called malapportionment instead of maldistricting? (If I don’t get an answer here, I may have to interrogate my civil liberties students Wednesday on this topic…)

I hadn’t really paid much attention to this Sunday Times piece by an American expat living in Oslo comparing Scandinavia with the United States, but this post from Brett Marston made me curious. Marston asks:

How can the New York Times get away with publishing a Week in Review piece on income in Norway and not even mention income distribution (except disparagingly), the GINI index, or the effect of income inequality on aggregate statistics?

Well, the first potential response is that it is, after all, an opinion piece, and the writer has the choice of what evidence to marshall or respond to. But I do think Marston has a point… at least to an extent.

Income inequality, of course, does bias some statistics like the mean income; comparisons of median income would be more helpful, since it is unbiased by outliers. My suspicion, however, is that median U.S. income is substantially higher than median Norwegian income, regardless.

I also think a focus on inequality (and the Gini coefficient, which is a measure of inequality) might be worthwhile… but what does inequality mean in this context. Is the poorest Norwegian better off than the poorest American? If so, that might be a problem. However, by most consumption measures, a large share of poor Americans are only “poor” relative to other Americans (consider that even many of the poorest Americans have cellular phones and cable TV, not to mention $100 tennis shoes), although certainly there are poor Americans who fall through the cracks—as, for that matter, there are poor Norwegians in the same situation.

Certainly income inequality can be viewed as a problem—consider, for example, the well-known problem of relative deprivation. I’m not sure the solution to that problem is to force rich people to have less money so poorer people feel better about themselves, which seems to be the implicit solution to the problem: giving the money the rich have to the poor, while a nice concept, probably wouldn’t materially help the poor that much—and they’d still be poor relative to everyone else, so relative deprivation would kick in again.

In other words, I don’t know that income inequality is prima facie bad; certainly, poverty is bad, and that is something most societies could do better at solving, the United States included. But I think a focus on inequality over objective conditions probably is counterproductive.

Update: Jason Kuznicki has nicer things to say about the piece, and also discusses the rather silly “constitution in exlie” piece that has all the lawprofs and law students atwitter.

Both Stephen Karlson and Reihan Salam are less-than-impressed with Amtrak’s latest fiasco: the discovery that the Acela high-speed train’s brakes aren’t up to snuff. Quoth Salam:

Rather than purchase a proven Swedish high-speed train, the X2000 tilt-train, designed to accommodate older, not-quite-straight tracks like those found in the northeastern corridor (and unlike the very straight railtrack used by the TGV and other high-speed lines overseas), Amtrak decided to build an entirely new model at vastly greater expense that—get this—experienced serious mechanical failures from the very start. For the sake of building a much slower fitfully tilting version of the TGV, a non-tilting train, they built a train that, remarkably and at the most inconvenient moments, failed to tilt. Had they gone with the X2000, they would’ve had an excellent high-speed train in 1998. This is stupidity on a colossal scale.

It’s rather clear that the choice of the Bombardier design had more to do with the byzantine financial structure of the deal than technical merit. Not surprisingly, this decision has come back to bite Amtrak in the ass.

As this Boston Globe piece points out, this latest round of bad news did not come at a good time for Amtrak, with many in Congress already highly skeptical of passenger rail and President Bush pushing for rail service to be devolved to the states.

It turns out that the only folks abusing Terri Schiavo were politicians, according to Florida investigators:

The agency completed nine reports of abuse accusations made from 2001 to 2004, including neglect of hygiene, denial of dental care, poisoning and physical harm. The accusations, which have been widely reported, focus on Michael Schiavo, the husband of Terri. Ms. Schiavo died on March 31, nearly two weeks after her feeding tube was removed.

The names of many accusers have been blacked out in the documents, but the name of Ms. Schiavo’s father, Robert Schindler, appears on one.

And via Stephen Bainbridge comes word that the Democrats will be bringing up Terri Schiavo again during at least the next two election cycles:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said Friday that his party would wield the Terri Schiavo case against Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections, but for now needed to stay focused battling President Bush on Social Security.

“We’re going to use Terri Schiavo later on,” Dean said of the brain-damaged Floridian who died last month after her feeding tube was removed amid a swarm of political controversy.

I can hardly wait…

Ok, somebody riddle me this: why would you go to the trouble of producing campaign signs that call yourself by two different names? And, yes, Ward 7 city councilwoman Margaret Barrett-Simon, I’m asking you:

I’m at a loss…

Saturday’s New York Times reports on the withdrawal of the Christian Democratic Union from Italy’s center-right coalition government under Silvio Berluconi. The withdrawal may lead to either a new government or fresh elections, the latter of which would probably favor a center-left coalition under former prime minister Romano Prodi. The CDU, however, is sending mixed signals about its withdrawal, so it’s possible Berlusconi will be able to maintain the coalition if he makes some policy changes.

As James Joyner points out, Italy hasn’t exactly been known for stable post-war governments, so if Berlusconi’s coalition collapses, it would hardly be unprecedented. (Italy manages to muddle through the instability largely because it has a remarkably strong civil service.)

John Quiggin asks, “Why hasn’t Labour introduced preferential (single transferable) voting in Britain?” It’s actually a fairly good question, although I think Quiggin answers it later in his post:

Sooner or later, there will be a hung Parliament, and the price of LDP support will be full-scale proportional representation. If Labour introduced preferential voting without being forced to, it would not only cement LDP support but would greatly weaken the case for PR.

Labour, however, doesn’t need to make a deal yet—and, judging from the past 100 years of British electoral history, a hung parliament where Labour needs the LDP either to form a coalition or to sustain a minority government isn’t likely to come about anytime soon. So why help the LibDems today if you can put off an accomodation until later, perhaps much later?

It’s probably not good when your boss reads something in the newspaper he doesn’t like:

President Bush said Thursday that he had been surprised to learn in the newspaper of his administration’s decision last week to require Americans to have passports to enter the country from Mexico or Canada by 2008. He said he had asked the State and Homeland Security Departments to look into other means of tightening border security.

I’m not at all convinced that passports are really any more secure than driver’s licenses anyway; my passport (from September 1998) doesn’t have any biometric data on it whatsoever, and neither does my 2004-vintage driver’s license. That said, I’m not sure that requiring passports will increase delays at the border—checking a passport shouldn’t take any more time than checking any other photo ID, unless for some reason the government insists on stamping the passport.

Steven Taylor notes that both houses of Connecticut’s legislature have approved civil unions bills in the past week, while James Joyner links a Reuters piece on the introduction of a same-sex civil unions bill with bipartisan support in the Oregon legislature. No word yet on when the Mississippi legislature plans to get in on this trend…

James Joyner has been pulling together various articles detailing which of our elected representatives have relatives on the campaign payroll. Suffice it to say that Sanders and DeLay aren’t the only ones…

Previous discussion here.

And so it begins… the round of newspaper stories saying “my congressman is too as corrupt as your congressman.” First up, the Bennington Banner finds U.S. Representative Bernie Sanders, DEIN-Vt., having a bit of a DeLay problem of his own:

Rep. Bernard Sanders used campaign donations to pay his wife and stepdaughter more than $150,000 for campaign-related work since 2000, according to records filed with the Federal Election Commission.

Jane O’Meara Sanders, his wife, received $91,020 between 2002 and 2004 for “consultation” and for negotiating the purchase of television and radio time-slots for Sanders’ advertisements, according to records and interviews.

Approximately $61,000 of that was “pass through” money that was used to pay media outlets for advertising time, Jane O’Meara Sanders said in an interview. The rest, about $30,000, she kept as payment for her services, she said.

Carina Driscoll, daughter to Jane O’Meara Sanders and stepdaughter to the lawmaker, earned $65,002 in “wages” between 2000 and 2004, campaign records show.

Frankly, I think the whole “family consulting” thing is a non-story, but if the Good Government types want to get their undies in a bunch about politicians putting their families on the campaign payroll, let’s have everyone’s cards on the table. (þ: Jeff Goldstein)

I apparently missed the big excitement in the Chicago art scene last week; the Secret Service, however, didn’t:

Organizers of a politically charged art exhibit at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery thought their show might draw controversy.

But they didn’t expect two U.S. Secret Service agents would be among the show’s first visitors.

The agents turned up Thursday evening, just before the public opening of “Axis of Evil, the Secret History of Sin,” and took pictures of some of the art pieces—including “Patriot Act,” showing President Bush on a mock 37-cent stamp with a revolver pointed at his head.

When isn’t a death threat a death threat? When it’s an artistic statement, apparently. Thankfully, exhibit curator Michael Hernandez de Luna has his priorities straight:

“It frightens me… as an artist and curator. Now we’re being watched,” Hernandez said. “It’s a new world. It’s a Big Brother world. I think it’s frightening for any artist who wants to do edgy art.”

Hernandez said he hopes the public sees the exhibit as a whole—and not just about one man or even one country. Some works Hernandez thought would be more controversial challenge Pope John Paul II and the Catholic Church. Others look at Nazi Germany and the killing fields in Cambodia.

He refused to talk about the 2001 incident, when he was suspected of being involved in a fake anthrax stamp that shut down an area of Chicago’s main post office. Hernandez and another Chicago artist routinely sent fake stamps through the mail, then sold them for thousands of dollars.

Man, I can so feel my free speech rights being trampled even from here.

Update: Jeff Quinton, who inexplicably hasn't trackbacked, has a roundup of posts.

Meanwhile, this guy doesn't seem to get the point; if I create an image of the president (George Bush, Bill Clinton, whoever) with a gun to his head, I'd pretty much expect a visit from law enforcement; there's this little thing called incitement to imminent lawless action, you know. If the image were of John Kerry or Hillary Clinton, I’d imagine the David Niewarts of the world would be screaming for the feds to investigate—and I’d agree with them.

Just what we need: Plame redux. Or, as the Associated Press put it, “[s]enators may have blown the cover of a covert CIA officer” at the confirmation hearings for U.N. ambassador nominee John Bolton on Monday. Yay.

Update: False alarm.

Monday’s Telegraph carries a report that the Saddam loyalists in the Iraqi insurgency may be willing to give up their fight in exchange for Saddam not getting the death penalty. (þ: memorandum)

Meanwhile, the real Olympic bomber, Eric Rudolph (not to be confused with Richard Jewell), avoided the death penalty for his mid-90s bombing spree in Alabama and Georgia this week by revealing information, including the location of weapons caches, to federal authorities.

Of course, if monsters like Saddam and Rudolph aren’t going to get the death penalty (even if they deserve it—an argument that could easily be made for both men), I’m not at all convinced that anyone else should get it—even putting my philosophical problem with the death penalty aside.

The BBC is among those reporting that British prime minister Tony Blair will call a general election for Thursday, May 5th, one month from today; at the moment, the Conservative Party is trailing Blair’s Labour Party by about five percentage points in the polls, although the Tories are running ahead among those “certain” to vote (þ: PoliBlog).

Well, the long-awaited column has finally arrived in print, and I only just learned it was there with an email from a reader. Serves me right for not checking the Clarion-Ledger website today.

It’s on judicial filibusters and a possible compromise between the Democratic and Republican positions on the “nuclear option.”

For most of the Terri Schiavo controversy, I’ve sided with the Schindlers. The ideal outcome, given that the daughter had the medical problems to begin with, would have been to let the parents take custody of her and have Michael Schiavo divorce her and move on. The time for that has passed, though.

When the week started, I was a little concerned that opponents of Congress’s move to allow federal jurisdiction would claim that it was unconstitutional, when the Constitution allows Congress to set the jurisdiction of cases. As a matter of custom we usually don’t allow this, but it’s unclear that it’s unconstitutional. It appeared to me that the opponents of the move were themselves being selective—and dishonest—in claiming that it’s unconstitutional.

Now it seems that the Schindlers have gone overboard. They’re obviously interested in seeing their daughter, but they’ve shown themselves to be too hysterical for anyone to accept their judgment. They made political threats against the Republicans in Congress and against Jeb Bush; one of their “expert” doctors is a quack; and, they’re making unverifiable claims that their daughter tried to speak before the tube was removed. Clearly they can’t be trusted on future decisions about the matter. To make things even worse, they’ve brought Randall Terry into the mix, which is never a good sign.

I started the week off thinking that Congress and the President did a good thing by allowing the federal courts to have a look at this. In the mean time it has become clear that the other supporters of that decision won’t be happy until they get the right outcome, regardless of what the law says. Every time a decision that goes against them is made, they move the goalposts and no-one will be spared from their wrath. I hope the Republicans (and I, also) never fall for an attempt to pander to hysterics again.

For more of their misadventures, see the attacks on Donald Sensing, here and here.

The Democrats offered a compromise on abortion that wasn’t a compromise at all. One of Ross’s commenters (see link) made a suggestion that is a real compromise and fits quite nicely with my own views on both the death penalty and abortion: pass a constitutional amendment that bans post-first-trimester abortions and ends the death penalty in this country.

It has the benefit of matching my views, which I’m sure everyone is concerned about, and it wouldn’t come down from our robed masters at SCOTUS. If it did pass it would represent a real consensus that we don’t get from SCOTUS rulings. It won’t happen, though, because the Left isn’t interested in compromising, but rather holding their own views in place and calling it a consensus.

(þ: Jane)