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Archive for 2005
July 25, 2005
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF PERSONAL FINANCE is up!
ROBERTS AND THE COMMERCE CLAUSE: Supposedly, the Democratic questioning of Roberts is going to focus mainly on his views of the Commerce Clause. That would interest me, since I’d like to know those myself, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s recent retreat from its holdings in Lopez and Morrison that — until this term — suggested it was taking the notion of constitutional limits on the commerce power.
Here’s a paper I wrote for the Cato Institute back before the Lopez decision, spelling out why this is important. And here’s an article I wrote for the Vanderbilt Law Review (with the catchy title “Is Democracy Like Sex?”) that spells out the important ways that federalism and limited government help to prevent the onset of what Jonathan Rauch calls “Demosclerosis.”
Lower courts were never very enthusiastic about implementing Lopez and Morrison, though. Brannon Denning and I looked at how those decisions fared in two articles surveying their reception in the Courts of Appeals and District Courts. The subtitle in this one, from the Wisconsin Law Review, tells the story: “What if the Supreme Court Held a Constitutional Revolution and Nobody Came?” This later installment noted that things were beginning to turn around, but that seems less likely to continue, post-Raich, unless Bush appoints people who are serious about enumerated powers and limited government, which — given that Bush himself doesn’t seem terribly serious that way — seems doubtful.
Denning, by the way, is coauthor (with Boris Bittker) of a Commerce Clause treatise, Bittker on the Regulation of Interstate and Foreign Commerce,
SCOTT BURGESS’S DAILY ABLUTION has achieved fame in Britain by putting The Guardian in an embarrassing spot. Burgess has comments regarding the Guardian’s over-the-top response on his blog, here.
Really, The Guardian has done itself far more harm than Burgess did.
ROBIN GIVHAN of the Washington Post has inspired James Lileks to write about fashion. ” I’ll tell you this: when it comes to dressing the kids, it’s quite possible they look at parents who get on airplanes in flip-flops with 12-year old daughters who have the word JUICY spelled out on their behinds, and they actually do think they’re better than those parents.”
ARE YOU NOW, OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN, a member of the Federalist Society?
LAST NIGHT I FINISHED Peter Hamilton’s Pandora’s Star,
Anyway, I liked it enough that I immediately preordered the sequel,
Hey, it’s not like I have a real life or anything! Just a book with a November deadline.
TREY JACKSON HAS BEEN LOOKING AT IDENTITY THEFT and reports that there’s a whole lot more of it than most people realize. “24% of Americans over 18 have been exposed to ID theft in the last 100 days.”
THIS WEEK’S CARNIVAL OF LIBERTY is up!
Some time ago I took a look at the statistics in the annual Harvard Law Review issue on the Supreme Court, and found that each time there was an increase in the number of Supreme Court law clerks there was also a step increase in the number of separate concurring and dissenting opinions. . . .
My radical proposal, which I am sure will never be adopted, is: reduce the number of Supreme Court law clerks to one or two. My expected result, were this ever to be done: many fewer separate opinions and clearer, more straightforward opinions that intelligent citizens could easily read in full.
He’s probably right.
ANN ALTHOUSE: “Are we so starved for a scandal that we’re biting at anything?”
Well, that question does come just above a post about “Plaidgate.”
ONLY IF IT HAD FREE WI-FI, TOO: None of that T-Mobile stuff.
BRUCE SCHNEIER writes on security and profiling. As with all of his stuff, it’s worth reading. (Via Rebecca Blood).
EGYPTIAN ANTITERROR PROTESTS are getting attention in the Arab world, even though they’re being pretty much ignored by Western media. More thoughts on that phenomenon over at GlennReynolds.com.
YES, THAT’S A BLOGAD FOR Contra Café over on the right. But they didn’t buy it in response to my post — I gave ’em a freebie after seeing the folks at antiwar.com go crazy over my earlier mention of them. I should’ve held out for a free t-shirt, at least.
Yes, I realize that I’m not properly monetizing InstaPundit. But it’s fun!
UPDATE: Reader Stephen Schwartz emails:
Pretty interesting how Dennis Raimondo, allegedly the only real conservative in America, has suddenly signed on to recycling idiotic propaganda against the contras — quoting old and thoroughly discredited Sandinista crap.
Someone needs to point out to him that the “terrorists” won the election in Nicaragua in 1990 and have never held power since.
Dennis being a person who only knows other countries via his computer, it wouldn’t be of interest to him to read the serious literature about Nicaragua and the outcome of Sandinista rule there. For example, this:
I detect a parallel here.
The American radical left took to referring to the anti-Soviet Afghans as “Afghan contras,” and then called the Kosovars “Albanian contras,” since both groups had the bad taste to join the original Nicaraguan contras in refusing domination by atheist totalitarians. So now, according to Dennis “The Jews Did It, Everywhere” Raimondo, the Iraqi Shias are also “contras.”
Some of us in San Francisco always believed that Dennis, like is associate Bill White, was a radical leftist posing as a conservative to get an audience. Now more than ever, that seems logical. I guess next Dennis will accuse Reagan of being a terrorist.
Yeah, the refrain’s a familiar one, since it’s always the same: Our guys are the bad guys, the only atrocities are by our guys, the murderous thugs our guys oppose are actually pure-minded agrarian reformers, and the U.S. is wrong and should get out. That’s the story from these guys every single time. I can’t pretend to take it seriously any more — and, of course, I never took Raimondo seriously. Nor do many others.