VA HOSPITALS:   More privatizing could only help.

SEVENTEENTH AMENDMENT RATIFIED ON THIS DAY IN 1913: Up until that point, state legislatures decided who would be a U.S. Senator. The 17^th Amendment made it a matter for popular election. Was this the death knell of state power in Washington? Did it mean that federalism was doomed? Or were democratic elections for Senators an improvement on the backroom deals that had produced the Senate in an earlier era? I report. You decide. All I can say is that it’s rather unlikely the country will ever go back.

I LOVE A HERO 2:  Orintheus Buster saved a life.  Knowing CPR pays off.

I LOVE A HERO:  And Jason Falconer is a hero.

HONORABLE MENTION:  The National Association of Scholars will honor Amy Wax.

NO MORE CONSERVATIVE DOCTORS (AT LEAST NOT HONEST ONES):  The MCAT has been politicized.

I’M SHOCKED, SHOCKED, TO FIND GOVERNMENT RESEARCH CONFIRMS WHAT WE ALREADY KNEW: A GAO report finds that boys are disciplined more often than girls in school. It also finds that African-American students are disciplined more often than white students and that whites are disciplined at higher rates than Asian Americans.  Of course, the NYT covers it with an utterly misleading headline “Government Watchdog Finds Racial Bias in School Discipline.”

Here’s what the NYT didn’t say: Just a few days ago, another government report showed that African-American students SELF-REPORT that they have been in a physical fight on school property at a rate MORE THAN TWICE the white rate.  Overwhelmingly, the aggregate disparities in school discipline are the result of differing rates of misbehavior, not bias.

Another non-surprise, surprise: The GAO report also found that students with disabilities are disciplined at higher rates than non-disabled students. But schools DEFINE behavioral problems as “disabilities.” Finding that students with disabilities are disciplined at higher rates than non-disabled students is equivalent to finding that students who misbehave a lot get disciplined a lot. If you are thinking of students in wheel chairs when you hear statistics of this kind, you are misunderstanding what’s driving the issue.

Federalizing school discipline policy is a mistake. It’s hard to think of an issue that is less likely to benefit from the intervention of bureaucrats.

QUESTION: WAS BOOKER WASHINGTON AN OBSEQUIOUS UNCLE TOM OR A CIVIL RIGHTS HERO? Answer: Civil rights hero, you idiot. For far too long it was fashionable in civil rights circles to view Washington negatively. Things have turned around somewhat in the last few decades, thanks in part to Louis Harlan’s biographies, and also thanks (more recently) to the work of black conservatives like Lee Walker, Carol Swain, and many others.

One thing that many people don’t know is that (among his many other accomplishments) Washington quietly raised the money to challenge black disfranchisement in the courts. This was typical of Washington: He was a man who got things done and didn’t necessarily demand the credit. Alas, the case–Giles v. Harris—didn’t work out as it should have. In an opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the Supreme Court essentially decided (5-3) that there was nothing it could do to prevent disfranchisement in the South. It was not the Court’s (or Holmes’) finest hour.  But the result doesn’t make Washington any less a hero.

Booker Washington’s 162^nd birthday is today.

YET MORE REASONS TO DOUBT LIZ WARREN’S INTEGRITY:  Mulvaney’s Letter to the Editor.

BOYS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN (WITH SPHERICAL OBJECTS OF VARIOUS SIZES): Last week, I posted that modern feminists don’t seem to care that women are now routinely discriminated against in college admissions, especially at small liberal arts colleges that complain of “too many women.” Indeed, this may be the most blatant form of discrimination that women face today. But women’s organizations ignore it, often in favor of fighting much less obvious wrongs. Why?

Part of the reason is that their own Title IX in athletics policies—which make it very difficult for small schools to entice men to enroll by offering them a chance to play on a varsity team—helped create the problem.  These policies require schools to spend proportionally on men’s and women’s athletics, unless they can absolutely, positively, no-doubt-about-it, prove that women have all the athletic opportunities they want.  So schools that think they don’t have “enough men” just discriminate at the intake level instead.

Another consequence of these Title IX policies is that they make it harder for schools to spend money on non-athletic extracurricular activities that many women would prefer.   The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, TWINKLETOES: Arthur Murray (born Moses Teichman) would have been 123 years old today. Among his students were Eleanor Roosevelt, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., Johnny Mercer and Jack Dempsey.  If you can bring one-tenth as much happiness to your fellow man as Murray and his chain of dancing schools have brought, you will have been a smashing success.

BANKRUPT:  More on Liz Warren’s unreliable “scholarship.”

AND TYLER TOO: President William Henry Harrison died on this day in 1841, only 31 days into his term. He was the first President to die in office. Here’s the Constitutional quirk: In those days, the Constitution simply said that in case of the President’s death “the Powers and Duties of the said office” “shall devolve upon the Vice President.” It didn’t say that the Vice President BECOMES the President. Tyler, however, took the position that he WAS then the President, and got royally (or at least presidentially) pissed off when some people disagreed. It wasn’t until the 25^th Amendment, ratified in 1967, that it was made clear that the Vice President actually becomes the President upon the death, resignation or removal of the President.

NEVER BE BORED AGAIN IN YOUR LIFE: If you are a policy nerd like me, who can’t get enough data, check out Paul Taylor’s Kindle books: The Big Picture: An Illustrated Guide to Modern American Trends (Volume I and Volume II).   They will cause you to hope for a blizzard in April, so you can spend more time with them.

END THE LEFT-RIGHT STALEMATE ON VOTER RIGHTS? John Fund writes:

All across the political spectrum, there’s agreement that our voting system is broken. Academics lament our low voter turnout. Liberals blame that on obstacles to voting, such as registration laws and ID requirements. Conservatives say our rickety system is vulnerable to bureaucratic incompetence and voter fraud.

It’s time to end this Left–Right stalemate, which caused the Obama Justice Department to spend over $50 million to fight ballot-integrity laws. Various civil-rights groups probably spent an equal or greater amount. What if all that money had gone instead into real efforts to put an ID in people’s hands?

It’s an idea being pushed by Andrew Young and Martin Luther King III.

ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY:  Joseph Stalin became General Secretary of the Communist Party on April 3, 1922.  It brings to mind a limerick by the great historian Robert Conquest:

There was an old bastard named Lenin

Who did two or three million men in

That’s a lot to have done in

But where he did one in

That old bastard Stalin did ten in.

Conquest wasn’t always so lighthearted in discussing the scourge of communism.  But now and then a guy has to “tell it true” in verse.

I’M GOING TO ARBY’S TODAY FOR LUNCH: Honestly. Powerline is reporting that, unlike some advertisers, Arby’s hasn’t pulled its ads from Laura Ingraham’s show. So I’m going to the Arby’s on 3777 Midway Drive in San Diego. You can find your location here.

I don’t like boycotts. It’s not good for society when people will only do business with those who agree with them about politics. I’m also not good at boycotts. I always forget. You need to a really passionate person to be good at it. And … well … I’m not all that fond of passionate people. I like people who just want to have a nice lunch. Alas, a positive boycott is sometimes necessary to counter a negative boycott. So here’s to Arby’s! Bon appetit!

NO MORE SECRETS:  I thought this was an April Fools’ joke, but it’s dated March 31.

HE WOULD HAVE HAD A VERY DIFFICULT TIME ON TODAY’S CAMPUSES:  On this day in 1725, Giacomo Casanova was born.

TO ERIC HOLDER, A CITIZENSHIP QUESTION ON THE CENSUS IS VOTER INTIMIDATION, BUT TWO JACK-BOOTED THUGS WITH BILLY CLUBS SHOUTING RACIAL EPITHETS IN FRONT OF A POLLING PLACE AREN’T: If you’ve forgotten how the Holder Dept. of Justice failed to enforce voting rights law when the victims were white (and then denied it), this detailed statement will serve as a reminder. And it wasn’t just the New Black Panther Party case.

WHAT MAKES THIS GROUP DIFFERENT FROM ALL OTHER GROUPS?  The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby on Passover and the Secret of Jewish Longevity.

TITLE IX IS OFF THE RAILS:  Shep Melnick’s The Transformation of Title IX:  Regulating Gender Equality in Education is now available on Amazon.  I was particularly intrigued by one of the back cover notes:

For those of us who still pin our hopes on the American civil rights tradition, this book is a disturbing call to account.  Melnick unravels the convoluted process by which Title IX became a barrage of mandates detached from any constitutional or statutory roots and oblivious to the law’s goal of increasing educational opportunity for women and girls.  His smart and compelling critique suggests a way forward:  follow the Administrative Procedure Act and keep your eyes on the prize.–Deborah Stone, Distinguished Visiting Professor, Brandeis University.

Nobody should have needed Melnick’s book to tell them that Title IX has gone off the rails.  But his book is invaluable for explaining how and why.

THE ODD COUPLE:  The great Heather MacDonald, a conservative’s conservative, clerked for the recently-deceased Ninth Circuit Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who was decidedly left of center.  She has written a beautiful obit for him.  I understand the feeling.  I, too, clerked for a judge who was considered a liberal’s liberal–Justice Seymour F. Simon of the Illinois Supreme Court.

CESAR CHAVEZ’S 91^ST BIRTHDAY—For good or ill, Chavez was a traditional union leader in the sense that he opposed the immigration of unskilled workers–sometimes in harsh and unlovely terms. To him, it was all about economic power; immigrants could undercut farmworker wages, so he was against them.

Things are different now. Instead of focusing on their members’ wages as the bottom line, union leaders are often unwavering in their support for the leftist party line. It’s about political power. In order to gain or keep it, they seek to keep the coalition together, even if it means sacrificing the short-term good of their own members. Fight global warming. Support abortion rights. Honor same-sex marriage. Elect Democrats. Any of those may or may not be good policy. But none is directly the concern of farmworkers as farmworkers.  Somehow union leaders have to believe that in the long run their members will be better off by maintaining the coalition.

The problem with this strategy is that it’s so easy to lose sight of the people you are supposed to be representing. The thinking gets very complex. It gets easy to confuse policies that benefit union leaders (or just make them happy) with policies that benefit union members.   One can always come up with a story about why the policies you personally favor will, in the long run, benefit the rank-and-file members too. Sometimes it’s just wishful thinking.  Keeping the goal simple is a better guarantee that the fiduciary will remain loyal to the beneficiaries’ interests.

THERE ARE LOTS OF BIOGRAPHIES OF JACK JOHNSON: Paul Beston can help you choose one.

My interest in Johnson, the first African American heavyweight boxing champion, began when the Commission on Civil Rights did a report on Sex Trafficking.  I thought the report went conflated three very different things (actual sexual slavery, teenage runaway prostitution and ordinary adult prostitution). They are all problems, but they are different problems with different solutions (or, in the case of prostitution by consenting adults, no good solution).  The Commission ran them together to sensationalize the issue.

In my dissent, I touched on the Mann Act (also known as the “White-Slave Traffic Act”)–a ghastly little piece of federal legislation that allowed Americans to be imprisoned for transporting women across state lines “for immoral purposes.” (It still exists, but its text has been tightened up.)

Johnson, who filmmaker Ken Burns once described as “for more than thirteen years … the most famous and the most notorious African-American on Earth,” was prosecuted TWICE under the Mann Act.  His “crime” was that he was a successful and flamboyant black man who enjoyed the company of white women.  His case is a good example of how overbroad legislation can (and usually does) lead to prosecutorial abuse.