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.

I BLOG THEREFORE I AM:  Rene Descartes was born this day in 1596.

TO MODERN FEMINISTS, EVERYTHING IS DISCRIMINATON AGAINST WOMEN EXCEPT REAL AND UNDENIABLE DISCRIMINATION AGAINST WOMEN. For reasons I can’t entirely explain, left-leaning feminists don’t seem to care that many colleges demand higher GPAs and SAT scores from female applicants than they do from male applicants. The schools are practicing affirmative action for men.

Conservatives have sometimes been weirdly inconsistent on this issue too. Some of same people who argue against race-preferential admissions policies use precisely the same arguments they reject in connection with race to argue in favor of preferential treatment for men.   What gives?

DON’T TELL MY EMPLOYER ABOUT THESE “FAMILY CLOTH” WIPES:  Like many universities, it has fallen head over heels for “sustainability,” and its judgment has been a bit impaired lately.

ON THIS DAY IN 2005,  Fred Korematsu died after a long and full life.  He lost his famous lawsuit in the Supreme Court, but he eventually won in the court of public opinion.  In Justice Robert Jackson’s dissent to Korematsu v. United States, he acknowledged that courts should ordinarily avoid second guessing military decisions, but nevertheless wrote:

Korematsu was born on our soil, of parents born in Japan. The Constitution makes him a citizen of the United States by nativity and a citizen of California by residence. No claim is made that he is not loyal to this country. There is no suggestion that apart from the matter involved here he is not law abiding and well disposed. Korematsu, however, has been convicted of an act not commonly a crime. It consists merely of being present in the state whereof he is a citizen, near the place where he was born, and where all his life he has lived. […] [H]is crime would result, not from anything he did, said, or thought, different than they, but only in that he was born of different racial stock. Now, if any fundamental assumption underlies our system, it is that guilt is personal and not inheritable. Even if all of one’s antecedents had been convicted of treason, the Constitution forbids its penalties to be visited upon him. But here is an attempt to make an otherwise innocent act a crime merely because this prisoner is the son of parents as to whom he had no choice, and belongs to a race from which there is no way to resign.

Anyway, what could be more American than suing the pants off the federal government for a breach of your civil rights?

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE SHOULD BE  A LOCAL ISSUE:  I have a USA Today op-ed today.

A GERMAN-STYLE APPRENTICESHIP SYSTEM IS LIKELY AN UNATTAINABLE GOAL FOR THE USA: The USA certainly should encourage apprenticeships as an alternative to college. But thinking we can come anywhere close to replicating the German system—in which considerably more than half of Germans participate—is unrealistic.  The German system works because of its unusually powerful unions and complex system of job “certification.”

SUPPORT DIVERSITY OF THOUGHT: If you’re an academic or grad student and you are uncomfortable with the one-party system on campuses today, you should consider joining Heterodox Academy.

THIS DAY IN CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY: On March 29, 1961, the 23^rd Amendment, giving the District of Columbia representation in the Electoral College, was ratified. Since then, D.C.’s 3 electoral votes have been reliably cast for the Democratic candidate.

Early in the Republic’s history, the argument sometimes advanced against giving government employees the vote was that they have a conflict of interest: They will always vote for the candidates who favor higher spending. The argument wasn’t entirely crazy.

NOT ALL TRANSGENDER ISSUES ARE CREATED EQUAL: Why did the Department of Defense take a year and a 44-page memo to decide how to deal with transgenders in the military while the Department of Justice and the Department of Education withdrew their joint transgender bathroom/locker room/shower guidance within weeks of Trump’s inauguration? Because DOD had to devise an actual policy. By contrast, DOJ/DoEd decided a legal issue—that local schools, not the federal government, have the authority to decide who gets assigned to which bathroom/locker room/shower. For an explanation of that legal issue (written before DOJ and DoEd withdrew their guidance), try here.

CHAPSTICK COSTS EXTRA: My 92-year-old mother’s first nursing home bill arrived yesterday:  Calculated on a yearly basis, it will be $123,120 PLUS $148,920 for round-the-clock sitters (required by nursing home as a condition to accepting my mother) PLUS assorted other charges including $4.56 for two sticks of “lip balm.” (And in case you haven’t heard, neither Medicare nor Blue Cross/Blue Shield covers nursing home care beyond a certain number of days after a hospital stay, and long-term care insurance pays for only about a quarter of the above. Plan well for your dotage.)

THE OMNIBUS CONTAINS AT LEAST ONE SMALL PUSHBACK AGAINST UNLIMITED GOVERNMENT:  Congress defunds Obama’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program at HUD.

ENCORE PERFORMANCE FOR THE E.R.A.: WOULDN’T THAT END CONTRACTING PREFERENCES FOR WOMEN-OWNED BUSINESSES? Democrats are talking about bringing the Equal Rights Amendment back. Check out here, here, here, and here.

In the late 1970s, Phyllis Schlafly argued that the ERA could be interpreted to require unisex bathrooms, same-sex marriage, and the military draft for women. ERA supporters accused her of fear mongering. But a funny thing happened: State constitutions with ERA-like provisions were indeed cited in courts arguments for same-sex marriage. It’s therefore hard to avoid acknowledging that she had a point. The difference today is that many are ready to embrace what Schlafly saw as an argument against the ERA.

Still, I’d be surprised if the ERA train gathers steam on the left. In 1996, feminist groups vehemently opposed California’s Proposition 209, which prohibits (among other things) the state from discriminating or granting preferential treatment based on sex in employment and contracting. Prop 209’s feminist opponents didn’t want equal rights then. They wanted affirmative action for women-owned businesses, etc.   I wrote about it a few years ago during the last “Let’s bring back the ERA” movement.

Since the ERA would put affirmative action preferences for women in serious jeopardy, it’s hard to imagine left-leaning feminist groups pushing the ERA for any purpose beyond fundraising.

CONFUCIUS SAYS: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” I can attest that there is little a college or university won’t do for free money, especially money that comes from a country that may be hostile to American interests. Complete report from the National Association of Scholars here.

NEW STUDY BY PAUL CASSELL & RICHARD FOWLES:  Chicago Homicides Spiked Due to ACLU Police Decree.

INQUIRING MINDS:  U.S. Department of Commerce Announces Reinstatement of Citizenship Question to the 2020 Census.