ILYA SOMIN: Victims Of Communism Day 2017.
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WHEN THE SCIENTISTS SUCCESSFULLY PERSUADE THEM: Ilya Somin: When should voters march to the beat of scientists?
Note: Condescension isn’t persuasion.
ILYA SOMIN: Gorsuch is right about Chevron deference.
Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch’s jurisprudence is his opposition to “Chevron deference”: the doctrine (first imposed by a 1984 Supreme Court decision) that requires judges to defer to administrative agencies’ interpretations of federal law in most cases where the law may be “ambiguous” and the agency’s position seems “reasonable.” In what is probably his best-known opinion, Judge Gorsuch denounced Chevron deference as “a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.” He’s absolutely right about that.
Much more at the link.
ILYA SOMIN: “Judge Neil Gorsuch is a well-respected jurist and a better Supreme Court nominee than I expected from Donald Trump.” Ilya’s biggest concern is that Gorsuch is too big a fan of judicial restraint, and insufficiently willing to strike down unconstitutional laws.
UPDATE: Ted Cruz likes Gorsuch.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Eugene Volokh: Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch on religious freedom.
Sasha Volokh: Neil Gorsuch, fortunately. “Generally, I don’t have any expectation that Trump will do the right thing, so I’m unexpectedly pleased that — of the three judges who were apparently on Trump’s short list — Judge Gorsuch is probably the best on civil liberties issues.” Well, live and learn.
Plus: “Oh, and — what’s the best Gorsuch line? ‘Ours is not supposed to be the government of the Hunger Games with power centralized in one district, but a government of diffused and divided power, the better to prevent its abuse.'”
MORE: A reader sends this suggestion: “Mitch McConnell should announce that he does not think there is any basis for a filibuster of Gorsuch, and that if the Democrats filibuster him, the majority will eliminate the filibuster not only for Sup Ct appointees but for legislation as well.” I predict the Dems will keep their powder dry this time.
ILYA SOMIN looks at a timely book from Sanford Levinson, Nullification and Secession in Modern Constitutional Thought. “While many people associate secessionism with the Confederacy and efforts to protect slavery, and nullification with state resistance to the civil rights movement, this book shows that both tactics were often advocated by political movements on both the right and the left. In the antebellum period for example, nullificationist tactics were adopted by both southerners seeking to protect slavery, and northerners trying to resist the federal Fugitive Slave Act. Like many political strategies, nullification and secession can be used to promote both good causes and evil ones.”
ILYA SOMIN: Time To Take Political Ignorance Seriously.
Well, yes, but in particular we need to look at the political ignorance of our elites, who want to run a country they’ve never been to.
I’VE GOT AN AMICUS BRIEF WITH ERWIN CHEMERINSKY AND ILYA SOMIN IN THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT, in a case involving prosecutorial misconduct and the “John Doe” investigations of Scott Walker supporters. A press account is here. The brief — which, unsurprisingly, cites my Ham Sandwich Nation piece — can be found here.
ILYA SOMIN on the politics of different science-fiction series.
ILYA SOMIN: Is the overthrow of a democratically elected government ever justified?
Most democratic governments – including the United States – condemned the attempted recent military coup against Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and welcomed its failure, citing the need to respect Turkey’s “democratic” institutions. But in the aftermath, Erdogan took the opportunity to persecute his political opponents on a large scale, including firing thousands of judges who might constrain his authoritarian tendencies. Erdogan’s government was also severely undermining civil liberties long before the coup, even going so far as to pass a law criminalizing “insults” to the president, under which hundreds of people have been prosecuted. Erdogan’s own commitment own commitment to democracy is questionable, at best. He famously once called democracy a tram that “[y]ou ride it until you arrive at your destination, then you step off.”
This raises the question of whether the coup attempt against Erdogan might have been justified. More generally, is it ever justified to forcibly overthrow a democratic government? In this 2013 post, written after the successful military coup against Egypt’s radical Islamist government, I argued that the answer is sometimes “yes.” There should be a strong presumption against forcibly removing a democratic regime. But that presumption might be overcome if the government in question poses a grave threat to human rights, or is likely to destroy democracy itself by shutting down future political competition.
Being elected democratically is not a get-out-of-jail-free card for acting dictatorially.
Related: After Turkey, An American Coup?
ILYA SOMIN: Political ignorance haunts 2016 campaign.
COMING OUT FROM ILYA SOMIN: Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government Is Smarter, Second Edition.
ILYA SOMIN: Why real-world governments don’t have the consent of the governed – and why it matters. “If it is indeed true, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, that ‘no man is good enough to govern another man without that other’s consent,’ that principle has more radical implications than Lincoln probably intended. Few if any of those who wield government power measure up to that lofty standard.”
As long as we’re talking about “affirmative consent” rules. . . .
ILYA SOMIN: The expanding role of women in combat and the future of male-only draft registration. “Male-only draft registration is one of the last bastions of open sex discrimination in US government policy.”
I had some related thoughts.
ILYA SOMIN: The Emerging Cross-Ideological Consensus On Zoning.
In recent years, and especially over the last few months, economists and other public policy experts across the political spectrum have come to realize that zoning rules are a major obstacle to affordable housing and economic opportunity for the poor and lower middle class. By artificially restricting new construction, zoning and other similar land-use restrictions greatly increase the price of housing, and prevents the market from adjusting to increasing demand. This emerging consensus is a good sign, though it may be difficult to translate it into effective policy initiatives.
Libertarians and other free market advocates have criticized zoning on such grounds for decades, at least as far back as the late Bernard Siegan’s classic 1972 book Land Use Without Zoning. Present-day pro-market scholars such as Steve Horwitz and Harvard economist Edward Glaeser have continued in a similar vein. More recently, however, the critique of zoning has been taken up by prominent left of center commentators. One particularly notable example is this widely quoted recent speech by Jason Furman, Chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers. . . .
Furman’s speech includes a good overview of the academic literature on the subject, which finds that in many cities, zoning restrictions artificially inflate the cost of housing by as much as 50 percent. Other prominent left of center commentators who have recently advanced similar critiques of zoning include Paul Krugman, Noah Smith, and Matthew Yglesias. As Krugman puts it, “this is an issue on which you don’t have to be a conservative to believe that we have too much regulation.”
The growing left-wing critique of zoning is particularly significant because the most liberal cities also tend to be ones with the most restrictive zoning laws, and the highest housing costs. In earlier posts on this subject, I have argued that this tendency is probably the result of voters’ ignorance of the effects of zoning, rather than callous indifference to the needs of the poor. Nonetheless, it would be good if more politically influential liberals become aware of the problem, and began advocate measures to curb zoning.
If you give politicians power, they will use that power on behalf of themselves and their supporters rather than the general public, to precisely the extent that they can get away with it. Lefties occasionally grasp individual applications of this principle, but never the general rule. Or, if they do, they cease to be lefties.
ILYA SOMIN: Judge Posner’s troubling explanation for his shift on same-sex marriage. “In 1997, Judge Richard Posner argued that it would be wrong for courts to strike down laws banning same-sex marriage. In 2014, he authored a judicial opinion invalidating such laws. While Posner was right to change his position, the justification he offers for the shift is a deeply troubling one.”
ILYA SOMIN ON the Tennessee Law Review’s Third Amendment Symposium.