Filibustering and the "Mainstream"

My dad left me a message asking whether I was going to blog on the Democrats' use of the filibuster against President Bush's nominees for the federal Courts of Appeal. There would, of course, be so much to say. That they are unprecedented -- no minority party has ever used the filibuster to prevent a judicial nominee from coming to a vote where the majority party had the votes to confirm (Abe Fortas, the only judicial nominee ever filibustered, was opposed by a bipartisan majority of senators, and would not have been confirmed). On this point, it is worth noting that Republicans not only didn't filibuster someone like Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but most voted to confirm her. It is also worth noting that Democrats, despite the fact that they vigorously (to say the least -- to say the most, dishonestly and corruptly) opposed Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, did not presume in either case to filibuster them, because it simply wasn't done. Which leads me to a second point -- that filibustering judges is not a "time-honored Senate tradition," as the Democrats demogogically argue. The mainstream media should use the word "lie" every time the Democrats say this, or try to blur the issue by lumping in this use of filibusters with using the tactic to delay passage of legislation. (Filibustering as a part of the legislative process in my view is fine, because the legislative process is the exclusive province of Congress. Filibustering judicial nominations -- or foreign policy nominations like John Bolton's -- is wrong, because nominations in these areas are the exclusive province of the President.) But I won't hold my breath waiting for the MSM to bring clarity to these distinctions.

The one thing that jumps out at me, however, is the media's permitting the Democrats to label President Bush's nominees "extremist" or "out-of-the-mainstream." I may be confused or naive, but it seems to me that in an open society with a free press and universal suffrage there is a pretty easy way to figure out what the mainstream is. It's called "elections." President Bush was elected by a majority of Americans to be President, and many of those who elected him did so, at least in part, because they wanted him to nominate federal judges who were conservative and who would interpret and apply the law as written, not make new law. He made his position quite clear in the campaign. He won. Similarly, many members of the current Senate were elected specifically on platforms pledging to confirm conservative judges. (Many former Democratic senators, by contrast, were defeated because of their views on judges, including the former Minority Leader, Tom Daschle.) A majority of senators thinks President Bush's nominees are just fine. By definition, then, in a democracy they are "mainstream."

But the point is made even easier by simply noting that many state court judges -- Janice Rogers Brown and Priscilla Owen, for instance -- are themselves elected. If Justice Brown was elected by 74% of the voters in California, a very liberal state, how exactly is she out of the mainstream? If Priscilla Owen was elected by 85% of the voters in Texas (obviously including many Democrats), how is that out of the mainstream? Is there some other definition of what the mainstream is that makes any logical sense? Is there some better evidence of what the mainstream is than the actual votes of actual Americans in two of the country's biggest states?

No, the reality is that the Democrats' use of "out-of-the-mainstream" is simply rhetoric. They can't say what they really mean, because it would be too offensive. What they really mean is something like this... yes, we know the majority of Americans voted for President Bush and elected a Senate that has a strong Republican majority, and yes, we know that the majority of Americans favor things like parental notification prior to a minor having an abortion, and that a majority of Americans favor things like having the Ten Commandments in schools, or saying the Pledge of Allegiance, and yes, we know that strong majorities in every state in which it has been put to a vote oppose gay marriage, yes, yes, we know all that. But we think the majority is stupid and wrong. We think we are smarter than the "mainstream." So we are going to use every trick in the book to try to block what the "mainstream" wants to do.

That's what the Democrats -- at least Democratic activists -- really think. The fact that the media lets them get away with positions that are so illogical merely shows that the mainstream media hold the same views of the mainstream and are, in fact, Democrats and activists themselves.

Dad, there you go.

Happy Memorial Day, everyone!

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UPDATE: Anthony McCarthy is making a similar point about the "mainstream" in NRO today, a few days after I noticed the same thing.

Andrew McCarthy Gets It Right

Andrew McCarthy gets it right on NRO:

In my world, militant Muslims, capitalizing on the respectful deference of others, have been known tactically to desecrate the Koran themselves: by rigging it with explosives, by using it to secrete and convey terrorist messages, and, yes, even by toilet-flushing parts of it for the nuisance value of flooding the bathrooms at Guantanamo Bay. Just as they have used mosques as sanctuaries, as weapons depots, and as snipers' nests.

There's a problem here. But it's not insensitivity, and it's not media bias. Those things are condemnable, but manageable. The real problem here is a culture that either cannot or will not rein in a hate ideology that fuels killing. When we go after Newsweek, we're giving it a pass. Again.

Like many others, I fell prey to the partisan joy of having an organ of the Left, Newsweek, get some comeuppance. But McCarthy brings us back to ground: just like the riots in Los Angeles were not caused by the Rodney King beating, but were convulsions of a dysfunctional urban sub-culture using the beating as an excuse, so too are the riots in Afghanistan and Pakistan not the result of the Newsweek article, but spasms of irrationality from a dysfuncational Islamist sub-culture using "flushing the Q'uran" as an excuse. A free press that makes mistakes is one thing; a culture that condones terrorism and murder in the name of religiou is another.

The Newsweek Debacle - More Thoughts

I’m confident that someone else has noticed this by now, but it also occurred to me that the contrast is telling between (1) the MSM’s treatment in the late 1980s of Christians who protested (without rioting and murder) the federal government’s subsidy of an “artist” placing a crucifix in a vat of urine (Andres Serrano’s “Piss Christ"); and (2) the MSM’s treatment of Muslims who rioted and murdered in protest of a soldier allegedly placing the Q’uran in a toilet at Guantanamo. In the first instance, Christians were wrong to be offended and were labeled “extremists,” even though their protests were non-violent. In the second instance, Muslims were (at least this is Newsweek’s implication) right to be offended, and their rioting was understandable, and it was the Americans who did the desecration who were wrong. The contrast shows a whole list of double standards, one of which is that American Christians have no right to be offended by slurs to their religion, while everyone else has an absolute right not to be offended; a second, unspoken and somewhat contradictory assumption is that American Christians are reliably reasonable, and can thus be insulted with impunity because they won’t riot and murder, while Third World Muslims are basically unreasoning creatures who will react wildly and violently to any perceived affront. The contrast also shows how very anti-American the MSM really is. Finally, it is worth noting that American Christians are not just supposed to tolerate slurs on their religion, they're obligated to subsidize them through their federal tax dollars.

And, of course, one slur really happened, while the other was fictitious.

Plumbing the Depths of the Newsweek Debacle

There are so many angles to the Newsweek debacle -- the mushrooming scandal surrounding Newsweek's erroneous report that American military interrogators at Guantanamo Bay had flushed the Q'uran down a toilet in order to intimidate Islamic prisoners. A threshold, somewhat facetious question that occurred to me that maybe didn't occur to the elitist reporters at Newsweek who presumably have nannies to take care of their kids is whether the story makes sense from a plumbing perspective. I mean, seriously, anybody who has had little kids, whose bowel movements can occasionally defy the laws of physics, knows that there are certain sized objects that simply will not go down. I can't imagine someone thinking they could flush a book down a toilet. The story doesn't -- pardon the pun -- pass the smell test.

The serious point is that, looked at this way, the story is eerily similar to the Rathergate, because the MSM's mistake was not just making journalistic mistakes, it was also just a failure of common sense. In Rathergate, they failed to notice what everyone else noticed almost immediately, namely, that the typewriting was Times New Roman. In WaterClosetGate (or Flushgate or whatever you want to call it), they didn't notice that a book can't go down a Crapper.

Some Thoughts on Social Security

Many, many corporate defined benefit pension plans and many, many multiemployer “Taft-Hartley” union defined benefit pension plans are in financial trouble. Why? Because they raised benefits too high. Because their stream of contributions to the plan were too low. Because the demographic mix of active participants (workers) to inactive participants and beneficiaries (retirees) shifted toward more inactives. (This is important because most pension plans are wage-based, with contributions to the plan being based on a percentage of the wages paid to active employers. When the number of actives goes down, the amount of contributions goes down.)

If all this sounds familiar, it should. Large corporate and multiemployer plans are a good model for the ills currently facing Social Security. So it makes sense to look at what corporations and unions are doing for their pension plans to keep them solvent. Private pensions are doing some or all of the following:

1. Cutting future benefit accruals and COLAs. In the private pension context, you can’t cut vested benefits as a matter of law. In the Social Security system, you can’t cut vested benefits (i.e., current retirees’ current benefit levels)as a matter of politics. But you can cut future accruals for active employees (i.e. younger workers) legally, because they haven’t vested yet – the worker has no property right in those future accruals. And you can cut COLAs to retirees, because those increases are essentially gratuitous. While politically unpalatable, this is the route Social Security will likely take. President Bush’s plan is essentially a plan to cut future COLAs for some participants ("the rich") by price-indexing them rather than wage-indexing them.

2. Raising contributions. In the private context, this means the company will put more money into the plan. But where does it come from? The company doesn’t care whether it pays wages or benefits – it’s all just the cost of labor, the cost of hiring Person X. If the cost of benefits goes up, over time the company will just pay less in wages, i.e., the worker’s salary will essentially be “taxed” to pay for benefits that are being paid to current retirees. Meanwhile, and similarly, in the government context, raising “contributions” to Social Security means raising payroll taxes, either as an increase in the rate or an increase in the ceiling for wages subject to the tax.

3. Investing in equity markets to get higher returns. The oddity of the Social Security debate and the Chicken Little fear fomented by Democrats that investing in stocks is too risky is that many, if not most, Americans – including the mostly Democratic members of teachers’ unions, members of public employee unions like CALPERS, etc. – have 60-70% of their pension funds invested in equity markets already. Over time, these investments have paid off and enabled higher benefits. (Too high, given the downturn in the markets in 2000-2002, but that’s the fault of raising the benefits, not a fault in the idea of getting a higher return over time through equities.) A bold idea – probably too bold – would be to take the current SS surpluses and, even without PSAs, invest broadly in the market, rather than spending them on other government programs. The SS system would get the return, and the influx of capital would provide a boost to the economy. And then their really would be a SS “trust fund,” rather than just IOUs.

4. Shifting the retirement plan away from defined benefits toward 401ks that are owned by the individual employee, who gets to reap the benefit of market returns over time. In the Social Security context, this is essentially President Bush’s plan for personal accounts. Why the Democrats are so fearful of something that is so normal in the rest of society is a mystery. Or maybe it’s not such a mystery. But that’s another story.

As for Social Security, as a conservative, I can get behind #1 cutting future accruals (if it were across the board price-indexing for everyone), #3 investing the SS “trust fund” in real assets, i.e., the equity markets (although I would obviously be leery of the U.S. government gaining too much power in the economy if they had trillions to invest) and #4 personal 401k-like accounts (in a big way, because it is the most conducive to individual freedom and dignity).