Allow Me To Repeat Myself

File this one under “here we go again.”

Common Cause, the Brennan Center and other nonpartisan organizations are warning about the dangers of an effort to call a Constitutional Convention, purportedly to consider a “balanced budget amendment” to the U.S. Constitution.

A balanced budget amendment is a truly bad idea but a Constitutional Convention is an even worse idea, as constitutional interpreters as different as Harvard’s Lawrence Tribe Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and former Chief Justice Warren Burger  have  explained.

So what is all the fuss about?

As I wrote in 2014, lawmakers frustrated by their inability to change government policies of which they disapprove, and unable to amend the Constitution through the process that has given us all of the amendments we have, will periodically propose convening a Constitutional Convention.

Thus far, none of these efforts have yet succeeded—for which we should be very grateful.

Why do I say we should be grateful?

When activists clamor for wholesale changes or major revolutions in the status quo, they always assume that the changes that ultimately emerge will reflect their own preferences and worldviews. History suggests that’s a dangerous assumption.

As an alert from Common Cause and the Brennan Center recently warned,

The effort to call a constitutional convention to pass a balanced budget constitutional amendment is being led in part by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization consisting of corporations and conservative state legislators. Advocates of such a balanced budget amendment claim that 27 states already have passed such calls. A major effort is underway in 2016 to obtain the seven more states they believe they need to reach two-thirds of the states, the number required by the constitution to call a constitutional convention.

It isn’t just ALEC. A variety of proponents of systemic change—liberal and conservative—want the states to convene a Constitutional Convention under provisions of Article V of the Constitution. They usually insist that the convention could be limited in scope to just their pet change.

Constitutional scholars disagree. The great weight of authority makes it clear that once a Convention is called, anything and everything would be on the table.

But the risk isn’t simply that a Convention could rather easily be hijacked by people who disagree with the conveners about the nature and extent of needed changes. There is also a real danger in calling together a group of people and asking them to amend a document that few of them understand.

Anyone who thinks that the public officials who take an oath to uphold the Constitution have actually studied it and understand it–are in denial. What they might do inadvertently to the Constitution is anyone’s guess.

As a recent USA Today editorial put it,

This year’s presidential election has seen more than its share of bad ideas, including deporting 11 million people, bombing Syria and Iraq until the sand glows, and enacting massive tax cuts or equally massive spending hikes.

To these we can add another: Sen. Marco Rubio’s call for a constitutional convention to draft amendments to balance the federal budget and impose term limits on judges and members of Congress.

Rubio’s convention is an invitation to constitutional mayhem and, even if it went as planned, his proposals could further poison our politics and hobble American leaders at moments of crisis.

And that’s the best-case scenario.

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The Most Important Issue in 2016

Yesterday, the Indiana Senate killed the bill expanding civil rights in Indiana to protect LGBT Hoosiers. The bill was terrible, but its continued viability at least provided a vehicle for further discussion and improvement. Its death means that Indiana law will continue to allow people to be refused employment, or fired, simply because they are gay. Indiana law will continue to allow landlords to turn away gay couples simply because they are gay couples.

And if you’re gay, Indiana law will allow that deeply “religious” baker to turn you away without a cake. In fact, unless you live in one of the cities that has passed a civil rights ordinance, you might as well resign yourself to continued second-class citizenship status–despite the fact that remedying the situation enjoys widespread public support.

It isn’t only Indiana’s legislature that seems incapable of acting on behalf of the common good. The last time I looked, the approval rating of the U.S. Congress was 9% (and many of us are scratching our heads, wondering who the hell is in that 9%).

In Indiana, much of the legislative paralysis is a direct consequence of the man who sits in the Governor’s office; when the chief executive of a political subdivision is incapable of leadership, it feeds intra-party squabbling and lack of discipline.

In Washington, the problem goes in the opposite direction: a deeply dysfunctional Congress intent upon thwarting any and every initiative proposed by the President is mired in petty posturing and has largely abandoned its constitutional role (not to mention any sense of obligation to the voters).

In fact, the only part of our national government that is functioning (barely) is the Supreme Court, and that Court is on the brink.

As election law guru Richard Hasen recently wrote,

The future composition of the Supreme Court is the most important civil rights cause of our time. It is more important than racial justice, marriage equality, voting rights, money in politics, abortion rights, gun rights, or managing climate change. It matters more because the ability to move forward in these other civil rights struggles depends first and foremost upon control of the Court. And control for the next generation is about to be up for grabs, likely in the next presidential election, a point many on the right but few on the left seem to have recognized.

When the next President of the United States assumes office on January 20, 2017, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg will be nearly 84, Justices Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy will be over 80, and Justice Stephen Breyer will be 78. Although many Justices have served on the Court into their 80s and beyond, the chances for all of these Justices remaining through the next 4 or 8 years of the 45th President are slim. Indeed, the next president will likely make multiple appointments to the Court.

Hasen’s article is long, but well worth reading in its entirety. His point, however, can be summed up by the title of his piece: The Most Urgent Civil Rights Issue of Our Time is the Supreme Court Itself.

As important as this year’s gubernatorial and legislative races will be, electing a President who will elevate non-ideologues to the Supreme Court is the most important issue for voters in 2016.

Without a Court willing to hold legislatures and governors to account, America runs the very real risk of becoming a nation none of us would recognize, and in which most of us would rather not live.

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The Death of Thoughtfulness?

A Minnesota colleague whose insights I respect, has an academic blog. Recently, he shared a post in which he summarized an aspect of contemporary life that keeps many of us up at night; he titled it “The Death of Thoughtfulness.”

As we watch an increasingly bizarre Presidential campaign–dominated on the Right by authoritarian know-nothings to whom the term “thoughtful” would never be applied and on the Left by voters impatient with complexity —his essay seems especially pertinent.

The post was lengthy, and I encourage readers to click through, but these paragraphs seemed to me to capture the essence of his—and my—concern:

The world is not black and white but it  is lived in shades of gray.  Solutions to America’s or world problems are not as simple as just send in the marines, cut taxes, or carpet bomb.  There are no silver bullets to fix the economy, bring about world peace, or eliminate poverty.  We live in a complex world with complex problems and understanding both and possible solutions require thoughtfulness about recognizing the limits of any one idea or policy proposal.

Yet simple-minded dogmatism is what sells.  Recently I attended a conference  of student college journals.  One of the speakers was a representative from a major media news service.  When one of the students asked how they could get more media attention for their journal the response from the news service was simple: Take a point of view and press it no matter what, even if extreme.  The advice was that to be successful you had to have a simple, clear perspective and argue it to the extreme.  It was not about being thoughtful or making clear careful distinctions–just take a position and advocate it, facts be damned.

The question we face—and by “we” I mean the whole world, including but not limited to the United States—is whether polities dominated by people demanding bumper-sticker solutions to complex and often highly technical problems can recapture what my colleague calls “thoughtfulness” and I would label intellectual humility.

When a United States Senator brandishes a snowball and claims it refutes climate change, when a candidate for the highest office in the land blithely promises to “carpet bomb” nations with which we are adverse, when outrage and pompous machismo are said to be signs of strength while considered, rational approaches to policy are sneeringly dismissed as evidence of weakness….we’re in trouble.

Big trouble.
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Education and Student Debt

A few days ago, I wrote about the increasing tendency to rank colleges on the basis of alumni earnings, as if higher education is simply another venue for job training.

In the comments, people pointed out the importance of earning power, especially in light of the staggering expense of a college education.

Believe me, I get that.

Nothing I wrote was intended to justify the increasing costs of a university education and the resulting sky-high levels of student debt. Indeed, to the extent that we are pricing education out of the reach of many, we are sabotaging the educational mission I was defending.

Student debt is not only a huge problem for recent graduates; it is dragging down the economy. As Matt Impink and I wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education,

Student debt constrains individual decision-making in a number of ways, and its growth affects the entire economy. For example, people paying back student loans are less likely to start businesses. Considering that 60 percent of new private-­sector jobs are created by small businesses, diminishing the ability to create businesses does considerable harm to the economy.

Debt loads also affect overall consumption. According to research by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, fewer 30-year-olds in general have bought homes since the recession, but the decline has been steeper for people with a history of student-loan debt and has continued even as the housing market has recovered. In an economy that depends upon the ability and willingness of consumers to purchase homes, furniture, automobiles, and other goods, a debt load that effectively precludes such purchases poses a real problem.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has found that three-quarters of the overall shortfall in household formation can be attributed to younger adults, ages 18 to 34. In 2011, 1.3 million more Americans in this age group lived with their parents than in 2007. Although it is impossible to determine the relative contribution of student-loan debt and the economic downturn to that phenomenon, student debt is clearly implicated. Any program that reduces the need to borrow can only improve the situation.

According to a report from Zillow, the relatively few millennials who are thriving economically are the ones whose parents are able to subsidize college tuition or a down payment on a home. Help with education and buying a home were the two primary ways in which the original GI Bill created upward social mobility. Estimates are that each new household leads to $145,000 of economic impact. If student debt is keeping just a third of those two million young Americans from living on their own — a reasonable, if undocumented, assumption — that adds up to a $100-billion loss or delay in economic activity.

Student debt is an enormous issue for the country. The Democratic presidential candidates have all addressed it; Senator Elizabeth Warren has proposed measures to ameliorate it.

If any of the Republican presidential candidates have paused their attacks on immigrants, reproductive choice and various kinds of “losers” in order to address student debt levels and their impact on either young people or the economy, I’ve missed it.

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Guns, Gays and Greenhouse Gases…Welcome to Indiana’s Legislature

I don’t know about the rest of you, but when Indiana’s (mercifully part-time) legislature is in session, I tend to break out in hives. Thanks to our massively gerrymandered election map, a number of people who get elected to that august body tend to advocate measures that don’t reflect the opinions of most Hoosiers.

It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in many cases, Indiana’s lawmakers’ actual constituencies are the special interests–the NRA and gun manufacturers, the Christian Right, Big Agriculture….

A quick look at some of the bills being considered this year may illustrate the point:

Let’s start with guns. Every year, guns kill some 33,000 Americans. The Indiana General Assembly isn’t deterred by that number, or by repeated massacres of children and innocents. No siree. This year, bills have been introduced 1) to get rid of Indiana’s requirement of a license to carry a handgun, 2) to allow guns at public universities and state office buildings, and 3) to make it easier for repeat alcohol offenders to get a handgun license.

What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve posted previously about the reluctance of our lawmakers to just bite the bullet and admit that LGBT folks are citizens and taxpayers entitled to the same civil rights protections that apply to women, racial minorities and religious folks. (Although it has been sort of enjoyable to watch the discomfort of legislators who are used to doing the bidding of both the Religious Right and business interests—constituencies that are on opposite sides of this issue.)

Survey research has uniformly found a solid majority of Hoosiers favor adding “four words and a comma” to the state civil rights statute. Employers large and small are lobbying for that approach, and significant numbers of clergy and other representatives of faith communities have come out to support it–but our lawmakers have thus far been reluctant to incur the wrath of the small (but shrill and intensely homophobic) Christian Right.

Then there’s HB 1082, authored by Representative David Wolkins. Dubbed the “no more stringent than” bill, it would forbid Indiana agencies from making or enforcing any environmental rule that is more stringent than those established by the federal government. As the Palladium-Item noted

Indiana consistently ranks near the bottom of the states regarding environmental quality. If State Rep. David Wolkins, R-Winona Lake, has his way, Indiana will stay there.

As the Hoosier Environmental Council points out, the situation in Flint illustrates precisely those gaps in federal regulation that Indiana would be prevented from addressing under HB 1082: For example, under federal regulations, drinking water systems can continue to deliver lead-tainted water to households and businesses for up to 24 months while a variety of fixes are attempted. In 24 months, children’s health and cognitive abilities can be permanently damaged.

In fact, there are a number of areas where EPA regulations are considered weak, among them pollution from fracking, factory farm manure pits, and outdoor wood boilers. There are probably others.

Why would we want to prevent Indiana from addressing areas where federal regulations may prove to be inadequate for our needs? It isn’t as if the absence of a “no more stringent” bill would require the state to act. Why tie the hands of those charged with citizens’ public health and safety?

I’m sure a closer examination of the bills that have been introduced would uncover still others belonging to the category that I call “good god, what were they thinking?”

Maybe I should just drink until they go home….

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