Mike Madison, an elementary school principal, took only his black students on a field trip to hear a black rocket scientist speak. He left his white students behind. Why’d he do this?  Well, the principal — who is black — said that “it gave the kids an opportunity to see that this type of achievement is possible even for them.”

Now that’s some affirmation in action.  But yet I resent the missed opportunity to witness the point to all, Mr. Madison, regardless of race, creed, or color.

Clearly, we need a progressive new plan of federal action.

The walrus is Paul.
– Which, that would make Ringo, like,
coral or some such.

Rick Manning, Americans for Limited Government:

Operating under the benign sounding title, “Create Jobs and Save Benefits Act of 2010”, [Senator Robert] Casey’s [D-PA] bill is actually nothing more than a transfer of approximately $165 billion in Big Labor’s pension debt over to the U.S. taxpayer.

For decades, one of the primary organizing tools used by labor unions has been the promise that their members will enjoy secure pensions upon retirement. Most of these union pensions are held in what are known as multi-employer pension funds. Created in 1974 as part of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, these funds are an agreement between a union and two or more employers to fund the pensions of workers and retirees.

The rub is that if a company goes out of business, their employees remain in the system, and become the remaining company’s responsibility. As these multi-employer pension plans become more and more insolvent, the unions that run many of them do not take the fiscally responsible step of cutting benefits, raising the retirement age, asking the members to contribute to the fund, or, gasp, contributing to the fund using union dues money. Instead, many have just wished that the problem would go away.

Now, the piper is demanding to be paid.

Moody’s rating service has found that large multi-employer pension funds are underfunded by $165 billion. This includes funds that either pay or secure the retirement for many Teamsters, AFL-CIO and SEIU members and other large, politically connected unions. Not surprisingly these unions are using the clout gained from spending their cash on politics rather than pensions to demand a taxpayer bailout.

Enter Senator Casey and his House cohorts in crime, Earl Pomeroy (D-ND) and Pat Tiberi (R-OH), who have a solution. Keep the benefits for the members of the Multi-Employer Pension Funds the same, but have them guaranteed by the Pension Benefits Guaranty Corporation (PBGC).

Who guarantees the PBGC? You guessed it, you and I, the American taxpayer. Just another proposal pushing one set of favored constituents over the rest that ensures the dizzying growth of our nation’s deficit continues unabated.

If these multi-employer lock boxes are underfunded — and they are, obviously — the question, it seems to me, is who is responsible? Who failed to meet its part of the agreement for funding and why?

If it is the companies who agreed in principle to take on the pensions — and they cannot meet that obligation — the unions can either demand the companies be liquidated to meet those obligations (the net result being a loss of jobs but a payment of retirement benefits as promised) or the unions can adjust demands in a compromise that will maintain corporate solvency and so retain jobs.

Is that about right?

What shouldn’t happen is that taxpayers be asked to make up the difference — in a move that serves as de facto welfare both for corporations AND union workers. Or at least, that’s how it appears to me at first blush.

Those of you better versed in such contractual agreements are encouraged to set me straight.

[updated from 5/17 - ed.]

(more…)

From the “some pigs are more equal than others” file:

Perhaps the most striking thing about the Disclose Act is that, while the Supreme Court overturned limits on spending by both corporations and unions, Disclose seeks to reimpose them only on corporations.

Well, in fairness to Schumer, corporations are evil, and unions are good. So what’s not to like?

As a bonus, media exemptions under the proposed bill will extend to major media corporations — but not to websites or the internet. Where all that free speech has proven most costly to elected officials.

This way, you see, only the right kinds of things will be “disclosed” — to your collective benefit, and just as God intended it. After all, too much information — particularly when it is the kind that escapes the helpful filtering of our betters — is a distraction from the real goal: learning the lessons the government wants you to learn by engaging only those narratives the government wants you engaging.

Because frankly, all this freedom is making some of you proles rather, you know, uppity…

(h/t Terry H and JHo)

Reason’s Jacob Sullum on the Supreme Court’s upholding of preventive detention:

Opponents of preventive detention for convicts who have served their time argue that it violates the right to due process, the guarantee against double jeopardy, and the ban on ex post facto laws. Although a 1997 decision upholding a Kansas civil commitment law suggests the Supreme Court is not receptive to such arguments, this week’s ruling did not address them. Instead it dealt with the question of whether the federal government, as opposed to the states, has the authority to commit “sexually dangerous” prisoners who would otherwise be released.

The seven-justice majority concluded that it does, citing the Necessary and Proper Clause, which authorizes Congress “to make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution” its enumerated powers. The Court said the civil commitment law is justified by the criminal statutes under which federal prisoners are convicted, which are in turn justified by specific congressional powers.

One problem with this argument is that Congress has federalized a wide range of offenses, including many already addressed by state laws, based on thin or nonexistent constitutional pretexts. Three of the prisoners in this case, for example, were convicted of possessing child pornography, which is a federal offense when the material “has been mailed, or has been shipped or transported in interstate or foreign commerce, or…was produced using materials which have been mailed or so shipped or transported, by any means including by computer.” In other words: always.

The newly minted “hate crime” law likewise federalizes offenses based on absurdly attenuated links to interstate commerce. If a misogynist uses a knife manufactured in another state to rape a woman, that’s enough to make it a federal crime.

Even if we assume the validity of such laws, Justice Clarence Thomas notes in a dissent joined by Justice Antonin Scalia, civil commitment does not carry them into execution, as required by the Necessary and Proper Clause. The criminal statute has been fully executed at the point where someone convicted of violating it completes the sentence it prescribes, which is precisely when civil commitment takes effect.

Continued confinement, Thomas notes, “is aimed at protecting society from acts of sexual violence,” not at “‘carrying into execution’ any enumerated power.” That point is reinforced by the fact that one-fifth of the prisoners whom the government has identified as “sexually dangerous” were never convicted of a federal crime involving sexual violence. Even someone convicted of mail fraud or tax evasion could be put in this category.

Furthermore, Thomas writes, “the definition of a ’sexually dangerous person’…does not require the court to find that the person is likely to violate a law executing an enumerated power in the future.” The commitment law therefore is only tenuously related to federal criminal statutes, which themselves may be only tenuously related to an enumerated power.

Thomas warns that the majority’s opinion, which requires no more than a “rational” connection between a federal law and an enumerated power, “comes perilously close to transforming the Necessary and Proper Clause” into a rationale for the general police power that the Constitution reserves to the states. “The Constitution does not vest in Congress the authority to protect society from every bad act that might befall it,” he writes. Unfortunately, this will be news to most members of Congress.

The fact of likely recidivism by sexual predators and certain kinds of sex offenders creates of those categories of offender something of a special problem for civil society: namely, when and how is preemptive action not only necessary, but seemingly ethical, as well. And so we shouldn’t diminish the impetus for the question simply as a matter of law: if we know of an imminent threat, we shouldn’t allow our laws to prevent us from dealing with that threat actively.

Having said that, law is designed not simply to protect society — but to protect the individual from society in certain instances. In fact, that’s what the idea of having a Constitution based in natural law is all about: protecting certain basic individual rights against the whims of ever-shifting public moods. Else we be treated to the spectacle of people texting in their “votes” for how a law should be “interpreted,” and calling the result a triumph of the “Living Constitution.”

As with the expansion in scope of the Commerce Clause, or the redefining of “public use” as “public good,” expanding the scope of the “Necessary and Proper Clause” — while it may have the salutatory short term effect of providing the rationale for a finessing of the law to match the will of the legislature and/or courts — will have the long term effect of broadening those clauses to the point where, because they apply to everything, the serve to constrain nothing.

Legal conservatism, as I’ve sometimes argued here, is often troubled by an excess of deference to precedent (stare decisis). So while legal conservatives on the bench will often prevent bad law from taking hold on the front end, they are also less likely to walk back bad law once that law has gained historical purchase.

To their credit, Justices Thomas and Scalia have, in this case, avoided the dual temptations of rationalizing the will of civil society into legality, and allowing the Constitution to take on an ethical dimension in this case that, when upheld (as it was by the majority) serves both to increase state power at the expense of fidelity to the particularities of the Constitution’s procedural dicta, and to diminish the check due process provides for the natural right to liberty.

Michael Barone to the GOP: “Republicans can’t take for granted in 2010 tradition-minded Democrats who are sour on Obama and/or his policies. They may just not vote.”

protein wisdom to the GOP: “Seems nobody much likes you either.”

To repeat: A hunter. In a hat. Carrying a rabbit gun and a sack.

Think about it.

Oh. So like, a wet dream. Now I get it.

That’s how the Washington Post frames it, at least:

In the legal battle over Arizona’s new immigration law, an ironic subtext has emerged: whether a Bush-era legal opinion complicates a potential Obama administration lawsuit against Arizona.

The document, written in 2002 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, concluded that state police officers have “inherent power” to arrest undocumented immigrants for violating federal law. It was issued by Jay S. Bybee, who also helped write controversial memos from the same era that sanctioned harsh interrogation of terrorism suspects.

The author of the Arizona law — which has drawn strong opposition from top Obama administration officials — has cited the authority granted in the 2002 memo as a basis for the legislation. The Obama administration has not withdrawn the memo, and some backers of the Arizona law said Monday that because it remains in place, a Justice Department lawsuit against Arizona would be awkward at best.

“The Justice Department’s official position as of now is that local law enforcement has the inherent authority to enforce federal immigration law,” said Robert Driscoll, a former Justice Department Civil Rights Division official in the George W. Bush administration who represents an Arizona sheriff known for aggressive immigration enforcement. “How can you blame someone for exercising authority that the department says they have?”

You’ll note that when the Post isn’t tripping all over itself trying to excuse the Obama administration (the tension between the adminstration’s stated position and their legal position is “ironic” and a “subtext”; the text of the prevailing policy memo was written by a would-be torture advocate tied to Bush; an Arizona sheriff is known not for his aggressive pursuit of illegal immigrants, but rather for his “aggressive immigration enforcement,” etc.), it eventually gets to the crux of the matter: Obama’s DOJ hasn’t pulled the memo in the 16 months Obama has been in office — suggesting either that the administration is in agreement with the policy position, or else that they read policy papers about as closely as they read their own legislation before rushing it through with no partisan support and then taking ill-advised victory laps.

Writes Ed Morrissey:

Eric Holder has been AG for almost as long, being one of the first Cabinet members confirmed by the Senate after Obama assumed office. During the transition, both men promised to “hit the ground running,” which should have meant a review of policy positions across the board. Immigration reform was a key agenda item for Obama and the Democrats — and yet no one at the DoJ or the White House apparently thought to withdraw this memo. That speaks volumes about competence.

One reason the memo remains in place is because it’s just common sense. The federal government works with state and local authorities to enforce federal law in other areas, especially on drugs, for example. The same applies to immigration violations when police already have detained a person for probable cause on another potential crime, as the law (now) stipulates. Unless we’re prepared to fund a massive federal police agency with officers in every town in America, the federal government needs to have state and local authorities helping to enforce federal laws — even the laws that the Obama administration doesn’t want to enforce. Especially those laws.

Well, that seems to suggest that the federal government under King Obama has an interest in delegating authority.

Which is funny when attributed to an administration that owns car companies and has placed itself in charge of banks and health care providers.

(h/t Joe)