Tag Archives: Nancy Pelosi

Private Social Distancing, Private Reversal

04 Monday May 2020

Posted by in Liberty, Pandemic, Uncategorized

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My original post on the dominance of voluntary social distancing over the mandated variety appears below. That dominance is qualified by the greater difficulty of engaging in certain activities when they are outlawed by government, or when the natural locations of activities are declared off-limits. Nevertheless, as with almost all regulation, people make certain “adjustments” to suit themselves (sometimes involving kickbacks to authorities, because regulation does nothing so well as creating opportunities for graft). Those “adjustments” often lead to much less desirable outcomes than the original, unregulated state. In the case of a pandemic, however, it’s tempting to view such unavoidable actions as a matter of compromise.

I say this now because the voluntary social distancing preceding most government lockdown orders in March (discussed in the post below) is subject to a degree of self-reversal. Apple Mobility Data suggests that something like that was happening throughout much of April, as shown in the chart at the top of this post. Now, in early May, the trend is likely to continue as some of the government lockdown mandates are being lifted, or at least loosened.

An earlier version of the chart above appeared in a Forbes article entitled, “Apple Data Shows Shelter-In-Place Is Ending, Whether Governments Want It To Or Not“. The author, John Koetsier, noted the Apple data are taken from map searches, so they may not be reliable indicators of actual movement. But he also featured some charts from Foursquare, which showed actual visits to various kinds of destinations, and some of theoe demonstrate the upward trend in activity.

In the original post below, I used SafeGraph charts lifted from a paper I described there. The four charts below are available on the SafeGraph website, which offered the services of the friendly little robot in the lower right-hand corner, but I demurred. You’ll probably need to click on the image to read the detail. They show more granular information by industry, brand, region, and restaurant categories. The upward trends are evident in quite a few of the series.

I should qualify my interpretation of the charts above and those in my original post: First, nine states did not have stay-at-home orders, though a few of those had varying restrictions on individuals and on the operation of “non-essential” businesses. The five having no orders of any kind (that I can tell) are lightly-populated, very low-density states, so the vast majority of the U.S. population was subject to some sort of lockdown measure. Second, eight states began to ease or lift orders in the last few days of April, Georgia and Colorado being the largest. Therefore, at the tail end, a small part of the increase in activity could be related to those liberalizations. Then again, it might have happened anyway.

The authoritarian impulse to shut everything down was largely unnecessary, and it did not accomplish much that voluntary distancing hadn’t accomplished already (again, see below). Healthy people need to stop cowering and take action. That includes the non-elderly and those free of underlying health conditions. Sure, take precautions, keep your distance, but get out of your home if you can. Get some sunny Vitamin D.

Committing yourself to the existence of a shut-in is not healthy, not wise, and it might destroy whatever wealth you possess if you are a working person. The data above show that people are recognizing that fact. As much as the Left wishes it were so, government seldom “knows better”. It is least effective when it uses force to suppress voluntary behavior; it is most effective when it follows consensus, and especially when it protects the rights of individuals to make their own choices where no consensus exists.

Last week’s post follows:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

How much did state and local governments accomplish when they decided to issue stay-at-home orders? Perhaps not much. That’s the implication of data presented by the authors of “Internal and external effects of social distancing in a pandemic” (starts on page 22 in the linked PDF). Social distancing began in the U.S. in a series of voluntary, private actions. Government orders merely followed and, at best, reinforced those actions, but often in ham-handed ways.

The paper has a broader purpose than the finding that social distancing is often a matter of private initiative. I’ll say a bit more about it, but you can probably skip the rest of this paragraph without loss of continuity. The paper explores theoretical relationships between key parameters (including a social distancing construct) and the dynamics of a pandemic over time in a social welfare context. The authors study several alternatives: a baseline in which behavior doesn’t change in any way; a “laissez faire” path in which actions are all voluntary; and a “socially optimal” path imposed by a benevolent and all-knowing central authority (say what???). I’d offer more details, but I’ll await the coming extension promised by the authors to a world in which susceptible populations are heterogenous (e.g., like Covid-19, where children are virtually unaffected, healthy working age adults are roughly as at-risk as they are to the flu, and a population of the elderly and health-compromised individuals for which the virus is much more dangerous than the flu). In general, the paper seems to support a more liberalized approach to dealing with the pandemic, but that’s a matter of interpretation. Tyler Cowen, who deserves a hat-tip, believes that reading is correct “at the margin”.

Let’s look at some of the charts the authors present early in the paper. The data on social distancing behavior comes from Safegraph, a vendor of mobility data taken from cell phone location information. This data can be used to construct various proxies for aggregate social activity. The first chart below shows traffic at “points of interest” (POI) in the U.S. from March 8 to April 12, 2020. That’s the blue line. The red line is the percentage of the U.S. population subject to lockdown orders on each date. The authors explain the details in the notes below the chart:

Clearly POI visits were declining sharply before any governments imposed their own orders. The next two charts show similar declines in the percent of mobile devices that leave “home” each day (“home” being the device’s dominant location during nighttime hours) and the duration over which devices were away from “home”, on average.

So all of these measures of social activity began declining well ahead of the government orders. The authors say private social distancing preceded government action in all 50 states. POI traffic was down almost 40% by the time 10% of the U.S. population was subject to government orders, and those early declines accounted for the bulk of the total decline through April 12. The early drops in the two away-from-home measures were 15-20%, again accounting for well over half of the total decline.

The additional declines beyond that time, to the extent they can be discerned, could be either trends that would have continued even in the absence of government orders or reinforcing effects the orders themselves. This does not imply that lockdown orders have no effects on specific activities. Rather, it means that those orders have minor incremental effects on measures of aggregate social activity than the voluntary actions already taken. In other words, the government lockdowns are largely a matter of rearranging the deck chairs, or, that is to say, their distribution.

Many private individuals and institutions acted early in response to information about the virus, motivated by concerns about their own safety and the safety of family and friends. The public sector in the U.S. was not especially effective in providing information, with such politicos as President Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, and the mayor of New Orleans minimizing the dangers into the month of March, and some among them encouraging people to get out and celebrate at public events. Even Anthony Fauci minimized the danger in late February (not to mention the World Health Organization). In fact, “the scientists” were as negligent in their guidance as anyone in the early stages of the pandemic.

When lockdown orders were issued, they were often arbitrary and nonsensical. Grocery stores, liquor stores, and Wal Mart were allowed to remain open, but department stores and gun shops were not. Beaches and parks were ordered closed, though there is little if any chance of infection outdoors. Lawn care services, another outdoor activity, were classified as non-essential in some jurisdictions and therefore prohibited. And certain personal services seem to be available to public officials, but not to private citizens. The lists of things one can and can’t buy truly defies logic.

In March, John W. Whitehead wrote:

“We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, ‘stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,’…”

That is fearsome indeed, and individuals can accomplish distancing without it. If you are extremely risk averse, you can distance yourself or take other precautions to remain protected. You can either take action to isolate yourself or you can decide to be in proximity to others. The more risk averse among us will internalize most of the cost of voluntary social distancing. The less risk averse will avoid that cost but face greater exposure to the virus. Of course, this raises questions of public support for vulnerable segments of the population for whom risk aversion will be quite rational. That would certainly be a more enlightened form of intervention than lockdowns, though support should be offered only to those highly at-risk individuals who can’t support themselves.

Christopher Phelan writes of three rationales for the lockdowns: buying time for development of a vaccine or treatments; reducing the number of infected individuals; and to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Phelan thinks all three are of questionable validity at this point. A vaccine might never arrive, and Phelan is pessimistic about treatments (I have more hope in that regard). Ultimately a large share of the population will be infected, lockdowns or not. And of course the health care system is not overwhelmed at this point. Yes, those caring for Covid patients are under a great stress, but the health care system as a whole, and patients with other maladies, are currently suffering from massive under-utilization.

If you wish to be socially distant, you are free to do so on your very own. Individuals are quite capable of voluntary risk mitigation without authoritarian fiat, as the charts above show. While private actors might not internalize all of the external costs of their activities, government is seldom capable of making the appropriate corrections. Coercion to enforce the kinds of crazy rules that have been imposed during this pandemic is the kind of abuse of power the nation’s founders intended to prevent. Reversing those orders can be difficult, and the precedent itself becomes a threat to future liberty. Nevertheless, we see mounting efforts to resist by those who are harmed by these orders, and by those who recognize the short-sighted nature of the orders. Private incentives for risk reduction, and private evaluation of the benefits of social and economic activity, offer superior governance to the draconian realities of lockdowns.

Social Distancing Largely a Private Matter

26 Sunday Apr 2020

Posted by in Liberty, Pandemic, Uncategorized

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How much did state and local governments accomplish when they decided to issue stay-at-home orders? Perhaps not much. That’s the implication of data presented by the authors of “Internal and external effects of social distancing in a pandemic” (starts on page 22 in the linked PDF). Social distancing began in the U.S. in a series of voluntary, private actions. Government orders merely followed and, at best, reinforced those actions, but often in ham-handed ways.

The paper has a broader purpose than the finding that social distancing is often a matter of private initiative. I’ll say a bit more about it, but you can probably skip the rest of this paragraph without loss of continuity. The paper explores theoretical relationships between key parameters (including a social distancing construct) and the dynamics of a pandemic over time in a social welfare context. The authors study several alternatives: a baseline in which behavior doesn’t change in any way; a “laissez faire” path in which actions are all voluntary; and a “socially optimal” path imposed by a benevolent and all-knowing central authority (say what???). I’d offer more details, but I’ll await the coming extension promised by the authors to a world in which susceptible populations are heterogenous (e.g., like Covid-19, where children are virtually unaffected, healthy working age adults are roughly as at-risk as they are to the flu, and a population of the elderly and health-compromised individuals for which the virus is much more dangerous than the flu). In general, the paper seems to support a more liberalized approach to dealing with the pandemic, but that’s a matter of interpretation. Tyler Cowen, who deserves a hat-tip, believes that reading is correct “at the margin”.

Let’s look at some of the charts the authors present early in the paper. The data on social distancing behavior comes from Safegraph, a vendor of mobility data taken from cell phone location information. This data can be used to construct various proxies for aggregate social activity. The first chart below shows traffic at “points of interest” (POI) in the U.S. from March 8 to April 12, 2020. That’s the blue line. The red line is the percentage of the U.S. population subject to lockdown orders on each date. The authors explain the details in the notes below the chart:

Clearly POI visits were declining sharply before any governments imposed their own orders. The next two charts show similar declines in the percent of mobile devices that leave “home” each day (“home” being the device’s dominant location during nighttime hours) and the duration over which devices were away from “home”, on average.

So all of these measures of social activity began declining well ahead of the government orders. The authors say private social distancing preceded government action in all 50 states. POI traffic was down almost 40% by the time 10% of the U.S. population was subject to government orders, and those early declines accounted for the bulk of the total decline through April 12. The early drops in the two away-from-home measures were 15-20%, again accounting for well over half of the total decline.

The additional declines beyond that time, to the extent they can be discerned, could be either trends that would have continued even in the absence of government orders or reinforcing effects the orders themselves. This does not imply that lockdown orders have no effects on specific activities. Rather, it means that those orders have minor incremental effects on measures of aggregate social activity than the voluntary actions already taken. In other words, the government lockdowns are largely a matter of rearranging the deck chairs, or, that is to say, their distribution.

Many private individuals and institutions acted early in response to information about the virus, motivated by concerns about their own safety and the safety of family and friends. The public sector in the U.S. was not especially effective in providing information, with such politicos as President Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill De Blasio, and the mayor of New Orleans minimizing the dangers into the month of March, and some among them encouraging people to get out and celebrate at public events. Even Anthony Fauci minimized the danger in late February (not to mention the World Health Organization). In fact, “the scientists” were as negligent in their guidance as anyone in the early stages of the pandemic.

When lockdown orders were issued, they were often arbitrary and nonsensical. Grocery stores, liquor stores, and Wal Mart were allowed to remain open, but department stores and gun shops were not. Beaches and parks were ordered closed, though there is little if any chance of infection outdoors. Lawn care services, another outdoor activity, were classified as non-essential in some jurisdictions and therefore prohibited. And certain personal services seem to be available to public officials, but not to private citizens. The lists of things one can and can’t buy truly defies logic.

In March, John W. Whitehead wrote:

“We’re talking about lockdown powers (at both the federal and state level): the ability to suspend the Constitution, indefinitely detain American citizens, bypass the courts, quarantine whole communities or segments of the population, override the First Amendment by outlawing religious gatherings and assemblies of more than a few people, shut down entire industries and manipulate the economy, muzzle dissidents, ‘stop and seize any plane, train or automobile to stymie the spread of contagious disease,’…”

That is fearsome indeed, and individuals can accomplish distancing without it. If you are extremely risk averse, you can distance yourself or take other precautions to remain protected. You can either take action to isolate yourself or you can decide to be in proximity to others. The more risk averse among us will internalize most of the cost of voluntary social distancing. The less risk averse will avoid that cost but face greater exposure to the virus. Of course, this raises questions of public support for vulnerable segments of the population for whom risk aversion will be quite rational. That would certainly be a more enlightened form of intervention than lockdowns, though support should be offered only to those highly at-risk individuals who can’t support themselves.

Christopher Phelan writes of three rationales for the lockdowns: buying time for development of a vaccine or treatments; reducing the number of infected individuals; and to avoid overwhelming the health care system. Phelan thinks all three are of questionable validity at this point. A vaccine might never arrive, and Phelan is pessimistic about treatments (I have more hope in that regard). Ultimately a large share of the population will be infected, lockdowns or not. And of course the health care system is not overwhelmed at this point. Yes, those caring for Covid patients are under a great stress, but the health care system as a whole, and patients with other maladies, are currently suffering from massive under-utilization.

If you wish to be socially distant, you are free to do so on your very own. Individuals are quite capable of voluntary risk mitigation without authoritarian fiat, as the charts above show. While private actors might not internalize all of the external costs of their activities, government is seldom capable of making the appropriate corrections. Coercion to enforce the kinds of crazy rules that have been imposed during this pandemic is the kind of abuse of power the nation’s founders intended to prevent. Reversing those orders can be difficult, and the precedent itself becomes a threat to future liberty. Nevertheless, we see mounting efforts to resist by those who are harmed by these orders, and by those who recognize the short-sighted nature of the orders. Private incentives for risk reduction, and private evaluation of the benefits of social and economic activity, offer superior governance to the draconian realities of lockdowns.

Left’s Pandemic Response: Politics As Usual

17 Tuesday Mar 2020

Posted by in Health Care, Pandemic, Regulation

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The Left asserts that President Trump dismissed and dismantled the nation’s Pandemic Response Team. That’s bullshit. So is the claim that the CDC was defunded. The news media and certain pundits have helped to feed this narrative. Or, as Glenn Reynolds calls those pundits, “Democrat operatives with bylines”.

First of all, the team in question was not at the CDC, a fact that hasn’t always been clear from the commentary on this issue. It was a team of White House overseers at the National Security Council’s “Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense”. What happened was this: the senior director of that team resigned after John Bolton was appointed to head the NSC. Bolton might have wanted him out, but what we know is the director resigned. Subsequently, that team was folded into another directorate as part of an long-overdue consolidation. Health experts from the team remain on the NSC staff today. Yet Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH)—and many others since—had the temerity to charge that Trump had fired “the entire Whilte House pandemic team”. Well, at least he didn’t imply that it was the CDC.

Tim Morrison wrote the following in the Washington Post yesterday:

“Because I led the very directorate assigned that mission, the counterproliferation and biodefense office, for a year and then handed it off to another official who still holds the post, I know the charge is specious. …

When I joined the National Security Council staff in 2018, I inherited a strong and skilled staff in the counterproliferation and biodefense directorate. This team of national experts together drafted the National Biodefense Strategy of 2018 and an accompanying national security presidential memorandum to implement it; an executive order to modernize influenza vaccines; and coordinated the United States’ response to the Ebola epidemic in Congo, which was ultimately defeated in 2020.”

This assessment at Brietbart.com quotes former senior NSC official Richard Goldberg:

“Weird. A year later I was inside the NSC working with talented global health/biodefense professionals who coordinated an incredibly effective response to Ebola. They’re still there. Working hard. On .”

It’s true that Bolton sought to eliminate red tape, duplication, and bureaucracy within the NSC, and that was wholly justified. According to Morrison, the NSC staff quadrupled from the 1990s through the second Obama term. Pandemics are supposed to be the CDC’s purview, but the proliferation of administrative layers is what happens as government grows uncontrollably. Leslie Eastman at Legal Insurrection questions whether the U.S. needs a permanent “Pandemic Response Team” in the White House. She quotes GOP Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel:

“JAN 7: CDC established a coronavirus incident management system, two days before China announced the outbreak. … Pelosi began Week 3 of withholding her sham impeachment articles. 

JAN 21: The CDC activated its emergency operations center to provide ongoing support to confront coronavirus. …What were Congressional Democrats focused on? Writing their opening arguments for their bogus impeachment trial.”

Well, bully for the CDC. As for “defunding the CDC”, the facts are this: the proposed budget submitted to Congress by the Trump Administration in February, but never passed, did indeed include cuts to the CDC’s budget, which has grown over the years as it expanded its mission from fighting infectious diseases to matters like obesity, racism, and questions of social justice. The cuts proposed by Trump, however, were primarily to state grants. Actually, the proposal called for increased CDC staffing, and it funded all programs related to infectious diseases. But no matter, because that proposal is unlikely to become part of any appropriations bill that would pass Congress.

True to form, the Left plays politics in the middle of a national crisis. When the Trump Administration told airlines that it was considering banning flights from China in late January, it was called racist. Now, of course, he hasn’t done enough. A huge irony, however, is that Trump’s biggest mistake was in trusting the FDA and the CDC’s authority to develop and regulate testing for the coronavirus. They botched it. In a classic case of over-regulation, they prohibited hospitals and labs from conducting tests developed privately or by academic researchers, insisting that everyone wait for the “approved” test to be distributed. Then, the test they released in early February was flawed, costing additional weeks before testing was available.

 

The Impaired Impeachment

22 Sunday Dec 2019

Posted by in Impeachment

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biden-impeach-trump

To avoid defections in their ranks, House Democrats had to pare back so much on the counts for impeaching Donald Trump that they laid bare the raw political motives for bringing the action. Not that their motives needed clarification. They’ve been dying to find grounds on which to impeach Trump since the day of his election. They also know the Senate will not remove Trump from office. Now, the real point is to stain the President as he seeks re-election, and that should strike anyone as an illegitimate purpose.

The two impeachment counts, abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, are flimsy. Proof of the first would require infallible mind-reading skills. It’s doubtful that the Democrats are any better at that than their inability to follow the simple facts of the case. During the controversial phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky, Trump clearly expressed interest in whether the Ukraine would investigate possible interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and whether the Bidens had been involved, given their involvement with Ukrainian organizations that may have had connections to the Steele dossier. That’s a fair question and a legitimate area of inquiry for the chief executive. It can’t be helped that Joe Biden happens to be running for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2020, as if running for office was enough to absolve one of crime.

The second impeachment count against Trump relies on vacating the constitutional privileges accorded to the chief executive, privileges to which President Obama, and others before him, generously availed themselves (also see here).

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now has opted to delay transmitting the impeachment articles to the Senate. She said it was important for the House to wrap up their proceedings quickly, so much so that her party could not be bothered to bring a court challenge against Trump’s assertion of executive privilege. But now, Pelosi insists that she must be assured the Senate trial will be conducted “fairly”, as if the proceedings in the House were remotely fair to the President.

One of the House Democrats’ own expert witnesses asserts that the President’s impeachment is not official until the articles are transmitted to the Senate. That might be, but he overlooks the Supreme Court’s 1993 ruling in Nixon vs. the United States in which the Court said that no trial is required for the Senate to acquit anyone impeached by the House, and it may do so without judicial review. So, the Senate can acquit the President now, without a trial and without waiting for Speaker Pelosi to transmit the “charges”, should Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decide to bring it to a vote. Of course, he might not want to as a matter of optics as well as pressure from an incensed Trump to air all of the laundry.

Like the misguided impeachment itself, Pelosi’s motive for holding the transmittal in abeyance is political. Democrats, quite possibly unaware of the Senate’s power under Nixon, and facing their comeuppance, might hope the public forgets the charade that took place in the House and blame Republicans for an “unfair” Senate process that would let Trump off the hook. Or, Pelosi might be hoping for a weakening of Republican resolve on establishing rules for a trial in the Senate, but even that calculation is chancy. It’s even possible Pelosi imagines she can delay the transfer through the 2020 election, hoping to use the House impeachment again and again as a cudgel with which to batter Trump’s re-election chances. Fat chance!

Or is the delay a form of damage control? Does it have something to do with Joe Biden’s vulnerability? He is perhaps at greater risk under a Senate impeachment trial of Trump than Trump himself. Biden is the one who gloated publicly of how he cowed the Ukrainians into dropping an investigation of Burisma, the gas company for which his son Hunter was a board member, by threatening to withhold loan guarantees. Quid Pro Joe!

Biden’s has stated that he would not comply with a subpoena to appear before the Senate in the matter of the Trump impeachment, apparently confusing Trump’s status as the executive with privilege with his own status as an out-of-office candidate for the Democrat nomination. Oh, wait! Now Biden says he would appear after all! Is the contrast between Trump’s phone conversation with the Ukrainian President and Biden’s gloating admission pertinent? You bet!

Or perhaps Pelosi believes it’s unwise to hand the impeachment counts over to the Senate with John Durham’s investigation still hanging in the balance. Durham is looking into the efforts of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the Trump campaign in 2016. An ill-timed and damaging outcome for the Obama Administration could make the impeachment trial into a catastrophic event for Biden and other Democrats.

The Democrats’ have brought their longstanding lust for impeaching Trump to fruition only to find that they’ve miscalculated. First, Trump is practically guaranteed an acquittal, so the whole effort was and is a waste of time. Second, public opinion is far from rallying to the Dems cause. According to Gallup, Trump’s approval now is higher than Obama’s at the same point in his presidency, and support for impeachment hasn’t responded as the Democrats had hoped. In fact, if anything, support has eroded, especially in swing states, and the effort has strengthened Trump’s base of support. I would argue that it’s much worse for Democrats than the polls show. Many anti-Democrats, like me, actively avoid participating in polls. That’s partly because the framing of questions is often biased, and partly because I don’t want to be bothered. Finally, the Democrats seem not to fathom the political risks they face with impeachment: 28 Democrat representatives from districts Trump won in 2016 may now face stiffer odds against reelection in 2020, having cast their votes for impeachment. More critically, there are severe risks of a Senate trial to the Bidens, potentially other Obama Administration officials, and the Clintons.

Note: An acknowledgement goes to the Legal Insurrection blog and A.F. Branco for the cartoon at the top.

Another Flop at the Impeachment Playhouse

04 Friday Oct 2019

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Listen, President Trump drives me crazy. His policy instincts often strike me as dangerous: trade protectionist, inflationist, and cronyist. I’m still suspicious that he might play ball with statists left and right on critical issues, when and if he perceives a political advantage in doing so. And Trump is hopelessly inarticulate and belligerent. Nevertheless, I will almost certainly vote for him in 2020 for several reasons, not least because the feasible alternatives are completely unacceptable. That view is reinforced by the behavior of the Democrat party in their effort to fabricate “high crimes and misdemeanors” on Trump’s part. That effort is not just dishonest, it is foolish, and they have a lot to lose. Their machinations are likely to blow up in their faces.

For one thing, the Democrats don’t seem to have much of a case. This time they are focused on a May 2019 phone conversation that took place between Trump and the recently-elected Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. The Democrats contend that Trump held up military aid in order to pressure Zelenskiy to investigate the Biden family’s activities in the Ukraine, a charge flatly denied by Zelenskiy. In fact, at the time of the call, the Ukrainians has no idea that military aid had been suspended, a fact first reported by The New York Times.

The Trump Administration released a transcript of the Zelenskiy call, which offers no evidence that a quid pro quo was offered by Trump. Even the text messages released this morning fail to support the claim. Joe Biden’s name came up during the call in connection with potential interference by the Ukraine in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. That’s reasonable in light of the events reported to have taken place, and it is certainly within the scope of presidential powers, as were Trump’s efforts to discuss election interference with Australia, the U.K., and other countries.

If you don’t know it already, a successful impeachment in the House of Representatives will not remove Trump from office. It will constitute a referral of charges to the Senate, which is controlled by Republicans, and a conviction requires a two-thirds majority. Ain’t gonna happen.

In the meantime, there really is no formal “impeachment” underway, despite what you think you’ve heard. This is a “proceeding” that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi really had no authority to initiate, and there is no set of rules or procedures guiding the spectacle. An impeachment investigation requires a House vote, but Democrats voted to table a resolution calling for such a vote because they really don’t want one, not yet anyway. Why? Because it would force them to go on record before they’re quite sure they want to, but more importantly it would demand due process for the accused. A House vote for an impeachment investigation would give House Republicans subpoena powers, something Democrats don’t want to take a chance on.

Again, the whole effort by the Democrats will ultimately be futile, and the trial proceedings in the Senate might be very ugly for them as well. It is likely to shed light on several matters that offer unflattering context for the impeachment effort and might well lead to criminal charges against prominent Democrats and their operatives:

These are all troubling questions that should be investigated. We may or may not get to the bottom of it before the impeachment vote in the House, if it ever occurs. Senate Republicans will undoubtedly be interested in pursuing many of these areas of inquiry, and Joe Biden will not come out of this unscathed. There is likely considerable evidence to support claims that he used political influence to gain his son Hunter favor in the Ukraine and China. 

This month, DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz is expected to release his report on the origins and conduct of the Russia investigation into Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. including potential corruption of the FISA process. His report will reflect the findings of two U.S. attorneys conducting separate inquiries into various aspects of the matter. These reports are a potential disaster for Democrats. Perhaps the distraction of impeachment theatre seems desirable to them, but the longer they continue the fruitless effort to “get Trump”, which began well before he was elected, the more incompetent they look. They don’t seem to have noticed that the whole spectacle is strengthening Trump’s base of support.

Which brings me back to Trump’s belligerence, which I briefly decried above. And it’s true, I often wince, but then I often laugh out loud as well. His political opponents and the media are constantly aghast at his every unapologetic response to their attacks. I will readily admit that it’s deeply satisfying to witness him hurling the crap right back at them, right on the schnoz. In the case of the impeachment drama, his base of support and many others in the middle know the Dems richly deserve it.

 

Mueller’s Muddle

05 Wednesday Jun 2019

Posted by in Trump Administration

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The Mueller Report effectively put to rest allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 election, despite lingering wails from crestfallen Trump haters. But Trump lovers and haters alike might agree that the report should have settled much more, including whether there was evidence on which a charge of obstruction of justice could be brought against Trump. Robert Mueller demurred from that responsibility as a prosecutor, but he left a few tempting but ultimately dangerous crumbs for those still obsessed with toppling Trump.

Mueller’s statement last Wednesday wavered around the suggestion that Trump might be guilty of obstruction, a connotation colored more by politics than evidence. My conclusions, gleaned from both the report and a few other sources, are the following:

  • There was no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
  • The original allegations were an attempted set-up of Trump. The scheme relied in part on the fraudulent Christopher Steele dossier, which was financed by the Clinton campaign, as well as a series of misrepresentations and suspicious contacts arranged by high-level officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI. That the entire investigation might have been compromised by such a conspiracy was not addressed by Mueller in the report, but we will learn more very soon when the DOJ’s Inspector General issues his findings. The IG will be interviewing Steele himself in the UK before long.
  • Mueller probably knew there was no collusion early in the investigation, but he persisted in “investigating” for two years. In my view, that created the appearance of an effort to entrap an angry Trump on obstruction charges.
  • Trump reacted to the collusion charges with a kind of raving petulance. Of course, it’s hard to blame him for his anger, and Mueller more-or-less acknowledged that. Trump did and said things that surely sounded intemperate, though some were within his prerogative (e.g., firing James Comey). Certain impulsive statements and actions might have risen to the level of obstruction had he not “changed his mind”, or had he bothered to follow-up on execution by aides. And Trump made statements (not under oath) that we’re intended to influence public opinion and possibly the willingness of certain witnesses to cooperate with investigators, but that sort of intent is hard to prove.
  • Of the ten instances of possible obstruction listed by Mueller in his report, two came dangerously close to qualifying as obstruction, two others were more of a stretch, and the rest were readily explained by motives other than an intent to obstruct, as Mueller sometimes indicated in the report.
  • Several of the possible obstruction issues were mitigated by Trump’s apparent willingness to cooperate with the investigation, including the provision to Mueller’s office of a huge volume of emails and documents, and by allowing members of the administration to be interviewed, some at great length.
  • Jonathan Turley has expressed his dismay at three underhanded actions taken by Mueller, one in the report itself and two in the wake of its delivery to his superiors at the DOJ (Attorney General William Barr and Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein). The first was an omission: Mueller chose not to identify grand jury material that had to be redacted before release to the public. This was contrary to instructions and with knowledge that the omission would delay the report’s release to the public and reflect badly on Barr.
  • The second action noted by Turley was a letter sent by Mueller to Barr complaining about the “impression” created by Barr’s summary of the report, despite the fact that Barr had invited Mueller to review the summary in advance. The letter also asked Barr to “release uncleared portions of the report”, which Mueller knew was prohibited. This also seems to have been intended to reflect badly on Barr.
  • Turley’s third point is Mueller’s legally incoherent statement that “he would have cleared Trump if he could have” but chose not to draw a conclusion. Mueller invoked an opinion from the DOJ’s Office of Legal Council (OLC), which he claimed prohibited the indictment of a sitting president. But over a period of two years, he failed to seek further guidance on the question from the OLC, his superiors, or the Inspector General.
  • A more obvious explanation for Mueller’s failure to seek an indictment is that he knew that no grand jury would indict on the evidence as described in the ten instances of possible obstruction he listed in the report.
  • Essentially Mueller left the ball in Barr’s court to decide whether to seek an indictment of Trump on obstruction changes, and Barr decided that the evidence did not support it.
  • However, the very idea of obstruction is moot, or should be, given the first three points above. And apparently Mueller never intended to seek an indictment on collusion, as he stated again last Wednesday.
  • Mueller strayed outside the role of a prosecutor and potentially subverted the cause of justice in stating that he could not exonerate the president of obstruction. There is no such thing as “exoneration” of an accused in U.S. criminal law. Mueller’s role as a prosecutor was to make a determination as to whether he should recommend an indictment against Trump. It was not his role to determine Trump’s guilt and certainly not his innocence, and innocence must always be the presumption.
  • The Mueller report could provide Congress with a “roadmap” for impeachment of Trump on charges of obstruction. If House Democrats decide to take that road, it would very likely be a prescription for their electoral suicide.

No matter how aggravating and uncouth you find Trump, and no matter how unwise his policies might prove to be, he was elected fair and square. Nevertheless, his opponents in Congress and on the campaign trail can’t easily give up the impeachment rhetoric without angering their leftist base. But not all congressional Democrats are voicing support for impeachment proceedings, and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi is doing her best to manage the division without making a commitment either way. The Senate will never go along with impeachment, of course. Now, a House vote to merely censure Donald Trump is mentioned as a possible “exit-ramp” to compromise that would let the hard-line impeachers down easy. Whatever they do, however, some Democrats might hope to drag out the process in an attempt to inflict maximal damage to Trump’s reelection prospects. And that, too, is probably ill-advised, because people are getting tired of all this.

Bad Idea: Campaign Finance Reform

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Campaign Finance, Free Speech

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Everyone seems to hate money in politics, and nearly everyone says campaign finance reform is needed to eliminate political corruption… nearly. Money in politics is blamed for allowing powerful interests to “buy” seats in the legislature, or in executive positions, as well as “tit-for-tat” influence over pieces of legislation. But not so fast: attempts at campaign finance regulation in the past have been largely unsuccessful in achieving their goals. Furthermore, campaign finance reforms may have perverse consequences, which I’ll discuss below. More importantly, while “taking money out of politics” sounds noble to many, it starkly implies abrogation of First Amendment rights. Far from “leveling the playing field”, there is a great danger that it would lead to suppression of minority opinions. For those reasons. it’s better to consider other means of ensuring that elected officials behave even-handedly in attending to their duties.

Protected Speech

Former Congressman Ron Paul is highly skeptical that any good can come of campaign finance legislation:

“…campaign finance reform legislation does not limit the influence of powerful special interests. Instead, it violates the First Amendment and burdens those seeking real change in government.”

Here is David Harsanyi on the same point:

“Reducing the power of ‘special interests’ in Washington is always a popular issue with voters. The problem, of course, is that every voter considers another group a special interest. … specific campaign finance reform legislation is always about inhibiting someone’s speech.”

Government attempts to curb speech are bad enough, but there is also interest in subsidizing speech arising from certain quarters. Harsanyi is rightly critical of a House bill that proposes to do just that, and Nancy Pelosi has promised to bring the bill to the floor. Among other things, it would authorize a 6-to-1 federal match of small-dollar campaign donations so as to promote “grass-roots” electoral efforts. It is quite simply a bad idea to create a mechanism whereby government bureaucrats can manipulate campaign funding, potentially favoring certain kinds of speech, via the explicit use of funds from taxpayers who might well blanche at the thought of funding certain campaigns.

The bill would also impose new disclosure requirements on large contributions to 501(c)(4) organizations, which qualify as “social welfare” groups under the tax code, and whose “primary” purpose is not campaign-related. To this he says:

“… this obsession with eliminating anonymity is also a transparent attempt to chill speech and undermine minority opinions.”

Let’s face it: to complain about the use of money in promoting speech is to complain about speech itself. We can all speak out loud, but one can’t hope to spread a message broadly without bringing resources to bear on the effort. That’s true whether you are printing, broadcasting, or spreading messages on social media. It almost always takes staff, including creative talent, equipment, media buying power, and usually office space. If you don’t have the requisite resources then you must hustle, press flesh, cajole members of the media, and join with other like-minded individuals, especially those who might agree to commit resources.

Barring a monopoly on speech, choosing a particular scale at which speech becomes unacceptable is itself a denial of the right to free speech. And that right can be exercised by individuals and by associations of individuals. As to the latter, the form of association makes no difference: the union, nonprofit, and for-profit corporate forms are all valid associations through which individuals can speak as one, just as all for-profit media corporations have always exercised their First Amendment rights. That was the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizen’s United vs. Federal Election Commission (FEC) in 2009, which remains oddly controversial. Again, if you think the ability to speak from a large platform is too much, then you are also willing to restrict speech by for-profit newspapers and television networks, and you are a tyrant.

Money and Electoral Success

In any case, virtually all campaign contributions originating in the for-profit corporate sector come from employee political action committees (PACs), not from corporations themselves. And since Citizen’s United, there’s been little uptick in campaign contributions from for-profit corporations. In fact, according to this report on campaign finance, unions have been much more aggressive than businesses in leveraging the Citizen’s United decision. The report also demonstrates the unsurprising fact that incumbents tend to spend much more on elections than their challengers. However, the authors note that across incumbents, greater spending is associated with lower vote shares, while the reverse is true across challengers. That just means, however, that incumbents must spend a lot to defeat a serious challenger.

Jeffrey Milyo made the last point more than 15 years ago:

“Most systematic studies, however, find no effect of marginal campaign spending on the electoral success of candidates … How can this be so? The best explanation to date is that competent candidates are adept at both convincing contributors to give money and convincing voters to give their vote. Consequently, the finding that campaign spending and electoral success are highly correlated exaggerates the importance of money to a candidate’s chances of winning.”

There is also a lack of evidence that politicians trade their votes for campaign contributions:

“… donors tend to give to like-minded candidates. Of course, if candidates choose their policy positions in anticipation of a subsequent payoff in campaign contributions, there would be no real distinction between accepting bribes and accepting contributions from like-minded voters. However, studies of legislative behavior indicate that the most important determinants of an incumbent’s voting record are constituent interests, party, and personal ideology.”

A tremendous disparity exists between public perceptions of the importance of money in political campaigns and the actual magnitude of campaign spending. Again, from Milyo:

“If campaign contributions do not buy favors, then why is so much money spent on politics? In fact, scholars of American politics have long noted how little is spent on politics. Consider that large firms spend ten times as much on lobbying as their employees spend on campaign contributions through PACs, as individuals, or in the form of unregulated contributions to political parties (i.e., soft money).”

Milyo’s article was written well before the Citizen’s United decision. At the time it was still illegal for corporations to make campaign contributions, but that seems to have made little difference.

In an Appeals Court decision in 2010, Independent Expenditure Committees (Super PACs) won the right to accept contributions from corporations and individuals beyond federal limits. Super PACs, however, are technically prohibited from coordinating their activities with political candidates for federal office. In fact, Super PACs have been known at times to work at cross-purposes to the political parties whose candidates they generally favor. Furthermore, there is very little evidence that corporate contributions provide more than a small share of Super PAC funds, not even via “dark money” contributions via 501(c) organizations.

Futile Reforms 

Ron Paul (linked above) notes that powerful interests will always find ways to support policies by which they stand to profit. Those interests often benefit from regulatory policies that create burdens for smaller competitors, spending programs that bring fat government contracts, and subsidies in support of favored activities or technologies. However, restricting campaign finance is a particularly troubling and ineffective approach to combating these efforts. As Milyo says:

“The consensus among academic researchers is that money is far less important in determining either election or policy outcomes than conventional wisdom holds it to be. Consequently, the benefits of campaign finance reforms have also been exaggerated.”

Beyond the lack of evidence that reform is needed, Milyo argues that restrictions on campaign contributions may have nasty unintended consequences. First, cross-sectional studies across states have shown that limits on contributions lead to less electoral competition and lower voter turnout. Second, less campaign advertising reduces interest and awareness of candidate positions among voters, also suppressing turnout. Finally, there is a real danger that incumbents can manipulate reform legislation in order to create electoral barriers to potential challengers.

Alternatives

There may be better ways to reduce the influence of moneyed interests on policy than campaign finance reforms. Term limits obviously shorten the duration of the incumbent advantage as well as corrupt actions by any office-holder who is somehow “bought and paid-for”. Most Libertarians favor term limits to reduce corruption and encourage the kinds of “citizen legislators” idealized by the nation’s founders. Others make an opposing argument that it is our electoral duty to remove legislators from office at the ballot box, and therefore term limits were left out of the Constitution for good reason. Still others say that term limits might make corrupt politicians too keen to act quickly.

Another idea is based on the “revolving door tax” often mentioned by Glenn Reynolds. Not infrequently, government bureaucrats are offered lucrative positions with firms whom they regulate, or they take on these firms as private clients once they leave government. Needless to say, this creates perverse incentives for self-interested public servants. Reynolds suggests an additional tax on subsequent income earned after accepting such an offer. Extending the idea to politicians would mean an additional tax on income earned by any former office-holder accepting work for a firm or industry specifically targeted for benefits under legislation they sponsored during their term. There is much detail to be fleshed out, but the idea is fascinating.

Conclusion

Campaign finance reform is futile: there will always be creative ways around it, so it generally doesn’t reap rewards. Campaign funding itself is rather ineffectual at the margin in generating electoral gains. Moreover, campaign finance reform is an endeavor that is almost guaranteed to run afoul of our First Amendment protections of free speech. In addition, the result may a reversion to a less-informed and less interested electorate, lower voter turnout, as well as manipulation of the reform process itself.