Will Your Local School Get a “Wokey-Dokey”?

16 Friday Jul 2021

Posted by pnoetx in Capital Markets, Education, Wokeness

Tags

Academic Dilution, American Bar Association, Cobb County Georgia, Cognia, Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Environmental Social Governance Scores, Equity, ESG Scores, Fact-Checking, Forward Though Ferguson, Grant Making, Investor Activism, John O. McGinnis, Missouri Department of Education, Originalism, School Accreditation, Stacey Lennox, Woke Middlemen

“Middlemen” are often characterized as rip-off artists, or “takers” who somehow insinuate a role for themselves without adding value. They usually do perform valuable roles, however, in price discovery and in matching and routing product to willing consumers, as well as offering a feedback loop to producers. Still, it would be difficult to defend them if they routinely favored producers whose business practices had specific political objectives. Certain middlemen, whom we might broadly label “influencers”, play an indirect role in the transaction process that is sometimes formalized, but not always. They can be rating agents, personalities on social media, or funding sources. Increasingly they blend political criteria into their ratings, recommendations, and decisions. Unfortunately, a number of institutions (and consumers) are falling prey to the corrosive influence of “woke middlemen”, or have already, including education, capital markets, and even law enforcement. The list broadens considerably if we include the influencer roles often played by media more generally, and even government itself.

Grading Schools’ Wokeness

School accreditation at the K-12 levels is often in the hands of organizations that serve as “woke middlemen”. For example, those in charge of accreditation may be in a position to demand compliance with the tenets of critical race theory (CRT). If you haven’t seen it, read this post by Stacey Lennox on the impact that accreditors are having on schools in Cobb County, Georgia. It can be very painful for a school and its students to lose accreditation. Such a loss can happen as a result of legitimate academic decline, but it also can be used as a threat of political retribution, as the situation in Cobb County so aptly illustrates. The task of awarding accreditation is performed by different agents in different states, but often a state’s education department will contract out to firms like Cognia, Inc. This company’s treatment of the Cobb County schools is shocking, and Cobb County taxpayers pay more than $133,000 annually for Cognia “membership”.

The CEO of Cognia says its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion has prompted it to introduce a “new protocol” in its approach to education standards. Celebrating diversity is one thing, but the application of “equity” in the allocation of school or district resources is quite another. But have no fear! Cognia is happy to offer its consulting services to schools to help them meet these new standards. Lennox notes that a few interested parties in Georgia, including parents and state officials, are scrutinizing Cognia’s sinister role in the matter of the Cobb County schools. That can’t happen soon enough!

Cognia operates in a number of other states. In Missouri, for example, the company is intimately involved in the accreditation of private schools. The state Department of Education is mandated by law to handle accreditation of public schools. The DOE’s standards were recently revised, with input from a variety of “stakeholders”, especially the public education establishment. It also receives input from organizations like Forward Through Ferguson, which represents “stakeholders” affiliated with a school district that lost its accreditation several years ago. As the last link shows, that organization takes a strong position on matters of racial equity and justice. It should not come as a surprise that the latest school standards issued by the Missouri DoE in 2020, which are greatly revised and expanded, place specific emphasis on racial equity. It’s certainly not clear that promoting equity, as a distinct mission beyond assessing academic performance, is part of the DoE’s mandate under state law.

The same dynamic is operative at higher levels of education. For example, John O. McGinnis reports on that august middleman known as the American Bar Association, which now proposes “new accrediting standards for law schools that would make them more race-conscious, more politically correct and less intellectually diverse.” This proposal reeks of a desire to downgrade law schools that treat originalist principles with respect. It’s as if we need more attorneys lacking any real understanding of the fundamental, individual rights recognized by and enshrined in our Constitution.

Back to the K-12 levels, the greater is the emphasis on equalizing outcomes, which is the ultimate goal of calls for academic “equity“, the less is the focus on academic excellence. Gifted programs are almost sure to receive fewer resources. Subjects like math and science are recalibrated toward a lower common denominator. Difficult reading assignments are put aside. Discipline suffers. And that’s all before we get to instruction in social justice and critical race theory! If they aren’t already in on it, today’s school leaders might well suffer from “Wokaphobia”, or fear of the consequences of insufficient wokeness.

Grading Corporations’ Wokeness

In the past I’ve written about “middleman” organizations assigning so-called “Environmental, Social, and Governance” (ESG) scores to public companies. These scores are marketed to activist investors, investment funds, and financial advisors as criteria for building “socially responsible” portfolios. ESGs are very much in vogue at the moment, and they have political and social objectives. A public company with a low ESG score, or a fund holding a portfolio of companies with a low average ESG score, may be penalized by the investment community. To avoid such an outcome, companies engage in all sorts of virtue signaling nonsense, not to mention misdirection of staff and assets on pursuits that have nothing to do with fundamental business objectives.

The same kind of corporate waste is motivated by attempts to gain positive media attention or even approval of so-called influencers. There is nothing new about public relations, but today, a veritable army of negative-PR activist “middlemen” hunt for corporate victims on which to prey. The slightest transgression, be it any direct or indirect association with carbon emissions, “cultural appropriation” in advertising, a gender/racial wage or hiring gap, a negative regulatory finding, or any disparate impact in pricing, can subject a company to withering condemnations on social media, in the community, and at the corporate gates. This excessive scrutiny does great social and economic damage, dominating attention and absorbing resources in a defensive posture, all at the expense of a proper focus on the value of product and the people who work honestly to produce it.

Woke Middlemen and Social Failure

Woke leftists performing reviews for school accreditation are dangerous to our children and the future of our republic, and there are other kinds of “middlemen” who are actively undermining schools, such as teachers’ unions. The ESG scores produced by middlemen from the woke investor community undermine business objectives and economic efficiency. We could add to the list of middlemen the corrupt “fact checkers” promoted by major media organizations, large political contributors who fund the campaigns of anti-police prosecutors, and climate-alarmist grant-making organizations. Conservatives and libertarians have varying levels of awareness of these influencers and middlemen, who have been broadly successful in institutionalizing their agendas. They sometimes operate behind the scenes, and they sometimes are cloaked in an ostensible legitimacy, but one must know one’s enemies. Like invasive weeds, they are difficult to root out. In a few cases they can simply be ignored, but their impact elsewhere will be hard to reverse unless they are challenged politically, in the courts, and in the marketplace.

Four More Years to MAGAA

28 Wednesday Oct 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Big Government, Liberty, Politics

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Tags

Abraham Accords, Affordable Care Act, Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, corporate taxes, Covid-19, Critical Race Theorist, David E. Bernstein, Deregulation, Donald Trump, Dreamers, Election Politics, Federalism, Free trade, Gun Rights, Immigration, Impeachment, Individual Mandate, Joe Biden, Joel Kotkin, Living Constitution, Medicare, Middle East Peace, Nancy Pelosi, National Defense, Nationalism, NATO, Neil Gorsuch, Originalism, Paris Climate Accord, Pass Through Business, Penalty Tax, Social Security, United Nations

As a “practical” libertarian, my primary test for any candidate for public office is whether he or she supports less government dominance over private decisions than the status quo. When it comes to Joe Biden and his pack of ventriloquists, the answer is a resounding NO! That should clinch it, right? Probably, but Donald Trump is more complicated….

I’ve always viewed Trump as a corporatist at heart, one who, as a private businessman, didn’t give a thought to free market integrity when he saw rent-seeking opportunities. Now, as a public servant, his laudable desire to “get things done” can also manifest to the advantage of cronyists, which he probably thinks is no big deal. Unfortunately, that is often the way of government, as the Biden family knows all too well. On balance, however, Trump generally stands against big government, as some of the points below will demonstrate.

Trump’s spoken “stream of consciousness” can be maddening. He tends to be inarticulate in discussing policy issues, but at times I enjoy hearing him wonder aloud about policy; at other times, it sounds like an exercise in self-rationalization. He seldom prevaricates when his mind is made up, however.

Not that Biden is such a great orator. He needs cheat sheets, and his cadence and pitch often sound like a weak, repeating loop. In fairness, however, he manages to break it up a bit with an occasional “C’mon, man!”, or “Here’s the deal.”

I have mixed feelings about Trump’s bumptiousness. For example, his verbal treatment of leftists is usually well-deserved and entertaining. Then there are his jokes and sarcasm, for which one apparently must have an ear. He can amuse me, but then he can grate on me. There are times when he’s far too defensive. He tweets just a bit too much. But he talks like a tough, New York working man, which is basically in his DNA. He keeps an insane schedule, and I believe this is true: nobody works harder.

With that mixed bag, I’ll now get on to policy:

Deregulation: Trump has sought to reduce federal regulation and has succeeded to an impressive extent, eliminating about five old regulations for every new federal rule-making. This ranges from rolling back the EPA’s authority to regulate certain “waters” under the Clean Water Act, to liberalized future mileage standards on car manufacturers, to ending destructive efforts to enforce so-called net neutrality. By minimizing opportunities for over-reach by federal regulators, resources can be conserved and managed more efficiently, paving the way for greater productivity and lower costs.

And now, look! Trump has signed a new executive order making federal workers employees-at-will! Yes, let’s “deconstruct the administrative state”. And another new executive order prohibits critical race theory training both in the federal bureaucracy and by federal contractors. End the ridiculous struggle sessions!

Judicial Appointments: Bravo! Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and over 200 federal judges have been placed on the bench by Trump in a single term. I like constitutional originalism and I believe a “living constitution” is a corrupt judicial philosophy. The founding document is as relevant today as it was at its original drafting and at the time of every amendment. I think Trump understands this.

Corporate Taxes: Trump’s reductions in corporate tax rates have promoted economic growth and higher labor income. In 2017, I noted that labor shares the burden of the corporate income tax, so a reversal of those cuts would be counterproductive for labor and capital.

At the same time, the 2017 tax package was a mixed blessing for many so-called “pass-through” businesses (proprietors, partnerships, and S corporations). It wasn’t exactly a simplification, nor was it uniformly a tax cut.

Individual Income Taxes: Rates were reduced for many taxpayers, but not for all, and taxes were certainly not simplified in a meaningful way. The link in the last paragraph provides a few more details.

I am not a big fan of Trump’s proposed payroll tax cut. Such a temporary move will not be of any direct help to those who are unemployed, and it’s unlikely to stimulate much spending from those who are employed. Moreover, without significant reform, payroll tax cuts will directly accelerate the coming insolvency of the Social Security and Medicare Trust Funds.

Nonetheless, I believe permanent tax cuts are stimulative to the economy in ways that increased government spending is not: they improve incentives for effort, capital investment, and innovation, thus increasing the nation’s productive capacity. Trump seems to agree.

Upward Mobility: Here’s Joel Kotkin on the gains enjoyed by minorities under the Trump Administration. The credit goes to strong private economic growth, pre-pandemic, as opposed to government aid programs.

Foreign Policy: Peace in the Middle East is shaping up as a real possibility under the Abraham Accords. While the issue of coexisting, sovereign Palestinian and Zionist homelands remains unsettled, it now seems achievable. Progress like this has eluded diplomatic efforts for well over five decades, and Trump deserves a peace prize for getting this far with it.

Iran is a thorn, and the regime is a terrorist actor. I support a tough approach with respect to the ayatollahs, which a Trump has delivered. He’s also pushed for troop withdrawals in various parts of the world. He has moved U.S. troops out of Germany and into Poland, where they represent a greater deterrent to Russian expansionism. Trump has pushed our NATO allies to take responsibility for more of their own defense needs, all to the better. Trump has successfully managed North Korean intransigence, though it is an ongoing problem. We are at odds with the leadership in mainland China, but the regime is adversarial, expansionist, and genocidal, so I believe it’s best to take a tough approach with them. At the UN, some of our international “partners” have successfully manipulated the organization in ways that make continued participation by the U.S. of questionable value. Like me, Trump is no fan of UN governance as it is currently practiced.

Gun Rights: Trump is far more likely to stand for Second Amendment rights than Joe Biden. Especially now, given the riots in many cities and calls to “defund police”, it is vitally important that people have a means of self-defense. See this excellent piece by David E. Bernstein on that point.

National Defense: a pure public good; I’m sympathetic to the argument that much of our “defense capital” has deteriorated. Therefore, Trump’s effort to rebuild was overdue. The improved deterrent value of these assets reduces the chance they will ever have to be used against adversaries. Of course, this investment makes budget balance a much more difficult proposition, but a strong national defense is a priority, as long as we avoid the role of the world’s policeman.

Energy Policy: The Trump Administration has made efforts to encourage U.S. energy independence with a series of deregulatory moves. This has succeeded to the extent the U.S. is now a net energy exporter. At the same time, Trump has sought to eliminate subsidies for wasteful renewable energy projects. Unfortunately, ethanol is still favored by energy policy, which might reflect Trump’s desire to assuage the farm lobby.

Climate Policy: Trump kept us out of the costly Paris Climate Accord, which would have cost the U.S. trillions of dollars in lost GDP and subsidies to other nations. Trump saw through the accord as a scam under which leading carbon-emitting nations (such as China) face few real obligations. Meanwhile, the U.S. has led the world in reductions in carbon emissions during Trump’s term, even pre-pandemic. That’s partly a consequence of increased reliance on natural gas relative to other fossil fuels. Trump has also supported efforts to develop more nuclear energy capacity, which is the ultimate green fuel.

COVID-19 Response: As I’ve written several times, in the midst of a distracting and fraudulent impeachment attempt, Trump took swift action to halt inbound flights from China. He marshaled resources to obtain PPE, equipment, and extra hospital space in hot spots, and he kick-started the rapid development of vaccines. He followed the advice of his sometimes fickle medical experts early in the pandemic, which was not always a good thing. In general, his policy stance honored federalist principles by allowing lower levels of government to address local pandemic conditions on appropriate terms. If the pandemic has you in economic straits, you probably have your governor or local officials to thank. As for the most recent efforts to pass federal COVID relief, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats have insisted on loading up the legislation with non-COVID spending provisions. They have otherwise refused to negotiate pre-election, as if to blame the delay on Trump.

Immigration: My libertarian leanings often put me at odds with nationalists, but I do believe in national sovereignty and the obligation of the federal government to control our borders. Trump is obviously on board with that. My qualms with the border wall are its cost and the availability of cheaper alternatives leveraging technological surveillance. I might differ with Trump in my belief in liberalizing legal immigration. I more strongly differ with his opposition to granting permanent legal residency to so-called Dreamers, individuals who arrived in the U.S. as minors with parents who entered illegally. However, Trump did offer a legal path to citizenship for Dreamers in exchange for funding of the border wall, a deal refused by congressional Democrats.

Health Care: No more penalty (tax?) to enforce the individual mandate, and the mandate itself is likely to be struck down by the Supreme Court as beyond legislative intent. Trump also oversaw a liberalization of insurance offerings and competition by authorizing short-term coverage of up to a year and enabling small businesses to pool their employees with others in order to obtain better rates, among other reforms. Trump seems to have deferred work on a full-fledged plan to replace the Affordable Care Act because there’s been little chance of an acceptable deal with congressional Democrats. That’s unfortunate, but I count it as a concession to political reality.

Foreign Trade: I’m generally a free-trader, so I’m not wholeheartedly behind Trump’s approach to trade. However, our trade deals of the past have hardly constituted “free trade” in action, so tough negotiation has its place. It’s also true that foreign governments regularly apply tariffs and subsidize their home industries to place them at a competitive advantage vis-a-vis the U.S. As the COVID pandemic has shown, there are valid national security arguments to be made for protecting domestic industries. But make no mistake: ultimately consumers pay the price of tariffs and quotas on foreign goods. I cut Trump some slack here, but this is an area about which I have concerns.

Executive Action: Barack Obama boasted that he had a pen and a phone, his euphemism for exercising authority over the executive branch within the scope of existing law. Trump is taking full advantage of his authority when he deems it necessary. It’s unfortunate that legislation must be so general as to allow significant leeway for executive-branch interpretation and rule-making. But there are times when the proper boundaries for these executive actions are debatable.

Presidents have increasingly pressed their authority to extremes over the years, and sometimes Trump seems eager to push the limits. Part of this is born out of his frustration with the legislative process, but I’m uncomfortable with the notion of unchecked executive authority.

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Of course I’ll vote for Trump! I had greater misgivings about voting for him in 2016, when I couldn’t be sure what we’d get once he took office. After all, his politics had been all over the map over preceding decades. But in many ways I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I’m much more confident now that he is our best presidential bet for peace, prosperity, and liberty.

Nominate and Confirm

23 Wednesday Sep 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Supreme Court

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Absentee Ballots, Amy Coney Barrett, Antonin Scalia, Barack Obama, Bush vs. Gore, Check Schumer, Contested Election, Court Packing, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Judicial Activism, Lindsey Graham, Living Constitution, Merrick Garland, Mitch McConnell, Originalism, Phil Murphy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Supreme Court, Ted Cruz, Tom Wolf, Voter Fraud

Many on the left practically cheered the passing of Antonin Scalia in 2016, a reaction I witnessed with disgust on my own social media feeds. Now, we should all mourn the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but some of the same people seem almost comically furious with her for “choosing such a bad time to die”, just 46 days before the presidential election! Or, for refusing to step down during the Obama administration, when she could have been replaced with a much more youthful lefty jurist.

Of course, the Left is also furious that President Trump plans to nominate a candidate for Ginsburg’s vacancy on the Court, and that Republican leadership in the Senate plans to bring the nomination to a vote, perhaps before November 3rd.

Trump and the GOP majority are entitled to do that under the Constitution, and they should. Senator Ted Cruz explained the primary reason:

“Democrats and Joe Biden have made clear they intend to challenge this election. They intend to fight the legitimacy of the election. As you you know Hillary Clinton has told Joe Biden ‘under no circumstances should you concede, you should challenge this election.’ and we cannot have election day come and go with a 4-4 court. A 4-4 court that is equally divided cannot decide anything. And I think we risk a constitutional crisis if we do not have a nine-justice Supreme Court, particularly when there is such a risk of … a contested election.”

This presidential election might be fraught with more procedural controversy than any before. The coronavirus, or its promoters in the media and the Democrat party, has spooked many voters into the belief that going to a polling place in-person on Election Day is too dangerous. This despite the fact that distancing and masks will be required, and the time it takes to complete a ballot does not require “prolonged exposure” to anyone. So now we face the prospect of mail-in balloting on an unprecedented scale, which is an invitation to manipulation and fraud. A couple of examples:

“… consider some of the suspect decisions already being made in various states that deliberately weaken ballot security. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, for example, voted last week along party lines (the judges are elected) that county drop boxes, including unattended ones, could be used to collect votes. Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, and his party supported the measure, which reached the court by lawsuits, thus avoiding GOP control of both legislative chambers. The decision obviously opens the door to potential fraud because ballots in unsecured drop boxes could be tampered with or stolen.

New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy also made some curious decisions. A Jersey friend sent me a mailer he received that was addressed only to ‘Residential Customer.’ Inside, a pamphlet from the county clerk in Bergen County said that a Murphy order ‘requires’ every county to mail a ballot to ‘every active registered voter.’ That raises the chances of thousands of unmarked ballots being stolen from the post office or front porches, practices not exactly unheard of in New Jersey.”

Already a number of lawsuits have been filed in various states over absentee ballots. There have been missed deadlines, disputes over whether certain candidates should appear on those ballots, invalidated pre-filled applications for ballots, and an incorrect mailer sent by the U.S. Postal Service to voters nationwide regarding absentee ballots. Let’s face it: for all the earlier denials by Democrats that the mail-in ballot process was not subject to gaming or fraud, neither side trusts the other. There will be many more disputes as ballots are counted before and after Election Day.

It’s reasonable to expect that a few cases might rise to the level of the U.S. Supreme Count before election tallies are final in some states, as in the Florida recount in the Bush vs. Gore election of 2000. A 4 – 4 tie on the Court would leave lower, state-court rulings in place that could decide the outcome of a federal election. That’s not how the process is intended to work. Needless to say, that’s another reason why Democrats oppose a Trump nominee prior to the election. There’s no doubt they’d push forward with their own nominee were the shoe on the other foot, however, just as Republicans opposed the confirmation of Merrick Garland in 2016.

So who’s a hypocrite? Republicans who said that they wouldn’t confirm or even conduct a confirmation process in an election year, as in 2016, certainly qualify (Lindsey Graham, among others). It must have seemed expedient to stay so at the time, but it was foolish. And Democrats who now protest after insisting in 2016 (and before) that a Supreme Court vacancy should be filled by the sitting president, even in an election year, also qualify (Chuck Schumer, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, among others). Here’s what some top progressive legal minds were saying in 2016: It’s a duty and obligation for the president to nominate and for the Senate to undertake a confirmation process!!

Here’s the key issue: The president has the authority to nominate Supreme Court justices any time during his term. If the Senate confirms, then a new justice is seated. If the Senate chooses not to confirm, the vacancy remains. That’s how it works. There have been 29 vacancies on the Court in election years, and in 22 of those cases the sitting president sent a nomination to the Senate. As Justice Ginsburg said in 2016:

“There’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being the president in his last year.”

Her purported wish on her death bed, that her replacement would be chosen by a new president, was not hypocritical. It was a wish, not a legal opinion. It was just as “political” as the contradictory statements made by the politicians, however.

Ginsburg also said it’s the Senate’s job to take up a vote, which the Republicans refused to do in 2016. That was their prerogative, however, and the decision does not bind anyone in the current circumstance.

Mitch McConnell is right:

“In the last midterm election before Justice Scalia’s death in 2016, Americans elected a Republican Senate majority because we pledged to check and balance the last days of a lame-duck president’s second term. We kept our promise. Since the 1880s, no Senate has confirmed an opposite-party president’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. By contrast, Americans reelected our majority in 2016 and expanded it in 2018 because we pledged to work with President Trump and support his agenda, particularly his outstanding appointments to the federal judiciary. Once again, we will keep our promise. President Trump’s nominee will receive a vote on the floor of the United States Senate.”

Democrats have promised to “pack the Court” by adding seats to the bench for new, ideologically-preferred justices if a Trump nominee is confirmed, among other threats. They should heed the caution of moderates who know how dangerous that may be. The mere threat gives Republicans reason to pack the Court themselves, when they can, which might be as soon as January. Moreover, nothing could do more to undermine confidence in the Court. RBG herself had the following to say about Court packing:

“Well, if anything, it would make the court appear partisan. It would be that one side saying, ‘when we’re in power, it was only to enlarge the number of judges so we will have more people who will vote the way we want them to…’ So I am not at all in favor of that solution to what I see as a temporary situation.”

Well, of course the Court is divided along certain ideological lines, and to some extent those differences break along dimensions of legal philosophy, such as originalism vs. a “living Constitution”, or judicial activism. That’s not to say that the Court is always partisan, however. The process of nominating and confirming justices should not be as partisan as it has become in the last 25 years (see the last link). Let’s not make it worse.

Trump will nominate an able jurist. Senators should meet and independently assess that individual’s legal qualifications and temperament. My expectation is they will vote to confirm, and I hope that vote takes place without rancor.

Note: Thanks to the Washington Free Beacon for the wonderful meme at the top of this post.

Living Constitution, Dying Liberty

14 Saturday Mar 2020

Posted by pnoetx in Living Constitution, Originalism

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Abortion, Article I, Community Standards, Deceleration of Independence, Emoluments Clause, Equal Protection Clause, FCC, Federalism, Fouteenth Amendment, Glenn Reynolds, Interstate Commerce Clause, Living Constitution, Neal Gorsuch, New Deal, Ninth Amendment, One-Man One-Vote, Originalism, Randy Barnett, Reproductive rights, Social Security, State's Rights, Tenth Amendment, Unenumerated Rights, War on Drugs, War on Prostitution

What would a “living Constitution” mean if the right wing “gave it life”, as it were? Your answer ought to reveal a truth you’ve probably overlooked if you’re a “living constitutionalist”.

The U.S. Constitution protects the rights of individuals against the coercive power of the state. It offers a thorough bulwark against that power not only by enumerating certain rights, such as the rights to free speech and free association, but also by recognizing the existence and sanctity of a complementary set of unenumerated rights. The Ninth Amendment states:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

The nearly 250 years since the nation’s founding have seen a debate in judicial case law about whether the Constitution should be interpreted based on its original language, or whether modern social and technological realities should change the way it is interpreted. This pits constitutional “originalists” against advocates of a so-called “living Constitution”.

Antiquated? Or Inconvenient?

For example, there is disagreement about whether the Second Amendment right to bear arms is broad, or limited to certain very small arms, or whether it should permit no private ownership of arms at all. Another example: do modern sensitivities men that constitutionally unprotected “fighting words” now encompass opinions that are merely controversial? Do expressions of support for such policies as flexible wages really fall under the rubric of racism, “hate speech”, or fighting words? Here’s one more: does the (unenumerated) right to life allow the state (and so the law) to claim a greater interest in protecting the contentment of a healthy, but reluctant, prospective mother than in the life of her unborn child?

Three years ago, Randy Barnett asked a question about the living constitution amid the debate over the confirmation of Justice Neal Gorsuch, an avowed originalist. Barnett asked:

“Why would you possibly want a nonoriginalist ‘living constitutionalist’ conservative judge or justice who can bend the meaning of the text to make it evolve to conform to conservative political principles and ends? However much you disagree with it, wouldn’t you rather a conservative justice consider himself constrained by the text of the Constitution like, say, the Emoluments Clause?”

That question was followed-up recently by Glenn Reynolds: his thought experiment asks how a right-wing majority might fashion a “living Constitution”, an exercise that should chasten “living constitutionalists” on the Left. He first notes that efforts to fight terrorism can become a real threat to civil liberties. As such, they represent a form of living constitutionalism. Will your on-line behavior and your phone calls be closely monitored, perhaps searching for various keywords? Will formerly unreasonable searches and seizures be sanctioned by an anti-terror, living Constitution? We haven’t gone very far in that direction, even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, but it’s easy to imagine a wave of support for such a revision under certain circumstances.

We’ve certainly witnessed erosions of civil liberties under the so-called “War on Drugs”. The courts have not always stood in the way of extra-Constitutional actions by law enforcement. A right-wing living Constitution might sanction certain searches, seizures, and confiscation of private property, to say nothing of the intrusion into the choices of individuals to use drugs privately. The same is true of the “War on Prostitution”.

Imagine a right-wing judiciary interpreting various forms of audio, video, and virtual reality content as violations of standards of “decency”. Imagine a case involving a restrictive FCC ruling of this nature, and the Court finding the FCC’s censorship constitutional at the federal level, not merely at a community’s level.

Imagine state legislation that forces the Court to weigh-in on whether federalism and states’ rights outlined in the Tenth Amendment outweigh the federal regulatory powers conferred by Article I’s Interstate Commerce Clause. Crazy? Maybe, but a conservative Court could decide that such an interpretation could permit state taxes, pollutants, or other restrictions on residents or businesses domiciled in other states.

Originalism? Or “Stretch” Originalism?

Reynolds mentions a few other possibilities, but without more detail, some of these examples seem muddled because the hypothetical interpretations could, conceivably, represent sound originalism, as opposed to conservative distortions of original intent. But perhaps these are all matters of degree, rather than kind. This includes the possibility of a conservative Court rolling back New Deal Court decisions related to price supports, wage supports, labor practices, and Social Security.

The same ambiguity applies to Reynolds’ brief discussion “one-man, one-vote” decisions of the 1960s, which leaned upon the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause to effectively prohibit states from apportioning either congressional districts or state legislative districts in any way other than proportional representation. This can result in discrimination against certain interests in states having diverse geographies with dissimilar economies or cultures. A conservative court might well chip away at the one-man, one-vote principle out of deference to original intent. This might not be an unreasonable interpretation of the unenumerated powers of states contemplated by the Tenth Amendment.

Then there are so-called reproductive rights. The pro-abortion Left would be aghast, but not surprised, to see a conservative court reverse key decisions that have been made in their favor. The rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” are mentioned explicitly in the Declaration of Independence, but not the Constitution. Nevertheless, they are presumed to be among those unenumerated rights recognized by the Ninth Amendment. Thus, with respect to abortion, the dividing line between original intent and living-constitutional overreach by a conservative Court is somewhat muddy. But in the view of the Left, a conservative Court might well reach radical decisions regarding the right to life.

Conclusion

The Constitution exists as a set of governing principles, but the founders’ intent was to shield rights from fickle waves of majoritarianism, or even would-be despots. You might despise conservatism or statism, but this recognition should serve as a warning to heed the original text and its intent, not to view it as a mere nuisance to the interests of one’s agenda and fellow travelers.

I’ll close with Reynolds’ admonition to “living constitutionalists” of the Left:

“All of these [decisions] would be catastrophic for the left, and I’m sure I could come up with many more examples given time and space. Fortunately for the left, Judge Gorsuch appears to be devoted to interpreting the Constitution as it was understood by the Framers (in terms of its ‘original public meaning,’ to use the law professor definition), and not to embracing a living Constitution. … But my advice to those on the left attacking originalist approaches is this: Be careful what you ask for, because you won’t like it if you get it.”

Sacred Cow Chips

Tag Archives: Originalism

Nominate and Confirm