Recently in Politics Category

Darren McKinney begs to differ on the recent love shown for Bobby Jindal as a vice presidential nominee. Earlier. More on legacy lawsuits: Heritage via Hayride; Lafayette Daily Advertiser; POL was ahead of the issue, discussing the problem in March 2012 and May 2011. LNL reports a reform bill compromise has been reached in principle.

On last Thursday and Friday, I was in Charlotte for the spring meeting of the Civil Justice Task Force of the American Legislative Exchange Council, to which I presented my thoughts on how today’s securities litigation affected states. Uptown Charlotte was visited by various protesters affiliated with labor unions, the Occupy movement, and other left-leaning causes who were objecting to ALEC’s meeting and at the earlier-in-the-week annual shareholder meeting for Bank of America.

The protests against ALEC have been led by Van Jones’s Color of Change organization, which has attacked the free-market organization for drafting “stand your ground” model legislation arguably (though not really) at issue in the Trayvon Martin shooting. (Note: Florida’s stand-your-ground law pre-dates ALEC’s model bill, and the group has now disbanded the task force responsible for advancing that model legislation.) Like Ted, I’ve found the left’s attacks on ALEC to be profoundly disingenuous. First, it’s clearly the case that those opposed to ALEC’s reform work—in the case of the Civil Justice Task Force, for instance, the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers of America—offer up legislation and legislative amendments to further their own interests. Second, if ALEC didn’t exist, corporations would still offer draft legislation and legislative amendments to further their own interests; it just wouldn’t be vetted by a broad group including legislators across several states and thinkers like myself, my former colleague and Point of Law founding editor Walter Olson (now at the Cato Institute), our editor Ted Frank and others at his Center for Class Action Fairness, and ALEC Civil Justice Task Force co-chair Victor Schwartz, who edits the most-used law school casebook on torts. Exactly how is ALEC supposed to be an unusually nefarious force, apart from the fact that its critics disagree with its agenda?

I'm very surprised that people are treating Obama's public statement as a watershed moment. Obama has publicly supported gay marriage since 1996, and only in recent years has cravenly pretended that he hasn't. Even now, Obama couches his support in terms of "states' rights," a concept the administration has repeatedly rejected, most recently in suits against states attempting to protect against voter fraud. As a policy matter, Obama's "evolution" has no effect: the Department of Justice was already breaking with its obligation to enforce federal law and litigating against DOMA on grounds that would guarantee a constitutional place for gay marriage.

I suppose one could celebrate that gays are now sufficiently accepted within society that the Obama administration felt it was politically more dangerous to continue its disingenuous hypocrisy on the issue than to publicly come out with half-hearted support for gay marriage. (As a political calculation, the Democratic voting bloc most likely to oppose gay marriage—African-Americans—is unlikely to leave Obama, despite the disastrous consequences his policies are having for that community.) And the administration has now successfully distracted the news cycle from the poor economy for a full four days. But they will be hard pressed to complain about the fact that Mitt Romney flip-flopped on social issues to appease his base.

Secondary boycotts on ALEC supporters demonstrate a breakdown of civil society. Liberals have NCSL and NAAG and any number of Soros-funded organizations where legislators can exchange ideas and think about model legislation; heaven forfend free-market legislators have the same. The racial mau-mauing is especially disgusting and unfair, especially given the fact that so many of these former ALEC supporters were already supporting the Congressional Black Caucus, which refuses membership to African-Americans who don't toe their anti-market and racial-grievance line. [Adler @ Volokh; Smith @ WSJ and @CCP; WSJ; Bader; Forbes; Cherokee Tribune; Franklin Center; ALEC]

Just last month I joked about whites who "claim the Cherokee great-grandfather" to get an affirmative action bump. Little did I know that former Harvard Law professor and Massachusetts Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren would bring the issue to the forefront: with 1/32 Indian heritage, Warren—and her law-school employers—had been claiming diversity credit as a Native American. We've previously noted Warren's penchant for academic dishonesty when it suits her political purposes (as well as her lobbying for the litigation lobby special interest at the expense of consumers).

Can we at least say that, when someone 31/32 white and 1/32 Indian finds it advantageous to her career to claim to be Indian, we can stop talking about "white privilege"? John Rosenberg and Hans Bader comment at Minding the Campus.

As complaints rise about Governor Bobby Jindal's failure to crack down on abusive "legacy" lawsuits that are killing jobs, questions are being raised about why the rising GOP star has such close ties to the litigation lobby. [Political Desk via LNL; earlier]

The big news story is that Mitt Romney's home under construction in San Diego has all sorts of nice features (including a car elevator and a big basement) and a lobbyist to help the construction through the permitting process. It's an odd story of the politics of envy. We already know Mitt Romney is rich; rich people can buy nice things that you and I can't afford; that sort of advantage of being rich creates an incentive to create wealth that makes society better off.

An aside: while 2012 Romney can buy things I can't afford, it's also worth noting that you and I can walk to the Apple Store (watch out for the glass!), and pay cash for things someone ten times as wealthy as Romney couldn't have dreamed of buying in 1992.

Anyway, it's not like Romney is a John Edwards hypocrite lecturing about poverty and inequality while spending campaign money on a mistress or an Al Gore hypocrite lecturing about the environment while leaving a huge carbon footprint or a Barack Obama hypocrite taking advantage of a backscratching land deal with Tony Rezko to be able to live in his own big house. One wishes Romney would stop treating the wealth as an embarrassment, rather than a signal of his previous success.

The San Diego news story is a good example of the phenomenon. Why is the story "Romney is so rich, his home has a lobbyist" rather than "California makes it so hard to create jobs that actually make things, that Romney's home needs a lobbyist"? The latter tells us much more about California's unemployment rate: the political class is extracting wealth and wealth-creation for its own benefit at the expense of the larger economy. It's a large reason why California has a 10.9% unemployment rate: Romney is rich enough to pay the additional expense of a lobbyist to create a lot of construction jobs just for the unnecessary luxury of a big California house; many other people are just throwing up their hands and not creating the jobs. It seems to me the latter is a bigger problem than the former.

Despite the president's promise that "you can keep your own insurance," key PPACA provisions are calculated to undermine the long-term viability of the private insurance market, by making existing coverage unaffordable or unavailable at any price. Indeed, while individuals may technically be allowed to keep their plans, that protection exists in name only. Plan serial numbers may temporarily remain the same, but the PPACA's combination of high taxes, large subsidies, and extensive mandatory contractual terms seems likely to eventually drive most private insurance plans out of business.

So say Richard Epstein and David Hyman in a new report on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act for the Manhattan Institute, "Why Obamacare will End Health Insurance as We Know It." PPACA not only drastically changes the entire face of the health insurance market, but will eventually be the death knell of employer-based private insurance, the two argue.

HR 5, federal regulation of medical malpractice litigation, represents good public policy that would reduce abusive lawsuits and improve health outcomes. But since it would transfer wealth away from lawyers to patients and doctors, the litigation lobby has actively opposed it, and quoted me out of context in that regard. One would certainly prefer that HR 5 be tweaked to unambiguously comply with a vision of the Commerce Clause consistent with, say, the Randy Barnett view. It would be painless to do so. For example, one could structure the legislation to withhold 25% of Medicare funds from states that fail to meet certain medical malpractice litigation standards, rather than federalizing what is (unlike, say, product liability or consumer class actions) largely a local issue: the end result would be even better than this bill. And states that have already implemented reform might be legitimately offended that the benefits of their foresight will be blunted when Congress shunts competing states along; one solution to that might be to limit the reforms to patients who use federally-subsidized medicine, such as Medicare, Medicaid, or PPACA exchanges. But given trial lawyer support for an administration that has propounded PPACA, the trial lawyer opposition to this bill on Commerce Clause grounds is totally disingenuous. Let's see the trial bar lobby for repeal of PPACA, and then they can legitimately complain about HR 5's federalism issues. (Of course, as a political matter, this is largely counting angels on the heads of pins: Harry Reid will never permit this to come to a vote in the Senate, and even if it passed the Senate, Barack Obama would veto this on behalf of his trial-lawyer friends.)

It's easy to magnanimously ask for a tax increase when you can get 25000% returns on hiring lobbyists to offset that with even larger tax breaks. [Stoll]

Josh Barro calls the Buffett Rule "a political gimmick, not a serious policy proposal," and notes that it will exacerbate existing distortions in the tax code.