“when the United States walks away from cooperative bodies — from the Paris climate accord to the WHO — it leaves behind a vacuum. China has hastened to fill it, and that, more than anything, is bolstering Beijing’s rise and influence. It gives China a chance to be a good guy — say, pledging $30 million to the WHO when the US threatened to withdraw, a fraction of the money the US provides annually. The Trump administration, in abandoning institutions for being too China-centric, is allowing them to become just that. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Again, this is not to say the US doesn’t have legitimate criticisms of the WHO, or China. But by refusing to work within the system, it is actively ceding leverage and losing credibility. Last week, in a discussion with reporters about the implications of the US leaving the WHO, Elizabeth Cousens, the president and CEO of the UN Foundation, said that even as the US is trying to push the WHO to reform, it’s “losing influence in that conversation because they’ve stepped off the field.””
“Imagine a dog. She spends her entire life in an iron crate so small that she cannot turn around. Her tail has been cut off so that other dogs in cages jammed up against hers won’t chew it off in distress. When she has puppies, the males are castrated without painkillers. They are left close enough for her to nurse, but too far away for her to show them any affection.
Fortunately, this dog is a fictional creation. We have laws preventing people from treating pets this way.
Unfortunately, we are doing this to animals that are very similar to dogs. This is an all-too-real description of how we treat some of the millions and millions of pigs we raise for meat on factory farms.
So why do we treat the animals we eat in ways we would never, ever treat our pets?”
“in the American system, essentially every law and regulatory undertaking is subject to litigation and second-guessing by the courts. That means Supreme Court appointments have vast and wide-ranging authority over economic issues — authority that is often ignored by politicians and the media, but not by people with money at stake.
The US Chamber of Commerce, for example, did not enthusiastically back Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination because they liked his thinking on abortion, but because they like his hostility toward regulatory agencies. And while progressives often appreciated that Kavanaugh’s predecessor Anthony Kennedy sided with liberals like Ruth Bader Ginsburg on some abortion and LGBTQ rights cases, it’s telling that Kennedy himself — like Sandra Day O’Connor before him — strategically timed his retirement to be replaced by a Republican president and a GOP Senate.”
…
“though the bulk of the law was spared by John Robert’s judiciousness, he did cost millions of people health insurance by inventing a new doctrine (that Congress could not threaten to take away previously provided matching funds to create an incentive for states to accept new matching funds) to block aspects of Medicaid expansion.
What makes Ginsburg’s departure from the bench alarming in this regard is that post-Lopez, essentially all new progressive legislation has been a crapshoot. There’s inevitably a lawsuit to strike down anything, but on any given issue, a Roberts or (more rarely) Gorsuch or Kavanaugh might defect. With a sixth conservative justice, it would be that much easier to stop any new law that you like, since you only need to get five of them. There are many conservative legal theorists — including Thomas on the bench and Georgetown professor Randy Barnett in the scholarly world — who believe that essentially all modern economic regulation is unconstitutional. There are plenty of smart conservative lawyers to write up a brief arguing that any new law should be struck down. As for using old laws to address new problems, well, there’s a fix for that, too.”
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“Conservative jurists, in other words, are preparing to sharply limit regulators’ ability to promulgate new rules, arguing that each new change in policy should be achieved through the passage of a new law.
That sounds nice, but it’s completely out of touch with how the American political system actually functions.”
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“the business community and the Supreme Court bar and the conservative legal movement are all well aware that there is a huge economic and regulatory element. Their strategy is to put in place a judicial roadblock to democratic governance of the economy.”
“Lebanon’s political system is the product of a decades-old power-sharing arrangement among leaders of Lebanon’s 18 religious sects, the most important being the Sunni and Shia Muslims and Maronite Christians.”
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“It has helped mediate sectarian conflict, forced leaders to build consent among their constituencies, and prevented the heavy centralization of power that plunged much of the Arab world into dictatorship.
But this particular medicine has side effects. Political elites have used their positions to bleed the economy dry and monopolize control over public institutions. Parliament and many cabinets have been filled with some of the same faces for decades. The speaker of Parliament, Nabih Berri, has occupied the post since 1992. As members of the traditional ruling class age or die out, their sons often replace them, meaning politics has become a family business for the Gemayels, Hariris, Aouns, and Jumblatts, to name a few.
Many politicians have amassed great wealth by taking cuts of public contracts, facilitating bureaucratic processes, or directly siphoning public funds. Public servants are appointed by sect rather than on merit, and national loyalty competes with and often loses out to sectarian loyalty.
This has undermined civic life and turned politics into a zero-sum sectarian competition rather than a policy debate. Questions as mundane as where to build a waste incinerator or how to reform public utilities, for example, take on sectarian dimensions over who gets what.
Why, then, do people not simply vote this rotten elite out?
For one, they have played on sectarian insecurities to perpetuate distrust among the population, casting themselves as saviors of their community. Attempts to unseat a particular leader are quickly seen as attacks on the sect itself, leading to a rallying effect around said leader regardless of their performance.”
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“The political class has also skillfully used the state to provide constituents with jobs, financial support, and other privileges. And, of course, where persuasion fails there is always coercion. Parties routinely harass and intimidate those who seek reform or even dare to criticize their leaders.
All factions are complicit to some degree, but one in particular presents an altogether more difficult problem: Hezbollah.”
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“Hezbollah maintains a formidable militia with direct support from Iran. It has turned Lebanon and its Shia community into the base of its “resistance” project of open-ended conflict with Israel and the West.
Hezbollah runs a state-within-a-state, complete with a military, security forces, and infrastructure; at the same time, it has penetrated Lebanon’s institutions through politics or by cultivating powerful allies. The Lebanese military lacks the will and ability to disarm Hezbollah. Those who present a serious challenge to its armed status are intimidated or killed.”
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“Attempts to constrain its military arm are violently repressed. In May 2008, for example, a cabinet decision to dismantle the militia’s independent telecommunications infrastructure was met with a military takeover of much of Beirut. Hezbollah has also been implicated in a string of assassinations of political rivals, most recently through a United Nations tribunal that convicted Salim Ayyash of complicity in the murder of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.”
“Erin Suggs applied for unemployment in March as soon as the California salon she works at shut down. She figured her case would be pretty straightforward — she works on commission, meaning she’s counted as a regular employee, not self-employed.
But it took the 50-year-old mother of two more than two months to get her benefits, during which time she estimates she and her husband called California’s Employment Development Department, which administers the state’s unemployment system, upward of 3,000 times. It turned out that in filling out the forms, she checked one box wrong. “It just put me in pending hell for 10 weeks,” she says. “There was no way of fixing it.”
Her experience is hardly unique. In California alone, more than 6 million people, or one-third of the state’s workers, have filed for unemployment benefits, and hundreds of thousands of them have been stuck in a weeks- or even months-long backlog. Meanwhile, nearly 1 million people across the United States continue to file new unemployment claims each week, and some 29 million people are receiving some sort of unemployment assistance. And for many of them, navigating the system has been a nightmare.
The coronavirus has brought home the many shortcomings of the American unemployment insurance system and revealed it to be fundamentally — and often intentionally — broken, chipped away over time to ensure that the jobless don’t use it too much, lest anyone get used to it. Unemployment insurance operates under a hybrid state-federal setup that has resulted in an awkward push-and-pull between the federal government, state governments, and employers. No one quite wants to take full responsibility of it, but everyone wants a say.”
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” A reimagined unemployment system would treat the jobless like customers, not criminals, while helping them stay afloat as they find their next gig. It would be easier to navigate, pay people more consistently, regardless of where they live, and take into account the wage stagnation of decades past. It would be easier to ramp up in times of crisis and better serve the modern workforce — groups such as gig workers, short-term employees, and people looking for jobs.”
…
“unemployment insurance has never worked super smoothly in the US. The first state in the country to put an unemployment insurance program in place was Wisconsin in 1932, and the federal program became law under the Social Security Act of 1935. It was set up as a mixed federal-state endeavor for reasons that wouldn’t surprise the average political observer today: There was disagreement over what level of government should be in charge of running the program, and proponents of unemployment insurance were nervous it might be undone by the Supreme Court, which had struck down multiple pieces of legislation. The hope was that this model would give it a better chance with the court, and even if the federal component were struck down, the state components could live on.
“It was designed to have this very broken and fractured structure,” Konczal said.”
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” In the US, unemployment insurance is meant to work by replacing about half of a worker’s wages (up to a certain cap) for about 26 weeks. It is intended for those who involuntarily lost their jobs, meaning they were laid off or fired, and not people who quit. Those who quit their jobs can wind up collecting benefits, namely if they can explain that they did so for good cause, such as experiencing sexual harassment, but it often winds up being a battle adjudicated by the state.
The program is financed through state and federal payroll taxes that are supposed to fund administrative systems and the benefits themselves.
Many states have kept those taxes pretty low, resulting in a system that is chronically underfunded. And during periods of stress, the impact of that underfunding really shows.”
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“Years of disinvestment in technology and administration led to problems like those now affecting Suggs and millions of unemployed workers across the country. You make one mistake, or your case has one little quirk, and you’re sucked into a bureaucratic black box disaster with no clear end in sight. And then, once the economy gets better, everyone moves on and forgets, and the political impetus to fix these problems fades.”
“President Donald Trump has admitted in a series of interviews with veteran journalist Bob Woodward that he downplayed the threat of COVID-19 despite knowing that it would cause considerable harm.
On February 7, Trump emphasized that the novel coronavirus was “deadly stuff.”
“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said on a taped call with Woodward. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”
Contrast that with Trump’s remarks later that month: “The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year,” he said at a briefing on February 26. “That was shocking to me. And so far if you look at what we have with the 15 people, and they are recovering.””
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“According to Trump, the move was strategic. “I wanted to always play it down,” Trump told Woodward mid-March. “I still like playing it down, because I don’t want to create a panic.””
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“it remains unclear how lying to the American public and deliberately propagating wrong information, even if it cultivates some false sense of security, is a winning strategy. Just last month, the president said that just 9,000 people had died from COVID-19.
The short-sightedness of such an approach is reflected not only in Trump’s public statements but also in how he approached the virus from a policy perspective in its nascent stages.
Consider Trump’s March 13 announcement that he would pave the way for a public-private partnership to create a robust testing program, as private labs were having difficulty navigating burdensome Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulations. The decision was a good one but could have been made earlier had Trump chosen to be frank with the American people.”
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“Also in February, Trump privately admitted to Woodward that the virus would pose a menacing threat. But the president did not shepherd the Roche test, which is particularly efficient at screening for the virus, through FDA approval until that March 13 press conference, hamstringing the country’s ability to get ahead of the problem.”
“Let’s remind everyone why we shouldn’t bail out airlines. Yes, the coronavirus crisis is both a public health and an economic tragedy. But this doesn’t justify the government granting special privileges to private firms, at least not without those firms first taking other available steps to potentially avoid the need for a bailout.
There are other options they could pursue.
First, the airlines still have plenty of access to private capital markets. They own significant amounts of durable assets that they can sell or use as collateral to get additional financing. Indeed, they’ve been able to secure substantial private capital since the beginning of the pandemic.
Second, if private financing fails, some airlines can and should do what they’ve done in the past when in such a predicament: declare bankruptcy. Past bankruptcies tell us that airlines can continue flying safely even during a bankruptcy, so there’s no systemic risk posed to the economy at large.
To be sure, bankruptcy would mean that, for the time being, airlines may fly on more limited routes. But that shouldn’t be a problem in light of a collapse in demand, which won’t be resolved as long as Americans remain wary of flying.
There’s no easy solution during this pandemic. Many people and businesses have no options at all. But an airline bailout would bring about more negative consequences. The first is that it’s a huge expense for taxpayers to shoulder with no promise for a solid return. We’ve already bailed out the airlines, and all this past coddling has done is to postpone the inevitable layoffs of its excess employees.
Analysts don’t think air travel will return to prepandemic levels for several years—some say up to seven. Let’s assume that it takes five years for air travel to return to its previous level. That would require taxpayers to extend up to $320 billion in bailout funds to the airlines.”
“We know she identifies as an originalist who believes that the original public meaning of the Constitution is binding law. But we also know that she is skeptical of the radical libertarian originalist idea that economic regulation is presumptively unconstitutional, and that she believes some Supreme Court decisions that originalists may conclude are incorrectly decided nonetheless stand as “superprecedents” that the Court can abide by.
Her legal writing has also prompted heated reactions from detractors. One piece (with fellow law professor John Garvey) on when Catholic judges might be obligated to recuse themselves from death penalty cases, prompted criticism from Senate Democrats during her appeals court confirmation hearings, who suggested Barrett was unable to separate her faith from her jurisprudence (a charge she strongly rejected).
Another piece (with late Notre Dame colleague John Copeland Nagle) on how members of Congress should incorporate the original meaning of the Constitution into their votes has raised the eyebrows of some commentators, because it begins by noting that there are originalist arguments (which the paper itself does not accept, except for the sake of argument) to think that West Virginia was invalidly admitted as a state; that the 14th Amendment wasn’t properly ratified; and that paper money is unconstitutional, among other surprising conclusions.”
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“She’s been pretty vocally committed to originalism as really being the guiding light, more so than some others. She is more explicitly committed to the notion that one ought to be an originalist, and that it is the primary principle for judges, than Roberts is, or than Kavanaugh historically was. In that sense, she’s a little more like Thomas and Gorsuch. She has a clear judicial philosophy, and originalism is at its core.”
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“she has also suggested that judges ought to care more about stare decisis [the doctrine that courts should generally abide by their previous rulings] than Thomas tends to. I think she’s a more moderate figure in that regard than Thomas. She would be trying to navigate precedents that are in conflict or in tension with original meaning, rather than just thinking they ought to be tossed overboard.”
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“I’m glad you brought up stare decisis. A paper she wrote with her colleague John Copeland Nagle, “Congressional Originalism,” has caused a bit of concern among critics, in part because she leads with a list of precedents that arguably conflict with the original meaning of the Constitution.
Brown v. Board of Education is the most incendiary one, but she mentions arguments that West Virginia was invalidly admitted, that the 14th Amendment wasn’t properly ratified, that paper money is unconstitutional, and so forth. She doesn’t say she thinks they ought to be overruled — and indeed suggests that the point is moot in most cases as these issues would never come before the Court — but I think even putting up the examples has raised hackles.
How should people weighing her nomination think about that paper?”
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“I tend not to think it’s terribly significant. To some degree, it is an academic enterprise of trying to think about, “What are the tensions here? What are the implications of adopting a certain theoretical perspective? What are the implications if you think there are tensions between the theory and some of these foundational constitutional decisions that have been made over time, whether they are things like creating the state of West Virginia or things like Brown v. Board?” For her, that’s just a starting point for then trying to think about how to deal with the fact that there are going to be these tensions.
Importantly, her view was not, “you’ve got to go overturn all these decisions,””
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” A lot of people have run with the notion that she’s emphasizing the significance of her religious belief and, likewise, the religious beliefs of other judges and justices. But I think it’s one of these cases where that’s the starting point for her, saying, “It is true that judges have religious beliefs. And those religious beliefs sometimes have implications for the kind of issues that come before the court.” And then the question is how judges ought to deal with that. Certainly her conclusion is not simply that judges ought to therefore impose their religious beliefs.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/9/26/21457224/2020-census-trump-ninth-circuit