More Pope

A few more thoughts on the Art Pope piece, which I still haven’t read in full, but did listen to Jane Mayer’s NPR interview.

1) There’s some real straw men in here.  Mayer focuses a lot on the case of conservative Democrat John Snow, who was brought down with the help of Pope’s money.   Of course, conservative Democrats were exactly those most vulnerable in 2010 because of their districts.  She gives several examples of the nasty and highly distorted mailers funded in part by Pope money.  Thing is, I’ve looked at a lot of campaign mail in my day, and these flyers– though appalling in their disregard for the truth– were simply politics as usual.   On a related note, a correspondent from the Locke foundation points out that almost none of Pope’s spending has anything to do with Citizens United.  I’m thinking that just makes a better journalistic hook.

2) The N&O’s Rob Christensen uses numbers to point out how the Mayer article really overstates the impact of Pope’s money (and in the interview, Mayer kept saying things like, “Pope and the foundations he’s associated with spent…”), which was quite useful, but Rob C ends with this:

Does Pope have the state in his back pocket as the cartoon caricature accompanying The New Yorker article suggests?

North Carolinians are a notoriously independent lot. I don’t believe the state is for sale, and I don’t think even a very rich man can buy it.

Really?  That’s sure a lot more faith in democracy than I’ve got.  North Carolinians are really independent so they can just ignore millions and millions spent to influence their political views?

3) I remembered that every spring when we head to the Brooks Avenue  Church of Christ spring carnival for Children with Special Needs and their Families the fabulous Easter Baskets they provide to all the kids, stuffed with toys, say “courtesy of Art Pope.”  Awesome. Good for him.  Thing is, though, he just helped elect a Republican legislature that dramatically cut funds to state programs that really help out these families.  Well, at least we’ve got our Easter baskets.

NC on MSNBC

Wow, so MSNBC spent a solid 15 minutes today on North Carolina and just how far right the Republicans have tried to take our state.  Alas, no embedding, but part 1 and part 2.  Generally good summary of what’s been going on (though not much new for readers of this blog).  That said, the segments also served as  good reminder as to why I don’t watch MSNBC.  While Art Pope undoubtedly has too much influence, he is far from the puppetmaster portrayed here.  He largely doesn’t have to be, because he has so well insured that like-minded people have been elected.  And, y’all know what I think about voter ID, but it is also true that NC’s law is about as reasonable as could be hoped for (tax on college student parents aside, which I’m not sure if its in the final bill).  Again, not to defend the NC Republicans, but I hate that MSNBC makes me feel like I have to.

Belated papal thoughts

A former students emailed to say she was surprised that I had not had anything to say about the new Pope here.  I’m surprised to.  Just been lazy, I guess.  Here’s what I told her…

I’m quite ambivalent.  I love the humility and the seeming commitment to poverty and social justice (and the implications of choosing to be named after St. Francis), but I don’t like that he’s so outspoken against gays. I don’t expect him not to follow the party line, but I don’t like that he’s so emphatic about it.  I’m somewhat with-holding judgement to see where his emphasis is in office. I was fully aware that there would be significant disagreement between myself and any possible new pope, but what I really want is a commitment to Catholic Social Teaching and fighting poverty. As long as there’s that, I’m willing to forgive a lot. But, we’ll see.   As for the domestic Argentina angle, unless I hear evidence a lot more compelling than I have so far, I’m withholding judgement. Considering the possible range of people who could have been named pope, I think I’m reasonably pleased.  Considering the type of pope I’d really like to see (unrealistic) I’d have to be considered disappointed.

NC taxes and cognitive dissonance

So, Art Pope, NC’s very own version of the Koch brothers is now our state budget director.  Scary. But here’s the really scary part– apparently he’s the most sane in the room.  While the rest of the NC Republicans seem quite willing to create a massively regressive shift in taxes away from income tax towards more sales tax, Pope– of all people– has publicly come out saying this is a bad idea:

CHAPEL HILL — Gov. Pat McCrory’s budget director distanced the Republican chief executive from a proposal to eliminate income taxes in North Carolina and expressed his own “great concerns” with the concept being floated by leading GOP lawmakers.

Art Pope said the state’s current tax system is plagued by “holes and problems” – but the idea of abolishing personal and corporate income taxes by increasing the sales tax and levying the tax on dozens of duty-free services creates more concerns.

“Maybe if you were designing a tax code from scratch, you may want to look at a broad-based consumption tax,” Pope told a reporter roundtable at UNC-Chapel Hill’s journalism school Wednesday. “To go there from where we are now, I think, is very difficult to do and has lot of impracticalities.”

In particular, Pope cited a concern that the higher sales tax is “absolutely, no doubt” regressive, meaning it would hurt low-income taxpayers the hardest. He said it amounts to a gross income tax “without any regard to whether you are making any money.” And he worried about upsetting the current three-tier system of income, sales and properties taxes, calling it “fairly balanced.”

Wow!  Good for Pope.  If his goal is to make the heads of liberals across the state explode in massive cognitive dissonance, he’s onto something.   There’s probably no Republican in the state more vilified.

What’s especially interesting is that Pope’s very own Civitas Institute sponsored a report by the (laughable and discredited among mainstream economists) Arthur Laffer that argues essentially that all states should abandon their income tax.  Here’s its press release.  I actually went and briefly looked at the report itself and a couple of criticisms.  On a basic level it is just a horrid example of taking correlation to mean causation.  I mean horrid.  I would give it to undergrads in a methods course to tear apart.  All the inter-related factors involved in a state’s economic health and all we get is a series of bivariate tables.  Spurious correlation anyone?  Not to mention, plenty of liberal think-tanks have picked it apart and found all sorts of ways he is cherry-picking information.   I really liked this from the NC Budget and Tax Center:

The Civitas/Laffer plan is based on the flawed theory of supply-side economics and the Laffer Curve, which hold that reducing taxes actually increases revenue and boosts economic growth. The evidence is overwhelming that this theory does not yield the economic growth.

There is no evidence of a direct relationship between top tax rates and economic or job growth, according to a 2012 study by the Congressional Research Service.10 Moreover, states that Laffer himself has termed “high income tax states” turn out to have economic conditions comparable to, if not better than, states that do not have a personal income tax,
according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.11

In fact, states with low income tax rates actually have lower employment growth and lower median household income than Laffer’s designated high-tax states according to a recent study by Good Jobs First and the Iowa Policy Project.12 Furthermore, the industry composition in a state has a greater impact on a state’s economic performance. Similarly, an educated workforce, the presence of research centers like major universities and other knowledge factors boost per capita income growth. Accordingly, states will likely suffer in the long run because they lack the resources needed to invest in education and other building blocks of economic growth.

And even if it did unleash great economic growth– which is almost assuredly would not, you are still looking at a massive redistribution of wealth from poor to rich (from the same report):

 

Also a nice study linked on the AFL-CIO website highlighting Laffer’s flawed and highly questionable methodology.

Tax cut theology

Liked this Yglesias post last week as it really captures how the Republican party’s position on tax cuts has moved from ideology to theology:

The text of the no-taxes pledge that he gets all Republicans to sign is terse and like all good elements of holy writ could be interpreted in different ways. But the Pope of the supply-side cult himself has weighed in and says this doesn’t work for him:

“If you raise taxes, it’s a problem with the pledge,” Norquist says in an interview. “Romney’s plan was always revenue neutral – I’m in favor of getting rid of deductions and credits and reducing rates, as long as it’s revenue neutral. That’s always been the Republican position.”

No tax reform.

This is why in practice things get a lot simpler if you just go “over the cliff.” With the new baseline in place, basically everything the White House has proposed counts as a tax cut rather than a tax increase. That doesn’t mean Republicans would just say yes to anything Obama put on the table. But it does mean that they at least could say yes. You can do tax reform, you can do a big bargain, you can do whatever. But you need to change the baseline first. It’s not logical for so much to hinge on the baseline rather than the policy outcome, but that’s how religion works. Its mysteries can only be truly understood by those who have faith. To those of us looking in from the outside it all seems arbitrary. [emphasis mine] But the details matter.

Yep. Somewhere I read the other day that even some little kid remarked that it’s ludicrous that Republicans should be opposed to a particular outcome on December 31, but favor the same outcome on January 1st.  Of course it is.  But, (not to pick on Judaism, but Kosher rules come readily to mind), does it really make a lot of sense that it’s okay to eat beef, it’s okay to eat cheese, but not together.

Kristof on the nuns

Great Op-Ed from Nicholas Kristoff today on the Catholic hierarchy’s misguided efforts against American nuns (which I addressed here).   Some highlights:

They [nuns] are also among the bravest, toughest and most admirable people in the world. In my travels, I’ve seen heroic nuns defy warlords, pimps and bandits. Even as bishops have disgraced the church by covering up the rape of children, nuns have redeemed it with their humble work on behalf of the neediest.

So, Pope Benedict, all I can say is: You are crazy to mess with nuns.

The Vatican issued a stinging reprimand of American nuns this month and ordered a bishop to oversee a makeover of the organization that represents 80 percent of them. In effect, the Vatican accused the nuns of worrying too much about the poor and not enough about abortion and gay marriage.

What Bible did that come from? Jesus in the Gospels repeatedly talks about poverty and social justice, yet never explicitly mentions either abortion or homosexuality. If you look at who has more closely emulated Jesus’s life, Pope Benedict or your average nun, it’s the nun hands down…

Nuns have triumphed over an errant hierarchy before. In the 19th century, the Catholic Church excommunicated an Australian nun named Mary MacKillop after her order exposed a pedophile priest. Sister Mary was eventually invited back to the church and became renowned for her work with the poor. In 2010, Pope Benedictcanonized her as Australia’s first saint.

“Let us be guided” by Sister Mary’s teachings, the pope declared then.

Amen to that.

The Catholic Church and IVF

Well, it’s Sunday the day I usually attend Catholic Mass, so to even things out, it’s also seems like a good day for my criticisms of the institutional Catholic Church.  The latest?  Oh, just firing a teacher for using In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) to get pregnant:

Emily Herx was a popular literature teacher at St. Vincent de Paul School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, until she used her medical leave for in vitro fertilization. Herx lost her job and says a church official called her a “grave, immoral sinner.” When she appealed to Fort Wayne Bishop Kevin Rhoades, he told her IVF was “an intrinsic evil, which means that no circumstances can justify it.” The federal government saw things a bit differently. Herx filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and won — paving the way for a civil lawsuit.

The Atlantic takes this story as a basis for a fascinating interview about Catholic sexual ethics with a PhD in Bioethics Catholic Priest, Richard Sparks.  Some highlights:

A lot of babies are conceived in circumstances that don’t seem particularly holy — a one-night stand, or even a rape. In contrast, two people undergoing fertility treatments would seem to be especially committed to each other and to their future family. 

Precisely. Sometimes Catholic theologians can be very insensitive about that. They’ll talk to a couple who have loved each other, have gone through pain together, and might be struggling with issues about their masculinity or femininity, and they’ll say, “Moral theology says you don’t have the right to have a child.” That might be correct on a blackboard. But to say that to a couple is like telling them what selfish, evil people they are. They’re loving people who want a child badly — and they know the Church wants people to have children, so they can’t understand why they aren’t getting more empathy.

But the Church does disapprove of in vitro fertilization, no matter how loving and committed a couple may be.

When it comes to sexuality, our Catholic natural law teaching is very genital-based. It’s more focused on biology than Catholic teaching is in other areas. Some would say that love, marriage, and commitment have to be taken into account. Pope John Paul II worked very hard to create what he called the theology of the body — instead of just talking about biology, he spoke about the loving meaning of the whole person. But in the end, the Church would say that you can’t go against biology. That’s the mechanics of our nature.

And here’s my favorite part:

The school might argue that it has the right to uphold its own values in any way it chooses.

Certainly. If you’re going to work for a church, or for the Boy Scouts of America, any organization that has values, it’s one thing to say that if you don’t uphold them they don’t want you as a leader. But when they get around to policing people’s sexual lives, what is that organization doing?

Let’s try a few of these. If you have married couples using contraception, does St. Vincent check their medical cabinets? They wouldn’t think of doing that. If some people aren’t paying their taxes fairly, does the Church fire them? I don’t think anyone ever does. What if they’re pro-capital punishment? No.

Similarly, if you hire a gay teacher who doesn’t have a partner, is that okay? What if he does have one? Should he get fired? What if he doesn’t have partner, but once in a while he goes to gay bars? Should he get fired then? If there’s a Jewish teacher who doesn’t believe in Jesus, can she be thrown out? For that matter, what about a Tea Party Republican who doesn’t seem to care much about the poor? Do we fire that person from a Catholic faculty?

The Catholic Church has always been a kind of universal church. Catholic means broad-minded and sympathetic. But now we’re starting to act more like a sect. My worry is that applying these kinds of purity tests can lead to witch hunts.

Now, obviously I disapprove of the church taking this action largely for the reasons Sparks brings to bear, above.  That said, part of me would actually love to see the Catholic Church undertake a bit of a “war on IVF.”  The truth is, assisted reproduction is just as anathema to Catholic doctrine as contraception, but you virtually never hear the Church complain about it or lobby on the issue.  Presumably because they realize the backlash would be massive and they would alienate a lot of otherwise supportive Catholics.  What has always bothered me, then, is the hypocrisy on this.  If the Church is going to always insist that it’s just about following their theological imperatives, they should be just as politically concerned with IVF as they are with contraception, abortion, and same-sex marriage.  The fact that they are not tells you something.  And I don’t think it’s something good.

Nuns vs. Bishops

So, I read a little bit about the Catholic Bishops chastising American nuns for, you know, caring about what happens to poor people, and crazy stuff like that, but did not pay particularly close attention, just thinking “there they go again.”  But then I read this post by Amy Davidson and got really annoyed.  The “problem” of the nuns is not that they are advocating for gay marriage or abortion along with caring about poor people.  Apparently, they are just insufficiently committed to the anti-gay, pro-life agenda.  Of course, all you need to do is check the Gospels.  Jesus spends all his time railing about the evils of gay marriage and legal abortion and hardly even mentions concern for the poor and oppressed.  Anyway:

What is striking, though, is the absence of a smoking gun in the Congregation of the Defense of the Faith’s findings on matters of faith, other than faith in bishops (which is presented as one of the Church’s doctrines). What seemed to bother the Vatican’s investigators was not that nuns were speaking out on political matters, but that they were failing to engage politically in the way the Church wanted them to: the L.C.W.R. had been

silent on the right to life from conception to natural death, a question that is part of the lively public debate about abortion and euthanasia in the United States. Further, issues of crucial importance to the life of Church and society, such as the Church’s Biblical view of family life and human sexuality, are not part of the LCWR agenda in a way that promotes Church teaching.

The Congregation also noted

the absence of initiatives by the LCWR aimed at promoting the reception of the Church’s teaching, especially on difficult issues such as Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter Ordinatio sacerdotalis and Church teaching about homosexuality.

In other words, instead of just talking about “social justice,” the nuns should be out on the barricades, agitating against abortion and gay marriage. And, again, they need to listen to the bishops.

Davidson also recounts the case from a few years back when a nun/administrator at a Catholic hospital approved the termination of a pregnancy that literally saved the life of a mother so she could go home and care for her already born four small children.  The nun got excommunicated for that (here’s my link from back when this case happened).  So long as the nuns are the ones following the stuff Jesus actually talked about, I’ll go with them over the bishops ever time.

Photo of the day

The Pope and Fidel Castro certainly seem like an appopriate shot (from this collection of the Pope’s visit to Cuba) for a Sunday:

Pope Benedict XVI meets former Cuban leader Fidel Castro in Havana, March 28, 2012. (Osservatore Romano/Reuters)

On Judicial Activism

I found it especially ironic that the Pope foundation’s Biology major chose to critique my readings on Judicial restraint/activism as this is an area many conservatives seem to especially misunderstand.  The key tenet of judicial restraint is that judges should be restrained in making law and should defer, whenever possible, to the duly elected representatives of the people.  Now, in general, that’s a solid doctrine.  Of course, if those duly elected representatives of the people are using their majority power to systematically deny Constitutional rights to citizens based on their race, sex, etc., well, then, that’s where you obviously need “activist” judges to step in and remedy this (e.g., Brown v. Board of Ed, etc.)  But to be clear, using judicial power to overturn laws based on the judgement of the judges is activism (and again, there’s many a time I’m all in favor of that).  I think it is safe to say, though, if one is in favor of “judicial restraint” you most definitely do not want SC Justices overturning the signal piece of legislation of the current president.  It’s honestly hard to imagine an act of judicial activism more breathtaking (or threatening to the legitimacy of the court as a theoretically non-political body) than that.  Of course, that seems to be exactly what the conservatives on the Court are at least contemplating.  EJ Dionne:

Three days of Supreme Court arguments over the health-care law demonstrated for all to see that conservative justices are prepared to act as an alternative legislature, diving deeply into policy details as if they were members of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.

Senator, excuse me, Justice Samuel Alito quoted Congressional Budget Office figures on Tuesday to talk about the insurance costs of the young. On Wednesday, Chief Justice John Roberts sounded like the House whip in discussing whether parts of the law could stand if other parts fell. He noted that without various provisions, Congress “wouldn’t have been able to put together, cobble together, the votes to get it through.” Tell me again, was this a courtroom or a lobbyist’s office?

It fell to the court’s liberals — the so-called “judicial activists,” remember? — to remind their conservative brethren that legislative power is supposed to rest in our government’s elected branches.

Justice Stephen Breyer noted that some of the issues raised by opponents of the law were about “the merits of the bill,” a proper concern of Congress, not the courts. And in arguing for restraint, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what was wrong with leaving as much discretion as possible “in the hands of the people who should be fixing this, not us.” It was nice to be reminded that we’re a democracy, not a judicial dictatorship.

And Chait:

What made Rosen’s piece so shocking was that, for decades, judicial activism had been primarily associated with the left — liberal judges handed down broad readings of laws to expand rights, enraging conservatives who believed they were taking upon themselves decisions better left to democratic channels. Their complaints were not wholly unfounded — even if you support, say, abortion rights, as I do, the notion that the Constitution requires the right to an abortion is quite a stretch of judicial activism. The whole conservative legal and political movement had come to orient itself around opposition to judicial activism, which actually remains the term Republican politicians use to disparage liberal judges.

The only thing Rosen truly failed to anticipate in his piece was how quickly Republican judges would pivot from impassioned defenses of judicial restraint to judicial activism when the opportunity arose to deploy it in their party’s behalf. In the piece, he described Antonin Scalia as a fierce opponent of this movement. Scalia, wrote Rosen, “was not in favor of striking down laws in the name of ambiguous and contestable economic rights.” At one point Scalia attacked the movement to read economic rights into the Constitution as a “threat to constitutional democracy.”

The spectacle before the Supreme Court this week is Republican justices seizing the chance to overturn the decisions of democratically-elected bodies. At times the deliberations of the Republican justices are impossible to distinguish from the deliberations of Republican senators. They are litigating the problem of adverse selection, and doing it very poorly. (Here are health economists Henry Aaron and Kevin Outterson tearing their hair out over the justices’ bungled attempts to describe the economic dynamics at work.)

Scalia himself offers the most blatant case. His famed thunderings against meddlesome judges are nowhere to be found. He is gleefully reversing his previous interpretation of the Commerce Clause, now that it is being deployed against big government liberals rather than pot smokers. He is railing against Obamacare like an angry Fox News-watching grandfather…

Just remember this next time you hear any conservative rail against “activist judges.”

Liberal Bias 101

A few weeks ago a graduate student whom I oversee (I supervise the Public Administration PhD students who get undergraduate teaching experience in our Political Science courses) wrote me that somebody at the Pope Center for Higher Education (if you are not familiar, try this) had received a copy of his syllabus and wanted to discuss the apparent liberal bias.  John chose to simply not respond.  Well, the emailer has now written up the conservative deconstruction of John’s syllabus on the Pope website.  I really got quite the kick reading this as I soon realized that every single article the writer was complaining about was from my very own syllabus (John had served as my PS 201 TA and I’m happy for them to use the same readings I do when they teach their own section).  A sampling:

Overwhelmingly, the readings blamed Republicans and the Constitution for the country’s problems.

The first article assigned for Strange’s class is “Our Godless Constitution” by essayist Brooke Allen. It opens with a swipe at George W. Bush’s intelligence and character. “It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell,” Allen writes, “but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts.”

Allen goes on to discuss the Constitution, minimizing the influence of religion in the creation of the Constitution by taking a close look at the non-Christian pronouncements of four of our Founding Fathers: Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams. She seems to be unaware that only one of the four (Franklin) was actually in attendance at the Constitutional Convention. Nevertheless, the point in assigning the essay to students is clear: the Constitution isn’t what you thought it was, having been devised by people whose religion stemmed from a political agenda rather than genuine conviction.

There is no rebuttal in the assigned readings to demonstrate the profound effect religion had on early Americans…

Conservative jurisprudence also takes a rhetorical beating in Strange’s class. For instance, Stuart Taylor’s essay in the National Journal, “Is Judicial Review Obsolete?” complains that conservative jurists who argue for judicial restraint are hypocritical. Although conservatives say they want judicial restraint, Taylor says, “they have used highly debatable interpretations of original meaning to sweep aside a raft of democratically adopted laws.” In a 2006 article for Slate magazine, Seth Rosenthal makes a similar point. He claims that conservative jurists’ restrictions on government involvement in people’s lives are, in themselves, examples of intrusion in people’s lives.

So, I’m not actually going to waste my time getting into a debate on these points with someone who holds a 2010 B.S. in Biology.  I haven’t seen John’s complete syllabus, but to the degree it matches mine, it’s pretty clear that Cheston is cherry-picking and substantially mis-characterizing the basic nature of the class and the main point of these readings.  But, whatever.  I did try to honestly ask myself, though, if I am doing my students a disservice by not having more “balanced” readings in this area.

My answer?  Absolutely not.  And here’s why… it all comes back to the asymmetry.   I have conservative students all the time who are literally 180 degrees wrong on what judicial activism is really all about.  I’ve never had a liberal student make a misguided and uninformed argument about judicial restraint.  I definitely have students all the time who come into class seemingly thinking that Jesus basically wrote our Constitution.  Again, I’ve never had a liberal student try and tell me that the Constitution was written by radical atheists.  Similarly, I’m not sure what would “balance” George Packer’s fabulous article on obstructionism in the modern Senate and somehow deny that it has reached new procedural heights with Republican use of the filibuster, etc.

One of the major things I try and do in PS 201 is disabuse students of ideas they have about government that are simply wrong.  Whether you want to blame Fox News, Rush, or whatever, the simple fact is that my students are way more likely to hold false views that represent a conservative political perspective and I don’t apologize for one second for trying to change that.  There is the occasional very liberal student who might hold very uninformed views on the nature of capitalism, etc., and I’m quite happy to correct them as well.   There’s not, however, a corresponding left-wing noise machine (don’t even try MSNBC) filling them with false information.  Short version: if one of my goals is to correct widespread misunderstanding and misinformation about our government it’s going to look like liberal bias, but that’ s not actually what it is.

I’m thinking maybe I need a new sub-heading for my blog: “It’s the asymmetry, stupid.”

Racism is dead, part CCLXI

Yowza!

The Meck Deck, an official blog of the Art Pope-funded conservative John Locke Foundation, this week published racially-charged and homophobic imagery of President Obama in a piece this on the president’s opposition to North Carolina’s proposed anti-gay marriage amendment. The post, which claims Obama is merely pandering to gay voters, is accompanied by an image of Obama in apparent drag while sitting next to a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Here’s a close-up of the image (which is labeled on Locke’s website “Obama.gay_.png”):

I’ve written a little on Pope and Locke before.  To their credit (I guess) they took the image down, but what does it tell us that a presumably mainstream Republican think-tank has employees and blog posters that think this is an appropriate image?