King Charles on America

 Many posts have discussed the Founding.

Ironically, the British monarch echoed the No Kings rallies in the US.

From King Charles's Address to Congress:

The Founding Fathers were bold and imaginative rebels with a cause. Two hundred and fifty years ago, or, as we say in the United Kingdom ‘just the other day,’ they declared Independence. By balancing contending forces and drawing strength in diversity, they united 13 disparate colonies to forge a nation on the revolutionary idea of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ They carried with them, and carried forward, the great inheritance of the British Enlightenment – as well as the ideals which had an even deeper history in English common law and Magna Carta.

These roots run deep, and they are still vital. Our Declaration of Rights of 1689 was not only the foundation of our constitutional monarchy, but also provided the source of so many of the principles reiterated, often verbatim, in the American Bill of Rights of 1791.

And those roots go even further back in our history: the U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.

This is the reason why there stands a stone, by the River Thames at Runnymede where Magna Carta was signed in the year 1215. This stone records that an acre of that ancient and historic site was given to the United States of America by the people of the United Kingdom, to symbolize our shared resolve in support of liberty, and in memory of President John F. Kennedy.

Distinguished members of the 119th Congress, it is here in these very halls that this spirit of liberty and the promise of America’s founders is present in every session and every vote cast.

Not by the will of one, but by the deliberation of many, representing the living mosaic of the United States. In both of our countries, it is the very fact of our vibrant, diverse and free societies that gives us our collective strength, including to support victims of some of the ills that, so tragically, exist in both our societies today.

Gorsuch on Tariffs, Deliberation, and the Separation of Powers

Many posts have discussed the presidency.

By a 6-3 vote, SCOTUS ruled that President Trump exceeded his authority under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to impose tariffs.

Justice Gorsuch's Concurrence in  Learning Resources Inc. v. Trump:

And, of course, it was duties on foreign tea that triggered the Boston Tea Party. J. Ellis, The Cause 17–18 (2021). Are we really to believe that the patriots that night in Boston Harbor considered the whole of the tariff power some kingly prerogative?

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For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason.  Yes, legislating can be hard and take time.  And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.  Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man.  There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions.  And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future.  For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious.  But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is. 

Pope Leo on the Meaning of Words

ADDRESS OF POPE LEO XIV TO MEMBERS OF THE DIPLOMATIC CORPS ACCREDITED TO THE HOLY SEE  Hall of Benediction Friday, 9 January 2026

The purpose of multilateralism, then, is to provide a place where people can meet and talk, modeled on the ancient Roman Forum or the medieval square. At the same time, in order to engage in dialogue, there needs to be agreement on the words and concepts that are used. Rediscovering the meaning of words is perhaps one of the primary challenges of our time. When words lose their connection to reality, and reality itself becomes debatable and ultimately incommunicable, we become like the two people to whom Saint Augustine refers, who are forced to stay together without either of them knowing the other’s language. He observes that, “Dumb animals, even those of different species, understand each other more easily than these two individuals. For even though they are both human beings, their common nature is no help to friendliness when they are prevented by diversity of language from conveying their sentiments to one another; so that a man would more readily converse with his dog than with a foreigner!” [6]

Today, the meaning of words is ever more fluid, and the concepts they represent are increasingly ambiguous. Language is no longer the preferred means by which human beings come to know and encounter one another. Moreover, in the contortions of semantic ambiguity, language is becoming more and more a weapon with which to deceive, or to strike and offend opponents. We need words once again to express distinct and clear realities unequivocally. Only in this way can authentic dialogue resume without misunderstandings. This should happen in our homes and public spaces, in politics, in the media and on social media. It should likewise occur in the context of international relations and multilateralism, so that the latter can regain the strength needed for undertaking its role of encounter and mediation. This is indeed necessary for preventing conflicts, and for ensuring that no one is tempted to prevail over others with the mindset of force, whether verbal, physical or military.

We should also note the paradox that this weakening of language is often invoked in the name the freedom of expression itself. However, on closer inspection, the opposite is true, for freedom of speech and expression is guaranteed precisely by the certainty of language and the fact that every term is anchored in the truth. It is painful to see how, especially in the West, the space for genuine freedom of expression is rapidly shrinking. At the same time, a new Orwellian-style language is developing which, in an attempt to be increasingly inclusive, ends up excluding those who do not conform to the ideologies that are fueling it.

Unfortunately, this leads to other consequences that end up restricting fundamental human rights, starting with the freedom of conscience. In this regard, conscientious objection allows individuals to refuse legal or professional obligations that conflict with moral, ethical or religious principles deeply rooted in their personal lives. This may be the refusal of military service in the name of non-violence, or the refusal on the part of doctors and healthcare professionals to engage in practices such as abortion or euthanasia. Conscientious objection is not rebellion, but an act of fidelity to oneself. At this moment in history, freedom of conscience seems increasingly to be questioned by States, even those that claim to be based on democracy and human rights. This freedom, however, establishes a balance between the collective interest and individual dignity. It also emphasizes that a truly free society does not impose uniformity but protects the diversity of consciences, preventing authoritarian tendencies and promoting an ethical dialogue that enriches the social fabric.

Reflecting on Covid

Many posts have discussed COVID and pandemic preparedness.

Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee, In COVID's Wake:  How Our Politics Failed Us (Princeton University Press, 2025), 197, 199, 294.

The central message of this book is that several tenets of basic rationality evaporated under the stress of the Covid onslaught. One of the greatest failures, as we have shown, was the failure to weigh the expected costs of policy against the expected benefits. Such failures were evident in government advising processes, as well as outside government in news media coverage and academic analysis. These failures occurred despite the public health field’s substantial investment in developing pandemic plans before 2020.  These pre-2020 pandemic plans correctly anticipated many of the costs and ethical dilemmas that emerged during the Covid pandemic response. But such considerations played  little role in informing discussion about what to do in 2020. Previously untested, unproven policies were implemented  wholesale across society in earnest hope of benefits, heedless of costs.

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 The pandemic response also raises some other troubling concerns about the quality of democratic deliberation involved. Pandemic policy seems to have been driven by a profound form of short-term bias. Any benefits of the policies in delaying infection and death were top of mind for policymakers. For many months, national newspapers, cable news outlets, and even local news led their daily coverage with the latest num-bers of Covid infections, hospitalizations, and deaths. Meanwhile, in almost all cases, the costs were much less vis i ble and experienced at some delay. Many of  these second-  and third-order costs—for education, mental health, cancer diagnoses, social disorder—unfolded only over lengthy timelines and emerge clearly only in hindsight. Clearly, democracies are likely to struggle with any policies having  these features, as political incentives for elected officials are to attend predominantly to the short term and to discount the long term.

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Experts, including scientific experts, play an important role in the policy  process, but it is also of necessity a  limited role. Experts must stay in their lane, so to speak. We must be more willing to engage in  political deliberation, including or especially with  those on the other side of the political spectrum. American democracy is defined deeply by polariza-tion based on having (or not having) a four-year college degree; educational polarization, in turn, has the unfortunate but unmistakable effect of placing the weight of the experts on one side of the partisan divide. A rebalancing of the role of experts could help address that tendency. At minimum, we have relearned that it is important to listen to more than one kind of expert in formulating policy on complex, society-wide issues. We must also not forget that experts tend to come from well-off positions in society and can be oblivious to their class biases

Shadow Docket and ICE

 Ilya Somin at Reason:

Today, the Supreme Court issued a "shadow docket" ruling staying a district court decision that had enjoined ICE from engaging in racial and ethnic profiling in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles. The decision was apparently joined by the six conservative justices; the three liberals dissented. As is often the case with "emergency"/shadow docket rulings, there is no majority opinion. Thus, we cannot know for sure what the majority justices' reasoning was. We have only a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh. But that opinion has deeply problematic elements. Most importantly, it is fundamentally at odds with the principle that government must be "color-blind" and abjure racial discrimination.

The district court found extensive use of racial profiling by ICE in immigration enforcement in the LA area, and issued an injunction barring it. Justice Kavanaugh, however, contends that the profiling is not so bad, and does not necessarily violate the Fourth Amendment because, while "apparent ethnicity alone cannot furnish reasonable suspicion," it could count as a "relevant factor when considered along with other salient factors."

Last month Erwin Chemerinsky wrote at SCOTUSblog::

The Supreme Court long has had an emergency docket. These are matters where a party comes to the court for an order on an emergency basis without full briefing and oral argument. For example, those facing the death penalty often have gone to the court seeking a last-minute, emergency stay of execution. But as Stephen Vladeck documented in his excellent book, The Shadow Docket, over the past decade there was a notable growth in matters decided by the court on its emergency docket.

Since Professor Vladeck’s book was published in 2023, the emergency docket has taken on even greater significance. In the 2023-24 term, there were 44 matters on the emergency docket. In the 2024-25 term, through June 27 (the last day decisions were released), there were 113 matters on the emergency docket.

In the past two months, the court has issued a number of important rulings on its emergency docket concerning the legality of actions by President Donald Trump. Virtually all have been 6-3 rulings, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting.

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Significant rulings without the benefit of full briefing, oral argument, and deliberation among the justices. As a lawyer, I want the opportunity to fully brief my case and to argue it to the court. The procedures in every appellate court are based on the assumption that briefing and argument can matter greatly. Yet, the briefs in cases on the emergency docket are nowhere near as developed as those in cases on the merits, and there is no oral argument. Nor do the justices even meet to discuss these cases before issuing rulings on them. If one believes that briefing, arguing, and deliberating matters are essential to a system of law – and I certainly do – we should be deeply troubled by their absence when the court is issuing major rulings without them.

Congress and Deliberative Technology

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Lorelei Kelly at The Conversation:

Congress has been working to modernize itself, including experimenting with new ways to hear local voices in their districts, including gathering constituent feedback in a standardized way that can be easily processed by computers.

The House Natural Resources Committee was also an early adopter of technology for collaborative lawmaking. In 2020, members and committee staff used a platform called Madison to collaboratively write and edit proposed environmental justice legislation with communities across the country that had been affected by pollution.

House leaders are also looking at what is called deliberative technology, which uses specially designed websites to facilitate digital participation by pairing collective human intelligence with artificial intelligence. People post their ideas online and respond to others’ posts. Then the systems can screen and summarize posts so users better understand each other’s perspectives.

These systems can even handle massive group discussions involving large numbers of people who hold a wide range of positions on a vast set of issues and interests. In general, these technologies make it easier for people to find consensus and have their voices heard by policymakers in ways the policymakers can understand and respond to.

Governments in Finland, the U.K., Canada and Brazil are already piloting deliberative technologies. In Finland, roughly one-third of young people between 12 and 17 participate in setting budget priorities for the city of Helsinki.

In May 2024, 45 U.S.-based nonprofit organizations signed a letter to Congress asking that deliberative technology platforms be included in the approved tools for civic engagement.

In the meantime, Congress is looking at ways to use artificial intelligence as part of a more integrated digital strategy based on lessons from other democratic legislatures.

Degraded Deliberation

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

 Philip Wallach at AEI:

As it scrambled to pass a continuing resolution and avoid a government shutdown at the end of 2024, the 118th Congress ended much as it began—with serious doubts as to whether America’s legislature can rise to the level of bare competence. The House of Representatives is mainly adrift because of the difficulties Republicans had in electing a Speaker in January 2023 and the consequences of that struggle for the House Rules Committee. Understanding the House’s current malaise requires understanding the degraded state of its deliberations, which in turn requires digging into the nitty-gritty of how it considers bills.

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Until this Congress, textbooks of procedure could straightforwardly explain that small and uncontroversial bills would be moved through suspension, while big and controversial bills would move under procedures agreed to by the Rules Committee. These rules are endlessly adaptable. They can allow for lots of debate and consideration of amendments (usually when the House organizes itself as the Committee of the Whole), or they can shut off debate entirely and force members to vote. In teeing up a bill for consideration, they have traditionally also debated many of the substantive issues implicated, offering a “dress rehearsal” for the floor debate itself in a way that ought to improve deliberation.

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Most of [Speaker Mike] Johnson’s colleagues find him more attentive than McCarthy, but in practice Johnson has done anything but decentralize. Under his leadership, the House depended on suspension to move several pieces of controversial legislation, including the continuing resolution that averted a government shutdown in late December 2024—the final version of which was introduced about an hour before the vote on final passage. Member input in the final stages of the legislative process occurs almost exclusively by bending the ears of top leaders, with amendments mostly prohibited.

Because passage under suspension requires the support of two-thirds of members, some may wonder if there’s anything wrong with relying on it to move legislation through the House. These defenders might point out that although suspension leaves little room for floor debates and cuts off all possibility of amendment, neither of those activities has been constructive in recent years. Yes, suspension minimizes formalities, but plenty of informal deliberation can still occur between legislators both in the public sphere and privately. Negotiation is alive and well behind the scenes.

The problem with this defense is that it requires we place extraordinary trust in our top partisan leaders, who decide among themselves what ought to be in the bills that will be rushed to passage. And, to put the matter gently, we are not in a high-trust moment. When matters are decided behind closed doors, many citizens suspect they are being sold out—and plenty of members are willing to voice those concerns. Given how little input most members have into the content of final deals, it is unsurprising that they object to the whole process.

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Withered deliberation is at the heart of many of our most intractable policy issues. The Congress’s ability to deal with immigration and border security, for example, has been poisoned by immigration hawks’ decades-long sense that their perspective was being systematically excluded from debate by bien-pensant dealmakers who derided critics as racists or xenophobes. Even when leaders have supported big deals (as in 2007 and 2018), they have not structured the process to include all voices, and the hawks have found various ways to tank their vaunted bipartisan deals.

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And what of the Rules Committee itself in the 119th? As of this writing, it is still without a chair; the expectation is that the dissidents will keep their three seats, though Massie may be swapped out for a substitute. The need to pass a Republican president’s agenda may tamp down on dissent, but Republicans’ highest hope seems to be docility. Despite the many tensions between factions in their ultra-thin majority, there is little sense of the need for deliberation, either in the committee itself or on the floor. By neglecting the need to work through difficulties through open debate, Republicans are setting themselves up for explosive failures on the floor.

Appropriations

 Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch:

Appropriations, which is the nitty-gritty business of putting money into agency coffers where it may be spent, theoretically happens in 12 parts, with 12 subcommittees writing appropriations bills and these then going to the House and Senate appropriations committees. The subcommittees are for the most part relatively capacious slop buckets: Agriculture, Rural Development, and Food and Drug Administration; Energy and Water Development and Related Agencies; Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies; Transportation, Housing and Urban Development, and Related Agencies; etc. Some are more focused, such as Defense—not to be confused with Homeland Security or Military Construction, Veterans’ Affairs, and Related Agencies.

When things are working the way they are supposed to, the appropriations subcommittees spend a lot of time listening to testimony and holding hearings about this or that program and its financial needs, with members of each party negotiating with their own fellow partisans and with those of the other party, doing all the usual horse-trading and favor-swapping and such that constitutes ordinary politics. It is a long, complicated, exasperating, labor-intensive process that, for the average congressional specimen, is not nearly as much fun as getting a hit on Fox News or MSNBC. And so we end up with what Jonah Goldberg calls our “Parliament of Pundits,” where relatively little work is done in the way of the ordinary business of politics (much less the ordinary business of governing!) and, while our lawmakers and bureaucrats angle for television time and hone their own-the-opposition social-media strategies, the actual fiscal process lapses into chaos. Holding off that chaos is what such stop-gap measures as “continuing resolutions” and “omnibus appropriations” and such are all about.

It matters how much money Washington spends. It also matters—a great deal!—what it spends that money on. And here I do not mean big broad vague categorical buckets such as “defense” or “education” or whatever, but actual programs. There is some education spending that is excellent and worthwhile and worth expanding, and some education spending that ought to be eliminated entirely, the programs ended, the records burned, the bureaucratic fields sown with salt by libertarian centurions under the command of Nick Gillespie (if only because I think he is likely to own a toga in addition to his 41 black leather jackets). (Rough estimate.) Talking about “how much we spend on education” doesn’t get to the important details.

You know what probably could get into those details? Congressional subcommittees doing their g—mned jobs.

“Getting spending under control” is only in part about debt and deficits—as important as those factors are. It also is about making sure that the money we do spend, we spend on things that are useful and productive. And that is why it is important to understand that continuing resolutions and budget ad-hocracy isn’t just about avoiding the hard work of intelligent appropriations and oversight—it is about avoiding accountability. If you lump everything together into one big mess and then pass it at the last minute under the shadow of a budget crisis, then you can pretend that you have an excuse for not watching where the money is actually going. And then you can go back to your career as a half-assed cable-news pundit who also happens to serve in Congress.

CRS 2024

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity. The Congressional Resarch Service is especially important in this regard.

Kevin R. Kosar at The Hill:

Last week, the Library of Congress made an important announcement: The Congressional Research Service (CRS) is getting a new director. Karen Donfried will begin her 10-year term on Sept. 23. She takes over for interim director Robert Newlen, who has led the agency since July 2023.

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Congress heavily leans on CRS to inform the legislative debate. CRS staff provided Hill staff and legislators with 479 in-person briefings, 2,754 confidential memoranda, 22,212 telephone responses and 36,222 email responses, according to the agency’s 2022 report. The agency also wrote 1,093 reports and general distribution products for Congress and 9,652 bill summaries, which the Hill and all of America can find on Congress.gov.

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Like any new leader, she will have to earn the trust of staff. Doing that will require spending a lot of time managing by walking about and encouraging staff to explain what they do along with what is working well and what isn’t.   And then she will need to start remedying the troubles, which are many. For example, various technology issues hinder CRS staff’s capacity to serve Congress. Staff works on buggy software and their phones often do not work due to cellular dead spots in the Madison Building, where CRS is headquartered.   

Donfried also will have to address some of the management problems, which she will no doubt learn about during her listening tour. Poor leadership has driven away a lot of staff, as Congress learned at a hearing in 2023.  CRS too often has placed people who are highly expert in policy analysis in management positions despite them not being people persons. Those individuals will need to be replaced. She also will need to figure out how to position CRS in the 21st century. Fifty years ago, the agency had a quasi-monopoly on the provision of expert information and analysis to Congress. These days, it faces stiff competition from think tanks, foundations, interest groups and private research firms. 

As I see it, the way forward is for CRS to lean into its six core strengths: It is a nonpartisan organization with deep expertise and long institutional memory that can provide rapid responses to congressional requests with customized research products and services that draw on diverse, in-house knowledge.

Congressional Testimony

   A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

My experience has been that the entire Democratic membership of the committee shows up, decently well briefed by staff, while only one or two Republicans show up, having done little to no preparation. It's extremely frustrating for Republican witnesses. Basically all you have is…

— Robert P. George (@McCormickProf) August 27, 2024

Congress and Deliberation

  A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Jordan T. Cash and Kevin J. Burns at Law & Liberty:

The Senate’s smaller size, with senators representing the states and holding office for longer terms, ideally allows for more in-depth discussions and creates a degree of stability within the law. By contrast, the much larger House with its smaller districts and shorter terms, helps guarantee that the representatives are responsive to the public mood and that every geographic part of the country has an opportunity to have input into the formation of a law. These provisions not only encourage representative government but also promote legitimacy. Because Congress represents every part of the country, Philip Wallach argues in his recent book, Why Congress, “Only congressional deliberation is capable of tackling the [country’s] thorniest challenges in a way that the whole nation will accept as legitimate.”

Moreover, congressional debates can be taught in ways that might even engage students more than presidential speeches or The Federalist. While those works typically focus on presenting one side of an argument, congressional debates have counterarguments built into them. This provides students with the chance to read, understand, and perhaps even identify with different lines of argumentation presented in the same reading which can then be teased out in class discussions. Teaching congressional debates also allows students to see how abstract theoretical arguments may intertwine with the actual practice of politics and better understand the limits imposed by practice upon theory. Seeing how debate is promoted or stifled by congressional rules of procedure may further demonstrate how such ostensibly mundane issues contribute to the function (or dysfunction) of the institution.

CRS Problems

Daniel Schuman at Washington Monthly:

CRS employs hundreds of experts—economists, lawyers, reference librarians, and scientists—to provide Congress with research and analysis. For most of its history, the agency had a hard-won reputation for providing independent and authoritative advice. But CRS’s usefulness to Congress has suffered over the last three decades. Years of mismanagement led to an insular culture and a glacial pace of technological modernization. Right-wing political attacks drove out experienced analysts and intimidated the leadership into making the organization’s policy analysis cautious and insipid.

CRS embodies some of the worst dysfunction of the entire legislative branch. With a few notable exceptions in recent years, Republicans inspired by the Newt Gingrich-led revolution of 1995 have advanced policies that undermine their branch’s ability to function, regardless of when the GOP is in charge of one or both chambers. Since 1994, CRS and another of Congress’s support agencies, the Government Accountability Office, have each lost more than a quarter of their staff. Congress has also cut its own member and committee staff and suppressed staff pay, focusing meager resources on essentials like security and physical infrastructure. The result is a vacuum of expertise. Without reliable expertise in-house, members look outside Congress and its support agencies for basic facts and analysis, leading to an undue reliance on lobbyists, advocates, and the executive branch.

Fortunately, Congress has begun to revamp CRS as part of its larger push to modernize the entire branch. The House Administration Committee and its Senate counterpart completed the first item on this to-do list by pushing out [Mary] Mazanec and starting a search for a new leader of the 600-person-strong agency. Now, the House is moving forward with legislation to empower CRS to more easily get information from the executive branch and eliminate unnecessary expenses.

Regulation and Messaging Votes

Don Wolfensberger at The Hill:

[On] three consecutive days (July 9-11), the House flexed its anti-over-regulatory chops by passing three measures disapproving executive agency regulations ranging from women’s rights to home appliance energy standards.

Then, on the final day, the House turned around and voted 205-213 to defeat its own funding bill for fiscal 2025, the Legislative Branch Appropriations Act. Ten Republicans and all but three Democrats voted against the measure. To say the House was sending mixed signals as to its self-worth as an institution would be an understatement, though the 15 members who did not vote might have produced a different result. Some leaders are still puzzling over why the House would bite the hand that feeds it — which is to say, its own hand.

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According to a Congressional Research Service brief (updated Feb. 27, 2023), the Congressional review Act has been used to successfully overturn 20 rules: one in the 107th Congress (2001-02), 16 in the 115th Congress (2017-18), and three in the 117th Congress (2021-22).

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The partisan votes on all three regulation disapproval measures and the legislative branch appropriations bill are telling. The two parties obviously differ on many policy issues these days, and that is reflected in the marked increase in strictly partisan votes. It is also understandable that a House Republican majority will push back on regulations promulgated by a Democratic administration.

The fact remains, though, that in a Congress with split party control of the two chambers, and with a Democratic president to boot, the exercises we witnessed last week were little more than partisan messaging, doomed ultimately to fail.

Until Congress gets serious about strengthening the resources of its committees and support agencies so that it can resume bipartisan deliberations and legislating, finding common ground will be impossible. Last week was a zero-sum game, only spitting-out campaign fodder that doesn’t do a thing about solving the country’s problems.  

Campus Protest

Many posts have discussed deliberation, argument, and the value of viewpoint diversity.

Princeton President Theodore Eisgruber:

Confrontations at Columbia, Yale, and other campuses around the country have highlighted the importance of “time, place, and manner” regulations to universities’ academic and educational missions. Because the enforcement of these rules is essential to our community as well, I wanted to offer some observations about their role at Princeton and their relationship to other free speech principles.

Princeton’s free expression policy, like the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, protects a strikingly broad range of speech. It “guarantees all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.” It specifically protects even speech that “most members of the University community [deem] to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed.”

Over the course of this academic year, we have seen again just how broad these rights are. In August and September, for example, I resisted calls to censor or condemn a controversial book that criticized Israel in harsh terms. In subsequent months, the University repeatedly protected the right to protest even when those protests included chants offensive to many members of the University — including to me personally.

Despite its breadth, Princeton’s free speech policy — again, like the First Amendment to the Constitution — contains exceptions. For example, it prohibits genuine threats and harassment. It also explicitly recognizes that “the University may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the University.”

The University thus may, and indeed does, limit the times and places where protests can occur. It may, and indeed does, prohibit tactics, such as encampments or the occupation of buildings, that interfere with the scholarly and educational mission of the University or that increase safety risks to members of the University community.

These time, place, and manner regulations are viewpoint-neutral and content-neutral. They apply to any protest or event, regardless of which side they take or what issues they raise.

Time, place, and manner regulations are fully consistent with — indeed, they are necessary to — Princeton’s commitment to free speech. The purpose of our policy is “to promote a lively and fearless freedom of debate and deliberation,” not simply to maximize expression in all its forms, no matter how disruptive.

Dialogue, debate, and deliberation depend upon maintaining a campus that is free from intimidation, obstruction, risks to physical safety, or other impediments to the University’s scholarship, research, and teaching missions.

Princeton’s time, place, and manner regulations include a clear and explicit prohibition upon encampments. They provide that “camping in vehicles, tents, or other structures is not permitted on campus. Sleeping in outdoor space of any kind is prohibited.”

Encampments can obstruct others from moving freely or conducting University business. They can create health and safety risks. They require significant staff time to keep occupants and bystanders safe, thereby diverting people and resources from fulfilling their primary purpose. They can intimidate community members who must walk past them. There is no practical way to bar outsiders from joining the encampments.

As recent events vividly illustrate, encampments are also prone to become sites of confrontation. Columbia University moved classes online because of concerns about the safety of its students. At Yale University, a student reportedly had to seek medical attention after an altercation at an encampment.

At ordinary protests, our Free Expression Facilitators, in partnership with the Department of Public Safety, work assiduously to minimize or de-escalate confrontations before they become harmful; the 24-7 nature of encampments makes that assignment nearly impossible.

Our ability to discuss difficult, sensitive topics depends partly on the culture of our community. I am grateful to everyone who has helped Princeton to talk constructively about hard questions during this very challenging year.

Our success also depends on the consistent application of our policies protecting free speech. Princeton will continue to enforce those policies resolutely, including both this University’s expansive protections for the expression of controversial ideas and the time, place, and manner regulations that enable us to engage in thoughtful dialogue, debate, and deliberation about those ideas.

Congress: Neither Productive Nor Deliberative

A number of posts have discussed congressional capacity, legislative productivity, and deliberation.

Moira Warburton and  Ally J. Levine at Reuters:

The U.S. Congress is navigating yet another government funding deadline — the eighth in less than six months — and are at an impasse over sending aid to key allies in Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel. Divisions among Republicans in the House and Senate killed a major bipartisan border policy bill. Reforms to bedrock programs like Medicare and Social Security are desperately needed but no closer to getting passed. Meanwhile, the House of Representatives spent close to a month without a speaker last year due to infighting between moderate and hard right factions of the Republican party.

When U.S. Representative Chip Roy, a Republican from Texas, begged his colleagues in November to “give me one thing I can campaign on and say we did,” he was articulating what many lawmakers and observers were feeling: Congress isn’t working.

 

Since the Reagan Era Congressional legislation has fallen by 2/3rds -- not to mention its failure to pass a full, on-time budget.
MORE pic.twitter.com/XbkFmuTPsu

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 14, 2024

And it's not just about laws and measures -- Congress is simply spending less time doing its job. And a lot more time raising $$$ and engaging in shouting hearings and name-calling speechifying.
Who is running the United States of America?
What will this look like by 2030? pic.twitter.com/7xlfeOGTML

— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) March 14, 2024

Dodgeball and Deliberation

Don Wolfensberger at The Hill:

There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, when House members were drilled by their leaders at the beginning of a new Congress on three unwritten party rules they were expected obey without exception. First, always vote for your party’s nominee for Speaker; second, always support your party’s package of House rules proposed at the opening of a Congress; and, third, always vote for your party’s position on special rule resolutions from the Rules Committee that set the terms of debate and amendment on major legislation. The Rules Committee was known then, at least, as “the Speaker’s committee” because it reflected the leadership’s policy priorities and procedural means of considering them.

For a small group of hard-right junior Republicans, all three of those rules were tossed out of the window as the beginning of this 118th Congress. They first balked at electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) as Speaker over the course of four days and 14 ballots until they had wrested from him certain concessions on House rules changes and processes they wanted him to adhere to.

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In grappling for an appropriate analogy for this new procedural game in town, I finally settled on circle dodgeball, labeled here as “procedural dodgeball.” A large circle is drawn and, in the middle a smaller circle with five or so targets (or leaders). Around the perimeter are 20 or so throwers (rebels) on marked spots who try to eliminate the players in the middle by hitting them below the waist with dodge balls. Once all the center circle targets are eliminated, they switch places with a comparable number of throwers in the inner circle until they in turn are all removed. And back and forth it goes, between special rules and the suspension bills.

Unfortunately, all the players on the inner and outer circles are of the same party. The Democrats, on the other hand, are in the stands, cheering on both sides in their game of self-elimination, while providing sufficient votes on special rules to allow the handful of rebels to prevail in defeating those rules.

It’s difficult to predict when or whether all this will end. But it is a far cry from James Madison’s ideal of a Congress in which various competing factions overcome their hostilities and finally come together to act in the public interest after extended deliberations over the nature of the problems and its solution. Deliberation today is in short supply. Performative, partisan point-making has replaced serious national lawmaking as the order of the day.

Chile and Deliberative Democracy

 

Many posts have discussed deliberation.

Nathan Gardels at Noema:

“Constitutions need general acceptance so we can turn to their rules to manage our differences,” the former left-of-center Chilean President Ricardo Lagos told me in September 2022 after the first attempt to ratify a proposed new constitution by referendum. “Only in this way — arguing within the limits of the constitution and not about it — can countries make changes within the framework of reasonable stability. In the end, what was proposed was a partisan document, which is why it failed.”

 The same could be said of the second failed attempt late last year when 55.8% of the public voted against the newest constitutional proposal. In the first case, the largely far-left and single-issue independents who dominated the final drafting of the text went too far, excluding other interests in society. In the second case, the right symmetrically mimicked their error. In both cases, the interested factions sought not so much to set out fair rules to govern political competition and constrain the use of power as to enshrine their agenda in the state’s founding document.

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That the body politic as a whole rejected both efforts when their voices were fully heard suggests that the obstacle to ratifying a new constitution is actually the way forward: Instead of electing delegates to a Constitutional Convention or Constitutional Council, a citizens’ assembly should be selected through sortition — a random lottery, as in the ancient Greek way of democracy, to choose delegates that would comprise a conclave more indicative of the public as a whole. In consultation and collaboration with knowledgeable constitutional experts, they would deliberate clauses of the constitution from a politically disinterested perspective and submit the document to their fellow citizens.

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The Chilean experience holds lessons for addressing the legitimacy crisis across all democracies today. In a starkly polarized environment, elections where partisans vie for power by any means necessary only deepen divisions. Particularly in an age when peer-to-peer social media fragments the public square as never before, what is needed is to bring the broader civil society, advised by non-partisan expertise, into governance through new deliberative institutions like citizens’ assemblies that foster negotiation and compromise to reach consensus.

The Dobbs Story

 Jodi Kantor and Adam Liptak at NYT:

At every stage of the Dobbs litigation, Justice Alito faced impediments: a case that initially looked inauspicious, reservations by two conservative justices and efforts by colleagues to pull off a compromise. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., a conservative, along with the liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer, worked to prevent or at least limit the outcome. Justice Breyer even considered trying to save Roe v. Wade — the 1973 ruling that established the right to abortion — by significantly eroding it.

To dismantle that decision, Justice Alito and others had to push hard, the records and interviews show. Some steps, like his apparent selective preview of the draft opinion, were time-honored ones. But in overturning Roe, the court set aside more than precedent: It tested the boundaries of how cases are decided.

Justice Ginsburg’s death hung over the process. For months, the court delayed announcing its decision to hear the case, creating the appearance of distance from her passing. The justices later allowed Mississippi to perform a bait-and-switch, widening what had been a narrower attempt to restrict abortion while she was alive into a full assault on Roe — the kind of move that has prompted dismissals of other cases.

The most glaring irregularity was the leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft. The identity and motive of the person who disclosed it remains unknown, but the effect of the breach is clear: It helped lock in the result, The Times found, undercutting Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Breyer’s quest to find a middle ground.

In the Dobbs case, the court “barreled over each of its normal procedural guardrails,” wrote Richard M. Re, a University of Virginia law professor and former Kavanaugh clerk on a federal appellate court, adding that “the court compromised its own deliberative process.”

AI and Deliberative Democracy

 From Helene Landemore at the International Monetary Fund:

We now have the chance to scale and improve such deliberative processes exponentially so that citizens’ voices, in all their richness and diversity, can make a difference. Taiwan Province of China exemplifies this transition.

Following the 2014 Sunflower Revolution there, which brought tech-savvy politicians to power, an online open-source platform called pol.is was introduced. This platform allows people to express elaborate opinions about any topic, from Uber regulation to COVID policies, and vote on the opinions submitted by others. It also uses these votes to map the opinion landscape, helping contributors understand which proposals would garner consensus while clearly identifying minority and dissenting opinions and even groups of lobbyists with an obvious party line. This helps people understand each other better and reduces polarization. Politicians then use the resulting information to shape public policy responses that take into account all viewpoints.

Over the past few months pol.is has evolved to integrate machine learning with some of its functions to render the experience of the platform more deliberative. Contributors to the platform can now engage with a large language model, or LLM (a type of AI), that speaks on behalf of different opinion clusters and helps individuals figure out the position of their allies, opponents, and everyone in between. This makes the experience on the platform more truly deliberative and further helps depolarization. Today, this tool is frequently used to consult with residents, engaging 12 million people, or nearly half the population.

Corporations, which face their own governance challenges, also see the potential of large-scale AI-augmented consultations. After launching its more classically technocratic Oversight Board, staffed with lawyers and experts to make decisions on content, Meta (formerly Facebook) began experimenting in 2022 with Meta Community Forums—where randomly selected groups of users from several countries could deliberate on climate content regulation. An even more ambitious effort, in December 2022, involved 6,000 users from 32 countries in 19 languages to discuss cyberbullying in the metaverse over several days. Deliberations in the Meta experiment were facilitated on a proprietary Stanford University platform by (still basic) AI, which assigned speaking times, helped the group decide on topics, and advised on when to put them aside.

For now there is no evidence that AI facilitators do a better job than humans, but that may soon change. And when it does, the AI facilitators will have the distinct advantage of being much cheaper, which matters if we are ever to scale deep deliberative processes among humans (rather than between humans and LLM impersonators, as in the Taiwanese experience) from 6,000 to millions of people.

Civic Thought and Deliberation

Many posts have discussed deliberation.

Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education b Benjamin Storey & Jenna Silber Storey at the American Enterprise Institute

• There is widespread, bipartisan concern that American universities are not adequately preparing students for citizenship. The most ambitious efforts to attend to this problem to date have been undertaken by Republican-led state legislatures, which have mandated that state universities create new academic units for civic education.
• While this innovation has been undertaken to meet political needs, its success or failure will be determined by academic standards. To meet those standards, these new academic units will need to define and execute a distinctive intellectual mission.
• An intellectual mission in the fullest sense requires a coherent program of teaching and research in a specific and demanding discipline. This report sketches the outlines of such a program, which we call “Civic Thought.” As its core elements are derived from a consideration of the intellectual demands of citizenship, it may be useful to all those working toward the renewal of university-level civic education.

.In a democratic republic such as our own, citizens need to learn howto deliberate with others who have different perspectives and experiences. They need to be capable of evaluating different arguments and considering different needs as they consider the best possible course of action for the country as a whole.

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Contemporary citizens should learn to consult and evaluate different forms ofexpertise in the course of deliberating between alternative courses of action. Insofar as the citizen’s responsibility is, however, for the whole of our common life in all its complexity, political decisions cannot be derived from the counsel of any particular specialist.

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 Since citizens need to learn to deliberate together about problems that call for action, the approach of Civic Thought is best characterized by a phrase borrowed from Hannah Arendt—the “willingness to take joint responsibility” for the problems one’s country faces and the remedies that might be employed to address them. For example, while considering the national debt, scholars of Civic Thought would consider it as our problem, and they would inquire into how fiscal accountability might be restored without neglecting areas where spending is truly necessary. The willingness to take joint responsibility for the challenges facing one’s country means, in Arendt’s words, refusing to adopt a posture of “estrangement” from it, an attitude of unquenchable “dissatisfaction . . . and disgust with things as they are,” and striving rather to understand oneself as implicated, for better and worse, in the unfolding history of one’s political community