Ending Poverty in California?

A number of posts have dealt with homelessness.

The problem is highly visible in California. Because of its high cost of housing, the supplemental poverty measure puts its poverty rate as the highest in the nation.

 At Reason, Steven Greenhut writes about former Stockton Mayor Michael Tubbs, who wants to end poverty in California:

Tubb's group is correct that poverty rates in California are atrocious. "California has the highest rate of poverty at 13.2% of any state in the U.S.," it notes. "28.7 percent of all California residents were poor or near poor in fall 2021." EPIC doesn't address that California's poverty rate is the worst in the nation—especially when cost-of-living factors are included—despite this being the nation's most progressive state. It offers the most generous welfare programs.

One would think that politicians who are serious about ending poverty would at least address that paradox. The video features union organizers who point to the need for an even more powerful union presence in our state, yet unions were on the vanguard of some of the state's most poverty-inducing policies—such as Assembly Bill 5, which tried to ban most forms of independent contracting and destroyed moderate-income jobs throughout the freelance economy.

With their progressive policies, lawmakers are destroying the incentive for developers to build more housing. They're always adding regulations and taxes that shutter businesses and discourage people from investing in new ones. Instead of recognizing that California's poverty problem largely is the result of government meddling, EPIC will propose more-aggressive interventions. At some point, lawmakers need to stop making unattainable high-school-level promises and begin wrestling with complex realities.

Student Debt Relief and Biden v. Nebraska

Katherine Knott at Inside Higher Ed:

Several Supreme Court justices appeared skeptical of the Biden administration’s plan to forgive up to $20,000 in federal student loans during a nearly four-hour hearing Tuesday.

As expected, the hearing focused on whether federal statute allows the Biden administration to forgive student loans, whether the plaintiffs have standing to challenge the plan and whether the justices should apply a stricter standard in their review of the two lawsuits before the court.

The court’s six conservative justices homed in on questions of fairness and what Congress intended when it authorized the education secretary in 2003 to “waive” or “modify” provisions of student loan programs to ensure that those affected by a national emergency aren’t worse off financially.

The conservative justices seemed to think the Biden plan was too large to say it was a modification. “We’re talking about half a trillion dollars and 43 million Americans,” Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. said. “How does that fit under the normal understanding of modifying?”

Six states—Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and South Carolina—and two Texas residents filed separate lawsuits in the fall to block the debt-relief plan before it began. The states allege that the plan would harm state revenues and agencies that hold student loans, while the Texas individuals take issue with the fact that they didn’t have a chance to comment on the proposal.

Both sets of plaintiffs argue that the Higher Education Relief Opportunities for Students Act of 2003, which the Biden administration says justifies its debt-relief plan, does not authorize that plan.

Taney: Good Riddance

 Amy B Wang and Marianna Sotomayor at WP:

The House on Wednesday passed a bill that would remove a bust at the U.S. Capitol of Roger B. Taney, the chief justice who authored the majority Supreme Court opinion protecting slavery in Dred Scott v. Sandford.

The House passed the measure by voice vote, and it now heads to President Biden for his signature. The Senate had passed it by voice vote last week.

If signed into law, as expected, the bill would direct the Joint Committee of Congress on the Library to remove Taney’s bust not more than 45 days after the bill is signed into law. The bill would also direct the committee to replace Taney’s bust with one of Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Supreme Court justice.

In 1857, Taney wrote the decision in the case of Scott — a Black man born into slavery who used the courts to demand his freedom — that Black people were not U.S. citizens and could not expect protections from the federal government.

Americans' International Knowledge

 Many posts have discussed public knowledge of issues and events.

From Pew:

Paleoconservatives

Matthew Continetti at Commentary:

However strong the conservative consensus of the mid-1990s may have appeared at the dawn of the Republican Revolution, it soon came under sustained criticism from intellectuals excluded from Kristol’s “more comprehensive conservatism.”

The most coherent challenge came from the so-called paleoconservatives. Their main cause was the dramatic reduction of immigration. Their champion was the syndicated columnist, author, former White House official, and cable-television personality Patrick J. Buchanan. He had built his reputation as a smart, plainspoken pundit before making a transition into electoral politics. After a surprise showing as a protest presidential candidate in New Hampshire in 1992, Buchanan galvanized that year’s Republican National Convention with a speech both describing and advocating a “culture war” in the United States.

Buchanan launched his second run for the presidency on March 20, 1995. In his announcement, he singled out Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, the GOP front-runner, for supporting American membership in the World Trade Organization. Buchanan pledged to withdraw from the WTO and the newly minted North American Free Trade Agreement. He said he would remove U.S. troops participating in UN peacekeeping missions, build a wall along the southern border, and bar immigration for at least five years. “When I raise my hand to take the oath of office,” he said, “this whole New World Order is coming crashing down.”

Buchanan’s invocation of a sinister global conspiracy hinted at his populism’s dark side. He was a well-known opponent of the neoconservatives, and he laced his rhetoric with anti-Semitic tropes cleverly masked for plausible deniability precisely because he was so intelligent. He flirted with racists, anti-government extremists, and conspiracists. The chief theoretician of Buchanan’s movement, the newspaper columnist Samuel T. Francis, was fired from an editorial position at the Washington Times in 1995 after it was revealed that he had told an audience, “The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”

Francis believed that conservatism was defunct. The label “conservative” was meaningless, he said, because Buckley’s movement had failed to generate support among the masses. He argued that the future of American politics hinged on “Middle American Radicals,” also known as the men and women from MARs. These were non-college-educated blue-collar workers disaffected from the electoral process and contemptuous of political, business, social, and cultural elites. They decided elections because they had no allegiance to either party.

According to Francis, the MARs seesawed between the economic nationalism of the left and the cultural nationalism of the right. Buchanan was the first Republican of the post–Cold War era to understand the importance of MARs. He campaigned for their votes by combining economic and cultural nationalism into one angry package. He and Francis introduced many of the terms and concepts that would come to dominate political discourse on the right—phrases like “the ruling class” and “globalism” and slogans like “America First.”

Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA)

 Caitlin Oprysko at Politico Influence:

FARA BY THE NUMBERS: The Justice Department’s reinvigorated focus on enforcing FARA in recent years has continued paying dividends for the department, a top DOJ official said Thursday, with the FARA office recording what could be record numbers of new registrants and foreign agents in 2021.

— The department’s 543 active FARA registrants as of Thursday is the highest number since at least 2013, Jay Bratt, who leads the department’s Counterintelligence and Export Control Section which oversees FARA, said in a keynote address at the American Conference Institute’s FARA forum yesterday. Bratt shied away from calling that number the largest ever at a given time because the Lobbying Disclosure Act and FARA’s LDA exemption siphoned off some registrants. “But probably post-LDA that could be the highest number that we have,” Bratt said.

— There are currently 2,772 active short-form registrants, or individual foreign agents, registered as of yesterday, which Bratt said is another high since 2013. Those agents represent 844 foreign principals. The department has recorded 121 new registrants this year, which is the second largest number, down from the peak in 2019, while the FARA unit has reviewed 5,975 documents over the last year, Bratt added. He chalked the improvement up to renewed attention on the statute since a pretty blistering 2016 inspector general report, as well as Russia’s 2016 election interference as highlighted by former special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe of those influence efforts.

...

— The turnaround for the unit, which by 2014 had seen active registrations drop by 60 percent from their peak in the 1980s, is enabling DOJ to focus on improving what FARA experts have repeatedly described as a severely outdated statute. “In essence … the department for the last four or five years has been focusing on enforcement,” Brandon Van Grack, the former head of the FARA unit now at Morrison & Foerster, told PI. “Now it's focusing on regulation and administration.”

Automation and Inequality

 Daron Acemoglu & Pascual Restrepo have an NBER paper titled "Tasks, Automation, and the Rise in US Wage Inequality." The abstract:

We document that between 50% and 70% of changes in the US wage structure over the last four decades are accounted for by the relative wage declines of worker groups specialized in routine tasks in industries experiencing rapid automation. We develop a conceptual framework where tasks across a number of industries are allocated to different types of labor and capital. Automation technologies expand the set of tasks performed by capital, displacing certain worker groups from employment opportunities for which they have comparative advantage. This framework yields a simple equation linking wage changes of a demographic group to the task displacement it experiences. We report robust evidence in favor of this relationship and show that regression models incorporating task displacement explain much of the changes in education differentials between 1980 and 2016. Our task displacement variable captures the effects of automation technologies (and to a lesser degree offshoring) rather than those of rising market power, markups or deunionization, which themselves do not appear to play a major role in US wage inequality. We also propose a methodology for evaluating the full general equilibrium effects of task displacement (which include induced changes in industry composition and ripple effects as tasks are reallocated across different groups). Our quantitative evaluation based on this methodology explains how major changes in wage inequality can go hand-in-hand with modest productivity gains.

Business and Social Issues

Joel Fox writes at Fox and Hounds:

Does business want to be in the middle of the political and culture wars that gain wide media attention and have passionate advocates on both sides of the issues?

The answer is generally no, although you’ll never hear that spoken by some executives who want to portray their businesses as good corporate citizens that must take a stand on moral issues.

All well and good, but as some critics point out, fairly, businesses are not always consistent on their moral stands. For example, as Los Angeles County Supervisor Mike Antonovich noted when he voted no on a county resolution to boycott North Carolina over the transgender bathroom issue, “The corporations and entertainers and others are calling for the boycott of North Carolina — however, they are more than happy to entertain or conduct business in countries which support and sponsor the persecution, oppression, and violence against individuals based on gender, religion, and sexual orientation.”

Why do businesses take a split stand? Because they believe they can influence state governments but don’t feel they have the power to change attitudes of foreign governments. Businesses are also afraid of the actions foreign governments might take against them. Apple, for instance, has taken a strong position on gay rights and against discrimination, even publicly opposing California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8. Yet, the company has not taken such a public stand against China where the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission says discrimination against gays and lesbians is still written into many laws.

International Views of the United States

At NBC, Tom Curry reports:

Even with President Barack Obama fresh off a trip to Africa and headed in late summer for a trip to Russia, people outside the United States take a less favorable view of America than they did right after he became president.

Surveys from different parts of the world show the initial goodwill toward the U.S. from the international community after Obama assumed office has waned and recent headlines point to some reasons why -- Revelations of U.S. international surveillance, the manhunt of information leaker Edward Snowden, drone strikes in foreign countries and the continued unrest in Syria have exposed the traditional fault lines of international relations.

...
In a recent commentary on the European disillusionment with Obama, Financial Times foreign affairs analyst Gideon Rachman said, “It has gradually dawned on President Obama’s foreign fan club that their erstwhile hero is using methods that would be bitterly denounced if he were a white Republican."

In 2008 Obama was "the vessel into which liberals all over the world poured their fantasies," Rachman said. Disenchantment was bound to happen.

In May, the Program on International Policy and Attitudes reported:

Positive views of China and India have fallen sharply around the world over the last year, a new 25-country poll for BBC World Service indicates.

The poll also finds that views of the UK have improved in the wake of its hosting of the 2012 Olympics, making the UK the third most positively rated country. Of the other fifteen countries rated, nine saw their ratings positive worsen this year while the UK was the most improved.

The 2013 Country Ratings Poll, conducted by GlobeScan/PIPA among 26,299 people around the world between December 2012 and April 2013, asked respondents to rate 16 countries and the EU on whether their influence in the world is "mostly positive" or "mostly negative."

On average positive views of China across 21 tracking countries have dropped eight points to 42 per cent while negative views have risen by the same amount to reach 39 per cent. After improving for several years, views of China have sunk to their lowest level since polling began in 2005. India has shown a similar decline, with negative views up eight points and positive views down six. For the first time this year, those negative views (35%) slightly outnumber those with positive views of India (34%). Overall, China is ranked ninth, while India is ranked twelfth.

Germany regained the position of the most favourably viewed country, with 59 per cent worldwide rating it positively. It displaces Japan, which saw its positive ratings plunge from 58 to 51 per cent and fell from first to fourth place overall. The UK, rated positively by 55 per cent, has climbed from fourth to third place with a four-point increase in positive views since 2012, more than for any other country.
...
Views of the US have shown some sharp declines among the citizens of its allies the UK (46%, down from 60%), France (52%, down from 62%), and Germany (35%, down from 44%), as well as in Egypt (24%, down from 37%). On a global scale, however, views have only slipped slightly (from 47% to 45% positive, with 34% now negative).

Is Democracy Going Into Reverse?

In the first chapter of our textbook's second edition, we have a box on the challenge of promoting freedom and democracy in the wake of the Arab Spring.  At Foreign Policy, Joshua Kurlantzick writes:

In reality, democracy is going into reverse. While some countries in Africa, the Arab world, and Asia have opened slightly in the past two years, in other countries once held up as examples of political change democratic meltdowns have become depressingly common. In fact, Freedom House found that global freedom dropped in 2012 for the seventh year in a row, a record number of years of consistent decline.

The Arab Spring has not only led to dictators like Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Bahrain's ruling Al Khalifa family digging in across the region, but it has also pushed autocrats around the world to take a harder line with their populations -- whether it's China censoring even vague code words for protest or Russia passing broad new treason laws and harassing human rights NGOs. As Arch Puddington, Freedom House's vice president for research, put it, "Our findings point to the growing sophistication of modern authoritarians.… Especially since the Arab Spring, they are nervous, which accounts for their intensified persecution of popular movements for change."

But it's not the Arab Spring alone that's to blame. According to Freedom House, democracy's "forward march" actually peaked around the beginning of the 2000s. A mountain of evidence supports that gloomy conclusion. One of the most comprehensive studies of global democracy, the Bertelsmann Foundation's Transformation Index, has declared that "the overall quality of democracy has deteriorated" throughout the developing world. The index found that the number of "defective" and "highly defective democracies" -- those with institutions, elections, and political culture so flawed that they hardly resemble real democracies -- was up to 52 in 2012.

In another major survey, by the Economist Intelligence Unit, democracy deteriorated in 48 of 167 countries surveyed in 2011. "The dominant pattern globally over the past five years has been backsliding," the report says. We're not just talking about the likes of Pakistan and Zimbabwe here. Thirteen countries on the Transformation Index qualified as "highly defective democracies," countries with such a lack of opportunity for opposition voices, such problems with the rule of law, and such unrepresentative political structures that they are now little better than autocracies.

Public Opinion and International Affairs

As we note in our chapter on foreign policy, the American public has only a fitful interest in international affairs. The Pew Research Center reports:

As the G-8 leaders prepare to meet at Camp David on Friday, the dominant topic of conversation will be the European debt crisis. Yet it is a crisis that has attracted minimal interest or concern among the U.S. public, despite warnings from economists that Europe’s problems may threaten this country’s fragile recovery.

Last week was typical: In the Pew Research Center’s weekly News Interest Index, just 17% said they were following news about economic problems in Europe very closely. Just 3% cited this as their top story of the week. By comparison, 40% tracked U.S. economic news very closely and 20% said they followed it more closely than any other story.

A week earlier, nearly four times as many said the death of football player Junior Seau was their top story than cited Europe’s economic problems (11% vs. 3%).

In part, the public’s lack of interest Europe’s woes is part of a broader indifference to international news. Last year, there were a number of breakthrough foreign stories, from the earthquake and tsunami in Japan to the “Arab spring.” Not this year.

Where Americans do have opinions on international relations, they often tend to differ from people in other countries.  Pew finds that people in most nations oppose Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons, but that Americans are particularly willing to use force:

 

Dual Citizenship

At The New York Times, "Room for Debate" has a symposium on dual citizenship.

Temple University Professor Peter Spiro:

Dual citizenship poses few concrete problems as the world moves away from zero-sum competition among states. Acceptance of the status allows the many individuals with multiple national attachments to actuate those identities. In this respect, dual citizenship represents a kind of freedom of association, a form of voluntary affiliation to be protected, not condemned.

Mark Krikorian of the  Center for Immigration Studies:

 Just as membership in a marriage entails an exclusive relationship, so does membership in a national community. Despite the multiple connections and loyalties we all have, a person can have only one ultimate political allegiance, be the member of one "We the people." Anything else is, in Theodore Roosevelt's words, a "self-evident absurdity."

University of Miami Professor David Abraham:

The increased mobility of people, goods and money has been creating a larger and larger population of dual citizens in the United States, Europe, Asia, Latin America and around the world. With some countries allocating citizenship on the basis of birthplace and others on the basis of descent, dual citizenship is inevitable. 

University of Toronto Professor Ayelet Shachar:

 The strategic value of dual nationality is immense. It allows emigrants to establish and maintain connections between their old and new home countries — connections that can generate significant knowledge transfers, remittances, and future investments. It may also mitigate the “brain drain” associated with the unidirectional movement of migrants, especially the highly skilled, from poorer to richer countries.

Brown University Professor José Itzigsohn:

 The United States does not officially recognize dual citizenship, but it does not take action against it either. I believe this to be a correct policy. Evidence suggests that dual citizenship does not delay the identification of immigrants with the receiving country. Migration does not imply an abrupt break with the country of origin and an immediate identification with the new country. This process takes time as migrants naturally keep an emotional attachment to the place in which they were born. This has always been the case, now and in the past, here and in other countries.

International Views of the United States

Previous posts have discussed international views of U.S. global leadership. Gallup reports:

Although the image of U.S. leadership is showing some cracks in the third year of President Barack Obama's presidency, it remains more positive worldwide than during the last years of the Bush administration. Across 136 countries, median approval of U.S. leadership in 2011 stood at 46% -- relatively unchanged from the 47% median across 116 countries in 2010.

Yet, U.S. leadership ratings in 2011 failed to regain the momentum they lost in 2010, and instead remained static or retreated even more in some places. Gallup surveyed more countries in 2011 than in 2010, but looking at approval in just the countries surveyed in both 2010 and 2011, the median is slightly lower at 43%, suggesting the U.S. has lost some of its status.

Last month, Pew reported:

Nearly a year ago, as Japan struggled with the devastation wrought by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and tsunami, the United States military launched “Operation Tomodachi,” a major humanitarian aid mission, to help the Japanese government respond to the crisis. The effort made a strong impression on the Japanese people – ratings for the U.S. reached sky-high levels following the American mission. And it was not the first time that relief to those in need has enhanced America’s reputation. In recent years, both Indonesians and Pakistanis have expressed more positive views about the U.S. after receiving significant levels of disaster relief. However, the Indonesian and Pakistani examples also suggest that the impact of humanitarian efforts has its limits.

Newt the Debater

Tonight's debate on foreign policy works to Newt Gingrich's advantage. He has a deep background in international affairs, staring with his doctoral dissertation on Belgian education policy in the Congo. And over a quarter century ago, he did well in a foreign policy session before one of the world's toughest debate audiences. On February 8, 1985, Associated Press reported:

U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich won praise today for an impressive defense of U.S. Central American policy but lost an Oxford "debate" to a team led by Nicaragua's vice president, who made his case and then left before the Gingrich spoke because the conservative U.S. lawmaker was of lower rank than he.

At the end of the evening Thursday, the vote was 285 to 158 in favor of the question, "American involvement in Central America is an affront to Western values."

The Oxford Union president, Roland Rudd, said the Georgia Republican also was a good sport for agreeing, with only three hours' notice, to the unusual format that permitted Sergio Ramirez to make a diplomatic point by walking out.

…

Rudd said Gingrich spoke brilliantly and deserved the standing ovation he received from the crowd of more than 1,000 people.

"Ramirez got his (ovation) because of what he represented," Rudd said. "Gingrich earned his by sheer brilliance."

And t is not surprising that he is calling for extended debates on health care. He has a great deal of experience with the subject and the format. In 1994, he helped organize an Oxford-style health care debate on the House floor:

Fakery Follows the bin Laden Killing

One of the boxed features in our book is "Myths and Misinformation," a category that includes fake or misattributed quotations. As a previous post noted, many credit Martin Luther King for saying "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice," even though the line belonged to Theodore Parker. At The Atlantic (h/t Tina Nguyen), Megan McArdle spots another fake King quotation:

Shortly after I posted my piece on feeling curiously un-thrilled about Bin Laden's death, the following quote came across my twitter feed:

"I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy." - Martin Luther King, Jr

I admire the sentiment. But something about it just strikes me as off, like that great Marx quote about the housing bubble that didn't appear anywhere in Das Kapital.

Owners of capital will stimulate the working class to buy more and more of expensive goods, houses and technology, pushing them to take more and more expensive credits, until their debt becomes unbearable. The unpaid debt will lead to bankruptcy of banks, which will have to be nationalised, and the State will have to take the road which will eventually lead to communism. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, 1867

Like the Marx quote, it's a bit too a propos. What "thousands" would King have been talking about? In which enemy's death was he supposed to be rejoicing?

A quick Google search turns up lots of tweets, all of them from today. Searching Martin Luther King Jr. quote pages for the word "enemy" does not turn up this quote, only things that probably wouldn't go over nearly so well, like "Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend." I'm pretty sure that this quote, too, is fake.

At Scripps-Howard, P.J. O'Keefe writes:

The news isn't yet two days old, but email hoaxes and scams related to Osama bin Laden's death are making their way around the Internet Tuesday.

The biggest hoax among them is the photo to the left. It claims to show bin Laden's dead body, but it is in fact a fake.

The website Scam Sniper shows how it was Photoshopped from the original image on the right. We have blurred the photo due to its graphic nature.

Scam Sniper says any photo of bin Laden's corpse found on Facebook should be considered fake.

And Websense reports:

We've seen scams using Osama bin Laden's death in other places and of course they made it onto Facebook as well. Here is the first example talking about a video:

When clicking on the link the user is taken to a page on Facebook asking them to copy/paste the code into the browser's address bar so that they can watch the video:

All you do is to help spread the message so don't do this.

Hispanic Vote in 2010

The Pew Hispanic Center has a new report:

More than 6.6 million Latinos voted in last year's election—a record for a midterm—according to an analysis of new Census Bureau data by the Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center. Latinos also were a larger share of the electorate in 2010 than in any previous midterm election, representing 6.9% of all voters, up from 5.8% in 2006.

Rapid population growth has helped fuel Latinos' increasing electoral participation. According to the Census Bureau, 50.5 million Hispanics were counted by the 2010 Census, up from 35.3 million in 2000. Over the same decade, the number of Latino eligible voters—adults who are U.S. citizens—also increased, from 13.2 million in 2000 to 21.3 million in 2010.

However, even though more Latinos than ever are participating in the nation's elections, their representation among the electorate remains below their representation in the general population. In 2010, 16.3% of the nation's population was Latino, but only 10.1% of eligible voters and fewer than 7% of voters were Latino.

This gap is driven by two demographic factors—youth and non-citizenship. More than one third of Latinos (34.9%) are younger than the voting age of 18. And an additional 22.4% are of voting age, but are not U.S. citizens. As a result, the share of the Latino population eligible to vote is smaller than it is among any other group. Just 42.7% of the nation's Latino population is eligible to vote, while more than three-in-four (77.7%) of whites, two-thirds of blacks (67.2%) and more than half of Asians (52.8%) are eligible to vote.

Yet, even among eligible voters, Latino participation rates lag those of other groups. In 2010, 31.2% of Latino eligible voters say they voted, while nearly half (48.6%) of white eligible voters and 44.0% of black eligible voters said the same.

Egypt and the Federalist

Democracy and liberty are not identical. In Federalist 10, Madison wrote:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community ... If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote. It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution. When a majority is included in a faction, the form of popular government, on the other hand, enables it to sacrifice to its ruling passion or interest both the public good and the rights of other citizens. To secure the public good and private rights against the danger of such a faction, and at the same time to preserve the spirit and the form of popular government, is then the great object to which our inquiries are directed.

To prevent tyranny, the Framers devised a system of federalism, bicameralism, and separated powers.

Egypt now faces the challenge of reconciling liberty and democracy, because the prospect of majority faction is very real. A 2010 Pew Research Center survey found the following percentage of Egyptian Muslims in support of:

• Requiring segregation of men and women in the workplace: 54%
• Whipping or cutting off the hands of thieves and robbers: 77%
• Stoning adulterers: 82%
• Executing those who leave the Muslim religion: 84%

Earmarks

In our chapter on Congress (p. 410), we discuss earmarks, legislative directives setting aside funds for a specific purpose in a district or state. They have become controversial in recent years. The House has put a moratorium on them, while the Senate has not. The Naples [Florida] Daily News reports:

Earmarks are expenditures aimed at projects that are local in nature, and are usually specific to a Congressional district, said Susan MacManus, a political science professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

The debate about whether earmarks should be allowed is a constant one, but MacManus said the decision to ban earmarks – even if only for a short time – has the most significant effect on local governments.

“Local governments are most stressed,” she said. “Local governments have been dependent on the money flowing down, and (the freeze) has a chain effect and the chain stops at the local level.”

Collier County is asking for federal dollars in fiscal 2012 for nine projects, seven of which are continuing initiatives. The county has said the Everglades Boulevard interchange, which comes with a $4 million request for federal funding, is the most important project in the coming fiscal year.

The project had $1 million earmarked in a fiscal 2011 Senate transportation bill, but Wight in a Jan. 11 memo said the earmark was in jeopardy after Congress failed to pass an appropriations bill.

“I think you probably read, and are probably well aware, of the earmark situation,” [county official Debbie] Wight said. “Our lobbyist has continued to emphasize that even though that is the current political climate … there’s a variety of other avenues to pursue funding for our projects.”

But Seana Segrue, a professor of political science at Ave Maria University, said there are only a limited number of areas in which the federal government has committed to offering grants.

“The freeze on earmarks is something that is a reflection of concerns of the debt and the desire to keep government spending under control,” she said. “Earmarks are discretionary, and it’s one of the areas you can have some cuts in tough times.”

Lobbyist Contributions

In a recent piece in Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum wrote:

In the 1974 congressional elections, total spending on Senate and House races came to only $77 million. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, by 2008 the figure was $1.36 billion, with lobbyists providing a significant amount.

The accuracy of the second sentence depends on the meaning of "significant." The Center for Responsive Politics calculates that lobbyists gave $36.6 million in 2008 -- a fair sum, but only 2.7 percent of total spending.

Rand Paul and Birthright Citizenship

We have previously posted items on the issue of the birthright citizenship of children of illegal aliens (here and here). Rand Paul, the controversial Republican Senate candidate in Kentucky, has weighed in:

U.S. Senate candidate Rand Paul is stirring it up again, this time by saying he opposes citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents who are illegal immigrants.

Paul, who a week ago won the GOP primary, told a Russian TV station in a clip circulating on political Web sites Friday that he wants to block citizenship to those children.

"We're the only country I know that allows people to come in illegally, have a baby, and then that baby becomes a citizen," Paul told RT, an English-language station, shortly after his win over GOP establishment candidate Trey Grayson. "And I think that should stop also."

Legislation dubbed the Birthright Citizenship Act was introduced in the House last year seeking to prevent citizenship to babies born to illegal immigrants even though the 14th Amendment to the Constitution guarantees citizenship to everyone born in the U.S. More than 90 lawmakers signed on as co-sponsors.

According to the Congressional Research Service:

The courts apparently have never ruled on the specific issues of whether the native-born child of illegal aliens as opposed to the child of lawfully present aliens may be a U.S. citizen or whether the native-born child of nonimmigrant aliens as opposed to legal resident aliens may be a U.S. citizen. However, Wong Kim Ark specifically held that under the Fourteenth Amendment a child born in the United States to parents who, at the time of his birth, were subjects of the Chinese emperor, but had a “permanent domicil [sic] and residence in the United States” and were not diplomats of the emperor, was born a U.S. citizen. The holding does not make a distinction between illegal and legal presence in the United States, but one could argue that the holding is limited to construing the Fourteenth Amendment in the context of parents who are legal permanent residents. However, the Court’s own discussion of the common law doctrine of jus soli and the Fourteenth Amendment as an affirmation of it indicates that the holding, at the least, would not be limited to permanent legal residents as opposed to nonimmigrant, transient, legal aliens and currently accepted law would also weigh against this argument. Also, the cases involving the deportation of illegal aliens simply take for granted that their U.S.-born children are U.S. citizens in considering whether the existence of or extreme hardship to U.S.-citizen, minor children should stay the deportation of the parents. This is true regardless of whether the children were born during the period of any lawful by the parents, during the period of any unlawful stay or after an I.N.S. finding of deportability of the parents. However, some scholars argue that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment should not apply to the children of illegal aliens because the problem of illegal aliens did not exist at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was considered in Congress and ratified by the states. Although the Elk decision construed the phrase, “subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” the situation of Native Americans is unique, so any interpretation that the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens are not born “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States arguably could not rely on the Elk decision.