David Boaz

In the interview touted below by Jim Harper, the faux-neocon character played by Stephen Colbert asks constitutional scholar Neal Katyal, “Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?”

He’s ostensibly speaking for the four conservative justices who dissented in the Boumediene v. Bush case. But today he could be channeling the four liberal justices who dissented in the D.C. v. Heller case. Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that he couldn’t imagine that the Constitution would “limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”

It is sadly hard to find justices who don’t, in some cases, sound like “Stephen Colbert”:

“Where does the Constitution get off telling the government what it can and cannot do?”

For a discussion of how the Constitution does in fact establish a government of delegated, enumerated, and thus limited powers, go here.

Over at RedState, they’re excited about a video narrated by Sen. Fred Thompson — remember him? — for the President’s Dinner of the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee. It’s a fine video, full of stirring music and appeals to freedom and smaller government by Thompson, John McCain, and the President — Ronald Reagan, that is. In 5 minutes and 28 seconds, there was no room for a clip, a photo, or a mention of the current President, what’s his name, Bush.

Republicans are no dummies. If they haven’t had a president they’re proud to be associated with in the past 20 years, they’ll reach back 27 years ago to the first inaugural address of a president they can still sell.

I’ve just posted a piece at the Guardian on Sen. James Webb’s Scots-Irish ethnic populism. But he’s got his good side, too. A Virginia newspaper reports today:

Virginia Sen. Jim Webb began building a public case Thursday to change the nation’s drug laws to stress treatment over incarceration for nonviolent offenders.

The freshman Democrat held a hearing of the Joint Economic Committee to solicit testimony from prosecutors and scholars who argued that the decades-long emphasis on incarceration has been costly and ineffective.

Executives from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley met with Democratic staff members of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee last week to make the case that trading in energy contracts is not the reason that oil prices are rising. Judging by Jeff Birnbaum’s report in the Washington Post, it’s not easy to teach Democrats about economics:

But the executives were met with skepticism and occasional hostility. “Spare us your lecture about supply and demand,” one of the Democratic aides said, abruptly cutting off one of the executives.

Another aide “warned the executives that no matter what arguments they muster, it would be hard to prevent Congress from acting.” So much for fact-finding and economic sanity in an election year.

The federal voucher program that enables nearly 2,000 children in the District of Columbia to attend private schools is facing opposition in the Democratic Congress and may be discontinued. Some people just can’t stand to think that kids might get educated outside the grasp of the government. 

The most honest, decent, and thoughtful Democratic president of modern times, Jed Bartlet, was surprised to find himself supporting vouchers on an episode of NBC’s “The West Wing.” Bartlet’s staff summoned the mayor of Washington, D.C., to the White House to plot strategy for his veto of a Republican-backed bill to provide vouchers for a few students in D.C. schools–and was stunned to discover that the mayor and the D.C. school board president both supported the program, as indeed Mayor Anthony Williams and School Board President Peggy Cooper Cafritz did in real life. Why? the president asked the mayor. “After six years of us promising to make schools better next year,” the mayor replied, “we’re ready to give vouchers a try….We spend over $13,000 per student–that’s more than anywhere else in the country-and we don’t have a lot to show for it.” (As Andrew Coulson wrote recently in the Washington Post, the real cost is actually much higher than that.)

Then the president summons his young personal aide to testify to the merits of D.C. public schools and gets another surprise:

Faced with the evidence, President Bartlet decided to do the right thing. Will Congress?

I pulled the September 24, 2007, copy of the New Republic out from a stack on my coffee table last night and happened on a fascinating column about the upcoming primaries. John Judis laid out in convincing detail just why the primary race was likely to go all the way to June and maybe even to the convention. He did acknowledge that people had made such predictions before:

Of course, dire prognostications of brokered conventions are made nearly every election…. But the structure of the election has changed this year. The old schedule of primaries and caucuses was designed to winnow the field. Invariably, only two candidates were left standing by March, one of whom would eventually capture enough delegates through the remaining contests to win the nomination. By contrast, the 2008 schedule concentrates more than half of the primary and caucus votes in the first month, which ends February 5. If there is no clear frontrunner by then, the race will probably continue on into June and perhaps even up until the convention.

And that’s why, he said, the delegates just might find themselves choosing the nominee at their convention in Minneapolis.

Yes, Minneapolis. Not Denver. The Republican convention. Because, Judis said, it was likely that Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson would divide the states on a regional basis and no one would get a majority of the delegates. “So there is a very good chance that, by June, none of the Republican candidates will have secured the nomination.”

And then what would happen? Well, “the struggle for the nomination would probably move to the GOP convention’s rules committee,” which would have to decide, among other things, whether to disqualify delegates from Florida and other states that held their primaries too early.

TNR readers might have been worrying, Could this happen to our party? Not to worry, said Judis:

Democrats seem far less likely to face this sort of challenge next year. Indeed, Hillary Clinton appears to be putting her competition behind her, and none of her challengers has a built-in regional advantage that will ensure a respectable block of delegates….In fact, the compressed primary schedule could make a stalemate less rather than more likely for Democrats….While Republicans become ever more fractious as the general election approaches, Democrats will have already spent months coalescing around a new leader.

In this I think Judis was doubly, or triply, wrong. Not only did he get the primary process completely wrong in each party, I think he was wrong to predict that a drawn-out nominating process would be bad for the party. It seems clear today that Barack Obama has greatly benefited from the long battle with Hillary Clinton: he held the nation’s attention longer, he became a sharper debater, he raised unprecedented sums of money, he built an organization in every state, he faced a lot of the revelations and charges that would otherwise have come up closer to the election.

So . . . what are the pundits predicting about the fall election?

Endorsing Barack Obama, Al Gore proclaims:

After eight years in which our constitution has been dishonored and disrespected, we need change.

He has a point. But he should have said sixteen years.

David Davis, the shadow home secretary in the United Kingdom (that is, the prospective attorney general should the Conservative Party take power), has resigned his seat in the House of Commons to protest Parliament’s approval of a bill that would allow the government to hold terror suspects up to 42 days without charges.

Davis, generally regarded as a Thatcherite, said:

Until yesterday I took a view that what we did in the House of Commons representing our constituents was a noble endeavour because for centuries of forebears we defended the freedom of people. Well, we did, up until yesterday.

This Sunday is the anniversary of Magna Carta, a document that guarantees the fundamental element of British freedom, habeas corpus. The right not to be imprisoned by the state without charge or reason.

But yesterday this house allowed the state to lock up potentially innocent citizens for up to six weeks without charge.

He denounced the bill as “the one most salient example of the insidious, surreptitious and relentless erosion of fundamental British freedom” and went on to cite ID cards, “an assault on jury trials,” and “a DNA database bigger than any dictatorship has” as other elements of that erosion.

Davis said he would run in a special election to reclaim his seat by campaigning “against the slow strangulation of fundamental British freedoms by this government.” Observers expect him to win handily, as the Labour Party has fallen dramatically in the polls. But Conservative leader David Cameron has already appointed a new shadow home secretary, so Davis may have forfeited his leadership role.

I’m reminded of Phil Gramm, a Democratic congressman, who worked with President Reagan and the Republicans to cut taxes and spending in the early 1980s. When the Democratic leadership removed him from the Budget Committee, he switched to the Republican Party. Saying that the voters of his district should have the chance to decide whether they wanted a Republican representative, he resigned, ran in the special election as a Republican, was easily elected on Lincoln’s birthday, and the following year waltzed into the U.S. Senate.

Will Davis find such success by resigning and giving the voters a chance to assess his performance? Only time will tell… In the meantime, you can watch the video of his five-minute speech here.

In an article about the wave of conservative reform under Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, the New York Times writes:

Meanwhile the House is considering an income tax cut that would cost the state $300 million. 

Another way to say that would be:

Meanwhile the House is considering an income tax cut that would save the taxpayers $300 million.

It all depends on whether you identify with the taxpayers or the tax consumers.

The Washington Examiner reports:

Attendance at Nationals Park has fallen more than a quarter short of a consultant’s projections for the stadium’s inaugural year, cutting into the revenue needed to pay the ballpark bonds and spurring a D.C. Council member to demand the city’s money back.

The District’s ability to pay down the debt on the publicly financed ballpark depends in part on the number of people who show up to the games, David Catania, independent at-large, wrote in a letter Tuesday to Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi. 

A study was commissioned in 2005 by Gandhi’s office. Written by Los Angeles-based Economics Research Associates, the report predicted attendance at the 41,000-seat ballpark would average 39,130 in year one, dropping to 32,737 in year four.

But paid attendance through 28 games has averaged only 29,141, Catania said, 26 percent lower than the consultant’s estimates. The Nationals are drawing the 15th-best crowd in baseball, according to ESPN, with a team that is in last place in the National League East and a 22-31 record as of Wednesday.

“It appears now,” Catania wrote, “that ERA may have seriously overestimated ticket sales, which represents a major portion of stadium-related revenues.”

Gandhi says it doesn’t matter, the bonds can be paid off with attendance as low as 10,000 per game. Which raises the question: if it’s that easy to pay for the stadium, why didn’t the multi-millionaire team owners agree to pay for it themselves?

Of course, these economic projections for subsidized stadiums are always vastly overstated. As Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys wrote in a 2004 Cato study criticizing the proposed stadium subsidy, “The wonder is that anyone finds such figures credible.”

Several Cato studies over the years have looked at the absurd economic claims of stadium advocates. In “Sports Pork: The Costly Relationship between Major League Sports and Government,” Raymond Keating finds:

The lone beneficiaries of sports subsidies are team owners and players. The existence of what economists call the “substitution effect” (in terms of the stadium game, leisure dollars will be spent one way or another whether a stadium exists or not), the dubiousness of the Keynesian multiplier, the offsetting impact of a negative multiplier, the inefficiency of government, and the negatives of higher taxes all argue against government sports subsidies. Indeed, the results of studies on changes in the economy resulting from the presence of stadiums, arenas, and sports teams show no positive economic impact from professional sports — or a possible negative effect.

In Regulation magazine, (.pdf) Coates and Humphreys found that the economic literature on stadium subsidies comes to consistent conclusions:

The evidence suggests that attracting a professional sports franchise to a city and building that franchise a new stadium or arena will have no effect on the growth rate of real per capita income and may reduce the level of real per capita income in that city.

And in “Caught Stealing: Debunking the Economic Case for D.C. Baseball,” Coates and Humphreys looked specifically at the economics of the new baseball stadium in Washington, D.C., and found similar results:

Our conclusion, and that of nearly all academic economists studying this issue, is that professional sports generally have little, if any, positive effect on a city’s economy. The net economic impact of professional sports in Washington, D.C., and the 36 other cities that hosted professional sports teams over nearly 30 years, was a reduction in real per capita income over the entire metropolitan area.

And yet millionaire owners and mayors with Edifice Complexes keep commissioning these studies, and council members and editorial boards keep falling for them.