Why Rand Paul is wrong about Title II

by Roger Koppl

Rand Paul won the Republican primary in the Kentucky Senate race and almost immediately stepped into a big pile of steaming controversy by telling Rachel Maddow that he did not support Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Since then few voices have defended his statements on Maddow’s show, with John Stossel as one of the rare exceptions.  In his recent Christian Science Monitor op-ed on this topic, Sheldon Richman defends Paul’s statements saying, “individuals are either free to do anything peaceful or they are not.”  I reject libertarian objections to Title II precisely because I agree with the quoted remark: individuals are either free to do anything peaceful or not. (For the record: I’m not a libertarian, but the quoted statement is a logical truth, not a political program.)  Black and white people in the recently-Jim-Crow South would not have been free to associate without the assistance of Title II.

Arizona law a blow to liberty

by Roger Koppl

Kris Kobach defends Arizona’s new immigration law, SB 1070, in today’s New York Times.  He says, “Presumably, the government lawyers . . . will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done.”  Well, I read the law and I do not like it.

Whenever a  law enforcement officer makes a “lawful contact” with a person, the officer must attempt to determine that person’s immigration status if he or she has “reasonable suspicion” the person is an illegal immigrant.  It is a “lawful contact” if the cops ask for a statement at the scene of an accident, for example.  Illegals now have an incentive to flee even as mere witnesses.  The local police or sheriff’s office cannot have a policy to counter this incentive lest they be sued.  The law provides that “a person” may bring suit against any “official or agency” that has a policy that “limits or restricts the enforcement of federal immigration laws to less than the full extent permitted by federal law.”  The central provision of SB 1070 threatens to reduce the ordinary protections of the law for illegal aliens, which threatens order and security for them and everyone else.

Time for a Truth Commission

by Roger Koppl

London’s The Times reports on evidence suggesting “George W. Bush ‘knew Guantánamo prisoners were innocent.’”  (HT: Radley Balko)  Supposedly, Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld were all in on it.  “The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee.”

According to The Times, “He [Wilkerson] said that many [persons] were turned over by Afghans and Pakistanis for up to $5,000.”  The problem with these payments is clear.  Paying persons serious money to turn in supposed terrorists creates a powerful incentive to invent false charges so that you can get the money.  In that part of the world, $5,000 is very serious money indeed.  It is hard to avoid the conclusion that many persons swept up in that operation were innocent persons who were sold out to fatten a wallet.

Karl Rove has said that waterboarding is not torture.  (Go to about 3:07.)  He has also said that “harsh interrogation” produced lots of good actionable intelligence (2:25).  That’s not a credible remark in my book.

In the US, our government has rendered, sequestered, and tortured.  Our government has flouted the rule of law and suspended habeas corpus.  It has made war on a nation that was not a threat to us in any way.  It has spied on us without the legal nicety of a specific warrant.  It has, in other words, grown tyrannical.  Isn’t it time for a truth commission?  It is too much to hope for a real criminal trial of our highest officials, but is it really too much to ask for the truth?  Patrick Leahy called for a truth commission in February 2009.  It’s time.

Our Inconvenient Constitution

by Mario Rizzo 

The question of questions for the politician should ever be — “what type of social structure am I tending to produce?” But this is a question he never entertains. (Herbert Spencer, “The Coming Slavery.”)

It is hard for an abstraction to win against a poor mother with a kid who is uninsured. But this kind of phenomenon has been the story for a long time.  

Human beings are prone to ignore the long-run, hard to measure, and more abstract consequences of their actions, especially in the public sphere. Each decision is taken is response to some concrete problem or need. “It is all about people; it is all about jobs; it is all about health,” we are told. Sometimes it is about the goals of special, concentrated interests. Other times people think of themselves as voting for the concrete interests of worthy individuals or groups.

Of course, there is usually a net social loss of wealth or efficiency. But that is not the main loss. The real loss is the weakening of the institutional and legal framework that can protect us from a serious diminution of liberty.  

A Circular Argument in Libertarian Reasoning?

by Gene Callahan

Although I have touched briefly on this topic at my (mostly) solo, non-serious blog, the volume of response I received there has prompted me to flesh out my argument and present it here, on the blog where I limit myself to my more sober postings.

The proximate cause of my addressing this topic was a post by Brian Doherty at Reason.com, where he wrote:

“States, after all, cannot function without first aggressing against someone, if only to get tax money to fund their activities.”

But the ultimate cause was my much longer-term conviction that such reasoning simply begs a central question that political theory is seeking to answer, namely, just when is coercion justified and when isn’t it? After all, every wavelength of the political spectrum considers some coercion to be OK, and some to be “aggression.”

Ideas have consequences

by Roger Koppl 

Last month the Los Angeles Times reported, “California Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown asked the state Supreme Court on Friday to invalidate the voter-approved ban on gay marriage.”  Brown’s brief argues that the states’ constitution protects liberty and privacy as “inalienable” rights, the courts have protected gay marriage under those constitutional principles, and the citizens cannot overturn such inalienable rights by majority vote.  “Voters are allowed to amend other parts of the Constitution by majority vote, but to use the ballot box to take away an ‘inalienable’ right would establish a ‘tyranny of the majority,’ which the Constitution was designed, in part, to prevent, he wrote.”  He was talking about California’s constitution, but he appealed to principles that were embodied in the founding the documents of the US, including  the Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, and the U.S. Constitution.

The U.S. Constitution did more than erect some formal governance structures.  It  embedded the ideal of ordered liberty in our political culture.  That ideal has been trampled on by the Republicans only to be picked up, dusted off, and put to good use by the Democrats.  The principles of liberalism still have an honored place in our political system.  I hope we can build on them to dismantle some of the structures of tyranny erected under Bush.