Antonin Scalia: A woman isn't a person, or a citizen

An interview with Antonin Scalia:

In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?

Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that. ... But, you know, if indeed the current society has come to different views, that's fine. You do not need the Constitution to reflect the wishes of the current society.  Certainly the Constitution does not require discrimination on the basis of sex. The only issue is whether it prohibits it. It doesn't. Nobody ever thought that that's what it meant. Nobody ever voted for that.

The text of the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Emphasis mine. 

Even if you want to argue that legislators of the 1860s didn't intend for women to be protected by the equal protection clause, I'd think that even Scalia would agree that it's not very smart to read one amendment of the Constitution in isolation from the others. If women didn't count as "citizens" or "persons" during the Reconstruction Era, they most certainly did by 1920, when the 19th Amendment was passed guaranteeing women the right to vote. 

It's not crazy for people to read the equal protection clause as protecting every citizen within the United States. That's plainly what the amendment says. If Scalia wants it to apply only to men, he can go back and have a vote. We already have the law and its language.

Three cheers for filibuster reform

It looks like Democrats in the Senate might force reform of the filibuster. This makes Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander mad:

In a speech prepared for a Tuesday appearance at the Heritage Foundation, Mr. Alexander reiterated his position that Democrats would be making a mistake. “Voters who turned out in November are going to be pretty disappointed when they learn the first thing Democrats want to do is cut off the right of the people they elected to make their voices heard on the floor of the U.S. Senate,” he said in his planned remarks.

Which is why Dems should make the entirely correct case that their proposed reforms actually help newly elected senators make their voices heard on the floor of the U.S. Senate.

After all, the changes -- as I understand them -- won't do away entirely with the filibuster: Democrats can clearly see the day, two years ago, when they'll be in the minority: they'll want to have the tool available for themselves at that point. But right now, all a senator has to do to conduct a filibuster is say the word "filibuster." He or she doesn't have to take the floor, Mr. Smith style, and hold it until it can't be held anymore: they just have to indicate they might. That merest gesture triggers a supermajority requirement to get any legislation passed.

The proposed reform would require, more or less, that senators who want to filibuster a piece of legislation actually filibuster a piece of legislation. They'd have to hold the floor in front of God and the voters -- and, presumably, they'd use some of that time to explain why they were taking such extreme measures. Filibuster reform doesn't stifle senators' voices; it forces them to use them instead of hiding behind a wall of procedural rules. Democrats should be able to win this fight in the court of public opinion.

Is your library 'big government liberalism' in action?

Bill Kristol chortles over cuts at a Maryland library, which includes the loss of a subscription to his own Weekly Standard:

THE WEEKLY STANDARD knows that government spending at all levels must be reduced. And TWS puts the country first! So to all our readers who are offering to write in protest, to organize petitions, and to gin up denunciations of Montgomery County officials: No. We'll do our part for the greater good. Unjust and unwise as it is to deprive Bethesdans of TWS in their public libraries, we're willing to say: As long as public sector unions, politically correct county activities, foolish and unnecessary programs, and bloated government payrolls are also cut—we'll take the hit, too.

So Bethesdans who've been reading TWS in the library will have to subscribe (it's a good deal!). And we'll have done our part to help put the nation on the path to recovery from big government liberalism.

I don't know. It's true that libraries can sometimes become ambitious and opulent on the taxpayer dime, but it had never occured to me to think of the library as "big government liberalism" in action. Even Glenn Beck uses libraries! But it does make me wonder what kind of community-based social service programming Bill Kristol finds reasonable. Meals on Wheels? A socialist plot. 

Today in inequality reading: The negative income tax

Cato's Facebook page points me to this new National Affairs article by Harvard professor Jeffrey Miron, who proposes scrapping pretty much all U.S. entitlement programs and creating a "negative income tax:"

A negative income tax — an idea advocated by Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman — would have two key components: a minimum, guaranteed level of income, and a flat tax rate that is applied to the total amount of income (if any) that a person earns. The net tax owed by any taxpayer would equal his gross tax liability — that is, his earned income multiplied by the tax rate — minus the guaranteed minimum income. If the gross liability were to exceed the guaranteed minimum, the taxpayer would owe the difference. If the gross liability were to fall short of the guaranteed minimum, the government would pay the difference to the taxpayer.

To illustrate, consider a negative tax-rate structure under which the guaranteed minimum is $5,000 and the tax rate is 10%. In this situation, a person earning no income would get a transfer from the government of $5,000 and have a total income of $5,000. A person earning $100,000 would have a gross tax liability of $10,000 and a net tax liability of $5,000, for a total after-tax income of $95,000. A person earning $10,000 of income would have a gross liability of $1,000 and a net liability of negative $4,000 (that is, this person would get a check from the government for $4,000), for a total after-tax income of $14,000.

The chief appeal of this proposal, according to Miron himself, is simplicity: One program to rule them all, instead of a hodge-podge of agencies that disburse various types of aid. Make sure everybody has a minimum level of cash in their pocket and send them on their way. It reduces admininistrative costs, and it frees entrepreneurs and big businesses to get on with the business of creating wealth. And that is enticing.

But I've got a couple of quibbles with Miron's piece -- one being the premise, the other in the proposal itself:

* The premise is that the welfare state is a huge drag on wealth producers. Maybe, but I'm not certain he makes the case. Part of his case is a table showing that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans pays 28.1 percent of all federal taxes. That does seem disproportionate until you realize that the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans own 42.7 percent of the country's entire wealth. Sounds like America's richest citizens are kind of getting off easy, actually. 

Look closer at the charts: The top 20 percent of Americans pay 68.9 percent of federal taxes, but control 85.1 percent of the wealth. The least-wealthy 80 percent of America owns 7 percent of the wealth -- and pay 30.9 percent of taxes. The burden of government, then, already falls disproportionately on the people who do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this country. 

* And that situation would probably get worse under Miron's proposal. Why? The flat tax that Miron says is a key part of the proposal. Everybody above Miron's minimum income rate would pay the exact same rate in taxes. But let's be honest: 10 percent out of a $10,000-a-year income is more burdensome in all sorts of ways than $10,000 out of a $100,000-a-year-income. The proportion of taxes might be more evenly amongst income groups, but it would feel heaviest to the people on the bottom. And as Miron himself suggests, there might be incentives for people right above the poverty line to abandon work and go on the dole. That's a problem with any program, but it seems likely to be a bigger problem if abandoning a progressive tax rate unduly burdens the lowest-income workers.

And to be honest, I'm not certain why a flat tax is a necessary component of the negative income tax. You can get the clarity Miron looks for, I think, by retaining a progressive tax system but reforming it to get rid of a ton of loopholes. That would allow tax rates to go down, even at the high end.

2011

The arrival of 2011 is just a touch bittersweet for me: It marks 20 years since I graduated from high school. Basically, I've been an adult now for longer than I was a kid, and yet I still feel like a kid. And I'm no longer even at the beginning of my adult journey, now: I'm approaching the middle somewhere. My feet and knees feel creeky, making sure that I understand that the youth inside my head is imprisoned there.

Other reasons to feel old. 2011 is...

* The 20th anniversary of "Terminator 2."

* The 25th anniversary of the Challenger disaster.

* The 30th anniversary of Reagan's presidency. He'll be as much a historical figure to my 2-year-old son as FDR was to me.

I can't remember 1976 too clearly. It was the year I turned 3, and I think I remember it mainly as the year my father introduced me to the "Captain Kangaroo" television show. 

Counterinsurgency: You're doing it wrong

General David Petraeus has his work cut out for him: Civilian casualties are at record levels in Afghanistan, with more than 2,000 having died in 2010. According to the Afghan Interior Ministry, 2,043 civilians, 1.292 policeman, 821 Afghan soldiers, and 5,225 insurgents were killed in 2010, plus many thousand more wounded. The U.N.’s number is even higher, estimating that 2,412 civilians died in 2010, up 20 percent from 2009. The 711 foreign troops killed in 2010 were also a record. Nearly two-thirds were American.

via thedailybeast.com

Needless to say, widespread civilian deaths are a pretty clear sign you're losing a counterinsurgency. Either you're doing the killing, and thus creating a backlash, or you're failing to prevent the killing -- in which case there's precious little reason for the population to support you.

BREAKING: Hugh Hefner is a gross, icky old man

When Hugh Hefner announced on Twitter that he was engaged to a woman who could be his great-granddaughter, it marked another instance of the Playboy tycoon living up to his reputation. A key part of that image involves the Playboy Mansion, the enviable setting of star-studded parties. But some of Hefner's so-called girlfriends have started talking about the inner workings of the place, revealing it to be more like a prison than a palace of love, reports the Daily Mail. At least for the women. That Hefner would treat women like property hardly seems surprising. Yet beyond that, it turns out the mansion is a disgusting mess that constantly smells like dog urine. They also had to put up with nightly curfews that would only be lifted when they accompanied Hefner to a club, where he would constantly check his watch to time his Viagra just right so that he could later enjoy the sex parties where he "just lay there like a dead fish," according to one of the disenchanted women.

via slatest.slate.com

A conservative friend of mine commented that this news wasn't surprising to people who run in social conservative circles. My reply? This story isn't really surprising to people who run in feminist circles, either.