A Silly Argument And A Smart One

Mark Thoma at The Fiscal Times argues that "balanced budget rules can cause rushed decisions if the statutory deadlines for achieving balance leave little time for careful deliberation" in the course of arguing that Congress is disfunctional. This is silly.

How many times in my lifetime have state or federal legislatures gotten fiscal matters done in advance in a carefully deliberated manner, rather than right at a deadline? I can't remember a year that Congress didn't have a continuing resolution or passed all of the dozen different appropriations bills separately before the deadline came and an omnibus bill had to be pushed through, even in years when we haven't had divided government.

Colorado's joint budget committee is better, but still highly deadline driven. And, one of the key's to Colorado's deadlines - a joint set of legislative rules made necessary by a short session, amateur legislature and strong legislative services division are almost impossibly to constitutionally impose on Congress.

But, Thoma also has a worthwhile point to make:

[A]nother explanation that is often put forth to explain the change in congressional behavior is that legislators today are less patriotic than they once were. That is, nation used to come before party, but those days are long gone.

But patriotism is not the problem. What has changed is that we have become, in many respects, two separate nations living within a common border. Patriotism is as strong as ever within each nation, but there is very little recognition that the needs of the other group are legitimate or have any standing at all in policy decisions.

Thus, we are no longer indivisible. Justice for my group rather than justice for all dominates the political landscape and pollutes the policy environment. Until that is fixed–if it can be fixed–no amount of rules, triggers, ticking bombs, or other devices will set it right again.

The two nations thing isn't entirely Mark Thoma's invented rhetoric. For example, Texas Governor Perry, who has campaigned for the GOP Presidential nomination in Colorado recently, has publicly said positive things about the possibility of Texas leaving the United States of American again. The partisan divide between U.S. regions is as strong as it has been in recent memory and social class divides are also more intense in the U.S. than they have been in a very long time.

It isn't just the politicans. I frequently finding myself asking what the heck Republicans are thinking, because when I ask myself what someone who hates American would do and then compare it to what they are trying to accomplish, it very frequently seems to be the same thing. My civility instincts tell me that this is a horribly bad attitude that I should try to fight, but it is what comes to the surface emotionally whenever their latest idea comes up. Whatever agenda they are advancing, it is so profoundly distant from my reality that it makes no sense at all to me, much of the time, or violates deeply held values about the political process and policy substance of what makes our country special and uniquely American. Sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't be better off if Governor Perry got his wish and rid us of the influence that he and his have on our politics.

Then again, Thoma makes one more argument that is neither here nor there. He says that the press doesn't do a good enough job of holding politicians accountable. There is merit to that. Politicans are held accountable for very little of their destructive bad behavior and mischief.

But, I'm not convinced that the press is the most guilty party. It is hard to educate the large share of the voting public that isn't interested in paying attention, and the fact that the nation feels that it can get away with indifference is mostly a testament to a fairly healthy political culture in the formative period of the average voter, rather than being a purely negative indicator. Many of us managed to earn the privilege of not paying much attention because politics has tended to be incrementalist for the last few decades in the United States. Only when elected leaders really screw up in a way that forces a radical change that is contrary to the agreed rules of the political game, as we saw this year in Wisconsin and Minnesota, does the sleeping giant that is the American public wake up and start paying attention. We can be outraged about the process because we have been taught to expect better.

If the U.S. had defaulted on its debt and there had been dire consequences, the American public probably would have woken up and been determined to do something about it in 2012. But, a deal to complex and arcane and unlikely to be adhered to in the long term to make it interesting to the general public was reached, constitutional crisis was avoided, and the public will return to its slumber for a while.

I don't like the way that we are making our sausage and would like to reform it. The Republican balanced budget amendment proposal is a DOA way of addressing the problem. But, there is room for process reform and better ways of holding politicians accountable as well.

READ MORE - A Silly Argument And A Smart One

There Are Still Idiots In Local Government

The City Council in Gould, Arkansas wants a police state, constitution be damned. More here, which restates pertinent parts of the ordinance adopted contrary to the recommendation of the Mayor and the City Attorney:

The Mayor of the City of Guild shall not call special meetings to discuss City business without two thirds of the City Council’s vote to do so.

The Mayor nor City Council members shall attend or participate in any meetings with any organization in any location without City Council approval by two thirds [vote].

The Gould Citizens Advisory Council by passage of this ordinance is hereby banned from doing business in the City of Gould.

That the said Council is, in effect, causing confusion and discourse [sic] among the citizens of Gould and as a result is contributing to the friction not only between the Mayor and Council but also among the citizens who deserve a cooperative government.

[N]o new organizations shall be allowed to exist in the City of Gould without approval from a majority of the City Council.

READ MORE - There Are Still Idiots In Local Government

Recall Elections Of Six Republicans Go Forward In Wisconsin

Public sector union supporters have successfully gathered enough signatures to force six Wisconsin legislators to face recall elections triggered by the controversial effort of Wisconsin legislators to deny public employees unions in the state collective bargaining rights. Notably, form a political perspective, Republicans has not made eliminating meaningful public sector unions a major point in their 2010 campaign effort which had focused on budget cutting measures, so it isn't unreasonable to expect that independents and Republicans who have some sympathy with the cause of public sector union workers or aren't happy with the fact that Republicans have pushed such a controversial issue in a way that created a media circus could vote to recall Republican state legislators whom they voted for last November.

A state judge in Wisconsin has also ruled that the public employee union law was passed in violation of the state's open meetings law and hence is void.

Thus, while Republicans won the battle to bust public sector unions in Wisconsin, they risk losing the war if voters use the recall elections to hand control of the state legislature, which Republicans won in November's election, back to Democrats. Another fight brought to the voters that was colored by the union busting legislation was, an electoral fight between a conservative and liberal candidate for the state supreme court that had previously been a non-issue that almost assured the incumbent conservative judge's re-election was won by the incumbent by only by a nose after a recount. The recall fights, however, are more directly related to the union busting legislation which they personally voted to enact.

The amount of grass roots support for a recall necessary to get one on the ballot in Wisconsin is suggestive of the amount of political energy and momentum that recall supporters have in this fight:

At no time in U.S. history have attempts been made to recall so many legislators at the same time over the same issue. To recall a senator in Wisconsin, recall organizers had to gather signatures from voters in each district equivalent to 25% of the number of people who voted for governor in November. That meant staff for the board had to review more than 18,000 signatures for each recall attempt.

Keep in mind that these signatures are being gathered in state legislative districts that elected Republicans within the last year, not safe Democratic seats. Also, the level of organization and political intensity displayed by union supporters against Republicans now may decisively influence Wisconsin's vote in the 2012 Presidential elections in favor of Democrats. The union busting move of Wisconsin's Republican leadership has activated vast numbers of otherwise apathetic or only slightly active union members and union supporters in the state, turning them into a political force to be reckoned with, regardless of the outcome of these particular recall efforts. And, if many of the recall elections are successful, it would also pop the balloon of any mandate in popular opinion that Republicans could have claimed based upon their 2010 electoral sweep, only about a year before the next state legislative and Presidential election. Voters, campaign contributors and political campaign volunteers don't like political losers; they want to vote for someone who can win and may lose faith when a candidate's prospects seem diminished.

The Wisconsin legislation inspired copycat efforts in a number of other states, some successful, that face a less imminent threat of being overturned after the fact than the Wisconsin legislation.

READ MORE - Recall Elections Of Six Republicans Go Forward In Wisconsin

The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried.

- Sir Winston Churchill, British politician (1874 - 1965)

Churchill's wisdom has much to be said for it, except that it doesn't do much to tell us which kind of democracy is to be preferred to the alternatives.

An important flaw of the American system, and some similar systems, is that it deeply and fundamentally entrenches a process that naturally produces an unstable equilibrium that is at always odds with voter desires in one direction or the other, rather than a stable process that consistently produces elected representatives who seek to maximize the popularity of the decisions made by the government.



Enik Rising (Seth Masket's blog) reports research that he and Hans Noel have done with a clever experimental design that establishes empirically and rigorously the empirical wisdom that:

There are actually plenty of moderate Assembly districts in California; there are basically no moderate Assembly members. Virtually every Democrat in the Assembly is more liberal than her district; virtually every Republican member is more conservative than her district. . . .

We also find that members of the majority party tend to deviate further from their districts than members of the minority party do. Time out of office, we suggest, causes the minority party to try to moderate to win back the majority.

The study focused on California, but its conclusions almost surely hold for all but a couple of states in the United States (Nebraska and Louisiana may be exceptions).

Actual partisanship in legislative districts has a bell curve distribution. Elected legislators have a bimodal distribution, like a two humped camel. The political middle is systemically underpopulated by elected officials, despite the fact that the vast majority of voters are in the political middle between the typical elected Democrat and the typical elected Republican on the spectrum of ideology from the political left to the political right.

The study is focused, appropriately, on the facts, rather than the causes for those facts. But, political theory would suggest that this outcome is a very natural and direct consequence of our election laws and legislative process.

The Electoral Bias Against Moderation

Single member plurality district election system naturally gravitates towards having two dominant political parties in any one geographic area. In that system, adding a new credible candidate to the mix hurts that candidate's allies and helps that candidate's enemies. In order to mitigate mutually self-destructive behavior, we have entrenched, in the United States, a two party system in which the political left and the political right choose nominees in partisan primaries and then face off against each other.

The single member plurality district system doesn't necessarily have to create a two party system. It can support regional parties that have majority support in a particular area, like a Quebec Nationalist party or Irish Republican Party. It also doesn't require that the party of the right be the same everywhere, or that the party of the left be the same everywhere. Canadians have one party of the right to the West of Ontario, and another one, the Tory's to the East. One U.S. States have a Democrat-Farm-Labor Party rather than a Democratic party. The U.S. historically used to have, de facto, Dixiecrats in some parts of the country, and Democrats in other partys of the country, both against a common Republican party.

But, for distinct regional parties to emerge, something has to give that region a strong identity. The more homogeneous a region is politically, the less prone it is to develop a distinct political party.

A Majority Requirement As a Weak Fix

A weak solution to this problem is to use French style elections, which have been adopted in Louisiana, Denver and in a less pure form, in a handful of states, where the winner of the election needs to get a majority of the votes cast to win in the first round, with the top two vote getters facing off in a second round.

While this isn't immune to the pathology that similar candidates tend to undermine each other, it eliminates the requirement that a candidate wanting to make it into the second round must have a plurality coalition made up entirely of partisan voters on the right, or partisan voters on the left. A coalition of unaffiliated and bipartisan moderate voters can also secure a candidate a second round slot.

More generally, in its pure form, it is more more neutral towards the number of political parties competing in the district than a traditional two party system. Not surprisingly, Louisiana has historically been the source of moderate candidates in both the Democratic and Republican political parties.

Proportional Representation As A Strong Fix

A stronger solution to this problem would be a true proportional representation system that doesn't penalize two political parties for having similar views without not actually merging. In a system where each voter picks on political party and that party gets a number of seats proportional to the share of the vote received by that political party, the sensible thing for a voter to do is the pick the party most closely aligned with their views and a political party doesn't face a penalty for being small unless its market share approaches the treshold minimum percentage necessary to secure representation in the legislature (typically in the low single digit percentages). A proportional representation system also allows representation of parties that have a majority in no particular district.

This kind of true multi-party system, which naturally gravitated towards roughly four to eight major political parties, leads to unequal sized clusters of voters with much more homogeneous views.

The Legislative Bias Against Moderation

When Are Coalitions Made? How Stable Must They Be?

In an idealized two party system, coalitions need to be assembled before the election. In an idealized multi-party system, coalitions are made after the election.

In a parliamentary system, a governing coalition forming a legislative majority, need to hold together on all major issues for the political system to function. The legislative leader becomes the head of government (i.e. the Prime Minister) who runs government on a day to day basis. If the coalition that put the Prime Minister in place fails to secure majority support for any major proposal, the Prime Minister will typicall then lose a "no confidence" vote in short order, and new elections will typically be held.

Somewhat complicating the matter of coalition building is that American legislative coalitions don't need to be very stable across all or most issues. Since we have a strong President whose tenure doesn't hinge upon maintaining a legislative majority (indeed our current President doesn't have one), the executive branch can continue to function and carry out the business of government even when one coalition of legislators may prevail on one set on issues, and another coalition of legislators may prevail on a different set of issues.

Historically, for example, the U.S. had a de facto "two and a half" party system at the national Congressional level. One domestic economic issues Democrats generally united against Republicans. But, on matters of national defense and social issues like race, Southern Democrats often allied themselves with Republicans against Northern Democrats. The Democratic Presidential nomination race reflected the vacillation between these two factions.

This three party system allowed the party that was moderate on any issue where there was no consensus among the three parties to prevail, moderating the process as a whole to some extent.

Today, after a process called "realignment" that has largely run its course, this isn't the case any more. There are few notable blocks of "moderates" in either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party in Congress who deviate from their party in a systematic way on a particular way. The Blue Dog faction in the Democratic Party has withered, as has the faction of Northeastern social moderate Republicans. We have a relatively pure party of the political left and a relatively pure party of the political right, and they are quite evenly matched on the national political scene.

The Majoritarian Legislative Process Has A Hidden Bias Against Moderation

Of course, some of the partisanship we see at the legislative level is a product not just of a two party electoral system, but is inherent in the legislative process itself. Legislative decision making generally involved for or against voting on politically controversial issues. Partisans get the results most to their liking when they favor proposals the secure majorities, but only the narrowest majorities possible. It is natural, in this context, for legislators to informally rank themselves from the political left to the political right, and for proposals that require legislators to form an allegiance with one side or the other to be common.

Thus, even in multi-party proportional representation system, governing coalitions that are clearly right leaning, or clearly left leaning are the norm. Governing coalitions like the Penteparti system of Italy, in which five mainstream parties formed repeated unstable and short lived coalitions in the political center in a calculated effort to exclude old school communists on the left, and old school fascists on the right, ar the exception, except in times of national peril from an outside force like the unity governments of the United Kingdom during World War II.

Moderates are more favored in a place like the U.S. Senate, that is not strictly majoritarian, with most proposals from the left or the right requiring supermajority support, than in the U.S. House, where majority rule prevails.

In order to favor the kind of moderate policies that voters in the political center favor, you need not only an electoral system that doesn't naturally generate a bimodal distribution of legislators, but also a legislative process that has stronger incentives to find supermajority, rather than mere majority support for legislation.

Supermajority Requirements Come At The Risk of Deadlock

Favoring supermajorities, however, comes at a cost. Any requirement that there be more than majority support for a measure in a single legislative body with ultimate say over the matter creates a risk that the system will be overconstrained and fail to produce action in situations where there is no acceptable status quo.

In the United States, recess appointment power and a strong Presidency prevent the status quo of all important positions in the government going unfilled for lack of a resolution to deadlocks between a nominating executive and a ratifying Senate. But, at both the state and at the federal level, it remains possible for a lack of an ability to reach consensus in a deterministic way on a budget bill to produce a government shutdown, something that House Republicans on one side, and Senate Democrats and the President on the other, have been dancing with in the lame duck session of the 2010 Congress and the current Congress.

Probably the most notable recent example of an overconstrained set of legislative rules in recent memory is that of the Iraqi Constitution, which requires supermajority support to choose a President and Prime Minister, at a time when there is stark disagreement between well defined factions that individually lack that supermajority (whose moderate unanimity the constitution attempted to coax). The result has been many months of government deadlock due to a lack of the required consensus. Afghanistan's constitution, notably, in contrast, was carefully crafted to allow the President to impose a budget and appointees in the absence of constructive disagreement by a legislative majority on an alternative (despite the fact that Afghanistan has less well defined factions in any case).

Supermajority Processes In Practice

The best examples of supermajority incentives in the legislative process are probably the adminsitrative law notice and comment process, and the Quaker meeting process, each of which hinges on having a "honest third party" receive input and try to formulate from the input a maximally popular (in the case of administrative rule making) or maximal consensus (in the case of Quaker meeting decision making) stance, by taking into account the details of the concerns expressed.

Monarchs, because they are well positioned to be that honest third party, can, if they are not politically tone deaf, secure support in the fact of partisan elected bodies, precisely by favoring the middle against partisan majorities, and favoring solutions that would secure supermajority support over those that would secure mere majority support.

I think that the Founders probably hoped (largely in vain) for that kind of dynamic to play out in the American political system, something that failed largely because the Presidential election system got locked into the two party dichotomy. It isn't implausible to think that if the Presidential election process could be redesigned to decouple it from partisan politics and instead have this office elected in a way that favored moderates, that a similar dynamic could be established, even without reform at the legislative level, through the veto power.

Indeed, I think it is a fair hypothesis that Governor Ritter's experience with consensus oriented politics as the norm from his days as a special interest advocate for Colorado's District Attorneys' Association may help explain a great deal of his approach to dealing with the Colorado General Assembly, in which he frequently cited process rather than substance oriented objections to legislation in veto messages.

Good legislators in the existing legislative process frequently try to craft such agreements in "smoke filled room" negotiations involving interested parties with a goal of reaching "kumbaya" (i.e. a consensus of the interested parties to support a bill). But, this kind of deal making and mutal accomodation reaching is ill suited to the formal legislative process.

Consensus or supermajority oriented politics are actually much more common than most people would think, indeed, it is the norm. This is because partisan caucuses and special interest groups much each reach consensus or something close to it in order to move boldly on legislative proposals. They tend to stay silent and refrain from acting in the absence of consensus.

Conclusion

In the absence of divided government (something that both the U.S. Congress and Colorado General Assembly are experiencing right now), there is little incentive to stretch beyond a majority supported compromise.

So, in American politics, voters are left between insisting that government function with deals negotiated between the left and right in exchange for a risk a damaging deadlock, within divided government, and government by a right of center, or left of center consensus with little to encourage it to be inclusive.

READ MORE - The Entrenched Politician-Voter Disconnect

Pakistani Politics Still Violent

"A Pakistani government minister who had said he was getting death threats because of his opposition to a controversial blasphemy law was shot to death Wednesday.

Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian member of the Cabinet in Pakistan, where 95 percent of people are Muslim. He served as the government’s minister of minority affairs....

The Taliban claimed responsibility. “(The) assassination of Bhatti is a message to all of those who are against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws,” said Ihsanullah Ihsan, a Taliban spokesman."

Two months ago, a governor of a Pakistan state — Salman Taseer — was murdered for the same reason.

From here.

How do you run a democratic civilian government when senior government officials who take positions on issues (never mind waiting around to see how the political and legal process resolved the dispute), that somebody else in the system doesn't like, are routinely murdered or executed?

It has been this way for a long time. Pakistan's first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, was assassinated in 1951, after which the first President, Iskander Mirza declared martial law and discarded the constitution, which lead to his removal from office in a coup by General Ayub Khan, the same day, October 7, 1958.

Zulifikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan's People's Party became President after a democratic election on December 20, 1971, was replaced in a coup in July 1977, and was executed for complicity in a 1974 political murder on April 4, 1979.

President Mohammad Zia ul-Haq was killed when his plane exploded in August 1988. Suffice it to say that it certainly sounds like suspicious circumstance.

Benazir Bhutto (the late Zulifikar Ali Bhutto's daughter) became Prime Minister in 1988, was removed by the President based on corruption charges August 1990, returned to power October 1990, and was removed for more corruption charges November 1996.

A coup removed the civilian regime entirely over dissatisfaction with the decisions on military matter being made by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on October 12, 1999, and the leading General Pevez Musharraf declared himself to be President on June 20, 2001. Between then and 2007, he survived four assassination attempts.

More than 140 people died in a suicide bomber's unsuccessful attempt to kill Benazir Bhutto as she campaigned for President after eight years in exile on October 18, 2007, and she was successfully assassinated December 27, 2007 after a political rally, in which the leaders of the regime of Pakistan in power at the time is accused of being complicit.

Bhutto's widower, Asif Ali Zardari lead the Pakistan Peoples Party to an electoral victory Febraury 18, 2008, and after street protests and a threatened impeachment, General Musharraf stepped down in August, and Zardari was sworn in as President.

This, of course, just includes the highlights, without mentioning assassinations and assassination attempts on lower level figures, and a constant low level parade of other political killings and suicide bombings. For example, seven more famous political assassinations in Pakistan can be found here (many of which are discussed with more narration here.) I've also omitted multiple wars, some still in progress today. The separation of Pakistan from India was not bloodless. One bloody civil war split Bangladesh and Pakistan into separate countries in the 1970s. There have been wars with India over the Kashmir and out of general mutual antipathy. There have been subnational insurgencies and violent counterinsurgencies in the country's "frontier provinces" since 1958, and one of them is in progress right now.

Xe Services, which is currently embroiled in revelations related to the arrest of a U.S. CIA contractor who used to work for them, was accused in 2009 of having conducted political assassinations of its own without Presidential approval. This is in addition to the many Presidentially authorized CIA assassinations of people believed to be involved with the Taliban, mostly with drone deployed missiles, pursuant to the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force by Congress following 9/11.

Pakistan is not Yemen. It is a developing country with a viable middle class and more than a hundred million people, with one of the oldest histories of civilization in the world, and a substantial GDP, that has nuclear weapons, not a sparsely populated poor nation in the middle of a desert. In theory, it is a nation of Muslims who have a lot in common with each other in a "nation-state" sense.

Even without any new provocations, it would take a lifetime just to settle the scores for all the political killings that have occurred so far. A simple change of President pursuant to election results in the ordinary manner, without assassinations, impeachments or coups, that takes place in the United States every four to eight years, most of the time, is almost unprecedented in Pakistan.

As much as we can become concerned with minor happenings in Pakistan, the very basics of orderly, peaceful civilian government of any kind seem elusive.

READ MORE - Pakistani Politics Still Violent

Egypt and Wisconsin

We live in a small world.

READ MORE - Egypt and Wisconsin

Wisconsin and 2012

Democratic partisans are fond of saying that anti-immigrant measures advanced by Republicans are good for Democrats because they alienate a large Latino population that would otherwise be inclined to vote Republican (see e.g. "Even More Opportunities for GOP Latino Alienation").

The Republican anti-union showdown with public employees unions playing out at the moment in Wisconsin (and the Denver Post's AP story advises me in other states across the country like Ohio, Tennessee, Indiana, Nevada and Florida) may have a similar effect.

One of the crucial sources of the big Tea Party wins in 2010 was union member ambivalence about voting for Democrats. While Democrats have near unanimous support from the leadership of organized labor, union members themselves barely favored Democrats more often than Republicans in 2010 election in many key races.

But, the current multi-state Republican jihad against labor unions, whether or not it is successful, may change that in 2012. By reminding the public that the Republican brand hates unions and favors making deep spending budget cuts substantially on the back of union member compensation, the Tea Party union members of 2010 may return to the Democratic fold in 2012.

Half of union members in the United States are public employees who are directly affected by the stance Republicans have taken in Wisconsin, and the other half don't have to be particularly prescient to see Republican attacks on public sector unions translating into attacks on their economic interests should Republicans gain control of the federal government as well.

READ MORE - Wisconsin and 2012

The Showdown In Wisconsin

Republican Governor [of Wisconsin] Scott Walker . . . is pushing a proposal that would eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers and make them pay half the costs of their pensions and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage. The changes amount to about a seven percent salary cut.

From here.

The budget shortfall that is being used to justify the step cuts to state employee pay and denying unions their collective bargaining rights, of course, is a crisis of Governor Walker's own making created by tax cuts that he backed. Unions are willing to discuss compensation custs, but not the loss of their collective bargaining rights.

A core principle of American political conservatives is that unions are bad and should be busted at every available opportunity. As I've noted before at this blog, one of the key points in the Republican playbook at the moment is that public employees, particularly unionized ones, are overpaid relative to private sector workers (despite evidence to the contrary) and that they employees should bear a large share of the public spending cuts that Republicans campaigned on in the 2012 election.

In Wisconsin, where the 2012 election left Republicans in charge of both houses of the state legislature and the Governor's office, they have the votes to put that ideology into action. While private sector union-management relations are governed by the federal government's National Labor Relations Board, states have considerable freedom to adopt laws concerning the rights of their public sector unions.

Since they don't have the votes to win this battle in the legislative process, Wisconsin union members have marched in force (25,000 strong) on the state capital as the legislature considers the bill and state senate Democrats have removed themselves to an undisclosed location to deny Republicans in the state senate the quorum they need to pass the bill, echoing a similar tactic used in Texas redistricting battles within the last few years. Wisconsin also lacks the citizen's initiative process present in states like California and Colorado, that might have given public sector union members in Wisconsin an end run around the normal legislative process. The unions have President Obama's support, but he has little power when it comes to labor relations in state and local government, an area where even the expansive commerce clause power of Congress probably does not extend.

America's private sector union movement in the United States is close to moribund. Maybe this is due to legislative changes, like labor laws that permit the permanent replacement of striking workers and tolerate significant management misconduct in organizing elections. Maybe it is due to the changing character of the economy that has reduced employment in traditionally unionized industries. Maybe labor is a victim of its own success. The causes are a matter of great debate and controversy. The result, however, is not. American private sector unions haven't been so impotent in numbers or as disinclined to cause work stoppages since long before the United States passed its first national labor laws during the Great Depression.

But, public sector unionization has soared and continues to grow in most states. (Colorado is an exception to the trend.) In part, this is because public sector unions, unlike private sector unions, have employees who can't easily be offshored and employers who can't convincing argue that their wages must be kept low in order to prevent them from losing their business to the competition. Civil service protections that public employees hold to protect them from politically motivated corrupt patronage systems have also made it safer to public employees to organize without fear of losing their jobs than comparable private sector employees. Recall that:

In 1950 . . .the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers . . . made up 31.5% of the total work force.

In 2008 . . . the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier.

This is a huge deal. As I've noted before, policy more often changes through widespread imitation at historic moments than it does through isolated case by case rational analysis. If Wisconsin is successful in breaking its public employees unions and slashing public employee compensation, the trend will almost surely spread to almost every Republican controlled state in the United States. If public unions lose big in Wisconsin it could mean the end of organized labor unions as a potent force in the American economy and political system entirely for much of the United States.

While looming labor-management disputes in the NFL have attracted lots of attention, public sector unions at the state and local government level in places like Wisconsin are the bread and butter of the labor movement in the United States today. This dispute alone involves hundreds of thousands of middle class workers and their families losing three and a half weeks of pay a year.

Public sector unionization is a different animal than private sector unionization. Protection from unfair unemployment termination has generally been a secondary issue for them because they already have civil service protections. Some public sector unions are legally prohibited from going on strike. While private sector unions can organize politically for labor laws and other laws favorable to their members, public sector unions can organize politically to put union friendly politicians in direct control of their employer.

But, the potential for strikes by public employees to rise to the level of general strikes and to bring vital government services to a halt, whether or not it is legal for them to do so, has always loomed in the background, and covert "sick outs" and work to rule slowdowns remind negotiators of that fact. Denver's police (who publicly deny that this was the case) recently carried out just such a slowdown last year over dissatisfaction with the vigor with which the City of Denver had finally decided to apply to cracking down on instances of police misconduct. Wisconsin is experiencing its own sick outs right now.

Assuming that the political process will eventually prevail in Wisconsin and result in public sector union crushing legislation being passed there, the question is how Democrats and labor unions will respond. With the next election almost two years away, working through the normal political process may not seem like a sufficient response to a powerful political player that is facing deep pay cuts for every single one of its members without any opportunity to collectively bargain the matter and is also facing something close to their very extermination as a means by which the economic cause of state workers can be advanced.

If anything can produce a high profile showdown that could shut down the government of the State of Wisconsin entirely through a work stoppage, legal or otherwise, this frontal assault on public employees unions seems to be a good candidate for it. If public employees' unions in Wisconsin lose this fight, they may be gone for good, and may see much of the rest of the public sector labor movement follow them.

Can they win? There is really no way to know until it happens. The last general strike in the United States outside Puerto Rico was in 1934. But, if public sector unions in Wisconsin manage to inflict decisive political pain on the Republican party in the state, even if they lose on the legislative front for the time being, they may have a real shot at remaining a relevant force in American politics.

READ MORE - The Showdown In Wisconsin

Questioning Patriotism For Fun and Profit

Liberals already control many aspects of American life, and they have undue influence on the Internet. . . . people who use e-mail or other services from companies such as Google, AOL, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple are unwittingly helping the liberals. These companies are, and will continue to be, huge supporters of those who are damaging our country.

The influence of these companies also extends internationally, where the liberal grip on the Internet has been demonstrated anew in the turmoil in Egypt. There, according to media reports, it is playing a key role in stirring up the mass protests that are clogging the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities such as Alexandria and fueling demands for the immediate ouster of President Hosni Mubarak . . . the movement is being manipulated by those who favor a hard-line, Iranian-style, Islamic theocracy. . . . Google executive Wael Ghonim, just released from 12 days of Egyptian detention, confirmed that he was responsible for the Facebook page that ignited "the revolution of the youth of the Internet."

This is the same Google where CEO Eric Schmidt is a personal friend of President Barack Obama. . .

Is that where you want your money to go? I didn't think so, so I started the very first conservative e-mail service provider. . . . Your purchase will help me promote true Reagan values to win back our country in 2012.

Liberals have gone too far to influence the Internet and the political process.

- Michael Reagan, son of President Ronald Reagan, professional pundit, and newspaper columnist (Source: Aurora Sentinel, February 9, 2011, page 9.)

Who knew that it was unpatriotic to financially support Internet companies by having a free gmail, hotmail, or yahoo e-mail account?

Who knew that there was a Democratic and a Republican way to provide e-mail accounts?

Who knew that preventing traffic jams was more important then ending dictatorships?

Who knew that it was unpatriotic for a private American corporation to support democracy in a totalitarian state?

Who knew that you could get paid for writing a newspaper column that is an infomerical for your own business?

Who knew that liberals control American life and the Internet too?

What Did Reagan Say?

What are "true Reagan values" anyway? What did Ronald Reagan had to say on the subject of religious people taking the streets to secure democracy with the help of shared information from Internet that his son is so wary of?

Information is the oxygen of the modern age. It seeps through the walls topped by barbed wire, it wafts across the electrified borders.

Without God, democracy will not and cannot long endure.

Freedom prospers when religion is vibrant and the rule of law under God is acknowledged.

Democracy is worth dying for, because it's the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man.

A people free to choose will always choose peace.

Above all, we must realize that no arsenal, or no weapon in the arsenals of the world, is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women. It is a weapon our adversaries in today's world do not have.

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

Then again, some of Reagan's messages on the issue can be interpreted in more than one way:

The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts.

READ MORE - Questioning Patriotism For Fun and Profit

Historic Moments

Conventional political science exams questions like regime change and legislative change primarily as domestic events with domestic causes. But, this model doesn't do a good job of capturing what is going on in either process.

Historic Moments

One of the defining features of regime change, and of most notable (and many not so notable) legislative policy changes, is that neither happens in a vacuum. While political science likes to neatly divide itself into foreign affairs and domestic politics, the reality is that domestic politics is generally strongly influenced by regional context. These kinds of changes happen in waves at historic moments.

Moments of Regime Change and International Domestic Policy Change

We did not see an isolated dictator case of a dictator being replaced in Tunisia. We saw one man's suicide in Tunisia over bureaucratic hassles in a dictatorship that denied him a livelihood set of a public uprising region wide that has produced a change of regime in Tunisia after decades of dictatorship, a change of cabinet in Egypt accompanied by a promise of the existing dictator to depart in the fall and a promise that his son will not seek to replace him, a promise in Yemen to hold elections soon in which the current leaders will not seek re-election, the sacking of Jordan's cabinet, a promise of prompt local elections in the Palestinian Authority, and the possibility of further tumult in Syria and Sudan.

We did not see an isolated change in government in the Soviet Union. We the non-Russian Republics in the Soviet Union granted independence, the dismantling of Yugoslavia, and the abandonment of a Soviet Communist political and economic system to a greater or lesser degree by every Warsaw Pact country, and every successor nation of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia.

The Colonial powers of Europe did not one by one decide to grant independence to their colonies. They did so en masse in the years around 1960, granting independence to dozens of newly independent nations all at once.

In Post-War Western Europe, each nation did not decide in a vacuum what kind of regime they would create. Essentially every regime that had been interrupted by World War II in Western Europe created a multi-party parliamentary system, reinstated a civil law judicial system, renounced the death penalty, developed political parties dominated by a Social Democratic party on the left and a Christian Democratic party on the right, and put in place a comprehensive social welfare system supported by fairly high taxes with payroll taxes and value added taxes constituting a fairly large share of the total tax burden.

In World War I, a single assassination in Serbia sparked a bloody world war. The Russian revolution in its wake rapidly spread Soviet Communist to the whole of Eastern Europe.

The process by which Latin American nations secured their independence and put in place republics was so similar from nation to nation and involved a wave of change so clearly linked in time that one studies of the "Latin American Wars For Independence" when one studies the region historically, rather than trying to understand any one of them independently.

Italy and Germany came into being as democratic states, and democracy took hold for good in France in the 1870s.

Democratic revolutions hit almost every monarchy in Europe in 1848.

Moments of Subnational Political Innovation

State constitutions change in much the same way. One year, no state has a prohibition on dueling in its state constitution. Half a decade later, they are widespread. One year, no state has merit appointment of judges. A decade later, the Missouri plan for merit based judicial appointments subject to retention elections is widespread. One year, no state grants women the right to vote. A decade later, women's suffrage is the norm.

* Legislative Innovation

You see the same thing in legislation in state legislatures in the United States, even on matters where federal government policy doesn't apply. California passed no fault divorce and it swept the nation in a few years. Pre-trial release programs that allowed recognizance release of carefully screened defendants awaiting trial went from an experiment to the national norm in less than a decade. Dozens of states passed smoker's rights bills in a few years. The original Uniform Commercial Code was adopted by a large share of all states in a short time period and that area of law has continued to be guided by Uniform Law Commissioners ever since, as have the areas of partnership law and a number of other "uncontroversial" areas of private law. All but a handful of states adopted court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure in short order, and likewise codified state ethics rules for lawyers based on a bar association model in one big sweep. Most states adopted laws providing for condominiums in about half a decade. Gay marriage and civil union laws have rapidly swept the nation, when less than a decade ago there wasn't even one. States put in place public school systems and structured the financing of state institutions of higher education all at about the same times in about the same ways, and followed suit by consolidating public school systems at the same time decades later. The deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill was done at the state level but happened mostly within the span of a few years without any national guidance. The replacement of orphanages with foster care happened in a similarly sweeping movement in a short period of time.

Worker's compensation laws, minimum wage and hour laws, child labor laws, local "dry laws," married women with property acts, heart balm acts, and laws regulating union-management relations swept state legislatures in very similar forms in the Progressive era. Local zoning laws that were very similar in structure and content were enacted in almost every major (and minor) city in the nation in a small number of years.

A contagion model of innovation dispersal better explains most legislative policy change and regime changes than a conventional account of purely domestic struggles between political factions in individual states or even in individual countries in a region.

* Judicial Innovation

Courts are every bit as prone to waves of innovation as legislatures and indeed, are sensitive to both legislative and judicial trends. A court decision in one state that there is a constitutional right to gay marriage or civil unions produces legislative action in another, and visa versa. The shift to court rules based on the federal rules of civil procedure was adopted legislatively in some places, and by judicial rule in others.

These waves are not confined to areas of the law where there is an arguable common federal constitutional basis for the requirement, and this is justified by the doctrine of persuasive common law authority. Thus, for example, strict product liability in tort, once adopted in California by the California Supreme Court, rapidly became the law of the land in almost every state. A cause of action for unjust enrichment, which was an obscure, mostly European legal concept until the critical moment, rapidly became a standard part of every commercial lawyer's arsenal of causes of action.

Moments Of Economic Change

Economists tend to be more conscious of this than political scientists, although the economists who recognize that economic change is follows a path dependent, evolutionary contagion model of change than acting like a thermodynamic system that is perturbed around an immutable natural equilibrium are still in the minority.

An innovation like franchising or "big box stores" comes along, and, in a decade of two, they are the dominant means by which retail sales are conducted. An innovation like subprime mortgage financing goes from being a trivial part of the mortgage finance industry to an immensely rapidly growing significant part of the whole over a decade and the vanishes almost entirely from the economic landscape in a year or two. A deregulated telephone industry engages in an intense marketing effort for long distance plans and phone service features like caller ID for less than a decade then suddenly starts almost giving long distance services and phone features away and launches into a competition to cell broadband access and mobile phone packages.

Economic collapses tend to spread even more rapidly than the spread of new economic models. The steel industry in the United States went under in the blink of an eye. The textile industry collapsed almost as fast. Airline bankruptcies have happened in waves. Travel agencies were culled in a couple of fell sweeps. Free standing investment banks organized as such disappeared from the economy in a matter of months, despite the fact that many of these firms had been around for more than a century. It took about sixteen years for the housing bubble that led to the financial crisis to reach its peak and only about three years for housing prices to collapse, with most of that devaluation happening in the first year.

There have been gradual, long term shifts in the economy, like the slow decline of the private sector labor union over about four decades, or the shrinking share of agriculture as a percentage of the labor force. But, if anything, these incremental charges are the exception, rather than the norm, and even these gradual changes conceal more dramatic shifts in particular industries and subindustries, and in particular regions.

Outlines of the Contagion Model Of Legal Innovation

What does a contagion model of political, economic and social change look like?

Political, Economic and Social Change Generally Happens In Sweeping Moments

Most of history, by which I mean political, economic and social change, happens not in gradual, uncoupled rational change by individual governments or businesses, but in sweeping historic moments that change the whole landscape in a flash like a disease outbreak, in a way that is path dependent and evolutionary in character.

Waves Of Legal Innovation Are Not Driven Primarily By Formal Legal Mandates

This happens even if there are no political or legal institutions with any formal authority to compel this to happen, and even if the changes adopted in one place have little spill over effects. The United States Constitution was very carefully drafted to make it possible for different states to have different suffrage rules without changing the federal balance of power. Yet, women's suffrage spread rapidly none the less and was the law in almost every state by the time that the 19th Amendment made it mandatory in federal elections, and while the U.S. Constitution does not expressly guarantee women the right to vote in state elections, few people doubt that the 14th Amendment equal protection clause (which clearly did not compel women's suffrage in practice at the time that it was adopted) would be held to compel states to give women the right to vote today.

It is the power of the idea that seems like a good one in its context, once it is cast in the spotlight communicated to the right outsiders, and not outside compulsion, that drives waves of innovation.

Sometimes there are coordinating forces. Federal legislation, or international treaties, or U.S. Supreme Court rulings may force state or national governments to follow a larger trend. But, as often as not, these compulsions are addressed to recalcitrant holdouts from trends that have already taken hold as they are influential in bringing about the bulk of the trend. By the time that Jim Crow laws were dismantled in the U.S. Civil Rights movement, apartheid laws had vanished from most of the world already -- and South Africa was for decades, the only country in the world that had to be compelled by international pressure to dismantle its apartheid system until it eventually submitted. Federal laws governing union-management relations were enacted only after they had become widespread at the state level. The European human rights treaty that banned the death penalty in member nations was adopted only after almost every nation in Europe had already done so.

Waves Of Change Have A Trigger

A wave of political, legal or cultural change generally has a clear identifiable trigger that starts it, focusing the attention of people with the power to act upon it on an idea or possiblity or reality.

The current uprisings in the Arab world were triggered by the Jasmine Revolution which in turn was triggered by the self-immolation of a particular young man in Tunisia. The fall of the Soviet system began when Mikhail Gorbachev started to implement Perestroika in late 1988.

The "no fault" divorce wave of legal innovation was triggered by California's enactment of its "no fault" divorce law. Women's suffrage didn't take off until Wyoming, which had adopted women's suffrage as a territory in 1869, became a state in 1890 (and was followed by Colorado in 1893 and many other states soon afterwards).

The Great Recession was triggered by a short sequence of economic events in the fall of 2007. The Great Deprssion was triggered by the stock market crash of 1929.

A First Innovator Is Often Not The Trigger For A Wave Of Change

Clearly, it does not mean that the first place to innovate will set off a wave of change. Indeed, much of the time, the first innovator or two will stand alone for decades or more before the wave of change takes hold. California clearly set off the "no fault" divorce legislative wave, but other states had no fault divorce for decades before it adopted it. India was granted independence from colonial rule more than a decade before decolonialization became the norm and a decade and a half before it reached its 1960 peak. Wyoming had had an obscure limited liability company law on the books for many years before changing tax regulations caused this kind of company to become one of the primary means of organization for closely held businesses in the United States. The United States, France, Switzerland and Iceland were the only nations to have had republican forms of government for almost a century before democracy became the norm in Europe.

Indeed, a well proven test case may be important in making widespread adoption of an innovation happen more smoothly when a wave of change takes hold. Tunisia's Jasmine Revolution would not have spread had demonstrators there been swiftly gunned down and failed to secure any change. The revolutions of 1848 in Europe would probably not have begun had France and the United States not established that Republican government might be a viable possibility decades earlier.

Waves Of Change Can Only Be Triggered When the Time Is Right

Most of the time, the status quo prevails. Yesterday's dicatorship will almost always be tomorrow's dicatorship. Yesterday's fault based divorce law will remain on the books until the moment comes when no fault divorce sweeps the nation. Last year's housing prices will be a good predictor of this year's housing prices.

An single young man's suicide would not have triggered the Jasmine Revolution in 1985, when the latest dictator had been in office for only a few years, and the Soviet Union appeared to provide evidence that one party states could be powerful and economically successful. No fault divorce wasn't ripe to sweep the legislative landscape until lawyers and members of the same social class as legislators had become familiar with just how ugly and hypocritical the increasingly common incidence of fault based divorce had become, and would not have happened without the ferment caused by the sexual revolution at a cultural level. Limited liability companies weren't very attractive until they received a desirable tax treatment. The Financial Crisis that gave rise to the Great Recession wasn't possible until a housing price bubble had reached an unsustainable level, and the entire financial industsry was exposed to more housing default risk than it could easily bear.

Waves of Change Follow Long Periods of Inaction.

Awareness of the problem that will be addressed by the spread of innovation doesn't have to be front and center in the public discussion. Indeed, it may be that a wave of innovation is possible only in circumstances when a problem or imbalance is widely known to exist by everyone involved but is considered an off limits issue or an issue of secondary importance that is not publicly acknowledge by all but a fairly small group of activists.

When a problem is the subject to active public discussion as an important public issue that receives wide attention and is not "off the table," the status quo is less likely to fall so far out of balance that a new wave of innovation, other than any wave of innovation that is already being ridden and worked through at that very moment, can be triggered.

A seven year old regime isn't going to trigger an uprising unless it is very bad. A regional political climate in which most of the region has been governed by local strongmen for three decades of more will.

Political innovations like term limits may be important in securing political stability because they prevent incumbency from allowing the political leadership to grow stale and prevent incumbency from being used with full force to suppress other political views (perhaps even intraparty, rather than partisan opposition, views).

Waves Of Legal Change Are Often Incomplete

A wave of innovation also often does not completely run its course. While the vast majority of the world's colonies secured independence by the 1970s, a handful remained colonies into the last decade of the 20th century and a few colonies remain today. The United States was a hold out against international norms on slavery and apartheid and remains a hold out among developed nations on the question of the death penalty, which is uses more widely than any other developed nation. Cuba held onto a Soviet style communist regime despite the fact that all such regimes in Europe were replaced. Spain had a dictator long after the other nations of Western Europe had genuine multi-party democracies.

This is true at the subnational political level as well. Almost every major city in the United States adopted a zoning code, but Houston was a hold out. The move to replace the grand jury with a preliminary hearing as the main way of determining if probable cause existed to bring criminal charges swept the Western United States, but did not upset the constitutional entrenched rules of almost any of the Eastern states. New York State and California resisted the national trend to adopt state civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Nebraska uses a unicameral legislature notwithstanding the fact that every other state in the country has a bicameral one. Lousiana and Oregon permit non-unanimous jury verdicts in felony trials contrary to the rule of every other state.

Waves Of Legal Change Do Not Require Genuinely Superior Proposals

The hold outs from waves of innovation tend to disprove the theory that waves of innovation happen because the change that has swept across many jurisdictions actually has overwhelming superiority on the merits.

The differences in the criminal justice process between Oregon, which permits non-unanimous felony jury verdicts and Washington, which does not, is subtle. New York State's refusal to adopt civil procedure rules modeled on the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure has not caused an exodus of business litigation from the state, despite the ability of businesses to agree to other forums. New York State's failure to adopt no fault divorce laws until a year ago did not prevent people from moving there or attract people to the state. Houston's land use patterns are not much different from those of other large Texas cities that have zoning codes (it has more multi-family housing in single family neighborhoods and a few more neighborhood convenience stores, but otherwise isn't much different). North Carolina has suffered few obvious ill effects from continuing to permit alienation of affection lawsuits that have been banned in almost every other state. Cuba's communist economic and political policies have not made it the poorest or more oppressed nation of Latin America. The places that remained colonies long after most of the world had decolonized, like Hong Kong and the British Virgin Islands, are not obviously any worse off than those countries that gained their independence, indeed, on the whole, they are better off than their peers that gains independence sooner.

It is enough that a proposed legal change is widely believed to be superior. Indeed, even proposed legal changes that empirically proved after the fact to be clearly dysfunctional, like the adoption of Western style democratic systems and legal regimes in newly independent nations that were former European colonies, which led to long periods of one party states, dictatorships, or military regimes in short order in almost every place they were attempted the first time (and often the second and third time) that they were attempted, did not prevent legal changes from being rapidly adopted on a widespread basis.

Wave Of Legal Change Have "Natural Boundaries"

Legal and political innovations (and no doubt economic and cultural ones, as well) do not automatically sweep the entire world. They have an impact only on jurisdictions where changes elsewhere are viewed as relevant.

The impact of the Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia has spread to almost every other Arab state in region with a generally similar history. But, it shows no signs of extending to dictatorships in former Soviet Central Asia, and doesn't even seem to be spreading to dictatorships in Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia.

Chinese style communism had enough of a distinct identity of its own that it did not collapse when Soviet Style communism did.

Political innovations in Europe in the 19th century had little impact on most of Asia and Africa that were seen as different in kind than European nation-states, but did have an impact on North American and Latin American colonial states whose significantly European populations did see their situations as more parallel to those of Europe.

Western European nations in the post-World War II era have generally seen political and legal innovations in other Western European nations as relevant to them, but have generally been oblivious to political innovations in Eastern Europe, the Third World or the United States. Latin America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand have paid more heed to innovations in Europe than in the rest of the world, with Latin America being particularly strongly influenced by Iberian political and legal development, and Canada, Australia and New Zealand being particularly strongly influenced by English political and legal innovation.

The United States, by and large, has borrowed relatively little from the rest of the world politically, legally or culturally considering the amount of information available to it from the rest of the world. For example, even innovations adopted everywhere else in the world, like the metric system, have only made modest inroads in the United States. Indeed, the general disregard that American policy makers have had for the rest of the world, and their tendency to focus heavily on federal rather than state and local politics for reasons explained by the national level of organization of academic scholarship, may explain the relatively insensitivity of American legal scholars and political scientists to the profound role of waves of legal and political innovation that is so obvious elsewhere.

Lousiana has resisted many legal innovations that are widespread in the rest of the United States because it sees itself as a civil law jurisdiction unlike the other 49 states in the Union, although this sense of exceptionality appears to be waning. Utah, similarly, is a place where political and legal innovations may arise despite not being found elsewhere, and may not spread very readily when Utah alone innovates, as its identity as a predominantly Mormon state limits the tendency of other states to follow its lead.

Political innovations like the realignment of Christian conservatives from the Democratic to Republican party have been profound in the Southern states where there was previously a dominant party system in which the Democratic party controlled everything and was the only viable political party, but have played out very differently in places that had a viable two party system before the Republicans adopted the Southern strategy.

To the extent to which jurisdictions are within the same "natural boundaries" and receive information from each other, they will strongly tend to follow the same course of political and legal innovation. But, places outside those natural boundaries will tend to follow courses of political and legal evolution independent of those within those boundaries.

"Natural boundaries" of Legal Innovation Aren't the Same In Both Directions.

The strength of the natural boundaries aren't necessarily the same in each direction and flow from historical ties and relatively scale. Japan, for example, to a much greater extent than any other nation in Asia, due to the lingering impacts of U.S. involvement in the post-World War II reconstruction of the nation, is influenced by the U.S. much more than other nations of Asia that tend to receive the U.S. influences that do impact them second hand through Japan.

For example, after U.S. occupation, the Japanese began to celebrate Valentine's Day, although in a different way than in the United States. In Japan, women express their romantic feelings for men on February 14 (generally with gifts of chocolate), but men reciprocate towards women romantically not on Valentine's Day but on "White Day" on March 14, and this modified Valentine's Day-White Day tradition has spread from Japan to South Korea, urbanized China and Taiwan (South Korea, in turn, had further innovated with "Black Day" on April 14, when singles who lacked Valentine's Day and White Day suitors commisserate together.) The Japanese have also adopted a version of the American criminal jury trial, baseball, a form of the American Thanksgiving celebration (in Japan they have KFC Chicken instead of the grand Turkey feast), Western clothing styles, American style toilets, and their own versions of the American comic book tradition.

But, Japanese political, legal and social innovations have had considerably less penetration into the American scene, and Japan, because it is considerably different from the U.S. has adapted rather than directly copied many of the innovations it has brought from the United States and Western nations generally. In the same time period, in contrast, South Korea, which sees Japan as within its national scope of relevance as a model, has heavily borrowed from the Japanese model in its laws, form of economic organization and culture.

Dominant Players More Strongly Resist Innovation From Others

It also seems to be the case that the more dominant a political and cultural unit is, the less prone it is to be influenced from contagions of innovation from elsewhere. New York, California and Texas are more comfortable being outliers that ignore legal and political innovations from outside their states than Connecticut, Washington State and Oklahoma. The United States was more comfortable ignoring innovations in the rest of the world than the nations like Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy.

The fact that Egypt could be so strongly influenced politically by developments in much smaller, but otherwise very similar Tunisia is a testiment to Egypt's lack of dominance in the region and its lack of a strongly distinct self-identity from its neighbors as a culture of its own as opposed to as a large generically Arab state, at this moment in history. Its unique identity has been swallowed in its understanding of itself by its regional identity, something that was not true in the ancient world, were it was a dominant player on the international scene that largely went its own way.

READ MORE - Historic Moments

Hungry Kids Not Fair Game, Who Knew?

Hungry Colorado Kids Make Poor Political Targets

Republican State Representatives Cheri Gerou of Evergreen and Jon Becker of Fort Morgan, two of the three Republicans in the Colorado General Assembly's Joint Budget Committee, have thought better of their decision to follow the mean spirited lead of Sen. Kent Lambert, R-Colorado Springs, who really does think that hungry poor kids should be denied free school breakfasts.

Apparently, Gerou and Becker lacked the common sense on their own to know that picking on hungry little children who benefit from the free breakfast program should not suffer because an anonymous state bureaucrat made an accounting error that left the program overbudget. But, they did have the political sense to realize that almost everyone else in the State of Colorado, even in conservative strongholds like Grand Junction, Colorado did realize this point and retreated from their hardline stance.

The Gessler Drama

Newly sworn in Secretary of State Scott Gessler, meanwhile, who outrageously announced last week that he is can't survive on the pay of the office he campaigned to win and secured, and wants to work part-time at his old election law firm, despite the obvious conflicts of interest and appearance of impropriety this creates, hasn't backed down, despite strong editorials from both the Denver Post's right wing editorial board and its token liberal commentator today, explaining just how off base he is for trying to do so. The fact that he can't see why this is a problem is itself troubling.

Equally amusing is his fall back position. He has know made clear that he will look to the Attorney General's office for ethical guidance on the issue. And, who in the Attorney General's office has been appointed to handle that task? Bernie Buescher, the Democrat whom he defeated for the Secretary of State post this past November. It has been a long time since Bernie Buescher actively practiced law, but his four years of experience as Colorado's Secretary of State, many years representing a conservative Grand Junction district as a Democrat in the State House, and abundant common sense, make him well qualified for the task.

Equally disturbing, Gessler claims to have raise the part-time job issue during the campaign, even though no one anywhere can be produced to say that he actually did. Making shit up is a standard part of the Republcan play book, but this blantant instance of it by Gessler is particularly galling, because everyone who is listening knows that it isn't true.

The Denver Post, to give it credit, endorsed Buescher, who was clearly the better man, and to anyone familiar with the two candidates, the choice was clear. But, of course, most people know little about candidates for the Secretary of State's post, which only involves real power when close call election issues come up, and voted based on party labels rather than individual qualifications in a year when Red rather than Blue was the hot political color.

What Next?

It took less than two weeks for the new Republican majority in the state house, and the new Republican Secretary of State to thoroughly embarass themselves by taking stances that even died in wool conservatives can't stomach. Walker Stapleton, our new Republican State Treasurer, hasn't made a miscue yet, but still has plenty of time to allow voters to regret their choices last November.

READ MORE - Hungry Kids Not Fair Game, Who Knew?

Quotes of the Day

I have the lowest regard for intelligent people who are clearly using their intelligence to forward weak arguments through clever and adroit use of rhetoric. In my book that’s immoral, at least if you don’t have a professional interest in the obfuscation.

- Razib Khan

[T]his year's Legislative Ebenezer Scrooge Award will go to the Republican members of the Joint Budget Committee for refusing to spend already designated state funds to provide school breakfast for poor children.

"As a family guy myself with children and grandchildren, I take a very strong responsibility to earn money to feed my own family," Lambert, one of the three naysaying Republicans, told the Post.

Lambert earns money the old fashioned way: from your tax dollars. He was a lifetime member of the military, now on pension, and he now collects tax dollars as a state lawmaker.

- Dave Perry of the Aurora Sentinel

READ MORE - Quotes of the Day

Ivory Coast Type Election Issues In Cincinnati

Hamilton County, Ohio, whose principal city is Cincinnati, is faced with an election law issue pertaining to an open, elected partisan juvenile court judgeship election dispute upon which the Ohio Supreme Court and Ohio Secretary of State have ruled one way (don't count the ballots), but a federal district court judge, Chief Judge Susan J. Dlott of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Ohio has reached a contrary result.

What is the Board of Elections member (the Board itself is split two to two and does not agree) to do? The officials in question now face a contempt of court hearing today, which puts the officials at risk of personally going to jail or being fined, for failing to honor a federal court order that is contrary to a state court order.

Generally, elections are matters of state law. But, if a federal constitutional right or federal statute is implicated, federal law supersedes state law. And, while the 11th Amendment prevents state governments from having to deal with cases in federal trial courts, state and local government officials in suits not seeking money damages and arising under federal law, and suits against governmental entities distinct from state governments are not subject to that limitations. Doctrines that one learns when studying the federal courts generally provide that a final ruling of either a federal court or state court is binding on the parties who may not then forum shop for another judge with a more favorable outlook on the case. In particular, a federal trial court may not generally sit as an appellate body with regard to a state court ruling in a civil matter. But, since the law in this federal v. state jurisdiction area is so complex, even in cases arising out of purely state office elections (which are far simpler than cases arising out of federal elections, like Bush v. Gore, where a host of special constitutional rules apply), judicial rulings are sometimes hard to predict in this cases and judges come to different conclusions in the face of hot partisan conflict that often sees judges and elections officials lining up along the lines that their political histories would suggest, despite their duties to enforce the laws impartially.

Republican John Williams leads Democrat Tracie Hunter by 23 votes in the official count, but the parties disagree on how to handle 849 provisional ballots that were not counted.

The ballots were set aside on Election Day because poll workers believed they were cast at the wrong precinct.

Dlott, however, has said 149 of those ballots were cast at the wrong precinct because of poll worker error and should be counted. Many may have been cast at the wrong table even though voters cast their ballot in the right building.

The [federal] judge said failing to count ballots that were disregarded through no fault of the voter would violate the 14th Amendment’s requirement that all citizens receive equal protection under the law.

Partisan, Personal and Federalism Issues Involved

There is a partisan dimension to this struggle as there is in most election law cases.

The Board of Elections is split two posts for Republicans, two for Democrats, split evenly by design.

The Ohio Secretary of State is an elected Republican and favors the Ohio Supreme Court position that lets the Republican judge win. Six of the seven officially non-partisan elected justices on the Ohio Supreme Court were nominated by the Republican party and known to have Republican affinities.

The Democrats on the Board, however, would like a recount, as the federal judge, who was appointed by President Clinton, a Democrat, in 1995 when Democrat John Glenn and Republican Mike DeWine were U.S. Senators from Ohio, has ordered. Dayton native Dlott is married to Stanley M. Chesley (a trial lawyer more familiar to me than almost any lawyer in Denver by name, despite the fact that I haven't lived in the area for a copule of decades), lives in the most expensive single-family home ever listed in Greater Cincinnati, shows dogs, and has won praise for her racial sensitivity and even handed management and resolution of complex cases.

The Secretary of State is (by design) normally a partisan tie breaker for county boards of election, in this case on the issue of whether the federal court ruling should be appealed to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. If the 6th Circuit overules the trial judge, the conflict between the courts no longer exists, but, should the United States Court of Appeal for the 6th Circuit (which is neither particular conservative nor particularly liberal as federal appellate courts go in the United States at the moment) affirm the trial court's ruling (in which she is entitled to considerable deferrence in a number of respects), its authority vis-a-vis the Ohio Supreme Court's ruling is just as ambiguous as the trial court's ruling. Only the U.S. Supreme Court has clear jurisdiction over both the state and the federal judges in this case.

The case also pits concerns about federal involvement in state and local government operations against concerns about fairness in elections in a system controlled by political allies of the aggrieved candidate. Stereotypically (for modern times), it is the Republicans who are pressing a state's rights argument in this case, and the Democrats who are pressing for federal involvement in the interest of civil rights.

There is also a perceived racial element to the contest. Hamilton County is 70% white and 25% African-American, with the African-American population predominantly in Cincinnati, the central city, ahd the white population disproportionately in suburban Hamilton County. Democrat Tracie Hunter, a former public defender and guardian ad litem, who is also a pastor and radio personality is an African-American woman, while Republican John Williams, a former prosecutor campaigning with a tough on crime agenda in a court where most of the defendants are African-American juveniles and African-American parents, is a white man whose website prominently displays white Hamilton county suburbanites in the background, in a county just on the border between Northern leaning Ohio and Southern leaning border state Kentucky.

To be perfectly honest, if I had been forced to vote in that election, I wouldn't have been terribly happy with either of my choices. Both candidates are partisans seeking a post that demands neutrality and evenhandedness.

Voters were very evenly split in the race, and usually, in this kind of situation, where a significant number of provisional ballots are at issue, a recount will favor a Democrat. It wouldn't be surprising for an apparently heavy handed or partial ruling to lead to a riot in Cincinnati.

The Stakes

This all sounds like a very technical issue of civil procedure and election law, with valid legal considerations on both sides of the case.

The outcome of this case won't directly affect anyone who doesn't do have a connection to Hamilton County Juvenile Court, a county where 99.7% of the population of the United States doesn't live, and with which 95%+ of the population of Hamilton County will never have any business. It has one other judge in addition to the position at stake in this election, and the Juvenile Court's rulings are very important to those who are before the court, and who in making child custody decisions and juvenile delinquency sentencing decisions has immense discretion.

Life will go on with either resolution of the matter, so long as it is resolved, and there is really no room for compromise. Neither candidate has shown any basis for a do over of the election, only one can be elected for a long term to the only judgeship on the court, and the judicial ideologies and the personal experiences that the candidates bring to the court are very different. Either way, unhappen litigants can try to appeal rulings without a proper legal basis.

Cote D'Ivoire Compared

But, while this particular case in Ohio won't change the world, an extremely similar legal issue in Cote D'Ivoire's 2010 Presidential election, in West Africa, in a country only a little larger in size and area than Ohio (it has 20.6 million people up by a third in the last decade alone, while Ohio has about 11.5 million although probably a similar number of adults of voting age; it has 124,502 square miles, while Ohio has 44,825 square miles; both have strong regional and ethnic partisan divides), in which a Board of Elections and independent election observers came to one conclusion on the outcome of a contested election dispute arising out of vote counting concerns (in favor of the contesting candidate Alassane Ouattara), while the Constitutional Court of the country came to a contrary determination (in favor of the incumbent President Laurent Gbagbo).

The election dispute in Cote D'Ivoire has brought that country to the brink of civil war, despite the absence of a complicated mix of federal courts. Scores or hundreds of people have died already in the several week old dispute. The international community has sided with the challenger (in part on the merits, and in part because the incumbent has manipulated the electoral process in undemocratic ways that were to be put behind the country in free and fair elections in 2010), while the incumbent appears to have practical control of most instruments of state power in the country.

UPDATE: The 6th Circuit has entered a stay in the case. All the original source documents you could ever want can be found here.

READ MORE - Ivory Coast Type Election Issues In Cincinnati

So Much For A Less Violent American Politics?

I recently made a couple of posts on the relative non-violence of American politics and labor relations compared to the European (and to some extent world) alternative.

Then, there was the attempted assassination of a Democratic Congresswoman in Arizona this weekend that resulted in the death of the chief judge of Arizona's federal trial court and five others, in addition to a dozen plus other gunshot wounds. The event was cited by many as a symptom of the violent political rhetoric by the Tea Party movement (including Sarah Palin, in particular) in the 2010 election. We a little of that climate in Colorado, but it was probably more intense in Arizona. The Congresswoman who was shot suffered a bullet shot through the brain and miraculously lives at the moment, but there is no telling if she will be able to continue to carry out the duties of her office, and certainly, her life will never be the same again.

I wasn't specifically contradicted by this event; I've never argued that there is never political violence in the United States, just that it is comparatively rare. But, was I fundamentally wrong? Is this a case of American politics turning a corner in the wrong direction after a low point that my post captured? Or, is this simply one more mass murder by a mentally ill person whose political character is really no more relevant than any other of these periodic mass murder outbursts?

We really won't know until time tells us if this was a freak event or the start of a trend. The arrest of a man for threatening U.S. Senator Michael Bennet isn't encouraging, of course, and this incident does remind us the outgoing Governor Ritter survived an assassination attempt by a mentally ill young man during his four year term of office. It also casts a different light on the act of animal rights terrorism involved in the burning down of the Sheepskin factory in Glendale, Colorado, a stone's throw from my office.

The fact that the killer was off his rocker (although quite possibly still legally culpable for his crime) doesn't necessarily mean that the political climate wasn't a factor. Extreme acts are committed by extreme people. Even in street gangs, the people who actually kill other people in gang crimes are not typical of the average street gang member from a mental health perspective. But, the fact that this most recent shooting does not appear to have involved an organized conspiracy, at least, is encouraging. Others may not have been attuned enough to the risk to take some sort of action before he struck, but they might be now and certainly the people who might have had a clue that the killer was dangerous but failed to stop him, had no desire to further his murderous plans.

(As an aside, while there is little doubt that the attempted murder of a Congresswoman took place here, the federal death penalty for murder of a federal official required an actual death, and it isn't clear whether or not one can be guilty of that crime if one did not know that one of the bystanders killed was a federal judge, or if the doctrine of transferred intent (i.e. that an intent to kill one federal official suffices to show intent even if a different federal official ends up being the one who dies) applies to that offense. Arizona's death penalty surely applies to this case at any rate.)

The man who committed the crime was caught and he will probably never be in a position to threaten anyone else ever again. The politicians and spinmeisters have been chastened, for a little while at least, about the perils of engaging in violent rhetoric, politically even if there is no causal link to this event. There is little one can do to prevent a single deranged individual from sometime, somewhere doing something horrible. But, if the causes are larger, there is something that can be done.

Gun control will be debated, and it just might just happen that some tangentially related legislation to limit the access of mentally ill people with criminal records (as the perpetrator apparently had) might advance just a little, or it might not. The bill most on point will probably be rechristened with the name of Gabrielle Giffords, who was the target of the attack (a la the Brady Bill).

In isolation, events like these are tragedies, but don't change the larger course of our lives. But, when they impact the rarified world of our modest community of high elected officials and judges, the potential for an event like this to change who choses to participate in politics and how they choose to do so is real. The fear that a comment will draw a violent attack from a crazy person can change how politicians act, mostly for the worse. This is particularly true when the deadly violent crazies who are our domestic terrorists seem to have a conservative partisan bias.

READ MORE - So Much For A Less Violent American Politics?

America's Tame Politics and Labor Relations

One of the striking aspects of the politics of Europe and many other nations of the world is the high level of political violence that takes place.

In Spain, members of rival political parties beat each other up as demostrators and counter-demonstrators clash, controversial arrests can lead to street protests, and informal labor actions have put Spanish air traffic controllers under martial law supervision, Portugal has had a widely successful general strike, Greece is experiencing general strikes and violent clashes between demonstrators and law enforcement, controversial parlimentary votes in Italy trigger riots in Rome, the streets of Dublin are full of Irish citizens protesting austerity plans, and even London has tens of thousands of demonstrators doing things like walking over police cars and breaking the windows of Prince Charles' car while he was in it.

All of that was just in the past month, and is confined to Europe. The spin would be different from different sources, but nobody denies that major strikes, general strikes, street demonstrations, violent clashes between demonstrators and police, and all sorts of "street politics" outside formal political channels are far more common in most European political systems and labor relations than they are in the United States. If you looked back just a little further, you'd find similar activity in France and many other European countries. Spain, France and Italy have all had general strikes since the 1980s. Spain and Northern Ireland have had on and off armed insurgencies in my lifetime. Greece and Germany have both had domestic terrorism in that time period.

Latin America, and much of the rest of the world, has followed this pattern of politics that spill outside the constitutional process into the streets, and of labor relations that produce frequent labor actions as strategic tools in negotiations between labor and management.

There are occassional large marches and public demonstrations in the United States, and even some small scale clashes between police and demonstrators. But, the United States has really seen nothing like what Europe and much of the rest of the world is experiencing right now in terms of street politics in the last thirty years. Even the turbulent activism and political violence of the 1960s and 1970s in the United States was probably not quite as intense as what much of Europe is experiencing right now.

The Growing Docility of American Labor Relations

Wikipedia notes six general strikes in U.S. history, one in 1919 in Seattle, and four in 1934, at the height of the Great Depression, one in Toledo, one in Minneapolis, one in San Francisco and one at West Coast Ports. There was also a general strike in the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico in 1998. The last one in the English Speaking United States was 76 years ago, and very few people living today remember it. The United States has never had a nationwide general strike and just two general strikes in its history, on restricted to a single industry, and the other to a U.S. territory, extended beyond a single city.

Union-management relations in the United States used to look a lot like they do in Europe. Strikes were large, frequent and involved a large share of the work force. National guard forces or private security forces were frequently called in to put them down in bloody conflicts. Openly socialist political parties were organized.

In 1950, a year that revisionist history remembers as a tranquil period in American history, there were 424 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all involving 1,698,000 workers, which was more than one in nine members of the unionized workforce of 14.3 million workers who made up 31.5% of the total work force.

In 2008, there were 15 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers, in all including 72,000 workers which was one in two-hundred and twenty-three members of the unionized workforce of 16.1 million workers who made up 12.4% of the total workforce. The public sector which is 36.8% unionized, is as unionized as the private sector was at its peak. The private sector, which is 7.2% unionized, has the lowest level of unionization in the private sector since the 1920s, if not earlier.

The unionized workforce has remained more or less constant for half a century, despite a growing workforce, and that masks the fact that there has been substantial growth in public sector union membership and a substantial decline in private sector union membership over that time period.

The United States, there has been only one year since 1983 that more than 3% of unionized workers went on strike (1986), and there has only been one year since 1998 (the year 2000) when more than one in eighty union members went on strike. In the entire United States from 1990 to 2008, there wasn't a single year that there were more than 45 strikes involving 1,000 or more workers in the entire United States, in a period that started with a labor force of 103 million workers and peaked at just short of 130 million workers. In contrast, there wasn't a single year from 1950 to 1987 that had less than 46 strikes, despite that fact that the workforce was signficiantly smaller. Prior to the 1980s there were a couple hundred major strikes in the United States per year, about ten times current levels of labor action.

Almost all strikes in recent memory have involved workers at just a single employer. Those strikes that do happen have mostly been pretty tame by international standards. American labor unions do not, as the French do, for example, kidnap members of management until a deal is reached.

Japan is probably the only other developed country in the world with a lower level of recent labor action.

The Rarity of American Political Violence

Political violence has been very rare, and mass demonstration have been both rare and mostly peaceful. The only real riot worth mentioning in that time period was the L.A. riots of 1992 sparked by the acquittal of a policeman whose acts of racially tinged brutality were captured on videotape; the riots left 53 dead and thousands injured. In brief summary:

FIFTY-THREE PEOPLE DIED in L.A.'s riot . . . Gunfire killed 35, including eight people shot by law enforcement and two by National Guardsmen. Six died in arson fires. Attackers used sticks or boards to kill two others. Stabbings killed two. Six died in car accidents; two in hit-and-runs. One was strangled. The violence crossed racial and ethnic lines. The dead included 25 African-Americans, 16 Latinos, eight whites, two Asians, one Algerian, and one Indian or Middle Easterner. Men outnumbered women, 48 to 5.

A lot of the killings in L.A. appeared to be random. Some of the killings in L.A. involved people trying to loot businesses or defending themselves from looting.

There have been other periods of civil disorder, in college towns after major wins and defeats in sports, and in connection with natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, but few that could properly be called political or labor related. Most of the other politically driven incidents of civil unrest, like the L.A. riots, involved instances of alleged toleration of police brutality.

You can count the number of politicans and judges assassinated in the United States in the last thirty years on your fingers (nine out of hundreds of thousands of politicians and judges over that time period) and in addition eight other successful assassinations of people for political reasons, a failed attempt to assassinate President Reagan in 1981 (that seriously injured three others), and a failed attempt to assassinate a civil rights leader in 1980. In the same period there have been more than a hundred political assassinations in Europe.

While we haven't been entirely free of domestic terrorism, particularly in support of animal rights and far right anti-government movements, it has been exceedingly rare and lacked any kind of mass support. But, the only fatal instances of terrorism in the United States by U.S. citizens were the Oklahoma City bombing and a couple of anti-abortion assassinations (one included in the list of political killings above).

There have been a few instances of deadly terrorism in the United States perpetrated by foreigners (e.g., the first World Trade Center bombing, an attack on CIA headquarters, and 9-11), but these instances have generally not involved a network of domestic supporters. Suspected foreign terrorist plots involving networks of domestic supporters have thusfar all been stopped.

It isn't that the U.S. has had particularly low levels of violence generally. Its murder rate was the highest in the developed world for much of this time period. Crime rates in the U.S. are quite low by historical standards at the moment, but the lack of political violence in the United States in the last thirty years hasn't been strongly linked to overall violent crime rates.

For whatever reason, perhaps demographic, perhaps in the political and legal system, perhaps because few issues have stirred Americans like the draft and civil rights movement did in the last major episode of street politics and political violence in the United States, politics has worked out the way we are taught in civics classes in schools, through voting, legislative action, and political litigation.

The Clarity of American Electoral Outcomes

The closest the United States has come to the kind of disputed Presidential election result that routinely come up in new democracies, such as the one pending in Ivory Coast right now, the most recent Presidential election in Afghanistan and Haiti, and the Presidential election in Ukraine a few years ago, each of which brought masses of supporters for both sides into the streets in mass demonstrations, was the 1876 Presidential election. We've had very close elections, such as the 2000 Bush v. Gore election, but that was resolved in courtrooms and election committees through basically normal channels and never led to public unrest.

Despite the fact that the 2010 election in the United States featured some of the most vitriolic and violent political rhetoric of a generation, and even a few instances of menancing with weapons, not a single person in the United States was killed or serious injured in election related violence, and no violence or threats of violence had no significant effect on the outcome of the election. The results didn't produce street protests or demonstrations. The election didn't even produce that many really large political gatherings in the course of the campaigns. The most notable rally of the campaign season was held October 30, by a couple of TV comedians on a more or less non-partisan basis.

The Demise of the Civil Jury Trial and Other Coincidences

Perhaps it is a coincidence, but the decline of labor union actions, street politics and political violence in the United States has coincided with the "vanishing trial" in which fewer and fewer civil cases actually are tried before a jury (or go to trial at all), despite swelling civil dockets. Criminal trials are also less frequent, although the decline has been less marked.

The decline has also coincided with a general decline in civil society membership organizations, and with declining church attendance and religious denominational affiliation.

A long period of economic growth may be a factor. The past thirty years has been a largely prosperous one of sustained economic growth with only short or mild recessions, until the current Great Recession. It has also been a period in which blue collar economic stagnation has been steady but mostly gradual.

Whatever the reason, the question of why American's politics and labor relations are so tame by international standards is a question worth considering.

READ MORE - America's Tame Politics and Labor Relations