COMMON CAUSE, a left-leaning advocacy non-profit, has filed a lawsuit against the Senate on the grounds that the filibuster defies the constitution. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post, a leading anti-filibuster opinion-maker, lays out the Common Cause case as it has been articulated by Emmett Bondurant, a celebrated litigator and Common Cause board member:

Between 1840 and 1900, there were 16 filibusters. Between 2009 and 2010, there were more than 130. But that’s changed. Today, Majority Leader Harry Reid says that “60 votes are required for just about everything.”

At the core of Bondurant’s argument is a very simple claim: This isn’t what the Founders intended. The historical record is clear on that fact. The framers debated requiring a supermajority in Congress to pass anything. But they rejected that idea.

The constitution sets out six cases in which a supermajority is required in the senate, and passing ordinary legislation isn't one of them. Mr Bondurant's basic claim is that the upshot of this omission is that the majority vote is the mandatory default for decision-making about legislation. That is to say, the use of anything other than majority voting is prohibited, except for those cases in which another voting rule is explicitly prescribed. If the constitution doesn't outright say this, that's only because the framers thought it was too obvious to mention.

Mr Klein thinks Mr Bondurant "makes a strong case". Gregory Koger, a political scientist at the University of Miami seems not to agree. "I am very excited that Common Cause has filed a lawsuit against the Senate filibuster", Mr Koger confesses at the Monkey Cage blog. "Excited in a John Stuart Mill, isn’t-it-great-when-bad-arguments-get-aired-and-demolished kind of way." In a 2009 post, Mr Koger systematically reviewed the arguments against the proposition that the filibuster is unconstitutional. In his more recent post he responds specifically to the Common Cause/Bondurant brief:

The central argument of the brief is that the use of supermajority procedures in the U.S. Congress is inherently unconstitutional. It states, “The principle of majority was so basic to the concept of a democratically elected legislative body that it did not need to be expressly stated in the Constitution.” Of course, too-important-to-be-written looks exactly like not-important-enough-to-include, so affirming this claim would invite a series of lawsuits claiming other “obvious but unwritten” principles.

Mr Koger goes on to observe that the principle that "every supermajority procedure used by Congress is prohibited" if not explicitly required would take down a number of longstanding and uncontested practices in both houses.

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MITT ROMNEY'S campaign site has a simple statement of principle at the top: "We have a moral responsibility not to spend more than we take in." If Mr Romney actually believes this, he must think America a thoroughly depraved and immoral country. The US government has spent more than it has taken in for 76 of the past 100 years, and 26 of the past 30. The last five Republican presidents, Messrs Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush and Bush, have all violated this putative moral responsibility with joyful abandon, and they have plenty of company. There are almost no countries in the world whose governments spend, on the whole, less than they take in; the ones that come close to breaking even are mostly oil-rich authoritarian plutocracies or theocracies (Kazakhstan, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and so forth; Chile and Estonia are the sole democracies with public debts under 10% of GDP). Most countries with very low public debts are in that position not because they are thrifty or responsible, but because they are so corrupt, poor or unstable that no one will lend them money. North Korea, as far as anyone can tell, has virtually no national debt at all, but is obviously not doing well by its future generations. The world's wealthy, happy democracies, meanwhile, from Sweden to Israel to America to Japan, almost all maintain national debts of upwards of 30% of GDP, meaning they usually spend more than they take in. I would be interested to hear Mr Romney's explanation for this.

If he wins the election, Mr Romney, by his own account, has no intention of fulfilling any moral responsibility the government might have not to spend more than it takes in. Mr Romney has endorsed Paul Ryan's proposed budget, whose chief feature is a quick burst of massive tax cuts that will dramatically increase the federal deficit, compensated for by notional spending cuts which he largely refuses to specify. This budget would, according to Mr Ryan's own highly favourable estimates, still be running a $287 billion annual deficit in 2022, and would not come into balance until 2040, when Mr Romney will be 93. If Mr Romney does actually consider it a "moral responsibility" for the government not to spend more than it takes in, it must be the sort of moral responsibility you pay lip service to, but expect to go on violating in practice every day of your life, like the responsibility to love your neighbour as yourself.

I can't pretend to know whether Mr Romney actually believes in this ridiculous slogan, or whether he is simply plastering it on his website because he knows that it sounds appealing to many people whose ideas about the way economies work are simplistic. It would be easy enough to change the slogan into an accurate one: simply add the words "too much". "We have a moral responsibility not to spend too much more than we take in": that's true. But the entire argument is about how much is "too much", and what kinds of trade-offs you make by failing to spend more than you take in right now, as opposed to later, depending on the circumstances. That's not the kind of statement you can put on your campaign website, because everyone would agree with it, including your opponent, and you'd get bogged down in technical arguments. My best guess is that Mr Romney is perfectly aware that his slogan, as stated, isn't really true, but is willing to stand behind it because in the context of the presidential campaign, it serves as a signaling device to voters on various issues. Indeed, the slogan as used here is actually a link to a section of Mr Romney's website calling for "Smaller, Smarter, Simpler Government". This isn't a call for cutting the deficit at all. It's a call for reducing the size of government, which only cuts the deficit if you don't slash taxes at the same time, which would be fine except that Mr Romney is planning to slash taxes.

This brings me to the point of this post, which I've been a long time getting to. It is this: As we watch the presidential campaigns, how much effort do we put into critiquing what the candidates actually stand for or are likely to do, and how much do we put into critiquing the stuff they put out in their propaganda? For example, yesterday my colleague rightly agreed with many conservative commentators that the Obama administration's "Julia" web cartoon is, considered as an ad campaign, pretty lame. Then he took it a step further: he argued that when conservative commentators slam the cartoon for sketching a vision of a society in which citizens' lives are shaped by government policies from cradle to grave, they're just complaining about the reality of American society, as it would be under any administration, Democratic or Republican. Right. I don't agree that the differences between the Democratic and Republican visions for America in the 2010s aren't significant. But clearly the problem with the Julia cartoon can't be that it described the existence of Head Start, Pell grants, health-insurance regulations, and so forth, all of which will continue to exist under Barack Obama or Mitt Romney, if at different levels of funding.

Fundamentally, I think the Julia cartoon and Mr Romney's declaration that budget deficits are by nature immoral are both responses to the same campaign imperative: the difficulty of representing complex arguments over policy in terms that average voters can get their heads around. The Julia cartoon fell prey to a problem that always haunts Democrats: the "laundry-list of programmes" trap, in which liberals see lots of different social problems, try to address them in different ways (which is, after all, a better way to deal with complex and multifarious social problems than one-size-fits-all systems that don't address many situations), and end up confusing and exhausting the voters. Mr Romney's slogan employs a classic Republican approach: hold out a simple, sweeping principle that voters understand and embrace, even if you don't actually believe in it yourself because it wouldn't really be a good idea. In the long run, the repetition of these bogus principles by political leaders rots the timbers of the body poiltic, but in the near term it'll probably be okay, because most likely nobody will be able to implement them.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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ACCORDING to the internet's hilarious headline writers, Eduardo Saverin, a Facebook co-founder, dis-"likes" America's tax rules and has "un-friended" the land of the free in order to dodge a potentially monumental tax bill after Facebook goes public. Mr Saverin is Brazilian by birth, but has been an American citizen since 1998. Last fall, he filed the papers to renounce his American citizenship. Considering how well Mr Saverin has done here, is this jake? Farhad Manjoo thinks that not only is Mr Saverin's extreme self-deportation unfair, "It’s ungrateful and it’s indecent. Saverin’s decision to decamp the U.S. suggests he’s got no idea how much America has helped him out." Ilyse Hogue of The Nation is incensed:

In making this decision, the Brazilian native did more than expose his blind disregard for all that his adopted country has done for him. He has made himself the poster child for the callous class of 1 percenters who are all too happy to use national resources to enrich themselves, and then skate, or cry foul, when asked to pay their fair share. The story evokes the image of the marauding aliens from the movie Independence Day, who come to Earth to take what they can get before moving on to another planet.

Wait a second! Did Eduardo Saverin plunder us? Are we now a desolate husk of a country, sucked dry by Eduardo Saverin's rapine? Well, no. Facebook created wealth. Mr Saverin is leaving having deployed his capital in a manner that made America better off than it was when he arrived. But will he escape without rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's? Well, no. Both Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue mumble in passing under their breath while coughing that Mr Saverin will have to pony up an "exit tax". So what's this woefully insufficient tribute come to, such that Mr Saverin may be so bitterly denounced for exploitation and despoilment? According to Danielle Kucera, Sanat Vallikappen and Christine Harper of Bloomberg:

Saverin won’t escape all U.S. taxes. Americans who give up their citizenship owe what is effectively an exit tax on the capital gains from their stock holdings, even if they don’t sell the shares, said Reuven S. Avi-Yonah, director of the international tax program at the University of Michigan’s law school. For tax purposes, the IRS treats the stock as if it has been sold.

Got that? Mr Saverin's on the hook for the amount his capital-gains tax would have come to had he sold all his American stock holdings. Tim Worstall sketches it out on his napkin:

[T]he net effect of his citizenship renunciation on his immediate tax bill is to increase it, hugely. For it will, at minimum, start with the idea that he’s just made a $3.5 billion or so profit (adjusted downwards for the difference between the private market value of Facebook last fall and the IPO price) on his Facebook stock which he got originally for minimal amounts of money. At the standard 15% long term capital gains rate that’s near $500 million right there.

Half a billion dollars! That is not scot-free. Did the marauding aliens in "Independence Day" leave behind a half billion American dollars after having successfully invested in Earth? They did not! One wonders how many pounds of flesh Mr Manjoo and Ms Hogue think Mr Saverin owes for the privilege of having Uncle Sam's hooks out once and for all.

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IN MOST opinion polls, Americans appear reluctant to cut defence spending. Of course, in most opinion polls Americans appear reluctant to cut everything apart from foreign aid. Despite all of the hand-wringing over the federal budget, the truth is most people don't have a firm grasp of how their money is spent. So the Program for Public Consultation (PPC), in collaboration with the Stimson Center and the Center for Public Integrity (CPI), tried to educate a group of Americans on one aspect of the budget. Last month they showed a representative sample of Americans the size of the defence budget from different viewpoints and presented them with arguments for and against cutting funds. The idea was to simulate a congressional debate; to put participants in the shoes of those actually voting on the budget.

Then they asked each member of the group how they would handle the defence budget if they were a member of Congress. They found

Presented the base national defense budget for 2012 and given the opportunity to set a level for 2013, three quarters reduced it, including two thirds of Republicans and 9 in 10 Democrats. On average defense spending was lowered 23%. A majority lowered it at least 11%.

When participants were asked to get more specific and propose changes to the levels of spending in nine areas, a majority cut all nine. "All areas combined were cut 18% on average, with Republicans cutting 12% and Democrats 22%," the study notes. Most participants were surprised by the level of America's defence spending when it was held up against the rest of the discretionary budget, historical levels of spending, and the defence spending of other nations. A previous poll showed similar results—support for defence cuts—when participants were informed about the comparable size of the 31 largest categories in the federal discretionary budget.

The potential cuts to the Pentagon contained in last year's budget deal are actually less than those proposed by the PPC study group on average. So it may seem odd that America's politicians are now scrambling to avoid those reductions. Instead, Republicans have proposed cuts to food stamps, Medicaid, social services and other programmes for poor Americans, while Democrats have proposed raising taxes on the rich. Few have pushed back against the military spendthrifts, who argue that America would swiftly decline were it to return to the level of funding George Bush laboured under at the end of his peaceable presidency.

I'm not sure if this means we need to educate our congressmen, or simply stop listening to them. It probably doesn't matter. As R. Jeffrey Smith, an editor at CPI, tells Suzy Khimm, the debate over the defence budget is one in which the “noisy minorities” dominate. And while knowledge is a powerful weapon, fear mongering is often more effective.

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IT'S a testament to the power of internet remix culture that I saw at least three parodies of "The Life of Julia", an online slideshow from Barack Obama's campaign, before I glimpsed the original. In the official version, we are shown Julia advancing through the stations of life, from girlhood to retirement, and told at each stage just how well she fares under Mr Obama's policies compared to Mr Romney's.

Looking at the real deal for the first time just now, and attempting to put out of mind the spoofs and criticisms I've already absorbed, my first impression is that there is something either metaphysically or politically queer going on. Barack Obama is president Julia's entire life! My second impression, after slapping the shackles on my hair-splitting inner stickler, is that it was really quite generous of Mr Obama's people not to admit outright the truth that Julia probably won't survive past 30 in the terrifying alternative universe in which Mitt Romney is eternally president, for in that timeline her heart is torn out and eaten by a roving band of cannibal savages in the aftermath of the global nuclear devastation precipitated by Mr Romney, who doesn't even have a Nobel peace prize. That is to say, my first impression was that "The Life of Julia" is completely ridiculous, even as a piece of propaganda, and I was immediately moved to satirise it. I guess that's why there are so many send-ups. David Burge at Iowahawk, I think quite accurately captures the flavour of the original's description of Julia's political alternatives, whatever you think of his politics. 

Ross Douthat goes beyond the observation that "The Life of Julia" is a risible piece of propaganda. He argues that "the slide show represents a monument to certain trends in contemporary liberalism" due to the "fascinating ideological purity [of] its attitudes and arguments". "On the one hand", Mr Douthat writes, "its public policy agenda is essentially a defense of existing arrangements no matter their effectiveness or sustainability, apparently premised on the assumption that American women can’t make cost-benefit calculations or indeed do basic math". But here's Mr Douthat's deeper critique:

At the same time, the slide show’s vision of the individual’s relationship to the state seems designed to vindicate every conservative critique of the Obama-era Democratic Party. The liberalism of “the Life of Julia” doesn’t envision government spending the way an older liberalism did—as a backstop for otherwise self-sufficient working families, providing insurance against job loss, decrepitude and catastrophic illness. It offers a more sweeping vision of government’s place in society, in which the individual depends on the state at every stage of life, and no decision—personal, educational, entrepreneurial, sexual—can be contemplated without the promise that it will be somehow subsidized by Washington.

This seems a bit too heavy to lay upon a cartoon slide-show intended simply to illustrate the difference between a few of Mr Obama's and Mr Romney's policies. Is Mr Douthat disappointed that there are no slides depicting Julia sniffing the crisp fall breeze, attending a pot-luck at a family reunion, backpacking through the Andes, kneeling at her bedside in prayer, or engaged in other mostly government-free activities? But Messrs Romney and Obama are seeking a government office. Mr Douthat grumbles that Julia "seems to have no meaningful relationships apart from her bond with the Obama White House". Now that I think of it, I cannot recall ever seeing a soldier eat nachos in an Army recruitment advert. Does the Army mean to suggest soldiers don't eat nachos? Lies! 

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THOSE who complain that Mitt Romney's privilege has left him insensitive to the workaday problems of the common man fail to consider that the man has apparently struggled for his whole life with the curse of awful timing. There he was Saturday, just days after Barack Obama was garlanded with praise for his surprise endorsement of gay marriage, giving a commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. That must have been about the last place a candidate would want to turn up if he was hoping to gently waffle about his views on social issues, as Mr Romney has been wont to do. 

The speech was an effort by Mr Romney, a Mormon, to bolster relations with non-Mormon Christians (or, to be precise, that subset of Christians who represent the "religious right"—as Timothy Noah aptly pointed out in March, the category of "Christian" encompasses nearly 80% of Americans). Polls show that a considerable number of people profess to be leery of voting for a Mormon; the wariness is especially pronounced among self-identified evangelical Christians, a demographic that has heavily favoured Republicans in recent elections.

This is actually the second major address Mr Romney has given on the subject of his religion. In 2007, while campaigning for the Republican nomination, he offered a speech that explicitly referenced John F. Kennedy's 1960 address on his Catholicism. In that speech, Mr Romney, like JFK before him, sought to reassure voters who were worried about electing a president whose religion includes a strong, centralised, earthly authority: "Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions."

The fact that Mr Romney became the nominee this year might be taken as evidence that concern about his religion has faded. This time around, Mr Romney focused on voters who were suspicious of Mormonism's beliefs rather than its governing structure. "People of different faiths, like yours and mine, sometimes wonder where we can meet in common purpose, when there are so many differences in creed and theology," he said. "Surely the answer is that we can meet in service, in shared moral convictions about our nation stemming from a common worldview."

Evangelical leaders applauded the speech. More generally, as Brad Knickerbocker notes at the Christian Science Monitor, Mr Romney's overall outreach effort has been "apparently successful". Sceptical though they may be of a Mormon, there are bigger bogeymen. I think back to Richard Land, the head of the Southern Baptist Convention, chuckling at an appearance at the National Press Club in DC last autumn, explaining that nothing unites evangelicals like Barack Obama. If values voters were going to undo Mr Romney, they were going to do it in the primary.

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THIS may get my blogger license yanked, but I haven't the faintest clue whether Barack Obama's endorsement of Dick Cheney's 2004 position on same-sex marriage hurts or helps his re-election prospects, or hurts or helps the fight for marriage equality. For all I know, Mr Obama has summoned the wrath of Jehovah and a horde of locusts is descending upon the South Lawn even as we speak. What I do know for certain is that Mr Obama's announcement made me a little cranky, and in much the same way it made Radley Balko cranky:

Obama’s statement doesn’t change a single policy. He has basically adopted a federalist approach to the issue. To my knowledge, gay marriage also happens to be the only issue in which Obama embraces federalism. Obama apparently believes the states should be able to discriminate when it comes to marriage benefits, but if they allow cancer and AIDS patients to smoke pot, he asserts the supremacy of federal law, and sends in the SWAT teams. What a twisted set of priorities. 

[...]

As leadership goes, it’s little more than acknowledging the direction the wind is blowing. It hardly merits a new chapter for Profiles in Courage.

Still, I think it was the right thing to do, and I'm glad he did it. One only wishes his views on other civil-liberties issues were evolving, or evolving in the direction of justice. 

Having declared my total ignorance of the net cash value of Mr Obama's flip-flop about legal gay nuptials, I will say that it seems quite sure to distract American voters somewhat from the economic recovery, such as it is. And one would expect this to force Mr Romney to spend rather more time than he'd like awkwardly imitating a conservative culture warrior. So Andrew Sullivan argues:

If this is a choice election, and social issues are salient, then Romney's in trouble. Every day he loses his economic message, his referendum on Obama gets shunted back a bit. So no surprise that Romney would rather not discuss immigration, gays, or marijuana. 

I'm rather less confident that the salience of social issues ultimately redounds to Mr Obama's benefit, but I do think Mr Sullivan is on to something, and that Mr Romney's reluctance to serve up a second helping of primary-season red meat does suggest that the long, justice-bending arc of the universe confers upon savvy conservative Democrats certain advantages.

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BARACK OBAMA took cubic miles of guff for spending the last few years insisting his position on gay marriage was "evolving". Now he's finally come out and said what everybody knew he was eventually going to say: he thinks gay people should be allowed to marry the partner of their choice. This puts Mr Obama back in the locomotive of the train of civil rights for gay people, which is where the Democratic Party wants him to be. It's hard to fault him for making the move, on either political or moral grounds.

But it's probably bad for the cause of gay marriage. Until today, the issue had only a moderate partisan cast. Officially, the Republican Party was opposed to gay marriage, and conservatives quickly responded to Mr Obama's declaration by reaffirming their opposition. But the issue didn't have a high profile, and many Republicans of a more libertarian slant on social issues were steadily coming to the conclusion in recent years that there was no reason why gays shouldn't get married just like anybody else can.

As of today, gay marriage is once again a partisan issue at the heart of a presidential election campaign. Many Republicans who might have had flexible opinions as of yesterday are now going to find themselves psychologically inclined to move towards the party line. Mitt Romney will be forced, within the next hours or days, to come out with a full-throated argument against gay marriage. Republican office-holders will have to vocally support that position. Republican media outfits (Fox News, conservative talk radio, RedState and so forth) will have to join the attack. Millions of GOP voters who otherwise might have gradually reconciled themselves to gay marriage within the next few months will be held back by the ideological alignments created in this presidential campaign.

The announcement is almost certain to help, not hurt, Mr Obama's re-election effort. Those who are radicalised against gay marriage by this announcement weren't going to vote for Mr Obama anyway; they are Republican voters who might have been on the fence about gay marriage. Almost no Democratic-leaning voters will switch or withhold their votes over this announcement. But many Democrats will be enthused to see Mr Obama take leadership on an issue of moral consequence in which they fervently believe. Voter turnout will rise; the tone of support for Mr Obama will become more emphatic. There will be a stronger sense that Mr Obama stands for a vision of America profoundly different from that of Mr Romney. The move may help re-elect a president who supports gay marriage. But my feeling is that it will delay the moment when support for the right of gays to marry becomes a widespread American consensus.

(Photo credit: AFP)

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