When I say “meta-law” I mean the philosophical underpinnings of the law. Here in the United States the Constitution is the law of the land but the meta-law includes things like the Declaration of Independence. I’m sure you’re familiar with the opening lines of the Declaration:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The emphasis is mine.

Other countries are based on blood kinship, long history, a common religion, or even accident. The United States, as G. K. Chesterton so aptly put it, is a country founded on a creed. Part of the creed is “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind”. That’s one of the reasons that I believe we should have good reasons for the things that we do and be willing to explain them to the world. It’s part of our DNA, our creed. Our meta-law.

Speaking of going to war, the editors of the Washington Post warn of the increasingly desperate situation in Libya that we are studiedly ignoring:

U.S. and Western responsibility for this mess is heavy. Having tipped the outcome of the war against the Gaddafi regime, NATO quickly exited Libya, which was left with no army or political institutions but was awash in weapons. Repeated Libyan requests for assistance in restoring security were brushed off; a small-scale NATO training program based outside the country was little more than symbolic. As in the case of Afghanistan, Congress rejected the Obama administration’s aid requests.

Libya’s attempt to establish a working democracy, meanwhile, was overtaken by infighting among militias, which slowly polarized along an Islamist-secular divide. Libyans appear to prefer secular government: Islamists fared poorly in a parliamentary election held in June. But their military forces, which include a militia from the coastal city of Misurata as well as Ansar al-Sharia, are formidable.

The Obama administration has done its best to ignore Libya’s collapse, even as Republicans in Congress obsess over conspiracy theories about the 2012 Benghazi attack. Administration officials continue to peddle the empty line that “Libya’s challenges can really only be solved by the Libyans themselves,” as Secretary of State John F. Kerry put it this week. Officials point to the newly elected parliament, which convened in the eastern city of Tobruk last weekend, as a possible vehicle for a political settlement.

It’s hard to decide which is more fanciful: the idea that there is some incipient “working democracy” in Libya struggling to get out or that we will intervene to end the chaos there. Liberal democracies are built on institutions and Libya does not possess the institutions that form the foundations for a liberal democracy and can’t develop them quickly. It would take years. Generations. The situation there has always been a contest between warring factions and the only thing that we’ve accomplished is to side temporarily with one of the factions, just long enough to produce chaos.

No one has ever built a nation or even stabilized one from an altitude of 30,000 feet. Air power can do a lot but those are things it can’t do and it’s pretty darned hard for me to imagine the U. S., NATO, or the UN intervening in Libya with a ground force powerful enough and with a mandate to bring order and stability out of the chaos we had a hand in creating.

President Obama has authorized airstrikes against ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, the notional “caliphate”, to protect our consulate in Erbil and, if necessary, our embassy in Baghdad:

President Obama authorized airstrikes “if necessary” against Islamic militants if they move toward Erbil in northern Iraq where American military, diplomats and civilians are stationed.

During a late night statement Thursday from the White House, the president said he’s okayed “targeted airstrikes to protect our American personnel and a humanitarian effort to help save thousands of Iraqi civilians who are trapped on a mountain without food and water and facing almost certain death.”

Mr. Obama explained that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in recent days has “continued to move across Iraq and have neared the city of Erbil, where American diplomats and civilians serve at our consulate and American military personnel advise Iraqi forces to stop the advance on Erbil.

ISIS is presently consolidating the areas of Iraq it presently controls and slowly extending that control. At some point I strongly suspect it is likely to move on Baghdad. In the areas it controls it is exterminating Christians. The surviving members of the small Iraqi Yezidi sect are now besieged on a mountaintop. If there were ever a case for a responsibility to protect this is it.

The Security Council has not authorized military action by the United States in Iraq and, unless it does or until it threatens our consulate in Erbil directly, military action by the U. S. in Iraq will be on shaky legal ground. IIRC it wasn’t too long ago that many were urging us to stay out of the conflict in Iraq. If they change their views once the president has authorized the use of force, the will abandon any pretext of coherence.

Just to make my own views clear I think that President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was an error, the treaty he negotiated with the Maliki government was an error, and President Obama’s adherence to that agreement was an error. Contrary to the president’s assertions of just a few years ago Iraq is clearly not stable and is not able to defend itself. The editors of the Wall Street Journal concur:

For President Obama, any decision to reinforce the Iraqis or Kurds will be painful. On Thursday night he still took credit for removing all U.S. forces from Iraq in 2011. He was at pains to reassure Americans that the U.S. will not fight another war in Iraq even as he committed U.S. air power to the war that continues in Iraq.

It’s clear now that his decision to withdraw all U.S. troops in 2011 was a strategic and increasingly a moral disaster. The President—which is to say the United States—bears responsibility now for the humanitarian catastrophe occurring in Iraq, just as it did for the mass flight of Vietnam’s boat people, some two million, after the Communist triumph in the 1970s.

Before using force in Iraq, the president should seek Congressional authorization and gain the support of the American people. Don’t be gulled into believing that ISIS’s progress can be stopped with air power alone.

I think this article on Vermont’s inching its way towards a single-payer system is an interesting one.

After getting off to a shaky start in her piece on the U. S. reaction to the Ebola outbreak (and bringing sick Americans home for treatment), Heather Wilhelm echoes a point I’ve made:

No matter your feelings on crazed grocery runs, a definite strangeness surrounds America’s leading Ebola narrative. There is, for instance, a whole lot of condescension going on. On Monday, online magazine Slate ran a “myth-busting” piece on Ebola, explaining why you’re pretty much a moron to worry even a little bit about a contagious virus that can melt your insides. The article included an alarming-looking photo, featuring three individuals in hazmat suits, with the following caption: “Members of Doctors Without Borders wear protective gear on July 23, 2014, in Conakry, Guinea, in a scene that’s not coming to the U.S. anytime soon.”

Ah, the smugness. Can you feel it? America is rich, you see. Africa, meanwhile, is The Other. This sentiment, explicit or not, is echoed repeatedly in much of the “don’t panic” press. Slate’s caption, when you think about it, isn’t too far from a recent headline from the satirical news site The Onion: “Experts: Ebola Vaccine at Least 50 White People Away.”

It’s a relief that I’m not the only one who sees it.

I guess I’m not as outraged as James Taranto about Jonathan Alter’s modest proposal for corporate loyalty oaths:

Before we settled on today’s topic, we weighed the question: Is Jonathan Alter joking? The question arose not on the basis of Alter’s character–we’ve met him, and he strikes us as very earnest, an unlikely prankster–but because his latest Daily Beast piece is so outlandish. The headline is “The United States Needs Corporate ‘Loyalty Oaths.’ ”

Although as a matter of pure logic one cannot rule out the possibility of a very elaborate deadpan charade, the balance of evidence–namely his Twitter feed–suggests he’s serious. Taken at face value, every Alter tweet about the piece is entirely unironic, especially this one: “I’m afraid headline made people react viscerally rather than read piece.”

We read piece and piece even more outlandish than headline. The term “loyalty oath” has a certain implication to those familiar with 20th-century U.S. history. Alter explicates it, which is to say he names names: “If Republicans cared about this issue, which most don’t, they would revive McCarthy-era loyalty oaths, where people were forced to swear that they weren’t communists.”

That might be because I doubt the proposal will go any farther than Mr. Alter’s column. I also think it’s more emblematic of a lack of understanding of the problem and a lack of imagination that it is of a mindset.

For once I find myself in agreement with E. J. Dionne:

Do Republicans really want to be known as a purely negative party? The GOP’s establishment was pleased that it again beat back the tea party with Sen. Pat Roberts’s victory in Tuesday’s Kansas primary. Might this not give the party a little more room to work with Democrats on something?

That’s where the plain vanilla agenda comes in. Yes, the label risks dooming the enterprise. The phrase comes from President Obama — last week, he scolded House Republicans for blocking “even basic, common-sense, plain vanilla legislation” — and many conservatives presume anything associated with Obama is toxic.

Still, it’s an instructive concept to encourage a search for policy ideas that ought not to be terribly controversial. To construct such an agenda, I sat down this week with Heather Boushey and Elisabeth Jacobs of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. We put together two lists. The as-plain-as-possible-vanilla list included proposals that already have a lot of Republican support. The ought-to-be-plain-vanilla ideas either once won GOP backing or should have appeal, given other things to which conservatives are committed.

On the first list: extending the earned-income tax credit (EITC) for single, childless people; a refundable child tax credit; and a big infrastructure bill, perhaps including an infrastructure bank.

[…]

And here’s the ought-to-be-plainvanilla list: a minimum-wage increase (many Republicans used to vote for it); pre-kindergarten expansion (many of the most ambitious pre-K programs are in Republican-led states such as Oklahoma and Georgia); paid family leave (financed as an insurance program so employers don’t carry the whole load); and the right not to be fired just for requesting a flexible work schedule.

There ought to be more areas of agreement between the two parties and there should be areas in which they would agree to work together for the good of all of us. To do that there would need to be an end to “poison pills”, comprehensive or omnibus legislation in which unacceptable aspects are intermingled with things that should be acceptable to both parties, a general swallowing of their pride on the part of the Republicans, and a general abandoning of the rejectionist stance they’ve held for the last six year.

Since I don’t believe that any of those things will happen, regardless of the outcome in November the next two years are likely to bring more of the same.

I think there’s some merit in Charles Lane’s comparison of a hypothetical executive order from President Obama

offering up to 5 million undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and others the same two-year renewable reprieves from deportation plus work permits that Obama already ordered for undocumented residents who arrived as children

with Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. It would simultaneously be an act of mercy and politically expedient; he would be exceeding his powers and, consequently, courting impeachment.

However, the analogy fails if the actual circumstances of each are taken into account. There is no comparison between illegal economic migrants and slaves. The economic migrants are free to return to their countries of origin, mostly Mexico. Additionally, the analogy fails to take into account the Emancipation Proclamation’s function as a tactic to end the American Civil War.

It would be a much closer analogy if, rather than a civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation had been issued to quell a slave rebellion. What do you think would have happened if there had been no civil war and President Lincoln had issued the Emancipation Proclamation during a slave rebellion?

After cataloging the gauntlet that the PPACA must run over the next two years, Shikha Dalmia remarks:

No doubt Democrats are going to berate Republicans as obstructionists. President Obama lectured Republicans to “stop hating all the time” after they voted this week to challenge the legality of his executive actions in court.

But the reality is that unless public opinion swings dramatically in Obamacare’s favor, Republicans have no skin in the game and no reason to cooperate.

All of this means that Halbig was just the beginning. For the foreseeable future, the country will remain embroiled in Obamacare battles—instead of actually fixing the myriad problems with American health care.

What I think that many supporters of the PPACA miss is that the unpopularity of the PPACA was designed in from the start. The number of people that it hurts was designed to outnumber of people it helps. Presumably, the idea was that it would hurt the people it hurt only a little and it would help the people it helped a lot. I don’t think that’s quite worked out as expected. For whatever reason the president and Congressional leaders thought that the law would be more popular than it has turned out to be and that its popularity would grow in the near term.

That hasn’t happened and if anything it has become less popular over time. The attitude now seems to be that public opinion is bound to turn around eventually. Un bel di.