In E. J. Dionne’s most recent column, in which Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is portrayed as a sort of saintly character, striving against the evils of rejectionist Republicans, I note that Mr. Dionne fails to mention Sen. Reid’s many changes in Senate rules which in aggregate and especially with respect to Sen. Reid’s refusal to allow amendments from the floor, presents Senate Republicans with only two alternatives: affirm or deny. That’s a Hobson’s choice which is to say no choice at all. Under the circumstances it’s a bit facetious to condemn them for rejectionism.

Should Republicans take the position of flatly opposing everything that the president wants? No. Should Democrats block them even from participating in the crafting of legislation? No. Should the president have done and be doing more to cultivate a relationship with Congressional Republicans that would facilitate a more collegial approach to government? Yes.

Apportion blame to your heart’s delight. There’s plenty to go around. Doing the people’s business will require Republicans to compromise, Democrats to compromise, and the president to compromise.

Also, with November in mind, do unto others as you would have others do unto you.

I originally had a much longer essay on this subject which I’ve decided to scrap in favor of simply mentioning that over at the Wall Street Journal Alan Reynolds has an op-ed noting the problems with the alternative data on U. S. wealth inequality to which rock star economist Thomas Piketty has drawn attention in preference to his own:

In his book, Mr. Piketty constructed estimates of top wealth shares, decade by decade, melding and massaging different kinds of data (estate tax records, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances). These estimates are suspect in their own right; but as we now learn from Mr. Piketty’s response to Mr. Giles, we can ignore them.

Yet Mr. Piketty’s preferred alternative, the Zucman-Saez slide show, is also irreparably flawed as a guide to wealth concentration. Mr. Piketty’s premonition of soaring U.S. wealth shares for the top 1% finds no credible support in his book or elsewhere.

Things have changed a lot since Pay Moynihan was around. Now everybody does have their own facts.

I find this device, a wearable medical sensor, fascinating:

The device features nine sampling needles, each only 800 millionths of a meter (microns) in height, and beneath them, a fluidic channel that can draw interstitial fluid over nine gold disk electrodes. Each disk can be tailored to detect a different analyte. The microneedles are so tiny that they don’t traumatize nerves when pressed into the skin. It also samples only interstitial fluid, the liquid between skin cells, so, it could be used for long-term, noninvasive use, they said.

The aspects I find interesting are not just its size but a) it doesn’t sample blood but the liquid between the skin cells; and b) it’s suitable for continuous sampling, something pretty hard to do with blood.

I can’t help but wonder if these long-term, real-time measuring devices won’t represent a completely new horizon in medical research.

A propos of the problem we’re having with large numbers of minors coming across our border with Mexico from points of origin in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and others, fearing for their safety due to the violent conditions in their home counries, I have a question. If we have a moral obligation to take them in and provide for them, do we have an equal moral obligation to keep the peace in their home countries? If not, why not?

Also, how do you reconcile that position with rights to private property and self-determination?

My own view is that we have a moral obligation only, the moral obligation has limits, and the preferred solution would be to pay their home countries to provide safe havens for them as we are already doing. Unfortunately, of the nearly $4 billion that President Obama has requested to deal with the situation, only about 8% is for that purpose which seems like the wrong balance to me.

Last week the Illinois Supreme Court ruled 6-1 that the lifetime free healthcare benefit granted to public retirees is constitutionally protected. The decision is here. I interpret that as a signal that the justices are predisposed to rule in favor of the opponents of Senate Bill 1, Illinois’s recently-enacted “pension reform bill”. I don’t honestly see how the justices could craft a decision that prevented the state legislature from reducing benefits paid to retirees that aren’t explicitly constitutionally mandated while allowing them to reduce benefits that are.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal are appalled:

The ruling is a dreadful precedent for sensible pension reform. The court majority opined that the state constitution is “aimed at protecting the right to receive the promised retirement benefits, not the adequacy of the funding to pay for them” and “must be liberally construed in favor of the rights of the pensioner.” And unions have sued to block last year’s de minimis pension fixes that tweaked cost-of-living adjustments, raised the retirement age for younger workers and capped annuities for employees making six figures.

The Court’s decision is completely unsurprising to me—it’s what I have been predicting for years.

The editors of the Sun-Times list the state’s alternatives when the inevitable happens and Senate Bill 1 is struck down:

Things are very wrong when taxpayers are taken hostage by pension debts. In three years, Illinoisans will spend one third of all our state-generated revenue on pensions.

That’s untenable. This is a crisis, and we’re teetering on the cliff. We either raise taxes and drive more of us to move away, or we change the constitution, or we change laws to control double-dipping and too-generous pension benefits approved by local school board members and other officials.

Or all of the above. Waiting any longer is pure insanity.

Raising taxes, the strategy preferred by Gov. Quinn and the state legislature, is unlikely to succeed in solving the state’s problems. You can mandate increased rates but you can’t mandate increased revenue. Amending the state’s constitution is an even bigger “Hail Mary”. Reducing future pension benefits might have worked if it had been adopted some years ago but it won’t solve the problem we have now.

My predictions are that the state legislature will do nothing until after the November election, the Illinois Supreme Court will strike down Senate Bill 1, and that most of the state’s legislators will be returned to office.

The clear message will be that there is no penalty for driving the state to ruin.

Where is the annual Social Security Trust Fund trustees’ report? It’s three months late.

Until the present administration publication within a month of its due date was the norm rather than the exception. I don’t blame the administration for the report’s tardiness but I do blame them for inattention to its tardiness. That’s part of the due diligence of managing the executive branch.

There are some interesting anecdotes and observations in former New York City Police Department Intelligence Director’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on the prospective dangers that radical Islamist violence in Syria and Iraq pose here in the United States:

In 2008, for example, the NYPD identified a young Staten Island man who admired Osama bin Laden and American-born terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki and sought to travel to Pakistan to join the Pakistani Taliban. Fortunately, an NYPD undercover officer managed to penetrate the cluster of radicalized men around him and learned of his plans. This police work allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to alert Pakistani authorities.

As a result, 18-year-old Abdel Hameed Shehadeh would be denied entry to Pakistan and sent back to the U.S., where he was later arrested for making false statements related to the reasons he gave for his travel. After Pakistani officials denied him entry, Shehadeh had told investigators from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that he had traveled to Pakistan to visit a university. But he later admitted that his true purpose was to wage violent jihad against U.S. forces; he was convicted in 2013 for lying about his attempt to join the Taliban and sentenced to 13 years in prison.

In June 2010, two men from New Jersey, 24-year-old Carlos Almonte and 20-year-old Mohamed Alessa, were seized at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport while trying to leave the country on separate flights for Cairo, en route to Somalia to join the Somalia-based al Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab. The men had stated that their goal was to train to kill Americans overseas—or when they returned. Once again, a NYPD undercover officer detected and penetrated their conspiracy, allowing the FBI and NYPD to work together to thwart their travel plans. In 2011, Almonte and Alessa pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder people outside the U.S. and were sentenced to 20 and 22 years in prison, respectively.

In January 2013, counterterrorism agents and NYPD officers intercepted 18-year-old Justin Kaliebe as he tried to board a flight to Oman at JFK airport on his way to Yemen. Prosecutors alleged that Kaliebe began plotting to join al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, in 2011. An undercover NYPD officer with whom Kaliebe was in contact was able to record their conversations and alert the authorities before Kaliebe attempted to leave for Yemen and jihad. He was arrested at the airport by members of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and charged with attempting to provide material support to an al Qaeda affiliate, to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

and

We have seen the implications, most clearly on 9/11, of trying and failing to detect individuals trained and radicalized to launch terrorist attacks once they have arrived on U.S. soil. As for homegrown terrorists, it is not easy to detect when thoughts and intentions turn to action unless covert sources are in place to observe these sometimes subtle changes. As the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings showed, missing the signs can be deadly.

I think his key observation, that radicals who have honed their skills overseas can bring them back here, is actually a more severe problem for Germany, France, and the United Kingdom than it is for us. We are the natural destination of immigrants from Latin America. They are are the natural destination of immigrants from the Middle East. Still, it highlights a problem I’ve noted for some time.

There are some very contentious and troubling questions we should be discussing but aren’t. Why is dual citizenship tolerated? Why don’t we keep track of visa holders? Under what circumstances does a naturalized American citizen implicitly renounce his or her citizenship? A native-born American citizen?

I don’t claim to have answers for any of those questions but I do believe we should be thinking about them. I also don’t claim that we can completely eliminate risk. Dealing with risk is a process of mitigation not elimination. If we’re not willing to take any steps to mitigate risk, that means that we accept the risks. It seems to me that’s something that should be explicit rather than implicit.

I do know that sanitary war in which no Americans are killed, only violent radicals are killed, and is enough to mitigate our risks here at minimal cost is a phantasm. That’s true whether it’s practiced by neoconservatives or liberal interventionists.

I think that Megan McArdle’s most recent post makes a valuable contribution to the discussion of the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case:

I think a few things are going on here. The first is that while the religious right views religion as a fundamental, and indeed essential, part of the human experience, the secular left views it as something more like a hobby, so for them it’s as if a major administrative rule was struck down because it unduly burdened model-train enthusiasts. That emotional disconnect makes it hard for the two sides to even debate; the emotional tenor quickly spirals into hysteria as one side says “Sacred!” and the other side says, essentially, “Seriously? Model trains?” That shows in Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent, where it seems to me that she takes a very narrow view of what role religious groups play in the lives of believers and society as a whole.

The second, and probably more important, problem is that the long compromise worked out between the state and religious groups — do what you want within very broad limits, but don’t expect the state to promote it — is breaking down in the face of a shift in the way we view rights and the role of the government in public life.

I recommend you read the whole thing.

I think that Ms. McArdle’s explanation is incorrect and that, as I’ve suggested in the past, there’s a more basic disagreement about the nature of law. For some rights and laws are strictly instrumental. When they don’t further the preferred policy they are to be set aside.

In my view our system is one of principles and processes; in the contrary view it’s one of policies and coercion. When you disregard precedent and blackletter law to further your preferred policies, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs” becomes the whole of the law.

Civil disobedience presents a problem for liberal democracies with the rule of law. It is always by definition illegal (otherwise it wouldn’t be civil disobedience) and except in certain special circumstances I believe it’s immoral, too. When the civil rights demonstrators of the 1960s engaged in civil disobedience in the South it was moral because the democratic process there had been subverted. They were being treated unjustly and they had no other choice.

However, when student protesters occupied college administrators’ offices, preventing normal business from being done, it was immoral. They were subverting the process in order to impose their own views on others.

It’s even more problematic when government officials engage in civil disobedience:

We now know that the IRS told Treasury and the White House about the missing emails in April—yet the Obama Administration withheld that information from Congress and the public. Did the FBI know too?

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen has testified that he didn’t tell the FBI about the missing emails. But if that’s the case, why aren’t the G-men shouting to high heaven? If the FBI discovered a private company had withheld documents in the course of a federal investigation, the handcuffs would be flashing. The FBI’s gumshoes seem to be remarkably relaxed about getting IRS answers.

Ditto the rest of the Justice Department. Congress learned in January that Justice assigned the IRS probe to an Obama donor, Barbara Bosserman, an attorney in the Civil Rights Division. Justice has refused to reassign the case—despite her political conflict of interest—and Ms. Bosserman has so far turned up nothing.

Then there’s the House’s May 7 contempt citation against Ms. Lerner. The section of the U.S. code governing contempt is clear: The House votes and then the Speaker sends the citation to the appropriate U.S. Attorney, “whose duty it shall be to bring the matter before the grand jury for its action.” U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Ron Machen has possessed that citation for eight weeks, yet his spokesman told us in late June that the matter is “still under review.”

What’s to review? Under the statute, Mr. Machen—an Obama appointee—has no role in analyzing the merits of the citation. His duty is to get it to a grand jury. Administrations have in the past directed U.S. Attorneys not to proceed—as the Obama White House did in a citation against Mr. Holder, and the Bush Administration did in citations against Harriet Miers and Josh Bolten. But unless the Obama White House is now stepping up to give Ms. Lerner special immunity from prosecution—she took the Fifth rather than testify to Congress—Mr. Machen’s job is clear.

I blame the Baby Boomers. They still haven’t gotten over the golden days of their youths. We have guerrilla theater in the House of Representatives and civil disobedience in the executive branch.