Presumably in reaction to the court decision striking down a state law compelling electors to vote for the winner of the national popular vote, the editors of the New York Times come down in favor of I’m not sure what, adding their voice to the clangor on the Electoral College:

If states were forbidden from determining how their electors vote, parties would only be more careful about vetting prospective electors.

The point is that faithless electors are not the real problem. What really disregards the will of the people is the winner-take-all rule currently used by every state but Maine and Nebraska. Giving all electors to the winner of the statewide popular vote erases the votes of citizens in the political minority — say, the 4.5 million people who voted for Donald Trump in California, or the 3.9 million who voted for Hillary Clinton in Texas. Nationwide, this was the fate of 55 million people in 2016, or 42 percent of the country’s electorate.

The winner-take-all rule encourages campaigns to focus on closely divided battleground states, where a swing of even a few hundred votes can move a huge bloc of electors — creating presidents out of popular-vote losers, like George W. Bush and Donald Trump. This violates the central democratic (or, if you prefer, republican) premises of political equality and majority rule.

What most people don’t realize is that the winner-take-all rule exists nowhere in the Constitution. It’s a pure creation of the states. They can award their electors by congressional district, as Maine and Nebraska do, or in proportion to the state’s popular vote, as several states have considered.

Or they could award them to the candidate who wins the most votes nationwide, regardless of the state outcome. That’s the elegant approach of the National Popular Vote interstate compact, which achieves a popular vote not by abolishing the College but by using it as the framers designed it — as a state-based institution. So far 15 states and the District of Columbia, with 196 electoral votes among them, have joined the compact, promising to award their electors to the national vote-winner. The compact goes into effect once it is joined by states representing 270 electoral votes — the bare majority needed to become president — thus guaranteeing the White House to the candidate that a majority of the country supports.

I don’t recall the Times protesting when Bill Clinton was elected president twice by a minority of the popular vote. But he won a majority of the electoral vote, fair and square. Or, in other words, once again where you stand depends on where you sit.

I should add that to date I have heard no one make a coherent argument in favor of plurality rule other than by implicitly defending the Electoral College. In other words you can accept the Electoral College which means that there will be presidents who receive a minority of the popular vote or you can reject the Electoral College and demand that presidents be elected by a majority of the popular vote, or you can oppose the Electoral College and demand that whoever gets the most popular votes wins. That’s not a defense of majority rule. It’s just changing which minority rules.

I see things drastically differently. Since the Founding our country has been governed not by a majority (however defined) but by rules. We have a rules-based system. Such a system depends on acceptance of the rules. When you find you can no longer tolerate the rules, you change them—according to the rules. If you cannot change the rules by the rules, you have some choices. You can take up arms against an intolerable system. You can accept the rules because the underpinnings of our system of government are more important than one or even a series of elections. Or you can go somewhere else more to your liking.

What you cannot do in good conscience is to continue to fulminate against the rules. That is merely sowing discord which helps no one.

I am not a Republican and I do not support Donald Trump. I do support the rules. As Robert Bolt wrote in A Man For All Seasons,

This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man’s laws, not God’s! And if you cut them down, and you’re just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I’d give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!

I am very, very confused after the release of the Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report on James Comey. If you believe that government officials have a primary obligation to conform to the law and the rules of their organizations, it’s a scathing indictment of James Comey on which the Attorney General may or may not act. That story has not been written yet.

If you believe there’s a higher justice which government officials must heed, then it’s a scathing indictment of the Department of Justice. Holding that view raises two follow-up questions. What is that higher standard? If it’s a personal standard, to whom does it apply?

So far, every commentary I have read is purely a case of where you stand depends on where you sit.

Contrary to my general practice in this post I am quoting in full the article of former Secretary of Defense James Mattis from the Wall Street Journal, which I find constitutes a sort of farewell address.

In late November 2016, I was enjoying Thanksgiving break in my hometown on the Columbia River in Washington state when I received an unexpected call from Vice President-elect Mike Pence. Would I meet with President-elect Donald Trump to discuss the job of secretary of defense?

I had taken no part in the election campaign and had never met or spoken to Mr. Trump, so to say that I was surprised is an understatement. Further, I knew that, absent a congressional waiver, federal law prohibited a former military officer from serving as secretary of defense within seven years of departing military service. Given that no waiver had been authorized since Gen. George Marshall was made secretary in 1950, and I’d been out for only 3½ years, I doubted I was a viable candidate. Nonetheless, I felt I should go to Bedminster, N.J., for the interview.

[continue reading…]

Speaking of fires, the BBC reports that Angola has them, too:

The severity of fires in the Amazon has prompted a global outcry. But, amid the protest, some are questioning how this compares with the rest of the world, with surprising results.

The issue has got people checking out Nasa’s maps of fires around the world. When you look at the map from Sunday, it clearly shows more fires burning in central Africa.

Some have expressed amusement (or taken umbrage) that Africa’s fires, despite their being more widespread and, reportedly, intense, have not received the kind of breathless coverage in the U. S. media that Brazil’s have. I think that claiming that the difference in coverage is completely apolitical strains credulity but there are important differences. For example, many of the sub-Saharan fires are in savannah rather than forest so their implications are different.

However, the causes of the Brazilian and African fires are the same. They’re both due to poor people using slash-and-burn techniques to clear land for farming. The solutions to both are the same, too: the people need alternatives other than agriculture to support themselves.

You might find this analysis of poverty in the United States compared with the rest of the world interesting:

A groundbreaking study by Just Facts has discovered that after accounting for all income, charity, and non-cash welfare benefits like subsidized housing and Food Stamps—the poorest 20% of Americans consume more goods and services than the national averages for all people in most affluent countries. This includes the majority of countries in the prestigious Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), including its European members. In other words, if the U.S. “poor” were a nation, it would be one of the world’s richest.

Before posting this I was unfamiliar with JustFacts.com so I did a little checking. It is generally considered to have a center-right bias but the bias takes the form of the facts it elects to check not in its handling of the facts which by all accounts is impeccable.

The post brings two issues to mind. First, how significant is relative poverty? I doubt there will ever be a consensus on that question.

The other point is that real poverty by world standards does exist in the United States and it is mostly localized among the rural poor, rural blacks in particular, and Indians on Indian reservations. As I have said repeatedly, I wish that more attention were focused on those in the U. S. who are poor by world standards. That is a scandal. Focusing on relative poverty will get you more votes, though.

I could not agree more with William Galston’s advise in his Wall Street Journal column:

“Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China,” President Trump declared last week in an instantly famous tweet. When skeptics questioned his authority to issue such an order, he cited the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA.

People who followed the ensuing debate among international-trade lawyers were likely surprised; I know I was. The president may well have the legal power to enforce much, if not quite all, of his tweet. Although he cannot literally compel U.S. companies to repatriate their enterprises from China, he can make it all but impossible for them to continue doing business there.

The language of the IEEPA is amazingly broad. In brief, once the president declares a specific emergency, he may block economic transactions of all kinds between the foreign countries or entities named in the emergency declaration and any party subject to U.S. law. The president is required to consult with Congress before instituting the block, but congressional consent is not required.

As originally enacted, the law allowed Congress to block the president’s action with a resolution not subject to presidential veto (a “legislative veto”). Five years later, in the case of Immigration and Naturalization Service v. Chadha, the Supreme Court held legislative vetoes unconstitutional. So to block an emergency declaration, Congress now has to muster a two-thirds majority of each house to override a president’s veto.

For Congress and critics of sweeping emergency powers, the bad news doesn’t stop here. Because the IEEPA doesn’t include a sunset clause, any amendments the president opposes will also require support from two-thirds of both the House and Senate.

The authority Congress has surrendered will be difficult to reclaim—unless the political parties unite to take it back or Americans elect a president who questions the wisdom of his expanded powers.

Those powers should be questioned.

The media’s take on this, as has so often been the case lately, has been wrong. The scandal is not that President Trump should say such outrageous things but that the Congress should attempt to delegate to the president such outrageous power and that the Supreme Court should defer to Congress’s power to delegate its own authority.

I would think it is obvious that you should give no power to Jimmy Carter that you wouldn’t give to Ronald Reagan and you wouldn’t give any power to Bill Clinton that you wouldn’t give to George W. Bush but apparently not. There is no such thing as a permanent partisan lock on the White House. That is a persistent fantasy but it will remain a fantasy.

Now Trump has that power.

The text of the law is here. There are presently more than 30 active emergencies under the terms of the act. All the more scandalous, it is actually a limitation on the president’s powers under the legislation it replaced, the Trading With the Enemy Act of 1917.

Presumably in reaction to the Business Roundtable’s pronouncement about their commitment to stakeholders rather than stockholders, the editors of the Washington Post open with this paragraph:

AMERICA’S CAPTAINS of industry are political orphans. Until relatively recently, both political parties struck a respectful, indeed solicitous, posture toward companies and the chief executives who ran them. The near-collapse of the economy in 2008 shook the legitimacy of both capitalism and its corporate stewards, however, with lasting repercussions — prominent among them a bipartisan swing toward populism.

Both sentences are false or at least exaggerated. Neither political party has driven Fortune 500 CEOs from their doors and, indeed, they are split between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party as suggested by the eye-catching graph at the top of this page.

The second sentence might have been true if the sources of the financial crisis had been capitalistic overreaching rather than just pursuing the incentives that borrowers and lenders alike had been given by the government or if the government response had been less predisposed to protect stockholders at the expense of everything else. It’s not impossible. When Sweden faced its own financial crisis some years before we did, the Swedes, made of sterner, more capitalistic stuff than Americans are, shuttered insolvent banks and sold off their remaining assets.

Let me propose some measures for making capitalism more “socially positive” by making it more capitalistic:

• When economic downturns occur as they inevitably will, do not save mismanaged companies. Save their employees. Let the stockholders fend for themselves (even if those stockholders are public employee pension funds).
• Do not allow the importing of goods from foreign companies that do not operate under the restrictions (environmental, labor standards, safety, etc.) as or more stringent than we impose on domestic companies. At the very least impose tariffs in the amount of the estimated cost of those restrictions.
• Abolish the corporate income tax. It imposes costs and encourages short term thinking.
• If you absolutely must continue the corporate income tax, restore the pre-Clinton rules on CEO compensation. They, too, encourage short term thinking.
• Impose extremely stiff tax surcharges on the private sector incomes of individuals who leave government service for the private sector for a lengthy period, at least until their Rolodexes aren’t valuable any more.
• Reforms governing boards of directors are needed.

I could go on by pointing out that most Americans’ notions of ethics and morality are about at the level of a ten year old or that I’m skeptical that any standard of morality can be maintained on a mass basis in the absence of traditional religion but those are the materials for other posts.

In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Brazilian journalist Leandro Narloch proposes reforms that will be counter-intuitive to many to preserve Brazil’s rainforest including:

• Support the legalization of sustainable mining.
• Favor new hydroelectric power plants.
• Support intensive agriculture and livestock.

While not unprecedented fires, mischaracterized as “wildfires” since most have actually been set deliberately, are worse than last year. I present that list uncritically. I am far from an expert on Brazilian politics or policy. The key point is that Brazil’s great problem is poverty.

I will admit that I suspect that Brazil’s agricultural policies are partially to blame but what are really needed to preserve the Amazon rainforests are better alternatives than farming for Brazil’s poor and fewer, more efficient farmers.

In an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal Wilfred McClay tries to draw a distinction between “genuine history” on the one hand and “weaponized history” on the other.

Genuine

A genuinely historical approach would acknowledge, even insist on recognizing, that Washington owned slaves. It would go on to consider that fact from the larger perspective of a long, important and consequential life. It would weigh Washington’s beliefs and actions carefully in the context of their time, and would take into account his decision to free his slaves at the time of his death.

Weaponized

A more disturbing example is the pell-mell rush to pass judgment against heroes of the past and tear down or rename the monuments to them—including George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson. Are we really so faint of heart that we can no longer bear to allow the honoring of great men of the past who fail in some respects to meet our current specifications?

If there were an ounce of sincerity in the present campaign to bowdlerize our history, the very people proclaiming the mortal necessity of the bowdlerization would be deserting the Democratic Party. For most of a century the party’s main annual fund-raising event has been called the “Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner” for good reason. Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson laid the foundations of the Democratic Party. If the United States has not transcended its original sin, slavery, it is manifestly impossible for the Democratic Party to have done so.

But people and history are more complicated than that. We must learn to embrace history’s contradictions rather than trying to bury them. We cannot do so through perseverating on our sins. Don’t confront me with my failings. I have not forgotten them.

James Mellaart, a sort of real-life Indiana Jones and quite a rascal, once said of archaeology that it wasn’t a science, it was a vendetta. That isn’t just true of ancient history. It’s equally true of more modern history if not more so..