The Obama administration decided not to defend Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act, which legally defines marriage as between a man and woman, because they believe it to be unconstitutional.

Orin Kerr explains why this could set a dangerous precedent:

If you take that view, the Executive Branch essentially has the power to decide what legislation it will defend based on whatever views of the Constitution are popular or associated with that Administration. It changes the role of the Executive branch in defending litigation from the traditional dutiful servant of Congress to major institutional player with a great deal of discretion.

He continues:

If that approach becomes widely adopted, then it would seem to bring a considerable power shift to the Executive Branch. Here’s what I fear will happen. If Congress passes legislation on a largely party-line vote, the losing side just has to fashion some constitutional theories for why the legislation is unconstitutional and then wait for its side to win the Presidency. As soon as its side wins the Presidency, activists on its side can file constitutional challenges based on the theories; the Executive branch can adopt the theories and conclude that, based on the theories, the legislation is unconstitutional; and then the challenges to the legislation will go undefended.

Our constitutional system is stable in large part because although elections have consequences, as Democrats were wont to say after the 2008 election, they have limited consequences; electing a new president or Congress does not mean that the right to free speech is up for debate, or that the last people in power may be prosecuted. Because the serious things are off the table, we can have elections without worry that our society is going to be upturned.

If this does set a precedent, though, that may no longer be true. It’s not difficult to imagine a Republican administration deciding that Obama’s healthcare reform is unconstitutional, and thus refuse to defend it in court, or any other number of laws. If so, elections would be dramatically more important and contentious, because each new administration could substantially alter our laws.

This wouldn’t be a surprise, though. Increasingly, it seems like both sides are viewing power as a game of getting as much as you possibly can, no matter what traditions you break in the process and what consequences there are. Obama said as much when he took office, telling Republicans that he won and thus what he desires will be done; Republicans adopted it, too, abusing the filibuster in the Senate; and Democrats in Wisconsin have took it to an entirely new level by fleeing the capital to prevent a vote on a bill they don’t like. The ends justify the means, indeed.

Megan McArdle on why Iraq’s business environment isn’t getting better:

But for Iraq to generate a healthy economy–rather than just another semi-failed oil state, with most of its population limping along on the income from dwindling oil reserves–it needs much more than the absence of Saddam.  When I started writing this piece, most of the war supporters I spoke to assumed that the major obstacle to economic growth in Iraq was Saddam’s legacy–insufficient education, crumbling infrastructure.  Most of the war opponents assumed it was the violence.

But neither is the major problem now.  We’re fixing the infrastructure, and the violence is declining.  Instead, the major problem is creating political and social institutions that support a vibrant, entrepreneurial business culture.  And that’s not just absent now; it actively seems to be going in the wrong direction.  And the reason Iraq is going in the wrong direction is not that our violence begot violence, but that the freedom and democracy, which work so well in America, may actually be promoting more corruption and rent-seeking than a horrible dictatorship.  

That’s why I think, long-term, China is in a much better position to transition to a free society than any other country. For now, they suffer under a repressive government that denies them freedom, but the CCP’s slow embrace of free markets, and reticence to liberalize their political system, is effectively allowing Chinese society to adapt to more liberal norms without (all) of the harms that other nations, like Russia, faced when they liberalized their economy and political system simultaneously.

Of course, it might not work out that way. There’s an argument to be made that the CCP is pioneering a new system, authoritarian capitalism, only adopting the elements of liberal countries they need to uphold the only mandate they have to their people, economic growth, and that this model will spread across the world, just like people assumed Soviet-style socialism would. Or, slightly less dramatically, the CCP could just prove adept at providing economic growth and go on in their current position.

I don’t think that’s how it will play out, though. the PRC’s stability is directly dependent on continued high levels of growth, which provide jobs and rising standards of living for the people, keeping a lid on frustration. This strategy has worked thus far; the CCP’s success thus far with generating economic growth has provided them legitimacy and respect among the greater population.

It is incredibly unlikely, however, that they will be able to continue with 7+ percent growth year after year. China’s growth to date is due almost entirely to infrastructure and export developments, and they are approaching the limits of this approach. Soon, they will have to move toward a more balanced economy, with a larger consumer market. This won’t be an easy transition. There will be a year, likely in the next decade, when China’s growth falters. And if China faces persistent economic trouble, there will be dramatic frustration, and all of it will be directed toward the CCP.

That’s the problem for dictatorships: when something terrible happens, and people are angry, there isn’t a way of dissipating that anger. It is bottled up until it finally explodes, and the regime in power receives the full brunt of it.

Democracy, though, provides a blow-off valve for this kind of anger. People can protest in the streets, write angry opinions, speak to others, and ultimately, vote out whoever is in office, whether they are responsible or not. The CCP may need to adopt democratic reform to survive. If it is in absolute control when the economy falters, the party, and the government, may not survive; but if there are other parties the people can elect in anger, the government will survive, and the CCP will be able to come back in future elections. It may turn out that the CCP’s own desire to survive will push them toward democratic reform.

As part of our START treaty with Russia, the U.S. agreed to provide Russia with the serial numbers of Trident missiles we supply to Britain.

A special relationship, indeed.

Nicholas Kristof thinks the White House should fully support the protests in Egypt:

All of this presents the White House with a conundrum. It’s difficult to abandon a longtime ally like Mr. Mubarak, even if he has been corrupt and oppressive. But our messaging isn’t working, and many Egyptian pro-democracy advocates said they feel betrayed that Americans are obsessing on what might go wrong for the price of oil, for Israel, for the Suez Canal — instead of focusing on the prospect of freedom and democracy for the Egyptian people.

Maybe I’m too caught up in the giddiness of Tahrir Square, but I think the protesters have a point. Our equivocation isn’t working. It’s increasingly clear that stability will come to Egypt only after Mr. Mubarak steps down. It’s in our interest, as well as Egypt’s, that he resign and leave the country. And we also owe it to the brave men and women of Tahrir Square — and to our own history and values — to make one thing very clear: We stand with the peaceful throngs pleading for democracy, not with those who menace them.

At this point, I think that’s right. I wrote earlier that up until Saturday, hedging our position was the right choice. But after Saturday, that changed; the protests did not weaken and they have strengthened since.

It’s clear Egypt will see significant change soon. It’s time for us to fully swing our support to the people fighting for democracy.

It isn’t a simple issue; the next government could, even if not radically Islamist, nullify Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel, which could lead to significant instability in the region. That’s not to be taken lightly. But what else is important is there is a real, organic movement for freedom and democracy in Egypt, one that looks like it will topple a dictatorship, and we would be remiss as a country of liberty not to support them.

Marc Lynch thinks Obama has handled the evolving situation in Egypt fairly well:

I completely understand why activists and those who desperately want the protestors to succeed would be frustrated — anything short of Obama gripping the podium and shouting “Down With Mubarak!” probably would have disappointed them. But that wasn’t going to happen, and shouldn’t have. If Obama had abandoned a major ally of the United States such as Hosni Mubarak without even making a phone call, it would have been irresponsible and would have sent a very dangerous message to every other U.S. ally. That doesn’t mean, as some would have it, that Obama has to stick with Mubarak over the long term — or even the weekend — but he simply had to make a show of trying to give a long-term ally one last chance to change.

I think he’s right in that regard. The U.S. had little choice but to, at the minimum, not undermine Mubarak in the beginning of what is increasingly looking like outright revolt by calling for him to step down. Mubarak is certainly a dictator, who’s refused to eliminate emergency powers for decades and to allow for democratic rule, but he’s also been a force for stability and moderation in the region. While it is debatable whether the U.S. should have put more pressure on him before to move toward democracy, I don’t think it’s up for discussion whether working with him, and pushing him to implement democracy, was the right strategy. It was, and immediately abandoning him at the first sight of opposition in the streets isn’t a good message to send to other allies.

The Obama administration has attempted to walk a rhetorical tight rope; they haven’t called for Mubarak to step aside, but they have said he must implement real political and economic reforms that give Egyptians liberty. They have tried to give Mubarak a chance to implement reforms before losing their support, and I think that was the right decision to make. One more reason this was the right choice to make before Saturday was that it gave the U.S. flexibility—while on the one hand they could say they were supporting the opposition movement’s desire for freedom if Mubarak were to fall, they also didn’t destroy their relationship with him if he didn’t. That’s a smart position to take in a very fluid situation.

The typical solution to recessions is to increase demand; as demand increases, companies will hire more workers to fulfill it, leading to more demand which creates more jobs. Krugman, and others, think a lack of demand is precisely the cause of our unemployment.

Jim Tankersley suggests it isn’t that simple. He writes:

Groshen and Potter noted that after the past two recessions, in 1990-91 and 2001, economic growth had picked up long before jobs began to reappear, bucking a long historical trend of growth and jobs returning in tandem. The explanation, Groshen and Potter said, was a shift away from the time-honored American tradition of laying off workers in bad times and recalling them when the clouds parted.
“Most of the jobs added during the recovery have been new positions in different firms and industries, not rehires,” they wrote. “In our view, this shift to new jobs largely explains why the payroll numbers have been so slow to rise: Creating jobs takes longer than recalling workers to their old positions and is riskier” when recovery still appears fragile.
In other words, American companies had adopted a more cold-blooded attitude toward recessions, one that fit the new model of globalization and automation. Technology made it easier to lay off your 100 least-effective workers and ship their jobs to India, or to replace them with a software program that made your remaining workforce dramatically more productive.

This might be okay if our economy was dynamic and generated new kinds of jobs rapidly, but that isn’t the case:

One baffling aspect of the current recovery is why U.S. companies continue to sideline nearly $2 trillion in cash instead of using it to buy equipment or hire workers. That hoarding turns out to be a piece of a decades-long investment puzzle. American corporate spending on nonresidential plant equipment—factories and equipment, not houses or shopping malls—has fallen to its lowest rate as a share of the economy in 40 years. Businesses aren’t investing in American workers, either. The major productivity gains of the fledgling recovery, and in the 2000s in general, came largely from companies producing more with fewer employees.

The simple truth is that American firms are either returning the spoils of globalization and technology to their shareholders, spending them on new projects abroad, or both. “Globalization isn’t the problem,” says Howard F. Rosen, a labor economist and visiting fellow at the Peterson Institute. “U.S. companies are investing in plants and equipment, just not in our borders.… They are privatizing the gains of globalization. That’s really it. They’re our gains!”

The question is why. Demand is certainly a part of it, but not the entire answer. This seems to reflect a view of the U.S. economy as staid and moribund.

Megan McArdle:

I am in general impatient with the notion that “discrimination against (fat people, Christians, Catholics, gays, transvestites, etc.) is the last acceptable prejudice.”  As you can see by the list, there still seem to be a lot of acceptable prejudices left.  But this rush to indict conservatives for every incident of mass violence where motives are unknown does have a bit of this flavor.  We have a laudable desire to avoid making incendiary remarks about Muslim terrorism, that might result in terrible violence against a mostly law-abiding community.  So why do we express this desire by rushing to blame any possible terrorist acts on a different, mostly law abiding community?  ”Round up the usual suspects” is a law enforcement tactic that we should be skeptical of no matter who it is applied to.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, former director of the CBO, thinks repealing health care reform is fiscally responsible:

The Congressional Budget Office says repealing the Affordable Care Act would increase the deficit by $230 billion over the coming decade and by a modest amount in the decade after that. The CBO estimate has become the central defense by ACA advocates fighting the upcoming repeal vote in the House.

They might want to re-think their strategy. A close examination of CBO’s work and other evidence undercuts this budget-busting argument about repeal and leads to the exact opposite conclusion, which is that repeal is the logical first step toward restoring fiscal sanity.

Here’s one reason:

The deepest spending cuts in the ACA are in Medicare. Let us be very clear: Medicare needs real reform that generates genuine budget savings. Sadly, the ACA’s cuts are illusory. Medicare’s payments to health care providers would fall below those of Medicaid. The network of hospitals and physicians willing to care for Medicaid patients is notoriously constrained. About 15 percent of the nation’s hospitals would have to stop seeing Medicare patients in just a few years to stem their losses. The idea that Medicare could pay less than Medicaid is such sheer folly that Congress will rapidly reverse course. What’s worse, ACA’s advocates are double-counting this fictional savings, claiming it can pay both for the ACA’s entitlements and Medicare solvency too. The truth is, these cuts cannot be relied upon to pay for anything.

If you’re curious how the budget process works in Congress, Keith Hennessey has a wonderful overview.

The Economist comments on Krugman’s, and other’s, rhetoric regarding the Tuscon shooting:

Got that? Ms Giffords failed to tender a satisfactory reply to “What is government if words have no meaning?”, was judged a fake, and…and Mr Loughner shot her in the head.   

At this point, there is simply no sound reason to believe this deranged young man was fired up by “toxic” or “eliminationist” conservative rhetoric from Michele Bachmann or whomever. Why are we even having this conversation? It’s nuts. It’s offensive. Is there any, you know, evidence that political rhetoric is now more vitriolic or incendiary than usual? Maybe there is, but I know of none. A feeling in Mr Krugman’s gut doesn’t cut it. Doesn’t it seem at least as likely that a 22-year-old would be inspired to an act of high-profile atrocity by violent video games or films? As far as I know there’s no evidence of that, either.

And:

Mr Loughner’s obsession with language as a form of control seems rather less like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin than Max Stirner, Michel Foucault, or even left-leaning linguists such as George Lakoff and Geoffrey Nunberg. Our own Johnson discusses speculation about the possible influence of one David Wynn Miller. But nobody’s going to try to smear Max Stirner, George Lakoff, or David Wynn Miller in the pages of the New York Times by recklessly associating their teachings with the tragedy in Tucson because, well, that would be completely bonkers and, more importantly, Max Stirner, George Lakoff, and David Wynn Miller didn’t just recapture the House.

Sounds about right.

In response to the attempted murder of Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Jim Clyburn wants the fairness doctrine re-instated:

Clyburn said he thinks vitriol in public discourse led to a 22-year-old suspect opening fire Saturday at an event Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords held for her constituents in Tucson, Ariz. Six people were killed and 14 others were injured, including Giffords.

The shooting is cause for the country to rethink parameters on free speech, Clyburn said from his office, just blocks from the South Carolina Statehouse. He wants standards put in place to guarantee balanced media coverage with a reinstatement of the Fairness Doctrine, in addition to calling on elected officials and media pundits to use ‘better judgment.’

Another way of saying this is Clyburn wants to use the death of six people and the attempted murder of a Congressperson by a mentally-ill man as a means of giving the federal government control over what can and can’t be said.

Classy.

Erick Erickson:

The point of all of this is not to blame Ted Rall, Mr. Obama, Media Matters, MSNBC, any other particular person or group on the left, or the left in general. It is also not to say in any way, shape, or form that the guy is of the left. If, however, we take the evidence as presented and not as the media and left would have it presented, the shooter very clearly is not of the right.

More precisely, the shooter is neither left-wing nor right-wing. He is crazy and evil — a word not used enough. The guy is very clearly not of the tea party movement, not a Dittohead, not led by Sarah Palin, me, or anyone else on the right.

What’s concerning about yesterday’s tragedy was not just the attempted murder of a Congressperson—it was how quickly people, using the power of the web, decided the shooter’s intentions and who, based on those intentions, was responsible for helping push him to violence. It turns out the issue wasn’t so clear-cut.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that violence-tinged rhetoric used by Palin and others recently is okay; it isn’t. But we should be worried by this, because if, God forbid, something like this happens again, the web can spread misinformation with lightning speed and may precipitate even more tragedies, based on it.

SeoulBrother comments on removing “nigger” from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

To edit the word from our literature we actually decriminalize the climate and context in which it was used. We allow the romantic notion of The Good Ol’ Days to go unchecked. If we let that happen slavery gets reduced to young Anakin Skywalker pouting because he can’t get time off to compete in the Pod-races, bigotry becomes a rednecked, chew spittin’ caricature instead of the well dressed, even toned bank manager denying a loan and racism becomes something that used to happen. “Nigger” keeps that in check. It’s like a birth certificate for both America’s slavery and apartheid—proof that it happened.

We need to feel uncomfortable about “nigger” so we can learn from the mistakes that created, fed and nurtured it. We need “nigger.”

When we discussed Huck Finn in school, my teacher used the word without any way of masking it, or making clear he was only using it because it was in the book—he just said it. It was jarring at first.

And that’s how it should be: it is an important element in the book and in its point. It helps capture the period’s brutality. Sanitizing it is to also reduce our understanding of an integral part of our history.

(Via Neven Mrgan.)

Brilliant essay by Clay Shirky on to whether and to what extent social media can be a force for democracy. His basic thesis is that a strong civil society, not communication, precedes the defeat of authoritarianism, but that communication is necessary to build it. Therefore, the U.S. should support social media generally in less-than-free nations, rather than just as an issue of freedom of speech:

But nearly every country in the world desires economic growth. Since governments jeopardize that growth when they ban technologies that can be used for both political and economic coordination, the United States should rely on countries’ economic incentives to allow widespread media use. In other words, the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative dilemma, appealing to states’ self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries’ public spheres.

Megan McArdle makes it even more clear why tax arguments for the individual mandate are so dangerous:

1)  Can Congress enact a $50,000 tax on second term abortions?

2)  Can Congress enact a $50,000 tax increase, which is then rebated to anyone who does not have an abortion?

3)  If not, why not?  I don’t want to hear any arguments about the social side: how necessary abortions are, how women would just have terrible back room abortions, how tragic this might be for women forced to carry a child to term.  Nor do I want to hear any arguments that this doesn’t involve interstate commerce, as of course abortions are frequently purchased across state lines, while in many places, it is illegal to buy insurance from other states.  Presuming that Congress is agreed that abortions are bad, and they want to discourage them, why shouldn’t they be able to use their taxing power to enact a ban that they could not enact more directly?

Be careful what you wish for, etc.