The Importance of Abstract State Intent

Here's one of my meta-theories of constitutional law: a wide variety of tricky constitutional problems can be simplified by modeling the government as an abstract corporate person, and drawing inferences about its state of mind from its actions. Or, to put it another way, forget about trying to divine the "legislative intent" of specific flesh-and-blood legislators. Just think about what might have motivated a reasonable government to adopt this measure. I'm most accustomed to thinking of this in the Equal Protection context, where my idea is that the state mayn't ever hold the belief that any of its citizens are inferior, and in the context of the religion clauses, where my idea is that the state mayn't ever adhere to a "comprehensive doctrine," e.g. a religion or a specifically atheist worldview, as opposed to a secular lack of any theological beliefs at all, positive or negative.

Republican Denial of Tactical Reality, An Example

I recently wrote a post arguing that the shutdown is simply the clearest yet manifestation of what we liberal types have known for a long time, namely that Republicans are unfit to govern, and that their unfitness is largely due to the takeover of their entire mentalities by the "reality-based community" thing, including the strategic parts of those mentalities. Well here's a nice Dave Weigel post about how Republicans simply do not believe that the shutdown is hurting them politically. Which it is. You cannot look at the bulk of the polling data and claim otherwise. Hell, there aren't very many individual polls you can look at and claim otherwise. And this is a big problem: if Republicans really believed that they're doing damage to their party, and maybe that it's long-term damage that won't be easily undone, they'd have an incentive to back the hell off before it gets any worse. But they don't believe that, so there's no incentive. A blind man driving toward a cliff doesn't know to stop, and if he won't even listen to his sighted passenger that there's a goddamn cliff half a mile in front of them, well... you're in trouble.

And Now For Something That Isn't The Constitutional Crisis

In my latest effort to avoid having to actually do my goddamn Procedure reading, I read this article about the problem with Malcolm Gladwell. It's very interesting stuff and I think I basically agree with its broad point, though I don't have any independence expertise with which to judge it. I do have one thought to add, though: Gladwell apparently claims that many dyslexic people become very successful (incontrovertibly true) and that, in fact, these people may become successful because of their dyslexia. The obvious rejoinder to the former claim is that it omits any discussion of, you know, proportionality: are "successful" people, whatever that means, more or less dyslexic than people in general? If, say, 3% of the population and 1% of "successful" people are dyslexic, then yes, dyslexia is not a total bar to "success," but it seems to be making it a lot harder. (No comment offered on whether this is because dyslexic people genuinely lack the capacity to be "successful" or because society unjustly places additional burdens in their way should they attempt to "succeed.") But that's not my point, because I think there's an even stronger response to be made to the second part of the claim.

Of course any dyslexic people who become successful will have become successful because of their dyslexia. Or, slightly more precisely, of course the path any successful dyslexic took to achieve their success will have been influenced by their disorder. If I put a roadblock up on your way to some destination, and you are thereby forced to take an alternate route but nonetheless reach your destination, then you took a successful path and I forced you to take it. Or, to use a perhaps more accurate metaphor, if you're wandering around in the fog and the dark with no idea of where you're trying to go, and I put a big ol' wall in front of you, maybe even a wall of infinite length that forecloses an entire portion of the world to you, and your further wanderings deposit you somewhere that's a very good place to be, it is entirely true that you reached that good destination because I obstructed you. So if there are extremely successful people who are dyslexic, then with every single one of them you will be able to tell a story of how their dyslexia shaped their lives in a way that led them to their successes. Tautologically. And because it's a tautology, it's uninteresting except as a matter of biography, in which context it could well be fascinating, or, perhaps, in the therapeutic context, i.e. in trying to help a further individual dyslexic person work on having a "successful" life despite their troubles. The societally interesting questions then become, okay, how does dyslexia affect the odds of becoming "successful," if you want to, and sure, is there some social value in having some people be successful in the different way that successful dyslexic people are successful?

Those are interesting questions and I might have more to say about this topic, but it's 1:06 a.m. and I have 30 pages of reading for a class that starts in all of seven hours, fourteen minutes, so I should stop writing and go do that. Yeah...

Wait, What? John Boehner Edition

So I saw the headlines with Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) saying that not threatening to blow up the government's finances by failing to raise the debt limit would be "surrender." But I didn't appreciate the context. Apparently the point is that Obama suggested that, if Republicans really wanted to negotiate about stuff, they should fund the government long enough and extend the debt limit far enough to cover the negotiation period. Boehner said that this would be "unconditional surrender" for the Republicans, and that our government doesn't work like that. (I.e., with unconditional surrender by one side the precondition to have negotiations.) Never mind that, you know, if there were no statutory debt ceiling and even if the appropriations process were such that government shutdowns didn't happen, the House Republicans control a crucial veto point of the U.S. government and would therefore have plenty in their arsenal going forward. Nuclear disarmament is not the same thing as unconditional surrender if you maintain your fleet of fighter jets and big ol' conventional bombs, after all.

No, what flabergasts me about this quote is that what Obama is proposing would be completely pointless from the good-guy point of view, which is to say, it wouldn't actually involve disarming the Republicans at all. It's like the broader point about how you can't, you can't, you can't negotiate over the debt limit because if you do you cement a pattern of brinksmanship over it that will inevitably end in financial armageddon, only in fast-motion. The threat would go from "we'll blow up the world tomorrow!" to "we'll blow up the world next week!" Great. That's real unconditional surrender, guys. You're not surrendering anything. You're surrendering one week of world-non-blown-up, and presumably if you win the battle then in the end it won't matter exactly how many weeks it took before you did so. I might be missing something here, although honestly between myself and John Boehner I trust the analytical abilities of the former a whole hell of a lot more, but if I'm not missing anything, John Boehner is saying that holstering his nuclear gun, in the full knowledge that, unless his adversary does what he wants, he'll be able to take it out again in an hour or whatever, constitutes unconditional surrender. Holstering might even be the wrong analogy because it suggests that the other guys could overpower him or something; it's like lowering the gun to where it's pointing at the other guy's feet instead of his chest. And the other guy doesn't have a gun. Surrender! Surrender, I say!

Seriously, you can't make this shit up.

Nope, Sorry, That's Not What That Is

Here's a headline from Huffington Post. I choose them not because I think they're worse than any other more-or-less conventional media types, but because I read them a lot. Anyway the headline is "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling 'Stalemate'." Curious whether that was actually true, I clicked on it and read the first, I dunno, sentence or so of the article. It's not true. His proposed 'solution' is "for the president to come to the table." That's not a solution. It's not a solution in part because the Republicans have spent literally the entire past calendar year refusing, as a matter of principle more than of strategy, to hold budget negotiations with the Democrats. It's not a solution in part because it so reeks of the highwayman in Lincoln's great anecdote, who tells the person he's robbing at gunpoint, "stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer." But it's mostly not a solution because it doesn't acknowledge the fundamental long-term game theory of this situation. If Obama comes to the table and negotiates, and the negotiations are successful, on their own terms at least, he has all but ensured that the debt limit breach will eventually occur, whatever exactly it will entail. Once debt limit hostage-brinksmanship becomes the normal way that divided governments do their budget negotiations, it becomes a matter of statistical certainty that eventually one of those showdowns will lead to the fuse running out and the bomb going off. Negotiating is not a way to end the problem. There could've been things Paul Ryan could have said, without making us suspicious about supernatural possession or something, that would have been proposed solutions to the problem. I'm thinking of some kind of budget deal that included a provision repealing the existence of the statutory debt limit, i.e. giving Treasury unlimited borrowing authority as needed to full the budget deficit. Making a deal under those circumstances would genuinely be better than hitting the limit now, because though it would be capitulation to threat it would be capitulation in exchange for melting down the weapon, thereby ensuring no analogous future threats.

But let's consider it proven that what Paul Ryan is "proposing" here is not a solution to the crisis. Not even a potential solution. This makes the Huffington Post headline wrong. Factually, objectively wrong. A correct headline would've been something like "Paul Ryan Proposes Something He Claims Would Solve the Debt Ceiling Stalemate." Okay, that's overly wordy, but someone more experienced writing news headlines than I could probably improve it. The point is that the only sense in which "the President should come to the table" is a solution is the sense in which Paul Ryan claims it to be one. That it is entirely his assertion that this would work is integral to conveying what he was saying. Or to put it another way, if the headline as written were true it would be huge news. What actually happened is the epitome of non-news. That's not even a matter of, like, subjective ideological/partisan interpretation, it's just true, and the Huffington Post is acknowledging it to be true by placing this story way below their monster mega-story at the top about the debt ceiling. "Paul Ryan Reiterates Silly GOP Talking Point" is barely worth telling anyone. "Paul Ryan Proposes Solution to Debt Ceiling Stalemate" could be the story that heralds the end of the constitutional crisis of 2013, as well as signal the bizarre transformation of the most problematic member of the House of Representatives. That the headline as written also implies a certain level of reasonableness on Ryan's part is also a problem, no doubt, but if Ryan were actually being as reasonable as the headline suggests that wouldn't be problematic. But he isn't, and it's just plain factually true that he isn't, and it's irresponsible to write headlines that say, not just imply or suggest but say otherwise

We Told You So

If you ask people whether the Iraq War was a mistake, most of them will say that it was. Like, two-thirds or more of them will say that. If you ask in 2013, at least. But if you asked people in 2003 whether they supported the war while it was starting up, most of them said they did. Only a few radical liberal types opposed it. You'd think that the fact that most people now agree with the substantive position they were advancing ten years ago would have had some sort of vindicating effect. Nope. As Paul Krugman likes to say, "it remains true ... that for the most part you’re not considered serious about national security unless you were wrong about Iraq." Apparently having been right is not a sufficient defense to the charge of having been a liberal dissident from a mainstream center-right consensus.

Well, it looks like the liberal dissidents might get proven right again. As Krugman himself notes, not surprisingly, the supposedly neutral political establishment has long just sort of assumed that Republicans were highly competent at governing, that they were the party of hard-nosed pragmatists to the Democrats' well-meaning but ineffectual idealists. But now the Republicans have shut down the government. In what they practically admit is a temper tantrum. Competence! No, what we're seeing this week is a party that is fundamentally unfit to be even a small part of the business of governance. And this is not even one tiny bit of a surprise to those of us who've been paying attention the last decade-plus. By which I mean, of course, liberal dissidents. We've been saying that the Republicans were unfit to govern since, well, since forever, but especially since the events of the Bush Administration.

The key, I think, lies in two realizations. First, that Republicans honestly don't care about doing government well. They may even be ideologically hostile to it. After all, according to Saint Ronald, the nine most terrifying words in the English language are "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Government is never the solution, just the problem when it tries to be the solution. So why bother trying? Or more to the point, governing competently provides strong empirical evidence rebutting the central claim of Republican ideology, namely that there's no such thing as competent government. Much better to bungle things, or even better, not to deliberately bungle things but to put people in positions of power who are woefully unsuited for them, with bungling the inevitable result, and then talk about how the government always bungles everything!

That's the substantive reason why Republicans are unfit to govern; the other is tactical. Among the virtues of democratic politics is supposed to be that it provides incentives to the greedy, unprincipled politician nevertheless to do the right thing, because doing the right thing keeps you in power. It's sort of like the way capitalism claims to harness private self-interest to create common good, and about as successful, namely, somewhat in general but with gaping exceptions. But that requires, well, rational self-interest on the part of our greedy, unprincipled politicians. Republicans, however, have bought their own hype, specifically the "reality-based community" hype. Here's that passage again, from the original Ron Suskind article:

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

I don't really have cause to analyze this quote afresh. For my purposes the point is that this kind of thinking has crept from the substantive areas of Republican thinking, and in particular the foreign policy substantive areas, to the strategic and tactical areas. The far-right flank of the Congressional Republican Party, in making its demands of leadership as to how they conduct themselves in dealing with the rest of the government, does not draw on, you know, reality. There's not even an attempt to understand what actions will lead to what consequences. It's government by slogan, except it's not just government by slogan, it's maneuvering by slogan. And the thing about detaching yourself from reality is that you don't actually escape it, and sooner or later reality comes back to bite you in the ass. Hard.

For the "are Republicans fit to govern?" purpose, though, the crucial thing is that you won't see it coming. If you truly escape the reality-based community, you lose the ability to know when you're about to make a huge mistake. Hell, you sort of commit in advance to not knowing when you're about to make a huge mistake. That would be listening to the evidence, after all, which is apparently a sign of weakness. So you make huge mistakes, which is to say, you don't avoid the kinds of behavior that will be even a predictable disaster. The combination of these two features is that Republicans have no inherent interest in governing well and lack even the capacity to understand their supposed incentives to do so anyway. That's a dangerous combination, and it all adds up to being deeply and fundamentally unfit to govern. And people like me have known about this since, well, since the reality-based community thing, and since Hurricane Katrina at least. And we've been saying it. Finally, finally the Republicans have misbehaved badly enough that some mainstream types are noticing their fundamental unsoundness, perhaps on the same scale as what happened during Katrina.

So on behalf of we liberal dissidents, who have seen through the Republican Party all these years and whose positions reality has almost inexorably born out over time, and who never ever get credit for having been right, and who are never ever considered to maybe, just maybe, be right the next time too, I just want to say, we told you so.

The Carlos Beltran Solution

Carlos Beltran is a beast. Specifically he's a beast if you put him on a team that's playing in the post-season. He's been a great player over his whole career, mind you, putting up a .283/.359/.496 batting line while playing a great center field (until recently) and adding excellent base running. But in the playoffs... well, today he was 2 for 3 with a walk, a home run, and (all) three runs driven in, and before that game he had a career .353/.456/.774 batting line in October baseball. That includes his insane 2004 with the Astros, when he hit .400, got on base over half the time, and slugged greater than 1. It includes his 2006 with the Mets, when he had a .500 on-base percentage in their NLCS win over the Dodgers and when he hit .296 with a .387 OBP and cranked three home runs. He also struck out five times, one of which... yeah, anyway. It includes last year with the Cardinals, when he had another .400/.500/.900 NLDS (and that's AVG/OBP/SLG, not OBP/SLG/OPS, heh) and then hit another home run and slugged .600 in the NLCS. It includes a mammoth home run he hit in Game 1 of the series against the Pirates this year, which tied him with Babe freakin' Ruth for career post-season home runs (though they don't hold the record, not by a long shot), and tomorrow it will include his great game from earlier today. Carlos Beltran is insane in the post-season.

He's also a free agent. A free agent outfielder, that is, who would provide a lot of what the Mets could use in 2014, namely a seriously threatening hitter. Sure his range has diminished beyond recognition as his knees have deteriorated with age, but he's still fearsome and, well, you see what he does if you can sneak into the post-season. Besides, he's a former Met, he's a beloved former Met, and bringing him back, perhaps to finish his career, would make it a shoe-in that he'll go into the Hall of Fame as a Met. (And I think this month is cementing his place in the Hall.) Interestingly both he and the team seem to be open to it. It's tough to know what Beltran is thinking, whether he's specifically interested in returning to the team that used two months of his services to snag a top prospect in an absurdly justified trade or whether he's just going to listen to all offers. But analyzing the Mets' thinking is perhaps easier. His offense is clearly in great shape, and would fill one of the holes in the Mets' lineup. His defense may not be that much of a concern with this guy patrolling center field. But there's reason to think that he just may not be able to play the outfield every day any more. Are you signing him to be a part-time player? Might he be better served going to an American League team where he could split time between the outfield and being the DH?

Well, it seems to me that a star outfielder who can't quite play every day would be a peculiarly good for for the Mets in 2014 and the immediate future. I can't speak to whether it would be best for Beltran, but the Mets are currently blessed with an uncommonly large number of outfielders under their control who seem like they could be valuable pieces but who are almost certainly not everyday players, at least not on a good team. I'm thinking of Eric Young, Jr., who just lead the National League in stolen bases but has a career .325 on-base percentage and .338 slugging percentage having spent most of his career playing his home games at Coors Field, and of Matt den Dekker, a defensive whiz perhaps on par with Lagares but whose difficulties not striking out may prevent him from hitting at the Major League level. Setting aside the question of left field for the moment, suppose the Mets signed Beltran to be their starting right fielder, but discovered that two or three games out of seven he needed not to be that. Perhaps he would need to sit on the bench, or to play first base, but not to play the outfield for a full nine innings. Well, stick den Dekker in center field and Lagares in right field. Or maybe the other way around. Maybe Matt would also be used to replace Carlos's defense with something resembling what he was once capable of. It could be a neat synergy between an aging star's need to be a part-time player and a young player's need not to be anything more than a part-time player. If the Mets wanted to be genuinely aggressive in acquiring players they could also sign Shin-Soo Choo to play left field, giving them a top of the order featuring Choo, Beltran, and Wright. Or maybe EYJ is actually good enough to be a leadoff hitter, if given the chance. Whatever they do with the other spot in their outfield, though, I think Carlos Beltran would be a uniquely good fit for the Opening Day right field spot in 2014.