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Thursday, January 10, 2008
Diplomats, donors, running mates
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Thinking Right’s weekend free-for-all. Pick a topic:
• The Bush economy is awful. An estimated 4,600 poor souls stood in line applying for the job of announcing the winning lottery numbers on television. It’s either the economy or evidence that good-paying jobs requiring no particular skills and not much work are always in demand.
• The U.S. needs a president willing to face down State Department diplomats and their union, just as Ronald Reagan did air traffic controllers. A survey by the American Foreign Service Association union finds that 48 percent of diplomats unwilling to serve in Iraq cite “disagreement” with administration policy as the reason. Some 70 percent object to unrequested duty in Iraq. If the diplomatic service is free to take leave of duty based on whether they like the boss or his policies, some serious housecleaning and retraining is needed.
• A fascinating case making its way through the courts involves a 1961 gift of $35 million, now grown to more than $900 million, to Princeton University by Charles and Marie Robertson to support the Woodrow Wilson School so that “men and women dedicated to public service may prepare themselves for careers in government service.” The Robinson heirs sued in 2002, contending the university misused the endowment, violating donor intent by funding unrelated activities and by diverting more than $100 million “to its own use and benefit.” It’s an important donor-intent suit. Princeton is invited here to use the endowment to train or retrain those in the State Department who have lost their bearings.
• Red-light cameras at one intersection in Roswell netted $1 million the first year. In the past nine months, two have netted $1.2 million for the city. One intersection got Marietta $1.7 million. If safety’s the justification, cities and counties should have no financial incentive for installing them. All money collected should go to the state.
• No real problem here with banishing criminals from one or several counties. But there are limits. Up this week before the Georgia Supreme Court was the question of whether a judge can banish a criminal defendant from all but one of Georgia’s 159 counties, as a judge in Douglas County did in banishing a man from every county except Toombs. “If you’re banished to one county, how do you get there?” asked Justice Harris Hines. Good question. As with the sex offender ban decided recently, there’s a reasonable application of the law. This isn’t it. The penalty, otherwise, could be incarceration plus loss of livelihood.
• My curiosity about the steady stream of Hispanics dropping canisters of coins into supermarket change-sorting machines may be answered. In apartment complexes and immigrant communities where “many residents don’t drive and cash is king, an underground marketplace has thrived,” reports the AJC’s Brian Feagans. That shadow economy features in-apartment “convenience stores” selling beer, snacks, batteries and the like.
• One driver of tax revision in Georgia is the belief that huge chunks of the economy escape taxation. See “shadow economy” above. The technical problem, however, with a shift to consumption taxes — which I favor — is the same as the problem with gun regulation. Yes, people use guns to commit crimes. And yes, the shadow economy escapes the sales tax. But in neither case is the answer higher and broader sales taxes or gun regulation, without evidence that the proposed solution actually addresses the problem — the shadow economy or the shootings at Virginia Tech, for example.
• John Kerry, turning on 2004 running mate John Edwards, endorses Barack Obama in South Carolina, a state Kerry lost. The endorsement likely gets him an e-mail list and nothing more. The more we see of Kerry and Edwards, the more we realize how blessed America was four years ago.
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Voter ID. The end is near.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
One of the silliest partisan political disputes of recent times — whether states can insist that potential voters produce proper identification — finally hit the U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday.
The case came from Indiana but the dispute tracks the one here in Georgia. Indiana’s law is stricter, requiring applicants for voter identification cards to present documents such as birth certificates, which can be harder to produce. They can vote, however, by filling out an affidavit at the nearest county clerk’s office. Voter ID cards are free in Georgia to those without other approved forms of identification, such as a driver’s license.
“You want us to invalidate a statute on the ground that it’s a minor inconvenience to a small percentage of voters?” asked Justice Anthomy M. Kennedy, who often casts the deciding vote in 5-4 splits.
As we heard repeatedly in Georgia, especially from Democrats and liberal commentators, photo IDs aren’t needed because “there’s not a single recorded example of voter impersonation fraud,” to quote the lawyer for the Indiana Democratic Party, Paul M. Smith.
Impersonation fraud, however, is hard to detect. Unless by happenstance a poll-worker knows the would-be voter and knows him not to be who he says, the fraud is not detected. “What if we determine that it does serve a purpose in preventing fraud?” asked Chief Justice John Roberts.
The dispute, at its core, has never been about anything but politics. The Dems use the perfectly reasonable Voter ID requirement to convince their voters that Republicans are trying to prevent them from voting. It’s silly, yes. You had to be there.
Georgia’s Secretary of State, Karen Handel, who has nevertheless done a first-rate job of attempting to make certain there’s nobody on any backwood trail anywhere in the state who hasn’t gotten the word to bring proper ID to the polls, was in DC for oral arguments.
“If it is upheld for Indiana, I think it will dramatically boost our case in the State of Georgia,” she said.
These challenges are time, effort and money wasted. The challengers say: If we were in power, we’d have chosen another approach (usually absentee voting) to restoring the integrity of the voting process. Fine. But just because one party doesn’t like the choice made by another to achieve the same end doesn’t make it unconstitutional.
The betting here is that Indiana gets upheld. We’ll know by summer.
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