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Trump has no Subutai and is unlikely to get one

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On twitter the other day, I injected myself into a conversation:

I’m no scholar of Mongol history, but my understanding is that Subutai was a remarkable general who was with Genghis from very early on in his conquests. Genghis conquered a huge empire, and Subutai was one of his key leaders. Part of what made Genghis so effective was his willingness to promote competence wherever he found it.

Trump has no skill in that arena. His businesses are closely held, family affairs that he runs in a paranoid and insular way. Nothing in his early administration suggests that he rewards and appreciates competence. I see that he plans to appoint his son-in-law to try to “lead a SWAT team to fix government.” He’s trying to mount a difficult campaign without generals who know their way around the battle field, and he lacks the temperament and good judgment he would need to acquire competent help.

On Historical Perspective and Political Discussion

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Idea: Historical perspective shapes political discussion.

It’s difficult to talk to someone about how things are if you don’t share, or at least recognize, their understanding of how things have been. Anyone who has been reading this blog for very long will probably have stumbled across me ranting about the “kids these days” genre of social aggrievement. (I happen to think kids these days are pretty good and that, in any event, every generation seems predisposed to belly ache about the younger generations. Get off my lawn!)

I have similar feelings with respect to lamentations about “how things are nowadays.” Things are generally good nowadays. (Though it’s tough to escape the fear that things could rapidly become much worse, particularly given the current crop of lawmakers.) But, my opinions about relative merits of today versus yesterday aside, it’s tough to even discuss the subject if you don’t know what version of “yesterday” a person is using as a benchmark.

I like to read Tipsy’s blog because: a) he’s a friend; and b) he posts stuff I would never come across on my own. Today’s offering includes some quotes from David Gelertner. His benchmark of the history of journalism is maybe somewhere in the 50s or 60s, and he is unhappy with the liberal trajectory of journalists caused by journalism schools:

[On the Cultural Revolution of the past 50 years] the growing importance of education schools and of journalism schools were three of the most important aspects of this big change. The transformation of journalism from a battered-hat group of rough-speaking, hard-drinking, widely-admired “ordinary guys” who were thought to be mostly conservatives to penetrating, opinionated intellectuals who are mainly liberal is a major story in itself.

This caught me off guard, not because of the “liberal media” accusation but because, when thinking of the historical progression of journalism, I wouldn’t have started with the 50s guy. In my mind (and I’m not saying this is at all accurate), I have dim thoughts of publications associated with 16th century London coffee houses, the political essays of the Founders (and libelous muck by the likes of James Callender),  and then to what’s probably my real historical benchmark for journalism — the yellow journalism of Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst.

With that as a benchmark, in my mind, the import of journalism schools is a progression from Hearst’s “you furnish me the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war” brand of yellow journalism to a more serious profession, grounded in the importance of objective facts. This is something I regard as generally positive, though I do have my opinions on the shortcomings of “objectivity.” It creates a blind spot by ignoring that every narrative has a bias, and it leads to a “both-sides” style of reporting that has trouble grappling with the situation where one side has a great deal more substance behind its arguments. On my own, thinking about that history, I barely would have registered the icon of the grizzled, alcoholic “common sense” noir journalist of the 50s and 60s. Without recognizing that as a point of departure, a hypothetical conversation between myself and Mr. Gelertner on the merits of modern versus historical journalism probably wouldn’t be very productive.

I have similar issues when he talks about the history of citizens, religion, and government:

[W]e all know that faith in the Judeo-Christian religions is dramatically weaker than it used to be. But human beings are religious animals, and most will find an alternative if the conventional choices are gone.

The readiest replacement nowadays for lost traditional religion is political ideology. But a citizen with faith in a political position, instead of rational belief, is a potential disaster for democracy.

I’m not sure what his historical benchmark is here, 1950s America again? But my thoughts on the subject are a mashup of places and times. You have a lot of societies where government and religion were the same: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Rome, and China come to mind. Right now, I’m reading about the period where political tensions between the (Constantinople-centered) Christians of the Roman Empire and the Zoroastrians of the Persian Empire led to greater religious fervor in both places (coupled with persecution of minority religions). The battle between those political powers weakened both and opened the door to the rise and spread of Islam which prevailed, in part, by practicing religious tolerance — particularly with respect to Christianity and Judaism. Christian American — and especially Judeo-Christian America — is a blip on the historical landscape.

I would not be surprised if Mr. Gelertner is smarter than me, knows more about history than I do, and/or knows more about religion than I do. But I think it’s safe to say neither of  us is dumb or ignorant in these areas. Yet, we probably come to radically different conclusions about how today compares to yesterday, simply because yesterday is so vast in terms of its potential scope of places and times.

I think this is a common problem for political discussions generally. So, find out what your counterpart’s vision of “yesterday” might be.

 

75th Anniversary of EO 9066 and American Internment of Japanese Americans

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A couple of days ago, Amy and I were talking about the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S. during the 1940s. One of the things we discussed was how little we learned about this monumental event when we were in high school. She didn’t remember hearing about it. I remembered a little, but no one made a big deal of it. Almost as if to underscore the idea that this is an under-remembered event in U.S history, the 75th anniversary of the signing of EO 9066 — the executive order that kicked off the undertaking — came and went without me realizing it. I don’t think it received much coverage. I know a lot of people complain about America bashing / blame-America-first, but this is one that we should legitimately feel bad about. It was clearly the wrong thing to do, and it happened within living memory.

On February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt signed the executive order that led to the forced relocation and incarceration of between 110,000 and 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. About 2/3 of them were citizens. It happened in the wake of Pearl Harbor, so security was the ostensible reason for the action. But fear and racism appear to be the real reasons. There was little or no evidence of a threat based on race, and we did not treat the Italians or Germans in nearly the same way. The majority of mainland Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated from their West Coast homes during the spring of 1942.

These citizens were forcibly housed in internment (or concentration if you prefer) camps in remote locations, often, featuring “tar paper-covered barracks of simple frame construction without plumbing or cooking facilities of any kind. The spartan facilities met international laws, but left much to be desired. Many camps were built quickly by civilian contractors during the summer of 1942 based on designs for military barracks, making the buildings poorly equipped for cramped family living.” These citizens, who had done nothing wrong, were guarded and often surrounded by barbed-wire.

The citizens who were forced into incarceration often suffered substantial financial losses. They were prevented from taking more than they could carry and forced to leave a great deal behind. The non-Japanese who were allowed to stay on the West Coast were able to profit at their expense. A 1948 act purported to make compensation for these losses available to those who had suffered them, but the paperwork required was unreasonable under the circumstances and did not come close to making the individuals whole.

We should remember this, not just as an occasion of the majority population treating a minority population badly; but also as a time when fear and unreason caused us to do horrible things to our fellow citizens. And we should remind ourselves of what we did so that we don’t do it again.

R.I.P. Stan Jones

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Various news sources, including the Journal & Courier, are reporting the passing of Stan Jones. He was a Purdue graduate and state Representative from the Lafayette area in the 70s and 80s. He then went to work for the Bayh administration as the Commissioner for Higher Education.

During his time as commissioner, Jones oversaw the development of the 21st Century Scholars program, Indiana’s Education Roundtable and the implementation of Core 40, the state’s required high school curriculum, according to the statement.

He went on to found Complete College America, a nonprofit with a goal to ” increase the number of Americans with quality career certificates or college degrees and to close attainment gaps for traditionally underrepresented populations.” Governor Holcomb released a statement saying, “Stan Jones was a leader in every sense, continuously striving to enhance the lives of Hoosiers and bettering the institutions that serve them.  He transformed the state of Higher Education in Indiana and helped countless students here and across the nation complete their dream of going to college. He will be sorely missed.”

I don’t believe I ever had direct interactions with Stan. But he was active enough in state policy that his name would come to my attention pretty frequently over the 20 years I’ve been paying attention to state politics. Obviously, his efforts extend longer than that — going back more than 40 of his 67 years. That’s an impressive record of public service. My condolences to his family.

Emoluments Clause Litigation

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The New York Times has an article on planned litigation to seek injunctive relief against the Trump administration over the Emoluments Clause. (h/t Indiana Law Blog). The Emoluments Clause in the U.S. Constitution says:

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

An emolument is a profit or gain. The argument is that foreign powers are going to funnel money through Trump’s business holdings in order to curry favor with him. The Founders were aware that foreign powers would try to buy influence with office holders and this provision is an attempt to stop that.

One argument that caught my eye is that, because Trump’s businesses are corporate entities, profits received by them aren’t attributable to him:

Andy Grewal, a University of Iowa law school professor, argued in an academic paper published last week that a payment to a hotel owned by the Trump family, like the Trump International Hotel in Washington, would not violate the Emoluments Clause because the money is paid to a corporate entity and not to Mr. Trump directly.

I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a case on the Emoluments Clause, so I’m nowhere close to an expert. My guess is that the toughest challenge, and the one it would likely fail, has to do with standing. Who has the right to enforce the clause. The judiciary is likely to try to avoid a head-on collision with the executive and might well say that this is up to Congress to enforce. But, like I said, I could be wrong.

On the other hand, I’d vigorously challenge the notion that the corporate form insulates the President from receiving gifts by proxy through his corporations. Hobby Lobby said that the owners of closely held corporations can assert religious objections to laws that impact the corporations — despite the fact that corporations can’t have religious beliefs. I would argue that, if the corporate form does not prevent religious beliefs from passing through to the corporation, then foreign influence via gifts to a closely held corporation can pass through to an office holder such as Trump.

If the plaintiffs passed the motion to dismiss stage and were found to have standing, they could presumably have a lot of fun with discovery, trying to dig up the various ways in which Trump has wide-ranging conflicts of interest that previous office-holders did not.

R.I.P. Gene Cernan

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We used to be able to do big things

The Big Blue Marble. Taken December 7, 1972

I remember in the late 80s, when I lived in Richmond, there was a considerable amount of hand wringing about how to repair the G Street Bridge over the Whitewater River. I asked my dad how it was that we were able to ever build these bridges if we were unable to even repair them now. I don’t recall what his answer was. At the time, I think I had Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series on my mind. In that series, the Galactic Empire was failing and the men of that time were unable to repair the great works of earlier times.

Today’s announcement of the death of Gene Cernan reminded me of that conversation with my Dad and, by extension, the diminished stature of the Galactic Empire (which was, itself, based on Asimov’s notion of the Roman Empire).

Cernan passed away at the age of 82. Forty-four years ago, at the age of thirty-eight, he was the last person to walk on the moon on December 13, 1972.

As he climbed the ladder to the lunar module and left the surface of the moon, he said:

[A]s I take man’s last step from the surface, back home for some time to come – but we believe not too long into the future – I’d like to just (say) what I believe history will record: that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow. And, as we leave the Moon at Taurus–Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return, with peace and hope for all mankind. Godspeed the crew of Apollo 17.

There is a good chance that I’m too focused on the moon as a measuring stick for our capabilities. After all, we (almost) harpooned a comet back in 2014. But it seems to be that the news is full of talk about what we can’t do, what we don’t want to do, what we can’t afford, and what we hate about each other. The fact is, we have not returned to the moon.

Some days, I think we need a Great Purpose to give our lives meaning. Without such a purpose, we take to building up the Other as Great Evils so that we can be heroic protagonists in our own minds. Nobody wants to be an insignificant part of an enormous, indifferent, and rudderless universe. So, we create narratives.

And, if we are not building mole hills into mountains, it feels like we’re drifting toward war just to give ourselves something important to worry about. It would be much better if we had something productive around which to unite and upon which to release our energies and focus our desire to be heroic parts of an epic story. I can think of much worse efforts than space exploration.

This is not, I’m afraid, much of a tribute to Captain Cernan. He was part of a great effort that did incredible things.  He said:

“What is the real meaning of seeing this picture? I’ve always said, I’ve said for a long time, I still believe it, it’s going to be — well it’s almost fifty now, but fifty or a hundred years in the history of mankind before we look back and really understand the meaning of Apollo. Really understand what humankind had done when we left, when we truly left this planet, we’re able to call another body in this universe our home. We did it way too early considering what we’re doing now in space. It’s almost as if JFK reached out into the twenty-first century where we are today, grabbed hold of a decade of time, slipped it neatly into the (nineteen) sixties and seventies (and) called it Apollo.”

Hopefully we can build upon his efforts sooner rather than later. I’d rather be of a generation that was part of a continued rise in knowledge, ability, and accomplishment than a generation that was part of a preventable failure in imagination and effort.

HB 1013 – Taxes on Vending Machine Food

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Indiana General Assembly tax policy

Excise taxes on vending machine “food” such as cookies could be phased out

Rep. Ober (800-382-9841) has introduced HB 1013 which would eliminate taxes on food sold from vending machines. In the context of sales taxes, “food” has a particular meaning. A lot of what comes out of vending machines (e.g. soda and candy) is not considered “food” and will continue to be taxable. However, some of what comes out of vending machines (e.g. chips, cookies, and crackers) is “food.”

As I understand the current tax law, if you bought the chips from the grocery store, it would not be taxed, but if you bought the same chips from the vending machine, it would be taxed. I can only speculate, but my guess would be that advances in vending machine technology since this tax structure was developed have improved the ability of vendors to separate “food” from “non-food” for tax purposes. It’s probably fair to ask why candy should be taxed while cookies are not; but, I think it makes sense that whether the cookies are taxed probably shouldn’t hinge on whether they came from a vending machine or a grocery store.

The tax would be phased out from the current 7% down to 5% in 2017/18, 3% in 2018/19 and zero thereafter. The fiscal note indicates that this would reduce sales tax revenue by $5.8 million per year once the tax was eliminated.

A Couple of Thoughts on Headlines

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Just a thought or two on the headline making process in light of the recent attention on “fake news.” A lot of fake news is pretty easily disregarded if you’re making an effort to be more or less objective. In my mind, headlines are a more pernicious subject. It’s my understanding that headlines mostly are not written by the journalists writing the article, and I think this gives rise to an editorial slant. The slant isn’t necessarily conservative or liberal, but if the headline writer is higher up in the hierarchy, there might be a tendency to write headlines that get more clicks or sell more papers.

I was close enough to a local story recently to see this play out, and I think it might be a more or less representative case. The journalist wrote a pretty straightforward account of a government action which was going to maintain the status quo. The headline made it sound like something controversial was happening. With the headline priming the reader for controversy, it really took some studying of the body of the article to determine that nothing very remarkable was taking place.

That feeds into a notion I’ve had that’s anecdotal and far from scientific on my part, but I’ve had the feeling with a number of articles over the years that the headlines skewed “conservative” while the bulk of the article skewed “liberal.” In any vent, the person skimming headlines gets a very different impression than the person reading closely.

Maybe it would be helpful to have a separate by-line when the headline is written by someone other than the author of the article. No solid thoughts here, just thinking out loud.

 

R.I.P. Senator Borst

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Lesley Stedman Weidenbener, writing for the Indianapolis Business Journal, has an article on the passing of long-time former state senator, Larry Borst.

Former state Sen. Larry Borst—one of the most influential budget leaders in modern state history—has died, a Senate leader said Tuesday. He was 89.

Borst served 36 years in the Senate representing southern Marion County and northern Johnson County. For more than three decades, he was chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the panel through which the budget and all tax legislation had to pass.

Both an understated and commanding presence, Borst was nicknamed the “Silver Fox,” a nod to his thick gray hair and his crafty approach to legislation.

Borst served from 1968 to 2004 when he was defeated in a Republican primary. I most recently mentioned him in this blog a couple of weeks ago in the bicentennial series. He was one of a couple of a few key senators who dominated the Indiana Senate with Senator Garton.

During the 1980s and 90s, the Indiana Senate was dominated by President pro tem Bob Garton and his allies, Senators Larry Borst, Joe Harrison, and Morris Mills. . . .  Phil Gutman and Mark “Chip” Edwards had been convicted on bribery charges. Their  conviction arose out of a scheme whereby railroad lobbyists gave a few Senators monthly payments for three years in exchange for their support on favorable legislation.

In the wake of the scandal, the leadership position was open. Garton and Harrison, in particular, seemed to be running hard for the spot. Ultimately Garton won, and Senators Garton, Harrison, Borst, and Mills would control the Senate for something like a quarter century.

. . .

This power structure was one with which Governor Bayh had to contend. Senator Borst recalled Bayh’s term as governor as one that was popular with the public but was skeptical of the actual accomplishments. Bayh immediately implemented a Task Force to trim government waste and reduce its size but, according to Borst, “the savings claimed were dubious.” Similarly, Bayh forbid state employees from accepting “so much as a cup of coffee,” but, he said, that was never really enforced. He allowed the unionization of state employees but never entered into a meaningful contract with them. That said, Borst concluded, Bayh’s “don’t rock the boat” philosophy was good for the state at that time, and he had capable, honest staff members.

I’m sure there was plenty to disagree about with Sen. Borst’s policy ideas. A person can’t serve that long in that powerful a position without generating disagreement. But, I think it’s safe to say that his was a life of substantial public service.

Violence broke out in Indiana when we did what North Carolina is doing

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The news tells me that, in a fit of strong arm politics, the North Carolina legislature is ramming through legislation to strip the governor of a lot of power before a Democrat takes office. The North Carolina legislation was described as:

a flurry of bills during a surprise special session this week to undermine Mr. Cooper by stripping him of his ability to make key appointments to state and local boards and mandating, for the first time, legislative approval of his cabinet.

There is, as it turns out, some bipartisan precedent for this in Indiana from back in 1883 and 1894.

In 1883, the Democrats swept into control of the General Assembly following a poorly received effort at Prohibition by the Republicans. The Democrats promptly stripped sitting Republican Governor Albert Porter of a number of his appointment powers. When Democratic Governor Matthews was elected, the General Assembly promptly restored the appointment powers. But the Democrats failed poorly themselves in the 1894 election. The Republican General Assembly promptly passed legislation stripping Governor Matthews of the appointment powers.

Gov. Matthews vetoed the legislation and did so minutes before the General Assembly was set to adjourn — in an effort to delay the Republicans’ ability to override the veto. However, the House Republicans blocked the governor’s messenger from reaching the House Speaker. This resulted in fist fights between Republican and Democratic lawmakers that lasted about a half hour. (A good round up of the newspaper coverage of the incident is here.) The governor’s private secretary, Myron King, was apparently in pretty rough shape after the beating.

“Revolvers were flourished and blows struck with such articles of furniture as the combatants could lay hands on conveniently.”

The Democrats apparently finally got King with his veto message to the Speaker’s desk, but moments after the Speaker declared the session adjourned sine die. The members of the legislature involved in the assault of King apparently left the city quickly thereafter to avoid arrest.