Wednesday, July 31, 2019

Natelson: The basics of amending the U.S. Constitution

Natelson: The basics of amending the U.S. Constitution

Widespread public dissatisfaction with the federal government has sparked interest in recalibrating the system.
One obvious way to recalibrate is by amending the U.S. Constitution. Historically, amendments have proven to be powerful vehicles for reform. Americans have used constitutional amendments to protect minority rights, guarantee women the vote, enact the Bill of Rights, overrule the Supreme Court, limit the president to two terms, and abolish slavery in states not covered by President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, the delegates decided early on that if their new Constitution were to last, there had to be an amendment procedure. In the years immediately previous, several states had adopted constitutions without any way of amending them. This proved to be a major mistake.
For example, South Carolina’s first constitution, adopted in 1776, had no provision for alteration, and, within two years, the entire document had to be scrapped. The Constitutional Convention delegates also understood that they had to abandon the Articles of Confederation partly because its amendment method was almost impossible to use.
There were at least four reasons the framers wanted the Constitution to be amendable. First, they recognized they might make drafting mistakes that needed correction later. Second, officials might abuse their power, and amendments could limit or end those abuses. Third, amendments could resolve disagreements over how to interpret some parts of the Constitution. Finally, conditions might evolve over time in ways of calling for change in the constitutional rules.
The framers were right. As matters have turned out, Americans have adopted amendments for all four reasons. For example, the 12th Amendment corrected a drafting omission in the original Constitution. The first 10 amendments—the Bill of Rights—were adopted partly to forestall abuses and partly to clarify the limits on federal power. Several amendments have addressed state abuses of power. The 11th Amendment overruled an erroneous Supreme Court interpretation. The 20th Amendment, which moved up Inauguration Day, was approved after modern transportation technology shortened the time needed to travel to the nation’s capital. The 19th Amendment—guaranteeing women the vote—was motivated partly by fairness. But it also reflected a social change: Advances in household technology and in medicine (birth control and longer female life expectancy) rendered women’s participation in politics far more practical than it had been in 1787.
Any well-drafted constitution contains an amendment procedure. When the people ratify (approve) the document, they approve the amendment procedure as part of the package. We can alter a constitution only by following the steps outlined in the document itself.
Generally, the amendment procedure is much more difficult and time-consuming than merely passing a law. This is to assure that the people have a chance to thoroughly examine the measure over time. It also assures that a strong popular majority agrees.
No constitutional amendment should be merely the result of a momentary impulse. During the 1970s, activists promoted what they called an “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). Because the ERA supposedly would further woman’s equality, initially it was very popular. It quickly sailed through Congress and through many state legislatures.
Then people began to notice problems. The measure was poorly drafted. It might have all kinds of unintended consequences. It was also a huge transfer of power to unelected judges from democratically elected lawmakers. Because the amendment process took time and required several different steps, the people had a chance to think things over. They eventually defeated the ERA.
Thus, a good amendment process includes several steps. At the state level, there generally are at least three: First, the sponsor presents a draft amendment to state legislative attorneys for review. The state attorneys may suggest or even mandate stylistic changes. Second, the amendment is formally proposed by the legislature or by a popular petition signed by large numbers of citizens. Third, the public votes on whether to ratify. Usually, ratification requires approval only by a popular majority, but in some states, a super-majority is necessary.
On the federal level, the steps for an amendment are outlined in Article V of the Constitution. There are two ways to propose an amendment. One way is for two-thirds of each house of Congress to vote for it. The other is for two-thirds of the state legislatures (34 of 50) to demand a meeting of state delegations that the Constitution calls a “convention for proposing amendments,” which decides whether to propose one or more amendments.
Thus far, a convention for proposing amendments hasn’t been held, and only Congress has proposed amendments. However, we know how a convention for proposing amendments would work, because similar meetings of states have been common in U.S. history. (The most recent was held in 2017 in Phoenix.) Unfortunately, special interest groups opposing amendments have thwarted the state-proposal method by spreading misinformation about it. As a result, no amendment has been proposed for several decades because Congress isn’t interested in reform.
After Congress or a convention of states proposes an amendment, Congress decides on a “mode of ratification.” This means Congress may opt to send the proposal either to state legislatures or to democratically elected state conventions. Both methods have been used.
Finally, the state legislatures or conventions decide whether to ratify. The proposal becomes an amendment only if three-fourths of the states (now 38 out of 50) agree.
Readers interested in the constitutional amendment process may obtain more information at the Article V Information Center website, www.articlevinfocenter.com.

6 facts about U.S. political independents

6 facts about U.S. political independents 


6 facts about U.S. political independents

While 38% of Americans identify as political independents, most in this group lean toward one party or the other. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Partisan divides in the United States are as wide as they’ve ever been in the modern political era. But what about the large share of Americans who identify as independents?
A recent Pew Research Center report took a detailed look at these Americans. Among other things, it illustrated that independents have lower levels of political participation and are demographically different from those who affiliate with a party – and that their views are often as divided as those of self-identified partisans.
Here are six facts about political independents:
1Nearly four-in-ten U.S. adults (38%) identify as politically independent, but most “lean” toward one of the two major parties. Only 7% of Americans overall don’t express a partisan leaning, while 13% lean toward the Republican Party and 17% lean toward the Democratic Party.
Though about four-in-ten Americans call themselves 'independents,' few are truly independent
2Independents who lean to one of the two parties are often much closer to partisans in their views than they are to independents who lean to the other party. For example, while 34% of independents as a whole said they approved of the way Donald Trump was handling his job as president in a March Pew Research Center survey, the gap between independents who lean to the GOP and those who lean to the Democratic Party (73% vs. 9%) was nearly as wide as the gap between Republicans and Democrats (85% vs. 8%).
People who affiliate with a party and independents who lean toward it have similar views on current political issuesThere are similar patterns in many political areas. While 36% of all independents favored substantially expanding the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border in a January survey, 75% of Republican-leaning independents – but just 5% of Democratic leaners – said this. For this reason, it can be misleading to look at “independents” as a single bloc.
3Republican-leaning independents more likely than Republicans to favor legal marijuana, gay marriageOn some issues, there are significant differences between leaners and partisans. Nearly six-in-ten Republican-leaning independents (59%), for example, currently favor allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally, compared with 37% among Republican identifiers. And while clear majorities of both Democrats and Democratic leaners favor same-sex marriage, Democratic-leaning independents are somewhat more likely than Democrats to hold this view (82% vs. 71%).
In a survey last fall, clear majorities of Democrats (69%), Democratic-leaning independents (75%) and Republican-leaning independents (60%) favored marijuana legalization, but Republicans were divided (45% favored, 51% opposed).
While partisan divides over immigration extend to leaners as well, independents in both partisan groups are also more likely than partisan identifiers to express positive views about immigrants. Nearly nine-in-ten Democratic leaners say immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents, compared with a somewhat narrower majority of Democrats (80%). By comparison, 44% of Republican leaners and 33% of Republicans say the same.
Wide majorities of both Democrats and Democratic leaners say more needs to be done to give blacks equal rights with whites, while partisan identifiers are somewhat more likely than leaners to say this (85% vs. 78%). Within the GOP coalition, 36% of Republican leaners share this view, versus 27% of Republican identifiers.
4Independents who do not lean to a party less likely to say they voted in 2018Independents – particularly the 7% of Americans who don’t lean toward a party – are less politically engaged than partisans. In a survey conducted shortly after the November 2018 midterm election, just a third of those who don’t lean toward either party (33%) reported voting. Democratic leaners (48%) and Republican leaners (54%) were considerably more likely to say they voted, though both groups reported lower rates of voting than partisans.
5Leaners much less likely than partisans to say quality of candidates running for office 'has been good'Independents feel more negatively about political candidates and parties than partisans. In early 2018, similar shares of Republicans (77%) and Democrats (74%) said the quality of candidates running for Congress in their district in the last several elections had been good. But those who leaned toward the parties were much less likely to say this.
This pattern holds for other offices as well: In views of candidates for president and local elections, independent leaners are consistently less likely than partisans to rate the quality of these candidates positively.
In addition, independents are more likely than partisans to have negative views of both major parties. About a quarter of both Republican leaners (24%) and Democratic leaners (27%) view both parties unfavorably, as do 37% of those with no partisan leaning. By comparison, only about one-in-ten partisans view both parties negatively.
6Independents are younger and more likely to be male than partisans. While 45% of Republicans and 51% of Democrats are under age 50, these shares rise to 55% among Republican-leaning independents and 68% among Democratic leaners. And while men account for about half of Republicans (51%) and four-in-ten Democrats (40%), they account for 64% of Republican leaners and 51% of Democratic leaners.

Chris Wray's FBI continues to cover for Team Comey's Russia shenanigans

Chris Wray's FBI continues to cover for Team Comey's Russia shenanigans 


Chris Wray's FBI continues to cover for Team Comey's Russia shenanigans

The FBI is going to court to fight the public release of a small number of documents the State Department sent to agents from Christopher Steele, the British intelligence operative and Hillary Clinton-paid political muckraker, during the 2016 election.
Normally, such Freedom of Information Act cases don’t merit public attention. This one does.
To hear the FBI tell it, the release of former Deputy Assistant Secretary Kathleen Kavalec’s documents is tantamount to giving up the keys to President Trump’s nuclear briefcase, aiding the enemy or assisting terrorists.
“We know that terrorist organizations and other hostile or foreign intelligence groups have the capacity and ability to gather information from myriad sources, analyze it and deduce means and methods from disparate details to defeat the U.S. government’s collection efforts,” an FBI assistant section chief swore in an affidavit supporting the request to keep the documents secret.
The FBI can’t afford to “jeopardize the fragile relationships that exist between the United States and certain foreign governments,” the FBI official declared in another dramatic argument against the conservative group Citizens United’s request to release the memos.
And if that wasn’t enough, the bureau actually claimed that “FBI special agents have privacy interests from unnecessary, unofficial questioning as to the conduct of investigations and other FBI business.”
In other words, agents don’t want to have to answer to the public, which pays their salary, when questions arise about the investigative work, as has happened in the Russia case.
The FBI’s July 10 court filing speaks volumes about Director Christopher Wray’s efforts to thwart the public understanding of what really happened in the FBI’s now-debunked Russia collusion probe.
Steele’s contacts at State can’t possibly be equated to the nation’s most sensitive secrets. The same research he provided to State and the FBI in fall 2016 was being provided to Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, and to the media.
In fact, Steele was fired from the FBI on Nov. 1, 2016, for leaking information. Any assumption of secrecy, privacy or classification is ludicrous. And a post-firing FBI analysis found most of Steele’s dossier was either wrong, could not be corroborated, or simply was made up of public source internet information. In other words, it was garbage intelligence.
On its face, the FBI’s behavior in the Citizens United case isn’t about protecting national security secrets. It’s about protecting the bureau’s reputation from revelations its agents knew derogatory information about Steele and his work before they used his dossier to support a surveillance warrant targeting the Trump campaign and failed to disclose that information to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC).
And that makes this court fight a waste of taxpayer dollars an unnecessary breach of public trust.
“Only through our litigation will the American people discover what the political operatives inside the Obama State Department and FBI were doing in 2016 with the fake Steele dossier before the FISA court," said David N. Bossie, the president of Citizens United.
To better illustrate the folly of the FBI’s fight, let’s examine one document the bureau is fighting to keep secret in its entirety.
It’s a five-page memo that Kavalec downloaded from Steele from an internet storage site after meeting with him on Oct. 11, 2016. She sent it to then-FBI section chief Steven Laycock, now an assistant director, two days later.
The document, according to my sources who have seen it, lays out a theory that Steele and some liberals spread late in the 2016 campaign that unusual computer pings between a Trump Tower server and Alfa Bank in Russia might be a secret communication channel by which Trump and Vladimir Putin were hijacking the election.
The theory has been written about in the media. Kavalec downloaded the file from Steele via a commercial internet download service and transmitted it to Laycock on non-classified email.
Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who reviewed the document recently, wrote Attorney General William Barr last week saying the memo was “based on open source media reporting” and that the FBI’s claim that revealing it would harm sources and methods is “completely unfounded.”
In other words, it’s not the stuff intelligence laws were designed to protect.
Furthermore, the FBI investigated the theory and debunked it. Even the tight-lipped special counsel Robert Mueller went out of his way during testimony last week to say the Alfa Bank theory “is not true.”
So if Mueller could talk about it and the information was transmitted in a non-classified manner, why would the FBI go to such lengths to fight its release?
My sources say it’s because the State Department included notations on Steele’s five pages of research strongly calling into question his Alfa Bank theories before sending it to the FBI. In other words, they challenged the veracity and quality of Steele’s intelligence.
Under the FBI’s human source rules, a U.S. government’s negative assessment of an informer’s information would constitute “derogatory information” that would have to be disclosed to the FISC if Steele’s work was being used to support a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.
Eight days after Kavalec sent Laycock her annotated version of Steele’s Alfa Bank research, the FBI submitted to the FISC an application that won the agency permission to surveil former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The bureau did not include State’s assessment. Instead, agents declared they possessed no derogatory information about Steele. 
Such shenanigans happened on the watch of fired FBI Director James Comey, whose band of merry agents included supervisors Peter Strzok and Andrew McCabe, both since fired for misconduct.
Wray took over the FBI long after such misdeeds occurred. But for some reason, his team has fought relentlessly to keep information secret from Congress and the public about Team Comey’s Russia case.
The House Intelligence Committee had to threaten it would issue a subpoena and go to court in summer 2018 before Wray gave up information about the bureau’s mistakes in the Russia probe. The Senate Judiciary Committee has not received a response to at least six letters it sent requesting FBI information in the Russia case dating to 2017.
Likewise, the FBI allowed text messages — some embarrassing — between Strzok and former FBI lawyer Lisa Page to be destroyed during the probe, blaming a software glitch. The Department of Justice inspector general was able to recover some of those texts after an extensive effort.
And when Kavalec’s documents were discovered recently, the FBI initially redacted the name of Laycock as recipient of the Steele information. It eventually released Laycock’s name and acknowledged it was wrong to hide his identity.
“The FBI mistakenly asserted Exemptions 6 and 7C to redact the name of the FBI executive,” the bureau sheepishly said in a footnote to its most recent court filing.
After Barr said he believed the FBI was spying on the Trump campaign, Wray questioned his boss’s assessment in public. “It’s not the term I would use,” Wray told Congress.
When the government gets stuff wrong, as it did in the Russia case on Comey's watch, transparency is the best panacea for restoring public trust.
Claiming FBI agents have a privacy right to avoid facing hard questions, portraying public source documents as national secrets and doing the Muhammad Ali “rope-a-dope” dance to thwart disclosure is not an acceptable alternative.
It’s a lesson Chris Wray should learn, quickly.

What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household | Competitive Enterprise Institute

What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household


What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household

What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household | Competitive Enterprise Institute

What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household


What the Green New Deal Could Cost a Typical Household