Scotland May Leave U.K. As Soon As 2014

The prime minister of the United Kingdom has agreed in principle called the Edinburgh Agreement to allow Scotland to hold a referendum whose precise details would be legislated by the Scottish parliament in consultation with ministers from the parliament of the United Kingdom, on whether or not it should become a country independent of the United Kingdom by the end of the year 2014. 

While the agreement doesn't say so in so many words, the implication of the agreement is that the unilateral determination of the people of Scotland in the referrendum would be honored by the United Kingdom without giving people in other parts of the United Kingdom, i.e. England, Wales or Northern Ireland, a say in the matter. 

The United Kingdom was created when England annexed Scotland in 1707.  Scotland has had considerable regional autonomy since 1999, thirteen years ago and this has generally worked quite smoothly.

Opinion polls at the moment suggest that independence as opposed to mere continued autonomy does not have majority support among the Scots.  But, this sentiment may change now that achieving independence no longer carries the threat of intense diplomatic or legal protests from the British parliament, or the risk that a violent insurgency might break out.  An independence that can be peacefully and cooperatively secured in an undisputedly legal manner (and hence is also more likely to lead to easy separate admission to the European Union) may be more attractive to the average Scotman than independence in general.  Fear of unknown future perils is usually one of the biggest barriers to independence movements.  So many places that secure independence or try to endure extreme misery in the process of trying to do so, as the example of their neighbors, the Irish, made clear.

Why Is Cameron Offering This Deal?

Why would conservative party leader and Prime Minister David Cameron (who leads a coalition government that also includes the Liberal Party) agree to the Liberal Party's platform position supporting this referrendum?

One big reason (other than the fact that Cameron had to give away something to get a majority coalition government that he could lead) is that geographically, the conservative party has come to become almost an English nationalist party, given that its electoral performance outside of England (and in English immigrant populations) is so dismal.  The Conservative Party's strength in England and weakness elsewhere is something of a mirror of the American Republican Party's strength in the South and Great Plains and relative weakness in the Northeast, Midwest and Pacific states.  Granting Scotland independence greatly increases the likelihood that the Conservative Party will be able to secure majorities in the parliament of the rump United Kingdom in future elections. 

The Liberal Party, meanwhile, after not receiving a share of representatives in parliament commensurate with its electoral support and given its deep intellectual support for ideals of good government, is sympathetic to other underdog minorities in the British political system like Scotland.  And, if the referrendum results in Scotland staying in the United Kingdom anyway, as seems most likely at the moment, the Liberal Party's efforts on behalf of the Scots will still be remembers fondly there and may lead to a long term expansion of the territory where the Liberal Party has strong political support.

Of course, allowing the Scottish people to vote on the issue also effectively sucks the air out of any insipient group advocating violent or even merely illegal and disruptive means to advocate for Scottish independence, even if the vote goes against them.  It is hard to mobilize people to get angry at a "colonial overlord" who is willing to let you hold a public vote on whether you want independence on terms you personally put into writing, and is then willing to respect the decision of the voters in that referrendum.

Reasons To Think That England Might Act In Good Faith

The Scots have many precedents to reassure them that their independence might be achieved smoothly if they vote for it now that the Edinburgh Agreement is in place.

While this hasn't always been the case (both the United States and Ireland fought long and bloody wars to secure independence from England, and the annexation of Scotland came only after roughly a century of near continuous massive bloodshed in the border region between England and Scotland), in more recent history, the United Kingdom's has had ceded sovereignty and/or broad grants of highly autonomous self-rule to a great many of its possessions in a relatively graceful and civilized manner.  Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and many of the United Kingdom's colonial possessions were granted autonomy without a serious fuss. 

The United Kingdom's grant of independence to India, while secured in the face of local protests and not bloodless, did not take a full fledged civil war or decades of victious insurgencies (the vicious and bloody civil war would come later to India when Pakistan split itself off from it, and Kashmir would provide India with its prolonged insurgency after it had been granted independence as well).  This is one of the very few cases where a grant of independence to a European colony did not lead to a coup, a one party state, or some similarly anti-democratic result and England in the case of India was the first European colonial power that I can recall to grant independence to a colony that was not ethnically European.

The Greater European Context

This comes at a time when movements for regional independence are bubbling up in Belgium, Spain and probably other places in Europe as well.  The willingness of the U.K. to strike a deal may embolden other populations seeking independence.  Flemish Nationalists secured large numbers of seats in local election in Belgium yesterday.  Catalonians are demanding an independence referrendum of their own and have marched one and a half million strong (20% of the population of the entire region) in the streets within the past few weeks.  And, any decision to let Catalonians vote on independence would be met with a powerful cry of "me too" from the Basque autonomous region.

All three populations, like the Scottish people, already have their own regional elected legislative bodies, organized nationalist movements, a history as a sovereign region of their own at some point, and considerable autonomy to enact at least some kinds of legislation on their own.

For the Catalonians, even if independence with the consent of the Spanish parliament isn't granted, greater autonomy for the regional government may be granted to it.

Catalonia wants to be able to collect its own taxes and send a share to Madrid, rather than the other way around. That would make it different from most of Spain's other 16 regional government, but similar to the northern Basque country.
 

The more that governmental adminstration is performed by a regional government, the easier it would be for it to unilaterally declare its independence while carrying on the ordinary business of government without interruption.


Analysis

While this may be somewhat of an overgeneralization, many of the most vigorous regional independence movements seem to have their roots in ethnically distinct regions that are more affluent or prosperous economically who are motivated by a desire to not have to subsidize or be held back economically by poorer and more backward parts of a multiethnic country.  This applies to the Northern League in Italy as well.

Scotland, however, does not fit this mold.  The GDP of Scotland about $33,680 U.S. per capita per year is lower than, but not all that much different from the GDP of England, which is about $35,000 U.S. per capita per year. 

On the other hand, however, Scotland is much poorer than London ($50,600), and has centuries of experience with absentee landlords in London non-governmentally sucking all of its fortunes away from it.  To the extent that this is still the case, a desire for independence may be rooted more in an effort to find a way to prevent private sector flows of funds out of the country than the desire to keep local tax money local that has fueled many other secessionist movements.

Another key distributive economic issue in the event that Scotland wins its independence is how the United Kingdom's North Sea oil revenues would be shared.  The Scottish, who are geographically closer to these oil fields may feel entitled to this, but nothing in the Edinburgh Agreement implies the the United Kingdom would be ceding complete ownership and control of these resources.

Of course, unlike the Flemish, the Catalans, and the Basque (but in common with the Northern Italians), both the Scots and the English speak the same language, even if there are regional difference in dialect.  So, there may be less of a cultural impetus for the Scots to break away than there is for some of its secessionist European peers to do so.

It is also interesting that all of the countries with really active secessionist movements at the moment: the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Spain, have constitutional monarchies (another thing lacking in Italy where the Northern League has been relatively quite lately despite a severe economic crisis in Italy as well). 

Could it be that symbolically placing sovereignty in a person, who can personally remain the sovereign of a country (or have a child or relative to the current sovereign become their monarch continuing the constitutional monarchy in that way) even after it gains independence from its existing government if the region seeking independence wishes, reduces the symbolic attachment that people have the the sovereignty of the the unified bureaucratic institution of the nation-state itself?

Reflections On Facial Hair

A grew a moustache in my freshman year in high school, and by the time that I was a senior, I had a neatly trimmed full beard and short scissors cut hair.  When I went to college, I let my hair and beard grow progressively longer until I had below shoulder length straight hair and a huge wild mountain man beard by my last semester of college.  After a summer shoveling dirt for a project at home before my sophomore year that left me with blistery scars in the palms of my hands, I looked like the classical depictions of the resurrected Jesus Christ in jeans, Chuck Taylors and a flannel shirt.

I got into a serious relationship with the woman I would marry during the last semester of my undergraduate education.  She liked neither facial hair nor long hair on men.  One weekend that spring, I got a buzz cut and shaved my face clean, causing every single one of my professors over the next week to ask the "guest" in the classroom to introduce himself.  Less than twenty-four hours after my college commencement ceremony, I started law school and keep the short haircut and clean shaven face for the next twenty and a half years.

Late this summer, my wife and I separated.  Two weeks ago, I had back surgery that kept me away from work long enough to grow back a beard without a long intermediate scraggly period that everyone would have to watch emerge.  So, I decided it was time for a change and grew a beard.  I now have essentially the same beard and haircut that I did in my senior year of high school, although I haven't gotten trimming it just so down to the science that I had then.  I'll have to spend some quality time sometime this week giving some real thought to what kind of look facial hair and haircut look I want to develop and how to keep it looking the way that I want it to look.

Most male fashion choices involve small numbers of simple choices with meta rules that guide making each one: khakis or jeans, with jeans being the less formal choice; a business suit that can be navy blue, dark gray or light gray, with dark suits conveying more authority and light gray usually reserved for days when it is warmer.  Dress shoes come in maroon or black.  Black is the default, maroon is a bit classier and calls more attention to you.  Dress socks and belts suitable to wear to a law office client meeting or court come in black and black.  Dress shirts suitable to wear to court come in white, off white, French blue or light blue, with certain combinations of suit colors and shirt colors being forbidden - white is for conveying honesty and neutrality, French blue conveys authority and pretention, the others provide middle ground variety.  The only acceptable jewelry items for men of my generation and sensibilities who are dressing business formal (which is not so formal that one would wear cuff links) are a wrist watch, and a wedding ring or a class ring.  Politicians and war heroes can add a flag lapel tie tack or pin, or a tie tack or pin denoting a military honor.  I keep the time with my cell phone in my pocket, and don't wear any of these items these days.

The world of facial hair presents far more choices and offers far less guidance.  Do you have a full beard?  If so, should it be long or short?  Should it merge with your sideburns?  Are there areas that should be trimmed other than for length?  Should you have just a moustache, and if so should it be narrow or wide, have curly ends or squared off ends, and should it be trimmed above your upper lip?  Should you instead have a goatee?  A soul patch?  Should your facial hair convey sharp edges or soften your look?  Should you have a scraggly stubbly Don Johnson look?  A trimmed area under the chin?  Every alternative makes a fashion statement and there are so many choices.  Your regular hair cutting style choices, which used to be pretty straight forward and small in number, now have become far more complex as they must be evaluated on the basis of how well they interface with your facial hair decisions.

It's a bit ironic that the most exclusively masculine of all fashion options for a man is the one that makes you feel the most empathy for the endless array of amorphous style options that women must make each day.  But, it is a bit a fun change of pace to take on the new creative challenge involved in working it out, which is so entirely different from any other kind of intellectual activity I ever engage in otherwise.

Ouch! 2011 Was Not Kind.

O.K., I admit it, I am often the cobbler whose children have no shoes, a lawyer whose practice includes tax work e-filing his tax return at that last moment on October 15, the extended deadline for filing your 2011 tax returns.

The process revealed just how demanding the 2011 calendar year was compared to the 2010 calendar year.

One of the painful items wasn't actually tax related at all.  In 2010, I was receiving COBRA coverage from a former big law firm employer that laid off everyone in my regional office including me a while back.  In most of 2011, I was receiving group of one health insurance coverage through the Colorado Bar Association which is actually a pretty good deal compared to some of the alternatives.  My deductible increased by about $4,000 a year, but the coverage was otherwise more or less identical and was provided by the same company with no changes in providers.  My premium increased by $3,020 from 2010 to 2011 mostly because I went from being part of a large group to being part of a "group of one."  The change in deductible made little difference in 2011 when my family's out of pocket health insurance expenses were unexceptional, but will make a huge difference this year since two weeks ago, I got back surgery for a squished disk complete with an MRI, another bit of specialized radiology, a neurosurgeon and an anethesiologist.  Basically, my cost of health care went up by about $3,000 from 2010 to 2011 and by an additional $4,700 from 2011 to 2012 between further premium increases and larger out of pocket health care expenses, for precisely the same level of care from precisely the same providers. Ouch!

But, it gets worse.  In 2010, the federal income tax finally treated the health insurance expenses of self-employed people like myself the same way it treats wage and salary earnings.  The health insurance expenses of self-employed people were deducted before computing self-employment taxes, before computing tax credits, and before considering income for any other purpose.

In 2011, the federal income tax law reverted to the old rule, computing self-employment taxes based on before health insurance expenses rather than after.  A random $800 tax credit called the Making Work Pay Credit present in 2010 was absent in 2011, and a number of other less notable provisions were also modified (the self-employment and FICA tax rates were actually lowered by two percentage points for 2011 without a change in the self-employment tax base, although the self-employment and FICA tax rates will go up to a rate higher than it started at in 2013).

I actually started calculating my 2011 taxes under the 2010 rules using last year's return as a model, and then recalculated my taxes for 2011 taxes under the 2011 tax laws that actually apply.  Bottom line, my taxes under the 2011 tax laws were about $3,300 higher than under the 2010 tax laws, something that I hadn't expected because I've had other things on my mind that the annual round of tax law changes.  This in turn, meant that I hadn't paid enough estimated taxes and owe a modest penalty for not paying enough by April 17 of this year.  Double ouch!

Between health care premium increases and federal tax increases between 2010 and 2011, I am about $6,300 worse off (ignoring penalties for failing to pay sufficient estimated taxes) than I would have been had the 2010 tax laws and health insurance premiums been in place and everything else in my life, from law practice revenues to business expenses to everything else in life, had been exactly the same.  The gap due to health care and federal taxes alone for me, between 2010 and 2012 will be something on the order of $12,000, all other things being equal.

This is enough to dampen anyone's recovery, and before the health insurance company and IRS stepped in, 2011 had been looking much better than 2010.  Even with those setbacks, one year further removed from the financial crisis (which hit lawyers with practices like mine very hard), I was still clearly better off by a large margin, but it was a two steps forward and one step back situation that I could do nothing about.

European Secessionist Movements

In Spain, the renewed vigor of the Catalan secessionists movement is gaining a lot of international attention.  The Basque independence movement also appears to be gaining political traction in Spain.

In Belgium, there seems to be little but spit, bubble gum, and a common monarch holding the linguistically divided country's two regions and its mixed leading city together.

Scotland has been making noises of late about gaining greater autonomy, and already has considerable independence in practice from England, with its own legislature, its own judicial system, and a variety of very different laws and governmental institutions than its southern neighbor within the United Kingdom.

While I haven't heard any recent news from Italy, at time, its Northern regions (roughly corresponding to the parts of Italy that were never part of the Kingdom of Sicily), have actively campaigned for independence in the post-World War II era.

There may be other active and viable secessionist movements among E.U. member nations, but I'm not aware of them.

While obviously not European, Quebec for a long time was very keen to secede from Canada, although this impulse seems to have been quite muted in the last few years, and Quebec's French nationalist party took an immense blow at the polls in the most recent Canadian parliamentary election, if I recall correctly.

One theory that has been advanced to explain the rise in regionalism in Europe is that the possibility that the multiple countries arising from a divided country that is an E.U. member might all become members of the E.U. and thus not face all of the economic isolation and reduction in capacity to act collectively in the face of a crisis that a small sovereign state outside of a larger federation would have to deal with has made secession a more attractive option for E.U. member countries facing deep internal cultural divisions.

Another theory is that the break up of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia (and further Kosovo from Serbia), Ethiopia and Sudan in recent memory, have provided evidence that while splitting up a single nation-state into component parts may be painful, that it is not necessarily an intolerable price to pay for autonomy or impossible to achieve, particularly if it can be brought about by political means rather than an insurgency or military intervention.

While some of the divisions involve a deep linguistic divide, in other cases, the divide linguistically does not seem all that deep - just a difference in mutually intelligible dialects within a single language.

What If Colorado Ballot Issue 65 Were Adopted?

Colorado Ballot Issue 65 directs Colorado's state and federal legislators to draft and advocate for a campaign finance constitutional amendment. While it would not be binding even if it was passed, at least some of Colorado's legislators would feel some obligation to at least try to comply with the voter's wishes if it did pass.

What kind of language could someone like me who is very concerned about protections for political speech as a core of our democracy live with? I gave it a shot and came up with the language below as a starting point for discussing the kind of language that might reasonably balance the right to free political speech with concerns about the undue influence of monied interests in American politics.

Overview

The core ideas in the draft, which is set forth verbatim at the bottom of this post, are mostly designed to fairly narrowly constitutionally overrule the notion of corporate personhood in the context of campaign contributions, an issue embodied in the controversial Citizens United case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Sections 1 and 2 provide that a law may constitutionally insist that campaign contributions be traceable to specific, disclosed natural persons and may impose reasonable, uniform, per contributor limits on their contributions to any given political race.

Note that the draft amendment allows any natural person to make contributions in any U.S. political race, even if the person isn't personally allowed to vote in that particular political race or any political race. By implication, however, this language authorizes governments to prohibit of campaign contributions by corporations, unions, non-profits and governments, although it does protect the right of entities to act as intermediaries who bundle contributions from disclosed U.S. voters.

It does not apply prior to the point in time at which a candidate gains ballot access, and does not apply to political speech that does not advocate for particular candidates or pertains to ballot measures. The distinction between ballot measures and candidate races flows from the notion that ballot language can't be "bribed" or influenced by campaign contribution money after it is adopted and show favoritism, while candidates may. Also, the distinction between generally policy discussion and advocacy for ballot measures is muddier than the distinction between advocacy for political candidates.

Section 3 provides political opinion made at a disclosed person or entity's own expense in their own publications, or at no expense financed by a contributor, may not be regulated, even if that person is not otherwise entitled to vote in any election.

This key definitional distinction between contributions and one's own speech is a safe harbor for such traditional political speech forums such as newspaper opinion pages, op-ed columns and letters to the editor, and for church and entity newsletters, websites and blogs.

The existence of this exception largely turns the limitations on campaign finance into time, place and manner restrictions. The distinction between media speech and "corporate" political speech is inherently problematic. There is no obvious reason that Rupert Murdock's media empire should benefit from a safe harbor, while Ben and Jerry of ice cream fame should be highly restricted in the extent to which their corporation may have a political voice.

Section 4 provides that campaign finance law violations may not be used to change electoral results or deprive someone of their political rights.

Fines for campaign finance violations must be proportionate to the office and incarceration for a campaign finance violation must be short. Thus, they must be purely collateral matters whose enforcement can not effectively be used to suppress political dissent or add uncertainty to disputed elections.

A lurking issue here that is not addressed concerns issues related to selective enforcement by winners of elections. For example, a President or state Secretary of State who wins an election might vigorously enforce campaign finance laws after the election against violators who opposed members of his political party while ignoring violators who support members of his political party. Colorado's current Secretary of State, Scott Gessler, has been accused of precisely this kind of behavior. Yet, in general, illegal contributions to election losers who are most at risk of prosecutions for campaign finance violations, are categorically people who made contributions that won't have an ongoing detrimental impact on the political process, while illegal contributors to election winners who are categorically more likely to pose the very kinds of risks that campaign finance laws were designed to address are likely, on average, to be the subject of more lenient and less diligent enforcement efforts. 

The institutional arrangements which might mitigate this important risk are too intricate to include in an amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Sections 5 and 6 address federalism issues.

Section 5 clarifies issues of subject matter and long arm jurisdiction of courts where campaign finance laws are enforced. Section 6 provides that campaign finance laws for elections to offices and ballot issues in a particular governmental entity may only be enacted by that governmental entity and are subject to any constitutional limits established by that governmental entity's constitution.

I don't expect that either of these sections are particularly controversial beyond the controversy over the substance of the limitations allowed. These provisions are common sense rules of the road that are helpful because there are a number of other alternative rules of the road that could also be fought over if an express statement weren't included.

Is this good policy?

Is it good to suppress anonymous political speech?

One aspect of this proposal, about which I am ambivalent, is that it effectively criminalizes a significant chunk of anonymous political speech. Yet, this kind of speech, in the form of documents like the Federalist Papers, that was pivotal in our country's founding and is also very important to the political arm of any revolutionary political movement.  One of the important features of the free political speech and democracy is to make democratic processes more attractive than extra-legal action and these proposals have the potential to bias political movements against buying into the democratic process.

This harm is mitigated by the fact that it applies only once the choice to proceed via the democratic process has been made by candidates and advocates of ballot measures and the candidates and proponents of the ideas behind the ballot measures have thus already escaped the most obvious routes by which they could be suppressed. A call for a revolution or new set of policies that wasn't on a ballot anywhere isn't governed by this amendment. Neither is an expression of opinion about specific pending legislation that voters do not have a direct say upon. Hence, it has no impact on grass roots lobbying of already elected officials.

Is it good to suppress overt corporate or union political contributions?

Another aspect of this proposal is that it deprives entities, which already lack a right to vote of their own, of even the possibility of a meaningful collective voice. Why shouldn't what the Federalist papers called "factions" and specifically contemplated would play an important role in American politics, have a voice in their capacity as "factions" rather than merely through members of that faction.

Is it so bad that a union or corporation be able to use its economic power to express its opinion on a candidate or ballot issue?

Often a disclosed union or corporate campaign contribution will have practical value to a voter by helping a voter to evaluate which corporations and unions believe that they will be helped or hurt by a candidate or ballot measure, something that can help both supporters of the corporate or union position and opponents of the corporate or union position.

For example, in school board elections, knowing the institutional affiliation of donors to school board candidates is often the most informative way to learn the policy leanings of candidates whose public statements are often vague or indistinguishable from other candidates.

When contributions are made by natural persons who are affiliated with a corporation or union, people who want to trace the source of the money have to do large numbers of mini-private investigations to connect the dots that would otherwise be obvious if direct corporate or union contributions were allowed. Breaking contributions down to natural persons can be effective at limiting the capacity of wealth to give someone excess political power, but it can actually undermine the disclosure aspect of campaign finance regulation.

Do contribution limitations make politics cleaner?

A core belief that drives a large share of all campaign finance regulation is the belief that campaign contributions can be used to effectively bribe candidates who eventually do get elected to take legislative action on their behalf, thereby distorting the political process. Most campaign finance reform advocates (e.g. Common Cause) see campaign contribution limitations as just one form of anti-corruption legislation. The trouble is that the way that campaign contributions influence the political process is considerably more complicated.

For one thing, more often than not, campaign contributors use their money to back candidates who have already adopted political positions that favor them before they even considered running for public office.

The conventional notion of a bribe involves the use of money to change how someone would act, but in the case of campaign finance, the purported recipient of the bribe is getting money to do what he or she would have done anyway in most cases.

Requirements that campaign contributors be "independent" of the candidate in some situations and not coordinate with the candidate aren't all that effective at addressing the fact that monied interests often prefer one candidate to another and can use their funds to advance their preference effectively without any interaction with the candidate at all. Indeed, they may be able to take actions that are more effective when the candidate can truthfully deny any involvement in the actions of their proxies and even complain about those proxy actions, than they could have been if the candidate that they favor could be held more directly responsible for their advertising conduct.

Campaign contributions also don't bribe voters.

Generally speaking, campaign contributions are not used to provide personal gain to any outcome determinative number of voters. They may be used to hire a few sign making companies and pay money to television stations and newspapers (in both cases, the same companies and media outlets often receive money from both sides of many races), and to hire campaign workers who may feel some loyalty to the person who paid them money for their services but often supported the candidate or issue before they were hired anyway.

Direct bribery of voters as an important political tool pretty much died with progressive era civil service, government procurement, and anti-machine politics election law reforms by the 1920s at the latest, except for a certain amount of pay to play politics by construction companies looking for road building bids and municipal bond industry officials. Indeed, campaign contributions are generally spent on mailings and political advertisements that annoy the voters they are targeted at, even when they are effective. When it comes to imparting personal economic gain to voters, campaign advertisements (which is where most of the money goes) are almost "anti-bribes" that low the personal utility of a voter.

The impact of campaign contributions is almost entirely dervived from the content of the speech it directs at voters. And, one of the core ideas of American political theory is that voters should be making decisions influenced only by political speech.

Keep in mind also, that a great many voters actually have less information about the candidates that they will be voting upon than would be optimal.

While a considerable amount of money is spent on political campaigns, a lot of the spending by candidates themselves goes towards name recognition advertising that more often than not even deliberately fails to disclose or downplays the candidate's political party affiliation.

Almost no private campaign contribution funds are devoted to the kind of comprehensive, even handed evaluation of candidates and ballot measures (especially below the top of the ticket) that would be most useful to voters - non-profits good government groups (like the League of Women Voters), government agencies (like the bodies that prepare the information packets that Colorado voters receive), unpaid or minimally paid bloggers, and the mass media continue to have a near monopoly on this kind of analysis.

People who dislike unlimited campaign contributions also tend to dislike "negative campaigning" and "attack ads", despite the fact that this kind of advertising tends to be the most effective in swaying voters. The sense that too much money is spent on political campaigns is driven to a considerable degree by the feeling that these kinds of ads have negative value because they can be misleading and because the undermine the civility of the political process.

There is, of course, no necessary connection between misleading campaign advertising and the amount of money spent on political advertising.

Campaign contribution limits also have institutional effects that are the opposite of those intended from an anti-bribery perspective. They force candidates for public office to spend money time raising money and make candidates beholden to more contributors. Since almost all contributors have more money than the vast majority of rank and file voters, widening the necessary base of contributors makes all candidates more beholden to the wishes of the class of people affluent enough to make some kind of political contribution relative to the wishes of people who can't make any political contributions, since a contributor whose political views are at odds with the vast majority of people affluent enough to contribute at all can't contribute enough to allow a candidate to ignore other members of that affluent class of individuals.  Put another way, campaign contribution limits favor the upper middle class to the detriment of rich progressives whose views are at odds with most of the rest of the upper class and upper middle class.

There are other ways that campaign contribution limits are problematic, not least among them being how very hard it is to prevent loopholes from swallowing the general rules restricting campaign contributions and spending in any meaningful way consistent with any kind of even minimal protection of First Amendment rights related to political speech.

For all those reasons, I do not believe that campaign finance regulation, in general, and campaign contribution limitations, in particular, do much good. Narrower efforts to limit the political influence of big corporations are even more futile.

But, lots of people, particularly liberals, have personal political world views that see a class of politicians controlled by corporate money and power as the root of most of the world's social ills, and if you believe this, crude campaign contribution limitations and a ban on corporate campaign contributions is the natural lynch pin of any plan to achieve progress on any other issue by political means. To those people, I would say that while this makes lots of superficial sense, it simply is not an effective tool to achieve that end and there are lots of process tools that would be much more effective (like finding ways to dramatically increase the share of eligible voters who actually vote through changes in the political process).

Draft Campaign Finance Amendment Language

Section 1: The Constitution of the United States of America, as amended, shall not prohibit Congress, State or an elected governing body of a federal territory, commonwealth or district, from passing laws requiring all contributions to another, that are used to advocate for or against, in the name of anyone other than the contributor, a candidate who has been authorized to appear on the ballot in for any elective office in a specific election be traceable by members of the public to one or more publicly disclosed natural persons, subject to such exceptions or exclusions as are provided by such a law. This amendment does not apply to political discussion that does not advocate for or against a candidate who has been authorized to appear on a ballot for a specific election for a specific office.

Section 2: A law permitted by Section 1 of this Amendment may set a limit, which is uniform for elected to the same legislative body or the same legislative office, on the maximum amount of contributions subject to such disclosure requirements that a natural person may make in a single election cycle for that office, in connection with a particular elective office, provided that this limitation may not be unreasonable small relative to amounts spent to advocate for or against candidates of that kind before the law was adopted, and provided that the amount is adjusted for inflation accruing after the law is adopted in each new election cycle. In the case of any candidate for the United States House of Representative, the United States Senate, or a ticket of candidates for President and Vice President (and any electors pledged to such candidates), an initial limit on contributions shall be not less than $5,000 per person per election cycle for that particular elective office.

Section 3: Neither Congress, nor any State shall make any law that prohibits or require disclosure from any person, or for profit, non-profit or cooperative entity with a substantial existence and purpose apart from political advertising and advocacy, in connection with the any publication in a publication controlled by that person or entity, of that person or entity's own opinions regarding any candidate for any office, for which that person or entity does not receive separate payment from any contributor, which are disclosed as that person's opinion or as the entity's own opinions or as the opinion of a disclosed editorial board of an entity. Likewise, neither Congress, nor any State shall make any law that prohibits or require disclosure from a person or entity whose opinions regarding any candidate for any office are published with no expense to the person or entity stating the opinion, if the publication of this opinion is not paid for by any contributor.

Section 4: No penalty for a violation of a law authorized by this amendment shall alter in any way the outcome of any election. No fine or monetary penalty or forfeiture for any particular violation of such a law shall not be in excess of (1) the actual cost including attorneys' fees in bringing the action, (2) three times the amount of any contribution made in excess of the limits established by law, and (3) the full amount of any contribution which would have been lawful had it been disclosed. No one may be incarcerated prior to trial solely for a violation of such a law and any criminal penalty for a violation of such a law shall be more serious than a misdemeanor, shall not cause a forfeiture of the political rights of the person so convicted before or after conviction, and shall not be punishable by more than six months of incarceration.

Section 5: The federal courts of the United States of America with jurisdiction over all or part of the geographic area in which resident voters are entitled to vote on the candidate with respect to which a contribution is made, shall have jurisdiction over any action to enforce any such law against anyone, anywhere in the world, provided however that the courts of a State shall have exclusive jurisdiction over any action by a State or subdivision of a State or any natural person or any entity to enforce any such law enacted in that State against a resident of that State.

Section 6: This amendment does not pre-empt provisions in state or local or territorial or commonwealth or district organic documents or constitutions prohibiting such laws. No State, or elected governing body of a federal territory, commonwealth or district shall pass any law requiring the disclosure or, of limiting, contributions to advocate for or against a candidate for the United States House of Representative, the United States Senate, or a ticket of candidates for President and Vice President (and any electors pledged to such candidates), regulating in any way contributions to advocate for or against a candidates for elected office in any jurisdiction other than its own.

GOP 7th CD Candidate Joe Coors Really Dumb

Business columnist Al Lewis explains an incident that illustrates that Joe Coors is one of the most gullible millionaires on the planet, making it clear that he is not smart enough to be a Congressman. He also points out that:

Mr. Perlmutter [the Democratic 7th CD incumbent] was a partner in a growing law firm that specializes in commercial litigation. He once hired Mr. Coors's own daughter as an attorney. So Mr. Coors's opponent has not only created jobs, he's created them for Mr. Coors's own family.

2012 Colorado Ballot Issues and Election Preview

Colorado State Ballot Issues in 2012

There are three state ballot issues this year in Colorado.

* Vote Yes on Issue S.

Issue S would amend the state constitution to modernize the state civil service system, a measure that made it onto the ballot only because it had bipartisan support and has no organized opposition. It is a carefully drafted good government measure that every voter should support. But, similar efforts have failed to pass in the past.
 
* Vote Yes on Issue 64.

Issue 64 is a carefully and thoughtfully drafted measure that would legalize recreational possession of marijuana for personal consumption at the state level in a taxed and regulated manner by people aged twenty-one and older that is parallel to Colorado's medical marijuana regime. Denver has already taken this step at the local level, and localities would retain considerable regulatory authority of the recreational marijuana industry. Due to the local control elements of Issue 64, the commerical side of the marijuana trade would likely be similar to gambling when the dust settles - it would be legal in perhaps a dozen jurisdictions and the rest would prohibit it out of NIMBY concerns and miss out on the economic benefits of deregulation.

Medical marijuana laws in Colorado which President Obama originally decided not to interfere with and has hence given the go ahead for federal law enforcement agencies to subject to incremental efforts to curb, would remain unchanged and have been a great success overall. Medical marijuana has not increased crime, has made treatments shown to work in published academic studies for certain conditions available to people who benefit from them without criminalizing them, has pushed disputes in the supply chain to the courts rather than the streets, gave the state's commercial landlords a critical boost in the middle of a real estate downturn, has generated considerable tax revenue from people who want to pay taxes and want to be regulated, and almost every single dollar spent on medical marijuana goes straight back into the Colorado economy to pay for labor reducing unemployment and strengthening the local economy. Medical marijuana has not driven up use of other drugs and even I, a strong proponent of it, don't disagree that some of the early prescriptions for it had a very thin medical basis and were basically recreational with a doctor's blessing.

There is no doubt that all of the commerce authorized by Issue 64 would be illegal under federal criminal laws and that federal law pre-empts state law in this instance. There is federal case law directly on point. The President could devote immense resources to having the federal government pick up the state and local slack in marijuana enforcement. But, few other states provide a more likeable test case for ending the drug war at least in part through decriminalization.

Marijuana is substantively less addictive and harmful to the public than alcohol and many other criminalized psychoactive drugs. Marijuana can be home grown preventing it from giving rise to large scale interstate drug trafficing rings. Colorado has a successful recent history and adminstrative skill set for regulating the industry reasonably. And, marijuana prohibition has grown publicly unpopular nationwide and in particular in Colorado. Also, the passage of Issue 64, even if the federal government chooses to enforce marijuana laws in the state leaves the specter of jury nullification as a likely possiblity in every single marijuana prosecution and a few jury nullification acquittals could quickly dampen federal interest in taking a crackdown approach.

Even if all that happens under Issue 64 is that Colorado successfully shifted the budgetary burden of enforcing marijuana prohibition from state and local government to the federal government, this is a win for Colorado taxpayers.

* Vote No on Issue 65.  But, what the voter's decide doesn't really matter.

Issue 65 urges state and federal legislators to pass a U.S. constitutional amendment legalizing campaign finance contribution dollar limitations, something the the Citizens United case, prior cases, and one follow up case, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution severely limit.

This measure is mostly irrelevant. It is a preference polls or suggestion that has no binding legal effect. Unlike many ill conceived proposals that Colorado Common Cause has helped to draft, it doesn't have the minutae of details that leave room for mischief. Most people agree with the concept of campaign finance limitations, although the U.S. Supreme Court hasn't been wrong in concluding that there are grave threats to constitutionally important issues of political free speech that are implicated by campaign finance limitations. Drafting a suitably narrow constitutional amendment that has real effect while not closing the door to vigorous democratic debate when ill intentioned politicians implement is a difficult and perhaps insoluable problem.

I personally think that campaign finance contribution limitations are a fundamentally flawed approach to addressing the problems of excessive influence by economically powerful individuals and institutions. Laws requiring transparency in campaign financing, moderate levels of public funding for election campaigns, and improved election laws are much better solutions that are far less prone to being hijacked or gamed. But, because this measure is merely a suggestion and lacks the poor drafting endemic to campaign finance measures, my opposition to Issue 65 is more tepid than almost any other campaign finance reform proposal that I have seen.

In a best case scenario, if Colorado and other states start to pass the measures, the constitutional amendment Colorado's state and federal legislators are urged to adopt never passes, but the U.S. Supreme Court crafts a judicial loophole to its First Amendment case law that provides a workable option for addressing the campaign contribution excesses almost akin to bribery that has undermined the faith that so many people do have in the political system.

Major Federal Partisan Race Redux

* Vote For Democrats in All Federal Elections

Polling suggests that every bit of campaigning effort in Colorado will matter this year. It is almost impossible for Romney to assemble the necessary 270 electoral votes without taking Colorado, and Colorado is a true swing state this year in which neither candidate has a lead so strong that it can shift hands in a matter of days. Romney needs to win essentially every toss up state and some Democratic leaning states to win the Presidency or tied up the race to throw it to the House of Representative to resolve.

Close Congressional races in the 3rd (Southern and Western Colorado), 6th (South and East suburban Denver and Aurora more or less), and 7th (North and West surburban Denver) all have the potential to go either way and influence which party has a majority in the U.S. House of Representative and by how much. This is the first election cycle after redistricting for these seats, so there is considerable uncertainty regarding how the incumbents will fare in new and less favorable districts (in the 3rd and 6th with Republicans hold) and in a new and somewhat more favorable district in the 7th (which Democrats hold). Odds makers favor the incumbents in all three of these races, but not heavily.

Colorado State Legislative Race Redux

* Vote For Democrats In All State Legislative Elections

Republicans currently hold a one seat majority in the sixty-five member Colorado State House, in which all seats are contested every two years. Since this is the first election cycle after redistricting and the quality of data and analysis at this level is much patchier than at the Congressional district level, more uncertainty is lurking.

Democrats have a more firm hold of the Colorado State Senate going into the election, only half of incumbent state sentators face voters this year, so the election is far less likely to change control of the state senate.

In both cases, the state legislative redistricting maps are widely viewed as favoring Democrats and Democrats are helped by the increased voter turnout in Presidential elections, so the advantage should be with Democrats in state legislative races this year.

Colorado Local Ballot Issues and Local Candidate Races

There are a number of notable local ballot issues and candidate races this year.  Many seek voter authorization for new spending and debt authority for local governments, which TABOR (the taxpayer's bill of rights) obligates governments to obtain before the taxes are levied and the debt is incurred.  Most of the time, I concur with the elected officials proposing these measures that the revenue or debt is needed.  Most voters most of the time agree with me on this point.

A number of District Attorney districts have contested DA races this year, the most interesting of which is the contested seat to fill the seat left open by controversial 18th Judicial District Attorney Carol Chambers who is term limited, where the Republican Sheriff of Araphahoe County and a recent former Republican District Attorney have endorsed the Democratic Party candidate in the race.

There are also a variety of other notable ballot issues and candidate races.

These will be discussed in a future post coming soon.

Colorado Judicial Retention Elections

In Colorado, almost all judges are nominated by blue ribbon committees, appointed by the Governor, and then subject to "retention elections" after two years in office and then after a longer period of time based on the particular judgeship in question.  One Colorado Supreme Court Justice (Justice Coats) and a number of Colorado Court of Appeals judges face retention elections this year statewide.  There are also a host of retention elections for the state's general jurisdiction court judges (District Judges), some speciality court judges in Denver, and many limited jurisdiction court judges (County Court Judges).

If a majority of voters casting ballots on retention cast no votes, the judge is not retained, and a vacancy is created for the Governor to fill (there is some slight variation in the pattern in Denver).

A state commission interviews every judge facing a retention election and surveys lawyers, court officials and non-lawyer litigants regarding the judges facing retention elections and reports the results and makes a recommendation.  In all but the most egregious cases, the recommendation is to retain the judge and usually the recommendation is unanimous.  The results are distributed in a pamphlet sent to every voter who votes on the judge in question.  These recommendations generally say almost nothing about the ideology of the candidate except to sometime disclose a perception of a prosecution or defense bias in criminal cases.

Often informal pressure from the commission or decisions not to seek retention or to retire from the judicial ethics body in the state keeps judges who would not receive retention recommendations from facing voter's wrath.  The appointment process also keeps most of the most volatile and unqualified candidates for judicial office who might be elected by voters or appointed by a purely political process in other states from ending up on the bench in the first place.

Judges can also be removed by impeachment in Colorado, but this almost never happens.  It is far more rare even than losing a retention election.

Most non-retention votes are driven by a personal controversy the judge is embroiled in with ethical dimensions, or by a controversial and unpopular decision in a very small number of high profile cases that the judge was involved in (even if the decisions were legally correct), rather than an overall pattern of subpar performance.

I am not a personal fan of the judicial retention election part of Colorado's judicial personnel process, even though I have nothing but praise for the manner in which it appoints its judges and have a guarded but positive view of the judicial discipline process. 

I would favor a process that is more selective in deciding which judges should face retention contests and one with more informed decision makers.  For example, I would prefer a system in which the Colorado Supreme Court, which is most informed about the matter, rather than the general public, made retention decisions regarding Colorado Court of Appeals judges.  Similarly, I would favor a system in which Colorado Court of Appeal judges made retention decisions for District Court judges, and in which District Court judges made retention decisions for County Court judges in their district.  I would leave voters with a say only over Colorado Supreme Court judges and over judges facing retention elections specifically flagged either by recall petitions with thresholds similar to those for DA or statewide or county official as the case might be, or by some threshold of performance set by the judicial retention commission for voter review (perhaps anything other than a unanimous vote to retain).  Thus, rather than having dozens of judicial retention elections on the ballot each year about which few voters know anything, there would be just a handful of the most salient  races statewide every year.

But, while these elections clutter the ballot and rely on usually ill informed opinions, the overall judicial appointment and removal process in Colorado is still one of the best in the nation overall.

In general, my attitude is to set higher standard for judicial retention than the state commission that makes retention election recommendations, and to vote no on retaining a judge whenever there are any signs in the judicial commission report that a significant minority of any class of people do not favor a judge's retention or there are any other material shortcomings in the judge's performance.  I also vote not to retain judges whom I have personal knowledge of any case in which the judge's performance has been questionable.  And, when as this year, I have a Governor I trust to make new appointments wisely, I vote not to retain judges who may be exemplary in the non-partisan components of their jobs but whose judicial ideology I am familiar with and disagree with on the merits. (See also this 2010-2011 summary of Colorado Supreme Court Justice ideologies.)

It is for the last reason that I will be voting not to retain Colorado Supreme Court Justice Coats.  His is by all accounts an ethical and diligent judge.  Unlike Wisconsin where they have had physical brawls in the Court chambers, every member of the Colorado Supreme Court conducts himself or herself in a civilized and professional manner.  Justice Coates also never fails to articulate a basis for his rulings in opinions that are at least par for the course for an appellate judge.  But, I disagree with his judicial ideology and approach to legal interpretation.

The most common split in Colorado Supreme Court is a five to two split with five "moderate liberals" in the majority, and two "conservatives" in the minority (there are plenty of cases that are decided unanimously and all manner of other voting alignments turn up now and then, the divide is not universal or monolithic).  I read a great many Colorado Supreme Court decisions.  With only very rare exceptions, I usually feel that the five judge faction's substantive judicial determination is a better intepretation of the law on the merits than the two judge minority faction.  The judges in that two judge "conservative" faction are Justice Eid and Justice Coats.  Between the two, Justice Eid is a bit sharper in her legal analysis and writing (on the writing score she is the rivial of any U.S. Supreme Court justice in recent memory) but ideologically in about the same place as Justice Coates. 

Both of these Justices, in my opinion, are somewhere to the ideological right U.S. Supreme Court Justices Kennedy and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice O'Connor, and somewhere a bit to the ideological left of U.S. Supreme Court Justices Thomas, Scalia and Alito.  These two judges are probably the closest match ideologically to Chief Justice of the United States Wiliam Rehnquist.

In my view, it is legitimate to make a judical retention election decision based on on judicial ideology and mode of legal interpretation, even though the commission that makes retention election decisions doesn't consider this factor and even though that commission has unanimously recommended that he be retained and did not receive exceptionally high level of dissent in the surveys regarding his performance.  Indeed, the real reason to have judicial retention elections, in my view, is to allow the public to weigh in on issues of judicial ideology.

It is much harder to weigh Colorado Court of Appeal judges because they write so many opinions, because they set on many varied panels that make their rulings harder to analyze, and because there are so many more of them.  Nothing in the judicial retention commission report suggests that any of them should not be retained, all were unanimously recommended for retention, and at least one of them, Judge Casebolt, I have a personally high opinion of him (I notice his opinions because he was formerly an attorney at a firm were I worked a long time ago).

I may address judicial retention elections for notable trial judges and for other members of the Colorado Court of Appeals, in a future post.
 
Colorado Voter Registration Redux

In early September, Republicans had a 72,585 voter edge in that category - or 4.6 percent. One month later, that edge has shrunk to 30,347 voters - 1.6 percent overall. 

From Fox 31 via Colorado Pols.

The Republican voter edge going into the election is really greater than raw voter registration numbers would suggest, because Republicans vote more reliably than Democrats.  Democratic voter registration gains are a combination of hard work registering voters and the fact that there are more unregistered voters to register.  Overall, there are about 3.6 million registered voters in Colorado.

Despite their voter registration edge, the difficulty that Republicans face going into the election is that independents have in recent years in Colorado, more often ultimately voted for Democrats than for Republicans.

Colorado Election Administration

Ballots will begin to be mailed to non-military voters this Monday, October 15 (at least where I live), and votes will begin to be cast the next day, three weeks before the November 6, 2012 election day. This greatly limits the impact of any "October surprise" on election outcomes in Colorado, but the most fickle voters also tend to be procrastinators, so there is still considerable room for last minute factors to influence voting outcomes.

Republican Secretary of State Scott Gessler has been severely criticized for his handling of a variety of election administration issues and of his own financial and ethical dealings with the Colorado Department of State by the state county clerk's assocation (whose executive director is a former Republican Clerk and Secretary of State), and the press, and rightly so.  Most recently, as many as thousands of voters seeking to register to vote may have been denied that opportunity on the October 9, 2012 registration deadline for this year's Presidential election due to entirely foreseeable computer hiccups in his office's voter registration system.

So far as I know, a high profile fight over mailing ballots to inactive voters (a term far to rigorously defined under Colorado election law) remains in play in the courts, just days from the date for mailing ballots.

Gessler's highly hyped claim that there were as many as 11,000 non-citizens on Colorado's voter rolls in the end revealed less than 200 possible non-citizens on the rolls many of whom may be exonorated in uncoming hearings, while harassing thousands of legistimate voters.  Only 35 people over the court of five elections, no more than eight in any one county, were found to have been possible non-citizen voters and these cases again, are instances where hearings have not been held and government paperwork errors could be at fault.  Republican misconduct in the voter registration process in the 2012 election has produced more fraud and that is being prosecuted.

American Flying Saucer Program Declassified

A classified American-Canadian flying saucer military aircraft program that dovetails neatly with the Hollywood stereotypes from the Roswell era and beyond was officially declassified last month.

The Cultural Foundations Of Secular America

As I noted in a post earlier today, secular Americans are most common in the West, then the Northeast, then the Midwest, and then the South. More whites are secular than blacks and Hispanics, although Asian-Americans are more secular.

One of the leading secular organizations in the United States, the American Ethical Union, has its roots in Jews who lived in or derived from New York City Jews. Another, the American Humanist Association, is basically an offshoot of the Unitarian-Universalist movement, two denominations that have their roots in Boston. The Unitarians were derived from the Congregational church which was derived from the establishment Puritan church of New England (the Trinitarian offshoot of the Congregation Church was the United Church of Christ).  Both offshoots emerged as independent denominations in the early 1800s when the Congregational church was disestablished.  The Universalists were a working class white storefront church movement that began at about the same time in Boston. New England Transcendentalists and Revolutionary era deists (mostly, but not entirely from the Northeast) were also important in the legacy of secular America. 

Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher whose most important works (e.g. "Why I am not a Christian.") were published in the early 20th century were part of the New York City intellectual scene when he found an appointment as a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York after being discharged from his post at Cambridge and jailed for six months by being an active British Pacifist during World War I.  He would in due course be discharged from his CUNY post in the 1940s in the face of complaints about his undue openness in a philosophical treatment of marital sexuality, his atheism and his pacifism.  Sometime after that point, he returned to his native England, although he would face arrest and be jailed again for anti-war protests as an elderly man.

All of this is somewhat ancient history, however.  The percentage of Americans who identified as not religious was pretty much constant until around 1990, after which it has steadily increased.  The study that produced an academic understanding of the historical roots of the modern secular movement in the United States took place mostly after the people driving that movement  were aware of it and had made their cultural and religious choices in their guts.

Unitarian-Universalism wasn't reformulated as a para-Christian or post-Christian denomination until the 1960s and 1970s, which is also about the time of an important wave of modern East Asian migration, an increasing popularization of Eastern religious ideas, a time when many traditional cultural ideas in the United States and the West were challenged, a time when birth control (a constitutional right to which was established in a Connecticut case) and the feminism more generally upset gender roles, a time when gay rights first emerged (Yankee settled San Francisco and Northeastern New York City were its epicenters), when the Boy Scouts of America began to welcome non-Christians (but not atheists and agnostics) into their ranks, and when advanced in disciplines like physics, genetics, linguistics, paleobotany, historical biblical criticism, and anthropology began to put the nail in the intellectual coffin of a literal reading of the Book of Genesis and the Evangelical Christian world view. More Eastern religious influence followed Southeast Asians who joined American lovers, parents and allies with whom they had made contact during the Vietnam war.

American secularism surged not then, but a generation later, when the children born once this cultural revolution had really embedded itself in their entire lives (and their parents' and teachers' attitudes about raising them), reached adulthood. 

The rise in secularism was also was a reaction to the emergence in the 1980s of the conservative, anti-intellectual, and mostly Southern and rural Evangelical Christian movement as a political force and the face of Christianity (a movement itself energized by political and cultural resistance to a Yankee driven civil rights movement with roots as old as the abolition movement and after that, the post-Civil War Reconstruction, and further empowered by Eisenhower era, anti-Soviet motivated governmental ceremonial Christian observances), which the more liberal liturgical and Black Protestant Christians who had fought the Civil Rights movement together never really effectively rebutted in the political and public sphere with an alternative image of Christianity. 

This Evangelical Christian movement that claimed to speak for Christianity generally without an effective rebuttal, espoused a set of values and an approach to understanding what the Bible commanded of Christians that was utterly foreign to mainline white Christians in New England, the Pacific Northwest, San Francisco, much of the Northern Midwest, and immigrants from Western Europe.  These mainline Christians had been raised to believe in a tolerant, social gospel Christianity far removed from the de-emphasized pronouncements of Saint Paul's epistles and Old Testament rules designed for the culture of honor of Jewish herders and warrior-conquerors who had ceased to exist around the time of the Jewish diaspora a thousand years after their laws were committed to writing.  Examining the claims made by Evangelical Christians made young Northern Christians aware of parts of the Christian tradition and doctrine they would never have been aware of and hence, never repulsed by, otherwise.  Their local clergy didn't make these points, but weren't very effective in forcefully disavowing them and condemning Evangelical Christians as not very Christian themselves either. 

While the churches that they were raised in supported the values that they held, they did not need churches to find ways to live the values that they were taught in church growing up in a nation where tolerance and the social gospel were the values of the secure establishment culture and a part of the secular law.  In contrast, Evangelical Christianity preserved the culture of the American South which was in the wake of the Civil Rights movement's successes more threatened than it has been since Reconstruction, while Roman Catholicism was also a haven for preserving old world culture for many Hispanic immigrants, and Black Protestant churches were a haven in which a black culture that had never been an elite culture in the larger world almost anywhere sustained itself.  The young people who have become America's non-religious people were mostly drawn from the ranks of people who didn't need religion to provide a haven for their values and cultural ideas because their values and culture were the elite and dominant culture of the United States already.  Also, their parents had already disrupted the one powerful role that mainline Christianity had continued to provide in the North until then, the notion that the church was central in the script of the life cycle of birth, coming of age, marriage and death.  Their counterculture biographies, the generation gap between them and their parents, feminism, and the divorce culture that emerged at this point in time, all proved otherwise and undermined the cultural authority of the church for mainline white Christians in the process.

Science was increasingly making it possible to have a worldview that didn't need religion to fill the gaps, so a search for a new religious home after young adults rejected the Christianity that they were born into wasn't such an urgent task.  Their affluent upbringing compared to their ancestors also removed from their lives much of the uncertainty that drives a psychological need to call upon metaphysical favor.  These were children raised to believe in meritocracy and the security of the social safety net.

This generation also had the example of the dramatic secular shift of Western Europe, and increasing awareness of a more secular approach to an increasingly modern life in Asia to look to as well.  The most secular places in America today already had an instinctual opposition to Dixie cultural initiatives.  These regions saw large waves on immigration from less Christian Europe and and Asia into many professional caste positions in the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.  In the case of the Northeast, an existing history of integration of Jews into the ranks of the previously WASP elites in the 1960s, in addition to non-Christian or only nominally Christian immigrants and the need to accommodate the religious diversity that had long existed there, created elite tolerance in both the Northeast and the Pacific Coastal states for a critical mass of non-Christians and heterodox Christians in daily elite life.

Meanwhile, at this point in time, Evangelical Christianity had come close to becoming an unofficially established religion, with only very modest mainline Christian minorities often themselves denominationally divided on North-South lines, and very few Catholics or Jews or Lutheran or Mormons or Orthodox Christians in much of the South.  In the South, it was only by the 1970s and 1980s that Northerners, a large share of whom were part of economic elites, began to migrate into the South's economically developing urban centers in large numbers, creating communities of white and Asian "carpet baggers" who did not share a sense of cultural solidarity with the native Southern whites who preceded them.  Others, inspired by the Civil Rights movement, moved South precisely to reform the South culturally, taking up a cause that had been abandoned when New England school teachers had been dispatched back to the North by local schools after Reconstruction ended. 

Some of the migrants assimilated, but many who moved to the South with no desire to become a part of Southern culture, did not. They were lured by the power to make good money transforming the South's economy into one consistent with their outsider's vision in a place that the Civil Rights movement had made more culturally tolerable, or as cultural missionaries seeking to reform the South's culture, not by a desire to join the ranks of likeminded people and share their historic vision of civilization themselves.

Cheaper and more widely available long distance telephone service, Hollywood and New York centered mass media, cheap long distance travel on commercial jet airplanes, Civil Rights laws suppression of local political power in the South, Warren Court era suppression of government limitations on freedom of conscience with roots deep in William Penn's colonial America, and eventually, the Internet, dramatically limited the social and legal pressure that Southern communities could impose on migrants who didn't want to assimilate local cultural norms.   So, some cultural foundation for a smaller but more motivated secular minority was put in place in the South as well, and then promptly threatened by an Evangelical Christian movement that had made a move to take political power and restore some measure of established religion on its communities. 

Notably, in my own home in Colorado, the secular organizations in the Evangelical Christian hotbed of Colorado Springs with Southern cultural roots, are much better organized and militant, despite having smaller numbers of non-religious people to draw from than in more secular Denver with Yankee cultural roots.  There is scarcely any organized secular movement at all in Pueblo, even further to the South, with long standing Southwestern American roots dating back to old Mexico and a tradition of casual and less militant and less political Roman Catholicism.

Why didn't the United States experience secularization when Western Europe did?

1.  In most of Europe, an expressly Christian Democratic party embroiled Christianity in politics in the immediate post-war period, mobilizing parties of the left to be openly anti-religious much earlier  than in the U.S. where few political forces had so explicitly aligned themselves with religious factions until the 1980s.

2.  A history of dominant established religious denominations weakened the need for churches to adapt themselves to win enthusiastic voluntary participation from their members, so when society collapsed after World War II, their religious institutions were less vital.  Competition for centuries and an absence of strong governmental support had made American religious organizations institutionally stronger.  Moreover, the need of Europe's established religions to remain acceptable to the rulers of the states they relied upon for their established status, prevented the anti-authority, anti-intellectual, fundamentalist Christian that had been endemic in America at least a century by World War II from emerging.  England and Europe generally had exported their most hard core religious dissenters to the United States for centuries and kept their own faiths tame and less threatening to establishment values in the process.

3.  European religious institutions, by and large, weren't strengthened as a means of protecting immigrant cultural traditions or outside a few notable exceptions like Ireland, of protecting local cultural traditions from elites imposed by outsiders.  Europe is mostly not a continent of recent immigrants (or wasn't anyway, during the period of European secularization).  In contrast, in the United States, a nation of immigrants that received a major new wave of immigration in connection with World War II, there were always many more relatively young immigrant churches whose cultural preservation role kept them vital.

4.  World War II was fought on lines that bridged the historical Protestant-Catholic-Orthodox religious divides of Europe on both side of the conflict rather than being a conflict framed by historic religious boundaries.  Catholic French waged war against Catholic Germans.  Nazis were both Protestant and Catholic united by nationalism and language despite their division religiously.  Much Nazi symbolism while anti-Jewish, was imagined in the tradition of an ahistorical form of Aryan paganism, and the Axis powers included the non-Christian Japanese.  Protestant Christians in Britain allied themselves with the secular Soviet Union and identified with the secularist left that lost the Spanish Civil War.  As a result, World War II didn't mobilize people on religious lines against foreign religious threats in the same way.  Instead, the Nazis were cast as uber-conservatives encouraging the whole of European society to a generally liberal reaction in the immediate aftermath of the war.  Even respectable European conservatism was wary of straying into the realm of fascism and wary of the Nazi use of superstition to consolidate power.

5.  The more comprehensive social safety net enacted in the post-war period after seeing how its absence had helped fuel the Nazi movement reduced uncertainty in daily lives and the instinct to turn to prayer to deal with uncertainty.  Also, almost every place in Europe had some period of anti-clerically inclined democratic socialist rule.  In the U.S., in contrast, anti-Soviet sentiment fueled conservative political gains and anti-secular sentiment as the Cold War arrived, and the social safety net remained relatively weak even after the New Deal.

6.  World War II utterly interrupted the forces of tradition almost everywhere, while there was no interregenum of disrupted traditional authority in the United States until the Civil Rights movement was successful.  The United States held elections as usual in 1942 and 1944, right in the middle of World War II.

7.  Very little of the immigration that disrupted cultural patterns in the Northeast and West had parallel levels of immigration to the South or to the rural Great Plains until after the Civil Rights era because the stagnant economy there (employment-wise anyway) didn't need them.  Industrialization needed people in cities and the "Great Migration" in U.S. history was from the South to the North to feed the labor needs of factories, not the other way around to feed the labor needs of the more agricultural Southern economy.  Thus, traditional religious folkways were not interrupted in the South, while the North saw more disruption and Europe saw its whole society disrupted.  Secularism was greater in the North than in the South and remains so, in part due to the impact of this migration.  Religion can't be a credible basis of a majority political coalition as it did in the South eventually without a degree of religious homogeneity over large geographic areas that wasn't present in the urban North.

More Americans Have No Religion

A new survey by the Pew Forum On Religion and Public Life profiles the rising ranks of the religiously unaffiliated (eighty page pdf with the full report here).

Compared to five years ago, many more Americans are religiously unaffiliated.

About 6% of of American adults surveyed are atheists and agnostics, and another 14% believe in god in some sense but have "no religion." Overall about one in five Americans (19.6%) have no religion. The percentage of Americans identifying as having no religion has increased by about a third, from 15% to 20% in the past five years.  About 26% of Americans in 2012 were not Christians, up from about 19% in 2007.

The ranks of non-Christians who have a religious affiliation has grown at roughly the same rate as those who identify as having no religion. The percentage of people in the subset of people who have no religion who identify as atheists or agnostics has risen about 50% over the past five year, about twice as fast as the rate of growth for people who have no religion but do not describe themselves as atheists or agnostics.

At whose expense has the "market share" of the religiously unaffiliated grown?

Almost all of the growth in the percentage of people identifying as having no religion is matched by a decline in the percentage of people identifying as white and Christian (the survey classifies Mormons as Christians and not "other" as a recent 5280 magazine article did).

Other studies have indicated that mainline white Christians and white Catholics have seen their ranks shrink fastest; the ranks of white evangelical Protestants have also fallen, although a fair amount of the decline in particular white evangelical Protestant denominations is attributable to the rebranding of white evangelicals as non-denominational Christians.  The percentage of Americans who identify as Mormon or as Orthodox Christian, respectively, has remained roughly constant over the last five years, but part of this is due to the limited power of the survey to discern trends in populations that make up roughly 2% and roughly 1% of Americans, respectively.  Atheists alone (2.4% of American adults) and Agnostics alone (3.3% of American adults) were more common than either Mormons or Orthodox Christians.  Of course, there are important regional variations in these percentages.  Religion is one of the strongest markers of regional differences in American culture, particularly among whites.

Growth in the ranks of Hispanic Catholics has masked decline in the number of white Catholics in the United States until the past few years when Hispanic immigration to the United States has leveled off to roughly zero net migration.  Also, the number of children born to an average Hispanic woman in the United States has fallen considerably in the last few years.

The religiously unaffiliated are not generally seekers. Only 10% of people who are not self-described atheists or agnostics, but who describe themselves as having no religion, are looking for a religion. They are no more, and no less, accepting of supernatural ideas and New Age religious ideas (ghosts, psychics, astrology, reincarnation, spiritual energy in mountains or crystals, yoga as a spiritual exercise, deep connections with nature and the Earth) than members of the general public. A minority of people with no religion believe in God and pray.  These are people who were seekers and found an answer by discarding a religious affiliation, who are mostly satisfied with that choice: 74% of people who say that they currently have no religion now were raised with some religious affiliation.

The Roman Catholic Church places a great deal of emphasis on at least annual church attendance at Easter. And, it is right, viewed in light of its own self-interest. Only 8% of people who attend church at least yearly view themselves as having no religious affiliation, while 50% of those who seldom or never attend church see themselves as having a religious affiliation.

This result is not a function of methodology or small sample sizes.

This is not a statistical blip. The percentage claiming no religious affiliation, an atheist religious affiliation or an agnostic religious affiliation, respectively, has risen or held steady in every successive year in response to identical questions using the same survey method conducted by the same organization from 2007 to 2012 with sample sizes of not less than 9,443 in any given year. This year's sample included 17,010 respondents. The margin of error in the 19.6% estimate of the percentage of people who have "no religion" in 2012 is about +/- 0.6 percentage points, and the margin of error in the survey's 2012 estimate of the percentage of people who are atheist or agnostic is about 3.6 percentage points. The study from 2007 through 2012 is based on a total of 121,788 survey responses over this entire time span.

This study's results are also consistent with the trend lines observed by other studies measuring trend lines in religious affiliation over time using methods that are not identical to Pew's.

The General Social Surveys (GSS), conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago) which has seen the percentage of people identifying as having no religion as having roughly doubled from about 9% in 1990 to about 18% in 2010 (when Pew's figure was 17.4% a result consistent with the GSS result at the one standard deviation level given the margins of error in the two large survey samples).

Similar trends have also been observed in the state level American Religious Identity Survey (ARIS), the most definitive survey based study of religious identification in the continental United States in existence (ARIS does not survey either Hawaii or Alaska for reasons of cost and logistics) and in surveys by Gallup and Barna, to name a couple of examples.

The religiously unaffiliated are demographically distinctive.

The change is a generational one that is working its way up the age pyramid of people with no religion get older, with younger cohorts much more prone to say that they have "no religion" than older ones. About 32% of adults under the age of thirty have no religion while 9% of those sixty-five years old or older have no religion. But, every cohort born after World War II has seen increasing percentages of cohort members who identify as having no religion in the past five years.

Thus, while younger American adults are less likely to be religious than older American adults, Americans born since World War II have also grown more likely to view themselves as having no religion rather than more religious as they have grown older.

Education and income had only slight impacts on the tendency to identify oneself as having no religion.  Women were less likely to identify as having no religion and much less likely to identify as atheist or agnostic.  Blacks and Hispanics were less likely than whites to identify as having no religion.

Consistent with prevailing stereotypes, those who identify as having no religion are most common in the West (26%), then the Northeast, then the Midwest and make up the smallest share of people in the South (15%).

[T]he United States remains a highly religious country – particularly by comparison with other advanced industrial democracies. . . . The number of Americans who currently say religion is very important in their lives (58%), for instance . . . is far higher than in Britain (17%), France (13%), Germany (21%) or Spain (22%).

Secularization is arriving late in the United States, but it appears to be finally arriving despite a long delay relative to Western Europe. Indeed, the very high percentage rates of growth in the percentage of people identifying as non-religious, after many decades during which there was almost no change in this percentage, suggests that this is a cultural trend that started around the time that I went to college and may have reached a tipping point.

The religiously unaffiliated, and non-Christians generally, favor the Democrats

Almost one in four registered voters who are Democrats are lean Democratic have no religion, the most common single religious affiliation in that political party, compared to 9% who are white evangelical Christians and 16% who are black Protestants. Collectively, non-Christians (including, for example, people who no religion, Jews, non-Christian Unitarian-Universalists, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, and pagans) make up one in three registered voters who are Democrats or lean Democratic. Catholics make up 21% of Democrats (and 22% of registered voters who are Republican or lean Republican), while Protestants make up 45% of Democrats.

In contrast, non-Christians make up about 18% of all Republicans, while 34% of Republican are white evangelical Christians. Non-Christians are as large a share of Democratic voters as White Evangelical Christians are a share of Republican voters.

Race is a key factor in the political affiliation of Roman Catholics. One-third of Democrats who are Catholic are not white; about 18% of Republicans who are Catholic are not white. Race is also a critical factor in determining the political affiliatioon of Protestant Christians. More than one in three Democrats who are Protestant Christians are black. Only about 1.7% of Republicans who are Protestant Christians are black.

The tendency of people who have "no religion" to favor Democrats over Republicans in the Presidential race has increased. In 2000 and 2004, people who no religion favored the Democratic Presidential ticket over the Republican one by a 2:1 margin. In 2008, people with no religion preferred Obama to McCain by more than a 3:1 margin: "Obama’s margin of victory among the religiously unaffiliated was 52 points; McCain’s margin of victory among white evangelical voters was 47 points."

About 48% of all registered voters are self-identified Democrats or leaning Democratic, 63% of people with no religion are, while 43% of all registered voters identify as Republican or leaning Republican, compared to 26% of registered voters who have no religion. People who have no religious identification are also, unsurprisingly, also more liberal than registered voters as a whole. But the difference is much more pronounced on social issues (e.g. abortion and gay rights) than economic ones (e.g., whether government is too big or too small).

Growth in the percentage of Americans who are not Christian and their increasing propensity to favor Democrats is a long term trend that favors the Democratic Party for the indefinite future.  If the Republican party does not become more welcoming to ethnic minorities and/or non-Christians, it is on a path towards permanent minority status in American politics.  The perception that the public has of the Republican party as bigoted, even if this is not fully accurate, is deadly to its political prospects.

Impressions From Albion's Seed

David Hackett Fischer's opus, "Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways In America" (1989), a self styled "cultural history" of the United States is a classic far beyond its core area of inquiry, the history of colonial America.

More than anything else, Albion's Seed is notable for making a powerful case that the culture of a founding population leaves a pervasive and persistent cultural legacy that can remain central to politics, dialects, and attitudes about how to live daily life centuries later, despite massive subsequent immigration, technological development and social change.

Linguists, political scientists, and cultural anthropologists have long observed some of the main currents of regional diversity in American life. But, Fischer traces in excruciating detail the way that these regional cultures came into being, naming names, attaching dates, trotting out statistics, quoting diaries and reviewing obscure legal enactments along the way to make his case.

The fact that differences in founding populations produce regionally different cultures itself is unremarkable. The fact that the detailed cultural affinities of a few thousand people here and there three hundred and fifty years ago could lead to wars and drive politics in the United States today is stunning.

The differences in adolescent sexuality and family structure we see in "Red State/Blue State" comparisons in the past decade were deeply ingrained already in colonial New England, Pennsylvania, Appalachia and Virginia by the 1770s and have clear British antecedents which have faded to near irrelevance to some extent where they originated. By then, 10% of women in the Delaware Valley (New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware and Northern Maryland),15% of New England women, 30% of women in Virginia and 40% or more of women in Appalachia (one contemporaneous source put the figure as high as 94% in one county) were pregnant when they married. On that wedding day, the average Delaware Valley woman was 24, the average New England woman was 23 years old, the average Virginia woman was 18, and the average Appalachian woman was 19. About 33% of the Delaware Valley women were literate, as were 50% of the New England women, 25% of the Virginia women, and a smaller percentage of the Appalachian women.

At the same time that Salem was prosecuting witches, Virginians were prosecuting people for falsely accusing their neighbors of witchcraft.

Fischer also notes a few of the notable exceptions to his four founding waves theory: the Dutch founders of New York City and the Hudson River Valley, the mix of founding families from the West Indies and French Huguenots as well as Virginia to coastal South Carolina that produced the Gullah dialect of the black slave majority there (Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court has origins there), and the Gaelic settlers of the Cape Fear Valley in North Carolina. Fischer also omits the cultural impacts of the French and Spanish colonists in later acquired territory, and doesn't discuss at any length of cultural origins of Canada.

More pertinently to his core thesis, however, he does discuss how subsequent waves of migrants to the United States assimilated not "American culture" at large, but the specific regional cultures of the places where they settled.

My own origins, for example, are from 19th century German Lutherans and an Irish Catholic migrant on my father's side, and Swede-Finn Lutherans on my mother's side. I was born in Atlanta, Georgia and lived there until I started the first grade, and one of my earliest childhood memories is of a visit to a monument to confederate war heroes. Yet, my cultural legacy owes a great deal to New England Puritans and Pennsylvania Quakers. My accent is that of a Midlander, not a coastal Southern drawl or the accent of a European immigrant or even the accent of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where my mother grew up. My allegiances are Blue and not Gray. I use more Yiddish and Japanese derived words that would have mystified all of my immigrant ancestors in my every day speech, than I do Swedish or German or Irish ones combined.

Personal and Economic Recovery

I had back surgery (successful) on Monday (once again, the lesson learned: piano movers are worth it).  Recovery is a tricky thing. One moment you think you are sharp and energetic. Another, like today, you sleep twenty hours in a day.

I caught bits and pieces of the debate on the radio yesterday.  Most commentators seemed to call it for Romney.  Debates in a Presidential race aren't so much won or lost, however.  They are pass/fail events, and this time around, no one failed.  If neither candidate fails (or both do), then they have little impact on the race.

The bits of the debate that I did capture were striking mostly for how much both candidates embraced a merchantalist, regulated mixed economy, welfare state.  Simple statements of principle were not in vogue.  This was a natural for President Obama (who also, wisely, embraced the moniker "Obamacare").  It was not at all a natural stance for Romney's political base.

The quality of the Presidential candidates' economic analysis left something to be desired. 

Probably least impressive point was a failure to challenge the notion that income taxes on business profits impact jobs, either in the debate or the analysis by pundits at larger. 

The case that business tax rates have an impact on job creation is quite weak.  The key point in economics is that incentives matter.  Your incentive to make a bigger profit, rather than a smaller one, is very similar whether the tax rate on those profits is 13% or 40%.  The incentive to hire more employees is independent of the rate of taxation on business profits.  You choose a profit maximizing level of payroll first, and then you pay taxes on that profit at whatever rate applies.  Payroll taxes directly impact the cost of labor.  Profit taxes don't. 

Profit taxes, instead, impact the desirability of investing in profit generating businesses.  But, at this point, a shortage of capital investment is not driving employment - businesses and banks are sitting on wads of cash and can borrow money at very low interest rates, and returns on capital investment are still tax favored, but aren't investing their capital in business because they don't see opportunities that are worth the risk involved in a capital investment.  Even when investment in government bonds provides a real rate of return that hovers between zero and negative, the bonds have many takers and private sector capitalists are having trouble providing investors with more attractive alternatives.  The incapacity of Wall Street to offer up investments that are more attractive than Treasuries is really rather pathetic.

Our tax code already heavily favors business spending on capital investments over payroll and job creation.  Neither candidate was willing to argue in favor of changing those incentives.  So, we are almost certain to continue to have a tax code that discourages job creation, relative to other forms of spending by businesses, for the next four years.

The only way that tax rates on business profits impact employment is via how the profits are spent.  If the tax rate is higher, more dollars are spent on government and government employment rises.  If the tax rate is lower, more dollars are spent on private sector goods and services (if not invested) and private sector employment rises.  It is not at all obvious that in late 2012, a marginal dollar spent on government generates fewer jobs than a a marginal dollar spent or invested in the private sector.  One of the main reasons that employment is recovering so slowly is that cuts in governent spending are resulting in the loss of government jobs.

Romney's pitch on the virtues of consolidating job training programs also rang sour.  Dan Quayle advanced a bill that did almost the same thing.  So have other politicians before him and after him.  None of these efforts has ever worked.  There is no reason to think that Romney's proposal would work this time around.