This Washington Post article follows up on this earlier post regarding Congressional hearings over Washington lobbyist Jack Abramoff and public relations consultant Michael Scanlon‘s shenanigans in 2002 involving the Tigua Indian Tribe’s casino in El Paso.
Playing both sides off against the middle, Messrs. Abramoff and Scanlon originally worked with conservative religious activist Ralph Reed to help the State of Texas shut down the Indian tribe’s casino, and then Messrs. Abramoff and Scanlon’s turned around and persuaded the the tribe to pay them $4.2 million to try to get Congress to reopen it. Messrs. Abramoff and Scanlon are now embroiled in Congressional and grand jury investigations over an incredible $82 million in lobbying and public relations fees they collected from six tribes that operate gambling casinos.
By the way, Mr. Scanlon, 34 is a former aide to House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, whose name seems to be bandied about in just about every Congressional scandal in Washington or Austin these days.
Charles Kuffner has been all over this story, so check out his blog for more analysis of the situation.

If this is the Republican Party’s idea of wise leadership, then we are in for a long four years. Professor Bainbridge provides his usual insightful thoughts.

Professor Ribstein provides a nice endorsement for 5th Circuit Judge Edith H. Jones of Houston as the next Associate Justice for the U.S. Supreme Court, and I wholeheartedly concur.
Judge Jones is widely recognized as an outstanding jurist and one of the nation?s leading experts on bankruptcy law. A 1974 graduate of the University of Texas Law School, Judge Jones served as an editor of the Texas Law Review and, upon graduation, she joined the law firm of Andrews, Kurth, Campbell & Jones, L.L.P. (now Andrews & Kurth, L.L.P.), where she was the first woman to make partner in the history of the firm. While at Andrews & Kurth, Judge Jones became involved in the small but emerging Texas Republican Party and, in so doing, created her strong political ties with the Bush Family.
Judge Jones was nominated by President Reagan to become a judge on the Fifth Circuit, and she was confirmed by the U.S. Senate on April 3, 1985. During her almost 20 years on the bench, Judge Jones has written nearly six hundred opinions and she has served as a member of the Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules for the Judicial Conference of the United States and the National Bankruptcy Review Commission. Judge Jones has also authored or coauthored more than 15 publications on the topics of bankruptcy law, mass tort litigation, arbitration, religion and the law, judicial workloads, and the judicial selection process. When Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. resigned from the Supreme Court in 1990, President George H.W. Bush considered Judge Jones for the Supreme Court before he ultimately nominated Justice David H. Souter to replace Justice Brennan.
If Judge Jones is nominated, then there is little question that opposition to her candidacy will coalesce arround her recent concurring opinion in McCorvey v. Hill, No. 03-10711 (5th Cir. Sept. 17, 2004). In that opinion, Judge Jones wrote both a panel opinion turning aside a new challenge to abortion rights by the original “Jane Roe” — Norma McCorvey — and a passionate concurring opinion in which she recommends that the Supreme Court reconsider its controversial decision in Roe v. Wade.
Although she was the original plaintiff in Roe, Norma McCorvey has since become an anti-abortion activist. In that role, she began a new challenge to Roe in U.S. District Court in June 2003. McCorvey filed a Rule 60(b) motion, which allows a federal court to relieve a party from an earlier judgment under certain limited circumstances.
In the District Court case, McCorvey’s lawyers offered more than 5,000 pages of affidavits and other written evidence in seeking to undermine the foundation of the decision in Roe v. Wade. Included among the materials were 1,000 affidavits from women who had had abortions expressing regret over their choice. The District Court summarily denied the motion on the grounds that it was simply too late to revisit the original judgment.
The appeal of that decision went to the Fifth Circuit and oral argument on the appeal was scheduled for this past February. However, oral argument was cancelled and the Fifth Circuit panel promptly issued its decision, which was written by Judge Jones. The panel decision upheld the District Court’s denial of McCorvey’s motion, but not on the finding that she was pursuing her case too late. Rather, the panel held that the controversy had become moot — inasmuch as Texas no longer seeks to criminalize abortion after Roe, the panel reasoned that there is no current controversy giving a court power to decide McCorvey’s motion.
However, attached to the panel’s rather straightforward opinion is Judge Jones’ separate concurring opinion (it is somewhat unusual that the author of the panel’s opinion also writes a concurring opinion, but not unheard of). In her concurring opinion, Judge Jones points out that the evidence supporting McCorvey’s motion “goes to the heart of the balance Roe struck between the choice of a mother and the life of her unborn child.” Judge Jones also notes that the evidence suggests that women may suffer for years after an abortion, that several other Supreme Court assumptions in Roe are probably wrong, and that new medical science suggests how much pain a fetus suffers:

“In sum, if courts were to delve into the facts underlying Roe‘s balancing scheme with present-day knowledge, they might conclude that the woman’s ‘choice’ is far more risky and less beneficial, and the child’s sentience far more advanced, than the Roe Court knew.”

Nevertheless, Judge Jones goes on to point out that the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe to constitutionalize abortion policy has had the consequence of creating a situation in which the Supreme Court likely will not be able to re-examine the factual assumptions of Roe in the context of a court record because no ‘live’ controversy can arise over the issues involved. As Judge Jones notes, “the Court’s constitutional decisionmaking leaves our nation in a position of willful blindness to evolving knowledge. . .”
Opinions such as this may make Judge Jones politically untenable for the Supreme Court confirmation process. But change does not come easily, and here’s hoping that the Bush Administration has the political courage to nominate this independent thinker to our country’s highest court.

One of the stories from the just completed Presidential campaign that historians will debate for many years is the effect that the Swift Boat Veterans had on the just completed Presidential campaign. Here are earlier posts on the Swift Boat Veterans.
This John Fund article on OpinonJournal.com is a useful review of the story of these Vietnam veterans groups that raised doubts during the campaign about John Kerry’s fitness to serve as commander in chief. The setting for the story is the Restoration Weekend, an annual gathering of political activists that David Horowitz organizes. Mr. Horowitz is a former left-wing radical who opposed the Vietnam War effort as an editor of Ramparts magazine, but who is now conservative writer and political activist.
The article does a good job of summarizing the Swift Boat Veterans’ activities during the campaign, and includes the following insightful observation:

As the evening proceeded and one Vietnam veteran after another shared the story of how veterans felt compelled to attack Mr. Kerry for his 1971 testimony branding fellow veterans as war criminals, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg leaned back in his chair in amazement.
“I think some of them are too intense,” he told me. “But screwing with these guys by accusing them of atrocities was one of the biggest mistakes John Kerry ever made. Thirty years later he woke a sleeping giant.”

Read the entire piece.

Jimmy Carter’s laudatory remarks today about the dubious leadership qualities of Yasser Arafat reminded me of this pithy book review that the Weekly Standard‘s Noemie Emery wrote earlier this year regarding Steven F. Hayward‘s book about Mr. Carter, The Real Jimmy Carter: How Our Worst Ex-President Undermines American Foreign Policy, Coddles Dictators and Created the Party of Clinton and Kerry. The gist of Ms. Emery’s review and Mr. Hayward’s book is that, as bad as the Carter Presidency was for America generally, it was absolutely devastating to the Democratic Party.
First, Ms. Emery stands in awe of Mr. Carter’s incredible ability to take either the wrong position on a political issue or alienate those on his side even when he was on the right side of an issue:

Carter is surely one of the worst failures in the history of the American presidency, but he is a failure of a special sort: He did not overreach, as did Lyndon Johnson, or seek to deceive, as did Richard Nixon. Rather, like Herbert Hoover, he seems a well-meaning sort overcome by reality. But while Hoover was blindsided by the depression, Carter failed on a broad range of matters and faced few crises he didn’t first bring on himself. Most presidents, even the good ones (sometimes especially even the good ones) leave behind a mixed record of big wins and big errors, but with Carter, the darkness seems everywhere: He is all Bay of Pigs and no Missile Crisis, all Iran-contra and no “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”

PBS, whose American Experience series on the presidents has done some fascinating things with such novelistic lives as those of Reagan, Kennedy, Nixon, Johnson, and both the Roosevelts, seemed (in a two-part series first aired two years ago and now reappearing) at a loss for how to handle this long dirge-like story, and, to its credit, the program did not flinch from portraying his actual presidency as the total disaster it was.

Ms. Emery notes that Mr. Carter’s domestic policies were an utter mess:

As a domestic manager, his crowning achievement was to take the old liberal creed of big government and hitch it to the new liberal creed of “limits to growth” and create incoherence. “We have learned that ‘more’ is not necessarily ‘better,’ and that even our great nation has its recognized limits,” he scolded, taking on two hundred years of the American temperament. Thus he tried to damp down the consumption machine that drives the economy, while balking at the tax cuts that might have spurred on investment. The result was stagflation, a condition economists had once thought impossible, of soaring inflation and no growth in jobs. Interest rates soared, and Carter’s approval ratings sank into the thirties. For this he blamed the American people, for being too immature to realize the good times were over for good.

And even though Mr. Carter’s domestic policies were bad, his foreign policy was even worse:

In an address at Notre Dame on May 22, 1977, [Carter] denounced the “inordinate fear of communism” that had produced the containment theory that had kept the peace for three decades. In his first month in office he announced his intention to withdraw nuclear weapons and ground troops from South Korea, cut six billion dollars from the defense budget, cancel development of the Trident nuclear submarine, and defer construction of the neutron bomb.
All of these proposals were made unilaterally, with no effort to induce concessions by the other side. Cyrus Vance, Carter’s first secretary of state, was described by Democrat Morris Abram as the closest thing to a pure pacifist since William Jennings Bryan, and by Defense Secretary Harold Brown as a man who believed the use of force was always mistaken. Paul Warnke, Carter’s chief arms-control negotiator, held views described by George Will as “engagingly childlike”–believing that if we disarmed, the Soviet Union would follow us. . .
Even Carter’s much vaunted human-rights effort, which gave some people hope he would use it as a moral weapon against the Soviet Union, quickly lost much of its power and luster when it became evident that he intended to use it less against Communists than against the more marginal despots in the non-Communist orbit. Thus he embraced Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev at the 1979 arms-control summit and assured an assemblage of East Europeans that “the old ideological labels have lost their meaning,” even as they remained under the Soviet boot. In Carter’s State Department, the Sandinistas were thought to be moderates and the Ayatollah Khomeini a saintlike figure surrounded by “moderate, progressive individuals” with a notable “concern for human rights.”

Ms. Emery goes on to mention many of the other debacles of the Carter Presidency that Mr. Hayward’s book addresses, but then points out that Mr. Carter has perhaps exceeded the incompetence of his presidency by being arguably the worst former president in American history:

Carter the ex-president has been more destructive than Carter the president, and, if possible, still more annoying, undermining later presidents with the ruthless ambition that marked his career.

Herbert Hoover accepted the verdict of history when he lost in 1932 to Franklin Roosevelt, keeping a profile so low he was all but invisible. Carter instead reacted as if he had retired by choice with the thanks of the nation. He did some good work for general charities, and he was useful at least twice in his international forays: in Panama in 1986 when he faced Noriega, and unexpectedly in 2002 in Cuba when he went against type to tell Castro off. He also acquired a lengthy record of criticizing, weakening, and undercutting a series of American presidents.
He publicly attacked Reagan’s morals and competence. In 1990 and 1991, as George Bush was assembling the Gulf War coalition, Carter wrote secretly to Margaret Thatcher, Francois Mitterrand, Mikhail Gorbachev, and a dozen others, asking the U.N. Security Council not to back Bush. (Bush only found out what had happened when a stunned Brian Mulroney called Dick Cheney up to complain.) Bill Clinton soured on the ex-president after Carter’s trip in 1994 to North Korea, in which he publicly embraced the dictator Kim Il Sung and negotiated a wholly worthless treaty banning production of nuclear weapons, which that country proceeded to break.
Carter of course made the same vehement objections to George W. Bush’s war on terror as he had made to his father’s war in the Gulf ten years earlier, going so far as to happily accept an award from the Nobel Prize committee that was given to him solely for the purpose of giving a black eye to America. “It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,” the Nobel committee chairman said helpfully, “a kick in the leg to all those that follow the same line as the U.S.” Carter’s “Lone Ranger work has taken him dangerously close to the neighborhood of what we used to call treason,” Lance Morrow wrote in Time. As Hayward notes, Carter’s successors have done far more than he did for human rights and for the nation’s security. Iran and Nicaragua, the twin targets of his attention as president, turned on his watch into hell holes. And we can safely say that had he been reelected, or had his way afterward, the Soviet Union might still be in existence, and the oil fields of Kuwait and possibly Saudi Arabia might be in the hands of Iraq.

Finally, Ms. Emery notes that the Democratic Party has ultimately borne the brunt of the consequences of Mr. Carter’s monumental lack of judgment:

No man has done more than he to create and empower the modern Republican party, which, when he became president, seemed down for the count. If he had been the man he seemed when he was running for president–an integrationist but a social conservative, a small businessman and ex-naval officer, a Rickover protege with a keen sense of power–he might have recreated the party of Truman and Kennedy. As it was, his incompetence and his blundering, coming after McGovern’s extremism and the implosions of Humphrey and Johnson, was the last straw for a great many Democrats, who decided the chances they were willing to give to their party had more or less run their course. Under his goading, millions who had never believed they could vote for a Republican president crossed over to vote for an ex-movie actor.

The end of the Democrats as the national majority begins with Carter–as does the end of liberalism as the national creed. A lot has been written about the maturation of the conservative movement from Goldwater to the present day, but this of course is only one half of the story. It was not enough for the Republicans to become more poised and accessible. The Democrats had to collapse, freeing millions of voters to look at an alternative. No one symbolized this collapse more than did Jimmy Carter, victim of rabbits and America’s muse of malaise.

Read the entire review. Ms. Emery and Mr. Hayward may be too harsh on Mr. Carter, who at least had the good sense to promote Paul Volker for the Federal Reserve chairmanship late in his term in office. But there is no question that his presidency was an unmitigated disaster for the Democratic Party in this country, and one from which the party is still attempting to recover to this day.

2004 Nobel Prize in Economics recipient Edward C. Prescott writes this outstanding Wall Street Journal op-ed in which he makes a persuasive case that the time for transition of the current Social Security system to one based on mandatory individual retirement accounts is now:

The time is right to act, and we don’t need a special commission to analyze the problem and recommend solutions because we already had one, and it submitted its report three years ago next month — The President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security. The trouble is that little has happened since. It’s time to dust off that report, sharpen our policy pencils and get to work on reforming our Social Security system before it’s too late.
The main contribution of that 2001 bipartisan commission was to propose the establishment of a system of voluntary personal accounts, which would increase national savings as well as increase labor-force participation — more on that later. But this contribution is also the commission’s main flaw, for the proposal does not go far enough. We need to establish a system of mandatory savings accounts for retirement, not voluntary. Without mandatory savings accounts we will not solve the time-inconsistency problem of people under-saving and becoming a welfare burden on their families and on the taxpayers. That’s exactly where we are now.

Professor Prescott debunks the notion that individual retirement acccounts are somehow riskier than the current Social Security system:

Some politicians have vilified the idea of giving investment freedom to citizens, arguing that those citizens will be exposed to risks inherent in the market. But this is political scaremongering. U.S. citizens already utilize IRAs, 401Ks, PCOs, Keoghs, SEPs and other investment options just fine, thank you. If some people are conservative investors or managing for the short term, they direct their funds accordingly; if others are more inclined to take risks or looking at the long run, they make appropriate decisions. Consumers already know how to invest their money — why does the government feel the need to patronize them when it comes to Social Security?
It would be one thing if the government’s Social Security system paid a decent return, but as the President’s Commission reported, for a single male worker born in 2000 with average earnings, the real annual return on his currently-scheduled contributions to Social Security will be just 0.86%. And for a worker who earns the maximum amount taxed (then $80,400), the real annual return is a negative 0.72%. A bank would have to offer a pretty fancy toaster to get depositors at those rates of return.

Indeed, as Professor Prescott points out, the trend internationally is to such individual retirement accounts:

Further, about two dozen countries have reformed their state-run retirement programs, including Chile, Sweden, Australia, Peru, the U.K., Kazakhstan, China, Croatia and Poland. If citizens in these countries can handle individual savings accounts, especially citizens in countries without a history of financial freedom, then U.S. citizens should be equally adept. At a time when the rest of the world is dropping the vestiges of state control, the United States should be leading the way and not lagging behind.

In fact, Professor Prescott notes that the economic benefits of such accounts are substantial:

The benefits of such reform extend beyond the individual retirement accounts of U.S. citizens (although that would be reason enough for reform) — they also accrue to the economy. As noted above, national savings will increase, as will participation in the labor force, both to the benefit of society. On the first point, more private assets means there will be more capital, which will have a positive impact on wages, which benefits the working people, especially the young. More capital also means that the economy will have more productive assets, which also contributes to more production.
Regarding labor supply, any system that taxes people when they are young and gives it back when they are old will have a negative impact on labor supply. People will simply work less. Put another way: If people are in control of their own savings, and if their retirement is funded by savings rather than transfers, they will work more. And everyone is better off. These are the type of win-win situations that politicians and policy makers should be falling over themselves to accomplish.

And what about the horrendous “transition costs” that we hear would undermine the transition from the current Social Security system to one based on mandatory individual retirement accounts? Professor Prescott keenly dispenses with that objection:

Some analysts have suggested that we can’t move from a transfer system to a saving system because current retirees will be left in the lurch. Who will pay for them if workers’ money is suddenly shifted to individual savings accounts? There will indeed be a period of time, likely no more than 10 years, when narrowly defined government debt relative to gross national income would increase before decreasing. But government debt is small relative to the present value of the Social Security promises that currently exist. Further, the sum of the value of government debt and the value of these promises will start declining immediately.
Under a reformed system there will always be some individuals who, owing to disabilities or other reasons that prevent them from working, will not have sufficient savings in their old age. The solution is to include a means-tested supplement to ensure that those citizens receive a required payment — just like they receive today. Nobody gets left behind under this new system, and most will move ahead. U.S. citizens deserve more than a minimum payment, and the U.S. economy deserves more than to have its savings, capital and labor weighed down by an increasingly costly tax-and-transfer system.

And how would such a system work? Professor Prescott touts one:

Have three-quarters of employer and employee Social Security contributions (currently 12.4% of wages, salaries and proprietors’ income up to $87,900) put into an individual savings account. This would be deferred income with taxes paid when people receive their retirement benefits. The other one-quarter of Social Security contributions would finance welfare and increase the labor supply, resulting in higher output and an increase in tax revenues.

Read the entire piece. Ed Prescott is definitely a clear thinker.
Update: Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution makes the case against forced savings accounts and for turning Social Security into a welfare program for the elderly.

Former Houston attorney (former partner at Vinson & Elkins) and current White House counsel Alberto Gonzales was nominated by President Bush Wednesday to succeed Attorney General John Ashcroft, who announced Tuesday that he is stepping down after serving as attorney general during the first Bush Administration.
Mr. Gonzales is a close, longtime adviser to President Bush. The 49-year-old Mr. Gonzales has been frequently mentioned as a possible nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, but my sense is that there are numerous more qualified jurists for that position. The AG post is a much better fit for Mr. Gonzales. Mr. Gonzales would be the nation’s 80th attorney general and the first Hispanic to hold the job.
Mr. Gonzales has a remarkable background. The son of Mexican immigrant parents, Mr. Gonzales was born in San Antonio and grew up sharing a two-bedroom house in Houston with his migrant-worker parents and seven siblings. From there, he went on to graduate from Houston’s Rice University and Harvard Law School, and then to become a prominent Houston attorney who was involved in many community and state affairs. Mr. Gonzales has been with President Bush virtually from the start of his political career, as he served with then-Gov. Bush in Texas as general counsel, secretary of state and then as a Texas Supreme Court justice before becoming White House counsel.
Inasmuch as the Texas Supreme Court handles only civil cases, Mr. Gonzales had little experience in international law, national security law, or in criminal law when he came to Washington. But boy, did that change after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. As White House counsel, Gonzales transformed that office from one that concentrated on domestic issues to one increasingly focused on fighting the war against the radical Islamic fascists. Under Mr. Gonzales’s leadership, administration lawyers in the National Security Council, the Pentagon and the Justice Department elaborated on views that the war against the radical Islamic fascists was a new arena not covered by domestic laws or the Geneva Conventions and other treaties.
In particular, one potential blip in the confirmation process could be the Jan. 25, 2002 legal memo to the President in which Mr. Gonzales described the Geneva Convention on humane treatment of prisoners of war as “quaint” and “obsolete” in the war on terror. That legal opinion was intended to advise the President on the handling of al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners captured in the war in Afghanistan. The Bush administration views those combatants as not covered by the Geneva protections and other treaties.
Nevertheless, most political pundits believe that Mr. Gonzales will be confirmed with little trouble, probably early in 2005.

Lupe Valdez is a woman, a Hispanic, a Democrat and a lesbian. She is also the new sheriff of Dallas County. Read about here here in this Washington Post profile.

Yale professor Ray Fair‘s model for predicting Presidential elections were the subject of these prior posts here and here. In this new piece, Professor Fair tries to explain why his model predicted that President Bush would win 57.4% of the two-party popular vote when he actually got only 51.5% (he speculates that the war hurt Bush more than projected), and provides this early prediction regarding the 2008 race:

It is possible to use the current vote equation to make a prediction for 2008. There will be no incumbent running again (PERSON = 0), and the Republicans will have a negative duration effect (DURATION = 1). If, say, GROWTH is 3.0, INFLATION is 3.0, and GOODNEWS is 2, which is a moderately good economy, the vote prediction for the Republicans is 50.1 percent, a dead heat. So the main message for 2008 is that the election will be close if the economy is moderately good. It would take a quite strong economy for the equation to predict a comfortable Republican win, and it would take a quite weak economy for the equation to predict a comfortable Democratic win. The Democrats clearly have a much better shot in 2008 than they had in 2004 according to the equation.

Professor Ribstein of Ideoblog — whose broad expertise in business law includes extensive knowledge on how business is portrayed in cinema — continues development here of a sure-fire winning screenplay on how President Bush won the 2004 election. Enjoy.