The Enlightened Despot

Over the past few weeks, almost every political blog I read that didn’t have an evening link round-up has added one. I suspect they know something we don’t, so I’m jumping on the bandwagon. The plan is to have an installment every week night, and a longer one on Sundays covering the weekend and looking back at the prior week. I’ll include a bit more of a comment on many of the items than one finds in a typical round-up, hence the title.

Tonight’s edition is of bonus length, including all sorts of old news from the past few weeks that I never got around to mentioning. Here we go:

• Nancy Pelosi doubled down on her claim that the briefing she got from the CIA in 2002 did not include the revelation that waterboarding had already been used. She requested that the CIA release its notes on the briefing to verify her claim. If she’s bluffing, I tip my cap to her ballsiness, if not to her torture-enabling. Even generally pro-Pelosi folk agree that the truth about her briefings probably wouldn’t look too good for her. Meanwhile, John Boehner says Pelosi should provide proof that the wasn’t told about the waterboarding or else apologize to the CIA for accusing them of lying. This makes perfect sense. By the same token, I hope Boehner will provide proof that he didn’t tell me how much he likes smoking crack, or else refrain from accusing me of lying about the matter.
• President Obama reversed his position on releasing a series of photos depicting the abuse of prisoners, deferring to the military’s purported belief that they would inflame anti-American sentiment abroad, thus endangering our troops. Needless to say, everybody completely lost it. Deep breaths, guys. Obama might be planning to punt on holding Americans accountable for torture, but the only plausible path toward not punting is necessarily a long, slow affair, with plenty of disappointment along the way. We simply won’t be in a position to judge any time soon.
• Cheerios are now a drug. Seriously. For some time now, General Mills has been advertising that Cheerios are “clinically proven to reduce cholesterol”. That counts as marketing the product as a cholesterol-combatting medication, which requires that the breakfast cereal be subjected to FDA testing. Assuming they don’t want this, General Mills will have to back off the claim. But I fear that we’ll still see off-label Cheerios recommendations from the medical community. There oughta’ be a law!
• Over at Next Right, Max Borders came up with five planks for a revamped GOP platform. Three of them are good ideas on the merits, and of those three, one could conceivably be adopted by a reformed Republican Party: means-test all federal entitlements. It does not make sense, Borders argues, to make direct transfer payments to rich old people simply to bolster the illusion that Social Security is actually a pension plan. No, Max, it sure doesn’t. And taking the lead on taking money away from rich people on solid conservative grounds in a way that would make Democrats uncomfortable would be tactically clever as well. Which is to say, we won’t be seeing this in 2012.
• Speaking of 2012, Utah governor Jon Huntsman, subject of 2012 GOP presidential-candidate buzz, received the nod from Obama to become our next ambassador to China. The near-consensus is that this is a masterstroke from Obama, taking his most dangerous competitor out of the race years ahead of time. This is an incredibly stupid near-consensus. Huntsman has been getting a lot of attention recently because he is a youngish Republican with a serious job who isn’t crazy, and, indeed, seems to be at least somewhat bright. But one thing pretty much all non-crazy, somewhat bright people have in common is that they don’t want to run for president as a Republican in 2012. Mike Allen has reported that some of his advisers think he’d be better of waiting until 2016. Great scoop, Mike!
• The Senate’s newest Democrat, Arlen Specter, said he was confident a compromise on EFCA would be worked out, perhaps by Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter. Everyone on earth said this was a massive flip-flop. I hate defending Specter against charges of unprincipled waffling, because he has no principles of which I am aware, and often waffles. But this is entirely fabricated by people refusing to pay attention to details. Specter said he wouldn’t support EFCA as-is, in part because it included a card check provision. The chances of a bill with card check passing went from around 5% to a nice round 0%. Now he says he thinks a compromise bill will pass. That compromise won’t include card check. Where’s the fire?

Quote round-up:

• Andy McCarthy: “If President Obama wanted to refrain from releasing these photos in order to protect the military forces he commands or promote the security of Americans — his two highest obligations as president — he could do so by simply issuing an executive order.” Keeping the military safe is one of the president’s two highest obligations? Maybe we should stop sending them to the middle-east, then. The artists-formerly-known as Blackwater should handle that - I think our troops would be much safer at home.
• Dick Cheney: “We fail to recognize the fact that we’re alone out there in terms of trying to achieve the objective of forcing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons … Everybody’s in a giant conspiracy to achieve a different objective than the one we want to achieve.” I’ve always assumed that Cheney only used the apocalyptic line as a means to serve cold, calculated ends. But I’m starting to suspect that he’s genuinely batshit crazy. I’m sorry I misjudged you, Dick!
• Andrew Sullivan: “It is quite something to have a government stamp in your passport, as I do, that will tell any immigration or police officer with a connection to a government database that I have HIV, that I am therefore a threat and can be arrested and detained and deported at the border if necessary.” That really is quite something, an aspect of the HIV ban of which I was unaware, and one that really is appalling. On this issue, though, I’m not sure that there is actual stalling, rather than just the beaurocracy working at the speed at which it works. But the delay on dealing with DADT is the least-defensible part of Obama’s record to date.
• Jay Nordlinger: “In my experience — and I’m just generalizing here — the better the person, the more positive he is about George W. Bush.” I’m not usually in to partisan hacks, but there is something so pure and simple about Nordlinger’s hackery that really appeals to me, and this is a pretty special piece of hackery even from him. But I’m just generalizing here.
  

If I see one more sentence like this, I may lose it:

Card check — the Employee Free Choice Act — is as dead as Audrina’s eyes.

That’s Marc Ambinder, who as far as I can tell doesn’t even have an axe to grind here, but says things like this constantly. Those who do, like Byron York, are even worse:

American Rights at Work is an important part of Big Labor’s push for the Employee Free Choice Act, known more accurately as card check.

‘Card check’ and ‘EFCA’ do not refer to the same thing! EFCA is a proposed bill being kicked around Congress. Card check is one of the policies that EFCA would enact. (Well, strictly speaking, the policy in question mandates that management accept decisions to unionize made via card check, which itself is a procedure. But, appearences to the contrary, I’m not just splitting hairs for the hell of it, so let’s not worry about that.) Equating them is a textbook category mistake.* People on both sides of the debate sometimes act as if ‘card check’ is a slur, but since it doesn’t convey much of anything to the person who doesn’t already know what it is, it seems to be all that one could hope for in a referring expression. Meanwhile, ‘Employee Free Choice Act’ is certainly loaded, but legislators are always giving bills names that cast them in a positive light, for obvious reasons (see USA Patriot Act, the). Coming up with insulting nicknames for bills may be good sport for the Michelle Malkins of this world, no serious person is going to form his opinion on a piece of legislation based on the fact that it is named ‘The Wicked Awesome Act’. But whatever problem you might have with ‘EFCA’ or ‘card check’, using the other won’t help, since they have very different meanings.

And this isn’t just a technicality. Other countries have a card check policy, but they of course don’t have EFCA on the books - it’s a proposed American law. Meanwhile, EFCA contains a lot of significant measures unrelated to card check. Indeed, card check itself is becoming increasingly irrelevant - there is simply no reason to think Democrats can put together 60 Senate votes for any bill that includes it, at least not until after the 2010 midterms.

At this point, the policy to watch is mandatory binding arbitration. Mandatory binding arbitration would require management and a newly formed union to enter a binding arbitration process for a two-year contract if the two sides are unable to come to terms on their own. The major compromise bills that have been introduced contain neither mandatory arbitration nor card check, and are about as popular with labor as Japanese car companies. Meanwhile, anti-labor types are worried that Democrats are planning to drop card check as a compromise for enacting mandatory binding arbitration.

For what it’s worth, I’m not wild about mandatory binding arbitration, and I’d rather see the Starbucks et al compromise go through, but it’s all a lot better than card check. But, really, I wish people would just keep their terminology straight.

UPDATE: I forgot to include the footnote about category mistakes indicated by the above asterix. I’ve corrected this in a seperate post.

The chances of EFCA passing in its current form seem to be dwindling fast, but the prospects of some sort of reform are better than ever. First there was the news that Starbucks, Costco, and Whole Foods were proposing a compromise bill. Then Arlen Specter announced that he wouldn’t vote for cloture on EFCA, but that he would like to see reforms:

Senator Specter signaled a receptiveness to possible amendments to the National Labor Relations Act (”Act”) that purport to remedy what he perceives as defects in the current system. In fact, he’s detailed several of the changes he’d like to see. These include, among other things, “quickie elections” that would be conducted between 10-21 days of the filing of a union election petition, a form of “equal access” that would give unions access to employees on employer premises, enhanced penalties for unfair labor practices, and expedited bargaining schedules imposed by the NLRB. He also appears open to “last best offer” arbitration of contract terms.

Furthermore, Specter has said he might be willing to support EFCA in 2010 when the economy is healthier (his prediction, not mine) if these reforms aren’t put into place, effectively holding a gun to the head of the people he’s backing down from in the short term.

I don’t generally have a lot of good things to say about Specter’s understanding of what it is to be a moderate, namely forcing arbitrary compromises. But this strikes me as one of those rare cases where compromise actually is the wonderful thing we try to sell to children. All of these proposals are tweaks on the system wherein workers decide whether or not to unionize. Almost everyone who feels stongly about the issue hates this compromise because, it seems to me, it is actually designed to make that decision reflect what the workers involved actually want. Our current system is rigged against unionization, which Republicans love because they hate unions. Card check is rigged in favor of unionization, which Democrats love because they love unions. Actually letting the workers decide for themselves is no one’s first choice, but it seems to be where we’re headed, and I’d say that’s a good thing.

*P.S. I’m still open to the possibility that there is an argument hiding out there somewhere for why card check is less bad than the current system and more feasible than the straightforward solution, but I still haven’t seen one.

Union fans all seem very impressed not just by Obama’s pick for labor secretary in general, but by the above speech she gave in support of card check. Now, I suppose these guys really love to watch people say that unions are swell in the public forum, which is fine, but they are not doing themselves any favors by pretending this is an impressive piece of card check advocacy. Solis argues:

1.) Unions are terrific
2.) …

There’s nothing very helpful about that. I’ve been looking for an argument that really supports card check for a while now, but I still haven’t seen one. I don’t mean that I haven’t seen a good argument; I haven’t seen a serious attempt at an argument at all. Basically, a real argument in favor of this legislation would have to establish either that card check is easier to enact than legitimate secret ballots, or that pressuring reluctant workers into forming unions against their instincts is a good idea. I suspect that most card check supporters have something like the latter in mind, but don’t want to say so, so they vaguely hand wave at the former. But I really don’t know. If anyone does know, please tell me.

Ezra Klein reports notes with surprise the opposition of tech companies to card check. I am not surprised at all: tech companies are not highly unionized, and tech workers are more likely to be the sort of people that don’t really want to be in unions if left to their own devices.

Here’s what mystifies me: why does Ezra Klein support EFCA? Still no answer to this pressing question.

Update: I’ve found a rational reason to support EFCA: Al Sharpton opposes it.

Kevin Drum has done me the favor of providing a fresh example of what I was talking about in my last card check post:

Unions support card check legislation because they think it will make it easier to organize new industries. Business leaders dislike card check for the same reason. But what they say is that card check is bad because it allows union organizers to intimidate workers into signing cards.

This doesn’t impress me. The notion that card check is bad because it allows (indeed, encourages) intimidation is either a good or a bad reason to oppose it. Whether that is actually the reason motivating employers is neither here nor there. This sort of thing is very common in political discourse, but it is equivalent to ad hominem - fun, but not helpful.

Drum does go on to address the point head on though, citing this from Jonathan Zasloff:

I used advanced research techniques unknown to many reporters, and called up Harry Arthurs of York University, Canada’s pre-eminent labour law scholar. Arthurs literally wrote the book on this stuff. And I asked him: what does the evidence show?

Arthurs answered that in all of his research about labour law complaints under card check, he could not find a single case where the employer complained of a union intimidating workers to unionize when they didn’t want to.

That’s right: zero. Zilch. Nada. Efes. Rien.

….This isn’t some obscure jurisdiction. It’s Ontario, the largest and richest province in the country. 50 years. A half a century. Zero.

That gets about a 3 on the convincing-scale. It’s anecdotal, and not much of an anecdote at that. There’s also the question of what is meant exactly by ‘complaint’ here. No employer has ever complained about it to his friends over drinks, or no employer has ever (to this guy’s knowledge) lodged a former complaint. The latter obviously depends on all sorts of details about Canadian labor law - what it takes to file such a complaint, how easy it is to win one, etc.

But more importantly, the whole anecdote misses the point. The question is not whether there is a long case history of workers being forced to sign cards at gun point (I have no idea if there is), it’s whether there is any reason to prefer card check over the alternative, secret ballots. Sure, card check is set up such that severe, overt coercion and corruption are possible, but more disturbing is the fact that it is set up such that some level of unintentional coercion is absolutely unavoidable. There is simply nothing controversial about the fact that people often don’t feel comfortable admitting where they stand on an issue to their peers. Not for nothing to people drone on about the sanctity of the voting booth.

Here’s Drum’s conclusion:

Look: unions aren’t perfect. Nothing is perfect. The financial industry, just to pick an example out of my hat, is obviously wildly imperfect, but that doesn’t mean we should get rid of the private financial industry. It just means we should regulate it to avoid some of its worst pathologies.

Ditto for unions. If anyone has a better mechanism for giving workers more bargaining clout and therefore higher wages, I’m all ears. Anyone who thinks collective bargaining is a good idea but believes we ought to reform the Wagner Act, I’ll listen to them too. But the evidence of the past 30 years makes it pretty clear that productivity growth and improved education aren’t nearly enough on their own to keep median wages growing. Neither is unionization, for that matter. But at least it pushes in the right direction. If card check helps that along, I’m all for it.

Unions aren’t perfect, but we shouldn’t get rid of them. Sure. In fact we need more of them. I don’t have a strong feeling one way or the other on that, but let’s accept it for now. That last step is too quick. Taking workers who don’t want to unionize out back and shooting them would no doubt help unionization along, but I doubt Drum is ‘all for it’. So there’s a question of just how far one is willing to go in promoting unions.

One might support card check precisely because it can lead to workers unionizing even when there isn’t a clear majority that wants to. Or, one might support card check because, for whatever reason, it’s easier to pass card check legislation than legislation that would ensure secret ballots were conducted honestly. But, since secret ballots quite clearly have the stronger prima facie case for representing what an electorate wants (which is why we insist on them everywhere else, after all), the burden of proof is surely on card check supporters to explain why securing fair balloting would be more difficult.