The Big Picture and the Closeup

Catholic turf should not be the bishops’ to rule in the first place. The hospitals and the universities were built with the funds and the blood, sweat and tears of generations of all Catholic believers, and should by all rights belong to all of their successors, the entire body of the faithful. Instead of acting like the in-title-only trustees of these institutions, accountable to those who built them and their successors, the hierarchy behave like the equitable owners. And if you think these would-be owners are in favor of religious freedom for the rest of us in the Catholic fold, I have a bridge in Brooklyn I want to sell you.

Imagine if we tried tactics akin to those of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act to force Asian electronic factories to adhere to U.S. standards of pay, safety, environmental responsibility and industrial hygiene.

The public interest, established by thousands of disciplinary statutes, should begin and end with the linkage between specified misbehavior and specified sanctions. With those sanctions achieved, the establishment of the facts of the misbehavior – at least by the prosecutor or agency in question – is not important. Why then is it pursued? Often, I believe, from the conscious desire to inflict those collateral consequences, a blood-lust to stigmatize.

What’s to prevent, for instance, a legislature chartering a bank one of whose very purposes is to be locally owned and controlled, with charter provisions that prevent out-of-state takeovers or incorporation into bigger banks? And charter provisions that protect its borrowers from usurious out-of-state lending rates? I can hear Tea Partiers complaining that all that local regulation would drive investors screaming to the exits – but bank investors have historically done poorly with the existing setup. Could this be worse?

Babulus is right that he’s exercising his First Amendment rights, but he’s not contributing to the First Amendment’s purpose. Jointly he and friends like Catus (with whom I mostly agree on the substance) have turned the encounter of disparate speakers into a sparring match whose sole end is the spectacle it produces. No one is seeking to convince anyone else or to be convinced.

Of course, it’s not the State of Michigan itself establishing the threat, but rather the National Collegiate Athletic Association. “The NCAA has strictly limited the role you, as a Michigan Fan, may take with regard to prospects and student-athletes.” So the chill on Mark’s free speech works a bit like the scene we’ve all seen in the movies: the bad guy holds a gun to some terrified child’s head and says to a parent: “Keep your mouth shut or the kid dies.” It makes the parent think twice about exercising free speech rights to call the cops. The only variation here is that here the state actor issuing the warning isn’t the one holding the kid: the (supposedly private) NCAA is holding the kid.

Even if you think it’s a good thing to be trying to unseat Kadafi, you ought to be discouraged by the thinly-veiled mutiny Obama is waging against the law. Me, I had this naive notion that the president was supposed to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Silly moi! Nothing faithful about this bit of execution.

Just because I’ve spent my whole life being “me,” that’s no reason for anyone to believe it, no reason at all. Vigilant, patriotic Americans recognize that all documents are forgeries, all history is made up, and anyone who says otherwise is a patsy or a traitor. Since in a digital age, the technology exists to fake anything, it follows that the technology has been used to fake everything. Watchful Americans recognize this inescapable logic.

The ABA’s report said that if a President thinks a law contains unconstitutional language, he shouldn’t sign it. To me, that is Ivory Tower impracticality. Take the 2011 Appropriations Act; if Obama hadn’t signed it, the government would have shut down. Would it have been remotely responsible for Obama to have done that? Such purity would make government impossible. Signing statements are actually a good alternative to such chaos. The President asserts non-aquiescence, government moves on, and the courts can sort the matter out if they need to.

So basically Obama is out of compliance. He has made a calculation to ignore what the written rules say, because history is on his side. Unfortunately, as far as the law goes, that bet is almost certainly right.