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Piracy Spreads, Bailouts Unconstitutional, Recount Ruling, and a Liberal War on Science
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Pirates have attacked and seized four more ships in the crucial shipping lanes off the coast of Somalia.
Piracy has fluorished partly because of Administration indecisiveness, and partly because of treaties like LOST that prevent swift punishment of pirates, and partly because of European Human Rights rules that give pirates the right to seek asylum and welfare rather than face harsh punishment or execution if returned to their home countries to face justice. Liberal lawyers like Harold Koh, who was recently nominated by President Obama to serve as the State Department's chief lawyer, argue that the LOST treaty binds the U.S. as "customary international law" even though the U.S. has yet to ratify it.
In Minnesota, a court has ruled in favor of Democrat Al Franken in the Franken-Coleman Senate race. But an appeal is likely, and controversy continues over the use of harsher standards to exclude ballots in GOP-leaning counties than in liberal-leaning counties, which violates the Supreme Court's ruling in Bush v. Gore (2000). The race may also have been affected by the liberal Secretary of State's failure to get military absentee ballots sent out in time to be returned and counted. That's a recurring problem that also affects other close Congressional races. (Military absentee ballots tend to favor the GOP).
Federal spending commitments for bailouts have now mushroomed to $8 trillion. Some of these bailouts leave such broad, unchecked discretion to spend money in the hands of the President that they seem to violate Supreme Court separation-of-powers rulings applying the non-delegation doctrine. The Obama Administration's proposed budgets would double the deficits contained in the Bush Administration's already huge budgets, increasing deficits by a cumulative $9.3 trillion (including $800 billion for a stimulus package that the Congressional Budget Office says will actually shrink the economy in the long run).
Christina Hoff Sommers writes about a looming liberal war on science -- specifically, a possible Administration plan to artificially cap male enrollment in math and science classes to achieve gender proportionality -- the way Title IX currently caps male participation in intercollegiate athletics. (The Title IX athletics regulation contains three alternatives for compliance, two of which are illusory in the long run. The first way (and only permanent way) to comply is to adopt a quota that artificially caps male participation. The second and third ways, which are only short-term fixes, involve continuous expansion of participation by, or satisfaction of all desire to compete by, the "underrepresented" sex. In a world of finite resources, these latter two ways can only work for a short period of time. I used to work at the agency, OCR, that administers this regulation, and I think that it would be a mistake to apply standards designed for allocating resources among all-male and all-female sports teams to the very different context of math and science classes, which are coed).
Critics claim the Title IX regulation is in tension with the Supreme Court's observation in opinions by Justice Sandra Day O'Connor that it is "completely unrealistic" to assume that people should be represented in each field or activity "in lockstep proportion to their representation in the local population," (See Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co. (1989)), and that "It is completely unrealistic to assume that unlawful discrimination is the sole cause of people failing to gravitate to jobs and employers in accord with the laws of chance." (See Watson v. Fort Worth Bank & Trust Co. (1988)).
