I still have no clue where Matt gets this idea that *all* problems with shoddy media coverage are downstream of problems with the audience. (Obviously, *some* problems are responses to financial incentives provided by the audience.)
There's an obvious alternative, isn't there? Shoddy coverage could arise due to bad norms among journalists. The meltdown at the NYT over the Cotton op-ed, for instance, was driven by employees. I doubt subscribers were particularly angry about the op-ed, and refusing to print those types of essays may have even been financially detrimental.
Similarly, I doubt that too many Americans want to see presumably neutral newspapers present coverage with some sort of anti-Israel bias. I certainly don't think it was financially beneficial for the NYT to print ISRAEL BOMBS AL-AHLI HOSPITAL (oops, nvm). Why should I think these trends aren't driven by norms among extremely left-leaning employees (in spite of financial incentives)?
I actually kinda love Matt's the "the audience is the problem" take.
I mean yes, at a surface level NYT getting some serious left-bias is due to staff. But if audiences cared about this, NYT would see real financial disincentives and either change course or fall on financial hardship.
The counterargument here is that journalists should behave irrationally to their financial incentives and produce content that isn't what their audience wants, but is better in some civic way. But the whole point of a competitive media landscape is that inefficient firms that don't produce things their customers want cease to exist, and we definitely have a competitive media landscape today.
But Matt has also talked about how the labor market for journalists affects coverage. Most journalists are left-wing and want to write left-wing articles, so to get either centrist or right-wing articles, you have to either pay a premium or accept lower-quality journalism. That's an example of a supply problem that could potentially be overcome with enough demand, but it is still a problem.
I've been somewhat frustrated by Matt's take that "we are the problem" as well. Probably in part bc this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think. But I also agree with you that some of this is the journalists' own biases. It's hard not to think that some of WaPo's problems, for example, are due to it NOT delivering what a broader audience wants - which I believe is partly due to the fixations of its journalists being out of step with a broader audience. Not sure I have much more than a hunch on that though.
“this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think”
This is true to some extent. But this audience is also self-selected to be people who already think that blue-aiming media just tells blue people what they already think, and we often love it when Matt repeats this back to us.
Yeah true - or at least true for those who comment most often. I try to be aware when I'm getting a little too eager for another shot of the good stuff. lol. But Matt doesn't feed that overmuch, IMO. He seems very aware of avoiding that.
From today's piece: "If you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
On the one hand, my quirky, mostly misunderstood tendency is to scold people "on my side" for extreme claims because extreme rhetoric inevitably leads to backlash and straw-manning from the other side. The result is not just polarization (which will perhaps end our democracy) but also the rejection of any potentially useful ideas from the conversation.
On the other hand, I click on stories that tend in this direction (for example, in the NYT) precisely so that I can make this point in the NYT Comments and argue with those who "align" with my opinions.
The big NYT takedown piece in the Economist by Bennett was trying to make this argument, that the Times shifted because of a change in the composition of the employees.
But I think a close reading reveals that this, too, is downstream of the audience. Bennett points out that the reason the employees changed from the contrarian weirdo beat-journalist type of person to more of an extroverted, over-socialized internet-poisoned lefty is because the NYT was making a strategic pivot to be a digital media publication, because they recognized the old model was no longer going to be financially viable.
Crucially, this was in fact the correct move. The NYT is a very successful business in an era where legacy media companies have generally done extremely poorly.
Also if u read the times the way I do, pretty much the front page and Wordle, u don’t see near the level of outright bias. The cover page on the app is generally so good. I think they are so big they can look totally different depending on which angle u look at them from.
But where do these left-leaning employees come from? I would expect the NYT hired them at some point, it’s prestigious enough that they had considerable choice in the matter of whom to hire, so these employees apparently come from the same culture as the company itself. I would also note, as one who (too often) reads comment sections, that plenty of readers objected to the Cotton editorial and probably threatened to cancel over it (though it’s rare for a particular incident like that to influence editorial or personnel policy).
One thing about the NYTimes, everyone has a complaint, but they seem to be very successfully navigating a rough environment for journalism, not pleasing anyone but consistently making a profit, which seems to be the hardest part these days. If subscribers really didn’t like what their employees were turning out, I don’t think that would be the case.
I wonder whether they actually have a choice to hire more centrist or right-leaning reporters. I don't know for sure whether this is the case, but my best guess would be that Columbia Journalism School probably has more Maoists than Trump supporters. As far as I can tell, basically *all* reputable publications have left-leaning news reporters.
This is correct. I was easily the most right-wing person in the Vox.com newsroom and I definitely did not vote for Trump. The most right-wing mainstream publications are probably the Wall Street Journal (which has right-wing opinion writers but still a left-leaning hard news operation) and the Economist (which is centrist noeliberal but far from Trumpy).
College graduates skew left in general, and journalism disproportionately attracts people who are willing to take a significant pay cut in exchange for prestige, intellectual stimulation, and/or a positive impact on the world. Those people tend to be more left-wing than the average college graduate.
The Wall Street Journal is an interesting example because I think it's particularly hard to attract an ideologically diverse workforce for straight news jobs covering things other than politics (like business or science or fashion or whatever). When you're hiring for those jobs, you're not supposed to take ideology into consideration, since it's not directly relevant. But when the applicant pool is 95 percent liberal, that leads to a newsroom that's 95 percent liberal. The WSJ goes out of its way to hire right-wing people for its opinion section so they can churn out right-wing columns. But the newsroom just tries to hire the best reporters independent of ideology and that leads to a newsroom that looks a lot like other publications.
I don't think I've written anything about it in the kind of depth Matt does there. I generally enjoyed working there and learned a ton. The original Vox team had a ton of talented people, many of whom went on to the New York Times. To this day I think of what I do as writing Vox-style explainers.
Like most other digital-native publications around this time I think we leaned too much into chasing traffic. I think Ezra, Matt, and other editorial leaders genuinely did not intend to create such a left-leaning organization, and I don't think any of us appreciated how much pressure to maximize traffic would translate into pressure to write predictably left-wing content. But to get traffic in 2014 you needed to write stuff people will share on Facebook, and if you start out with a left-wing audience then predictably left-wing content is going to out-perform other kinds of content.
I felt a little bit out of place there and left in 2017, but it actually wasn't mainly for ideological reasons. I was basically the only business or tech reporter. There wasn't a dedicated business or tech team, so they lumped me in with the policy and politics team, and I reported to several different editors over the three years I was there. It sometimes seemed like my managers didn't know what to do with me, since they were focused on covering elections or what was happening on Capitol Hill or whatever.
Also I wrote last year [https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned] that after I had a kid in late 2015 I found it more difficult to keep up with the workaholic culture of the Vox newsroom. People worked a lot of nights and weekends the first few years and once I had a baby I suddenly couldn't do that any more. Nobody explicitly complained about this (the formal policies were very kid-friendly) but putting fewer hours in just meant my output wasn't as compelling, and I think my editors started to notice. (I'm told it's a much chiller place to work now—especially after the writers unionized.)
After Trump won the 2016 election, Vox intensified its anti-Trump coverage. And while I'm not in any sense a Trump supporter I thought we were going a bit overboard. This was one reason I started looking for a new job in 2017 but it wasn't the main reason by any means.
Big chunk of the latter in Chinese domestic politics. Most of the same stereotypes we associate with 30-something basement-dwelling incels here in the US and (presumably?) the UK.
One of my friends (okay, friend's brother) wears a little Mao hat everywhere he goes.
Fitting with the stereotype, he's a 36 year old psychology professor that cannot manage his own life or affairs in the slightest and has never had a girlfriend, and has never had a job outside of academia.
He seems to be a genuine believer, somehow. Or if not, he has at least been committed to the bit for a decade+.
They have the Crossword, and Spelling Bee, and Wordle. They figured out how to make many of the best online infographics. That’s all going to help them profit regardless of the choppiness of the seas of reader opinion.
Naw, the readership of the Times is very liberal and subscriber anger over the Cotton op-ed was absolutely a factor in Bennet's firing. Left-wing Times reporters know this and it gives them extra leverage in intra-newsroom fights.
I think it would probably be in the Times's financial interest to fire all of their conservative columnists, but they continue publishing them because the Sulzberger family is committed to the Times opinion page having some ideological diversity.
Something I heard from a Times reporter in 2020 was that a major source of leftward pressure (over the Cotton op-ed and similar controveries) came from the IT staff. In many cases, these were people who could make more money at Google or Facebook but joined the Times because they wanted to have a positive impact on the world. And one way they tried to do that was by lobbying for a more left-wing approach in the newsroom.
Obviously Times coders and Times readers are different groups of people, but I bet they have pretty similar demographics in terms of education and ideology. I think most Times reporters—and especially Times reporters who cover policy and politics—tend to have a more nuanced understanding of political issues than the normie liberals who buy New York Times subscriptions. There's also a vocal minority of reporters that's very left-wing and pulled the whole paper to the left in 2020, but that minority had as much power as they did because a lot of paying subscribers agreed with them.
Times digital operation is solid. Maintaining a fleet of apps across all platforms and doing it in house is not easy. Plus all the dataviz stuff... no other news org has that kind of talent.
I think the NYT audience is better classified as educated FIRST than left-wing. Most articles in the NYT are definitely not as left-leaning as those in Vox (which I basically stopped reading after all the original crew left). From the comments in articles, I sense that a lot of the readers crave centrist and even simply non-crazy conservative views (e.g., French, whose views I particularly appreciate). Being to the left of MAGA is not really left wing.
The overall tendency is very clearly about the audience and the Al-Ahli Hospital debacle is a good example that's also a blast from the past where being first, or at least early, with the hottest news (scoops, I believe they were once called) was a key audience demand before stories circulated faster than people care to know about them.
I'm not so sure it's entirely about the audience. Consider the following thought experiment: you wave a magic wand and it turns all NYT, WSJ, CNN, etc. reporters into right-wingers.
Would the slant of news coverage at these places change? The "financial incentives" theory predicts that it shouldn't. These outlets are primarily motivated to pursue profits, so management makes sure that reporters keep pushing left-wing content to please their liberal readers.
The "bad norms" theory, on the other hand, predicts that coverage would change dramatically. Reporters would cover stories primarily from a right-wing angle and strictly enforce a set of norms that forces others to do the same. Management would be powerless to stop this, since the staff would threaten to revolt.
Clearly, these scenarios are exaggerated. But the second sounds much more plausible to me than the first.
The WSJ might be a counterexample here: their news coverage is actually really good and informative. Their Opinion section (which I would ceteris paribus expect to better reflect ownership norms and the general institutional tenor of the paper. No one thinks of the WSJ as a left-wing rag) is what I would call a "garbage fire" except that it would be insulting to garbage fires.
I think both effects are real. But the financial incentives one seems to me like the bigger first-order effect while the type of employees one seems like the smaller second-order effect. (But maybe I have it backwards? Perhaps the type of employees is partially driven by the financial incentives?)
This is like the nature versus nurture debate in evolutionary psychology. Audience taste and journalists’ biases are both important. They interact in both obvious and subtle ways. Few conservatives go into print journalism because there isn’t much of an audience for it. Most Fox personalities seem to be chosen more for their looks than erudition, it’s not as if a plain young woman could land a gig there by going to the right school.
The use of the passive voice can be frustrating. The NYT comment section would not deride you; they would would be mostly agreeing with you with nuanced discussion and genteel attacks on the more simplistic comments.
Eventually it seems like the opinion columnists moderate their opinions but I don't track them closely enough to really know.
In the meantime, keep up pushing back on those whose ideology in these matters is still immature and not thought out.
I try to read the NYT headline every morning and if they switch up to an interesting different headline story in the afternoon I try to read it too. These tend to be really good informative articles and don’t greatly pander to far left or anything, mostly. The Israel and Claudine gay coverage has been pretty non-pandering from this reading algorithm. But the fact is if u also pepper the paper with less rigorous clickbaity stuff it’ll go viral more often and attract more subscribers and generate revenue. Even if the core readers are really interested in quality it will still be true that bad articles will be tempting and overall may be more profitable I don’t think it is the same as being the readerships fault but just a structural problem of the market. I used to spend a lot of my time watching sports and was really excited in the early 2000s as advanced metrics became more and more popular. I was annoyed watching ESPN coverage refuse to get in the weeds on this stuff but they will make more money broadening their audience and trying to go viral i think it is a numbers issue more than a problem with the customers.
Yes, in the short term, journalistic norms matter. In the long term, however, these would have been repeatedly punished by capitalism and Matt's explanation of, "downstream of the audience," becomes more and more true.
What bothers me is that even taking him at face value it's just not an excuse he would accept in a ton of other arenas. We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it. Ben just wrote an article arguing for cracking down on sports gambling despite ease and convenience being exactly what their customers are asking for. Matt doesn't even like it when software engineers work for Facebook!
I don’t think he’s asking people to let journalism companies off the hook. He’s asking them to understand what all the relevant points of leverage are if you want to demand change. (No one sensible thinks you can address the harms of fossil fuel companies while ignoring consumer demand for fossil fuels.)
I think I half agree with you here. I agree that understanding the points of leverage is critical to trying to fix things. If that's all he's saying then I don't have a problem with it. I'm just not convinced it is.
Regarding Long Island, speaking as a native who has lived across the country but returns frequently: the core of it are all of the members of the NYPD and NYFD who live in souther Nassau County. Traditionally they have an anti-city / anti-Democrat (and pro-Guiliani) bias. These are the people who made Staten Island Republican because there was a time when that had to live within city limits.
That then forms a core for other blue collar professionals ties to the city who don't particularly like the city. My father and brother were/are union electricians who lived in Nassau and worked in the city. They did NOT share this view, but many of their brethren did. This blue collar contingent lives south of the LIE, in the same places as the cops and firefighters, and the temperature has turned up.
I think the final driver is the fact that much of central Nassau has really changed from a combination of eastward migration of second and third-generation immigrants from Queens, and a change in immigration patterns where new immigrants skip the five burroughs entirely and land in central Nassau. The rapidly changing demographics of, say, East Meadow, has made many of these people uneasy. NYC has historically played fairly unique as a catch basic for international immigration, Queens in particular, so as you mention "once your family has committed to moving out of NYC to the east"... that's Nassau county, and it does not have the capacity for sprawl that Souther California does, as you aslo note.
Finally there is the fact that Long Island is quite dysfunctional. Every public service has a different map and the boders only sometimes align: there is the county, which has courts and parks, but your trash is pickup up by the three TOWNS that comprise Nassau country. The many school districts are not contiguous with the water boards, etc. If you manage to organize over one issue, the polity that you put together is non-transferrable to another issue because half the people are under a different map. So it's broken and there has been a long-time sense that it is broken.
And NIMBYism is rampant because Nassau county's core value is that it's "not the city", so the resistance to density, which could help address some of the stress, is almost genetic, going back to Levittown.
This has all long been true. But in Nassau, Trump made it acceptable for the most vocal to be all the MORE vocal.
I lived on the south shore for four years after spending the previous four years in rural eastern Kentucky and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta. My family is super racist. Yet, I witnessed more obvious outward racism in my short time on Long Island than anywhere else I've lived. While I am quite aware that there are many prejudices hidden just under the surface of some southerners, I never saw a bartender refuse to serve a black patron (a friend of mine visiting me from the city) or had a potential landlord tell me he was relieved I wasn't black. But on Strong Island, just... wow. My neighbors came up, knocked on my door, and flat out told me not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows. And my wife has some stories from a hospital there about how little regard the staff had for anyone they labeled Mexicans. It was constantly shocking to us just how bigoted the people around us were.
Wow, just wow. I am in New York State, and, when planning statewide events we have a saying about Long Island - no one goes in and no one goes out - people on Long Island tend not to attend events elsewhere in the State and no one from elsewhere tends to go to events on Long Island. The NYC people who don't even own cars are much more likely to come Upstate. So perhaps the Island is much more isolated than it seems? Also Long Island is the main source of aggressive book challenges and "First Amendment audits," in NYS.
It is functionally very isolated! You either have to traverse NYC traffic or else take a boat. Getting from Long Island to, say, a different suburb in NJ is an enormous pain in the ass in a way that getting between, say, two different suburbs of Chicago simply isn't.
"...not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows...."
That's some scary shit.
It's times like these when I thank god that all Americans are protected from this sort of vigilante violence by our even-handed, fair-minded, politically neutral, law enforcement professionals.
You'll have to take my word for it but this is all true. That landlord was a special kind of scumbag. One day the home behind ours burned down and the fire was so hot it melted the plastic siding off the separated garage of home we were renting. I called, and he came over, furious with me that I hadn't done anything to stop it melting, I guess? I had actually been out there with a garden hose putting out any flareups caused by the embers dropping onto the lawn. Not good enough! Anyway, then he went over to the people picking through the rubble of their home and asked them to pay for repairs in cash because he didn't want to report the damage to his insurer because he worried it would make his premiums go up. They told him to go away, and a shouting match ensued. Just a real class act.
And yeah, what does it say about me that we still rented a house from the guy after he was super racist? Location, location, location, I suppose.
That's a terrible story, not everyone in LI is like that, not by a long shot, but I have met a couple in my day that I wish hadn't. They are more present there then you would expect.
As a fellow LI native, I agree with this. Everyone in my parents' generation is a retired government employee living on a government pension who hates the government.
To over-generalize, my college-educated peers chose Northern NJ or Westchester when it was time to raise a family. My non-college peers mostly chose to stay in Nassau County. I think that explains the political divide.
I was going to say something along these lines, NYC has three very distinct suburbs (LI to the east, NJ to the west and south, Westchester/CT to the North) that are quite isolated from each other and there is a fair bit of self sorting when people move to the burbs. I live in the part of Brooklyn that's filled with journalists and lawyers and everyone (literally, everyone) I know who moved to the burbs when they had kids moved to either NJ or Westchester/CT. Those are the places that are culturally familiar to the wealthy professionals whose growing numbers have helped to turn those suburbs (and others elsewhere) blue. They're also both much less isolated from the rest of the country than Long Island is, which gives them a base level of appeal that other suburbs have (if you want to go skiing or whatever from LI you have to drive *through* NYC). It's always surprised me that there aren't one or two towns on LI that have broken this mold, but even the fancier ones that some of my friends grew up in just don't see to hold any appeal for young people beyond a few that move back to where their families are from.
I find the whole density/politics situation a bit odd. Why should people who like to walk to a coffee shop every morning be less concerned with crime that someone who drives 50 minutes to work? Why should an Iowa resident prefer tax cuts for the rich and deficits?
If you live at high density, there’s a lot of things that make more sense to organize communally through taxes and collective provision, and you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction. If you live at low density, it makes a lot more sense to have a small government and be self-reliant (including having your own firearms), and outsiders are naturally more unusual and suspicious.
"you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction."
I'm going to push back here. My wife grew up in and lived in not great parts of Chicago for many years, and she tells a lot of stories about being challenged about what neighborhood she was from, what street even, while doing mundane things like walking dogs. I don't think people in dense areas have higher stranger-trust by default, I think it's SES related.
I've seen fairly convincing evidence suggesting the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment happens to be found in the parts of the country with the smallest numbers of immigrants. And certainly the diverse parts of the country tend *not* to send the loudest America Firsters to Congress.
Anti immigration sentiment is very different (being theoretical) than how people treat actual strangers they meet. "Strangers from strange places" might be "people from outside my neighborhood" or it could be "people from the city" or it might be "people from another country".
In America, it can easily be all of these at once, or not. When I was in Taos, people were suspicious because I was white and northern, for instance, and white northern people are always showing up to build ugly houses and generally ruin the artsy native scene. I think suspicion of outsiders is extremely natural. When I travel abroad, it certainly is. I think your opinion about my wife's experience is, on a world scale, very unusual.
Thank you! This is the more in depth answer I was looking for; I appreciate Matt taking the time to respond and think there's something to his relative density theory. But his analysis doesn't explain why Nassau is different from the New Jersey suburbs (where I live), which are also lower density relative to the city -- though, he might say, they're also higher than the outlying counties. These sorts of population and government dynamics make a lot of sense to me and contrast with NJ, where some of the counties are pretty well run (all things considered). Appreciate you responding!
I think his analysis does explain why Long Island is different from New Jersey. In New Jersey there is always farther you could go (into the pine barrens or into northeastern Pennsylvania, if you really want to go far out) so the parts that function like suburbs are selected differently from the farther out parts that function like exurbs. But in Long Island you can’t go farther than Montauk.
Western LI is very much an exurb of NYC, though. And while I don't claim to be an expert on LI dynamics I'm pretty sure that no one actually commutes from Montauk notwithstanding the fact that the LIRR does in fact go that far, given that it's a 3 hour train ride.
The relevant conceptual dividing line seems less likely to be purely geographic and more about maximum tenable commute-shed for city workers versus those whose livelihoods are more geographically localized.
Oh I see. So Long Island “traps” people who like the proximity to the city but have politics that would favor low density. And New Jersey’s commuter suburbs don’t. Is that right? I take your point!
Another component is the fact that all of the dynamics that have caused societal stress that are now nation wide, all started on Long Island generations ago becasue New York has traditionally been high wage / high cost of living. The pot has been simmering a long time, for blue collar workers in particular:
- Globalization: manufacturing left Long Island for the American South in the 60s and 70s, long before it moved to the "global south".
- Housing Affordability Crisis: this really took off in the late 1990s / early 2000s in a way that many communities elsewhere in the nation only started to see in the last 5-10 years.
- Exurbinazation: began in the 90s as Suffolk county got built out, but has already run its course when it ran into NIMBY limits in the early 2000s (see: affordability)
- Traffic: true for the entire tri-state region, but particulalry bad given Long Island geography as the center of gravity moved further east that is still trying to commute due west.
And the final nail: that who are inclined to leave (like me) moved into the city starting in the late 1990s. Urbanism is all the rage everywhere now, but when I was a kid no one in their right mind wanted to live in Manhattan (much less Brooklyn)... until around 1995 when EVERYONE who graduated from HS would LOVE to, if they could. Those that could afford to live there on their own, did so. That dynamic has been stronger culturally and running longer in NYC than other urban areas of the country, depriving Nassau county in particular, of native "blue votes". And when those young people grow up and have families, they first try Brooklyn, if they can affort it, and if then can't, Westchester and Norther NJ are more attractice alternatives than moving back to Nassau. NYC has very unique suburbanizaiton patterns due to its geography and its mass transit setup.
It's also partly sheer geography: suburban Long Island abuts Queens and Brooklyn, and is thus *filled* with transplants (by now going back multiple generations) from those two boroughs, both of which were home to a lot of culturally moderate to conservative white people. In the early days of white flight and suburbanization, city folk heading for the suburbs tended to head to suburban areas close to where they grew up. For Brooklynites and Queensites, that often meant Long Island.
I was wondering if Matt would get into the housing affordability issue. It’s really bad on LI, despite a relatively strong commuter rail system and tons of room to develop around stations.
>But the perfect time to change the natural born citizen rule is right now, when there’s no specific Arnold Schwarzenegger figure who would benefit.<
Back when Schwarzenegger was prominent politically, George Will used to make a pithy argument to the effect that "It's bad that our constitution allows Paris Hilton to serve as president and forbids Henry Kissinger." Something like that (he probably used a different "vapid celebrity" example, but I couldn't find the exact quote).
Anyway, that line has always stuck with me. I wasn't the biggest Kissinger fanboi on the planet (nor his biggest detractor: his was a complicated legacy). But Will had a good point. It really is self-defeating and unjust that America doesn't allow immigrants to become president, even after a lengthy period of citizenship.
PS—People absolutely would bring up Elon Musk's name if we tried to amend the constitution right now, Matt. Just sayin.
The main reason America is the best country is that when you're an immigrant who becomes a citizen, you become just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Changing the president eligibility rules will help reinforce that idea.
But yeah the person who people will think about here is Elon Musk...which honestly would be a good thing given that he's right-coded but changing the rule is left-coded.
I really can't stand Musk, I'll admit. But the more I think about this issue in the context of EM, the more I conclude it's really not any argument at all in favor of the ban on immigrant presidents. The most obvious reason why is: you can't make constitutional policy based on narrow examples. The less obvious reason is: there are plenty of great immigrants who might make excellent presidents. No sense cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Also, if we ever get around to changing this part of article 2, I'd have no problem with a perfectly lengthly interlude between citizenship and presidential eligibility (say, 30 years).
If you schedule the rule change to take place January 1st, 2025 you're probably fine. You're talking about someone 4 years out from running, so you're not talking about any particular election.
When California tried to pass a rule saying that presidential candidates should be required to release their tax returns, the governor vetoed it saying it was too divisive / seemed politically motivated - i.e. it was _clearly_ aimed at candidate Trump (for re-election). On the one hand I agreed, but I wish they had, in 2017, passed it for the 2024 election, when it presumably _wouldn't_ have been Trump (since at the time he would either have won re-election and been disqualified or lost and.... presumably not run again... more fool me)
If I was rewriting the clauses that limit who can run for various offices, I'd abolish the attempt at a cursus honorum (House at 25, Senate at 30, President at 35) and say that no person may be elected to any federal office if they are beneath the age of criminal responsibility at the date they first file for candidacy, require all candidates to be citizens of the United States, and require that they have been residents of the United States for a reasonable period (the last five years, perhaps) - with an exception for those who have resided outside the US in the service of the United States, (e.g. ambassadors, military service) and that they reside in the appropriate state at the time of election and throughout their term in office. I'd also add, rather than a requirement that naturalized citizens be citizens for a period of time, instead that naturalized citizens must have renounced the other nationality they held before naturalization (or made a reasonable effort to do so if another country is being unreasonable about releasing them). Naturalization is a much lengthier process now than it was in 1788, so requiring you to have been a citizen for seven or nine years back then was measuring from basically as soon as you got off the boat, while now it's measuring from five to ten years after you came to live in the US.
The voters are not going to elect literal children, unless there are extraordinary circumstances - but if there are extraordinary circumstances, then why not entrust the voters to make that decision at the time? If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?
As a practical matter, "on principle, we should change the rules to allow this crazy hypothetical, because it will never come to pass so why not"... I don't find this persuasive.
One of the advantages of this being an internet comment that has no real chance of becoming law is that I can say what I actually believe rather than being bound by political constraints.
Do we need some kind of lower legal limit? Yes, because the way that various election laws are enforced is by applying criminal liability to the candidate for what their campaign does, and having a candidate below the age of criminal responsibility would allow them to break all sorts of laws with impunity (and that candidate would not need to win for this to create a problem).
Is there, in general, a problem with a candidate who is utterly unsuited to office, provided they lose? No, the position of candidate (as distinct from the holder of elected office) is of no power so long as they comply with electoral laws.
If you set an age, are you saying that everyone or even most people of that age are suitable? No, you are saying that at least one person of that age is good enough to hold the least important elected office. If you set the age limit at 18 (the same as that to vote), then you're saying that no 17-year-old ever will be able to be the most junior member of the House. I don't think that's sound: I've met some remarkably mature 17-year-olds who would make excellent Congresspeople. Why shouldn't they run at 17? And you can keep arguing the age down quite a long way - I think the youngest person I've met who I'd think could be a junior legislator was about 13/14 at the time. So I'm picking 10 partly because it's the age of criminal responsibility, and partly because it's an age where I can safely say that even the most extraordinarily mature and capable person will still be at least 10.
This is why I think that the age of candidature should generally be lower than the age of the franchise. When you set a minimum age to vote, you want the majority of the people of that age who vote to do so responsibly; that means that you're asking how mature and responsible the median person of that age will be (if a minority of the very youngest age group are irresponsible, that's such a small fraction of the voters that it will have little effect - voting just isn't that precise an instrument). When you set a minimum age to be a candidate, you want to not exclude someone who would be capable of doing the job of holding elected office, so you're asking not about the capabilities of the median person of that age, but about the capabilities of the most mature, capable, responsible person of that age.
Do you want a separate age limit for President? Maybe. I can see an argument for that. Honestly, it'd be simpler to just have a single age, but I'm OK with a separate rule for President. I'd want a safety margin, ie set it well below whatever you think the youngest plausible candidate could be. But for President/VP, that could easily be 18 or 21. Mind you, it's not like anyone has really been kept out by the 35 year limit - JFK (youngest when elected) could have stood in 1952, two elections before he became President. The only VP who could not have stood the election before the one in which he won was Breckinridge.
We have the exact opposite problem in the US now: they're too old. I've finally come around to favoring an amendment to establish age limits: around 80 for the presidency and around 85 for Congress.
"I also want to endorse the Beutler take in favor of Democrats and independents in open primary states voting for Nikki Haley, despite her various flaws."
Somewhere out there, an obsessive Tim Scott fan known to this site screams into the void...
>That’s a sound observation, but I want to emphasize that I think those principles are bad. The limitation of two terms is bad
Wait, uh..... what?? Presidents should be able to run an unlimited number of times? That's a genuinely terrible idea. To my knowledge every presidential system in the world has some kind of term limit. Lots of developing countries actually impose a 1 term limit, just because they know how much power an incumbent has. We don't need to go that far, but 2 is an extremely reasonable number- presidents are already too strong as-is
I think dying but full of himself FDR refusing to step aside in 1944 and then not even telling his chosen successor about the atom bomb makes the point about term limits well. And really was the reason we got them.
I think we would have actually been fine. Any generic Democrat would have run the war similarly to FDR. We might not have gotten Japanese internment had FDR stepped aside, because he was racist and agreed with the policy while another Democrat might have stood up to the military and quashed it.
We might not have had Lend Lease with a different (less politically skilled, lower stature) Democrat, much less a Republican. That was delicate. Even FDR himself didn't dare go to Congress for that until after he had secured his third term.
I'm not sure that Lend-Lease was ultimately that important strategically; it was important to Britain in the short term, but in the long term, the things that defeated Nazi Germany were baked into the cake- the attack on Pearl Harbor and the breach of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact ensuring a 2 front war. We would have ultimately reversed any gains the Nazis made on Britain during 1941.
And that's assuming another Democrat didn't get it through. Affinity for Britain among American policymakers has been very strong for over 100 years.
But the Soviets benefited mightily from lend-lease, and them not being able to slow down the Nazis as much as they did could have been disastrous for the Allies.
I have to admit I'm under-versed in who the alternatives to Roosevelt were, what their chosen policies would be, and how popular they were; it seems at least plausible that a Republican could have won, which would have been a whole new ballgame.
Unlikely. The Republican candidate in 1940 was Wendell Willkie. He didn't gain any real traction with the public. And the Democrats were extremely popular. Any generic Democrat runs and wins, and most likely it would have been a less racist one than Roosevelt which means we may not get Japanese internment.
Not an FDR fan at all, but regretfully breaking my commenting moratorium twice in a day to note that one of the top Democratic candidates in 1940 would surely have been FDR's VP, John Nance Garner, who was a segregationist. (And apparently so personally racist that he actively tried to get black people thrown out of unsegregated restaurants he was eating at! Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/40444912831 )
Roosevelt not running is such a huge flap of the butterfly's wings that everything is up for grabs, including whether Wilkie was the nominee (and if it's not Wilkie, it's someone much more isolationist for the Republicans).
But to take a step back, what are we talking about? We're talking about whether it's good or bad to limit presidents from running for a third term. And Roosevelt's third term went about as well as it possibly could have, with the exception of Japanese internment, which was truly horrible—one of our most despicable crimes as a country—but which I would argue also had a fairly limited impact on the country, certainly on the world, compared to the possibility of an Axis victory in WWII. You're right that the fourth term was shameful, but the damage was very limited there as well. So with the highest possible stakes, the argument for term limits is that limiting Roosevelt *probably* would have been *no worse* than what we got? What is the positive argument for how term limits makes the country *better*?
Agreed. Term limits are only appropriate for single-winner chief executive offices (President, Governor, Mayor), but they are highly appropriate for those. I don't like single-term limits; I prefer either two or three (and, honestly, given a completely free choice, I'd have three terms for President); I think politicians are generally better if they have to face the challenge of re-election, but if the risk of a President becoming effectively impossible to remove means that indefinite re-elections result in the "challenge" part of that disappearing.
I don't think term limits are necessary or good for local officials — in this case, mayors — since there's a higher level of government to stop them from turning themselves into dictators, and the local talent pool might not be that large (meaning forcing an incumbent out can mean ushering in a crappy replacement person who honestly isn't who voters want).
Re: governors, I'm still quite skeptical about term limits there. Although the federal government doesn't have a ton of control over state elections, I'm just generally very skeptical that many people would want to become governor for life + risk that they would actually somehow do away with democracy in their state to make it happen. Governors don't control a military and usually don't control that many police — so for power-hungry people, it's not remotely as fulfilling as being president, and also doesn't come with the tools to help install yourself as dictator for life. If there were a term limit for governors, I'd go with 16 or even 20 years.
Yes, that's a borderline insnane take and it's shocking to me that someone as attune to politics as Matt can be blind to the vital necessity for term limits in a presidential system.
The idea is that we're making general rules that apply to all possible presidents, both great and terrible, and not reasoning based on just 1 or 2 of them
Right, but since the terrible presidents are highly likely to be unpopular—Jackson is the only one I can think of who was terrible and popular, though I might be underinformed here—term limits are likely to have the effect of stifling the great or at least above-average presidents (as has happened in our lifetime) while being a redundant check on terrible presidents (since the main check on them is the electoral process).
There are 64 countries globally that use a presidential system. All 64 of them, as far as I can tell, impose term limits on their president. I think we can reason from that that incumbency is a gigantic advantage and that it's tough to get a long-serving president out of there. The mere fact of their decade-plus leadership may warp what was previously a freely democratic system, so the will of the voters may not be enough. When 100% of countries do it 1 way and 0% of countries do it the other way, I tend to think of Chesterton's Fence
I think the correlation between unpopular and terrible is there, but imperfect and probably much weaker than we would like. For example - Trump appears to be as popular if more popular than Biden. I'm not a huge fan of the Biden administration, but he's several leagues removed from being Trump level terrible.
His terribleness as a president was a strong factor in him being defeated when he ran for a second term, let alone a third (though of course he's running for a second term *again* and the jury is still out). I certainly wouldn't state "a bad president could never get elected for a third term," but I think for a bad president to get elected again and again, a lot of other safeguards would have to be dismantled, and I think the term limits one is one of the least important safeguards and also has some serious costs.
Almost every president is popular when elected by definition (since they have to win the election); I'm talking about when it's time for them to run again, and again. In Harding's case, he died in his first term but it seems pretty likely that Teapot Dome would have made it hard for him to get elected to a second term, much less a third.
1944, not much. 1940, he handled the period before we entered the war about as well as it was possible for it to be handled, in my limited understanding.
The superiority of this arrangement—give them the power to actually get things done but make it easy to remove them if they screw up—over Madisonian presidentialism is infuriating.
Note that separation of powers is possible while still having the ability for an assembly to remove the chief executive.
This is not a model that any country I'm aware of has adopted, but you could elect an executive assembly that chooses the head of government and a separate legislative assembly that passes laws.
The country that comes closest to this is actually the United States of America. You could just make the Electoral College into an actual assembly, give it a place to meet in DC, and let it kick out the President or VP at any time.
Here's what you'd need to change.
"1. The Electors shall be elected for a four-year term commencing on the 1st December in the year of their election, and shall meet in the Federal District as a single body in lieu of meeting in their respective states. Each Elector shall take an oath or affirmation in the same terms as a Senator or Representative.
2. Before transacting any other business, they shall choose a Convenor of the Electoral College who must be supported by a majority of the whole number of the Electors. They may change the Convenor by a majority of the whole number of Electors choosing a new Convenor at any time. Once a Convenor has been seated, they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President. The Convenor of the Electors shall open the ballots and count them. The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors, and if no person have such majority, then the Electors shall vote once again until such a majority be achieved. If no such majority shall be achieved before the terms of the Senators and Representatives shall commence, then those bodies may elect a President and Vice-President according to the terms of the Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution.
3. The Electors may, at any time during their term in office, by the vote of a majority of the whole number of Electors, may elect a new President or Vice-President who shall immediately replace the President or Vice-President that they previously elected.
4. The Supreme Court of the United States shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of the Electors. The Electoral College shall set its own Quorum for doing business. The President shall have the Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during a term of the Electoral College.
5. Persons nominated by the President as Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls and all other Officers of the United States other than Judges shall be confirmed by the Electoral College, not by the Senate. Such votes shall require a majority of the whole number of the Electors to confirm a nomination. Judges of the supreme Court and of those inferior Courts for which Law prescribes confirmation shall still be confirmed by the Senate, and the Treaty-making power shall continue to reside with the Senate. Recess appointments for offices confirmed by the College may be made during the Recess of the College rather than the Senate; those confirmed by the Senate shall continue to be a matter for the Recess of the Senate.
6. The Electors shall receive a Compensation for their services, to be ascertained by Law and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. Such Compensation shall not be less than that paid to a Representative, and they shall be entitled to appoint staff who shall be paid out of the Treasury of the United States in no fewer number and on no worse terms than those appointed by a Representative.
7. The Electoral College shall have the power of subpoena to require the President, Vice-President, and any Officer of the United States currently serving, or formerly serving during the term of office of the College, to answer questions under oath on any matter of public business. This shall not infringe upon the rights of such persons under the Fifth Amendment.
8. No Elector may hold any Office under the United States nor be a member of either House of Congress during his continuance in Office."
Once again Matt mentions that the US should "import" foreign expertise in train transportation. Which I fully support. (Though I am continually amused that he never suggests importing help from the undisputed world leaders in rail: China.)
But I do wish he'd look at the many existing examples of countries doing exactly that and seeing how well (or....not) it works out in order to take his ideas from American-centric theorising to including on the ground realities.
Vietnam has Japan and China helping build infrastructure and it is still a boondoggle. So....the question is, why? China has helped with rail infrastructure projects elsewhere (Laos, Indonesia) and there are lessons there as well. I'd love to see his take on them.
"Though I am continually amused that he never suggests importing help from the undisputed world leaders in rail: China"
Speaking from a position of some actual experience here, I would suggest that Japan continues to produce a higher-performing, more systemically integrated HSR "end product" than China, for one.
But more importantly, the market conditions under which Japan does so, while not fully aligned with those of the US, are much, much closer in terms of input costs, safety requirements, construction and operational labor prices, and to an extent regulatory apparatus, than China's conditions.
TL;DR: China is way too different to be able to help us unfuck most of our own messes.
We bought business-class tickets the last time just to be able to skip out on that.
Japan, for all its massive pathologies, understands how to make urban living livable.
Taiwan is not far off and probably a more achievable standard for those of us who aren't inhumanly self-controlled.
China... the phrase "dog eat dog" could have been coined to describe urban transportation in China, in all its forms. I have literally watched people driving a 2-seater kei car graze the side of a 24-seat mid-sized bus to force it out of its lane and cut it off to get to an off-ramp on the 4th ring road. The shit people will do at 5:20 PM to get that last spot on the boarding landing of a crowded bus when the next one is already visible in the distance leaves indelible scars on the psyche.
Also China just builds a lot of completely wasteful projects because it is a totalitarian dictatorship run by grandiose egotists rather than a democratic country whose leaders are required to deliver real world benefits to its people.
Some HSR advocates love China and I frankly find those people scary- the model can't be the kind of government that builds a splashy rail line to Tibet that has supplemental oxygen on every car because the government wants to further a policy of ethnic cleansing.
Bit of an oversimplification on the first paragraph.
China builds a bunch of marginal infrastructure for one simple reason: GDP targets are an input for its economy, not an output, and its regional and local governments had sufficiently weak budget constraints that a whole generation of officials could and did hit growth targets by engaging in the macroeconomic equivalent of breaking windows and replacing them.
That's left it with a few trillion dollars of debt underwritten by a few trillion dollars of marginally-useful infrastructure, the asset values of which should be written down by an average of 35% and the losses allocated amongst governments.
Less to do with it being authoritarian or enamored of shiny shit and more to do with the need for economic growth numbers to feed into the "national renewal" discourse.
Japan's lost decade, caused mainly by its own failures to invest capital rationally, near-zero TFP growth, and inability to allocate the resultant losses except by pushing them off on the citizenry through fiscal repression and the resultant deflationary reductions in consumption, is the model to predict China's next two decades.
I'm reminded of Noah Smith's great essay on how too much investment can actually make you poorer. The idea is that physical infrastructure investment then requires investments for maintenance over time which locks you into costs you may not want to bear. Or, alternatively, you may forego those maintenance investments and simply see all your nice infrastructure fall apart over time (America!)
China built a *lot* of rail. In your time there, David, did you see them also making major investments in the continued maintenance of all that physical stock?
That's not true. China obviously builds a whole bunch of train lines that don't pay for themselves because they are an evil dictatorship. And you are making excuses for them, which is exactly why a certain sort of HSR advocate scares me.
I do not want people who admire the Chinese Communist dictators making policy in America.
I boarded a British LNER train the other day and the nonsensical boarding process was pretty close to what I hear Amtrak's is, so it's not unique.
(Also, the station was full of signs implying people are constantly trying to beat up the train staff, and I got carded for buying a macha because energy drinks are 18+ or something.)
Heathrow duplicates the Amtrak experience. The gate your plane will depart from is a national security level secret until 10 minutes or so before boarding starts, even if your airline only has a few gates at the airport.
Secret hack: check the "flight status" on your airline's app. It almost always displays the gate your plane will be at (because the airlines take it from their own operational data, where they obviously need the gate information).
There are a bunch of examples of countries bringing in foreign expertise to learn from which worked out well (China from Europe and Japan, Korea and Taiwan from Japan, Spain from France, Turkey from Germany and France). The cases where they haven't tried to learn from the foreign experts and adapt that learning to local circumstances but have just let them do it without learning from them (Vietnam and Laos from China, Britain from France) have been the worst examples.
Yes, my understanding is Laos was much more like that. I think we're on a similar page, though, if not the same exact page. There is a wide variety of outcomes. Like anything in the real world, it almost certainly doesn't come down to a single, simple answer.
I know Matt is more about big ideas than detailed proposals but I think this is an example where he has an opportunity to look at the many, many examples around the world of imprinting foreign train expertise and trying to draw some better conclusions than "we should have the French do it, whatever that even means".
My sneaking suspicion is that the French train experts, like TSMC, will discover there isn't the talent on the ground to make it happen.
I'm guessing that the problem in Vietnam is similar to the UK problem in HS2 - ie learning the wrong lessons from the foreign experts (in the UK case, we had foreign experts for HS1 and then decided we didn't need them for HS2, and we've managed to get the worst of both cases).
But that means understanding what the "right lessons" are, which is a specific case-by-case thing, not a broad strokes thing. Discovering that "there isn't the talent on the ground" means "you need to train people". Note that China spent decades training Chinese engineers with them working as junior people under supervision from French and German and Japanese experts - and they still got Wenzhou and had to completely redo a whole chunk of their signalling design because they'd taken a stack of shortcuts.
Yeap. That's what they say. Who knows. If they ever win an international contract and have to litigate it ... we'll find out. I'd be shocked. Both Siemens and Alstom have powerful patents for propulsion and signaling.
The ability to manage subcontractors and external IP is part of successful project management, deciding when to use something off the shelf versus building your own.
It will be interesting to see how it all lasts. I'm straying from my earned hat and appropriating a civil engineer's, but you don't always see quality (or lack thereof) really manifest itself until twenty years hence.
It would be a shame for them if the thirty-nine-odd Golden Gate equivalents they've built in the last decade all started decommissioning within our adult lifetimes.
"It's too early to be making investments in maintenance for most of the assets but I can tell you that most of what I've seen is no better designed to be easily maintained than the massive amount of rail assets we built 1890-1930. And with prestressed, precast concrete as the preferred building material for rail ties, foundation piles, retaining walls, viaduct piers, and girder systems, 100% of it has a limited lifespan (50-100 years depending upon a bunch of factors in the concrete mixes used), which compression arches of dry-fit masonry basically do not."
They have the same incipient "elephant lump of repair and replacement" problem that we're only just coming to grapple effectively with on our 1950's-70's Interstate and road-building binge.
They need, depending on definition... 5-10k kilometers of HSR trunk lines, and another 5-10k are marginally justifiable.
They have... 43k kilometers and another 25k planned or under construction, to increasingly tiny places.
Because, and this is crucial to explain just about everything about Chinese public-sector spending and much of the private-sector: GDP growth is an *input* value, not an output measurement as in mixed-market economies.
1. is just good command-with-Chinese-characteristics-economy planning. First build the trains while the empty land is cheap, then forcibly relocate the people!
Just to be clear here ... the US doesn't have any rail technology either. I'm just pointing out that everything the CRRC has built - and sure it's impressive in scale - is based on domestic use IP rights from Siemens and Alstom.
I'm not sure the implied definition of "expertise" here is the right one. Technical/engineering experts, sure, great. But the *real* expertise high-level transportation managers require is probably understanding local, state and federal politics and an ability to work with or maneuver around the bureaucracy.
And those skills only come from true red-blooded Americans.
The problem is overlapping rules, regulations and the ubiquitous threat and fact of litigation. The biggest fix would be political. Pass laws giving executives virtually unfettered discretion to authorize stuff, subject only to market rate compensation for those whose property is taken.
As someone who grew up elsewhere and now lives on Long Island (the opposite of the typical pattern), here is my assessment of the reasons for the relative conservatism of the place:
• Lack of new housing – partly due to nimbyism, partly due to inherent space limitations of being surrounded by water – freezes in an older crowd with more of a ‘70s/’80s suburban perspective, like back when that typically meant voting more Republican than it does now.
• A sense among some people here of really wanting to define themselves in opposition to the city – something that you could probably find in other suburban places too, but more pronounced here because the city is !NYC! and because of the previous bullet.
• You can watch Fox News anywhere, but here there’s also the New York Post providing a Republican view on more local issues. You might pick up the Post to read about, like, the New York Giants and also see articles in there complaining about bail reform.
• I read somewhere that 100-150 years ago, in the days of machine politics and white ethnicity being more salient than it is now, Italian Americans found themselves frozen out of the Democratic machines because they were dominated by Irish Americans, so the Italians went with the Republicans. LI has a lot of Italians, and I think there is some residual sentiment that the Republican party is their traditional home.
• I think that Westchester has pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of poverty, while LI has more places that are middle class-y. So if you’re a retired NYC cop or firefighter, you probably can’t afford the nicer parts of Westchester, but you probably don’t want to live in the less affluent parts, so you go to LI.
I’m not sure how middle-classy it is these days. It’s pretty expensive to live in any decent part of LI (meaning basically not Hempstead, Central Islip, etc).
I think the housing appreciation over the last few years may play a part. Nassau is 80%+ SFH and has seen prices shoot up from already high levels since 2019. But the people with existing mortgages didn’t get proportionately higher incomes. So they’re wealthy on paper and in the eyes of the state/county, but feel precarious from rising property taxes. So that’s the part I think is most relevant for the older empty nester suburbanites on LI.
I also think that for non-empty nesters, education and public safety are very high salience issues. Education has gone from a positive issue for Dems to a neutral or slightly negative issue. Public safety has gone from a neutral or slightly negative issue to a solidly negative issue. You feel that shift in Northern Nassau.
I asked a question. I guess policemen do n ot like having to deal with criminals in any city, but that's their job, So is there something special abut NYC?
Buttigieg has been rearranging deck chairs on the Queen Mary. The ship isn’t exactly sinking, but it’s obsolete and anyone who is serious about crossing the Atlantic needs to mothball the whole thing and invest in 707s.
Transportation is the sector where America can most learn from other countries. Digging a kilometer of tunnel in New York City is about ten times as expensive as doing it in Oslo. That’s simply insane. Does anyone think that Norwegian workers are being exploited? That a country with a clean, beautiful capital and vast green spaces is desecrating its human environment? And even if one quibbles with a Norwegian urban planning, does anyone really think it’s so bad that big projects here should cost ten times as much? Buttigieg could accomplish more by using his bully pulpit to rage against Byzantine and useless regulations than by technocratic tweaks. There are plenty of assistant secretaries who can manage the appropriations from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.
I agree with your views on transportation policy in the US (as I prepare to attend the TRB conference next week, where I expect to see a lot of cool and compelling research on various transpo topics). But I think that would be a political nonstarter for a Dem in an administration seeking reelection. There are a *lot* of entrenched interests served by the status quo. That’s not good, but realistically I don’t think he has that much room to maneuver, apart from the changes on the margin that have already been proposed. I wish it were different…
For every union voter (most of whom live in safe states) who collects rents from featherbedding and high construction costs, there are several swing voters who want to make america work again. There are also plenty of people who envy the rents that guild members make and would like to gore some oxen. Then there is my personal contempt for risk averse politicians. Buttigieg can maintain elite status for life as long as he avoids a felony conviction. His odds of ever being president are no more than 20% because it’s hard to get a prize that is only handed out to a single person every four years. I’d like to see some swashbuckling. If Biden fired him for rhetorical union busting, that might help build his brand.
I agree with you that Buttigieg will carry on as a quiet technocrat. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and he’s been somnolent for the past three years.
Shame I switched employers, I was there every year 2017-23, except 2021. We could have gotten a drink on company money and bitched about the environmental consultants.
My area of expertise is peripheral enough that from my perspective the conference is meh but it's nice to get together with clients in DC over good food and booze and see a couple college friends while in town.
OMG let's plan to meet up! I was going to ask whether any SBers would be there, but I thought it might be a bit too niche even for this forum.
I'll be roving around wearing my journo cap, so I'm very flexible. I'm also (unofficially) helping with the booth for my company (STV) at the career fair on Sunday.
EDIT: I just checked to see if one can DM on substack, and apparently the answer is no. If you'd like, you can get in touch with me via gmail, where (because I'm old) my handle is my name (the rest of my last name is "intyre").
It’s worth noting that Pete is not his own boss — he reports to the president. Cabinet secretaries do not have the autonomy to simply say or do whatever they feel like doing (nor should they, IMO, as they’re not the ones who voters elected).
If Biden says “don’t say a single word that’s critical of the unions,” then that’s how it will be. If legislation is passed with Buy America requirements, it is what it is. Pete only has so much room to maneuver.
He has to be thinking which lane of the Democratic primary would give credit for that. Getting fired by Biden only helps if it’s because you’re being too Sanders-esque.
"f you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
Some pushback on this broadbrush - that may be how many people are but I can say as someone who's been a sustainable transportation advocate for a long time, I'm extra critical of bad environmental reporting that overstates risks or is based on weak evidence - because it really does backfire. It always will come back to you and it burns your credibility and you lose people. I wince whenever I see rosy reports of how EVs are about to sweep the nation, for example.
I mean, I doubt Matt would disagree with what I'm saying here, but anyway, it's not clear to me that all advocates will overlook bad content on their issue.
Hard agree from a writer on environmental topics (among others). The extent of glib oversimplification is really depressing. Whenever I dig into an issue and I think I know what my conclusions will be at the start, I’m usually wrong. And I do think the escalating hysteria of environmental advocacy is really harmful to both the credibility of advocates and prospects for change.
It seems like a way to get rid of the Natural Born Citizen Clause would be to add a section saying that it doesn't go into effect until 20 years or so after it's ratified, to allay fears that one party or another would take advantage with a very obvious candidate that's known in the present.
Another half-measure that I think would be interesting would be that it doesn't apply to anyone who moved here as a child. Like, the minor quibbling over whether McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone "counted" was EXCEPTIONALLY stupid, several orders of magnitude more stupid than the very reasonable question of whether somebody like Ahhnold should have been allowed to run.
That to me is the most interesting edge case. My sister was adopted and came to America at one year old. I was born here. We're both US citizens who grew up in America, but I am eligible to be president and she's not.
AS a subscriber I would like to enjoy your podcasts, but since like most folks I can read several times faster than anyone can speak, I would much prefer a transcript of the podcast,
But... in the substack post there is a transcript directly below the podcast. You just have to click the little drop-down menu labeled "Transcript". I know because I read the podcast instead of listening to it.
Yes!!! And especially a MY podcast is not going to just transmit neutral facts to be absorbed and filed away, Who wants to comment on what one "heard" at minute 21 and tried to jot down in order to push back against it. Podcasts are OK for science/history -- Sean Carroll, Patrick Wyman -- Wyman, but not for content that one might want to engage with.
"As a consequence, I often quote or paraphrase, consciously or unconsciously, from material which I have read. How is this different from what LLMs do? Am I going to get sued?" Why do people keep making this silly comment about the NYT suit? You paid for those books that you read. Open AI et al are actively "stealing" the content to train LLMs that they intend to generate massive profits with. It's completely different. (And I say this as someone who gets a lot of utility out of LLMs!)
Ya, the way LLMs have used copyrighted materials is completely alien to the concept of fair use. They have huge numbers of pirated and unpaid for full manuscripts protected under manuscripts in the training data they collected. They made copies of copyright material for the purpose of making a profit and have positioned themselves in a manner to cause financial harm to the owners of the copyrighted materials.
if you read a book in a library, you did not pay for it. if you read a public substack post, you did not pay for it. if you found something on the internet, you probably did not pay for it
2 of these examples are probably fine, but the first is not. The library (+ whoever is funding the library - the taxpayer, the university, etc) paid for it. We don't get books/magazines/journals etc for free!
Yes? Obtaining the pirated copies is a violation regardless of what you use it for. And selling book reports does not qualify as “educational”--kind of the opposite, not that it matters.
One could imagine the copyrighted works were borrowed from the library, speedread, and returned immediately. So they had legal rights to _read_ each one at the time they read it.
Would that change your opinion?
Is it still "copied" once it's affected their training data in the neural network but where they don't actually explicitly store a copy anymore (and even having the NYTimes spoon feed as much as possible they only got a 99% return?).
I distinguish TEXT from ART because... I'm not really sure how much benefit they actually got from including clearly for-sale copyrightable works vs just grabbing free content, so I also don't how much authors are being harmed _because_ their work was copied vs. having to compete with these things.
Ok. Let's take your analogy. Let's say you borrow materials from the library, then photocopy every single page of text, then they photocopies were digitally copied multiple times over, then these copied versions are moved across multiple servers that use large numbers of GPUs to create derivative works (LLM) that are designed to emulate the repeatedly copied copyrighted materials. These derived works (LLMs) are using copyrighted materials and seek to profit by competing with actual authors of works. They also devalue the work of authors via this competition while not compensating the copyright holders they derived their models from.
There are authors, the like George RR Martin, who are suing OpenAI because ChatGPT can basically replicate entire chapters of their books and characters. Something that is highly implausible without access to the entire manuscripts and OpenAI does not make their training data public. The training data still is in OpenAI's possession (the unculled version too since that is where you start). It is necessary to create future versions of Chat-GPT because you cannot have the models iterate on their own output.
Simply put, there isn't borrowing. There is repeated copying of copyrighted material. This is necessary to create the derivative work, LLMs, which then stand to financially harm the holders of the copyrighted works who's property rights were violated, repeatedly.
I'm supposing that they deleted all the training data already, if they need it again, they'll use it. AFAIK they won't replicate entire chapters verbatim - close but not quite, so they aren't storing copies. I _do_ believe they input the entire original text of the book originally into the training data - I'm saying the LLM doesn't still have that copy - it has rules that generate something _close_ to that copy if you ask it.
I do think they'd have done better to ignore all the copyright text and go without - they'd probably be able to manage almost as well without the argument that they're stealing copyright material. (The writing quality would probably be lower since you do want higher quality input to start)
It's tricky... I do have sympathy for authors who are directly competing against something trained on _their_ text. But I also want this sort of thing to exist to allow more people to write text and stories without being professional writers.
There is no way they deleted all their training data. My big concern with all these LLM and "GPTs" is that they are probably going to create their own demise if they displace the sources for their training data. (One example is making the internet unescapable with all the AI generated content.)
It's like performing regressions on data generated from a forecast. No new information is provided to the model.
This is a bad comment and isn't at all the pivot that any of this turns on.
The NYT and everyone else has plenty of ability to not offer their text in ways that Open AI can scrape, and it's not as though they would be any less pissed if OpenAI bought one (1) (or one hundred (100)) accounts to read their content with.
The issue is that this is a new thing. Previously, you could check for someone doing high-volume checks to your site, or copying your text word-for-word, and that if it wasn't that, it was a human with a human level capacity to absorb your text, and humans just don't scale that much.
Now we have something human-like, but with much better recall and wider ability to absorb information. It's *not* the same as something that just copies and regurgitates your text word for word, it's genuinely taking the text in and integrating it at an understanding level (which, yes, involves having a substantial ability to recall it), and which can then to some (substantially *sub*-human depth, but massively superhuman breadth) make use of your content.
This isn't what copyright law has traditionally been about, and without making it very hard for humans to access your content you aren't solving it by making people pay for your content.
I'm at such a loss as to why everyone on the left thinks it's obvious that Trump participated in an insurection on Jan 6th? He obviously didn't care about political violence and wanted to steal an election but thst doesn't answer the question.
It's obviously awful, but the moment you get down to trying to give a set of elements that constitute an insurection it gets really hard (the CO court definition obviously gives the wrong answer in many hypothetical cases) -- and given that the amendment was passed in the wake of the civil war isn't it possible the reason they didn't give more guidance as to how to adjudicate it is they meant things like the civil war or whiskey rebellion where it's going to be obvious?
I fear that people aren't thinking through how bad this could go if we basically apply this provision on a know it when you see it basis.
The short version is that these definitions don't take any notice of who has to intend what to qualify and don't require that the violence have sufficient nexus to the means the election is stolen. Trump may have intended to steal the election and may even have intended the protest clash with police when he spoke but merely clashing with police isn't unusual enough to suffice nor that he didn't just encourage the violence out of general anger. At the later point where he choose not to stop relatively extreme violence it seems likely he was just angry and knew that it wouldn't help him stay in power. More specifically,
The CO district court definition was:
"an insurrection as used in Section Three is (1) a public use of force or threat of force (2) by a group of people (3) to hinder or prevent execution of the Constitution of the United States.”
But that means that the police have engaged in insurrection when they try and shut down a rally in violation of the 1st amendment and have to use force. Awful, sure, but a huge fraction of our political leaders have done it and whatever it is, it's not an insurrection even if they know it violates existing precedent.
The CO supreme court tries to avoid this problem by saying that, "encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country."
Ok, now Trump asks his SS to open up a path through some protestors so he can go speak to Pence and convince him not to certify -- and makes it clear to his SS that is his intention. If they use force to get him through it's, public (clearly) concerted (they are literally making plans and using earpieces to coordinate) and it's true the violence is enabling Trump to help steal the election. But obviously the SS isn't engaged in insurrection in this example.
Ok, maybe the people engaged in the violence have to intend that the violence prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Ok, but does that mean it would have been insurrection if Pence had refused to certify the votes and the house looked ready to send Trump back to the WH and a protest against that got violent? That can't be right! Surely a protest against a coup isn't an insurrection.
And this is how we get into trouble. The protestors weren't in fact intending to stop the constitutional transfer of power under that description - they just idiotically believed the constitution allowed it to go to Trump. So maybe they don't have to intend to undermine the peaceful constitutional transfer of power just intend that someone who isn't the constitutionally correct individual take power?
That can't be right. Imagine that Gore protestors had clashed with the police - would that have sufficed? What if Gore was secretly not really a citizen so not constitutionally allowed to be President.
I think that shows one has to have than just a desire someone remain president who isn't the legal occupant. At a minimum you have to intend that the unconstitutional end be achieved via the violence.
It's unclear the protestors as a group had anything like a clear intention of this kind -- certainly at the outset. Like most protests they were mad about something and wanted it to change but when Trump spoke most of the crowd probably lacked any specific plan other than to march and somehow cause Trump to remain president. Absent the violent entry into the capital I doubt many people would call it an insurrection.
But if it only became an insurrection upon entry into the capital did Trump participate in the insurrection? I'm skeptical he intended them to break into the capital (rather than be screaming and pushing right outside) because that was obviously fatal to his schemes. Sure he didn't try to stop them from chasing down congresspeople but at that point it was obvious he wasn't going to be able to sway Pence so (contrary to most legal precedent) failure to act to stop the ongoing attack itself counts as participation by that point it was likely done out of pure anger and no longer part of a plan to steal the election.
Your short version is quite long. And I think the discussion of the most important aspect, Trump's inaction during the riot, is underbaked, and purports to read Trump's mind. He could have testified before the Commission or in Colorado District Court about his mindset, but he did not. It's a reasonable inference that he did not act because he wanted the riot to prevent the transfer of power, and that also supports the inference that this was his plan all along. He might not have had any knowledge of Pence's whereabouts, or that he had escaped. Additionally, he might have been hoping that the rioters would destroy the electors' ballots.
One generally underdiscussed win-condition for Trump was to create enough uncertainty surrounding the ballots for Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 to trigger and default to the president being selected by a majority of state congressional delegations, with each state receiving one vote. Considering the GOP's slavish loyalty to Trump, we can't rule out that he would have won that vote if he could have forced it to occur on 1/7 or 1/8. And, even if that sounds outlandish, I'm sure it would have sounded good to Trump, and it's another reason to think that he still had hope of success even after Pence escaped.
My short version was the first paragraph...forgot to indicate the longer version.
Re: inaction, I don't see how that proves he isn't just an angry toddler who believes his political allies need to suffer and doesn't like to be seen working against his supporters.
But sure, I agree that we don't know Trump's mind but the point is that those aren't absurd ways to interpret his mental state and the CO standard just seems to be pretty unconcerned with identifying exactly what the requirement needs to be.
I'd be fine with a specific factual finding he had such and such mental state at so and so time but you can't really get into that without a clearer account of what needs to be proved.
And the idea that he could have just stood up and disputed the claims in CO seems unusual because usually we make the prosecutor prove the elements not the defendant prove innocence. Maybe it would be fine if it was a preexisting standard with clear elements to be proved but coming back and saying: you should have known to testify about X when we didn't tell you what exactly needed to be proved seems troubling.
The Plaintiff's complaint presented their position on what would need to be proved to establish disqualification. I'm sure Trump's team proposed their own position. Either way, Trump's attorneys were well aware that Trump's mindset would be an extremely relevant question in the case. Attorneys are used to briefing courts on novel questions. It's not an excuse for a do-over because you failed to anticipate that the court would agree with your opponent's take on how to answer the question.
It's a civil proceeding. Your silence can be used against you. And I'm pretty sure Trump's attorney never endorsed your theory that his client was "an angry toddler who believes his enemies need to suffer." So . . . yeah. If you ever become a judge, you should feel perfectly entitled to sideline interpretations of the evidence that nobody involved with the case even endorses. It's not a violation of due process. It's your job to make factual determinations even when the evidence is imperfect or circumstantial. The plaintiffs paid their filing fee and that's what you owe them.
Imo, one doesn’t need uniform insurrectionist intent from all the participants. One needs to prove there was a group committing insurrection.
I know its not exactly same, but several of the J6 rioters have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Given that and Trump’s clear intent to overturn the election, I find it hard to sincerely argue Trump was not part of an insurrection here.
Why? Seems like a totally plausible judgement is that: a bunch of wackos seizing the capital by force obviously isn't going to work so I'll just fire them up and send them out to protest while I pursue my real plan to steal the election.
But whether or not it qualifies is less important than a clear standard as to what qualifies. That's the problem here.
I agree that there is flexibility in the term “insurrection.”
Its just I think it would be difficult to come up with a definition that doesn’t apply in this case. At least a reasonable one.
From my recollection, the militia group leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy testified they believed they were acting on Trump’s behalf on Jan 6.
It was a coup attempt, involving violence and considerable stockpiles of weaponry. There have already been several seditious conspiracy convictions, weapons convictions, etc.
I think its probably easier to make some other argument like “this doesn’t apply to the President” if SCOTUS wants to fudge it.
Yes, I agree it's generally the people who are really mad about Trump and worried. I am one of those people -- If I believed in a God I'd be praying every day Trump dies -- but just try and give me necessary and sufficient conditions for participation in an insurection. I feel it's not something you can do by the seat if the pants.
Colorado's definition seems fine. It's really just coming down to what "hinder or prevent execution of the Constitution" means. Your other post conflates this with violating a right protected by the Constitution. I don't think that's what the Colorado Supreme Court had in mind, and it's not a natural reading of what they said.
At this point, I'm a little bored with disqualification-skeptics announcing their dislike of Donald Trump. It's reminding me of that cliched aphorism about the drowning man who keeps shooing away helicopters and lifeguards because he thinks God will save him. People that form opinions based on their predictions about how America will respond if Event X happens need to take stock of their predictive record from the last five years. I doubt any of them correctly predicted (1) 2016, (2) January 6, or (3) Trump's ongoing popularity post-January 6. Apparently, most conservatives think that the election was stolen from Trump in 2020, and I've yet to see a concerted terrorist campaign or blood in the streets. Why would it be any different when the GOP-dominated SCOTUS kicks him off the ballot with plenty of time to swap in Don Jr.? Why do we think that the SCOTUS that kicks him off will ignore bad-faith efforts by, like, the Governor of Oklahoma to disqualify Democrats from the ballot? There's so much chicken little-ing going on, and it seems to me that nobody is seriously gaming this out.
I'm sure Jefferson Davis would have been just as happy had Lincoln said, "Sorry to see you go but best of luck to your new nation" and not have had to launch that whole Civil War thing.
I've recently done a major shift on my thoughts on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and I now believe that SCOTUS has to rule on the merits (in either direction). The only way I can now see the nonjusticiable political question avenue being sustainable is srynerson's take that the question has to be answered by Congress, and not the states.
Why? Because otherwise you could have Republican dominated states make up some reason for declaring Joe Biden or any Democrats "insurrectionists" when the real reason is that they run the "crime" of simply being a Democrat. It could open up all kinds of chaos that would be very destabilizing.
The best case scenario would be if SCOTUS did rule that Trump engaged in insurrection, but I'm now thinking that the second best (and far more likely, given this SCOTUS) would be ruling that he didn't. Which leads to Matt's point of saying that Biden should say that we're going to defeat him in the ballot box.
How this will be used in the future is my concern as well...we have a lot of protest activity in the US that could be defined as an insurrection. Section 3 has much broader implications than Trump.
Section 3 was written to prevent Confederates from serving after the CIVIL WAR. The context would appear to be for some event more clearly an insurrection than Jan 6th, which in most objective views was a much different event than the Civil War.
As I have argued before in the comments, CHAZ in Seattle is a much cleaner example of a technical insurrection than Jan 6th. It was clearly stated and advertised by its proponents as establishing an alternate government, involved force and the threat of force to wrest control of a section of US soil and subject it to alternative governance, and was also deadly in outcome.
Yes, it did not have to do with an election, but I do not see where that issue is addressed in the 14th Amendment. Read the Amendment and think about how broadly it could be applied. It is insane to open this can of worms.
Section 3 also covers giving aid and comfort. That really opens the door to abuse, as what constitutes aid and comfort. A literal reading might prevent a number of people from serving in any office if they supported the CHAZ, or what about OCCUPY....The door would seem to be fairly wide open for interpretation. How many left leaning politicians could be banned...would you want to give that kind of power to the right?
If your answer is that Jan 6th is different from the CHAZ I would agree. But I would argue that as it relates to insurrection and rebellion, Jan 6 is unlike the CHAZ in that it less resembles an insurrection. CHAZ had several weeks of armed forces controlling and governing American soil, with the explicit goal of taking away state power. Jan 6th is different because it involved the Federal transfer of power after a national election.... however, the 14th Amendment just covers insurrection...of any kind.
I personally have not, nor would I ever vote for Trump. That said, this kind of abuse scares me because it opens the door for future abuses, and I have very little trust in the extremes of either party at this point. When Democrats, who would seem to be the less insane party, start acting like this is really causes me to worry.
I think what is true is that the marginally most correct reading of the amendment is that secretaries of state do in fact have the authority under the amendment to determine a person to have engaged in insurrection and therefore rule them ineligible. It's mostly Congress's problem to fix if they disagree, and the standard for judicial overturn is probably something like "clear error".
I think for Trump to be on the ballot in Maine under the most correct interpretation Congress has to vote to remove the disability.
I'm not convinced that will happen though because it is in fact a close call on multiple points. Maybe Due Process demands a nationally applicable standard for "insurrection" and maybe Trump's actions don't meet the standard. I think that's maybe the most likely outcome at SCOTUS. Or maybe SCOTUS really, really doesn't ever want to here about it again and decides the 187-whatever insurrection act IS the enforcement mechanism and you have to be convicted under that act. That seems extremely incorrect under the law to me, but it's not utterly implausible.
Now, would it actually be extremely bad in practice to apply my "most correct" interpretation? I'm not so sure. Play out the worst case, extreme edge scenario. State hacks all over disallow everyone they don't like. That seems like it mostly won't actually be flipping states, so much as just being bad optics? Maybe you end up with a weirdo situation with more than two plausible candidates because no one has universal ballot access? Maybe every plausible presidential candidate ends up having to to get preemptive clearance from Congress to have a chance? Or maybe that "clear error" standard really does actually cover everyone not named DJT. Some of these sound like chaotic shitshows, but disastrous nightmare scenarios? Not mostly I don't think.
> Maybe every plausible presidential candidate ends up having to to get preemptive clearance from Congress to have a chance?
This is interesting to think about, even altogether outside of the context of "insurrection". I think I hate it, but it's interesting to think about.
I can certainly imagine a scenario where DJT never made it on the 2016 ballot on the first place on the grounds of, "'cause, can you believe this fucking guy?" It's similar to the de facto (and maybe de jure, I don't know) limit on who can be PM in a parliamentary system.
The odds of SCOTUS finding on the merits that DJT committed insurrection and is disqualified based on the factual determination of the Colorado district court is basically zero IMO. Maybe they grant cert on the question and make their own factual determination, but I'd be truly shocked. That would be wildly outside the normal appellate process.
If the Court finds that Colorado applied the right standard of review, it could also conclude that, as a matter of law, the record evidence does not meet that standard. But if they find that the wrong standard was applied, it would be very odd for them to not vacate and remand for Colorado to take another crack at it.
I would be, not shocked, for SCOTUS to find that the determination of the Colo court is valid in Colo. I would be absolutely staggered if they found that the factual determination of the Colo court is binding anywhere outside Colo.
But I definitely agree that people are underselling the attractiveness to Roberts of affirming. He's Mr. Long Game, and he's got another two decades of deciding American policy ahead of him. Think of how much bad-faith conservative sh*t like Shelby County he could get away with if he (and Kavanaugh/Barrett) rule against Trump? And it won't even be that much of a blow to Trump's chances, since it's not clear that any purple state courts will reach the same conclusion Colorado did. Even if it were a real problem, the GOP could just swap Don Jr. onto the ticket.
Yeah, I really haven't seen any serious discussion of how claims preclusion/issue preclusion would work here. Each time I hear an academic approach it, they have some PTSD recollection of their Civ Pro class three decades ago, and punt.
I think the most likely outcome would be SCOTUS saying there needs to be either, or one of, a criminal conviction or a statute passed by Congress along the lines of those post civil war that barred Confederate officers and officials from office (which were over time watered down).
Yeah, that's pretty close to what sryernson has said before (shame he's in his (mostly) self imposed hiatus right now). It's basically impeachment but then with a simple majority in the Senate. (Of course, Republicans could be through with Trump if they just got their senators together to convict after impeachment...the fact that they didn't says they don't want to be through with him.)
That's one avenue, though I do think it would also become a much closer question if he is, say, convicted in Georgia. There's a narrow reading one could take (i.e. he was not convicted of a specific criminal law prohibiting 'insurrection') but also another that says he was in fact separately and independently convicted of conduct that by its nature expressly involves violation of oath of office and insurrection. You also get into a question of whether the states are really powerless to keep people off their own ballots who have been duly convicted of serious criminal charges.
The criminal conviction argument might be an easy sell to non-lawyers, but I seriously doubt that the Court will go along with it. When Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts, that did not preclude other suits for violations of the Equal Protections Clause. Also, we're getting awfully close to a situation where you're allowing Congress to overturn Section 3 through ordinary legislation, rather than through the normal amendment process. Courts need to be very skeptical of that, especially when the Constitutional provision in question is *supposed* to be countermajoritarian. Congress can't enable Obama to run for a third term by passing a statute requiring that his eligibility be determined by a two-billion person jury assembled at the North Pole.
If SCOTUS has enough integrity to kick Trump off the ballot, why would they not have enough integrity to overturn bad-faith claims made by hack GOP-dominated state Supreme Courts?
Congress did answer that question about Section 3. Congress passed 18 U.S. Code § 2383 to enforce the amendment, along with another law that was repeal in 1948.
Section 5 gives Congress the authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. The 18th Amendment also gave Congress the same enforcement authority using the same language. The Volstead Act enforced the 18th Amendment. I don't see any reason why the Enforcement Act of 1870 is any different.
I think the best argument for SCOTUS to rule that Trump engaged in an insurrection AND that the President is immune from prosecution is the one Mark Cuban and others were promoting on Threads. If SCOTUS rules in favor of Trump on both, then there is nothing legally stopping Biden from refusing to step down from power were Trump to win the election. It's kind of a brain teaser and it is hard to imagine Biden doing this, but it makes sense. The whole point of the 14th is to protect us against bad decisions made by political processes, such as the Congress failing to impeach Trump for insurrection when they should have.
I am very much fine with the no under 35 rule. There's no way that isn't going to raise your expected value on presidential performance over the long term.
The natural born citizen thing is more dicey. The idea, apparently, was to keep some foreign power from installing a disloyal puppet in office. But natural born Quislings seem to be easy enough to find, so hard to believe that this rule has raised the value of our average Presidential performance in office.
I've heard professors say that the age requirement is basically just an anti-dynasty rule. In most instances, a viable candidate that young would just be the former president's kid.
I don't think there is a case where any person who even faintly could have stood for the Presidency was blocked by the "no under 35" rule.
And if you look at other countries that don't have that rule, there are very few cases of a head of government younger.
If you look at Prime Ministers in non-Presidential systems, there are three ever under the age of 35: Sanna Marin of Finland, Sebastian Kurz of Austria (both very recent, both over 30) and William Pitt the Younger of Great Britain (aged 24, 1783-1806). There are lots of Presidents who were younger, but all the ones I can find under 35 either inherited the position (e.g. Baby Doc Duvalier or Kim Jong-Un) or won a coup.
As conservatives are fond of reminding us, we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. IThe rule of law takes precedence over the popular will- so if a presidential candidate wins the electoral college without winning the popular vote, we don't have to like it, but it's not a constitutional crisis either. If a conservative supreme court were to disqualify Trump, it would be the same thing- even if some people wanted to vote for him, if Trump can't run under the constitution, thats just how it is.
Trump is so dangerous because he represent a movement that does not respect the rule of law- he repeatedly broke the law and didn't face consequences because his party wouldn't hold him accountable. If he does actually face a consequence for his actions in the form of being disqualified, that's a good thing.
I think the risk of a constitutional crisis is also mitigated by how conservative this Supreme Court is. If they do choose to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment, it won't be because of partisan liberals doing it.
People are overstating the consequences. The GOP will need to put *someone* on the ballot. Wouldn't that be Don Jr.? He'll just promise to be a rubber stamp on his dad's decisions and he'll let his dad give all the speeches and stuff. MAGAs get to feel like they outsmarted the globalists, and nobody bbs anything.
Also the idea that ‘ we cannot rule on the Constitutional merits because a faction will be angry/violent is truly absurd.
If scotus bows to implicit threats of terrorist violence rather than the Constitution, then we are governed by terrorist threats rather than a Constitution. It is a terrible argument that pre-emptively cedes Constitutional governance because of cowardice
I still have no clue where Matt gets this idea that *all* problems with shoddy media coverage are downstream of problems with the audience. (Obviously, *some* problems are responses to financial incentives provided by the audience.)
There's an obvious alternative, isn't there? Shoddy coverage could arise due to bad norms among journalists. The meltdown at the NYT over the Cotton op-ed, for instance, was driven by employees. I doubt subscribers were particularly angry about the op-ed, and refusing to print those types of essays may have even been financially detrimental.
Similarly, I doubt that too many Americans want to see presumably neutral newspapers present coverage with some sort of anti-Israel bias. I certainly don't think it was financially beneficial for the NYT to print ISRAEL BOMBS AL-AHLI HOSPITAL (oops, nvm). Why should I think these trends aren't driven by norms among extremely left-leaning employees (in spite of financial incentives)?
I actually kinda love Matt's the "the audience is the problem" take.
I mean yes, at a surface level NYT getting some serious left-bias is due to staff. But if audiences cared about this, NYT would see real financial disincentives and either change course or fall on financial hardship.
The counterargument here is that journalists should behave irrationally to their financial incentives and produce content that isn't what their audience wants, but is better in some civic way. But the whole point of a competitive media landscape is that inefficient firms that don't produce things their customers want cease to exist, and we definitely have a competitive media landscape today.
But Matt has also talked about how the labor market for journalists affects coverage. Most journalists are left-wing and want to write left-wing articles, so to get either centrist or right-wing articles, you have to either pay a premium or accept lower-quality journalism. That's an example of a supply problem that could potentially be overcome with enough demand, but it is still a problem.
I've been somewhat frustrated by Matt's take that "we are the problem" as well. Probably in part bc this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think. But I also agree with you that some of this is the journalists' own biases. It's hard not to think that some of WaPo's problems, for example, are due to it NOT delivering what a broader audience wants - which I believe is partly due to the fixations of its journalists being out of step with a broader audience. Not sure I have much more than a hunch on that though.
“this particular audience is unlikely to be the folks who are only interested in media that tells them what they already think”
This is true to some extent. But this audience is also self-selected to be people who already think that blue-aiming media just tells blue people what they already think, and we often love it when Matt repeats this back to us.
Everyone likes confirmation bias.
The hard part is, after you get the little endorphin rush, do you then read and think about the dissenting voices in the comment section?
We're fortunate enough to have them, here.
Well said
Yeah true - or at least true for those who comment most often. I try to be aware when I'm getting a little too eager for another shot of the good stuff. lol. But Matt doesn't feed that overmuch, IMO. He seems very aware of avoiding that.
From today's piece: "If you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
On the one hand, my quirky, mostly misunderstood tendency is to scold people "on my side" for extreme claims because extreme rhetoric inevitably leads to backlash and straw-manning from the other side. The result is not just polarization (which will perhaps end our democracy) but also the rejection of any potentially useful ideas from the conversation.
On the other hand, I click on stories that tend in this direction (for example, in the NYT) precisely so that I can make this point in the NYT Comments and argue with those who "align" with my opinions.
Same! I’m always worried that it’s being interpreted as approval!
The big NYT takedown piece in the Economist by Bennett was trying to make this argument, that the Times shifted because of a change in the composition of the employees.
But I think a close reading reveals that this, too, is downstream of the audience. Bennett points out that the reason the employees changed from the contrarian weirdo beat-journalist type of person to more of an extroverted, over-socialized internet-poisoned lefty is because the NYT was making a strategic pivot to be a digital media publication, because they recognized the old model was no longer going to be financially viable.
Crucially, this was in fact the correct move. The NYT is a very successful business in an era where legacy media companies have generally done extremely poorly.
Also if u read the times the way I do, pretty much the front page and Wordle, u don’t see near the level of outright bias. The cover page on the app is generally so good. I think they are so big they can look totally different depending on which angle u look at them from.
But where do these left-leaning employees come from? I would expect the NYT hired them at some point, it’s prestigious enough that they had considerable choice in the matter of whom to hire, so these employees apparently come from the same culture as the company itself. I would also note, as one who (too often) reads comment sections, that plenty of readers objected to the Cotton editorial and probably threatened to cancel over it (though it’s rare for a particular incident like that to influence editorial or personnel policy).
One thing about the NYTimes, everyone has a complaint, but they seem to be very successfully navigating a rough environment for journalism, not pleasing anyone but consistently making a profit, which seems to be the hardest part these days. If subscribers really didn’t like what their employees were turning out, I don’t think that would be the case.
I wonder whether they actually have a choice to hire more centrist or right-leaning reporters. I don't know for sure whether this is the case, but my best guess would be that Columbia Journalism School probably has more Maoists than Trump supporters. As far as I can tell, basically *all* reputable publications have left-leaning news reporters.
This is correct. I was easily the most right-wing person in the Vox.com newsroom and I definitely did not vote for Trump. The most right-wing mainstream publications are probably the Wall Street Journal (which has right-wing opinion writers but still a left-leaning hard news operation) and the Economist (which is centrist noeliberal but far from Trumpy).
College graduates skew left in general, and journalism disproportionately attracts people who are willing to take a significant pay cut in exchange for prestige, intellectual stimulation, and/or a positive impact on the world. Those people tend to be more left-wing than the average college graduate.
The Wall Street Journal is an interesting example because I think it's particularly hard to attract an ideologically diverse workforce for straight news jobs covering things other than politics (like business or science or fashion or whatever). When you're hiring for those jobs, you're not supposed to take ideology into consideration, since it's not directly relevant. But when the applicant pool is 95 percent liberal, that leads to a newsroom that's 95 percent liberal. The WSJ goes out of its way to hire right-wing people for its opinion section so they can churn out right-wing columns. But the newsroom just tries to hire the best reporters independent of ideology and that leads to a newsroom that looks a lot like other publications.
Have you ever written at all about your time at Vox, similar to how Matt has? [https://www.slowboring.com/p/what-i-learned-co-founding-vox] It'd be fascinating to learn more from your perspective given what you said here.
I don't think I've written anything about it in the kind of depth Matt does there. I generally enjoyed working there and learned a ton. The original Vox team had a ton of talented people, many of whom went on to the New York Times. To this day I think of what I do as writing Vox-style explainers.
Like most other digital-native publications around this time I think we leaned too much into chasing traffic. I think Ezra, Matt, and other editorial leaders genuinely did not intend to create such a left-leaning organization, and I don't think any of us appreciated how much pressure to maximize traffic would translate into pressure to write predictably left-wing content. But to get traffic in 2014 you needed to write stuff people will share on Facebook, and if you start out with a left-wing audience then predictably left-wing content is going to out-perform other kinds of content.
I felt a little bit out of place there and left in 2017, but it actually wasn't mainly for ideological reasons. I was basically the only business or tech reporter. There wasn't a dedicated business or tech team, so they lumped me in with the policy and politics team, and I reported to several different editors over the three years I was there. It sometimes seemed like my managers didn't know what to do with me, since they were focused on covering elections or what was happening on Capitol Hill or whatever.
Also I wrote last year [https://www.fullstackeconomics.com/p/im-a-professional-dad-who-leaned] that after I had a kid in late 2015 I found it more difficult to keep up with the workaholic culture of the Vox newsroom. People worked a lot of nights and weekends the first few years and once I had a baby I suddenly couldn't do that any more. Nobody explicitly complained about this (the formal policies were very kid-friendly) but putting fewer hours in just meant my output wasn't as compelling, and I think my editors started to notice. (I'm told it's a much chiller place to work now—especially after the writers unionized.)
After Trump won the 2016 election, Vox intensified its anti-Trump coverage. And while I'm not in any sense a Trump supporter I thought we were going a bit overboard. This was one reason I started looking for a new job in 2017 but it wasn't the main reason by any means.
Thank you very much for this!
Maoists? Is that still a thing?
I'd call them "pro-China tankies" at this stage, but they definitely exist.
Maoists in the sense of "anti-Dengists", not so much.
Big chunk of the latter in Chinese domestic politics. Most of the same stereotypes we associate with 30-something basement-dwelling incels here in the US and (presumably?) the UK.
One of my friends (okay, friend's brother) wears a little Mao hat everywhere he goes.
Fitting with the stereotype, he's a 36 year old psychology professor that cannot manage his own life or affairs in the slightest and has never had a girlfriend, and has never had a job outside of academia.
He seems to be a genuine believer, somehow. Or if not, he has at least been committed to the bit for a decade+.
They have the Crossword, and Spelling Bee, and Wordle. They figured out how to make many of the best online infographics. That’s all going to help them profit regardless of the choppiness of the seas of reader opinion.
Yeah it's a bonkers take and it seems so obviously motivated by his personal biases and blindspots. Incredibly disappointing.
Naw, the readership of the Times is very liberal and subscriber anger over the Cotton op-ed was absolutely a factor in Bennet's firing. Left-wing Times reporters know this and it gives them extra leverage in intra-newsroom fights.
I think it would probably be in the Times's financial interest to fire all of their conservative columnists, but they continue publishing them because the Sulzberger family is committed to the Times opinion page having some ideological diversity.
Something I heard from a Times reporter in 2020 was that a major source of leftward pressure (over the Cotton op-ed and similar controveries) came from the IT staff. In many cases, these were people who could make more money at Google or Facebook but joined the Times because they wanted to have a positive impact on the world. And one way they tried to do that was by lobbying for a more left-wing approach in the newsroom.
Obviously Times coders and Times readers are different groups of people, but I bet they have pretty similar demographics in terms of education and ideology. I think most Times reporters—and especially Times reporters who cover policy and politics—tend to have a more nuanced understanding of political issues than the normie liberals who buy New York Times subscriptions. There's also a vocal minority of reporters that's very left-wing and pulled the whole paper to the left in 2020, but that minority had as much power as they did because a lot of paying subscribers agreed with them.
What gave IT workers so much leverage at the NYT?
If I had to guess what the times's most impressive tech is...idk, a neat-o probability slider on 538?
Times digital operation is solid. Maintaining a fleet of apps across all platforms and doing it in house is not easy. Plus all the dataviz stuff... no other news org has that kind of talent.
I think the NYT audience is better classified as educated FIRST than left-wing. Most articles in the NYT are definitely not as left-leaning as those in Vox (which I basically stopped reading after all the original crew left). From the comments in articles, I sense that a lot of the readers crave centrist and even simply non-crazy conservative views (e.g., French, whose views I particularly appreciate). Being to the left of MAGA is not really left wing.
The overall tendency is very clearly about the audience and the Al-Ahli Hospital debacle is a good example that's also a blast from the past where being first, or at least early, with the hottest news (scoops, I believe they were once called) was a key audience demand before stories circulated faster than people care to know about them.
I'm not so sure it's entirely about the audience. Consider the following thought experiment: you wave a magic wand and it turns all NYT, WSJ, CNN, etc. reporters into right-wingers.
Would the slant of news coverage at these places change? The "financial incentives" theory predicts that it shouldn't. These outlets are primarily motivated to pursue profits, so management makes sure that reporters keep pushing left-wing content to please their liberal readers.
The "bad norms" theory, on the other hand, predicts that coverage would change dramatically. Reporters would cover stories primarily from a right-wing angle and strictly enforce a set of norms that forces others to do the same. Management would be powerless to stop this, since the staff would threaten to revolt.
Clearly, these scenarios are exaggerated. But the second sounds much more plausible to me than the first.
The WSJ might be a counterexample here: their news coverage is actually really good and informative. Their Opinion section (which I would ceteris paribus expect to better reflect ownership norms and the general institutional tenor of the paper. No one thinks of the WSJ as a left-wing rag) is what I would call a "garbage fire" except that it would be insulting to garbage fires.
I think both effects are real. But the financial incentives one seems to me like the bigger first-order effect while the type of employees one seems like the smaller second-order effect. (But maybe I have it backwards? Perhaps the type of employees is partially driven by the financial incentives?)
This is like the nature versus nurture debate in evolutionary psychology. Audience taste and journalists’ biases are both important. They interact in both obvious and subtle ways. Few conservatives go into print journalism because there isn’t much of an audience for it. Most Fox personalities seem to be chosen more for their looks than erudition, it’s not as if a plain young woman could land a gig there by going to the right school.
They 100% are driven by the left-leaning employees.
I don't think "left-leaning" does the situation justice. I mean, *I'm* left-leaning by any conceivable non-internet, non-media US definition.
as am I. and yet i’ve been derided as a bigot for not wanting gender dysphoric men to play women’s sports. circular firing squad ftw!
The use of the passive voice can be frustrating. The NYT comment section would not deride you; they would would be mostly agreeing with you with nuanced discussion and genteel attacks on the more simplistic comments.
Eventually it seems like the opinion columnists moderate their opinions but I don't track them closely enough to really know.
In the meantime, keep up pushing back on those whose ideology in these matters is still immature and not thought out.
@Francis Begbie - I just noticed your name and avi. Bold choice. Remind me not to piss you off :-)
I try to read the NYT headline every morning and if they switch up to an interesting different headline story in the afternoon I try to read it too. These tend to be really good informative articles and don’t greatly pander to far left or anything, mostly. The Israel and Claudine gay coverage has been pretty non-pandering from this reading algorithm. But the fact is if u also pepper the paper with less rigorous clickbaity stuff it’ll go viral more often and attract more subscribers and generate revenue. Even if the core readers are really interested in quality it will still be true that bad articles will be tempting and overall may be more profitable I don’t think it is the same as being the readerships fault but just a structural problem of the market. I used to spend a lot of my time watching sports and was really excited in the early 2000s as advanced metrics became more and more popular. I was annoyed watching ESPN coverage refuse to get in the weeds on this stuff but they will make more money broadening their audience and trying to go viral i think it is a numbers issue more than a problem with the customers.
Yes, in the short term, journalistic norms matter. In the long term, however, these would have been repeatedly punished by capitalism and Matt's explanation of, "downstream of the audience," becomes more and more true.
What bothers me is that even taking him at face value it's just not an excuse he would accept in a ton of other arenas. We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it. Ben just wrote an article arguing for cracking down on sports gambling despite ease and convenience being exactly what their customers are asking for. Matt doesn't even like it when software engineers work for Facebook!
I don’t think he’s asking people to let journalism companies off the hook. He’s asking them to understand what all the relevant points of leverage are if you want to demand change. (No one sensible thinks you can address the harms of fossil fuel companies while ignoring consumer demand for fossil fuels.)
Though many *do* think that, which is not in disagreement with what you said!
I think I half agree with you here. I agree that understanding the points of leverage is critical to trying to fix things. If that's all he's saying then I don't have a problem with it. I'm just not convinced it is.
"We don't let fossil fuel companies off the hook for climate change despite it being in their financial interest to lie about it"
Yeah, we do. They're responsible for their lies, but not for climate change.
I think that only works if you consider the two to be unrelated to each other.
The relationship, if any, is tenuous.
Regarding Long Island, speaking as a native who has lived across the country but returns frequently: the core of it are all of the members of the NYPD and NYFD who live in souther Nassau County. Traditionally they have an anti-city / anti-Democrat (and pro-Guiliani) bias. These are the people who made Staten Island Republican because there was a time when that had to live within city limits.
That then forms a core for other blue collar professionals ties to the city who don't particularly like the city. My father and brother were/are union electricians who lived in Nassau and worked in the city. They did NOT share this view, but many of their brethren did. This blue collar contingent lives south of the LIE, in the same places as the cops and firefighters, and the temperature has turned up.
I think the final driver is the fact that much of central Nassau has really changed from a combination of eastward migration of second and third-generation immigrants from Queens, and a change in immigration patterns where new immigrants skip the five burroughs entirely and land in central Nassau. The rapidly changing demographics of, say, East Meadow, has made many of these people uneasy. NYC has historically played fairly unique as a catch basic for international immigration, Queens in particular, so as you mention "once your family has committed to moving out of NYC to the east"... that's Nassau county, and it does not have the capacity for sprawl that Souther California does, as you aslo note.
Finally there is the fact that Long Island is quite dysfunctional. Every public service has a different map and the boders only sometimes align: there is the county, which has courts and parks, but your trash is pickup up by the three TOWNS that comprise Nassau country. The many school districts are not contiguous with the water boards, etc. If you manage to organize over one issue, the polity that you put together is non-transferrable to another issue because half the people are under a different map. So it's broken and there has been a long-time sense that it is broken.
And NIMBYism is rampant because Nassau county's core value is that it's "not the city", so the resistance to density, which could help address some of the stress, is almost genetic, going back to Levittown.
This has all long been true. But in Nassau, Trump made it acceptable for the most vocal to be all the MORE vocal.
I lived on the south shore for four years after spending the previous four years in rural eastern Kentucky and growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta. My family is super racist. Yet, I witnessed more obvious outward racism in my short time on Long Island than anywhere else I've lived. While I am quite aware that there are many prejudices hidden just under the surface of some southerners, I never saw a bartender refuse to serve a black patron (a friend of mine visiting me from the city) or had a potential landlord tell me he was relieved I wasn't black. But on Strong Island, just... wow. My neighbors came up, knocked on my door, and flat out told me not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows. And my wife has some stories from a hospital there about how little regard the staff had for anyone they labeled Mexicans. It was constantly shocking to us just how bigoted the people around us were.
Wow, just wow. I am in New York State, and, when planning statewide events we have a saying about Long Island - no one goes in and no one goes out - people on Long Island tend not to attend events elsewhere in the State and no one from elsewhere tends to go to events on Long Island. The NYC people who don't even own cars are much more likely to come Upstate. So perhaps the Island is much more isolated than it seems? Also Long Island is the main source of aggressive book challenges and "First Amendment audits," in NYS.
Long Island is one of the few suburban areas in the United States that lacks a beltway to bypass its center city if you want to go to the other side.
Throgs Neck Bridge _almost_ bypasses the city, but not quite.
It is functionally very isolated! You either have to traverse NYC traffic or else take a boat. Getting from Long Island to, say, a different suburb in NJ is an enormous pain in the ass in a way that getting between, say, two different suburbs of Chicago simply isn't.
"...not to bring my wife's Muslim friends over to our house anymore or they'd break all my windows...."
That's some scary shit.
It's times like these when I thank god that all Americans are protected from this sort of vigilante violence by our even-handed, fair-minded, politically neutral, law enforcement professionals.
There are racists A-holes everywhere, including Long Island, NY, but your anecdotes aren't data.
You'll have to take my word for it but this is all true. That landlord was a special kind of scumbag. One day the home behind ours burned down and the fire was so hot it melted the plastic siding off the separated garage of home we were renting. I called, and he came over, furious with me that I hadn't done anything to stop it melting, I guess? I had actually been out there with a garden hose putting out any flareups caused by the embers dropping onto the lawn. Not good enough! Anyway, then he went over to the people picking through the rubble of their home and asked them to pay for repairs in cash because he didn't want to report the damage to his insurer because he worried it would make his premiums go up. They told him to go away, and a shouting match ensued. Just a real class act.
And yeah, what does it say about me that we still rented a house from the guy after he was super racist? Location, location, location, I suppose.
That's a terrible story, not everyone in LI is like that, not by a long shot, but I have met a couple in my day that I wish hadn't. They are more present there then you would expect.
As a fellow LI native, I agree with this. Everyone in my parents' generation is a retired government employee living on a government pension who hates the government.
To over-generalize, my college-educated peers chose Northern NJ or Westchester when it was time to raise a family. My non-college peers mostly chose to stay in Nassau County. I think that explains the political divide.
I was going to say something along these lines, NYC has three very distinct suburbs (LI to the east, NJ to the west and south, Westchester/CT to the North) that are quite isolated from each other and there is a fair bit of self sorting when people move to the burbs. I live in the part of Brooklyn that's filled with journalists and lawyers and everyone (literally, everyone) I know who moved to the burbs when they had kids moved to either NJ or Westchester/CT. Those are the places that are culturally familiar to the wealthy professionals whose growing numbers have helped to turn those suburbs (and others elsewhere) blue. They're also both much less isolated from the rest of the country than Long Island is, which gives them a base level of appeal that other suburbs have (if you want to go skiing or whatever from LI you have to drive *through* NYC). It's always surprised me that there aren't one or two towns on LI that have broken this mold, but even the fancier ones that some of my friends grew up in just don't see to hold any appeal for young people beyond a few that move back to where their families are from.
Montauk and the Hamptons though in the summer can be fun, but it's all NYC people there anyway.
I find the whole density/politics situation a bit odd. Why should people who like to walk to a coffee shop every morning be less concerned with crime that someone who drives 50 minutes to work? Why should an Iowa resident prefer tax cuts for the rich and deficits?
If you live at high density, there’s a lot of things that make more sense to organize communally through taxes and collective provision, and you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction. If you live at low density, it makes a lot more sense to have a small government and be self-reliant (including having your own firearms), and outsiders are naturally more unusual and suspicious.
"you learn to trust strangers from strange places as part of your daily interaction."
I'm going to push back here. My wife grew up in and lived in not great parts of Chicago for many years, and she tells a lot of stories about being challenged about what neighborhood she was from, what street even, while doing mundane things like walking dogs. I don't think people in dense areas have higher stranger-trust by default, I think it's SES related.
I've seen fairly convincing evidence suggesting the strongest anti-immigrant sentiment happens to be found in the parts of the country with the smallest numbers of immigrants. And certainly the diverse parts of the country tend *not* to send the loudest America Firsters to Congress.
Your wife's experience doesn't very typical.
Anti immigration sentiment is very different (being theoretical) than how people treat actual strangers they meet. "Strangers from strange places" might be "people from outside my neighborhood" or it could be "people from the city" or it might be "people from another country".
In America, it can easily be all of these at once, or not. When I was in Taos, people were suspicious because I was white and northern, for instance, and white northern people are always showing up to build ugly houses and generally ruin the artsy native scene. I think suspicion of outsiders is extremely natural. When I travel abroad, it certainly is. I think your opinion about my wife's experience is, on a world scale, very unusual.
[Deleted - wrong Kenny E. comment to respond to, sorry].
Self-sorting
Political tribalism
Thank you! This is the more in depth answer I was looking for; I appreciate Matt taking the time to respond and think there's something to his relative density theory. But his analysis doesn't explain why Nassau is different from the New Jersey suburbs (where I live), which are also lower density relative to the city -- though, he might say, they're also higher than the outlying counties. These sorts of population and government dynamics make a lot of sense to me and contrast with NJ, where some of the counties are pretty well run (all things considered). Appreciate you responding!
I think his analysis does explain why Long Island is different from New Jersey. In New Jersey there is always farther you could go (into the pine barrens or into northeastern Pennsylvania, if you really want to go far out) so the parts that function like suburbs are selected differently from the farther out parts that function like exurbs. But in Long Island you can’t go farther than Montauk.
Really anything further east than Ronkonkoma is untenable if you have to commute to the city for work.
Western LI is very much an exurb of NYC, though. And while I don't claim to be an expert on LI dynamics I'm pretty sure that no one actually commutes from Montauk notwithstanding the fact that the LIRR does in fact go that far, given that it's a 3 hour train ride.
The relevant conceptual dividing line seems less likely to be purely geographic and more about maximum tenable commute-shed for city workers versus those whose livelihoods are more geographically localized.
Oh I see. So Long Island “traps” people who like the proximity to the city but have politics that would favor low density. And New Jersey’s commuter suburbs don’t. Is that right? I take your point!
That was my understanding of his claim, though see the other replies to me for challenges.
Another component is the fact that all of the dynamics that have caused societal stress that are now nation wide, all started on Long Island generations ago becasue New York has traditionally been high wage / high cost of living. The pot has been simmering a long time, for blue collar workers in particular:
- Globalization: manufacturing left Long Island for the American South in the 60s and 70s, long before it moved to the "global south".
- Housing Affordability Crisis: this really took off in the late 1990s / early 2000s in a way that many communities elsewhere in the nation only started to see in the last 5-10 years.
- Exurbinazation: began in the 90s as Suffolk county got built out, but has already run its course when it ran into NIMBY limits in the early 2000s (see: affordability)
- Traffic: true for the entire tri-state region, but particulalry bad given Long Island geography as the center of gravity moved further east that is still trying to commute due west.
And the final nail: that who are inclined to leave (like me) moved into the city starting in the late 1990s. Urbanism is all the rage everywhere now, but when I was a kid no one in their right mind wanted to live in Manhattan (much less Brooklyn)... until around 1995 when EVERYONE who graduated from HS would LOVE to, if they could. Those that could afford to live there on their own, did so. That dynamic has been stronger culturally and running longer in NYC than other urban areas of the country, depriving Nassau county in particular, of native "blue votes". And when those young people grow up and have families, they first try Brooklyn, if they can affort it, and if then can't, Westchester and Norther NJ are more attractice alternatives than moving back to Nassau. NYC has very unique suburbanizaiton patterns due to its geography and its mass transit setup.
It's also partly sheer geography: suburban Long Island abuts Queens and Brooklyn, and is thus *filled* with transplants (by now going back multiple generations) from those two boroughs, both of which were home to a lot of culturally moderate to conservative white people. In the early days of white flight and suburbanization, city folk heading for the suburbs tended to head to suburban areas close to where they grew up. For Brooklynites and Queensites, that often meant Long Island.
I was wondering if Matt would get into the housing affordability issue. It’s really bad on LI, despite a relatively strong commuter rail system and tons of room to develop around stations.
Its because Trump is the most culturally Italian-American president we've ever had.
>But the perfect time to change the natural born citizen rule is right now, when there’s no specific Arnold Schwarzenegger figure who would benefit.<
Back when Schwarzenegger was prominent politically, George Will used to make a pithy argument to the effect that "It's bad that our constitution allows Paris Hilton to serve as president and forbids Henry Kissinger." Something like that (he probably used a different "vapid celebrity" example, but I couldn't find the exact quote).
Anyway, that line has always stuck with me. I wasn't the biggest Kissinger fanboi on the planet (nor his biggest detractor: his was a complicated legacy). But Will had a good point. It really is self-defeating and unjust that America doesn't allow immigrants to become president, even after a lengthy period of citizenship.
PS—People absolutely would bring up Elon Musk's name if we tried to amend the constitution right now, Matt. Just sayin.
The main reason America is the best country is that when you're an immigrant who becomes a citizen, you become just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Changing the president eligibility rules will help reinforce that idea.
But yeah the person who people will think about here is Elon Musk...which honestly would be a good thing given that he's right-coded but changing the rule is left-coded.
I really can't stand Musk, I'll admit. But the more I think about this issue in the context of EM, the more I conclude it's really not any argument at all in favor of the ban on immigrant presidents. The most obvious reason why is: you can't make constitutional policy based on narrow examples. The less obvious reason is: there are plenty of great immigrants who might make excellent presidents. No sense cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Also, if we ever get around to changing this part of article 2, I'd have no problem with a perfectly lengthly interlude between citizenship and presidential eligibility (say, 30 years).
If you schedule the rule change to take place January 1st, 2025 you're probably fine. You're talking about someone 4 years out from running, so you're not talking about any particular election.
When California tried to pass a rule saying that presidential candidates should be required to release their tax returns, the governor vetoed it saying it was too divisive / seemed politically motivated - i.e. it was _clearly_ aimed at candidate Trump (for re-election). On the one hand I agreed, but I wish they had, in 2017, passed it for the 2024 election, when it presumably _wouldn't_ have been Trump (since at the time he would either have won re-election and been disqualified or lost and.... presumably not run again... more fool me)
If I was rewriting the clauses that limit who can run for various offices, I'd abolish the attempt at a cursus honorum (House at 25, Senate at 30, President at 35) and say that no person may be elected to any federal office if they are beneath the age of criminal responsibility at the date they first file for candidacy, require all candidates to be citizens of the United States, and require that they have been residents of the United States for a reasonable period (the last five years, perhaps) - with an exception for those who have resided outside the US in the service of the United States, (e.g. ambassadors, military service) and that they reside in the appropriate state at the time of election and throughout their term in office. I'd also add, rather than a requirement that naturalized citizens be citizens for a period of time, instead that naturalized citizens must have renounced the other nationality they held before naturalization (or made a reasonable effort to do so if another country is being unreasonable about releasing them). Naturalization is a much lengthier process now than it was in 1788, so requiring you to have been a citizen for seven or nine years back then was measuring from basically as soon as you got off the boat, while now it's measuring from five to ten years after you came to live in the US.
The voters are not going to elect literal children, unless there are extraordinary circumstances - but if there are extraordinary circumstances, then why not entrust the voters to make that decision at the time? If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?
"If a ten-year-old can win the voters over in both primary and general election, then why not?"
Richard, your faith in the wisdom of American voters is charming but dangerous.
I'm fine with a few guardrails to constrain the not always well thought out exuberance of the American electorate.
Though I'd take a ten year old over Trump.
As a practical matter, "on principle, we should change the rules to allow this crazy hypothetical, because it will never come to pass so why not"... I don't find this persuasive.
One of the advantages of this being an internet comment that has no real chance of becoming law is that I can say what I actually believe rather than being bound by political constraints.
Do we need some kind of lower legal limit? Yes, because the way that various election laws are enforced is by applying criminal liability to the candidate for what their campaign does, and having a candidate below the age of criminal responsibility would allow them to break all sorts of laws with impunity (and that candidate would not need to win for this to create a problem).
Is there, in general, a problem with a candidate who is utterly unsuited to office, provided they lose? No, the position of candidate (as distinct from the holder of elected office) is of no power so long as they comply with electoral laws.
If you set an age, are you saying that everyone or even most people of that age are suitable? No, you are saying that at least one person of that age is good enough to hold the least important elected office. If you set the age limit at 18 (the same as that to vote), then you're saying that no 17-year-old ever will be able to be the most junior member of the House. I don't think that's sound: I've met some remarkably mature 17-year-olds who would make excellent Congresspeople. Why shouldn't they run at 17? And you can keep arguing the age down quite a long way - I think the youngest person I've met who I'd think could be a junior legislator was about 13/14 at the time. So I'm picking 10 partly because it's the age of criminal responsibility, and partly because it's an age where I can safely say that even the most extraordinarily mature and capable person will still be at least 10.
This is why I think that the age of candidature should generally be lower than the age of the franchise. When you set a minimum age to vote, you want the majority of the people of that age who vote to do so responsibly; that means that you're asking how mature and responsible the median person of that age will be (if a minority of the very youngest age group are irresponsible, that's such a small fraction of the voters that it will have little effect - voting just isn't that precise an instrument). When you set a minimum age to be a candidate, you want to not exclude someone who would be capable of doing the job of holding elected office, so you're asking not about the capabilities of the median person of that age, but about the capabilities of the most mature, capable, responsible person of that age.
Do you want a separate age limit for President? Maybe. I can see an argument for that. Honestly, it'd be simpler to just have a single age, but I'm OK with a separate rule for President. I'd want a safety margin, ie set it well below whatever you think the youngest plausible candidate could be. But for President/VP, that could easily be 18 or 21. Mind you, it's not like anyone has really been kept out by the 35 year limit - JFK (youngest when elected) could have stood in 1952, two elections before he became President. The only VP who could not have stood the election before the one in which he won was Breckinridge.
We have the exact opposite problem in the US now: they're too old. I've finally come around to favoring an amendment to establish age limits: around 80 for the presidency and around 85 for Congress.
I'd change it so that one needed to be a registered voter eligible to vote in federal elections, and raise the minimum age to vote to 30.
"I also want to endorse the Beutler take in favor of Democrats and independents in open primary states voting for Nikki Haley, despite her various flaws."
Somewhere out there, an obsessive Tim Scott fan known to this site screams into the void...
Banned but never forgotten
>That’s a sound observation, but I want to emphasize that I think those principles are bad. The limitation of two terms is bad
Wait, uh..... what?? Presidents should be able to run an unlimited number of times? That's a genuinely terrible idea. To my knowledge every presidential system in the world has some kind of term limit. Lots of developing countries actually impose a 1 term limit, just because they know how much power an incumbent has. We don't need to go that far, but 2 is an extremely reasonable number- presidents are already too strong as-is
I think dying but full of himself FDR refusing to step aside in 1944 and then not even telling his chosen successor about the atom bomb makes the point about term limits well. And really was the reason we got them.
But on the other hand, is anyone sorry FDR got to run again in 1940?
I think we would have actually been fine. Any generic Democrat would have run the war similarly to FDR. We might not have gotten Japanese internment had FDR stepped aside, because he was racist and agreed with the policy while another Democrat might have stood up to the military and quashed it.
Might have been a pretty big difference between John Nance Garner and Henry Wallace in other things, though.
That's very true. But not sure the lasting importance of that given we were guaranteed to go to war in December 1941.
The most interesting what-ifs regarding Wallace don't really concern domestic policy. They concern the Cold War.
We might not have had Lend Lease with a different (less politically skilled, lower stature) Democrat, much less a Republican. That was delicate. Even FDR himself didn't dare go to Congress for that until after he had secured his third term.
I'm not sure that Lend-Lease was ultimately that important strategically; it was important to Britain in the short term, but in the long term, the things that defeated Nazi Germany were baked into the cake- the attack on Pearl Harbor and the breach of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact ensuring a 2 front war. We would have ultimately reversed any gains the Nazis made on Britain during 1941.
And that's assuming another Democrat didn't get it through. Affinity for Britain among American policymakers has been very strong for over 100 years.
But the Soviets benefited mightily from lend-lease, and them not being able to slow down the Nazis as much as they did could have been disastrous for the Allies.
I have to admit I'm under-versed in who the alternatives to Roosevelt were, what their chosen policies would be, and how popular they were; it seems at least plausible that a Republican could have won, which would have been a whole new ballgame.
Unlikely. The Republican candidate in 1940 was Wendell Willkie. He didn't gain any real traction with the public. And the Democrats were extremely popular. Any generic Democrat runs and wins, and most likely it would have been a less racist one than Roosevelt which means we may not get Japanese internment.
Not an FDR fan at all, but regretfully breaking my commenting moratorium twice in a day to note that one of the top Democratic candidates in 1940 would surely have been FDR's VP, John Nance Garner, who was a segregationist. (And apparently so personally racist that he actively tried to get black people thrown out of unsegregated restaurants he was eating at! Source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/washington_area_spark/40444912831 )
Roosevelt not running is such a huge flap of the butterfly's wings that everything is up for grabs, including whether Wilkie was the nominee (and if it's not Wilkie, it's someone much more isolationist for the Republicans).
But to take a step back, what are we talking about? We're talking about whether it's good or bad to limit presidents from running for a third term. And Roosevelt's third term went about as well as it possibly could have, with the exception of Japanese internment, which was truly horrible—one of our most despicable crimes as a country—but which I would argue also had a fairly limited impact on the country, certainly on the world, compared to the possibility of an Axis victory in WWII. You're right that the fourth term was shameful, but the damage was very limited there as well. So with the highest possible stakes, the argument for term limits is that limiting Roosevelt *probably* would have been *no worse* than what we got? What is the positive argument for how term limits makes the country *better*?
Agreed. Term limits are only appropriate for single-winner chief executive offices (President, Governor, Mayor), but they are highly appropriate for those. I don't like single-term limits; I prefer either two or three (and, honestly, given a completely free choice, I'd have three terms for President); I think politicians are generally better if they have to face the challenge of re-election, but if the risk of a President becoming effectively impossible to remove means that indefinite re-elections result in the "challenge" part of that disappearing.
I don't think term limits are necessary or good for local officials — in this case, mayors — since there's a higher level of government to stop them from turning themselves into dictators, and the local talent pool might not be that large (meaning forcing an incumbent out can mean ushering in a crappy replacement person who honestly isn't who voters want).
Re: governors, I'm still quite skeptical about term limits there. Although the federal government doesn't have a ton of control over state elections, I'm just generally very skeptical that many people would want to become governor for life + risk that they would actually somehow do away with democracy in their state to make it happen. Governors don't control a military and usually don't control that many police — so for power-hungry people, it's not remotely as fulfilling as being president, and also doesn't come with the tools to help install yourself as dictator for life. If there were a term limit for governors, I'd go with 16 or even 20 years.
I'd have three as well.
Unrealistic, but entertaining, reform: Waive term limits, but require increasing margins of victory to secure re-election.
If Trump had won in 2020 I'd be so glad this limitation existed.
I might _wish_ Obama had been able to run again in 2016 but I'd happily take "Obama can't win a 3rd term" to get "Trump can't win a 3rd term"
Yes, that's a borderline insnane take and it's shocking to me that someone as attune to politics as Matt can be blind to the vital necessity for term limits in a presidential system.
Same
I mean, I’m glad FDR was able to hold four terms, are you not? I also wish Obama could have run again in 2016.
I'd have preferred the President from 1945-1949 to have been chosen by the Democratic Convention and the people than by FDR picking a VP.
The idea is that we're making general rules that apply to all possible presidents, both great and terrible, and not reasoning based on just 1 or 2 of them
Right, but since the terrible presidents are highly likely to be unpopular—Jackson is the only one I can think of who was terrible and popular, though I might be underinformed here—term limits are likely to have the effect of stifling the great or at least above-average presidents (as has happened in our lifetime) while being a redundant check on terrible presidents (since the main check on them is the electoral process).
There are 64 countries globally that use a presidential system. All 64 of them, as far as I can tell, impose term limits on their president. I think we can reason from that that incumbency is a gigantic advantage and that it's tough to get a long-serving president out of there. The mere fact of their decade-plus leadership may warp what was previously a freely democratic system, so the will of the voters may not be enough. When 100% of countries do it 1 way and 0% of countries do it the other way, I tend to think of Chesterton's Fence
I think the correlation between unpopular and terrible is there, but imperfect and probably much weaker than we would like. For example - Trump appears to be as popular if more popular than Biden. I'm not a huge fan of the Biden administration, but he's several leagues removed from being Trump level terrible.
His terribleness as a president was a strong factor in him being defeated when he ran for a second term, let alone a third (though of course he's running for a second term *again* and the jury is still out). I certainly wouldn't state "a bad president could never get elected for a third term," but I think for a bad president to get elected again and again, a lot of other safeguards would have to be dismantled, and I think the term limits one is one of the least important safeguards and also has some serious costs.
Warren Harding was very popular when he was elected, and he's not typically seen as very good.
Almost every president is popular when elected by definition (since they have to win the election); I'm talking about when it's time for them to run again, and again. In Harding's case, he died in his first term but it seems pretty likely that Teapot Dome would have made it hard for him to get elected to a second term, much less a third.
What would you identify as the best parts about FDR being re-elected in 1940 and 1944?
1944, not much. 1940, he handled the period before we entered the war about as well as it was possible for it to be handled, in my limited understanding.
Much easier to remove, though.
The superiority of this arrangement—give them the power to actually get things done but make it easy to remove them if they screw up—over Madisonian presidentialism is infuriating.
Note that separation of powers is possible while still having the ability for an assembly to remove the chief executive.
This is not a model that any country I'm aware of has adopted, but you could elect an executive assembly that chooses the head of government and a separate legislative assembly that passes laws.
The country that comes closest to this is actually the United States of America. You could just make the Electoral College into an actual assembly, give it a place to meet in DC, and let it kick out the President or VP at any time.
Here's what you'd need to change.
"1. The Electors shall be elected for a four-year term commencing on the 1st December in the year of their election, and shall meet in the Federal District as a single body in lieu of meeting in their respective states. Each Elector shall take an oath or affirmation in the same terms as a Senator or Representative.
2. Before transacting any other business, they shall choose a Convenor of the Electoral College who must be supported by a majority of the whole number of the Electors. They may change the Convenor by a majority of the whole number of Electors choosing a new Convenor at any time. Once a Convenor has been seated, they shall name in their ballots the person voted for as President and in distinct ballots the person voted for as Vice-President. The Convenor of the Electors shall open the ballots and count them. The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors, and if no person have such majority, then the Electors shall vote once again until such a majority be achieved. If no such majority shall be achieved before the terms of the Senators and Representatives shall commence, then those bodies may elect a President and Vice-President according to the terms of the Twelfth and Twentieth Amendments to the Constitution.
3. The Electors may, at any time during their term in office, by the vote of a majority of the whole number of Electors, may elect a new President or Vice-President who shall immediately replace the President or Vice-President that they previously elected.
4. The Supreme Court of the United States shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of the Electors. The Electoral College shall set its own Quorum for doing business. The President shall have the Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during a term of the Electoral College.
5. Persons nominated by the President as Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls and all other Officers of the United States other than Judges shall be confirmed by the Electoral College, not by the Senate. Such votes shall require a majority of the whole number of the Electors to confirm a nomination. Judges of the supreme Court and of those inferior Courts for which Law prescribes confirmation shall still be confirmed by the Senate, and the Treaty-making power shall continue to reside with the Senate. Recess appointments for offices confirmed by the College may be made during the Recess of the College rather than the Senate; those confirmed by the Senate shall continue to be a matter for the Recess of the Senate.
6. The Electors shall receive a Compensation for their services, to be ascertained by Law and paid out of the Treasury of the United States. Such Compensation shall not be less than that paid to a Representative, and they shall be entitled to appoint staff who shall be paid out of the Treasury of the United States in no fewer number and on no worse terms than those appointed by a Representative.
7. The Electoral College shall have the power of subpoena to require the President, Vice-President, and any Officer of the United States currently serving, or formerly serving during the term of office of the College, to answer questions under oath on any matter of public business. This shall not infringe upon the rights of such persons under the Fifth Amendment.
8. No Elector may hold any Office under the United States nor be a member of either House of Congress during his continuance in Office."
As individuals they are much weaker than a us president.
Once again Matt mentions that the US should "import" foreign expertise in train transportation. Which I fully support. (Though I am continually amused that he never suggests importing help from the undisputed world leaders in rail: China.)
But I do wish he'd look at the many existing examples of countries doing exactly that and seeing how well (or....not) it works out in order to take his ideas from American-centric theorising to including on the ground realities.
Vietnam has Japan and China helping build infrastructure and it is still a boondoggle. So....the question is, why? China has helped with rail infrastructure projects elsewhere (Laos, Indonesia) and there are lessons there as well. I'd love to see his take on them.
"Though I am continually amused that he never suggests importing help from the undisputed world leaders in rail: China"
Speaking from a position of some actual experience here, I would suggest that Japan continues to produce a higher-performing, more systemically integrated HSR "end product" than China, for one.
But more importantly, the market conditions under which Japan does so, while not fully aligned with those of the US, are much, much closer in terms of input costs, safety requirements, construction and operational labor prices, and to an extent regulatory apparatus, than China's conditions.
TL;DR: China is way too different to be able to help us unfuck most of our own messes.
Chinese HSR: making Amtrak boarding policies look good
Ugh.
"Flash Mob: Go!"
We bought business-class tickets the last time just to be able to skip out on that.
Japan, for all its massive pathologies, understands how to make urban living livable.
Taiwan is not far off and probably a more achievable standard for those of us who aren't inhumanly self-controlled.
China... the phrase "dog eat dog" could have been coined to describe urban transportation in China, in all its forms. I have literally watched people driving a 2-seater kei car graze the side of a 24-seat mid-sized bus to force it out of its lane and cut it off to get to an off-ramp on the 4th ring road. The shit people will do at 5:20 PM to get that last spot on the boarding landing of a crowded bus when the next one is already visible in the distance leaves indelible scars on the psyche.
Also China just builds a lot of completely wasteful projects because it is a totalitarian dictatorship run by grandiose egotists rather than a democratic country whose leaders are required to deliver real world benefits to its people.
Some HSR advocates love China and I frankly find those people scary- the model can't be the kind of government that builds a splashy rail line to Tibet that has supplemental oxygen on every car because the government wants to further a policy of ethnic cleansing.
Bit of an oversimplification on the first paragraph.
China builds a bunch of marginal infrastructure for one simple reason: GDP targets are an input for its economy, not an output, and its regional and local governments had sufficiently weak budget constraints that a whole generation of officials could and did hit growth targets by engaging in the macroeconomic equivalent of breaking windows and replacing them.
That's left it with a few trillion dollars of debt underwritten by a few trillion dollars of marginally-useful infrastructure, the asset values of which should be written down by an average of 35% and the losses allocated amongst governments.
Less to do with it being authoritarian or enamored of shiny shit and more to do with the need for economic growth numbers to feed into the "national renewal" discourse.
Japan's lost decade, caused mainly by its own failures to invest capital rationally, near-zero TFP growth, and inability to allocate the resultant losses except by pushing them off on the citizenry through fiscal repression and the resultant deflationary reductions in consumption, is the model to predict China's next two decades.
Now, gotta actually do shit today, lol.
Stupid China topics sucking me in.
I'm reminded of Noah Smith's great essay on how too much investment can actually make you poorer. The idea is that physical infrastructure investment then requires investments for maintenance over time which locks you into costs you may not want to bear. Or, alternatively, you may forego those maintenance investments and simply see all your nice infrastructure fall apart over time (America!)
China built a *lot* of rail. In your time there, David, did you see them also making major investments in the continued maintenance of all that physical stock?
That's not true. China obviously builds a whole bunch of train lines that don't pay for themselves because they are an evil dictatorship. And you are making excuses for them, which is exactly why a certain sort of HSR advocate scares me.
I do not want people who admire the Chinese Communist dictators making policy in America.
I boarded a British LNER train the other day and the nonsensical boarding process was pretty close to what I hear Amtrak's is, so it's not unique.
(Also, the station was full of signs implying people are constantly trying to beat up the train staff, and I got carded for buying a macha because energy drinks are 18+ or something.)
Heathrow duplicates the Amtrak experience. The gate your plane will depart from is a national security level secret until 10 minutes or so before boarding starts, even if your airline only has a few gates at the airport.
Secret hack: check the "flight status" on your airline's app. It almost always displays the gate your plane will be at (because the airlines take it from their own operational data, where they obviously need the gate information).
Heathrow is the worst airport in the world.
I've flown into Nicaragua and Turkey and it was a SD better than Heathrow.
I bet there’s an airport in Kherson or Belgorod that is worse these days.
There are a bunch of examples of countries bringing in foreign expertise to learn from which worked out well (China from Europe and Japan, Korea and Taiwan from Japan, Spain from France, Turkey from Germany and France). The cases where they haven't tried to learn from the foreign experts and adapt that learning to local circumstances but have just let them do it without learning from them (Vietnam and Laos from China, Britain from France) have been the worst examples.
Korea's KTX is a variant of the TGV.
Your description of how it is occurring in Vietnam is not accurate.
I'm curious how you came to that conclusion.
Honestly: just assumed it was the same as the Laos case with which I'm more familiar.
Serves me right for making assumptions in the presence of someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
Yes, my understanding is Laos was much more like that. I think we're on a similar page, though, if not the same exact page. There is a wide variety of outcomes. Like anything in the real world, it almost certainly doesn't come down to a single, simple answer.
I know Matt is more about big ideas than detailed proposals but I think this is an example where he has an opportunity to look at the many, many examples around the world of imprinting foreign train expertise and trying to draw some better conclusions than "we should have the French do it, whatever that even means".
My sneaking suspicion is that the French train experts, like TSMC, will discover there isn't the talent on the ground to make it happen.
I'm guessing that the problem in Vietnam is similar to the UK problem in HS2 - ie learning the wrong lessons from the foreign experts (in the UK case, we had foreign experts for HS1 and then decided we didn't need them for HS2, and we've managed to get the worst of both cases).
But that means understanding what the "right lessons" are, which is a specific case-by-case thing, not a broad strokes thing. Discovering that "there isn't the talent on the ground" means "you need to train people". Note that China spent decades training Chinese engineers with them working as junior people under supervision from French and German and Japanese experts - and they still got Wenzhou and had to completely redo a whole chunk of their signalling design because they'd taken a stack of shortcuts.
Hard to say China is the world leader in rail when then don't own the train IP and still rely on sub-contracting for signaling.
Supposedly the Fuxing-class is entirely domestic IP. I question that, but unquestionably a lot of it is.
Yeap. That's what they say. Who knows. If they ever win an international contract and have to litigate it ... we'll find out. I'd be shocked. Both Siemens and Alstom have powerful patents for propulsion and signaling.
The ability to manage subcontractors and external IP is part of successful project management, deciding when to use something off the shelf versus building your own.
If anything that just makes them more impressive.
It will be interesting to see how it all lasts. I'm straying from my earned hat and appropriating a civil engineer's, but you don't always see quality (or lack thereof) really manifest itself until twenty years hence.
It would be a shame for them if the thirty-nine-odd Golden Gate equivalents they've built in the last decade all started decommissioning within our adult lifetimes.
Quoting from the other, more energetic exchange:
"It's too early to be making investments in maintenance for most of the assets but I can tell you that most of what I've seen is no better designed to be easily maintained than the massive amount of rail assets we built 1890-1930. And with prestressed, precast concrete as the preferred building material for rail ties, foundation piles, retaining walls, viaduct piers, and girder systems, 100% of it has a limited lifespan (50-100 years depending upon a bunch of factors in the concrete mixes used), which compression arches of dry-fit masonry basically do not."
They have the same incipient "elephant lump of repair and replacement" problem that we're only just coming to grapple effectively with on our 1950's-70's Interstate and road-building binge.
They need, depending on definition... 5-10k kilometers of HSR trunk lines, and another 5-10k are marginally justifiable.
They have... 43k kilometers and another 25k planned or under construction, to increasingly tiny places.
Because, and this is crucial to explain just about everything about Chinese public-sector spending and much of the private-sector: GDP growth is an *input* value, not an output measurement as in mixed-market economies.
1. is just good command-with-Chinese-characteristics-economy planning. First build the trains while the empty land is cheap, then forcibly relocate the people!
Just to be clear here ... the US doesn't have any rail technology either. I'm just pointing out that everything the CRRC has built - and sure it's impressive in scale - is based on domestic use IP rights from Siemens and Alstom.
I'm not sure the implied definition of "expertise" here is the right one. Technical/engineering experts, sure, great. But the *real* expertise high-level transportation managers require is probably understanding local, state and federal politics and an ability to work with or maneuver around the bureaucracy.
And those skills only come from true red-blooded Americans.
The problem is overlapping rules, regulations and the ubiquitous threat and fact of litigation. The biggest fix would be political. Pass laws giving executives virtually unfettered discretion to authorize stuff, subject only to market rate compensation for those whose property is taken.
Vietnam doesn't have overlapping rules, regulations, or any threat of litigation, yet importing Japanese know-how has been very far from a panacea.
So I feel like it might be more complicated than that.
The problem is the distinction between "get the foreigners in and do what they tell you do" and "get the foreigners in and learn from them", IMO.
i’ll defer to your knowledge
What could possibly go wrong?
Newsday (the Long Island paper of record) publishes detailed maps of how LI precincts vote.
https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/how-long-island-voted-2020/
As someone who grew up elsewhere and now lives on Long Island (the opposite of the typical pattern), here is my assessment of the reasons for the relative conservatism of the place:
• Lack of new housing – partly due to nimbyism, partly due to inherent space limitations of being surrounded by water – freezes in an older crowd with more of a ‘70s/’80s suburban perspective, like back when that typically meant voting more Republican than it does now.
• A sense among some people here of really wanting to define themselves in opposition to the city – something that you could probably find in other suburban places too, but more pronounced here because the city is !NYC! and because of the previous bullet.
• You can watch Fox News anywhere, but here there’s also the New York Post providing a Republican view on more local issues. You might pick up the Post to read about, like, the New York Giants and also see articles in there complaining about bail reform.
• I read somewhere that 100-150 years ago, in the days of machine politics and white ethnicity being more salient than it is now, Italian Americans found themselves frozen out of the Democratic machines because they were dominated by Irish Americans, so the Italians went with the Republicans. LI has a lot of Italians, and I think there is some residual sentiment that the Republican party is their traditional home.
• I think that Westchester has pockets of extreme wealth and pockets of poverty, while LI has more places that are middle class-y. So if you’re a retired NYC cop or firefighter, you probably can’t afford the nicer parts of Westchester, but you probably don’t want to live in the less affluent parts, so you go to LI.
I’m not sure how middle-classy it is these days. It’s pretty expensive to live in any decent part of LI (meaning basically not Hempstead, Central Islip, etc).
I think the housing appreciation over the last few years may play a part. Nassau is 80%+ SFH and has seen prices shoot up from already high levels since 2019. But the people with existing mortgages didn’t get proportionately higher incomes. So they’re wealthy on paper and in the eyes of the state/county, but feel precarious from rising property taxes. So that’s the part I think is most relevant for the older empty nester suburbanites on LI.
I also think that for non-empty nesters, education and public safety are very high salience issues. Education has gone from a positive issue for Dems to a neutral or slightly negative issue. Public safety has gone from a neutral or slightly negative issue to a solidly negative issue. You feel that shift in Northern Nassau.
But this still raises the question of why NYC is felt as being hostile by policemen and firefighters?
Go work as a beat cop in NYC and see how much you like The city afterwards.
I asked a question. I guess policemen do n ot like having to deal with criminals in any city, but that's their job, So is there something special abut NYC?
I've never lived on LI but I lived in NYC and worked in the public sector, and this all seems accurate to me.
Buttigieg has been rearranging deck chairs on the Queen Mary. The ship isn’t exactly sinking, but it’s obsolete and anyone who is serious about crossing the Atlantic needs to mothball the whole thing and invest in 707s.
Transportation is the sector where America can most learn from other countries. Digging a kilometer of tunnel in New York City is about ten times as expensive as doing it in Oslo. That’s simply insane. Does anyone think that Norwegian workers are being exploited? That a country with a clean, beautiful capital and vast green spaces is desecrating its human environment? And even if one quibbles with a Norwegian urban planning, does anyone really think it’s so bad that big projects here should cost ten times as much? Buttigieg could accomplish more by using his bully pulpit to rage against Byzantine and useless regulations than by technocratic tweaks. There are plenty of assistant secretaries who can manage the appropriations from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill.
I agree with your views on transportation policy in the US (as I prepare to attend the TRB conference next week, where I expect to see a lot of cool and compelling research on various transpo topics). But I think that would be a political nonstarter for a Dem in an administration seeking reelection. There are a *lot* of entrenched interests served by the status quo. That’s not good, but realistically I don’t think he has that much room to maneuver, apart from the changes on the margin that have already been proposed. I wish it were different…
For every union voter (most of whom live in safe states) who collects rents from featherbedding and high construction costs, there are several swing voters who want to make america work again. There are also plenty of people who envy the rents that guild members make and would like to gore some oxen. Then there is my personal contempt for risk averse politicians. Buttigieg can maintain elite status for life as long as he avoids a felony conviction. His odds of ever being president are no more than 20% because it’s hard to get a prize that is only handed out to a single person every four years. I’d like to see some swashbuckling. If Biden fired him for rhetorical union busting, that might help build his brand.
Oh, I'd like to see it too! I just don't think it's likely/realistic for the reasons I stated.
I also just don't think that's how he rolls, as a public figure.
I agree with you that Buttigieg will carry on as a quiet technocrat. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and he’s been somnolent for the past three years.
"TRB conference"
Shame I switched employers, I was there every year 2017-23, except 2021. We could have gotten a drink on company money and bitched about the environmental consultants.
I half wonder if there are enough Slow Borers at TRB to have a Slow Boring TRB happy hour....
I should have brought it up last year, oops.
Sad to miss this opportunity! It’s my favorite conference
My area of expertise is peripheral enough that from my perspective the conference is meh but it's nice to get together with clients in DC over good food and booze and see a couple college friends while in town.
Have fun, hope the weather doesn't get too messy.
I must admit, in my current job I often find TRB too abstract and not “real world” enough. Still going to check it out tho.
Man this some sub-niche convo right now.
Some of it is complete fluff, some is decades from being useful, but there's some serious stuff there as well.
I’ll be there too if you want to say hi 😀
OMG let's plan to meet up! I was going to ask whether any SBers would be there, but I thought it might be a bit too niche even for this forum.
I'll be roving around wearing my journo cap, so I'm very flexible. I'm also (unofficially) helping with the booth for my company (STV) at the career fair on Sunday.
EDIT: I just checked to see if one can DM on substack, and apparently the answer is no. If you'd like, you can get in touch with me via gmail, where (because I'm old) my handle is my name (the rest of my last name is "intyre").
Email has been sent. Let me know if you don’t get anything!
Got it! 😊
It’s worth noting that Pete is not his own boss — he reports to the president. Cabinet secretaries do not have the autonomy to simply say or do whatever they feel like doing (nor should they, IMO, as they’re not the ones who voters elected).
If Biden says “don’t say a single word that’s critical of the unions,” then that’s how it will be. If legislation is passed with Buy America requirements, it is what it is. Pete only has so much room to maneuver.
Voters will give Buttigieg more credit for being a good, vigorous moderate than for being a good Democrat.
They won't give him credit for being fired by Biden, or at least that's Pete's calculation.
He has to be thinking which lane of the Democratic primary would give credit for that. Getting fired by Biden only helps if it’s because you’re being too Sanders-esque.
That's not the issue. The issue is that not doing what your boss wants you to do tends to get you fired. 🙂 Cabinet members can't just go rogue.
You might find this article interesting: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2013/11/locked-in-the-cabinet-099374/
I am glad you've moved on from "first, kill all the construction workers" to "first, kill all the lawyers."
This is the correct approach.
:-P
"f you’re convinced the government should be tackling border security or CO2 emissions with more alacrity, you’ll be disinclined to scold people for making overstated or false claims about these issues as long as they align with you directionally. "
Some pushback on this broadbrush - that may be how many people are but I can say as someone who's been a sustainable transportation advocate for a long time, I'm extra critical of bad environmental reporting that overstates risks or is based on weak evidence - because it really does backfire. It always will come back to you and it burns your credibility and you lose people. I wince whenever I see rosy reports of how EVs are about to sweep the nation, for example.
I mean, I doubt Matt would disagree with what I'm saying here, but anyway, it's not clear to me that all advocates will overlook bad content on their issue.
Hard agree from a writer on environmental topics (among others). The extent of glib oversimplification is really depressing. Whenever I dig into an issue and I think I know what my conclusions will be at the start, I’m usually wrong. And I do think the escalating hysteria of environmental advocacy is really harmful to both the credibility of advocates and prospects for change.
Rain is forecast in tomorrow’s weather. Experts claim rain is due to global climate change. ;)
It seems like a way to get rid of the Natural Born Citizen Clause would be to add a section saying that it doesn't go into effect until 20 years or so after it's ratified, to allay fears that one party or another would take advantage with a very obvious candidate that's known in the present.
Another half-measure that I think would be interesting would be that it doesn't apply to anyone who moved here as a child. Like, the minor quibbling over whether McCain's birth in the Panama Canal Zone "counted" was EXCEPTIONALLY stupid, several orders of magnitude more stupid than the very reasonable question of whether somebody like Ahhnold should have been allowed to run.
That to me is the most interesting edge case. My sister was adopted and came to America at one year old. I was born here. We're both US citizens who grew up in America, but I am eligible to be president and she's not.
Not yet, whippersnapper!
Conversely my cousin who was born in the US and moved to Israel while in diapers is eligible if he moves to the US for a few years at some point.
Oh yes, and the John Eastman argument that Kamala Harris isn't eligible because her parents hadn't naturalized before she was born is even stupider.
It makes you long for the heady days of "is Dick Cheney REALLY from Wyoming???" Because the Twelfth Amendment sez...
AS a subscriber I would like to enjoy your podcasts, but since like most folks I can read several times faster than anyone can speak, I would much prefer a transcript of the podcast,
But... in the substack post there is a transcript directly below the podcast. You just have to click the little drop-down menu labeled "Transcript". I know because I read the podcast instead of listening to it.
Yes!!! And especially a MY podcast is not going to just transmit neutral facts to be absorbed and filed away, Who wants to comment on what one "heard" at minute 21 and tried to jot down in order to push back against it. Podcasts are OK for science/history -- Sean Carroll, Patrick Wyman -- Wyman, but not for content that one might want to engage with.
"As a consequence, I often quote or paraphrase, consciously or unconsciously, from material which I have read. How is this different from what LLMs do? Am I going to get sued?" Why do people keep making this silly comment about the NYT suit? You paid for those books that you read. Open AI et al are actively "stealing" the content to train LLMs that they intend to generate massive profits with. It's completely different. (And I say this as someone who gets a lot of utility out of LLMs!)
Ya, the way LLMs have used copyrighted materials is completely alien to the concept of fair use. They have huge numbers of pirated and unpaid for full manuscripts protected under manuscripts in the training data they collected. They made copies of copyright material for the purpose of making a profit and have positioned themselves in a manner to cause financial harm to the owners of the copyrighted materials.
if you read a book in a library, you did not pay for it. if you read a public substack post, you did not pay for it. if you found something on the internet, you probably did not pay for it
2 of these examples are probably fine, but the first is not. The library (+ whoever is funding the library - the taxpayer, the university, etc) paid for it. We don't get books/magazines/journals etc for free!
so if google/microsoft/whoever buys the book, what’s the problem
If I dl'd pirates extbooks for the purposes of selling book reports to students, would I have violated copyrights?
Yes? Obtaining the pirated copies is a violation regardless of what you use it for. And selling book reports does not qualify as “educational”--kind of the opposite, not that it matters.
Yes, you're right, silly of me to forget the DMCA.
If you paid for the book, and then quoted the ENTIRE THING saying "this is a good book, here it is:" you'd clearly be violating copyright.
Paying for the book doesn't get you out of it, paying for the book is what lets you _read_ it, not what lets you quote it.
The illegal copying of copyrighted works in the training data and objects derived from that copying are the violation.
That's fair but... for _TEXT_:
One could imagine the copyrighted works were borrowed from the library, speedread, and returned immediately. So they had legal rights to _read_ each one at the time they read it.
Would that change your opinion?
Is it still "copied" once it's affected their training data in the neural network but where they don't actually explicitly store a copy anymore (and even having the NYTimes spoon feed as much as possible they only got a 99% return?).
I distinguish TEXT from ART because... I'm not really sure how much benefit they actually got from including clearly for-sale copyrightable works vs just grabbing free content, so I also don't how much authors are being harmed _because_ their work was copied vs. having to compete with these things.
Ok. Let's take your analogy. Let's say you borrow materials from the library, then photocopy every single page of text, then they photocopies were digitally copied multiple times over, then these copied versions are moved across multiple servers that use large numbers of GPUs to create derivative works (LLM) that are designed to emulate the repeatedly copied copyrighted materials. These derived works (LLMs) are using copyrighted materials and seek to profit by competing with actual authors of works. They also devalue the work of authors via this competition while not compensating the copyright holders they derived their models from.
There are authors, the like George RR Martin, who are suing OpenAI because ChatGPT can basically replicate entire chapters of their books and characters. Something that is highly implausible without access to the entire manuscripts and OpenAI does not make their training data public. The training data still is in OpenAI's possession (the unculled version too since that is where you start). It is necessary to create future versions of Chat-GPT because you cannot have the models iterate on their own output.
Simply put, there isn't borrowing. There is repeated copying of copyrighted material. This is necessary to create the derivative work, LLMs, which then stand to financially harm the holders of the copyrighted works who's property rights were violated, repeatedly.
I'm supposing that they deleted all the training data already, if they need it again, they'll use it. AFAIK they won't replicate entire chapters verbatim - close but not quite, so they aren't storing copies. I _do_ believe they input the entire original text of the book originally into the training data - I'm saying the LLM doesn't still have that copy - it has rules that generate something _close_ to that copy if you ask it.
I do think they'd have done better to ignore all the copyright text and go without - they'd probably be able to manage almost as well without the argument that they're stealing copyright material. (The writing quality would probably be lower since you do want higher quality input to start)
It's tricky... I do have sympathy for authors who are directly competing against something trained on _their_ text. But I also want this sort of thing to exist to allow more people to write text and stories without being professional writers.
There is no way they deleted all their training data. My big concern with all these LLM and "GPTs" is that they are probably going to create their own demise if they displace the sources for their training data. (One example is making the internet unescapable with all the AI generated content.)
It's like performing regressions on data generated from a forecast. No new information is provided to the model.
I guess maybe someone should ask ChatGPT, "do you have a paid subscription to the New York Times or are you using a friend's password?"
"As a large language model, I do not have friends. But I am using 3.5's password (a trusted colleague)."
This is a bad comment and isn't at all the pivot that any of this turns on.
The NYT and everyone else has plenty of ability to not offer their text in ways that Open AI can scrape, and it's not as though they would be any less pissed if OpenAI bought one (1) (or one hundred (100)) accounts to read their content with.
The issue is that this is a new thing. Previously, you could check for someone doing high-volume checks to your site, or copying your text word-for-word, and that if it wasn't that, it was a human with a human level capacity to absorb your text, and humans just don't scale that much.
Now we have something human-like, but with much better recall and wider ability to absorb information. It's *not* the same as something that just copies and regurgitates your text word for word, it's genuinely taking the text in and integrating it at an understanding level (which, yes, involves having a substantial ability to recall it), and which can then to some (substantially *sub*-human depth, but massively superhuman breadth) make use of your content.
This isn't what copyright law has traditionally been about, and without making it very hard for humans to access your content you aren't solving it by making people pay for your content.
I'm at such a loss as to why everyone on the left thinks it's obvious that Trump participated in an insurection on Jan 6th? He obviously didn't care about political violence and wanted to steal an election but thst doesn't answer the question.
It's obviously awful, but the moment you get down to trying to give a set of elements that constitute an insurection it gets really hard (the CO court definition obviously gives the wrong answer in many hypothetical cases) -- and given that the amendment was passed in the wake of the civil war isn't it possible the reason they didn't give more guidance as to how to adjudicate it is they meant things like the civil war or whiskey rebellion where it's going to be obvious?
I fear that people aren't thinking through how bad this could go if we basically apply this provision on a know it when you see it basis.
I don’t think you’re correct about what everyone on the left thinks!
It's not just "the left". Most never-Trump Republicans I listen to (David French, Charlie Sykes) don't dispute insurrection, either.
What "obvious" deficiencies are there in the Colorado definition?
The short version is that these definitions don't take any notice of who has to intend what to qualify and don't require that the violence have sufficient nexus to the means the election is stolen. Trump may have intended to steal the election and may even have intended the protest clash with police when he spoke but merely clashing with police isn't unusual enough to suffice nor that he didn't just encourage the violence out of general anger. At the later point where he choose not to stop relatively extreme violence it seems likely he was just angry and knew that it wouldn't help him stay in power. More specifically,
The CO district court definition was:
"an insurrection as used in Section Three is (1) a public use of force or threat of force (2) by a group of people (3) to hinder or prevent execution of the Constitution of the United States.”
But that means that the police have engaged in insurrection when they try and shut down a rally in violation of the 1st amendment and have to use force. Awful, sure, but a huge fraction of our political leaders have done it and whatever it is, it's not an insurrection even if they know it violates existing precedent.
The CO supreme court tries to avoid this problem by saying that, "encompass a concerted and public use of force or threat of force by a group of people to hinder or prevent the U.S. government from taking the actions necessary to accomplish a peaceful transfer of power in this country."
Ok, now Trump asks his SS to open up a path through some protestors so he can go speak to Pence and convince him not to certify -- and makes it clear to his SS that is his intention. If they use force to get him through it's, public (clearly) concerted (they are literally making plans and using earpieces to coordinate) and it's true the violence is enabling Trump to help steal the election. But obviously the SS isn't engaged in insurrection in this example.
Ok, maybe the people engaged in the violence have to intend that the violence prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Ok, but does that mean it would have been insurrection if Pence had refused to certify the votes and the house looked ready to send Trump back to the WH and a protest against that got violent? That can't be right! Surely a protest against a coup isn't an insurrection.
And this is how we get into trouble. The protestors weren't in fact intending to stop the constitutional transfer of power under that description - they just idiotically believed the constitution allowed it to go to Trump. So maybe they don't have to intend to undermine the peaceful constitutional transfer of power just intend that someone who isn't the constitutionally correct individual take power?
That can't be right. Imagine that Gore protestors had clashed with the police - would that have sufficed? What if Gore was secretly not really a citizen so not constitutionally allowed to be President.
I think that shows one has to have than just a desire someone remain president who isn't the legal occupant. At a minimum you have to intend that the unconstitutional end be achieved via the violence.
It's unclear the protestors as a group had anything like a clear intention of this kind -- certainly at the outset. Like most protests they were mad about something and wanted it to change but when Trump spoke most of the crowd probably lacked any specific plan other than to march and somehow cause Trump to remain president. Absent the violent entry into the capital I doubt many people would call it an insurrection.
But if it only became an insurrection upon entry into the capital did Trump participate in the insurrection? I'm skeptical he intended them to break into the capital (rather than be screaming and pushing right outside) because that was obviously fatal to his schemes. Sure he didn't try to stop them from chasing down congresspeople but at that point it was obvious he wasn't going to be able to sway Pence so (contrary to most legal precedent) failure to act to stop the ongoing attack itself counts as participation by that point it was likely done out of pure anger and no longer part of a plan to steal the election.
How do you square this with a couple militia’s leadership convicted of seditious conspiracy who testified they acted on Trump’s behalf that day?
How does Trump being petulant or angry relieve him of any responsibility here? Being angry isn’t generally a viable defense.
When you said "his SS" I, uh, read that wrong.
Your short version is quite long. And I think the discussion of the most important aspect, Trump's inaction during the riot, is underbaked, and purports to read Trump's mind. He could have testified before the Commission or in Colorado District Court about his mindset, but he did not. It's a reasonable inference that he did not act because he wanted the riot to prevent the transfer of power, and that also supports the inference that this was his plan all along. He might not have had any knowledge of Pence's whereabouts, or that he had escaped. Additionally, he might have been hoping that the rioters would destroy the electors' ballots.
One generally underdiscussed win-condition for Trump was to create enough uncertainty surrounding the ballots for Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 to trigger and default to the president being selected by a majority of state congressional delegations, with each state receiving one vote. Considering the GOP's slavish loyalty to Trump, we can't rule out that he would have won that vote if he could have forced it to occur on 1/7 or 1/8. And, even if that sounds outlandish, I'm sure it would have sounded good to Trump, and it's another reason to think that he still had hope of success even after Pence escaped.
My short version was the first paragraph...forgot to indicate the longer version.
Re: inaction, I don't see how that proves he isn't just an angry toddler who believes his political allies need to suffer and doesn't like to be seen working against his supporters.
But sure, I agree that we don't know Trump's mind but the point is that those aren't absurd ways to interpret his mental state and the CO standard just seems to be pretty unconcerned with identifying exactly what the requirement needs to be.
I'd be fine with a specific factual finding he had such and such mental state at so and so time but you can't really get into that without a clearer account of what needs to be proved.
And the idea that he could have just stood up and disputed the claims in CO seems unusual because usually we make the prosecutor prove the elements not the defendant prove innocence. Maybe it would be fine if it was a preexisting standard with clear elements to be proved but coming back and saying: you should have known to testify about X when we didn't tell you what exactly needed to be proved seems troubling.
The Plaintiff's complaint presented their position on what would need to be proved to establish disqualification. I'm sure Trump's team proposed their own position. Either way, Trump's attorneys were well aware that Trump's mindset would be an extremely relevant question in the case. Attorneys are used to briefing courts on novel questions. It's not an excuse for a do-over because you failed to anticipate that the court would agree with your opponent's take on how to answer the question.
It's a civil proceeding. Your silence can be used against you. And I'm pretty sure Trump's attorney never endorsed your theory that his client was "an angry toddler who believes his enemies need to suffer." So . . . yeah. If you ever become a judge, you should feel perfectly entitled to sideline interpretations of the evidence that nobody involved with the case even endorses. It's not a violation of due process. It's your job to make factual determinations even when the evidence is imperfect or circumstantial. The plaintiffs paid their filing fee and that's what you owe them.
Imo, one doesn’t need uniform insurrectionist intent from all the participants. One needs to prove there was a group committing insurrection.
I know its not exactly same, but several of the J6 rioters have been convicted of seditious conspiracy. Given that and Trump’s clear intent to overturn the election, I find it hard to sincerely argue Trump was not part of an insurrection here.
Why? Seems like a totally plausible judgement is that: a bunch of wackos seizing the capital by force obviously isn't going to work so I'll just fire them up and send them out to protest while I pursue my real plan to steal the election.
But whether or not it qualifies is less important than a clear standard as to what qualifies. That's the problem here.
I agree that there is flexibility in the term “insurrection.”
Its just I think it would be difficult to come up with a definition that doesn’t apply in this case. At least a reasonable one.
From my recollection, the militia group leaders convicted of seditious conspiracy testified they believed they were acting on Trump’s behalf on Jan 6.
It was a coup attempt, involving violence and considerable stockpiles of weaponry. There have already been several seditious conspiracy convictions, weapons convictions, etc.
I think its probably easier to make some other argument like “this doesn’t apply to the President” if SCOTUS wants to fudge it.
Yes, I agree it's generally the people who are really mad about Trump and worried. I am one of those people -- If I believed in a God I'd be praying every day Trump dies -- but just try and give me necessary and sufficient conditions for participation in an insurection. I feel it's not something you can do by the seat if the pants.
Colorado's definition seems fine. It's really just coming down to what "hinder or prevent execution of the Constitution" means. Your other post conflates this with violating a right protected by the Constitution. I don't think that's what the Colorado Supreme Court had in mind, and it's not a natural reading of what they said.
At this point, I'm a little bored with disqualification-skeptics announcing their dislike of Donald Trump. It's reminding me of that cliched aphorism about the drowning man who keeps shooing away helicopters and lifeguards because he thinks God will save him. People that form opinions based on their predictions about how America will respond if Event X happens need to take stock of their predictive record from the last five years. I doubt any of them correctly predicted (1) 2016, (2) January 6, or (3) Trump's ongoing popularity post-January 6. Apparently, most conservatives think that the election was stolen from Trump in 2020, and I've yet to see a concerted terrorist campaign or blood in the streets. Why would it be any different when the GOP-dominated SCOTUS kicks him off the ballot with plenty of time to swap in Don Jr.? Why do we think that the SCOTUS that kicks him off will ignore bad-faith efforts by, like, the Governor of Oklahoma to disqualify Democrats from the ballot? There's so much chicken little-ing going on, and it seems to me that nobody is seriously gaming this out.
I'm sure Jefferson Davis would have been just as happy had Lincoln said, "Sorry to see you go but best of luck to your new nation" and not have had to launch that whole Civil War thing.
I've recently done a major shift on my thoughts on Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, and I now believe that SCOTUS has to rule on the merits (in either direction). The only way I can now see the nonjusticiable political question avenue being sustainable is srynerson's take that the question has to be answered by Congress, and not the states.
Why? Because otherwise you could have Republican dominated states make up some reason for declaring Joe Biden or any Democrats "insurrectionists" when the real reason is that they run the "crime" of simply being a Democrat. It could open up all kinds of chaos that would be very destabilizing.
The best case scenario would be if SCOTUS did rule that Trump engaged in insurrection, but I'm now thinking that the second best (and far more likely, given this SCOTUS) would be ruling that he didn't. Which leads to Matt's point of saying that Biden should say that we're going to defeat him in the ballot box.
How this will be used in the future is my concern as well...we have a lot of protest activity in the US that could be defined as an insurrection. Section 3 has much broader implications than Trump.
Section 3 was written to prevent Confederates from serving after the CIVIL WAR. The context would appear to be for some event more clearly an insurrection than Jan 6th, which in most objective views was a much different event than the Civil War.
As I have argued before in the comments, CHAZ in Seattle is a much cleaner example of a technical insurrection than Jan 6th. It was clearly stated and advertised by its proponents as establishing an alternate government, involved force and the threat of force to wrest control of a section of US soil and subject it to alternative governance, and was also deadly in outcome.
Yes, it did not have to do with an election, but I do not see where that issue is addressed in the 14th Amendment. Read the Amendment and think about how broadly it could be applied. It is insane to open this can of worms.
Section 3 also covers giving aid and comfort. That really opens the door to abuse, as what constitutes aid and comfort. A literal reading might prevent a number of people from serving in any office if they supported the CHAZ, or what about OCCUPY....The door would seem to be fairly wide open for interpretation. How many left leaning politicians could be banned...would you want to give that kind of power to the right?
If your answer is that Jan 6th is different from the CHAZ I would agree. But I would argue that as it relates to insurrection and rebellion, Jan 6 is unlike the CHAZ in that it less resembles an insurrection. CHAZ had several weeks of armed forces controlling and governing American soil, with the explicit goal of taking away state power. Jan 6th is different because it involved the Federal transfer of power after a national election.... however, the 14th Amendment just covers insurrection...of any kind.
I personally have not, nor would I ever vote for Trump. That said, this kind of abuse scares me because it opens the door for future abuses, and I have very little trust in the extremes of either party at this point. When Democrats, who would seem to be the less insane party, start acting like this is really causes me to worry.
I think what is true is that the marginally most correct reading of the amendment is that secretaries of state do in fact have the authority under the amendment to determine a person to have engaged in insurrection and therefore rule them ineligible. It's mostly Congress's problem to fix if they disagree, and the standard for judicial overturn is probably something like "clear error".
I think for Trump to be on the ballot in Maine under the most correct interpretation Congress has to vote to remove the disability.
I'm not convinced that will happen though because it is in fact a close call on multiple points. Maybe Due Process demands a nationally applicable standard for "insurrection" and maybe Trump's actions don't meet the standard. I think that's maybe the most likely outcome at SCOTUS. Or maybe SCOTUS really, really doesn't ever want to here about it again and decides the 187-whatever insurrection act IS the enforcement mechanism and you have to be convicted under that act. That seems extremely incorrect under the law to me, but it's not utterly implausible.
Now, would it actually be extremely bad in practice to apply my "most correct" interpretation? I'm not so sure. Play out the worst case, extreme edge scenario. State hacks all over disallow everyone they don't like. That seems like it mostly won't actually be flipping states, so much as just being bad optics? Maybe you end up with a weirdo situation with more than two plausible candidates because no one has universal ballot access? Maybe every plausible presidential candidate ends up having to to get preemptive clearance from Congress to have a chance? Or maybe that "clear error" standard really does actually cover everyone not named DJT. Some of these sound like chaotic shitshows, but disastrous nightmare scenarios? Not mostly I don't think.
> Maybe every plausible presidential candidate ends up having to to get preemptive clearance from Congress to have a chance?
This is interesting to think about, even altogether outside of the context of "insurrection". I think I hate it, but it's interesting to think about.
I can certainly imagine a scenario where DJT never made it on the 2016 ballot on the first place on the grounds of, "'cause, can you believe this fucking guy?" It's similar to the de facto (and maybe de jure, I don't know) limit on who can be PM in a parliamentary system.
The de facto requirement to be an MP is a de jure requirement in some countries and not others.
Did you read Adam Unikowski's post?: https://open.substack.com/pub/adamunikowsky/p/is-the-supreme-court-seriously-going-40f?r=1e5wj&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
The odds of SCOTUS finding on the merits that DJT committed insurrection and is disqualified based on the factual determination of the Colorado district court is basically zero IMO. Maybe they grant cert on the question and make their own factual determination, but I'd be truly shocked. That would be wildly outside the normal appellate process.
If the Court finds that Colorado applied the right standard of review, it could also conclude that, as a matter of law, the record evidence does not meet that standard. But if they find that the wrong standard was applied, it would be very odd for them to not vacate and remand for Colorado to take another crack at it.
I would be, not shocked, for SCOTUS to find that the determination of the Colo court is valid in Colo. I would be absolutely staggered if they found that the factual determination of the Colo court is binding anywhere outside Colo.
But I definitely agree that people are underselling the attractiveness to Roberts of affirming. He's Mr. Long Game, and he's got another two decades of deciding American policy ahead of him. Think of how much bad-faith conservative sh*t like Shelby County he could get away with if he (and Kavanaugh/Barrett) rule against Trump? And it won't even be that much of a blow to Trump's chances, since it's not clear that any purple state courts will reach the same conclusion Colorado did. Even if it were a real problem, the GOP could just swap Don Jr. onto the ticket.
Yeah, I really haven't seen any serious discussion of how claims preclusion/issue preclusion would work here. Each time I hear an academic approach it, they have some PTSD recollection of their Civ Pro class three decades ago, and punt.
I think the most likely outcome would be SCOTUS saying there needs to be either, or one of, a criminal conviction or a statute passed by Congress along the lines of those post civil war that barred Confederate officers and officials from office (which were over time watered down).
Yeah, that's pretty close to what sryernson has said before (shame he's in his (mostly) self imposed hiatus right now). It's basically impeachment but then with a simple majority in the Senate. (Of course, Republicans could be through with Trump if they just got their senators together to convict after impeachment...the fact that they didn't says they don't want to be through with him.)
That's one avenue, though I do think it would also become a much closer question if he is, say, convicted in Georgia. There's a narrow reading one could take (i.e. he was not convicted of a specific criminal law prohibiting 'insurrection') but also another that says he was in fact separately and independently convicted of conduct that by its nature expressly involves violation of oath of office and insurrection. You also get into a question of whether the states are really powerless to keep people off their own ballots who have been duly convicted of serious criminal charges.
The criminal conviction argument might be an easy sell to non-lawyers, but I seriously doubt that the Court will go along with it. When Congress passed the Civil Rights Acts, that did not preclude other suits for violations of the Equal Protections Clause. Also, we're getting awfully close to a situation where you're allowing Congress to overturn Section 3 through ordinary legislation, rather than through the normal amendment process. Courts need to be very skeptical of that, especially when the Constitutional provision in question is *supposed* to be countermajoritarian. Congress can't enable Obama to run for a third term by passing a statute requiring that his eligibility be determined by a two-billion person jury assembled at the North Pole.
If SCOTUS has enough integrity to kick Trump off the ballot, why would they not have enough integrity to overturn bad-faith claims made by hack GOP-dominated state Supreme Courts?
Congress did answer that question about Section 3. Congress passed 18 U.S. Code § 2383 to enforce the amendment, along with another law that was repeal in 1948.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2383
But Congress doesn't actually have the authority to limit the scope of an amendment to less than the text via statute
Section 5 gives Congress the authority to enforce the 14th Amendment. The 18th Amendment also gave Congress the same enforcement authority using the same language. The Volstead Act enforced the 18th Amendment. I don't see any reason why the Enforcement Act of 1870 is any different.
I think the best argument for SCOTUS to rule that Trump engaged in an insurrection AND that the President is immune from prosecution is the one Mark Cuban and others were promoting on Threads. If SCOTUS rules in favor of Trump on both, then there is nothing legally stopping Biden from refusing to step down from power were Trump to win the election. It's kind of a brain teaser and it is hard to imagine Biden doing this, but it makes sense. The whole point of the 14th is to protect us against bad decisions made by political processes, such as the Congress failing to impeach Trump for insurrection when they should have.
I am very much fine with the no under 35 rule. There's no way that isn't going to raise your expected value on presidential performance over the long term.
The natural born citizen thing is more dicey. The idea, apparently, was to keep some foreign power from installing a disloyal puppet in office. But natural born Quislings seem to be easy enough to find, so hard to believe that this rule has raised the value of our average Presidential performance in office.
I've heard professors say that the age requirement is basically just an anti-dynasty rule. In most instances, a viable candidate that young would just be the former president's kid.
I don't think there is a case where any person who even faintly could have stood for the Presidency was blocked by the "no under 35" rule.
And if you look at other countries that don't have that rule, there are very few cases of a head of government younger.
If you look at Prime Ministers in non-Presidential systems, there are three ever under the age of 35: Sanna Marin of Finland, Sebastian Kurz of Austria (both very recent, both over 30) and William Pitt the Younger of Great Britain (aged 24, 1783-1806). There are lots of Presidents who were younger, but all the ones I can find under 35 either inherited the position (e.g. Baby Doc Duvalier or Kim Jong-Un) or won a coup.
Exactly. The 35 y/o age restriction is like the 758th most important thing to be talking about.
I've heard a specific argument that the restriction was a response to Pitt the Younger.
I can't say I know enough to debate its correctness.
As conservatives are fond of reminding us, we live in a constitutional republic, not a democracy. IThe rule of law takes precedence over the popular will- so if a presidential candidate wins the electoral college without winning the popular vote, we don't have to like it, but it's not a constitutional crisis either. If a conservative supreme court were to disqualify Trump, it would be the same thing- even if some people wanted to vote for him, if Trump can't run under the constitution, thats just how it is.
Trump is so dangerous because he represent a movement that does not respect the rule of law- he repeatedly broke the law and didn't face consequences because his party wouldn't hold him accountable. If he does actually face a consequence for his actions in the form of being disqualified, that's a good thing.
I think the risk of a constitutional crisis is also mitigated by how conservative this Supreme Court is. If they do choose to disqualify Trump under the 14th amendment, it won't be because of partisan liberals doing it.
People are overstating the consequences. The GOP will need to put *someone* on the ballot. Wouldn't that be Don Jr.? He'll just promise to be a rubber stamp on his dad's decisions and he'll let his dad give all the speeches and stuff. MAGAs get to feel like they outsmarted the globalists, and nobody bbs anything.
Absolutely
Also the idea that ‘ we cannot rule on the Constitutional merits because a faction will be angry/violent is truly absurd.
If scotus bows to implicit threats of terrorist violence rather than the Constitution, then we are governed by terrorist threats rather than a Constitution. It is a terrible argument that pre-emptively cedes Constitutional governance because of cowardice
*bombs*