Best of the Web Today - December 13, 2005
Best of the Web is off today. In its place, we offer a free sample of Political Diary, the editorial page's daily, subscription e-mail newsletter on American politics (subscribe here). James Taranto returns tomorrow.
In today's Political Diary:
o Let's Talk About Redistricting, Mr. Alito
o Memo to President Bush (Quote of the Day)
o Chafee Has a Challenger
o Onward, Charter Soldiers
o The Touch Screen Voting Row Continues
Let's Talk About Redistricting, Mr. Alito
The stakes in the confirmation battle over Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito were raised some more yesterday. The Supremes agreed to review challenges to a controversial 2003 Texas redistricting plan engineered by Rep. Tom DeLay that helped pad the GOP House majority by five seats. In a 1985 job application for the Reagan Justice Department, Mr. Alito questioned the reasoning in the Supreme Court's "one man, one vote" redistricting cases. With the news that the Texas case will be heard by the court on March 1, expect Democratic Senators to press Mr. Alito for his views on the matter.
Ideally, the Senators hope to get Mr. Alito to articulate his opinion of redistricting cases, forcing him to recuse himself in the Texas case and thus increasing the chances that the GOP-oriented Texas redistricting map will be declared unconstitutional. But it's more likely that Mr. Alito will decline to comment on a pending issue before the court. That will allow Democratic Senators to use his silence as grounds for opposing his confirmation or launching a filibuster against him.
The Supreme Court is precariously divided on the issue of whether courts can intervene and declare gerrymandered districts unconstitutional. In its last case on the subject, it upheld a GOP redistricting plan in Pennsylvania by a narrow vote of 5 to 4, with the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist and departing Justice Sandra Day O'Connor voting with the majority.
Even if current Chief Justice John Roberts and a newly confirmed Justice Alito were to vote to uphold the Texas redistricting map, the court could declare it unconstitutional. In 2004, Justice Anthony Kennedy voted not to overturn the Pennsylvania map but declared that the court might do so in the future on standards that would declare some partisan line-drawing impermissible.
If the court rules against the current Texas Congressional map, there's a chance that the 2006 elections will be held under new district boundaries. The Texas legislature could be told to draw a new map, or Texas could even be ordered to return to an old set of Democratic-friendly district lines imposed by a panel of federal judges back in 2001. There is precedent for last-minute changes in district lines. In 1996, a three-judge U.S. District court redrew the lines of several Texas districts five months after the March primary for those seats. The three-judge court ordered that the November 1996 general elections in those districts be conducted under the new district lines as open primaries featuring candidates of all parties, with a run-off the next month if no one won a majority.
Given that the Texas Congressional delegation went from 17 Democrats and 15 Republicans, before the current lines were imposed in 2003, to a 21-to-11 GOP majority, a set of new districts ordered by the Supreme Court could have the effect of threatening Republican control of the House, which is now split at 232 Republicans and 203 Democrats.
-- John Fund
Quote of the Day
"Do you know how many Republican Senators and Representatives have said privately that it [the Medicare drug benefit] is the worst, most regrettable vote of their careers? The drug benefit will add trillions to the national debt over time; because of its complexity, it is overwhelmingly disliked by the very seniors it is designed to help; and like most government programs, it is guaranteed to become massively more unwieldy and costly in the future, as new provisions and baubles are added on. Eliminate it, or at the very least, cut it way back by limiting it to the poor. Your gigantic, additional Medicare entitlement underlines the Bush Administration's reckless overspending. The ocean of red ink you have created will be an enormous black, er, red mark on your legacy in the history books. Why not do something about it while you still can? All at once, you can please your party, make better policy, and change your image by confessing a big goof. People will be amazed at your display of humility. Sometimes, the best politics is counterintuitive." -- University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato's "Urgent Memo to the President"
Chafee Has a Challenger
The Club for Growth, a political action committee with a reputation for backing conservative challengers against liberal Republicans, endorsed Steve Laffey over incumbent Senator Lincoln Chafee in the Rhode Island Republican primary. Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Pat Toomey, the Club's president, explained the main reasons for the endorsement. Mr. Chafee is among the most liberal Republicans in the Senate, wrote Mr. Toomey. He consistently opposes tax cuts, citing the growing fiscal deficit, but then votes to increase federal spending. By contrast, the Club sees Mr. Laffey as a Reagan conservative who will support making the Bush tax cuts permanent, cut wasteful spending, expand trade, reform insolvent entitlements and fix the tort system.
But if Mr. Laffey hopes to win the hearts of conservatives nationwide by unseating Senator Chafee, he'll first have to explain a few things about his own record. As mayor of Cranston for the past three years, Mr. Laffey has increased taxes three times. The city now has one of the highest property tax rates in the state, and Mr. Laffey has said Cranston may "need" an additional tax hike in 2007. And while living in Tennessee in the 1990s, he gave money to Democratic senatorial candidates who ran against former Republican Sen. Fred Thompson and the current Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist. He even made a campaign contribution to Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr.
Even if Mr. Laffey's explanations on those matters are to conservatives' satisfaction, he still has his work cut out. Incumbent senators are extremely difficult to beat. In addition to more money and name recognition, Mr. Chafee has the National Senatorial Campaign Committee in his corner, and it's already running TV ads in Rhode Island attacking Mr. Laffey's record on taxes in hopes of depressing conservative turnout in the primary next year. That said, Mr. Laffey has been able to raise more than $600,000 -- about half of what's in Senator Chafee's war chest -- and is likely to raise a lot more with the support of the Club for Growth. Mr. Laffey made his reputation in Cranston by locking horns with unions and installing cameras in government offices so he could catch bureaucrats dozing off on the job. Senator Chafee may not have been caught napping, but he does have a race on his hands.
-- Brendan Miniter
Onward, Charter Soldiers
Despite Big Labor's success in defeating California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's reform initiatives last month, a few brave officials are still willing to challenge the public employee unions at the local level. Take the burgeoning charter school movement, which now has 570 schools in the state serving about 3% of the state's public school enrollment. They are about to be joined by one of the state's largest high school districts, fast-growing Grossmont in San Diego, which wants to convert all 10 of the high schools serving its 25,000 students into self-governing charter schools.
Charter schools are a halfway house between traditional public schools and the use of vouchers. Schools remain public, but can ditch the state's massive rulebooks and have control over their own hiring and firing. In exchange, they must show gains in student achievement or risk the loss of their charter. It's performance-based education, and most parents love it.
But school bureaucrats do not. Bruce Seaman, the president of the local teachers union in Grossmont, calls the idea "the first step toward the privatization of public schools." Nonsense, says Ron Nehring, the chairman of the local elected school board and a booster of charters. "The schools would be governed by a board elected by the parents which would report to the school district's trustees," he told me. "What can be more democratic and sensitive to what parents actually want?"
The proposal has been praised by Grossmont Superintendent Terry Ryan, who told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Mr. Nehring "is calling for a full discourse on charters, and that's really what should be happening." In fact, even the supporters of the status quo are pushing a plan to convert one local high school in the district to charter status, although half of the seats on the board governing that school would be guaranteed to be filled by teacher union representatives.
The debate over reforming public education in California is increasingly between those who want real reform and those who recognize the public is demanding change but still want to have the new system controlled by the status quo behind the scenes.
-- John Fund
The Touch Screen Voting Row Continues
Try as they might, state election officials can't get rid of the conspiracy theories that swirl around the direct recording electronic voting machines known as DREs. The ATM-like devices recorded the votes of 35 million Americans in last year's presidential election. Even more voters are expected to use them in next year's midterms, though Internet bloggers continue to insist the 2004 election may have been stolen or manipulated. DREs have become the latest punching bag in the mutual war of suspicion over which party is trying to steal elections.
The critics of DREs do have a point. Every election system is subject to fraud and errors. Paper ballots were so abused in the 19th century that lever voting machines were invented. Party bosses soon learned how to add votes to the machines while leaving no evidence of their handiwork. Punch-card machines and optical scanners replaced the lever machines in most places in the 1970s. Now it's incumbent upon election officials to make sure the DREs pass the public confidence test.
To that end, California Secretary of State Bruce McPherson has been working with a computer security expert to try to break into a DRE election system. Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer specialist, will report whether Diebold Election Systems machines used in 17 out of California's 58 counties can be hacked into and the results they record changed. Mr. McPherson refused to certify the Diebold systems after a fifth of the machines failed to perform adequately in a July test in Stockton.
A test is certainly called for. Last May, Mr. Hursti broke into a Diebold system in Tallahassee, Florida, and changed the data he found there. "Granted the same access as an employee of our office, it was possible to enter the computer, alter election results and exit the system without any physical record of this action,'' said Ion Sancho, the local election supervisor.
But Internet activists have taken the problems with Diebold machines and extrapolated them to encompass an elaborate conspiracy theory about the 2004 election. They point out that in 2003, Walden O'Dell, the head of Diebold's parent company, wrote a fund-raising letter to Republicans, saying he was "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." Supposedly, that could have included efforts to hire what one activists called "Manchurian computer programmers" who altered the Ohio results in Mr. Bush's favor, even though a Democratic National Committee report found no evidence that had happened.
That said, in the current climate of partisan bitterness and suspicion, the computer companies have to rise to the highest standard of performance. And that's why public scrutiny of the DRE manufacturers is called for, along with outside auditing and testing. Elections are too important to leave in the hands of the insiders.
-- John Fund |
