Show Notes:

– The Remnant with Michael H. Parsons (rat guy)

– The Dispatch Podcast on the debate that didn’t matter

– A post-debate Dispatch Live 

– Jonah breaks down the debate with Chuck Todd

– Tevi Troy: “Moderators Have Ruined Presidential Debates. Let’s Get Rid of Them.”

– The Remnant with Luke Coffey

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In a 126-page detailed legal analysis, William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen conclude that the 14th Amendment, added to the Constitution after the Civil War, bars “any person who had previously taken an oath to support the Constitution” from “any office, civil or military, under the United States, if that person “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.”

Obviously, this language was initially intended to bar from office any person who had sworn allegiance to the Constitution but had then been an official of the Confederacy. But as the authors point out, there is no reason to suppose that the language is not still binding on a person who has sworn allegiance to the Constitution and then violated that oath.

Importantly, this constitutional provision can be enforced by any citizen, or by any official of a local, state, or the federal government, so it’s now only a matter of time before a suit is brought to disqualify Mr. Trump. Obviously, this case will have to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

The key issue before the Court will be whether Mr. Trump has “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, or gave “aid and comfort” to its “enemies.” On this issue, professors Baude and Paulsen write:

Did President Trump’s “willful, deliberate refusal to accept the outcome of the lawful constitutional election resulting in his defeat for re-election and, instead, his (and others’) attempt to overthrow constitutional election results and install or maintain himself in office, by force, by fraud or by attempted de facto political coup d’etat against the regime of lawful constitutional government, constitute engaging in ‘insurrection or rebellion against the Constitution of the United States’”? “We think the answer is yes.” [emphasis in the original]

This is also the issue in Mr. Trump’s second indictment (the so-called January 6 case). That case is based on his alleged violation of various US statutes—but many lawyers have found the statutory foundation of the indictment to be weak and vague. For example, the statutory prohibition against insurrection was not cited in the indictment, probably because an insurrection today implies violence. Instead, Mr. Trump was charged with (i) conspiracy to defraud the United States, (ii) conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, (iii) obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and (iv) conspiracy against rights. These statutes may be applicable to the facts as presented at trial, but may not be clear enough to persuade jurors to convict Mr. Trump.

However, professors Baude and Paulson point out that the language of the 14th Amendment may be read more broadly than a statute, since its purpose was to disqualify someone from office who has violated his previous oath to support the Constitution.

The case for disqualification is strong. There is abundant evidence that Trump deliberately set out to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election result, calling it ‘stolen’ and ‘rigged’; that Trump (with the assistance of others) pursued numerous schemes to effectuate this objective; that among these were efforts to alter the vote counts of several states by force, by fraud or by intended intimidation of state election officials, to pressure or persuade state legislatures and /or courts unlawfully to overturn state election results, to assemble and induce others to submit bogus slates of competing state electors, to persuade or pressure Congress to refuse to count electors’ votes submitted by several states, and finally, to pressure the Vice President to overturn state election results in his role of presiding over the counting of electors’ votes. . . The bottom line is that Donald Trump both “engaged in” “insurrection or rebellion” and gave “aid and comfort” to others engaging in such conduct, within the original meaning of those terms as employed in Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment.

The reference to “original meaning” in this sentence should not be ignored. The authors are talking to an originalist Supreme Court and urging upon them a rule that Donald Trump—who previously had sworn to support the Constitution at his inauguration—had now betrayed his oath of office and is no longer eligible to hold an office under the United States.

The post A Summary of the Baude-Paulsen Paper on Donald Trump’s Ineligibility to Run for President appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Show Notes:

–Dr. George’s webpage

–Dr. George: “Universities Shouldn’t Take Political Positions”

–Dr. George: “How Universities Can Restore Academic Freedom and Free Speech”

–Dr. George’s advice for incoming students

–Julien Benda’s The Treason of the Intellectuals

The post He Ain’t Heavy, He’s Brother George appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

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The post Discussing Trump’s Georgia indictment: Yoo on Fox News’ ‘Your World Cavuto’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

“A movement can’t be about the personality of one individual,” DeSantis told the Florida Standard. “If all we are is listless vessels that’s just supposed to follow, you know, whatever happens to come down the pike on Truth Social every morning, that’s not going to be a durable movement.”

He prefaced his “listless vessel” line, by noting that the case for Trump has been “totally detached from any type of substance.” Conservatism and the Republican Party, he said, have got to be about the question, “What are you trying to achieve on behalf of the American people? And that’s got to be based in principle.”

It’s a bit frustrating that DeSantis is only saying this now, as some of us have been saying this for the better part of a decade. Years of listlessness have created an environment where Republican voters now say they think Trump tells the truth more than religious leaders or their own families. I’m not convinced they actually believe this, but the response certainly speaks to the dysfunction on the right.

Even more annoying: DeSantis is himself a recovering listless vessel. His most famous ad in his 2018 bid for governor showed him reading bedtime stories to his baby about Donald Trump and teaching his daughter to read with Trump’s “Make America Great Again” yard signs.

The Trump world’s response to DeSantis’ “listless vessel” line—which was clearly not intended as an insult, given that he referred to “we”—was not only predictably whiny, it largely proved his point. All weekend, with ample boosting from Fox News, Trump surrogates tried to spin the comments as a replay of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” moment. The spokesperson for the aptly named MAGA Inc. declared, “DeSantis must immediately apologize for his disgraceful insult.”

Given that DeSantis’ campaign motto is “Never Back Down,” one would hope he won’t give in to Trump’s patented crybullying.

But that’s not assured. A debate prep memo from a super PAC supporting DeSantis was made public last week. (Super PACs can’t directly coordinate with campaigns, so this was apparently seen as a clever work-around.)

In the hothouse world of campaign nerds, it has already earned a spot in the Hall of Fame of unforced errors, given that it’s a pas de deux of banality and listlessness. Drafted by the shop of Never Back Down PAC’s chief strategist Jeff Roe, it advised DeSantis to: “1. Attack Joe Biden and the media 3-5 times. 2. State (DeSantis’) positive vision 2-3 times. 3. Hammer Vivek Ramaswamy in a response. 4. Defend Donald Trump in absentia in response to a Chris Christie attack.”

The first problem is that by making this advice public, it’s much harder for DeSantis to follow it. It’s almost an in-kind donation to Christie, who will surely monitor DeSantis’ attacks and sarcastically point them out.

Second, DeSantis shouldn’t need to be told points 1 and 2, while points 3 and 4 reveal how scared his campaign is of Trump.

Of course, DeSantis is not alone. With the exception of Christie, Asa Hutchinson, and the underrated Will Hurd, the other candidates are all desperately running to come in second to Trump. Hence the advice to DeSantis to defend Trump and “take a sledge-hammer” to Ramaswamy, preferably with Trumpy nicknames like “Fake Vivek” or “Vivek the Fake.”

Mike Pence, by his own book-length eyewitness account of the events that led to Trump’s federal and state criminal indictments, argues that Trump tried to violate the Constitution and overturn the election. Yet now he says Trump should be given the “presumption of innocence” and that he “would have preferred that these matters be left to the judgment of the American people.” That’s fine for legal punditry, but rhetorically weird for someone running against the quarce-indicted Trump.

To one extent or another, all of the candidates—Christie included—have been complicit in turning the GOP into a vast armada of listless vessels. But at least Christie’s trying to atone by honestly, and full-throatedly, addressing Trump’s unfitness for office.

The rest are waiting for a deus ex machina to remove the runaway frontrunner for them. It’s the only way to explain why DeSantis’ brain trust wants him to “hammer” Vivek the Fake while defending Trump. Of course, the only plausible mechanism for that deus ex machina is the criminal justice system, which all of the candidates have spent their days attacking and delegitimizing.

I’m glad DeSantis sees the mess he helped create so clearly, but identifying the problem is only the first step to remedying it. What’s required is more truth-telling and listfulness than the GOP crowd wants, which is why both qualities are in such short supply.

The post Will DeSantis Stay on the Attack Against Trump? appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Show Notes:

–Robert’s webpage

–Robert’s new book, The Loom of Time: Between Empire and Anarchy, from the Mediterranean to China

–Robert: “Order After Empire: The Roots of Instability in the Middle East”

–Robert: “Will America Share Rome’s Fate?”

–Frederick Kagan: “Biden Could Have Stopped the Taliban. He Chose Not To.

–Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia

The post The Kaplan Chronicles appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The phrase came to mind when I saw an article that the US could not afford to keep sending arms to Ukraine.

The fact is that the US and NATO have to win in Ukraine or they will face a continuing threat from Russia for the foreseeable future. Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, has made it clear that he wants to re-establish the old Soviet Union of his KGB youth—a crazy goal, to be sure, but one that is much in tune with Russia’s past and Putin’s view of his future.

The countries of NATO would like to have as much of a buffer zone as possible against a vengeful Russia of the future, so their interest in supporting Ukraine today is obvious.

But why is this in the interests of the United States?

Let’s begin with NATO itself. The US has fostered NATO for its own reasons.  Even though it is not physically threatened by a Russian invasion, if the weak nations of Europe are gobbled up by Russia, that country would become a far more dangerous adversary for the US than Russia alone.

This is pure pay me now or pay me later. If we beat Putin in Ukraine, it may end his rule in Russia, and his dream to recreate the Soviet Union, but if we back away because of the cost our assistance, we’ll be paying later to defend Poland and the others, possibly with the lives of American troops.

This is not only a 21st-century notion. We sold and delivered badly needed supplies to the UK before World War II, often against the opposition of Americans who thought it was a waste of our money and national resources. Thousands of lives of American commercial seamen were lost to German submarines, but this too was pay me now or pay me later. Eventually, after Pearl Harbor, we declared war on Germany, but by that time Hitler had taken over France and was in the process of creating a massive defensive wall against an invasion across the English Channel.

Paying later in this case was the heavy price on June 6, 1941, when we finally massed the forces to breach Hitler’s wall. As is often the case, the cost we had to pay later was far greater than the cost we did not want to pay at the outset.  

Today we are confronted with a growing menace from China, another superpower that is not only in an informal ally with Russia but also one with a population, resources, and technical skill to send manned rockets to the moon and build a navy larger than ours. China claims Taiwan, an island off the coast of China with which we are friendly, and which supplies most of the powerful computer chips that we need for our economy as well as our military. How will we deter China from attacking Taiwan, which the Chinese regard as a province of China?

What will happen if we hold back the resources we are now giving to Ukraine, and let that country be swallowed up by Russia? We will save a lot our shells, missiles, tanks and personnel carriers, but China will see this as a signal that we lack the will to defend Taiwan. What, after all, could be clearer?

Again, pay me now or pay me later.  

If we let Russia swallow up Ukraine because we thought it would cost too much, China will be far more likely to invade Taiwan. Chinese strategists will think: if the US will not help Ukraine—where it has allies and a history of intervening in Europe—why would it defend Taiwan?

And after China takes Taiwan, there are a number of nations that are now allied with the US that will be eager to become friends of a more powerful China: South Korea, the Philippines, maybe even Japan.

We could prevent this outcome, of course, by defending Taiwan with our army and navy, but at a huge cost in American lives and treasure.

Here again—pay me now or pay me later—we will be paying an enormous price to prevent the loss of Taiwan, because we failed to pay an infinitely smaller price in Ukraine today.

The post Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later Is Not a Sound Policy appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The post Discussing the Hunter Biden probe: Yoo on Fox News’ ‘Fox News @ Night’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Show Notes:

–Jonah’s problem with small dollar donors

–This weekend’s Dispatch Podcast

–The Remnant with Daniel Hannan

–The Remnant with Ken Pollack

–Advisory Opinions on the Georgia indictments

The post The Right Regime appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The post Discussing Trump’s Georgia indictment: Yoo on Fox News’ ‘Cavuto Live’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The post Discussing First Amendment rights and foster parent applications: Haun on CNN’s ‘Smerconish’ appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

As loyal listeners know, yesterday Steve, John, and Lucretia took over the flagship Ricochet podcast in the absence of both Peter Robinson (still somewhere in the Witness Protection Program) and Rob Long (out walking a Hollywood picket line somewhere), and we made James Lileks’ life completely miserable.

We decided that a couple of issues we brought up deserved some extended discussion in this bonus episode, starting with the “trust” question: why do Americans now hold nearly all major institutions, both public and private, in such low regard? We run through a number of factors, from ideology, competence, and corruption, but also wonder about whether our ruling elites today don’t have the same kind of noblesse oblige that characterized the elites of the 1950s (the Dulles brothers get a special shout-out).

Next, we return to the question of “human rights” versus the natural rights of the American Founding, and the mischief that the rise of “human rights” has entailed in modern times. Steve had intended to nitpick John’s understanding of Thomas Hobbes, but the Learned Lucretia shows up in force, with marvelous renditions of Locke and Hobbes, casting doubt on Steve’s proposition that maybe there exists a “Hobbistotle” to go with Tom West’s “Lockistotle.” It’s not as wonky and esoteric as it sounds! Well actually maybe it is, but we think you’ll still enjoy this Trump and Biden-free episode (and ad-free, too!)

The post The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Ricochet Overtime Edition appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

On a very cold day in March this year, AEI’s former president Chris DeMuth arrived at AEI to pick me up in a snazzy new convertible. We were going to lunch with Jim Buckley, who would turn 100 years old the next day. Jim loved convertibles, and we drove with the top down from Jim’s home to a lively little pub. Jim was warm and gracious as usual, and he clearly enjoyed the discussion of recent Supreme Court activity and the challenges of the administrative state. I was in heaven. Two of my favorite bosses.

Jim Buckley came to the U.S. Senate in 1971 as a Conservative, after a surprising plurality victory in New York State. I was one of many young staffers. The pre-Reagan era was a lonely time for young conservatives, but our Senate experience served us well. We learned the mechanics of the Congress, but more important, we learned lessons about governance from a deeply principled conservative who was schooled in the wisdom of the Founders. Jim Buckley was the second Republican after Massachusetts Senator Ed Brooke to call on Richard Nixon to resign his office. The Senator “propose[d] an extraordinary act of statesmanship and courage — an act at once noble and heartbreaking; at once serving the greater interests of the nation, the institution of the Presidency, and the stated goals for which he so successfully campaigned — Nixon’s resignation.” He championed the Human Life Amendment. He was a true environmentalist and served on the Environment and Public Works Committee. He championed free speech in the campaign-finance reform case, Buckley v. Valeo, and won.

Buckley is one of a handful of Americans who served in the highest echelons of three branches of government, first as a Senator, then at the State Department, and finally as a judge on the nation’s second highest court, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. He continued to write, and in 2014 published Saving Congress from Itself. Many judges and former staffers attended his portrait unveiling at the court where he had served. Judge Patricia Wald, who probably rarely agreed with Jim, said of him that he was a “man of all seasons, not just intellect and acumen, but patience and tolerance for other person’s point of view, good nature and true restraint.” He was all of those things and much more.

The post A Tribute to Jim Buckley appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

The first essay, published in 1987, is “Toward a ‘Plain Reading’ of the Constitution—The Declaration of Independence in Constitutional Interpretation.” The title itself was a provocation: as conservative judges, lawyers, and scholars coalesced around a constitutional jurisprudence to re-anchor judicial decisions in the original meaning of the Constitution’s words, Thomas challenged them to recognize that the words could only be understood as embodying the nation’s founding principles, best expressed in the Declaration.

Thomas read the Constitution as “the fulfillment of the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, as Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, and the Founders understood it.” He explicitly rejected Dred Scott’s assertion that the Constitution gave no protection to black Americans. Even if early Americans failed to live up to their founding principles, “the Declaration’s promise of equality of rights” was the timeless criterion by which government must be judged.

For Thomas, this was a fundamental matter of republican government, in the small-r sense. Liberty was a reflection of each citizen’s equality. And the “principle of equality,” in turn, “is contained within the republican principle of self-government,” he wrote.

At a moment when conservatives were emphasizing constitutional institutions over merely “good intentions,” Thomas rejected the false choice: “the problem is not replacing good intentions with good institutions but rather having good institutions that protect and reinforce good intentions,” he wrote. “While appearing a fine point, in fact it is crucial for the way we view the Constitution and the influence the Constitution ought to have today.”

His essay’s ultimate goal was to reorient modern thinking on civil rights, and to lament Brown v. Board of Education’s “missed opportunity” to vindicate the Fourteenth Amendment’s foundation in the Declaration. Vindicating the Amendment’s original meaning would “inspire our political and constitutional thinking,” leading us “above petty squabbling over ‘quotas,’ ‘affirmative action,’ and race-conscious remedies for social ills.”

He extended this theme in a second essay: “Civil Rights as a Principle Versus Civil Rights as an Interest.” Published in a 1988 Cato Institute book reviewing the Reagan Administration (alas, not available online), Thomas criticized the Supreme Court for being “more concerned with meeting the demands of groups than with protecting the rights of individuals.”

He did not downplay civil rights. “No other domestic issue of this century compares with it,” he observed, “so conservatives should not be surprised at the ferocity with which the heirs of the civil rights movement react when they are attacked.” (He made a similar point in his 1987 address to the Heritage Foundation.) But civil rights activists and the Court failed to recognize that civil rights were best protected through properly principled and limited government.

Criticizing the irresponsible Congress and aggressive administrative state that had allowed civil rights to become unmoored from the Fourteenth Amendment’s original meaning and purpose, he concluded that “a civil rights policy based on principle, replacing the one based on interest-group advantages, would be a blessing not only for black Americans but for all Americans.” And, in lines foreshadowing his Harvard concurrence, he warned that “[n]o one in this country should be made the fall guy for some other person’s easy way of solving problems.”

Finally, in 1989, he published “The Higher Law Background of the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.” Here he broadened his arguments beyond civil rights per se: “The best defense of limited government, of the separation of powers, and of the judicial restraint that flows from the commitment to limited government, is the higher law political philosophy of the Founding Fathers.”

He urged conservative lawyers to broaden their appeal, too. “In defending these rights,” he argued, “conservatives need to realize that their audience is not one composed simply of lawyers. Our struggle, as conservatives and political actors, is not simply another litigation piece or technique.”

Above all, conservatives needed to root their arguments in the principles of equality and liberty that the Constitution embodies. “The higher-law background of the American Constitution, whether explicitly invoked or not, provides the only firm basis for a just, wise, and constitutional decision,” he emphasized.

A year later, Thomas would be appointed to the Supreme Court.  For three decades, his judicial opinions have embodied this approach, both in substance and in style—especially in the Harvard and UNC civil rights cases, the culmination of his judicial service.

The post Justice Thomas’s Original Intentions appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

We’ve got a crossover episode, folks! Our friends of the Three Whiskey Happy Hour podcast (Steve Hayward, “Lucretia” and John Yoo) join to talk about the wacky legal matters of our time. There are environmentalists claiming the positive right to enjoy cooperative weather; they discuss the plush and cozy Hunter Biden tier of criminal justice compared to the briar patch tier that The Donald’s living in; James dishes out some, ahem, tough love to the yutes; plus our guests pick the word that annoys them most these days.

The post A Sparkling Powerline appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Show Notes:

– Dr. Pollack’s page at AEI

– Dr. Pollack: “Iran’s Grand Strategy Has Fundamentally Shifted”

– The Remnant with Frederick Kagan

– The Remnant with Daniel Hannan

The post The Trouble with Tehran appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

RICO prosecutions are not limited to organized crime families or gangs, but there has to be an actual criminal enterprise and related criminal acts to further the enterprise. This is true even in Georgia, whose RICO statute is broader than others, including the federal one, because it combines a longer list of predicate offenses with a looser definition of “enterprise” and “racketeering.” A Georgia RICO conviction is a felony that has a statutory prison term of five to 20 years, a fine of the greater of $25,000 or three times the amount of money gained from the criminal activity, or both a prison sentence and a fine.

Right off the bat, the indictment’s first alleged overt act against Trump is his nationally-televised “victory” speech on the day after the election, which already goes beyond RICO case norms. Yet at the time of the speech, there was insufficient information available as to whether any voting fraud in Georgia had tipped the scales, no plan existed for alternate electors, and Trump seemed to genuinely believe that he won. Trump’s speech was protected under the First Amendment, which protects political speech, even if no one else believes the speaker, and even if it contains false information.

Furthermore, while Georgia RICO forbids defendants to “acquire or maintain, directly or indirectly, any interest in or control of any enterprise, real property, or personal property of any nature, including money,” no one alleges that Trump engaged in his post-election shenanigans because he was trying to gain money or property or control of a business. Moreover, unlike in a traditional RICO case, Trump did not create or belong to a criminal enterprise, as traditionally known, nor did he intentionally commit criminal acts for the purpose of keeping that enterprise going for the acquisition or control of property, money, or businesses. Instead, Trump wanted to be declared the winner of the 2020 election because he apparently genuinely believed that he won, regardless of what some advisers told him.

The indictment also cites as crimes the legal advice that Trump received. This sets a very dangerous precedent, because legal advice, even outlandish or bad advice, should not be criminalized, especially where the issues are novel and untested in court. For example, lawyers in famous Supreme Court cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda, Griswold, and many others argued against the existing precedent and legal thinking of their time, and certainly they were not and should not have been prosecuted.

Furthermore, it is quite possible that Trump’s post-election lawyers’ misguided strategy to create alternate slates of electors and the legal advice supporting it were based on two historical events: the 1876 Electoral College drama between Rutherford B. Hayes (R) and Samuel J. Tilden (D), and the 1960 presidential election drama in Hawaii between Richard M. Nixon (R) and John F. Kennedy (D). In 1876, Tilden won the popular vote and 184 electoral votes, but Republicans challenged the election results in Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina, because, they claimed, the Democrats engaged in election fraud and intimidated Black voters. Hayes eventually won with 185 electoral votes, but the Democrats had presented alternate slates of electors from Oregon, South Carolina, Florida, Louisiana, and Vermont, knowing that their alternate slates from at uncertified or doubtful. No one was criminally charged, nor should they have been, even though Tilden’s nephew, William Tilden Pelton, admitted that he tried to bribe local election officials in Oregon, Florida, and South Carolina.

Similarly, in 1960, Hawaii Democrats challenged Nixon’s initial win, signed alternate elector certificates, and sent them to Capitol Hill, even though JFK was not declared to have won Hawaii until later. Again, no one was criminally charged and in fact the judge praised the Democrats for creating and signing an alternate slate.

In fact, on November 4, 2020, while Pennsylvania was still counting votes, Van Jones of CNN and Professor Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law published a CNN article citing these events and endorsing alternate electors! Indeed, it’s worth noting that after the 2016 election, the Clinton campaign and allied groups such as Unite for America recruited celebrities like Martin Sheen to importune electors not to cast their electoral votes for Trump; electors received death threats, harassing phone calls, and hundreds of thousands of hostile emails. The Clinton campaign also tried to request an intelligence briefing on foreign election intervention in order to sway the electors with false information; the Clinton team cooked up the phony “Steele Dossier” and knew that it and other claims regarding Trump and Russia were false. Anyone who thinks that Clinton or her campaign staff—an actual organization or enterprise—should not have been criminally charged, as they were not, must therefore also think long and hard about whether Trump should be.

It may have been an irresistibly tempting part of District Attorney Willis’s calculus to file criminal charges against the leading Republican presidential candidate, especially because Fulton County is reliably Democratic and went for every single Democratic presidential candidate since 1976. However, her over-broad indictment should serve as a cautionary tale against twisting and distending criminal laws beyond their norms. Prosecutors should recognize that what can be charged is not always what should be charged.

The post The Democrats Are Using Criminal Law to Fight Their Political Battles. It’s Very, Very Dangerous. appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Is Donald Trump toast? Are the walls closing in on Hunter Biden? Those are questions that can’t adequately be answered by two minutes of cable news. Luckily, Professors Richard Epstein and John Yoo are here with one of the all-time deep-dive Law Talk episodes: a thorough look at the cases facing Donald Trump in Georgia, Florida, D.C., and Manhattan as well as the increasingly inscrutable case of Hunter Biden. Which case is most likely to take Trump down? What kinds of questions are raised by the DOJ’s bobbling of the Biden charges? And who’s going to be left standing when the dust clears? All that and more  — plus a chance to submit your questions for the professors — on this episode.

The post Indictments: Infinity War appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Virtually every popular idea in American life has cheerleaders for this fallacy. You’ve surely heard someone say something like: “The only cure to the problems with free speech is more speech.” Or: “You can never have too much inclusion or diversity.” 

Broadly speaking, I take the opposing point of view on nearly all such claims. This doesn’t mean I oppose free speech or diversity any more than I oppose cheesecake or scotch. Rather, I subscribe to the view that life, and especially politics, is full of trade-offs. All medicines or poisons are determined by the dose. 

Nowhere does this longstanding view earn me more grief than when the subject of democracy comes up. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in favor of democracy. I just don’t think it’s the answer to every problem any more than hammers are the right tool for every DIY project.

For years, I’ve opposed lax rules about mail-in voting and other trends that make voting too easy. Maybe it’s the journalist in me, but I think deadlines are really useful and having an Election Day (or even an Election Weekend) that means something would be better. I think lowering the voting age is a ridiculous idea. Our 50-year-old experiment with democratizing candidate selection—the primary system as we know it today—has gone awry.

Such arguments were once well received on the right and absolutely loathed on the left. They’re still mostly loathed on the left, but in this populist age they’re increasingly despised on the right, too.

For instance, last week, on CNN, I made a fairly conventional point about the distorting effects of the rise in small donors have had for democracy. Candidates who depend on small donors tend to take more polarizing positions. In part because they don’t care much about electability, they push their party to more extreme stances, making the party “brand” less appealing to moderates.

Such observations are not particularly controversial among experts. Election expert Richard Pildes writes, “One of the most robust findings in the empirical campaign-finance literature is that individual donors are the most ideological and polarizing sources of money flowing to campaigns.”

You don’t have to be a political scientist to see this. Democrats routinely waste millions on ideologically “blue state” candidates in “red” states—Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Amy McGrath in Kentucky—who pander to the views of liberal out-of-state donors rather than more conservative but persuadable in-state voters.

On the right, small donations tend to flow to candidates and grifters vowing to wage war on the mythologically all-powerful “establishment.” After she lost her bid for Arizona governor, Kari Lake raked in $2.5 million, 80 percent of which came from out of state. She promised to spend the money on court challenges to her “stolen” election but barely spent $1 for every $10 on that effort. 

As uncontroversial as this in the real world, it’s now heresy on certain quarters of the right, particularly among those who make a living trying to keep small donors angry enough to provide a credit card number. 

For instance, in response to my CNN comments, Sen. J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, claimed I’m just angry that the fat cats I allegedly depend on have lost their influence in politics. I laughed not just because Vance’s candidacy was launched with $10 million of his billionaire former boss Peter Thiel’s money but also because, last year, the newly pro-Trump Vance insisted that the GOP’s “red wave” failed to materialize not because of Trump’s meddling but because of the baleful power of Democratic small donors.

A common refrain among my dyspeptic critics is that small donors are enriching democracy by participating. Obviously, this is true for plenty of individual small donors. But it leaves out the fact that, at scale, they cut out the parties and disproportionately reward performative rabble-rousers on the left and right. Again, the most ideologically polarized candidates monetize the most ideologically polarized small donors who in turn reward further polarization. This monetization of fear and outrage is a big business. 

Most Americans don’t vote in primaries, religiously watch cable news, or make small donations. But the tiny slice of Americans who do all three have captured the primary process, and because most candidates worry more about primary challenges than general election ones, this sliver has outsize influence over politics generally.  

I’m not for banning small donors, but if you think polarization is a problem for democracy, then it’s hard for me to see how they’re not part of it.

The post Why Small Dollar Donors Have Such Outsize Influence on Our Politics appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI.

Show Notes:

– Daniel’s webpage

– Inventing Freedom, Daniel’s oft-plugged book

– Kevin Carroll: “An Unthinkable Choice”

– Orlando Figes’ The Story of Russia

– Joseph Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World

– George Orwell: “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”

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