Presidential authority, unilateral action, recess appointments, executive orders, administrative agencies, and the structural tensions between executive capacity and democratic accountability.
“Disambiguiating,” as wikipedia fittingly obscurely puts it, Conservatism is a set of political philosophies that favour tradition. My point in this post is a defense of the notion that the Supreme Court’s ruling in US v. Windsor that the “Defense of Marriage Act” is unconstitutional. (The majority’s reasoning in that case—that Section 3 of DOMA amounted to … Read more
The IRS scandal, and in particular the handling (or, mishandling) of it by President Obama’s counsel, Kathryn Ruemmler, has raised a classic question: what did the President know, and when did he know it? In my mind at least, the question is predicated on the presumption that the president ought to know everything that is going on … Read more
American politics lately has been centered on SCANDAL! In particular, President Obama has been at the center of several well-publicized controversies, ranging from Benghazi to the IRS to the Department of Justice. The politics of scandal is interesting. For example, in none of the current scandals is there any real evidence that President Obama “did” … Read more
The idea of a “permission structure” has attracted some attention this week. The basic idea of this phrase, it seems, is as follows: A doesn’t trust B to do some activity X because A fears that B does not have A’s best interests at heart in the “realm” of X. A good example of this … Read more
In light of this week’s horrific series of events in Boston, I (and many others) have been thinking a lot about what exactly the “Miranda warning”—or more specifically, “being Mirandized”—means. There are a lot of angles to this, and I will focus on only one. In the interest of full disclosure, I believe that the … Read more
President Obama proposed his 2014 budget this week. A huge document, it contains a number of interesting policy proposals. One that is attracting a lot of attention concerns the “chained CPI.” In a nutshell, this change will reduce the rate of growth in social security payments over the next decade. Overall, the proposal arguably represents a compromise with … Read more
I have to be honest—I don’t actually know the criteria for being classified as naughty or nice by Santa. I also don’t know how I would find out. I do know that he flies around the world giving out “incentives” once a year. …It turns out that the Obama Administration is stealing a page from … Read more
A federal appeals court has ruled invalid the three recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board President Obama made on Jan. 4, 2012. (My birthday, as it so happens.) The basics of the situation are pretty well known. During this time period, the Senate was holding pro forma sessions during which almost no members were present. The court … Read more