DanKohn.com

Evidence on how New York’s chronically dysfunctional legislature is a result of not having independent judges or bureaucrats redistrict.

“States where bipartisan commissions or judges draw district lines have far more competitive elections, and routinely see control shift between parties…. The arrangement turns the notion of bipartisanship on its head. Opposing factions go at each other, tooth and claw, over every issue where the public would want them to compromise. But in the one area where they are expected to battle, elections, they do not…. New York State legislators are literally as likely to die in office or be arrested as to lose at the ballot box.”

This, along with improving voting machines, is one of the fascinating areas of politics where real progress could be made, yet is a completely non-partisan issue.

Do you support democracy? Then push for the rest of the country to redistrict as Iowa does.

Amazingly compelling, comprehensive WSJ article arguing that a lack of government regulation in 5 markets is largely responsible for the current business turmoil. I think it’s unfair to blame the ‘96 telecoms act for dumb decisions that people made as a result, but I strongly support increased funding for the SEC.

An essay in the NYT travel section: A child gets a dire prognosis, and is set off on a lifetime of fearless travel. Of course, all of us are facing a dire prognosis: you see, we’re all going to die.

In this hilarious Reuters picture, President Bush and his wife Laura are stepped on by the giant Republican opposition to his war plans. It is quite difficult to get such a picture in focus.

Dowd has an excellent article on Bush family psychodynamics:

[Bush 41's] proudest legacy, after all, was painstakingly stitching together a global coalition to stand up for the principle that one country cannot simply invade another without provocation. Now the son may blow off the coalition so he can invade a country without provocation.

Irving Kristol writes in the upcoming Weekly Standard that Mr. Scowcroft and Mr. Powell are “appeasers” who “hate the idea of a morally grounded foreign policy that seeks aggressively and unapologetically to advance American principles around the world.”

What does that make the old man? The Chamberlain of Kennebunkport?

Who needs a war plan? We need family therapy.

I actually agree with Kristol that “European international-law wishfulness and full-blown Pat Buchanan isolationism are the two intellectually honest alternatives to the Bush Doctrine.” I may be one of the few Americans who support both the ICC and pre-emptive action against Iraq.

William Saletan in Slate crystallizes why Clinton won (twice) and Gore lost:

Like Clinton, Gore said he would fight to help ordinary people. But Gore seemed more interested in fighting than helping. “I’ve taken on the powerful forces, and as president, I’ll stand up to them, and I’ll stand up for you,” he proclaimed. In the environmental war, he boasted, “I’ve never backed down, and I never will.” To Gore, conflict seemed noble. “The presidency is more than a popularity contest,” he said. “It’s a day-by-day fight for people. Sometimes you have to choose to do what’s difficult or unpopular. Sometimes you have to be willing… to pick the hard right over the easy wrong.”

This love of fighting was exactly what Clinton criticized in 1992. “The Republicans have campaigned against big government for a generation,” he observed. “They’ve run big government for a generation, and they haven’t changed a thing. They don’t want to fix government; they still want to campaign against it, and that’s all.” Besieged by Republican attacks on Arkansas, Clinton smiled and talked about lifting people up rather than tearing them down. The objective, as Clinton described it, wasn’t a victory of one group over another but a nation in which “no one is left behind.”

I love the us/them quote, which is remisniscent of Orson Scott Card’s ramen/varelse dichotomy, which as an evocation of the liberal arts concept of The Other, one of the central ideas of our civiliization and culture.

A great, short history by Gail Collins in an NYT editorial observer of the suffragist movement, and “the vast arc of history between the summer of 1848 and the summer of 1920,” when women got the vote.

Brilliant review by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker of Robert Dahl’s new book, “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?”:

Even if it were true that the condition of being a citizen of a state with a small population entails such grievous disadvantages that, to correct for them, the very votes of such citizens must be assigned a greater weight than the votes of other Americans, how much is enough? Are the special needs of people who live in small states — people who can, after all, escape their condition by moving somewhere else — greater than the special needs of people who are short, or people who are disabled, or (more to the point of American history) people who are black? Here’s a little thought experiment, inspired by Dahl’s reflections. Imagine, if you can, that African-Americans were represented “fairly” in the Senate. They would then have twelve senators instead of, at present, zero, since black folk make up twelve per cent of the population. Now imagine that the descendants of slaves were afforded the compensatory treatment to which the Constitution entitles the residents of small states. Suppose, in other words, that African-Americans had as many senators to represent them as the Constitution allots to the twelve per cent of Americans who live in the least populous states. There would be forty-four black senators. How’s that for affirmative action?

I had always considered it obvious that the way to deal with the European Union’s constitutional problems of different sized states was a bicameral legislature, but this has caused me to reconsider. Of course, I certainly don’t expect the US Senate to allocate seats differently in my lifetime (though I could imagine California splitting into 3 states to get 4 more Senators), so I’m much more focused on much more essential (and, interestingly, all non-partisan) issues of political infrastructure:

• We need to bring voting machine technology into the 21st century so that the person you think you voted for actually gets your vote (more on this soon).
• Move redistricting out of legislatures and into independent state agencies to eliminate gerrymandering and create some actual competitiveness in Congressional elections (as Arizona has done).
• Pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the possibility of faithless electors (i.e., make the electoral college a purely statistical function of causing votes to be taken by the state and representing the number of representatives rather than by percentage of people). And no, I’m not happy with how much more the Presidential vote of a Wyoming citizen will count then mine, but it’s better than the current situation, in which as random political hack chosen as an elector might throw the whole election.

The NYT’s gift for understatement in explaining that conservatives are unhappy with Ashcroft, who has had an “unusual” trajectory the last two years: “Losing to a dead candidate is a decidedly unpromising sign about the electoral future…”