It has been a little more than two months since Pine Lawn Police Chief Rickey Collins began enforcing the anti-sagging ordinance that the municipality’s aldermen passed. According to the Post-Dispatch, “The ordinance calls for fines of up to $100 for those 17 and older who wear pants below the waist that expose underwear or skin. [...] Parents of those 16 and under face up to a $500 fine or 90 days in jail if they knowingly allow their children to wear pants in such a manner.”

Personally, I think sagging is uncongenial, representing the antithesis of a gentleman. Despite my views, I believe that government does not have the right to enforce family values by acting like the fashion police. Besides being difficult to implement and patrol, this policy is also unconstitutional. There are many forms of expression that are not protected by the First Amendment, such as fighting words, libel, commercial speech, and obscenity. While some try to place sagging under the umbrella of obscenity, it would be relevant to put it through the “Miller Test,” which is the standard for determining whether material is obscene. In the 1973 case of Miller v. California, the Supreme Court ruled that material is legally obscene if:

1. The average person, applying contemporary community standards, would conclude that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interests.
2. It depicts sexually explicit conduct, specifically defined by law, in a patently offensive manner.
3. It lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

I believe tha sagging passes the ‘Miller Test’ with flying colors. For young people who are part of our country’s inner-city hip hop culture, it is a form of rebellion and identity. To some, it is just plain fashionable. This ordinance in Pine Lawn is just another example of how our liberty and freedom of expression are in danger today.

Other cities around the country, most recently Flint, Mich., are also taking stride to incorporate the same ordinance in their efforts to restore family values and ethics. I do applaud the importance of ethics in American society, but how ethical is it for government to deny our freedom of expression?

I don’t usually pay too much attention to letters to the editor, but there was a very interesting one in the Jefferson City News-Tribune, linked to on Combest today. The letter writer notes the political differences between the current governor and attorney general, and suggests that Missouri follow the federal system, whereby the attorney general is appointed by the president subject to confirmation by the Senate. The writer seems to think that this would lead to better government in Missouri. Would it?

I am not going to get into the partisan aspect of the question, but I think making the attorney general an appointed position would be a terrible idea. It is very important that the highest legal officials at the state and local levels be responsible directly to, and only to, the voters. Almost every state has an elected attorney general. I think they are appointed in Alaska and Hawaii, and maybe another western state or two, but they are elected everywhere else — and for good reason. Locally, even counties in Missouri that have eliminated most of their elected positions have retained the prosecuting attorney as an elected position (St. Louis and Jackson). This is for the exact same reason I listed earlier — independence from all other officials in enforcing the laws.

I actually think Missouri has just about the right amount of statewide elected officials. I can think of good reasons for maintaining all six as elected. I don’t think, though, that we should add any new ones, like commissioner of insurance or railroad commisioner — to give a couple of examples of offices that are subject to elections in other states. Missouri certainly has examples of positions that should be appointed instead of elected (county coroners jump to mind), but I think we have it correct statewide.

Regular readers will recall the debates we have had over the recently repealed "Village Law," which made forming one’s own incorporated town much easier — too easy, in my opinion. To give a quick recap, I objected to the method used to pass the law in 2007, as well as the idea that anyone, whether well-intentioned or, more likely, a crackpot, could just go and form their own municipality to do whatever they wanted without regard to the previously existing laws established by the residents of that area. Supporters of the Village Law admitted to the problems with the process while whistling past it, and defended the rights of anyone who feels violated by their government to form a new government, in the proud tradition of prior Americans. I found those arguments to be either unrealistic or anachronistic, to put it mildly. Libertarians have many fine intellectual qualities, but respect for the hard work of democracy is not one of them (with the large exception of the Ron Paul movement).

Which gets me back to the point I was originally trying to make. Some of you may be aware of the Free State Project, in which dedicated Libertarians declared their intention to move en masse to New Hampshire in order to bound their voting power and principles together in one state. This would have been another exception to my above statement, if it had worked. Needless to say, far fewer people have actually followed through on their commitment to make the move to a new state than hoped. According to Wikipedia, 269 Libertarians have followed through on their promise to move to New Hampshire during the past two years, which was probably dwarfed over the same time period by the number of Massachusetts liberals who moved to southern New Hamphire for more standard reasons. Within New Hamphire itself, the Free Town Movement was born, with the idea of making Grafton, N.H., a libertarian paradise. This, too, has not succeeded yet, and was not helped by the involvement of lunatics who advocated legalizing cannibalism, among other things. (Third-party movements always have difficulty with extremism, almost by definition.)

OK, now I am finally at my original point. There is a perfectly legitimate and also viable compromise between the village law, respect for democracy, and libertarian principles. With that, I urge the libertarian community here in Missouri to consider the Missouri Free Suburb Project. (My family will happily remain in University City.) It would be EASY to take advantage of the number of small cities in Missouri, and in particular the smaller suburbs of our larger cities, to establish a voting bloc to create as much of a libertarian community as possible, via pure democracy. To do this, you need not convince tens of thousands of people from across the country to more to another state, you just need to convince 10 people in St. Louis County to move to Champ. Or 100 Ron Paul supporters to move to Mackenzie. In Jackson County, you just need to find 200 libertarians to move to Sibley. This isn’t quitting your job, picking up your entire life, and moving to a new state. This is staying within your own metro area.

Once a voting majority was established within an existing community, you could do a number of things to promote local libertarianism. You could get rid of planning and zoning laws, forbid the use of eminent domain, take the radical step of allowing pickup trucks to park overnight on the street (forbidden in many suburbs), completely privatize every service possible (such as trash collection), and contract with larger governments to provide other services (such as police protection, which probably would not be needed as you would be living in a utopia). If you kept your own police force, the elected officials could instruct the chief to de facto decriminalize certain things like drug possession, although legalization would probably not be valid.

This is really a great idea. All it takes is for one 1950s-style Irish-Catholic libertarian family of 13 to move to Champ (population 12), and you have control. You don’t need to convince yourself that someone in the Ozarks who just wants to build a casino is the next Daniel Boone in order to achieve true freedom. It’s right here for the taking.

There is a very enjoyable article today in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about a local expert on vice presidents, which is topical because Washington University will be hosting the vice presidential campaign debate later this year. I share Professor Joel Goldstein’s interest in this office, and other unusual political offices. I say "unusual" because the vice president — and, at the state level, the lieutenant governor — are the only elected offices that cross multiple branches of government. They are offices of both the executive branch in their capacity of being successor to the president or governor, representing the president or governor (in Missouri, assuming both officials are of the same party) at official events, and sitting on various boards or commissions as the representative of the executive branch.

They serve in the legislative branch in their capacity of president of the Senate at both the national and state level, at least here in Missouri (not every state does it the same way). Nowadays, the vice president or lieutenant governor only oversee the Senate on ceremonial occasions or perhaps for major votes where their tie-breaking authority might be called upon. However, it used to be common for them to do so. This even led to a lawsuit in the 1970s in Missouri when Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Phelps (who I had the pleasure of talking to just this past weekend) wanted to oversee the state Senate, and the large Democratic majority at the time did not want him involved, for obvious reasons. (The practice of vice presidents overseeing the daily operations of the Senate ended long before the 1970s.) The senators won the case, and I have no idea whether it was a good decision or a bad one, but it’s an interesting footnote for the office.

Some voters are still unaware that, unlike the president and vice president, Missouri’s lieutenant governors are not elected as part of a ticket. As such, while not common, it is also not unusual for the governor and the lieutenant governor to be of opposite parties. I like keeping the elections separate, although I would be happy to concede certain points for them to be elected on a ticket. As the 35th senator and the successor to the governor in the event of a tragedy (which happened in Missouri just a few years ago), I like that the lieutenant governor is independently elected. Voters can judge a candidate’s fitness for those capacities, and go from there.

I feel that the president of the Board of Alderman in the city of St. Louis sort of crosses branches as well. While those serving in this position primarily fall in the legislative branch, they are elected citywide and also serve in an executive sense on the Board of Estimate & Apportionment. I guess you could say that the attorney general and county prosecuting attorneys serve in both executive branch and the judicial branch, but I think they more accurately represent the executive branch (and the citizenry) before the judiciary, and are not a part of it.

The Post-Dispatch ran a front-page story last Friday revealing the glacial pace of "justice" in the city of Saint Louis. Because of a variety of reasons, nearly 400 citizens have sat imprisoned in the city jail for more than a year without ever having their cases brought to trial. Eighty of those prisoners have been incarcerated for more than two years while waiting for trial.

Both the state and federal constitutions recognize in unambiguous terms that individuals accused of crimes are entitled to a speedy trial. The right to a speedy trial reflects the American notions that one must be presumed innocent until proven guilty and that the government must provide due process of law in order to deprive someone of their liberty. Those responsible for these provisions recognized that the government must not be permitted to imprison presumptively innocent people any longer than necessary to afford a fair trial. Yet here in Saint Louis, this precise evil is taking place.

Part of the problem is that the public defender’s office has a limited number of attorneys to manage the host of Saint Louis defendants who cannot afford to hire their own lawyers. According to one representative from the public defender’s office, as many as 150 extra attorneys (statewide) would be necessary to meet national caseload standards, yet legislators are hesitant to authorize any additional funds for attorney hires.

I’m certainly no advocate for increasing the size of government or the amount it spends, but let’s consider the financial repercussions of this understaffing. The city estimates that holding a prisoner in the city jail costs about $50 per person per day. The United States Supreme Court’s current position is that eight months (240 days) should be adequate time for a serious felony case to go to trial, assuming the defendant does not voluntarily initiate delays. Illinois is even stricter on the government, requiring prisoners to be released if they are not brought to trial within four months (120 days).

For an accused person to be held in jail for eight months (as opposed to posting bail), taxpayers can expect to spend roughly $12,000 per defendant, not including the cost of legal expenses. The incarceration bill for the 400 accused who have spent more than a year waiting for trial comes to at least $7.3 million — $2.5 million more than would have been necessary if they were brought to trial within the time period deemed to be reasonable by the Supreme Court, and $4.9 million more than would have been necessary under Illinois’ guidelines.

The judges responsible for overseeing St. Louis’s criminal docket have instituted new procedures that they believe will provide some improvement to the system, but they have also
asked the Board of Aldermen to consider an additional $520,000 to bring
in additional defense attorneys to help alleviate the logjam. It is true that many of these trials, once held, will likely result in convictions. In those cases, taxpayers will still bear the financial burden of incarcerating felons, although the burden will be shared by the rest of the state — whereas the city jail is financed primarily by local taxpayers. If the new public defenders resulted in just 84 of these accused citizens ending their incarcerations (either through acquittal or plea bargaining) within the Supreme Court’s eight-month guideline, the attorneys would, essentially, have paid for themselves. While I cannot speak to whether the full $520,000 would be necessary to secure the constitutional rights of those being held without trial, hiring more public defenders is an idea worthy of the city’s consideration.

An op-ed by Amy Blouin of the Missouri Budget Project has been making the rounds. Combest linked to it in the St. Joseph News-Press a few weeks ago, and the St. Louis Business Journal ran it last Friday, although we can’t link to their version. Her op-ed deserves a careful review.

It begins with her driving her children somewhere and them complaining about taxes from the back seat. Really? Is this believable? Young children riding in the back of a car complaining about sales taxes, giving their mom an opportunity to explain the importance of taxation? I don’t buy it, and so I’m calling b/s on the opening premise of the article. (As my infant grows, if he ever out-of-the-blue says to me, "Dad, I look forward to one day receiving a license from the government to work in whatever occupation I choose," thus giving me an opportunity to tell him about the harm occupational licensure does, then I shall retract my call of b/s and offer a full apology.)

She then lists the many important things taxes do:

Taxes pay for the fireman who one day might carry your spouse to safety; the public school teacher who spent extra time teaching your child algebra; the road that transports your business’ products to customers [...]

All of these are, of course, completely true. The fun is in what she leaves out. Taxes also pay for the unnecessary city employee who does nothing all day, but is some committeeperson’s brother so they keep him on the payroll. Taxes pay for subsidized giveaways to developers and professional sports teams that don’t need or deserve them. Taxes pay for the transfer programs that are one day going to bankrupt this country. Taxes paid for the welfare state and Great Society that cured poverty created a cycle of dependency and didn’t reduce poverty rates, despite spending enormous amounts of money.

She then considers the low-tax nature of Missouri:

Missouri is already one of the lowest tax states in the nation, ranking 40-something in nearly every category. As a result, our services have slipped dramatically.

She gives no evidence of which services have slipped, but I have to be fair here — op-ed word limits are tight. There are two assumptions that underlie everything she writes. First, that it is the proper role of government to solve every problem and provide every service (health care, poverty, retirement money, cheap higher education, etc.), and second — and just as important — that the government does a good job in providing these services.

She then gets specific as to the low-tax nature of Missouri, but not as to why this is a problem:

Missouri now ranks 46th lowest for state and local spending per capita; 44th lowest for K-12 education spending; 46th lowest for higher education spending, causing tuition at public universities to skyrocket; and we have one of the lowest eligibility levels for health care for working parents in the nation, resulting in a 15 percent increase in the number of uninsured in the last year alone.

I personally think it is a good thing that we have a strict eligibility level for state-provided health care. That makes it more clear to me that the people who need it the most are the ones receiving it. Just because someone out there may have a need, it does not follow that the government must provide that need. I also fail to see why tuition at our universities can’t rise in order to pay for the eduction of the people who will benefit from it. It is still far lower than the costs at most private universities. As for the rise in the uninsured (at least she gives factual evidence here), there are innovative ways for that to be addressed that don’t involve government benevolence and control.

I could go on, but blog posts — like op-eds — have size limits or people would just stop reading, which most of you likely already have. She sums up her point with this:

What Missouri leaders should instead focus efforts on is not how to reduce taxes, but how to create a tax structure that is both equitable and adequate to meet our needs.

Creat a tax structure that is both equitable and adequate? I couldn’t agree more.

I would like to commend the members of the Manchester Board of Alderman for defeating a helmet ordinance in Manchester. The Suburban Journals has the story here. Children should always wear helmets when riding bikes, but it is the parents’ job to mandate that, not the government’s. And just because some parents fail to do that is NOT a reason for government to assume more control of our lives. I am pleased to have found a few more local officials who understand freedom:

"I have great respect for the chief and have no doubt of his motivation to protect the public," [Manchester Mayor Asa] Wilson said. "But on balance, this law would usurp the authority of parents."

Well put.

This is atrocious. Just hit the preview clip to watch. I will never cease to be amazed at how people are willing to let their lives be surveilled and followed in the name of safety. And this isn’t even about defending against terrorists — steps which may or may not have been needed after 9/11. This is just to protect against vandalism, for Christ’s sake. Have local officials who move forward with things like this ever even heard of 1984?

Voters in the state of Florida will have the opportunity to eliminate a provision of their constitution that (according to a recent appellate court’s ruling) requires religious discrimination. The provision is a Blaine Amendment, named after James G. Blaine, a congressman who drove an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution so that Catholics would be excluded from certain public benefits. His efforts were unsuccessful at the national level, but 37 states — including Missouri — still have a
Blaine-type amendment within their constitutions. Most of these, though, have been rendered only marginally effective toward their original purpose, because the states have either modified them through amendment or the Supreme Court has interpreted them in such a way as to render them inactive.

Here’s the story of how all this came to pass:

The 19th century saw the United States inundated with waves of immigrants, many of whom were members of the Roman Catholic Church. The nation had been, up to that point, almost uniformly Protestant in its religious composition. The influx of hundreds of thousands of new citizens who, it was feared, would challenge the religious orthodoxy and look to Rome for political instruction was more than many Americans were willing to tolerate. Nativist societies emerged whose purpose was to limit the volume of immigration and to regulate the nationality and class of persons allowed to enter the United States. The anti-immigrant attitudes eventually coalesced into support for the American Party, formed in 1843, also called the "Know-Nothings." By the middle of the century, the
Know-Nothings had realized significant political success, winning more than a hundred congressional seats and coming to dominate some state governments.

At the same time that these Nativist attitudes were fermenting, activists such as Horace Mann were pushing for the growth of "common schools" in which the youth of the nation could be taught in matters of faith, as well as in fundamental courses of study. These educators sought to find a sort of moral "common denominator" — a set of basic Christian principles to which all Protestant denominations could agree, and which would then be used as part of the curriculum. It was assumed that such a system should be considered "non-sectarian," because no one denomination could exert any special authority for its doctrines and, as a result (according to Mann himself), "[the] system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed in no other system, to speak for itself."

To be sure, Mann’s schools required daily reading of the King James Bible, but he viewed this as no more than neutrally presenting the text and allowing the students to draw their own conclusions from it. In the minds of the Protestant majority, this distinguished the educational practice of the common schools from "sectarianism," in which a religious authority indoctrinated the students by exegeting the text for them.

The groundswell of Catholic students posed a serious problem for the common schools, however, because the religious convictions the immigrants brought with them from Europe were not easily compatible with the standardized Christianity advanced by the schools. The conflict is exemplified by the situation New York faced in 1842. As was the case in Mann’s Massachusetts, it was the policy of the New York Public School Society to have the King James version of the Bible — which was forbidden by the Catholic Church — read in their classrooms, and certain textbooks included historical characterizations that were repugnant to Catholics. The Catholics, under the guidance of Bishop "Dagger John" Hughes, demanded public support for their own schools. They initially won some concessions from the Public School Society, but ultimately the legislature created a City Board of Education to establish new public schools and acted to bar the public funding of "sectarian" schools.

A decade later, similar Catholic efforts in other states were labeled as attempts to "destroy public education" or "subvert basic American principles." These accusations coincided with the rise of the Know-Nothing Party during the election of 1854. Its action against Catholic interests was wide-ranging and swift where they had gained the necessary authority. After their sweeping victory in Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings proposed constitutional amendments that would have denied Roman Catholics the right to hold public office, and limited the franchise to males who had lived for at least 21 years in the United States. They dismissed Irish state-government workers, banned foreign-language instruction in the public schools, and established a special committee charged with the task of liberating women believed to be held captive in convents and nunneries, targeting as well "acts of villainy, injustice, and wrong [...] perpetrated with impunity within the walls of said institutions."

The anti-Catholic sentiment carried on beyond the demise of the Know-Nothings, though it was not as prominent during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. James G. Blaine arrived on the national political scene in 1863, having ridden a wave of anti-Catholic, Nativist support from his home in Maine to a seat in the House of Representatives. He served in the House for thirteen years, acting as the Speaker of the House from 1869-1875. True to his base of support, Congressman Blaine made it a personal quest to see that the doors of the public treasury were finally and unquestionably closed to Catholics who wanted money to establish tolerable alternatives to the Protestant-dominated public school system. When, in September 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant called for the passage of a constitutional amendment that would deny public funds to religious organizations, Blaine responded by proposing the constitutional amendment that would come to bear his name, and which he hoped would catapult him to the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1876. It read:

No state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefore, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.

Despite Blaine’s failure to get his amendment added to the federal Constitution, the influence of his cause did not disappear; it simply changed form. While Blaine’s supporters could not command the votes necessary for a federal amendment, they
did have the requisite votes to set the terms for new states’ admission into the union. In some incoming states, popular sentiment alone led to the passage of a Blaine Amendment. For others, however, Congress utilized its continuing anti-Catholic sentiment by requiring territories applying for statehood to include a provision in their new state constitution that would echo the restrictions of the Blaine Amendment.

These constitutional provisions are relics of anti-Catholic bigotry. They reflect some of the worst impulses in the human character — exclusion and discrimination against those who may think or believe differently from the mainstream — and they are directly contrary to the ideals of the First Amendment, which guarantees a right to the free exercise of religion without exclusion from generally available governmental benefits.

There is such a thing as too much milk, even if it does a blog good, so I’ll move on to another topic. The Post-Dispatch has an article about a city reviewing the results of its use of red-light cameras to improve safety make money. At the very least, we can credit the St. Peters Police Department for taking a hard look at the results of the cameras, and for trying to ensure the owner is also the driver. And while they point to a reduction in accidents at intersections, they admit they can’t credit it to the cameras — and also that they have no measure of the increased rear-end collisions at the same places. From the article (emphasis added in all excerpts):

But there was a piece of good news. The number of traffic crashes in St. Peters dropped 34 percent between 2005 and 2007 — though the report acknowledged that attributing the decline solely to red light cameras is problematic.

"While experiencing a reduction in crashes both citywide and at the target sites, the impact of red light photo enforcement on driver behavior may be difficult, if not impossible, to quantify," the report said.

Some studies have found that while red light cameras can help reduce side crashes, they can increase the number of rear-end accidents, as drivers slam on their brakes to keep from setting off the cameras.

Townsend said St. Peters has yet to determine whether the number of rear-end accidents has gone up.

In fact, the cameras do increase rear-end collisions — as several studies have shown. I don’t think anyone would deny that an increase in people covering their faces as they go through intersections is a bad thing. This can’t help but lead to an increase in accidents of just about any type, from front-end collisions to Dukes of Hazzard–style river jumping:

Police refer to them as "duckers" — drivers who try to shield their faces from red light cameras as they run signals at intersections watched 24/7 by electronic traffic enforcers.

The city of St. Louis maintains no such pretense of making sure the owner is the actual driver, nor do officials even pretend to care about anything other than raising revenue:

[T]he city of St. Louis is pulling in substantial revenue. Of nearly $2 million in total ticket revenue in the past year, the city has kept about $1.6 million, said Ron Smith, the city’s operations director.

Cameras in St. Louis don’t take pictures of drivers’ faces, so the city does not have the problem with duckers that St. Peters faces.

To be fair, if you go to court in the city and swear under penalty of perjury that you were not the driver, you can get the ticket dismissed. The best thing about people in local government is being able to watch your neighbors work to build a better community, and dedicate large amounts of time and effort to their city. The worst thing about some (not all, just some) of the people in local government is that they are all about the immediate and local issues, and have no knowledge of — or, more likely, just don’t care about — broader issues, like how red-light cameras and eminent domain abuse take away our liberty, piece by piece. (In the case of cameras, its the liberty to be presumed innocent that’s under assault, among other things.) So I hope we see an end to red-light cameras sometime soon.

There is a great deal going on in Jefferson City these days, which might normally be a bad thing, as I take P.J. O’Rourke’s attitude toward government gridlock, where, "Preventing the government from governing is like preventing a pit bull from eating your child." That being said, there are some excellent ideas moving forward. Let’s succinctly take them one at a time:

Reassessment in Missouri might be undergoing some much-needed changes with Senate Bill 711, sponsored by Senator Gibbons. It appears to be sailing through, and it will address one of the primary problems with assessment and taxation — when taxing entities already below their legal cap don’t roll back rates after a reassessment. This change, which will mandate a 100-percent rollback during reassessments, will be a great improvement for the taxpayers of Missouri.

The state is also considering additional sales tax holidays. Instead of debating this one again around SMI, I’ll just point you to last year’s debate on the subject. And before Sarah tears into me, I just want to note that I completely agree with her earlier post today. I will say that if they propose too many of these tax holidays, I might have to start agreeing with Sarah and Tim on the issue.

Justin and Eric have been arguing about the proposals to toughen the rules for initiative petitions. I agree with many of Eric’s points, but on the whole Justin is right. Too many people, particularly on the left side of the political spectrum, are going around our democratic system with idiotic proposals on things that should be made by legislators who have studied an issue and put it through the legislative process, rather than the masses who will have no idea what they are voting on, or will just vote for what make them feels good. I am specifically referring here to the stupid proposal to expand Medicaid in the state through an initiative petition. If you want to expand Medicaid and the welfare state, then elect people to office who agree with you. That is how our country is supposed to work, Eric’s history lesson notwithstanding. To be clear, I merely support making the signature requirements higher and banning collectors from being paid by the signature, which is an open invitation to fraud. I don’t want to get rid of the system entirely.

Finally, the bills regarding repealing the controversial village ordinance from last session are also moving forward. There is no need to make it easier to form a municipality in Missouri. Private property rights are separate from the ability to declare your own property as a political entity all on its own. It would be a good idea to repeal last year’s law and go back to the way it was in Missouri.

I respectfully, yet strongly, disagree with my colleague Dave Roland’s post yesterday on changes to the initiative petition/constitutional amendment rules in Missouri. We are a republic, not a direct democracy. We elect people to make laws and decisions. If they are not doing a good job, then we should elect different people. These petition-gathering amendment drives have led to some terrible legislation, in my opinion, such as the recent minimum-wage increase. They have also led to some excellent legislation, such as the Hancock Amendment. However, as more people and organizations become willing to pay people to gather signatures for pet causes, I believe it is reasonable to increase the amount of signatures required.

I disagree with some of the suggested changes, particularly the requirement that petition gatherers must be residents of Missouri. That is just silly. I support the increase in signatures required and the restriction on paying people by the signature, which is just an open invitation to fraud.

Via AndrewSullivan.com, here is a map of the world’s surveillance societies. As the article points out, it is clear to anyone who looks at the map that the world’s most free and leading democratic counties are quickly becoming the most surveilled, all in the name of security and safety. Way too many people are happy to be watched all the time if it means they can feel more safe. Don’t believe me? Just try arguing against red-light cameras with the next few people you meet. … 

I have had the pleasure of receiving some great feedback from David Steelman over the past two days about my op-ed on the Missouri Plan. We have had an excellent discussion. Steelman, an attorney and former state representative, corrected me on one point. I said I couldn’t imagine that the framers of the Missouri Plan had in mind the ability to "stack the deck" (my term, not his) with supporters of an ex-governor, when they instituted six-year, staggered terms for members of judicial commissions. He pointed out that at the time of the reforms, Missouri governors could not serve consecutive terms — so the six-year term was absolutely an intentional decision by the plan’s framers to take politics out of the appointments, by making commission members independent of whomever was currently serving as governor. So I stand corrected and appreciate the information.

He pointed out that the most clearly political selections come after one party has had a stronghold on the commission selection for a long period of time. He then suggested that the best way to go would be for the commission to have no political appointments, since that inevitably leads to politics being injected into judgeships. I don’t think he intends for every member of the judicial commissions to be elected lawyers or automatic judges, but rather that citizen members should be chosen by some other method. Since, in his opinion, that last option is unlikely, he believes keeping six-year staggered terms is the best way to have more consistent, less volatile, and less political judicial selections.

In short, my opinion is that if the use of six-year, staggered terms for appointees was intended to keep politics out of the appointments and increase independence, then that is one part of the Missouri Plan that failed. Too often, the appointees of ex-governors — particularly in the current Appellate Court panel — are more loyal to their party than to the idea of a fair panel. So it would be better, to my mind, to eliminate the idea that appointed spots aren’t political, and instead just admit the obvious and have appointees serve their terms concurrent with the governor. There would still be checks and balances on appointees through elected lawyers and the automatically placed judge on each committee. This is what I mean by respecting the will of the voters.

But David made a number of good points, and I greatly appreciate his time and thoughts.

I also received a call today, with some similar commets and critiques, from a judge I won’t name (even though it would not be a big deal if I did). I appreciate the judge’s feedback, as well. I wish to emphasize again that I support the Missouri Plan and think it would be an enormous mistake to get rid of it. If my op-ed can play a small role in sparking discussions about ways to improve the plan, while keeping it primarily intact, then I will be very pleased.

I have weighed in on my absolute hatred of red light cameras before.  Now my own hometown, University City, in which I am extremely proud to live, is considering installing them right by my house.  University City, which was the only (I think) municipality in the area to pass one of those ‘don’t-cooperate-with-the-Feds’ anti-Patriot Act ordinances, is now getting into the very same act itself, or at least considering it.  As I said previously, red-light cameras are not about safety, they are about new revenue collected under the guise of safety, and the last thing in the world that should be contracted out to private companies is law enforcement.  And I say that as someone who thinks government should contract out lots of things to private industry.

I may have to take the radical-yet-strangely-whimsical act of speaking before my city council about this at the next meeting.  By the way, the cameras at Big Bend don’t even make any sense to me as it is a T-intersection, not a 4-way, and my experience with it is that traffic goes very slowly around the intersection.  I admit there can be a problem at Hanley, but U. City should have its police enforce the intersection more closely, not hire a company to snap photos of me as I walk my dog.  I shall keep you all informed as this issue progresses…      

Missouri’s non-partisan court plan, which may not be as non-partisan as we would all like, is under attack.  In the KC Star today, one lawyer does a so-so job of defending the plan.  I am oppposed to the dramatic changes propsed by the legislature and discussed in the op-ed, but I agree there are problems with the system.  I have two (maybe three), simple suggestions for keeping the non-partisan court plan that will, in my opinion, address the legitimate concerns of the legislators seeking to change it. 

For one, make the terms of the governor’s appointments to all the judicial commissions run concurrent with the governor’s term of office.  Staggerd, six-year terms make no sense, and just serve to allow defeated parties to keep putting their supporters up for judgeships.  Second, add one more gubanatorial appointment to each commission so that the number of lawyers either serving automatically or elected by the bar association is equal to the number of governor’s appointees.  Finally, allow one of the governor’s appointees to be an attorney themself.  At present, they cannot be attorneys and it is easy for them, as non-lawyers, to be intimidated or dominated by the majority lawyers on the commission.  For the record, that last line is a supposition - I have no evidence that the non-lawyers have been intimidated by not being as knowledgable about the issues or applicatns as the lawyers, but I don’t see it as far-fetched for it to happen. 

There it is.  Basic changes to improve an already good plan.  Now let’s go get some ice cream frozen custard.

There’s an interesting article over on the Columbia Missourian website regarding an ongoing court battle between MO, the federal Justice Department, and local phone companies over the release of private records of Missourians to the NSA by the phone companies. The pretext for the alleged privacy violations is, of course, national security, the "war on terror," and a process known as "data mining."

The NSA, President Bush, and the other intel agencies argue that attaining this private communications information is crucial to preventing another terrorist attack, and that the process of "data mining" has worked to catch terrorists and prevent such an attack by finding terrorist cells based on their communication patterns. They further assert that such "wiretapping" actions are justified under the Patriot Act and the broad authority granted the president as commander-in-chief to prosecute the ongoing "war on terror" in whatever manor he finds most suitable.

The issue here is efficacy. If the procedure of "data mining" works, and the associated right to privacy being surrendered is made up for with real added security and effectiveness against terrorists, and the information being gathered is being used solely for that purpose, then it’s reasonable to surrender some privacy right in exchange for that security. Commissioner Steve Gaw sums it up nicely:

“We have tried to be sensitive on not delving into issues that could cause a security issue,” Gaw said. “At the same time, if we give up rights and freedom in order to be secure, what have we gained? And what have we lost?”

Our friends over that the Cato Insititute have published an interesting paper calling into question the very efficacy of "data mining," or the systematic combing through of billions of bits of information for communications patterns likely to be attributable to terrorist activities. They essentially argue that the process is flawed, largely ineffective, and that the benefits it conveys are not worth the tradeoff in security gains. I am no expert on anything, much less computer science or national security, but I do know that I’m not a terrorist,  nor is there any reason for the gov’t to assume that I am. Until they have probable cause to believe otherwise, my phone records should remain nobody’s business but my own. If my telephone company has circumvented that right to privacy I deserve to know, and will most assuredly switch to another provider more respectful of my civil liberties.

Legislators in Illinois and Missouri are pondering legislation that would give their states’ electoral votes to the presidential candidate who won the most popular votes nationwide. The idea is to avoid a repeat of the 2000 presidential election, in which one candidate won the popular vote but the other candidate won in the electoral college.

The proposal is premised on the seemingly obvious idea that we’re a democracy, and in a democracy, the majority rules, right?

Well, not really. In fact, the United States is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. And “majority rules” is not, and never has been, the basis of our system of government.

Consider the United States Senate. In the Senate, Wyoming’s half-million voters have the same amount of power as California’s 30 million voters. “Undemocratic?” Probably. A violation of “one man, one vote?” absolutely.

And there are lots of other examples. We have a Bill of Rights that prohibits the government from engaging in censorship, unreasonable searches, or torture, even if the majority of Congress wants to do these things. Those rules are enforced by the Supreme Court, about as undemocratic an institution as one can imagine. Even within the Senate, a minority of 41 Senators can bring legislation to a halt using a technique called the filibuster.

And if you want to change any of these requirements, you have to pass a constitutional amendment, a thoroughly undemocratic process that involves a 2/3 vote in each House of Congress and the approval of 3/4 of the states. In a more democratic nation, all you’d have to do to change the constitution would be to get a majority of Congress, or perhaps a majority of the popular vote in a referendum.

Why did the Founders set up such a crazy, undemocratic system? They could have set up a process more like the mother country. The British have a parliamentary system in which the House of Commons appoints the prime minister. They also have an unwritten constitution, which means that in theory, at least, a majority in parliament can change the law any time it likes. The House of Commons is not only more democratic than the American Congress, it’s arguably more efficient and more accountable, too.

The founders designed our federal system the way they did for an important reason: they believed a system of checks and balances was essential to preserving liberty. They wanted a system in which different branches of government represented different interests and responded to different political incentives. This purpose would be defeated if all three branches of government were elected by a majority vote, because then all three would be likely to reflect the short-term passions of the majority.

The electoral college also symbolizes another extremely important principle of our republic: federalism. Unlike many other nations, our states are not simply administrative districts of the federal government. They are sovereign entities that voluntarily joined together to form a nation. Just as the Bill of Rights prevents a majority of voters from using their power to the detriment of minorities, the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College ensures that the distinct concerns of each of the 50 states has a voice in the national decision-making process.

If Missouri adopted legislation that helped to effectively emasculate the electoral college, it would be encouraging future presidents to ignore the particular concerns of Missouri voters and and undermine the sovereignty of our state. The United States is not a democracy, it’s a federal constitutional republic. I think that’s an important principle, and I hope our elected officials don’t do anything to undermine it.