Tag: constitution

Categories
ideological culture

Tea Readers

According to a New York Times article by Kate Zernike, the “Movement of the Moment Looks to Long-​Ago Texts.” A strange way of saying that Tea Party folks are reading, learning, and studying ideas older than those of, say, Paul Krugman.

Tea Partiers are reading classics … but ones not recognized as such by the New York Times:

  • Frédéric Bastiat, The Law
  • F. A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
  • Saul D. Alinsky, Rules for Radicals

Huh? That third book serves as an oddity on the list. It’s a handbook on street-​level ways to effect political change. The left’s loved it for years. Now it’s in the hands of people with scant interest in mass expropriation or heavy, vindictive regulation, or a vast, tax-​funded gimme-​gimme state. 

The article cites the “Austrian School of Economics” — a brand of economics that includes many of the most important free-​market thinkers — as an important force, but merely mentions its 20th century leader, Ludwig von Mises, as if a duty. Bastiat, a French economist who died before the school was founded, is lumped in with Mises and Hayek, perhaps because he’s so radically anti-taxation that the Times hopes by mentioning his ideas over and over, readers might dismiss him as a nut.

That could backfire. Some of the Times’s smarter readers might become curious, reading Bastiat and Mises and Hayek with the notion of learning something. 

Maybe they’ll even read the Constitution.

Wow. What a revolutionary thought.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
term limits

Long Time (1996+12=2008) Coming

Been a long time coming. The twelve-​year term limits law passed by Nevada voters in 1996 is finally taking effect.

Except for state lawmakers elected in 1996, that is.

Nineteen ninety-​six plus twelve equals 2008. But in 1996, legislators seized on a technicality to claim that — unlike for other office-​holders — for them the count didn’t start until 1998. That’s because, under Nevada law, state lawmakers take office the day after the election. Yet it takes more than a day to ratify ballot results. So the argument goes that it would be unfairly “retroactive” to include the 1996 term in the twelve-​year limit.

Inspect the Nevada constitution, and you’ll see provisions stating that no person may be elected to legislative or other elective office who “has served in that office … twelve years or more.…” Nothing about starting the clock on the date the ballot measure is ratified.

But in 1996 politicians and courts pretended the new law was not retroactive, and got away with it.

Come 2008, non-​legislative office-​holders finally facing term limits scavenged for yet another technicality. They claimed that the law is unconstitutional and should be thrown out altogether. Fortunately, the Nevada Supreme Court didn’t play along with the latest scam, so Nevada voters must wait only two more years for state lawmakers to be ousted by it. 

Better late than never.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

Categories
Common Sense

Petty Police State

Could the most important thing one does for one’s community be to send a pocket copy of the U.S. Constitution to local politicians and police?

Some officers in the Dallas Police Department are doing things against the letter and the spirit of our laws. After writing a traffic ticket up, and getting the signature, too many on the force then add on infractions.

Gretchen West was stopped for a burned-​out tail light. She took away her ticket for $220. And paid. Then she got a letter in the mail, saying she owed an extra $378 for failing to wear a seatbelt and driving without her headlights on.

But, but … the officer had not mentioned those alleged violations!

The Dallas Morning News informs us that an assistant city attorney documented about a dozen cases like this in recent months.

This weird twist on ex post facto law is Kafkaesque, actually, the kind of thing you’d expect from a police state.

Now, I know: Dallas, Texas, today, is a better place to live in than was Moscow, USSR, circa 1950. The Soviets set in place a totalitarian police state.

Here in America, when our rulers and enforcers forget the importance of the rule of law, and the primacy of citizen liberties, they tend to set up not totalitarian police states but petty ones.

Sure, the pettiness is a bit of a relief. But it’s just not the American way.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.