Tuesday, February 22, 2011


Last Friday the Winter 2011 class of Glenn Fellows, accompanied by Ken Kolson and Chris Adams, enjoyed a visit to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, across the street from the Kennedy Center in Foggy Bottom. Our information officer host, Tariq Allagany, is the son of a former U.N. official and grew up in New York City. Best factoid from the presentation: there are some 400 employees of the Saudi embassy scattered across Washington. What do they all do, one wonders.

As the above photo indicates, two of the fellows, Meghan Gannon and Mark Hudak, "went bush," but only temporarily.

February 27, 2011 update: In today's Washington Post, Rachel Bronson touches on some of the issues I wish we'd had a chance to explore at the Saudi embassy.

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

The Social Media and Revolution in the Arab World


RasoirJ, one of my favorite bloggers, has tried to make sense of the revolutionary fervor that has broken out in north Africa and the Middle East. This is particularly timely, given our policy salon with Henry Precht this evening and our visit to the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia on Friday afternoon. Enjoy.

February 17 update: Why are we always surprised by how quickly autocratic regimes can be brought down? Joseph Wood considers that question here.

March 4 update: Today's Washington Post has a column, "Why the Mideast Revolts Will Help al-Qaeda," by Michael Scheuer, a former CIA official and security expert. Scheuer has some choice words for the "Facebook-obsessed, Twitter-addled West."

Saturday, February 12, 2011


Andrew Hacker is a political scientist and public intellectual who contributes frequently to The New York Review of Books. In "Where Will We Find the Jobs?" he writes about how the job market is likely to develop over the next decade or so.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)


There is no denying that the long-lived Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) was an American treasure. The son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, he graduated at age 20 with the highest GPA in the history of Harvard Law School. He made his reputation as a Progressive lawyer and as a leader of the worldwide Zionist movement. In 1916, he was nominated for a seat on the United States Supreme Court by President Woodrow Wilson.

The definitive biography of Justice Brandeis was published by Pantheon in 2009. The work of Melvin I. Urofsky of Virginia Commonwealth University, the 955-page tome is getting rave reviews. One, written by Anthony Lewis, appeared in The New York Review of Books. Brandeis, according to Lewis,

was intensely interested in facts. His law clerks did research on facts as much as law. When the Court considered a case on presidential appointment power that involved the 1867 Tenure of Office Act, Brandeis had his law clerk, James M. Landis (who became the dean of Harvard Law School), go over the Senate journals of 1867 to see what the views of the times were. Landis spent months in the Library of Congress reading the journals page by page.

Brandeis even tried to get Justice Holmes, who read philosophy in the original Greek, to take more interest in facts. He urged Holmes to spend the summer break reading up on working conditions and visiting the textile mills in Lawrence, Massachusetts. A year later Holmes wrote Harold Laski that “in consideration of my age and moral infirmities, [Brandeis] absolved me from facts for the vacation and allowed me my customary sport with ideas.”

Brandeis’s obsession with facts continues to reverberate through American law and politics. Consider, for example, what Wikipedia has to say about the term “Brandeis brief,” which refers to

a pioneering legal brief that was the first in United States legal history to rely not on pure legal theory, but also on analysis of factual data. It is named after the litigator Louis Brandeis, who collected empirical data from hundreds of sources in the 1908 case Muller v. Oregon. The Brandeis Brief changed the direction of the Supreme Court and of U.S. law. The Brandeis Brief became the model for future Supreme Court presentations in cases affecting the health or welfare of classes of individuals. This model was later successfully used in Brown v. Board of Education to demonstrate the harmful psychological effects of segregated education on African-American children.

This week members of the Winter 2011 class of Glenn Fellows are reading essays and court cases organized around the theme of fact-finding and its jurisprudential consequences. As they read these materials, my hope is that they will perform a little thought experiment by asking themselves about the facts that the Court recognized in Muller, Brown, and Roe v. Wade, and whether it would have been wiser for the Court to base its rulings on strictly legal grounds, rather than conducting fact-finding expeditions.

In Brown, for example, the Supreme Court had the option of resurrecting Justice Harlan’s stirring dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, which would have meant striking down school segregation on the grounds that “our constitution is color-blind,” rather than on the less substantial grounds that segregated schools inflict psychological damage upon African-American children. Likewise, in Roe v. Wade, there were a number of precedents that the Court, rather than wrestling with the question of fetal viability and formulating a national “right of privacy,” might have used to finesse the issue of abortion by declaring that public health is a matter that the Constitution, through the Tenth Amendment, reserves to the states. I hope the Fellows will ask themselves, in short, whether the Brandeis brief, so well intentioned, has inflicted a great deal of legal and political harm in the century since Muller v. Oregon.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Hell Freezes Over (from CQ)


Inouye Agrees to Halt Earmarks

Senate Appropriations Chairman Daniel K. Inouye, D-Hawaii, said Tuesday that his committee will impose a moratorium on earmarks in spending bills for fiscal 2011 and fiscal 2012.

The announcement appears to bring Senate Democrats, the last powerful holdouts out he earmark issue, in line with positions already taken by Republicans and President Obama. “Given the reality before us, it makes no sense to accept earmark requests that have no chance of being enacted into law,” Inouye said. The House and Senate Republican caucuses voted in November to support voluntary bans on earmark requests. Obama highlighted opposition to earmarks in his annual State of the Union speech last week. “The American people deserve to know that special interests aren’t larding up legislation with pet projects,” he said. “Both parties in Congress should know this. If a bill comes to my desk with earmarks inside, I will veto it.”

Inouye’s decision may have removed a potentially distracting sideshow from the already fierce battle over federal spending. Enacting significant spending cuts into law almost certainly will require a successful collaboration between Inouye and his House counterpart, Appropriations Chairman Harold Rogers, R-Ky. Having earmarks in the mix would have been an additional point of contention between the two, who are tasked with making tough calls on which federal programs lose money. While many voters and lawmakers are calling for budget cuts, few, if any, groups that benefit from federal money are volunteering to give up this aid. Like Inouye, Rogers once defended earmarks before joining in the rising clamor to halt them. Staff members on Rogers’ committee have been looking for cuts in the first appropriations bill of the 112th Congress, a proposed continuing resolution (CR) designed to last through September. The current CR expires March 4.

Inouye said his committee will “thoroughly review its earmark policy” to make sure members understand the policy. “If any member submits a request that is an earmark as defined by that rule, we will respectfully return the request,” he said. Late last year, Republican appropriators helped Inouye write an omnibus spending package wrapping together unfinished fiscal 2011 spending bills. That measure included requests for earmark spending. But under pressure from incoming conservatives affiliated with anti-spending tea party groups, those GOP appropriators then revoked their support. The House and Senate agreed on the short-term CR.

Inouye left open the possibility of an earmarks return. His committee will revisit the issue and look for ways to improve the process, after the consequences of the ban are “fully understood,” Inouye said. “At the appropriate time, I will once again urge the Senate to consider a transparent and fair earmark process that protects our rights as legislators to answer the petitions of our constituents, regardless of what the president or some federal bureaucrat thinks is right,” he said.

P.S. The image above shows a Sami herder using a sharp knife to apply his "brand" to a young reindeer in northern Finland. For obvious reasons, the practice is called earmarking. --KK