Washington Buckeye

The Brief against Brandeis (Reprise)

2012-02-05T09:30:00.002-05:00

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 has received 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 2012 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.

The Administrative State: Costs and Benefits

2012-02-01T11:13:00.003-05:00

Yesterday's Politico contained an essay by Senators Rob Portman (R-OH) and Pryor (D-AR) making the case for passage of a bill, called the Regulatory Accountability Act, that would require agencies to conduct more systematic analysis of costs and benefits prior to administrative rule-making. Read it here.

Garfield: A Book Reivew (Reprise)

2012-01-28T13:17:00.002-05:00

My first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of 1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker" and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.

That was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.

Early on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read that book, too. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and leadership. He wrestled with male students, and he debated itinerant atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In 1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were collected and edited by a colleague in the English department. Another colleague produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.

Garfield was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist before the war and remained committed to full racial equality afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition. In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor, though he was no goody two-shoes.

That Garfield was “not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive research in what appear to be the most pertinent sources. The madman at the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older physicians in the United States strenuously resisting the revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease.

As for murder, Millard endorses the testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection almost immediately when he and many others repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the bullet. Later, they were unable to recognize the infection that had set in, let alone stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally, was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to save its intended beneficiary.

This is a wonderful book, though in a recent Washington Post review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do, however, have two reservations of my own.

The first has to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as a “disappointed office speaker,” and Millard shows that he shamelessly lobbied to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire assassination.

My second reservation has to do with the book’s title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the presidency--Lincoln's example notwithstanding--were narrlowly circumscribed during this period. And in any case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur, the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse. Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet Arthur rose to the occasion to an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American political history.

If it seemed to some people at the time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be because the president of the United States, in addition to being chief legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues, which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.

The Empty Chamber (reprise)

2012-01-25T08:15:00.003-05:00

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer has made the same argument, specifically about the Senate, in The New Yorker. Actually, no one has issued the indictment more eloquently than former Senator John Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--maybe, as a wag once suggested, they never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated while the executive--and the judiciary--have been flexing their muscles. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

January 25, 2012 update: There's an interesting story in today's Politico on the GOP legislative agenda--interesting in part because it features Rep. Steve Stivers.

Winter 2012 Glenn Fellows at Voice of America

2012-01-21T07:16:00.004-05:00

Yesterday afternoon we had a revealing tour of Voice of America and a very interesting conversation with Kent Klein, VOA's White House correspondent.

Left to right in the photo above: Cathy Hatten, Elliot Stone, Kristen Maiorino, Ana Hontz Ward (our tourguide), Zach Rybarczyk, Kris Fetterman, Adam Kong, Jenn Semon.

The Wisdom of Cal Ripken, Sr.

2012-01-11T09:24:00.006-05:00

Because the Washington Academic Internship Program emphasizes the importance of public service, and because our students—Ohio State juniors and seniors all—will soon be venturing out on the job market, we devote a fair amount of attention to career planning. We have found that our alumni are a valuable resource on this front, both as mentors and as guest speakers or presenters. And we are very proud that a fair number of former Glenn Fellows find their way into public service jobs in the nation’s capital. I have heard Senator Glenn estimate that about 20% of our students end up in D.C. I would guess that the percentage these days—perhaps because the Washington-area job market is not as distressed as that of Ohio—is actually closer to 25%. Placement is an important enough part of our mission that it is one of the metrics by which we would want to be judged.

That is why we schedule a presentation early each quarter by Julie Saad, a former Glenn Fellow who works as an analyst at the Office of Personnel Management. It’s also the reason we like to introduce the Glenn Fellows to Presidential Management Fellows and OSU alumni who work in Congressional offices. We invite civil servants with hiring authority to critique the fellows’ résumés, and we pay attention to employment patterns, hiring practices, and training opportunities.

That’s why I recently picked up a book that a former Glenn School colleague, Ryan Meadows, had on his reading list for M.P.A. students a few years ago. The book, written by Geoff Colvin, a senior editor at Fortune, is called Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else (New York: Vintage, 2008). A central tenet is that nurture is more important than nature, which is why Colvin’s book would be more accurately entitled Innate Talent is Overrated. But never mind….

Colvin’s is a positive message, in that being a great performer does not in any serious sense depend on having a special “gift” for one’s chosen profession. People aren’t born with or without the innate ability to hit a three-iron like Tiger Woods, plot chessboard moves like Gary Kasparov, or belt out a tune like Luciano Pavarotti. And being a first-rate scholar is not all about IQ. The skills required to excel in any line of work have to be acquired—through practice. But Colvin—and this is the “bad news”—argues that people in general and business corporations in particular have very little understanding of what one has to do to acquire the skills necessary to work at world-class levels. And that means that while some people might be willing to put in long hours of arduous effort, they may not know how to practice the right way, which means their efforts will be futile.

Colvin develops his thesis with great care, and he relies on a number of case studies that are fairly compelling. Colvin’s portrait of Tiger Woods, which was written prior to Woods’s mortification, focuses on Earl Woods’s fanatical devotion to his son’s training; they were on the course together by the time Tiger was two years old. Judging from Colvin’s account, one wonders whether Earl Woods was more obsessed with nurturing genius than any man since Leopold Mozart.

Or consider the case of the Polgar sisters of Budapest. Their father was a psychologist committed to the proposition that geniuses are made, not born. He purposefully set out to prove it by turning his children into chess prodigies, which he did to prove a point: neither he nor his wife were accomplished chess players, so no innate talent was involved. His efforts at home-schooling proved to be completely successful, largely because he devised the right kinds of drills for his daughters to structure their practice.

Being a genius, in other words, is all about being willing to endure the regimen of what Colvin calls “deliberate practice,” which is not just going through the motions over and over again, but an entirely self-conscious process of constantly pressing the envelope of one’s competence. In order to become an Olympic champion ice skater, for example, Shizuka Arakawa had to endure at least twenty thousand episodes of failure, because that’s what deliberate practice is all about: “Landing on your butt twenty thousand times is where great performance comes from.”

I’m betting that Geoff Colvin is not a baseball fan, for if he were, he would have known to invoke Cal Ripken, Jr., as the quintessential product of the training regimen of deliberate practice, a regimen devised by his father, Cal Ripken, Sr. (see photo above). Much like Colvin, Ripken père rejected the idea that “practice makes perfect”; in fact, he insisted that “It’s not practice that makes perfect, but perfect practice that makes perfect.” For Ripken fils this meant self-consciously repeating drills designed to address whatever his inadequacies were at a given point in his development as a shortstop and hitter—the baseball equivalent of falling on his butt twenty thousand times. It made the legendary “iron man” a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

There is another world class innovator missing from Talent Is Overrated, and his story is dramatically conveyed by Dava Sobel in her Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Penguin, 1996). His name is John Harrison, an eighteenth-century clockmaker whose innovations resulted in the perfection of a timekeeping device that was accurate and reliable enough to determine longitude at sea. Harrison’s is an unforgettable story of sheer, mind-boggling tenacity over four decades during which the British parliament kept raising the bar, sending Harrison back to his workshop over and over again to improve his marine chronometer. It’s a case study that Colvin should have cited because it demonstrates—conclusively, to my mind—that innovation is based on knowledge and the mastery of sharply focused technique (deliberative practice), and that it is foolish to think, as do some admirers of the cult of amateurism, that “too much knowledge of the domain or familiarity with its problems might be a hindrance in creative achievement.”

There is another lesson in Talent is Overrated to which Glenn Fellows ought to pay heed. It is the idea that career planning isn’t just about landing a desirable entry-level job in one’s chosen profession. It’s about maintaining and adding to the skills associated with high performance on the job. Finally, one should be encouraged by what Colvin has to say about the inexorable effects of aging. It turns out that outstanding performers “suffer the same age-related declines in speed and general cognitive abilities as everyone else—except in their field of expertise” [emphasis added]. In short, on-going professional development and career planning are life-long enterprises, to be sustained up to and even into retirement.

Ratiionality and Public Policy Making (Reprise)

2012-01-11T08:54:00.005-05:00

It's week 2, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books had a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars and Euros in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know the causes of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Winter 2012 Glenn Fellows at the Newseum

2012-01-07T17:14:00.003-05:00

From left to right: Cathy Hatten, Elliot Stone, Zach Rybarczyk, Kristen Maiorino, Adam Kong, Kris Fetterman, Jennifer Semon

The Federal City

2012-01-04T13:26:00.005-05:00

After the Constitution of the United States went into effect in 1789, the government proceeded to make a number of momentous decisions, some of which had to do with the finances of the precarious new republic. Congress had been granted the power to levy taxes, to regular interstate commerce, and to print money—all of which had been denied the Congress under the Articles of Confederation. But the challenges were many, including the issue of who would be responsible for repaying debts incurred during the American Revolution. Some of the states had made an effort to retire their loans, but others had not. Our creditors included both individual Americans and foreigners, and it wasn’t clear whether the states respectively or the national government under the new Constitution should bear the burden of repayment.

The first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who harbored a vision of a “strong, well-mounted government” and a bustling commercial republic, viewed the national debt as a national blessing—up to a point, at least. Hamilton proposed that all of the nation’s public debt be assumed by the new national government and funded at par, a policy that enriched the many speculators who had bought up depreciated war bonds during the hard economic times of the 1780s. In addition to making some people rich (and in effect buying their loyalty to the new republic), Hamilton also proposed the creation of a national bank and investment in infrastructure, that is, “internal improvements” such as roads and canals. To win Congressional approval of this highly controversial plan, Hamilton had to cut a deal with those harboring a more modest, agrarian vision of America’s future, particularly the two Virginians, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. A deal was cut over dinner at a New York townhouse: Hamilton’s financial measures would be approved by the Congress, but in return states that had paid off their debts would be reimbursed by the federal government ($1.5 million in the case of Virginia), and the national capital would be moved away from the northeast, where the commercial classes were prominent, to a location more convenient for and receptive to the rural and slave-holding south.

The issue of the national capital was addressed by Congress with the Residence Act of 1790, which authorized President George Washington to select a location somewhere along the Potomac. Unsurprisingly, Washington favored a spot that was below the fall line and not too far from Mount Vernon; to implement the plan, Washington recruited aides, including Hamilton, whom he had learned to trust during the Revolution.

Enter the shadowy figure of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the man whose name is synonymous with the design of the city of Washington, DC. L’Enfant had come to the New World to help General Washington win the Revolutionary War. He made himself useful at Valley Forge, and he did some networking among the officer class through the terrible winter of 1777-78. Afterwards, he employed his talents—many of them artistic—to further the creation of the Society of the Cincinnati, which some people regarded as an American version of the English House of Lords. It was L’Enfant who designed Federal Hall in New York, the building where Washington was sworn in as president of the United States on April 30, 1789, and he earned something of a reputation for what we would call “event planning.” After passage of the Residence Act, L’Enfant offered his services as designer of the city that would arise in the new Federal District straddling the Potomac.

Though L’Enfant was enamored of life in the New World—he wanted to be called “Peter,” for example—it was natural for him to look to his home town, Paris, for inspiration, and that suggested the standard baroque playbook of geometric plans with radiating boulevards, public squares with their neoclassical palazzos, obelisks, and equestrian statues, and long axial vistas—elements suitable for military parades and revues and for exploiting the local topography, the whole composition being an implicit rejection of the humble Jeffersonian gridiron that was to become ubiquitous throughout the rest of urban America.

The result is that among cities in the United States, Washington is unique, and has always been so. L’Enfant thought that the several states would take responsibility for developing “their” grand avenues and piazzas, and that the city as a whole would issue from these nodes like a puppy growing into its paws. That happened in the end, but it took the better part of a century. During that time Washington was ridiculed as an “embryo capital,” featuring “squares in morasses,” and “obelisks in trees,” a city of “magnificent distances,” with tree stumps in the boulevards and a swamp dividing the President’s House from Jenkins’ Hill (i.e., Capitol Hill). For many decades, L’Enfant’s plan seemed a hopelessly grandiose exercise in futility. Benjamin Latrobe called it a “gigantic abortion.”

L’Enfant himself, unfortunately, was a prideful and somewhat prickly character who rubbed DC’s commissioners the wrong way, alienated the most powerful local landowner, and finally wore out his welcome with President Washington. L’Enfant was dismissed in February of 1792, and an imperfect version (see image above) of L’Enfant’s plan executed by the surveyor Andrew Ellicott. Rather quickly, L’Enfant drifted into obscurity along with most of the leaders of the Federalist party that had been led by his patrons.

Washington, DC, began to look like a proper national capital only with the growth of government that accompanied the Civil War, with soldiers, bureaucrats, construction crews, office-seekers, and prostitutes descending upon the capital city. But the growth that ensued was higgledy-piggledy, unguided by the L’Enfant plan, which was neglected along with memory of the man himself. The elderly L’Enfant lived as the “permanent houseguest” of kindly friends at Warburton Manor, where he spent his time petitioning Congress for proper recognition of his service to his adopted country. He died and was buried in an inconspicuous grave in 1825.

Recovery of L’Enfant’s original vision was spurred by the professionalization of landscape architecture and the popularity of Beaux-Arts classicism during the Gilded Age. The watershed event was the Chicago Fair of 1893—formally, the World’s Columbian Exposition celebrating the “discovery” of America. Through the Senate Park Commission, also called the McMillan Commission, Progressive politicians called for recommitment to the basic principles of L’Enfant’s plan; their wooden models are on permanent display at the National Building Museum. As for the long-neglected Major L’Enfant, his mortal remains were exhumed in 1909; his grave now occupies a place of honor near the front of the Lee-Custis Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery.

L’Enfant’s original plan for the city is easily discerned in the modern city. The Victorian train station on the National Mall was eventually removed, part of a deal struck to build Union Station, Washington’s most eloquent tribute to the Chicago Fair. Tiber Creek, which L’Enfant turned into a canal, was covered over, finally giving way to Constitution Avenue. Until fairly recently, Washington still had many of the features of a somewhat sleepy Southern city, racial segregation being only the most lamentable of these. As late as the early 1960s, it was still possible for President Kennedy to joke about the city’s unique combination of “southern efficiency” and “northern charm.” Before long, the Capital Beltway and the Metro had transformed the black-and-white city that had dazzled Mr. Smith when he came to Washington in the person of Jimmy Stewart. Architectural controls and building height limitations have preserved much of the spirit of the L’Enfant plan.

And now, with publication of Scott W. Berg’s Grand Avenues: The Story of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the French Visionary Who Designed Washington, D.C. (New York: Vintage, 2008), we have a biography worthy of the city that took shape so gradually over a long span of time. Berg shows us that the distinctiveness of Washington, D.C.—it’s beauty, most would be willing to say—is due entirely to its designer’s recognition that this city, unlike all others, “would not happen; it would be made.”

The Controversy over the Eisenhower Memorial

2011-12-19T09:14:00.005-05:00

Two weeks from today, the Winter 2012 class of Glenn Fellows will be settling into their accommodations on Capitol Hill. My hope is that they will find time to pay attention to the debate over a famous architect's design--to be reviewed by the National Capital Planning Commission in February--for a memorial to Dwight David Eisenhower, the 34th president. It is to be built on Independence Avenue near the Air and Space Museum.

The memorial was designed by Frank Gehry, who ranks as the brightest star in the galaxy of American architecture since the sensation caused by his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. But Gehry and his undulating titanium sculptures are controversial, and so is the question of how American heroes should properly be memorialized. To no one's surprise, the prospect of a Gehry structure on the National Mall has generated a kerfuffle. It turns out that members of the Eisenhower family find much that is objectionable in Gehry's design. Just as predictably, Philip Kennicott, the Washington Post's smart, eloquent, and irascible architectural critic, has pronounced it a great success. Stay tuned.

December 21, 2011 update: There is a fascinating display at the National Building Museum of architectural projects that were proposed but never executed in the nation's capital. See Amanda Hurley's lively review here.

Earmarks: They're Back!!!!!

2011-11-30T08:56:00.006-05:00

This morning's Post contains a story about earmarking and how the practice has crept back into the legislative process, despite last year's efforts to rule it out of bounds. Apparently earmarks are like mildew in the shower, and that reminds me of a book review I posted a couple of years ago in this space. I've pasted it below.

The sordid story of Congressional sausage making is well told in Robert G. Kaiser’s So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). Kaiser makes a persuasive case that American universities—not Wall Street or the Teamsters or the AARP—are responsible for one of Washington’s nastiest and most expensive habits: earmarking.

As technical instruments for the appropriation of public monies, earmarks haven’t been around nearly as long as one might suppose. The protagonist in Kaiser’s history is a lobbyist named Gerald Cassidy, one of whose clients, Tufts University, wanted to build a nutrition center on its campus in Medford, Massachusetts—which, as luck would have it, was in the district of Tip O’Neill, who was soon to be elected Speaker of the House. O’Neill enlisted the support of Rep. Jamie Whitten, long-time power broker on the House Agriculture Committee. And voilà. In fiscal year 1978, as Kaiser tells the story, “Congress appropriated $20 million to build the nutrition center, and an additional $7 million to fund its initial operations. Though attached to Tufts, it would be formally part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which would pay its operating expenses for years to come.”[i]

As soon as they saw what Cassidy and Tufts president Jean Mayer had done, other universities were quick to get into the game. Kaiser’s story is fascinating because it involves so many academics—and priests, in the case of Georgetown and other Roman Catholic universities—along with a few certified scoundrels, including Jack Abramoff, and some of the most prominent members of Congress on both sides of the aisle (most notoriously, the late John Murtha (D-Pa), pictured above). The bucks, let it be said, are decidedly big; the last photo in the book’s gallery is an aerial shot of Gerry Cassidy’s $8 million estate on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay.

One of the many virtues of this book is that Kaiser recognizes that there is a case to made on behalf of earmarks. To begin with, the distinction between “pork” and the legislator’s responsibility to “bring home the bacon” is largely one of perspective; it’s legitimate bacon when it’s on my plate, it’s pork when it’s on yours.

That said, I fear that Kaiser is right to suggest that while legislators sometimes can be corrupted by crooked lobbyists, it is as often the case that the vicious circle begins with Members of Congress who feel they must be increasingly aggressive in their pursuit of campaign contributions. So Damn Much Money is an informative account of Congressional sausage making, and one that suggests that Congress remains, in the words of Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, “the broken branch.” It’s not a pretty picture.

[i] Robert G. Kaiser, So Damn Much Money: The Triumph of Lobbying and the Corrosion of American Government (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), p. 71

December 11, 2011, update: Today's Washington Post reports that this year's defense authorization bill included some $834 million in earmark requests put forward by both Democratic and Republican Members of the House of Representatives.

Glenn Fellows Lay Wreath at Arlington National Cemetery

2011-11-19T17:20:00.004-05:00

On the initiative of Kyle Nappi, who is interning this quarter in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Nappi and three other Glenn Fellows participated today in a wreath-laying ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns, Arlington National Cemetery. Pictured from left to right next to their military escort in the photo above are Glenn Fellows Mitch Moximchalk; Anthony Adornetto, an ex-Marine; Nappi; and Joe Guenther, member of the Ohio National Guard. Other Fellows in attendance were Alexandra Constantinou, Gia Domine, Blake Swineford, and Abby Warner.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (Reprise)

2011-11-14T10:14:00.004-05:00

This week the Autumn 2011 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms, who blamed him for "losing Iran."

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” set in Iran, Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, it seems that no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

During his posting to Cairo, Prentice is asked to interview a Sheikh who might have been in a position to influence the extremists holding a number of American hostages in Beirut. Prentice’s efforts fail. “But never mind,” seems to sum up his reaction. “I could only hope that someone—the ambassador or an unknown friend in the department—would make an excellent report of my performance for my file.” The adventure, he concludes, “just might be a turning point—upward—in my career.” On the basis of the evidence provided by the author, the judgment handed down by Prentice’s first wife seems just: He has “a pretty good soul, even though sometime it seems quite lost in the bureaucratic maze.”

Molly Williamson to speak at WAIP policy salon Tuesday, November 15

2011-11-14T09:40:00.002-05:00

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Molly Williamson speaks extensively on US foreign policy, the interagency process, energy, economic and demographic factors affecting policy formulation, and US-Middle East relations, especially the Israel-Palestine conflict, Iran and nuclear challenges. Williamson is a scholar with the Middle East Institute, a consultant, and lectures at Johns Hopkins University Osher Institute. She is a former Foreign Service Officer, having served six presidents, and achieved the rank of Career Minister. She is also a member of Georgetown University’s MSFS oral boards, a Board member of the American Foreign Service Association, and Board member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.

2005-2008: Williamson was the Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy, with global responsibilities at the nexus of foreign policy and energy policy.

2004-2005: Williamson served as U.S. Charge d'affaires in Bahrain. She was also assigned to special projects regarding Israel/Palestine, Iraq, and the United Nations.

1999-2004: Williamson was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce responsible for the Middle East, South Asia, Oceania and Africa, advancing trade relations with 86 countries with a trade portfolio valued at over $120 billion/year.

1996-1999: Williamson was Principal Deputy, then Acting Assistant Secretary of State, International Organizations Bureau, responsible for the policy and programs affecting UN political and Security Council matters, peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

1993-95, Williamson was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense responsible for the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. She was engaged in operational defense structure bottom-up reviews, and the policy challenges of Iraqi provocations, crises in Rwanda and Somalia, and nuclear tests in South Asia.

She has had numerous postings in the Middle East, including Chief of Mission and Consul General in Jerusalem during the Madrid Peace Process (1991-93) which culminated in the Oslo Accords.

She has been trained in both Hebrew and Arabic.

Williamson, a native of California, has been awarded 2 Presidential Meritorious Service Awards, the Secretary of Energy’s Exceptional Service Award, Secretary of Commerce Performance Award, the Secretary of Defense’ Service Award, and 14 awards from the Department of State.

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz College of Law (Reprise)

2011-11-09T12:03:00.002-05:00

In one of my first posts on this blog I argued that easterners are inclined to dismiss Midwesterners as rubes and that Glenn Fellows, who tend to be professionally ambitious and have every reason to be, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided a few years ago by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in May, 2009, in The New York Times, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their chances of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because those plums are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others.” Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to this rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

"One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.” My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts that are not really in dispute, and that his enthusiastic endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools is ultimately not rational. True, he would seem disinclined to buck the system that from which he has profited, yet I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended as irony. They learn that sort of thing at the elite law schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree.

September 14, 2009, update: Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, Chief Justice John Roberts says no—some went to Yale (AP).

Turkey on the World Stage (Reprise)

2011-10-30T10:08:00.003-04:00

Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Three years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar, PUBPOLM 689, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking, removing their missiles and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not Arabic), and some European (though not Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

November 12, 2011 uptdate: Soner Cagaptay has a column in today's Post on U.S.-Turkish relations.

Autumn 2011 Glenn Fellows Visit Pentagon

2011-10-29T14:06:00.003-04:00

From left to right: Ken Kolson, Mitch Moximchalk, Kyle Nappi, Abby Warner, Gia Domine, Blake Swineford, Alexandra Constantinou, Karlton Laster, Zach Druga, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army Jay Aronowitz, Joe Guenther, Anthony Adornetto. Photo by Mike McCandlish

October 31, 2011 update: See Robert J. Samuelson's column on military spending in today's Washington Post.

The Brief against Brandeis (Reprise)

2011-10-23T07:00:00.001-04:00

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 Autumn 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.

Why There Is No Socialism in America (Reprise)

2011-10-23T06:55:00.000-04:00

In a lecture reprinted by The New York Review of Books, (now the late) Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendants of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin and his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they are rewarded with the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we harbored no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by the kulaks, whose very existence as a class was an affront to Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Senate Averts School Lunch Crisis

2011-10-19T14:53:00.002-04:00

For any of you who might have been worrying about the "broken branch," there is encouraging news from Slate today. Thanks to Maine Senator Susan Collins, there will be no limits set on the number of times that schools can serve potatoes in their cafeterias, so don't be afraid to take seconds at the tater tot line. Read all about it in this article by K.J. Dell'Antonia.

The Empty Chamber (Reprise)

2011-10-16T08:40:00.003-04:00

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

Mighty Slovakia Bails Out Europe

2011-10-12T17:56:00.005-04:00

Sounds like a headline in The Onion, doesn't it? Well, it's really real. As the Autumn 2011 Glenn Fellows learned last week at the K Street offices of the E.U. delegation to the United States, the European Union, like the Congress under the Articles of Confederation, needs unanimity from its members to do anything of significance. That lesson has been on display this week in Bratislava, capital of the Slovak Republic, where a governing coalition was undone by rejection of the bailout fund, and where, today, a new government appears ready to sign off on the deal.

Garfield--a book review

2011-10-05T11:01:00.006-04:00

My first full-time teaching job was at Hiram College in northeastern Ohio. When I washed up on the shores of that bucolic campus in the summer of 1970—I was 25 years old—I was vaguely aware that the school was the descendant of something called the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, and that it had been founded by the Disciples of Christ in 1850. I also was aware that its most famous alumnus was James Abram Garfield, the twentieth president of the United States. Somewhere along the way I had learned that Garfield was assassinated by a "disappointed office seeker" and that he was succeeded by a non-entity named Chester A. Arthur.

That was about it. For me Garfield was merely one of several post-Civil War Ohio Republican presidents who had been officers in the Union Army during the Civil War and wore full beards. I probably could not have picked Garfield out of a lineup if it had included Rutherford B. Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. Over the next decade and a half, I was to learn a lot more, some of it from Allan Peskin’s definitive biography, Garfield (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1978), and some of it from my faculty colleagues, alumni of the college, and local townspeople.

Early on, It was pointed out to me that one of the handsomest houses in Hiram Village, still in use as a private residence, had been Garfield’s home while he served as teacher and principal of the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute. Several alumni of the college were, it was said, on friendly terms with direct descendants. Faculty colleagues supplied some important biographical details. Garfield, I was to learn, was born in a very rude log cabin on the Ohio frontier, endured desperate poverty through much of his childhood, and went to work early on the Erie and Ohio Canal. Garfield’s was a Horatio Alger story—literally, I read the book. He worked his way through the Eclectic as a janitor, proving to be a brilliant and industrious scholar with a gift for friendship and leadership. He wrestled with his students, and he debated itinerant atheists. There were persistent rumors about his having carried on a love affair with Almeda Booth, one of his teachers at the Eclectic. In 1858, he married a local girl, Lucretia Rudolph; their love letters were collected and edited by a colleague in the English department. Another colleague produced a play about Garfield’s assassination.

Garfield was an accomplished scholar in several fields, including Latin and Greek. Though he studied ancient languages, he was enlightened in many ways that we would consider modern. He was a voracious reader; he was one of the few Members of Congress who made good use of his lending privileges at the Library of Congress; he was a confirmed abolitionist before the war and remained committed to full racial equality afterwards. He treated everyone with respect, had a playful sense of humor, and saw both the tragic and comic aspects of the human condition. In an age of rampant political corruption, Garfield was a man of honor, though he was no goody two-shoes.

That Garfield was “not just a tragic figure, but an extraordinary man” is one of the major themes of a new book: Candice Millard’s Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The book is a careful study of the assassination based on extensive research in what appear to be the most relevant sources. The madman at the center of the tale is, of course, the assassin, Charles Guiteau. The practice of medicine was very much in flux at the time, with older physicians in the United States being strongly inclined to resist the revolutionary ideas of England’s Dr. Joseph Lister, who called for antisepsis in the operating room based on his understanding of the role of germs in the spread of disease. As for murder, Millard endorses the testimony that Guiteau provided at his trial: Guiteau might have done the shooting, but Garfield’s attending physicians murdered him with two months of wrong-headed, agonizing treatment. The chief physician, the ironically named Dr. Bliss, introduced infection when he and many others repeatedly stuck their fingers in Garfield’s wound searching for the bullet. Later, they were unable to recognize the infection that had set in, let alone stop its spread. Millard is unable to resist the temptation to assert that this was a case in which ignorance, literally, was Bliss. The other major character in this sad tale is Alexander Graham Bell, who invented a metal detector called the Induction Balance that he hoped would aid Garfield’s physicians in their search for the bullet. Unfortunately, the perfection of the device came too late to save the intended beneficiary.

This is a wonderful book, though in a recent Washington Post review, Del Quentin Wilber makes a legitimate point when he complains that the story of Bell’s Induction Balance is somewhat tangential to the Garfield drama. I am inclined to concede the point, but for me it doesn’t begin to ruin what is an informative and moving story. I do, however, have two reservations of my own.

The first has to do with Guiteau and his motives. Invariably, Guiteau is described as a “disappointed office speaker,” and Millard shows that he lobbied shamelessly to be appointed to a consulship to Paris. There can be no question about his having been a disappointed office seeker. But, as Millard makes clear, he was also a lunatic, a religious fanatic who was convinced that his deed had been divinely inspired. It suited the enemies of the spoils system and the advocates of civil service reform to play down his derangement while stressing the role that the patronage system played in causing a disappointment keen enough to inspire assassination.

The second has to do with the book’s title, which asserts that the destiny of the republic was at stake during the many weeks that Garfield’s physicians attended so incompetently to their patient. This is a little overwrought. For one thing, it doesn't consider the extent to which the powers of the presidency were circumscribed in the late 19th century, despite Lincoln’s aggrandizement of the office during the Civil War. And in any case it isn't clear what public policies were at stake as the honest and enlightened Garfield lay on his deathbed and the hapless Chet Arthur, the creature of a political machine, cowered in a Manhattan townhouse. Garfield may have been the one politician of the Gilded Age who had it in him to put an end to the spoils system, introduce the principle of merit into public service, and put a hammerlock on Jim Crow—had he not been thwarted by an assassin’s bullet. But, as it happened—and Millard tells this story very well indeed—mediocre Chet rose to the occasion to an extent that no one had imagined possible, which is further cause for wondering whether Guiteau's heinous deed altered the course of American political history.

If it seemed to some people at the time that the destiny of the republic truly was at stake, it may be because the president of the United States, in addition to be chief legislator, chief diplomat, and leader of his party, serves as head of state—part of what Walter Bagehot called the “dignified” aspect of government, in contradistinction to the “efficient” exercise of political power. The American people will mourn a president—even one who is practically unknown to them, like William Henry Harrison, or one who was unloved because he was unlovable, like William McKinley—because the president is, among other things, the embodiment of the state. In Garfield’s case, the mourning was profound, because his many virtues, which included his gregarious and passionate nature, were so conspicuous. He must have been an easy man to love. Careful readers of Millard’s admirable book will mourn his loss still.

Great Moments in Debt Crisis Management (reprise)

2011-10-03T09:59:00.004-04:00

Ordinarily the Washington Buckeye prefers linking, rather than simply reproducing, sources that shed light on what used to be called "problems of democracy." Today (July 24, 2011), however, the Outlook section (page B5) of the Washington Post contains a piece by historian Chris Myers Asch that speaks so directly to the continuing crisis over raising the debt ceiling--while demonstrating the enduring dangers of unintended consequences--that the copy-and-paste temptation has proven irresistible, especially since the autumn 2011 class of John Glenn Fellows is reading the Simpson-Bowles report, "Moment of Truth," this week. Here is Ashe's essay.

President Obama and congressional Republicans are still struggling to strike a deal on the debt ceiling that would keep the nation from default. It is difficult to foresee what final compromise they might reach — but it’s hard to imagine one more consequential than the bargain struck more than 200 years ago that ended another debt crisis while laying the foundation for our economic system. That fateful deal also ensured that Washington became a slave capital.

In 1790, the federal government and the states were nearly $80 million in the red, burdened by annual interest payments that were triple the nation’s income. A decade after the financially strapped United States madly raised funds for the Revolutionary War, the country was facing default. If the new nation failed to pay its debts, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton feared, it would be shut out of world markets. Foreign governments and individual investors, worried that their loans would never be paid back, might refuse to invest in America. The young economy would be crippled.

To avoid economic collapse, Hamilton proposed a series of financial reforms, including “assumption,” or having the federal government assume the states’ debts and commit to paying their full value. A national debt, he argued, was “the price of liberty” — a free nation was not free to walk away from its financial obligations. Many members of Congress, particularly Virginia’s James Madison and other Southerners, vociferously objected. Opponents saw assumption as a sign of the growing power of the federal government and rejected Hamilton’s insistence that the Constitution’s “necessary and proper” clause allowed fiscal measures of such huge scope.

The issue produced what Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson called “the most bitter & angry contests ever known in Congress.” Opponents of assumption threatened secession, and they had enough votes to block the measure. Hamilton, a New Yorker, knew that Jefferson had substantial credibility with Madison and the Southerners, and he pleaded for help. Jefferson agreed to intervene, hatching a compromise that also addressed the other major political stalemate that bedeviled Congress that spring: where to put the nation’s capital.

The Constitution authorized Congress to create a federal district to serve as the national seat of government but did not specify its location. The city awarded this prize would enjoy prestige, power and economic growth. If built in the South, the capital would also be more likely to protect the bedrock of the Southern economy: slavery.

In 1790, about 20 percent of Americans were considered property. Though some Southern leaders felt uneasy about the institution — Jefferson, a slave-owner, fretted about its “unhappy influence” — few could imagine the South without slaves. As an international abolitionist movement gained steam in the late 18th century, many Southerners felt under siege and believed that a Southern capital would protect their interests. But they did not have the votes to put the capital in the South, while Hamilton, a founding member of the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, did not have the votes to get his assumption plan through Congress.

Jefferson, hardly a disinterested observer, stepped in to broker a compromise. Over dinner at his rented Manhattan home in mid-June — historian Joseph Ellis called it “the most meaningful dinner party in American history” — Jefferson brought Hamilton and Madison together to hammer out an agreement. Madison agreed to lean on Southern representatives to support the assumption bill. In exchange, Hamilton would persuade his Northern allies to support a capital on the banks of the Potomac.

It was a deal with tremendous long-term consequences for the nation and for the future capital. The compromise secured America’s financial future as well as the constitutional doctrine of implied powers, strengthening the federal government at a critical time.

But the deal sealed the new city’s fate as a slave capital. Safely ensconced between two of the country’s largest slave states, Washington became a glaring contradiction — a citadel of freedom that nonetheless protected slavery and prospered from the burgeoning domestic slave trade. Thanks to the port of Alexandria, which remained part of the District until 1846, D.C. became the largest slave-trading city in the nation. Slaves here were an everyday part of life. They helped build the city, they lived in the White House, and they were sold on auction blocks downtown.

Fighting a war to preserve the Union from a slavery-friendly capital, President Abraham Lincoln tread cautiously lest he frighten Maryland into the arms of the Confederacy, resisting calls for D.C. emancipation until 1862 and allowing compensation to be paid to Washington slave-owners. For almost a century after the Civil War, D.C. remained distinctly Southern, with separate schools, neighborhoods and jobs for its black citizens. The city’s white leadership repeatedly rebuffed attempts to create an interracial democracy. Instead of representative self-government, D.C. was ruled by three invariably white commissioners appointed by the president, an arrangement that one commissioner in 1901 called “an ideal form of government because it is a government by the best citizens.”

Today, with the District losing its black majority, battles over gentrification, voting rights, school reform and even bike lanes show that racial tension remains embedded in Washington life. The grand bargain struck over Jefferson’s dinner table in 1790 came with a tremendous price.

October 2, 2011 update: Simpson and Bowles weigh in with advice to the debt supercommittee in the Post today.

Solar Decathlon 2011

2011-09-20T13:45:00.004-04:00

Because the National Book Festival has top billing this weekend, the Solar Decathlon has been relegated to West Potomac Park, which is just off the Mall, near the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and not far from the new Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial.

The Solar Decathlon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Twenty teams are competing in the 2011 event, which will open on Saturday, September 23, and run through Sunday, October 2. The team from The Ohio State University will try to improve on its top ten performance of 2009. Because of the plethora of interesting things to do on or near the Mall this weekend, Glenn Fellows could easily scratch a half-dozen activities off their checklists for the quarter. And then they can write about their experiences on the WAIP blog.

National Book Festival

2011-09-18T17:04:00.007-04:00

The Fall 2011 class of John Glenn Fellows moved into the Congressional apartment building today, which means that the National Book Festival can't be far behind. Sponsored by the Library of Congress and now in its eleventh year, the event will take place on the National Mall next weekend, September 24-25.

One of the big attractions of the National Book Festival is the opportunity it provides to meet best-selling authors. Here is a list of featured authors.

September 19 update: See photo above of the Fall 2011 class on the stairs at the National Archives. From left to right: Zachary Druga, Alexandra Constantinou, Joseph Guenther, Gianna Domine, Blake Swineford, Abby Warner, Karlton Laster, Mitchell Moximchalk, Anthony Adornetto, Kyle Nappi. Check out their brief bios here.

Remembrance and Reflection

2011-09-05T13:09:00.005-04:00

For the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the National Museum of American History has assembled an exhibition of more than 50 objects recovered from wreckage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania. These objects, which under any other circumstances would be regarded as entirely prosaic, help to convey the human dimensions of the tragedy of that day. For one week, the objects will be displayed on open tables at the Museum, which is on the Mall at Constitution Avenue and 14th Street, N.W. Dana Milbank has a piece about the exhibit in Sunday's Washington Post. In the same issue, Marc Fisher writes about the how the Pentagon attack has been completely overshadowed not only by the images of Ground Zero but even by the extended memorialization controversy. Meanwhile, Anne Applebaum considers the appalling cost of the War on Terror pursued in response to the attacks. It is my understanding that after this week the artifacts will become part of the permanent collection of the Museum, which means that the incoming class of Autumn 2011 Glenn Fellows will be able to see them under glass.

September 7 correction: I went to see the show today. It's very moving, in part because the items are spread out on tables quite informally, along with minimalist identifying labels, like the objects for sale at a church bazaar. When the show closes on September 11, they will be sent for permanent storage to New York. So it's now or never for Washingtonians.

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial

2011-08-31T12:28:00.006-04:00

Last week’s brush with Hurricane Irene caused the ceremonial dedication of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial on the National Mall to be indefinitely postponed. That doesn’t mean that the memorial isn’t open for business, however. In fact, my colleague, Michael McCandlish, and I spent part of yesterday afternoon at the site, four acres of hallowed ground on the Tidal Basin between the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials. As usual, the opening of a new memorial on the Mall has been marked by controversy.

To begin with, charges of “profiteering” have issued from critics offended by the King family’s insistence that they be paid licensing fees for use of Dr. King's image.

Then there was a dust-up when it was revealed that Lei Yixin, a Chinese sculptor noted for his work on a statue of Mao Zedong, had been commissioned to use Chinese laborers to sculpt Dr. King’s likeness from an enormous piece of Chinese granite. Naturally, none of this sat well with African American artists or U.S. labor unions.

The completed composition is said to express the idea of a “stone of hope” emerging from a “mountain of despair,” the stone in this case being a colossal image of the martyred Civil Rights leader (see photo above). There are those who say the sculpture doesn’t look much like Dr. King, or that his facial expression is wrong. Others complain about its alleged “Stalinist” overtones. I’ll confess that the sculpture looks to me like a faithful rendering of Dr. King, and I would think that the National Mall might be the one place in America where bombast on a colossal scale seems right at home.

Now it turns out that Maya Angelou and others are unhappy with the inscriptions that adorn the central composition and the surrounding stone wall. Their grievance has to do mainly with a passage on the side of the central sculpture that reads “I was a drum major for justice, peace and righteousness,” though without the quotation marks, because the passage was abridged and yanked out of context from one of Dr. King's speeches. Angelou says that the resulting inscription makes him sound like an “arrogant twit.” I’m not sure I see that, but I agree that it’s trivializing, which is to say not appropriate for a memorial, where dignity and sense of decorum count for a lot.

I found the memorial moving, and definitely worth the trip. It brought back memories of the man of peace and of how polarizing his message was at the time. It’s a little unsettling to reflect on the many ways that later generations manage to dishonor fallen heroes--usually unwittingly, and often by sanitizing their disturbing messages. Even the formal study of history, a noble calling too often treated as just one damn thing after another, can have the same effect.

A case in point: In the early 1990s, I was in Memphis, Tennessee, to attend a meeting of faculty members and administrators from many of the nation’s historically black colleges and universities. The organizers had arranged for us to have a private tour of the newly opened National Civil Rights Museum, which was very cleverly designed to incorporate the Loraine Motel, where Dr. King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, as part of the museum. As it happened, the young woman who served as our tour guide was a history graduate student, and she had memorized a script containing what seemed like an infinite number of arcane factoids and random statistics more or less bearing on the Civil Rights movement. But it was all book-learnin’, stuff suitable for cramming on the night before the final exam. For her, Martin Luther King, Jr., was nothing more than a name in a textbook.

Not so for my colleagues on the tour. Most had participated in boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations during their youth. Some had been arrested. Some had traveled to Washington for Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. They had seen Jim Crow up close, and felt his wrath. They were moved by the National Civil Rights Museum, and visibly distraught and embarrassed by the tour guide who, not having lived through the Civil Rights Era, was simply tone-deaf to its drama. As mementoes, factoids just don't cut it.

Hurriquake Week in DC

2011-08-26T08:38:00.004-04:00

Word from the National Building Museum is that their popular exhibit, "Lego Architecture: Towering Ambition," sustained only minor damage during the earthquake. We'll see what happens this weekend with the hurricane. Then there's the tidal wave and the plague of locusts....

Turkey on the World Stage

2011-08-16T15:17:00.010-04:00

Anyone who has ever taught for a living will understand that a large part of the appeal, and the challenge, lies in trying to package a wide range of scholarly sources in such a way as to tell a compelling story. Unfortunately, the charms of syllabus development can lead to the folly of imagining that it can ever be a completely finished product; in this way a reading list is akin to public policy. To quote Lord Salisbury: "There is no such thing as a fixed policy, because policy like all organic entities is always in the making."

The result is that a syllabus or a reading list can be the occasion for unanticipated intellectual excursions. Three years ago, when I began leading the WAIP policy seminar, PUBPOLM 689, it never occurred to me that modern Turkey, a remnant of the old Ottoman Empire regarded as "the sick man of Europe" prior to World War I, is a remarkably useful lens for viewing world affairs.

The seminar has evolved in such a way that Turkey intervenes at three different points in the course of the quarter. First, there is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, a classic case study in crisis management and a staple of all introductory courses in public policy. The standard treatment has President Kennedy staring down Premier Khrushchev, with the Soviets finally blinking, removing their missiles, and dismantling their Cuban bases, all in exchange for our promise to leave Castro alone. It turns out that there was more to it than that. Robert F. Kennedy, JFK’s Attorney General, offered discrete assurances to Soviet Ambassador Dobrynin that we would take our Jupiter missiles out of Turkey, which shared a tense border with the U.S.S.R. at the time. We did so less than six months later.

Second, we read Samuel P. Huntington’s famous, or infamous, "clash of civilizations" essay, in which Turkey is treated as the epitome of a “torn” country, having been riven by competing traditions, some of them Muslim (though not Arabic), and some European (though not Christian). Turkey—the secular, Western-oriented republic created by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (pictured above)—rejected Mecca, only to be rejected in turn by Brussels; at the end of the 20th century Huntington saw Turkey as "making strenuous efforts to carve out [a] new identity for itself.”

Turkey, mainly a sidebar in the history of the 20th century history, promises to feature much more prominently in the narrative of 21st-century world affairs. In a recent issue of The New York Review of Books, Stephen Kinzer discusses four books that assess the profound policy initiatives being pursued by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party. Erdogan’s Turkey is a modernizing republic inclined to put the military in its place and turn its back on secularism--though not on economic growth or autocracy. Tellingly, Kinzer’s piece is entitled “Triumphant Turkey?”

Kinzer raises a number of interesting questions about Turkey's changing place on the world stage, and given the current condition of Europe, it may inspire one to ask why the Turks are so keen to join the European Union. To help bail out the Greeks, perhaps?

September 16, 2011, update: For the Washington Post, Craig Whitlock reports that the U.S. and Turkey have signed an agreement that will allow the U.S. to install a radar station that will be part of a system designed to fend off missile attacks from either Iran or Russia. Separate negotiations about predator drones continue.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

2011-08-15T20:41:00.002-04:00

Last week the Summer 2011 class of Glenn Fellows read Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

Moment of the Summer: Witnessing Gabby Giffords' Return

2011-08-11T10:14:00.002-04:00

Below is a post recently published on the WAIP blog by S.R., one of our summer Glenn Fellows.

I'm not a lucky guy, nor do I have a particularly good sense of timing (just ask the girls I asked to any of my high school dances). But in what is hopefully a sign of more good luck to come, I happened to witness what might be the defining moment of the 112th congress.

To give a little context, I've been following the debt ceiling debate pretty closely over the past two weeks. It's almost impossible not to living only two blocks away from the capitol building. Even so, I've gone a little overboard - listening to c-span for hours every day as I complete database work for my internship, reading the Washington Post on my phone during lunch breaks, and I’ve had this recurring dream where President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House John Boehner get married in New York.

As such, I was naturally quite excited to hear that a solution was on the horizon just before Tuesday's final deadline. Since I had invested so much time over the past month following the debate, I decided to call up my good friend and fellow Glenn Fellow Joe Flarida to see if he’d be interested in trying to catch the vote after work.

We met up at the Capitol Visitors Center around 6:30, checked our cell phones and bags with security, and headed into the gallery. The chamber of the House of Representatives is a beautiful room and absolutely buzzing with energy when full of frenzied congressmen. We arrived just as they announced that the bill was to be voted on, but we were only permitted to stay for 20 minutes. Luckily enough, this vote took 15 minutes, a pretty standard time allotment because of the limited number of voting devices. There was little to do other than sit back and people watch as the Representatives milled around. Some Congressmen were talking quickly in groups and trying to figure out if they’ll have enough votes, others were chatting amicably with friends.

Joe and I were pointing out various "celebrity" congressman. We took note of famous republicans Ron Paul and Paul Ryan, the Representatives who had been running the debates David Dreier and Louise Slaughter, as well as minority leader Pelosi and Speaker Boehner. Soon, it became very apparent that the house would succeed in passing the compromise. I thought that would be the piece of history I got to take with me back to Columbus in the fall.

That’s when Gabrielle Giffords showed up.

With two minutes left in the debate, Rep. Giffords tentatively walked into the chamber. Slowly, as people realized what was going on, thunderous applause filled the room. Everyone was stunned; only a few congressmen had been informed that she’d be coming to vote. It’s difficult to recall in the excitement, but the first standing ovation had to have lasted at least three minutes. There were several more to come after the congresswoman had voted and Speaker Boehner announced the bill had passed. Despite the bitter partisanship of recent months, both republicans and democrats united in honoring Giffords’ tenacity.

The vote was her first after six months of recovery from an assassination attempt. It signifies not only an incredible amount of personal strength and courage, but it also indicates the importance that the debt issue has for the short and long term future of our country.

I am honored to have borne witness to her return. It’s amazing how lucky we were – 15 minutes earlier or 15 minutes later and we would have missed the moment completely, a moment that will give me chills every time I think about it for years to come.

tl;dr: Rep. Gabby Giffords left me and everyone else in the House of Representatives totally stunned tonight.

Steven

Meeting History

2011-08-07T16:09:00.002-04:00

Below is a post recently published on the WAIP blog by J.T., one of our summer Glenn Fellows.

Being in D.C. allows you to be around a group of people who play a major role in shaping policy that can affect your daily lives and even your future. However, there are only a couple of current politicans I can think of who really have made history. One of those is current Congressman John Lewis ( D- Georgia), who is considered one of the "Big Six" from the Civil Right Movement of the 1960s, one of the 10 speakers from the March of Washington, and one of the founders of the Nashville sit-ins that integrated the city's public facilities. Needless to say, he's a politician AND a historical figure who played a major role in ending Jim Crow segregation in our country.

I hadn't heard much of Congressman Lewis' story until this past Winter Quarter, where his autobiography was assigned for my Sixties history class. After reading his story, I was completely inspired and moved by the amount of dedication and faith Lewis carried throughout the movement. During the Freedom Rides, Lewis was almost beaten to death by a violent mob of bigots and had his skull fractured during the March to Selma now known as Bloody Sunday.

When I arrived here for the summer I thought it would be a fun idea to at least see if I could arrange a meeting with him. I knew it would be a difficult task given that it seems that most Reps and Senators have crazy schedules, but I thought it would be worth a try. I definitely wasn't expecting to actually make it happen but I was approved for an appointment with Congressman Lewis!

I was so nervous walking to his office knowing that I would be meeting someone that has been so important to the Civil Rights Movement. Barack Obama had signed a picture after his presidential inauguration with the phrase, "Because of you, John." YEAH THAT'S HOW IMPORTANT HE IS! Luckily, Congressman Lewis was as friendly and humble as I could have imagined. I was shocked that I was speaking to walking history, as he gave insight into his relationships with Martin Luther King to SNCC members to his violent encounters with the KKK.

I was so fortunate for Congressman Lewis to have given me an hour of his time and will always remember that meeting!

- JT

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

2011-08-01T16:56:00.003-04:00

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 Summer 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.

John Marshall and Friends

2011-07-21T09:31:00.005-04:00

I don't know when people started to refer to the President of the United States as POTUS, but whenever that occurred, I suppose it was inevitable that we would get FLOTUS (First Lady of the United States) and SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States). Anyway, the Glenn Fellows took a field trip to the Supreme Court last Friday to view a film about the Court and to hear a courtroom presentation (all Q and A this time) about Court procedures and the federal judiciary. The Fellows are shown clustered around the Great Chief Justice above.

The Mystery/Miracle of Economic Growth

2011-07-10T17:50:00.009-04:00

The Summer 2011 class of Glenn Fellows visited the Ronald Reagan Building last Friday and enjoyed a presentation by Ohio State alumna Virginia Brown and her USAID colleague Wade Channell, who did a fantastic job of showing that the making of public policy is both an art and a science, and that analytical skills are crucial to the making of enlightened public policy.

The subject of nation building and international development reminded me of an article that appeared some time ago in The New York Review of Books. "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU, was a review of two then-new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Here's a link.

Here's the nub of Easterly's argument. He says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Think of it. After the investment of billions and billions of dollars in the righteous cause of economic development, we actually don't know what accounts for rates of growth. According to Easterly, summarizing Mlodinow, economists have identified 145 factors associated with growth, but "most of the patterns were spurious, because they failed to hold up when other researchers tried to replicate them." As for Bad Samaritans, Easterly says that Chang criticizes "those who have made overly strong claims for free trade and orthodox capitalism, but then he turns around and makes equally strong claims for protectionism and what he calls 'heterodox' capitalism, which includes such features as government promotion of favored industries, state-owned enterprises, and heavy regulation of foreign direct investment."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

On the miracle of economic growth, here (with a tip of the cap to Carmen Flores-Carrion) is a link to a YouTube mini-lecture by Hans Rosling.

Summer 2011 Glenn Fellows Meet with Senator and Mrs. Glenn

2011-07-05T14:14:00.005-04:00

From left to right,

front row: Lauren Zacks, Jessica Tolbert, Dan Redmond, Senator John H. Glenn, Annie Glenn, J.P. Stevens, Kelsey Shoub, Katie Brown

middle row: Carmen Flores-Carrion, Carrie Charbonneau, Liu Jiang, Chelsea Pflum, Taozhen Huang, Sarah Fries, Belinda Cai, Rachel Coyle, Alexa Odom, Karine Aswad, Dennis Mawhirty

back row: Kenneth Kolson, Charles Bronder, Joe Flarida, Steven Redd, Patrick Manley

The event was held in the Hall of the States (photo above), new home of the Glenn School's Washington Office as of June 15, 2011.

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz School of Law

2011-06-30T08:53:00.003-04:00

One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals” in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia’s chambers. “I wouldn’t have hired Jeff Sutton,” Justice Scalia said. “For God’s sake, he went to Ohio State! And he’s one of the very best clerks I ever had.”

Paul C. Light on the Comptroller General of the United States

2011-06-27T12:58:00.004-04:00

In the old days, when GAO stood for General Accounting Office, many Americans might have thought of it, to the extent that they thought of it at all, as an agency full of Bob Cratchits (see image above), with or without their green eyeshades. On Wednesday, June 29, at 6:30 in the Hall of the States, the Glenn Fellows will learn about the work of what is now called the Government Accountability Office from two staffers, OSU graduates Patrick Dynes and Jillena Roberts. The head of the GAO is the Comptroller General of the United States. Currently, that post is held by Eugene Louis Dodaro.

For a little background, here is a link to an article published in May, 2010, by Paul C. Light of New York University, one of America's leading public policy scholars. Light refers to the Comptroller General as "perhaps the most important job that most Americans do not know about."

Summer 2011 Glenn Fellows Arrive D.C.

2011-06-20T18:57:00.002-04:00

We have had our orientation for the summer 2011 WAIP and G-WAIP fellows (see photo above, taken at the Pension Building). Mike McCandlish and I encouraged the fellows to read a daily newspaper or two, and I referred explicitly to The Washington Post. As I did so, I felt a little guilty, as I always do, about withholding an endorsement of The New York Times, which is, all things considered, the better paper.

But here in the nation’s capital, The Washington Post is our hometown rag, and that means more complete coverage of local events, reviews of museum exhibitions, local theaters and restaurants, and the like. But mainly, the Post does a better job of covering the company in what is essentially a company town. And that company is, of course, the federal government.

There is, for starters, Joe Davidson’s regular column in the Post. Today’s "Federal Diary" explores some of the reasons why the federal government seems to have such a hard time hiring and firing, and why it is so difficult for recent college graduates and MPAs to secure federal employment through USAJOBS. According to Davidson, Congress is looking into the matter, and it comes at an opportune time for us, since the fellows will be engaging in a conversation next Tuesday evening with former U.S. Senator John Glenn, an eloquent spokesman for the merits of public service. And in the following week, we’ll hear a presentation on federal hiring by Julie Saad, a thoughtful WAIP alumna who now works for the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the federal government's HR office.

Congress’s inquiry, undertaken by the Senate subcommittee on the federal workforce, chaired by Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii), appears to be targeting OPM policies. Ironically, based on my experience in the executive branch, I would submit that the roots of the federal government’s hiring problems may be statutory—i.e., embedded in the fine print of legislation passed by Congress--rather than regulatory.

Whatever the cause, the fact is that for so long as the federal hiring process is deeply flawed, America’s best and brightest young people, such as those in the photo above, will be discouraged from entering the federal service. That may not constitute a national crisis--not yet, anyway--but certainly, it is a pity.

Backstage at the Tomb of the Unknowns

2011-05-28T16:37:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the Spring 2011 Glenn Fellows tagged along with some twenty or so Glenn School Learning Community members on a trip to Arlington National Cemetery, traveling double-quick time so we could witness the changing of the guard ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknowns. Today, Washington Post reporter Sarah Kaufman scoops the WAIP bloggers with her story about the highly disciplined professional lives of the soldiers who keep watch at the Tomb. Definitely worth a read.

Liberal Education and Return on Investment

2011-05-24T18:49:00.008-04:00

While the Washington Academic Internship Program is open to all juniors and seniors at The Ohio State University, most of the John Glenn Fellows are students majoring in fields at the core of the humanities and social sciences: political science, economics, history, international studies, the modern languages, and so on. Those of us inclined to celebrate the virtues of the liberal arts and sciences are used to making the case that while a more vocationally oriented curriculum might be useful in landing an entry-level job in business and industry, the liberal arts have staying power and are correlated with career advancement over the long run.

Now, unfortunately, there is evidence that this may no longer be true, if indeed it ever was. In today's Washington Post, Peter Whoriskey describes the results of a new survey by researchers at Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce. Read it and weep.

Why There Is No Socialism in America (a reposting from January 24, 2010)

2011-05-17T11:32:00.002-04:00

In a lecture recently reprinted by The New York Review of Books, Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendants of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that, there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin with his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they get the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we harbored no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by kulaks, whose very existence refuted Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Glenn Fellows at Scarlet and Gray Congressional Breakfast

2011-05-13T18:32:00.003-04:00

Is this a great picture or what? From left to right: Leah Tingley, President Gee, Katie Contino, Dara Doss, Archie Griffin, Jamie Clow, and Erika Dackin.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

2011-05-09T07:47:00.002-04:00

This week the Spring 2011 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

Glenn Fellows meet Kim Beazley, Australian Ambassador to the United States

2011-05-03T10:51:00.005-04:00

Through the good offices of Carnegie Mellon University, the Spring 2011 Glenn Fellows had a chance to meet Australia's ambassador to the United States, the Hon. Kim Beazley. Pictured above, from left to right, are Dara Doss; Michael McCandlish, program administrator; Erika Dackin; Ambassador Beazley; Katie Contino; Ken Kolson, Director of the Washington Office, John Glenn School of Public Affairs; Leah Tingley; Jamie Clow. Photo by Gale Frank-Adise.

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

2011-05-02T15:25:00.002-04:00

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.

The Prospects for Democratization in the Middle East

2011-04-22T07:33:00.004-04:00

On the evening of Tuesday, April 19, the Spring 2011 Glenn Fellows were among members of the audience for a policy forum co-sponsored by the John Glenn School of Public Affairs and the DC chapter of the OSU Alumni Club. Glenn School faculty member Trevor Brown moderated a discussion about recent events in the Middle East and North Africa and the prospects for democratic reform in a region of the world known for its autocratic regimes. The other members of the panel were Scott Mastic, an OSU alumnus currently serving as Middle East and North Africa Director at the International Republican Institute, and David Newton, a retired foreign service officer who served as the first U.S. Ambassador to Iraq after the resumption of diplomatic relations with Saddam Hussein's regime in the late 1980s. The event was part of an on-going collaboration between the Glenn School and the DC Alumni Club.

April 23 update: See Yasmine El Rashidi's piece, "The Battle for Egypt's Future," in the April 25, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books.

Keynes Lives

2011-04-19T10:31:00.003-04:00

The current issue of The New York Review of Books has an article by Robert Skidelsky and Felix Martin arguing for creation of something akin to the European Investment Bank (EIB) for the United States. The current essay builds on (or, if you prefer, "is based off of") an article by Felix Rohatyn and Everett Ehrlich and published in the NYROB last November (see footnote 3 in the Skidelsky-Martin piece for the full citation).

A National Blessing

2011-04-11T17:43:00.004-04:00

"A national debt, if it is not excessive, will be to us a national blessing" --Alexander Hamilton

Last Friday's last-minute deal to avert a government shutdown has been dissected by critics of the left and right, and from all other conceivable angles. One thing worth keeping in mind is that the next episode of partisan confrontation is likely to take place over the need to raise the legal debt limit. Yes, the ceiling would have to be raised even if either of the two main Republican proposals--that introduced by Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, and that of the Republican Study Committee and associated with Rep. Scott Garrett of New Jersey--were to be adopted as is. The only difference is whether we want to live with unbalanced budgets until 2040 (Ryan's plan) or 2020 (Garrett's plan).

In today's Post, columnist Robert J. Samuelson argues that this is a sympton indicating that our government is "suicidal." He has a point.

April 14 update: I've seen lots of worthwhile commentary since President Obama's speech yesterday, but I particularly liked Fareed Zakaria's op-ed column in today's Post.

2011-04-07T11:17:00.002-04:00

Over the winter of 1995-1996, a budgetary impasse between the Clinton Administration and Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich resulted in the furloughing of federal workers and a partial shutdown of the federal government. When people howled over the closing of a special Vermeer show at the National Gallery of Art, private funds were found to keep the exhibition open, though the rest of the museum remained shuttered. Media coverage of the saga did much to turn the shutdown into a public relations fiasco for the Republican Speaker.

How times change! Or don't. This coming weekend the Spring 2011 class of Glenn Fellows is likely to have an up-close-and-personal look at another government shutdown. The fellows should keep an eye on media coverage, which is likely to depend upon whether the source in question is located inside or outside the Capital Beltway.

Spring 2011 Glenn Fellows Arrive D.C.

2011-03-28T18:03:00.004-04:00

Photographed in Union Station, from left to right: Erika Dackin, Leah Tingley, Dara Doss, Katie Contino, Jamie Clow.

Internships begin Tuesday, March 29.

2011 Mellon Lectures Feature Mary Beard

2011-03-27T16:14:00.006-04:00

Mary Beard, a Cambridge scholar who writes accessible essays on ancient Greece and Rome, delivered the first of six lectures this afternoon at the National Gallery of Art. She can be counted on to comment insightfully on the aspirations of Washington, D.C., which has more than its fair share of classically inspired monuments and temples. Phillip Kennicott previewed the lecture series in yesterday's Washington Post. There is a schedule for the lectures at the end of Kennicott's article.

Pictured above the Patent Office in D.C., the Pantheon in Rome, and Greenough's statue of George Washington in a toga.

Great Planning Disasters

2011-03-17T12:00:00.004-04:00

Years ago Peter Hall--now Sir Peter Hall--wrote a book about the "pathology of planning" that demonstrates how easy it is for experts to underestimate both the costs associated with mega-projects and the likelihood that something will go terribly wrong. Now that we are witnessing the slow-motion meltdown of nuclear reactors in Japan, it is hard not to ask the question posed by Steven Pearlstein in yesterday's Post, "The Costly Lessons from the Long Tail of Improbable Disaster." The question, as put by Pearlstein, is why we continue to underestimate the frequency of and severity of calamitous events--both natural and man-made--and how we can learn to live with a more realistic appraisal of risk. One suspects that, as President Reagan used to say, there are no easy answers--simple answers, maybe, but no easy answers.

An Exemplary Public Servant Turns 80

2011-03-08T16:08:00.005-05:00

In my pantheon of public service, Alice Rivlin is enshrined along with such rock stars as John Glenn, Bob Gates, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Here is the tribute by Stan Collender that appeared in yesterday's Roll Call.

March 10, 2011, update: This is slightly off-topic, but in his Federal Diary yesterday Joe Davidson discussed the importance of training opportunities in the federal service, and specifically in the foreign service. Note the plaintive reference to former Senator George V. Voinovich and also to the recent GAO study of State Department training.

Washington Is Bad at Scheming

2011-03-04T20:35:00.005-05:00

Years ago I wrote a book called Big Plans: The Allure and Folly of Urban Design. The point was The Rationality Project overrates the efficacy of planning and underrates the virtues of improvisation and serendipity.

In today's Washington Post blog, Ezra Klein makes essentially the same case about how things get done, or don't get done, in our nation's capital. Everything would be so much more comprehensible if only the conspirators would get their act together. Ain't gonna happen.

Volcano of Rage

2011-03-03T20:34:00.005-05:00

The March 24 issue of The New York Review of Books has an insightful piece on recent events in Tunisia and Egypt. I thought it significant that the author, Max Rodenbeck, analyzes these events largely without referring to the United States, and that he doesn't really get to the question of what regime change in the Arab world means for us.

March 5 update (with thanks to Kyle Everett): Here, David Brooks reflects on Samuel Huntington's Crisis of Civilizations thesis in light of recent events in North Africa and the Middle East.

March 9 update: In the March 24, 2011, issue of The New York Review of Books, Perry Link writes about Facebook and Twitter and the way that events in the Middle East have been received in China.

2011-02-22T14:18:00.005-05:00

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.

The Social Media and Revolution in the Arab World

2011-02-15T08:48:00.008-05:00

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."

2011-02-12T07:24:00.003-05:00

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.

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

2011-02-05T09:25:00.001-05:00

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.

Hell Freezes Over (from CQ)

2011-02-02T10:06:00.003-05:00

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

The Empty Chamber (a reposting from August 13, 2010)

2011-01-30T08:36:00.004-05:00

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer has made the same argument, specifically about the Senate,in The New Yorker.

Actually, no one has issued this indictment more eloquently than Senator Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--and, as a wag once suggested--never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated while th executive--and the judiciary--have been flexing their muscles. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

Rationality and Public Policy Making

2011-01-11T11:26:00.002-05:00

So here's the nub of the argument. Easterly says that the phenomenal rates of economic growth enjoyed by Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore (see skyline photo above), and Taiwan in the period between 1960 and 2007 inspired a tsunami of research by economists eager "to find in the empirical data which factors reliably lead to growth. Yet hundreds of research articles later, we wound up at a surprising end point: we don't know."

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Winter 2011 Glenn Fellows at Union Station

2011-01-03T18:16:00.003-05:00

From left to right: Jake Young, Meghan Gannon, Jay Hunter, Kelsey Poole, Rebecca Bradley, Bethany Simms, Joe Sadek, Jessica DiCerbo, Mark Hudak, and Douglas Hochberg.

Welcome!

Upgrading GPRA

2010-12-22T11:35:00.005-05:00

Today's Post has a story by Paul Light, who applauds Congress for upgrading the 1993 act that required government agencies to focus on the results of federal policy, rather than on government activities. A worthy cause, no doubt, though I am not as sanguine as Professor Light about the likelihood of real change.

A Reading List for New Members of Congress

2010-12-12T15:15:00.003-05:00

In a column that appeared the day after the midterm elections, The Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein offered his congratulations to the Representatives- and Senators-elect, while issuing a “reading list for the incoming Congressional class of 2010.” His “list” consisted of exactly one book: the recently published collection of the letters of Daniel Patrick Moynihan (1927-2003), well described by Pearlstein as a testament to the late New York Senator’s intellectual integrity, his seriousness of purpose, and his love of the English language. Pearlstein concluded by posing this unnerving question to the newly elected members of the 112th Congress: “Are you going to accept the low bar now set for political leadership, or will you commit yourself to bringing some Moynihan-like style, intelligence, candor and independence to an ailing institution? It’s your choice.”

I do not expect the new Members to agonize over Pearlstein’s challenge. Rather than opting for 720 pages of epistolary grace and erudition, I think it far more likely that they will turn instead to more prosaic studies of the national legislature. Among these one of the most distinguished is The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, by Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein.

The co-authors of The Broken Branch, respected Congress watchers of long standing, see the institution as a perfect storm of dysfunction. Particularly in their chapter reviewing the history of “The First Branch of Government,” Mann and Ornstein make it clear that while Congressional decline has been caused by external challenges of long standing, many of its wounds are relatively recent (they trace the “seeds of the contemporary problem” to 1969) and essentially self-inflicted. In the case of the House of Representatives, frequently adopted closed rules have severely restricted debate, standard rules of procedure have too often been honored in the breach, the role of the Speaker has been grotesquely inflated, strident partisanship has replaced the bipartisan camaraderie of the committee system, and deliberation has been eclipsed by the “permanent campaign” that necessitates non-stop fund-raising. Finally, the chamber has ceased to be interested in exercising oversight of the executive branch. Over on the Senate side, there has been an increased reliance on the filibuster, or filibuster threats; heavy reliance on anonymous “holds” that sidetrack bills and nominations; more aggressive use of the budget reconciliation process; and a decline of debate on the floor that makes a mockery of the Senate’s traditional claim to be “the world’s greatest deliberative body.” In both chambers, ideological purity trumps bipartisan comity.

The good news is that to the extent that Congress has broken itself, it should have the capacity to reform itself back to good health. Mann and Ornstein recommend—among many other things—turning redistricting over to the professionals, restoring the power of committee chairmen, rewriting the campaign finance laws, beefing up ethics guidelines, reinstituting legislative oversight of the executive branch, taming the filibuster, reining in reconciliation, bringing Congressional families to town, and reintroducing bipartisan lunches.

There are, however, those who believe that Congressional decline is much more the result of the exertion of executive and/or judicial muscle. If Congress has been “broken” from without, inward-looking reform strategies such as those advocated by Mann and Ornstein begin to look much less compelling. Our newly elected Representatives and Senators should perhaps be dipping into this literature as well.

Consider, for example, the argument of Matthew Crenson and Benjamin Ginsberg in Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). The authors contend that while Abraham Lincoln did much to aggrandize the presidency (and, by extension, the national government) during the Civil War, it wasn’t until the twentieth century that unfettered “presidentialism” really took off (at the expense of Congress). Crenson and Ginsberg pay particular attention to three more or less concurrent developments having to do with control of the federal budget, war powers, and what the authors call “executive unilateralism.”

At a time when even the presumptive Republican Speaker of the House believes that it’s the Democratic president “who sets the agenda for our government,” it is amazing to think that prior to World War I everyone agreed that budget planning was a Congressional responsibility. In fact, Crenson and Ginsberg contend that the national legislature “maintained near-absolute control of the federal bureaucracy” and was understood to be the formulator of national fiscal policy. In the course of the twentieth century, Congress was gradually eclipsed. In 1921, the legislation authorizing the Bureau of the Budget (BoB) was passed. Later, during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s long watch, BoB was assigned to the executive office of the president. In 1974, it was upgraded to the Office of Management and Budget, at which time Congress thought to create the Congressional Budget Office as a kind of “counter-weight.” Could it be that the diminished role of Congress in the budget planning process has something to do with its inability to pass appropriations bills? Now some Republicans are talking about restoring a prominent role for Congress in budget planning, though perhaps one may be forgiven for wondering whether their motivations are more partisan than constitutional.

On the war-making front, Crenson and Ginsberg note that during the 70 years that have elapsed since the last time Congress exercised its exclusive power to declare war, the United States has been almost continuously engaged in hot or cold warfare. The expansion of the Commander-in-Chief clause has rendered declarations of war superfluous. And while the War Powers Act of 1973 often is celebrated as a post-Vietnam reassertion of Congressional initiative, it actually conceded powers to the President that go far beyond Constitutional provisions.

In a revealing anecdote, Crenson and Ginsberg ask their readers to keep in mind the kinds of powers relied upon by the Bush Administration in Iraq and Afghanistan while relating the story of James K. Polk’s attempt to prosecute the Mexican War. Polk, a Democrat, was able to persuade Congress to declare war on Mexico, but a freshman Congressman named Abraham Lincoln gave him a serious case of heartburn in the process. It didn’t help that both of Polk’s top generals, Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor, were leading Whigs who harbored presidential aspirations. Cresson and Ginsberg emphasize that Polk was unable even to control the State Department functionary, Nicholas Trist, who was dispatched to negotiate a peace settlement with the Mexicans. When Trist encountered difficulty, Polk ordered him home. But Trist elected to stay in Mexico and negotiate a deal, the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, instead. Polk, who disapproved of the treaty, then ordered that Trist be put under military arrest and put on a boat bound for Washington. Subsequently, the Senate ratified Trist’s treaty, celebrated Taylor’s military exploits, and censured Polk for “a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.” The contrast with the Bush Administration’s twenty-first-century experience could hardly be more stark: with the conspicuous exception of Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV)—though others took up the cause later—Congress put up little or no initial resistance to the wars against terrorism, Afghanistan, and Iraq.

Regulatory review, too, once resided with Congress, but gradually it has migrated to the executive branch. The authors of Presidential Power: Unchecked and Unbalanced document the increased reliance on executive action, particularly as it has been promulgated through executive orders. Congress fought back with the Congressional Review Act of 2001, which seemed to give the legislature oversight over the independent regulatory agencies. “The problem,” however, as Crenson and Ginsberg explain, “is that a congressional decision to invalidate a regulation could be vetoed by the president.”

It is worth mentioning, too, that the judiciary—famously characterized by Alexander Hamilton as the “least dangerous” branch, also has had a hand in the emasculation of Congress. Since Louis Brandeis introduced “sociological jurisprudence” to the federal judiciary in the 1908 case of Muller v. Oregon, judges have gradually become used to legislating from the bench, an activity that liberals now take for granted and do not regard as particularly controversial—witness Justice Sotomayor’s casual acknowledgement that “the court of appeals is where policy is made.” What’s surprising is that even conservative judges seem to have lost their inhibitions about judicial activism. Congress’s instinct seems to be to roll over and play dead. Given the balance of partisan power in Washington at the moment, it seems highly unlikely, for example, that Congress will act to undo the electoral consequences of the Court’s controversial decision in the Citizens United case any time soon.

Congress, alas, cannot be portrayed simply as the hapless victim of an imperial presidency or activist judiciary. All too often, the House and Senate have acquiesced as aggressive presidents or appellate courts have assumed legislative prerogatives. Mann and Ornstein are particularly eloquent on this point, bemoaning how a supine Congress has too often shrunk from contesting and overseeing the executive, especially when partisan and ideological interests prevail over institutional responsibilities. But again, this is nothing new. The agenda for the New Deal was set by a hyper-partisan FDR White House, not by Congress. Likewise, the Civil Rights movement proceeded mainly in the judiciary, with courageous support provided at critical moments by the executive branch—Little Rock being the classic instance, with Congress managing to keep a discreet distance.

Similarly, it looks as if the contentious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy will be resolved by an odd coalition of Pentagon bureaucrats and appellate court judges, rather than Congress. And after the failure of H.R. 2454, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, it appears that U.S. policy on global climate change will be forged, for better or worse, through executive orders drafted by functionaries in the Environmental Protection Agency or the Energy Department. In sum, members of the freshman class of the 112th Congress could do far worse, by way of orientation, than to study both The Broken Branch and Presidential Power to consider both internal and external challenges to Congressional authority.

And they’d better be prepared for partisan in-fighting that has become nasty and ingrained. Like most observers of Congress, Mann and Ornstein seem to assume that the unleashing of partisan and ideological passions is the cause of Congressional irresponsibility. I would argue that it is more effect than cause. It’s a disturbing thought, but it could be that Congressional politics is vicious for the same reason that university faculty politics is vicious: because “the stakes are so low.”

Pearlstein is probably right that the only cure for the disease from which Congress suffers would require “bringing some Moynihan-like style, intelligence, candor and independence to an ailing institution.” And so we have come full circle.

National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform

2010-11-14T15:59:00.010-05:00

Over the next few weeks, it will be extremely interesting to follow reactions to the recent report of Erskine Bowles and Alan K. Simpson, co-chairmen of this bipartisan panel, which is looking into ways of making America solvent again. One thing is certain: there are profound implications for federal employees and prospective federal employees. Joe Davidson explores some of them in his Washington Post column, "The Federal Diary," of November 12. Meanwhile, Dana Milbank offers his views on how the No Regrets Democrats and the No Compromise Republicans are likely to view the unsettling prospect of fiscal responsibility.

It seems that the Glenn School's policy forum, "Avoiding Catastrophic Budget Failure," will be very timely, especially since the Commission is scheduled to release a report the next day. We're hoping for a big crowd of Washington-based Buckeyes on November 30.

November 17 update: Norman Ornstein weighs in on the Deficit Commission in today's Roll Call.

November 18 update: Roll Call's Morton Kondracke reviews three tax reform plans and urges President Obama to seize this opportunity to do something that would win popular approval because it would create jobs.

November 24 update: Today's Post has a terrific chart that compares the recommendations of the three panels (Simpson-Bowles, Rivlin-Domenici, and Galston-MacGuineas) that are looking for ways to reduce the deficit. Accompanying the summary table is a column by Ezra Klein.

November 29 update: The Brookings Institution's William Gale reviews five myths about cutting the deficit in the Outlook section of Sunday's Post.

December 2 update: Here, finally, is "The Moment of Truth: Report of the President's Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform." And here is a persuasive argument by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities that the Rivlin-Domenici plan is better.

An Intellectual's Guide to Public Service

2010-11-08T13:00:00.008-05:00

On the morning after the 2010 midterm elections, The Washington Post published a column by Steven Pearlstein that congratulated the winners while offering a "reading list" to those who will be new members of the 112th Congress that convenes in January, 2011. The "reading list," it turns out, consisted of a single book: a collection of the letters of the late New York Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, edited by Steven R. Weisman.

The 720-page volume of letters has been getting rave reviews. One of the most entertaining of which is Hendrik Hertzberg's "Politics and Prose," in the October 25, 2010, issue of The New Yorker. Moynihan was a larger than life character, to be sure. George F. Will couldn't resist pointing out that Moynihan had written wrote more books than most Senators had read. On the other hand, the droll Eric Severaid once complained that the trouble with Senator Moynihan was that he threatened to make it respectable to be a sociologist.

Once, long ago in a galaxy far away, I wrote a review of Moynihan's book about the United Nations, where he had served as U.S. Ambassador. His book was called A Dangerous Place. I thought it would be clever to submit a review entitled "A Dangerous Man," the point of which was that Ambassador Moynihan might have enough rhetorical power all by himself to pose a threat to the mendacity from which the U.N., and particularly the General Assembly, suffered in those days.

My editor had different ideas. He replaced my title with one of his own, which made my reference in the body of the review to Moynihan as "a dangerous man" seem very odd indeed. I was not happy when the review appeared in print, but I didn't expect any real fallout from it.

But I was wrong. Late in the summer of 1979, I received the following letter on the stationery of the United States Senate:

Pindars Corners, N.Y.
August 31, 1979

Dear Dr. Kolson,

Help me. My friends say yours was the most hostile review A Dangerous Place has received. I thought it friendly. Am I bonkers? Please write, as I need to know!

Best,

DPM

Not being all that accustomed to receiving letters from United States Senators asking me whether I considered them "bonkers," I sat down at once to compose something reassuring. I think I managed to explain the confusion over the title convincingly enough, but in the process I'm sure I demonstrated that as a correspondent I had very little entertainment value. Senator Moynihan's framed letter occupies a prominent place on the wall of my den at home. But he never wrote back.

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review (reprise)

2010-11-02T09:09:00.001-04:00

This week the Fall 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was blocked by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

The Brief against Brandeis (reprise)

2010-10-24T16:46:00.005-04:00

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 2008. 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 Fall 2010 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.

October 25, 2010, update: As if on cue, The New York Review of Books has published an insightful review by Jonathan Zimmerman of Martha Minow's new book, In Brown's Wake: Legacies of America's Educational Landmark (Oxford University Press). Toward the end, Zimmerman observes, "Live by the social science, die by the social science." It could be Justice Brandeis's epitaph.

Is the British Parliament Broken?

2010-10-21T13:02:00.004-04:00

This week the Glenn Fellows are reading Mann and Ornstein's The Broken Branch, an indictment of both houses of Congress on a number of different grounds, among which are excess deference to and minimal oversight of the executive branch.

The U.S. Constitution separates the legislative and executive branches of government. The British Constitution, in contrast, fuses them together. I think it was shrewd Walter Bagehot who referred to the cabinet as the buckle that fastens, the hyphen that joins, the executive and legislative powers in Great Britain. One of the consequences of that is that it is fairly easy for new governments to implement new policies, citing their electoral mandate and exploiting the advantage of a parliamentary majority.

The freshly minted coalition of Conservatives and New Democrats that recently threw out Gordon Brown and New Labour has now announced its program to attack deficit spending in Great Britain. (That's British Chancellor George Osborne, above, unveiling the government's plan. He is flanked by Prime Minister David Cameron, in the purple Tory tie, and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, with his yellow New Dem tie.) Here is a story in The Economist. And here is Andrew Sullivan's typically idiosyncratic take in the Daily Dish.

Implementation of the program will put Keynesian propositions to a systematic test and will likely usher in a new age of austerity, at least over the short run. Most assuredly, other countries, especially those, like the United States, where deficits are staggeringly high in relation to Gross Domestic Product, will be watching closely. Pull yourself a pint and pass the Spam.

Richard Holbrooke and the Clash of Civilizations

2010-10-19T11:47:00.004-04:00

Talks are being held in Rome to chart a common strategy for mapping the future of Afghanistan. In addition to the United States and NATO, participants have included delegations from Afghanistan's neighbors. According to Karen DeYoung in today's Post , participants in these talks now include diplomats from Iran. Richard C. Holbrooke, the Obama administration's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, asserts that the participation of diplomats from a number of Muslim countries constitutes "a living refutation of the clash of civilizations" thesis advanced by the Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and warmly endorsed by many Muslim extremists. We'll be reading an excerpt in the Shafritz reader later this quarter. That's Professor Huntington with the glasses and natty tweed jacket. He died in 2008 at age 81. And that's Ambassador Holbrooke in the gray flannel State Department suit.

Philip Kennicott on Andrea Palladio

2010-10-16T17:44:00.004-04:00

At the beginning of the quarter I posted a piece on the Palladio exhibit at the National Building Museum.

In today's Post, Philip Kennicott weighs in with his views on Palladio, which are charateristically subversive of conventional wisdom, verging on mean-spirited, and yet eloquently expressed and not unpersuasive.

Climate Change and EPA

2010-10-12T14:10:00.003-04:00

The Fall 2010 class of John Glenn Fellows recently read Andrew E. Dessler and Edward A. Parson's The Science and Politics of Global Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), a book that I have been assigning since last year, when Congress appeared on the verge of adopting some version of the Waxman-Markey bill. That proved a chimera, of course, and now, as Robin Bravender explains in Politico, it devolves to the Environmental Protection Agency to do what it can to slow down the pace of global climate change by regulating greenhouse gases.

Bravender's is a pretty good account of the "iron triangle" of Congressional committees, bureaucrats, and industry lobbyists that sees to it that change occurs incrementally in our pluralistic system.

Why There is No Socialism in America (a reposting from January 24, 2010

2010-10-12T14:07:00.001-04:00

In a lecture recently reprinted by The New York Review of Books, Tony Judt of New York University tells us that this query—why is there no socialism in America?—was posed a century ago by a German sociologist, Werner Sombart. The question remains pertinent, for reasons that I try to explain below, despite the enactment of a great deal of “social democratic” legislation in the course of the twentieth century.

Judt’s lecture explores some of the many answers that have been formulated in response to Sombart’s question. I was surprised, however, that Judt never mentions Louis Hartz, a political philosopher with an original take on American political history that he published during the McCarthy Era as The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Harcourt, 1955).

Somewhat surprisingly, Hartz’s answer boils down to this: there can be no genuine socialism in America because there was never any genuine conservatism here. And we have no conservatives because in the New World there was no Old Order to conserve. Early settlers came to the British colonies in North America in an effort to get away from vestiges of feudalism (primogeniture, for example) that retained their oppressive potency in Europe. We Americans are the descendents of religious dissenters and others who voted with their feet against the Old Order. The deal was sealed when our few remaining Tories, aristocrats, and monarchists escaped, or were chased, to Canada after the American Revolution.

Canada, in fact, proves Hartz’s point. Even today there are a few honest-to-God Tories, and roughly the same number of authentic socialists in Canada, and neither feels obliged to offer apologies for itself. The result, to take just one example, is that the Canadians were able to create something akin to socialized medicine; it couldn’t be rejected, as it has been in the U.S., as part of a wholly alien tradition.

In the United States, by contrast, liberalism (think John Locke, for whom society is “atomistic,” i.e., the sum of its individual parts) is the only tradition we have. Some American liberals may be inclined to promote equality, even at the expense of personal liberty; Hartz calls them “liberal democrats.” Others may favor liberty over equality; Hartz calls them “liberal whigs.” We have neither a Far Right reminiscing about an organic, corporate order dominated by a benign and paternalistic gentry, nor a Far Left intent on overthrowing bourgeois capitalism and replacing it with a collectivist Social Welfare state (i.e., a Workers’ Paradise). The good news is that, there is nothing in our tradition for fascism to feed on. Never mind all the dire warnings about indigenous fascism that have been issued by the Far Left; the closest we’ve ever come was Father Coughlin in the 1930s, and that wasn’t very close. BTW, that's Ben Shahn's image of Father Coughlin with his Hitlerian fist pump up top.

The result, according to Hartz, is that American politics oscillates between the two “extremes” of liberal democracy and liberal whiggery, which aren’t extreme at all, but variations on the same theme. Thus, it is very much in the Hartzian tradition for Judt to pose the following musical question about American politics: “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so?” It’s because our liberal tradition is so capacious it makes everything else seem beyond the pale.

In the United States, the liberal democrats (i.e., people like Judt) have traditionally had the stronger hand. This is because they (unlike, say, the author of Federalist No. 10) have no real reservations about majority rule, and they know how to appeal to majoritarian instincts, some of which are not very honorable (e.g., the abolition of debts). Liberal whigs (e.g., today’s Republicans) have a harder time of it, because if they articulate their principles clearly they run the risk of offending the many who stand to profit from “majority tyranny.” Still, the liberal whigs are able to compete by planting seeds of fear and doubt in the American democrat. Conjuring up the “rags to riches” fantasy (e.g., Andrew Carnegie’s “gospel of wealth”) allows the American right, such as it is, to enjoy what Hartz called the Great Law of Whig Compensation, by which he meant that for the death of Hamilton (and genuine Toryism) they get the perpetual triumph of McKinley (an Ohioan, of course). You take what you can get. Come to think of it, Hartz himself was born in Youngstown, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Still with me? Hang on, there’s just a bit more. Implicit in Hartz’s description of a consensual and monotonous liberal order is the idea that the parameters of American political discourse are unusually narrow. Tony Judt is on exactly the same page when he says, apologizing for the academic jargon, that the great shortcoming of American politics is discursive. One of the effects of that is that the stakes of American politics are fairly low, though politicians do everything they can to try to make them seem much higher.

Some will note that the U.S. has had its collectivist moments: the Progressive movement at the turn of the twentieth century; the New Deal during the Great Depression; Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. And that is true, though each was more of an improvisation than part of a Grand Design, which explains why American institutions differ so markedly from their European counterparts. During our spasms of Social Democracy (to use Judt’s term) in the 1900s, the ‘30s, and the ‘60s, we were trying to solve practical problems. We were “muddling through”; we had no wish to create a Brave New World. From the days of Benjamin Franklin at least Americans have been practical-minded empiricists (the Branch method, rather than the Root), not theoreticians.

What Judt has to say at the very end of his lecture is extremely interesting. He is clearly disgusted with the American left for not recognizing that it “has something to conserve,” i.e., the collectivist, social democratic heritage of the twentieth century. He notes that the left often seems intent on apologizing for its own legacy. Judt also criticizes the left for not recognizing that the right (thanks largely to George W. Bush, though he doesn’t say that in so many words) has put itself in the awkward position of advocating utopian ideas such as not worrying about budget deficits (“Deficits don’t matter,” according to Dick Cheney) and “making the world safe for democracy.” The right, according to Judt, “has inherited the ambitious modernist urge to destroy and innovate in the name of a universal project.” They ought to feel more uncomfortable in that position than they seem to be.

This, in my view, is astounding, especially when one considers that (quoting Judt again, but now with a bow in the direction of Charles Lindblom) “If we learned nothing else from the twentieth century, we should at least have grasped that the more perfect the answer, the more terrifying its consequences.” (Consider, for example, Hitler’s answer to “the Jewish question,” or Stalin’s answer to the challenge posed by kulaks, whose very existence refuted Marxist ideology.) Yes, what we have here is another argument for muddling through.

Oops. $1 Billion SNAFU in Alexandria

2010-10-05T08:48:00.003-04:00

This office building, not far from where I live, is supposed to accommodate 6,400 Defense Department employees, though it seems no one gave serious thought to the impact it would have on the local transportation network. The building is a creature of the 2005 Base Realignment and Close Commission. Read Andy Medici's story in the Federal Times.

Rationality and Public Policy Making: A Reposting

2010-10-04T16:58:00.002-04:00

What follows is a slightly updated version of a post originally published on September 29, 2009.

It's week 3, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books has a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

The Gargoyle Shot

2010-10-02T11:07:00.005-04:00

Fall 2010 Glenn Fellows at the Library of Congress. Left to right: Chandra Caldwell, Kevin Ruppert, Justin Canfil, Alex Petrucci, Sara Hinds, Christina Buckler, Claire Racine, Lindsey Wilson, Kyle Everett, Brock Hutchison, Theresa Brenner, Nichole Hill, Katie Heffernan.

Fall 2010 Glenn Fellows Arrive in D.C.

2010-09-21T10:02:00.005-04:00

Left to right: Alexandra Petrucci, Chandra Caldwell, Nichole Hill, Justin Canfil, Sara Hinds, Kyle Everett, Kathryn Heffernan, Brock Hutchison, Theresa Brenner, Kevin Ruppert, Lindsey Wilson, Christina Buckler, Claire Racine.

Members of the fall 2010 class are living in The Congessional Apartments at 215 Constitution Avenue, N.E. We held our orientation session on Monday. Tuesday was the first day of their internships. Seminars and study tours will be held on Fridays this quarter.

"In private industry, if you screw things up, you get the boot; in the civil service, if you screw things up, I get the boot"

2010-09-21T08:53:00.006-04:00

In the Washington Academic Internship Program, we talk a lot about how public policy is made, which usually leads to consideration of the tension, endemic to the nation's capital, between politicians and civil servants. Indeed, the Washington Buckeye is convinced that it is this tension--and not the more celebrated rivalry of Democrats with Republicans, or liberals with conservatives--that makes this city tick.

There is no better way of gaining insight into the contest between politicians and civil servants than through the 1980s BBC comedy series called Yes, Minister and its sequel, Yes, Prime Minister; they were Margaret Thatcher's favorite television shows. The main characters in the original series were Jim Hacker, a Member of Parliament of indeterminte party affiliation who serves as Minister of Administrative Affairs, and his Permanent Secretary (a senior career civil servant, in other words), Sir Humphrey Appleby. Wikipedia sums up their relationship as follows:

The different ideals and self-interested motives of the characters are frequently contrasted. Whilst Hacker occasionally approaches an issue from a sense of idealism and a desire to be seen to improve things, he ultimately sees his re-election and elevation to higher office as the only measures of his success. Accordingly, he must appear to the voters to be effective and responsive to the public will. To his party (and, in the first incarnation, the Prime Minister) he must act as a loyal and effective party member. Sir Humphrey, on the other hand, genuinely believes that it is the Civil Service that knows what is best for the country (a belief shared by his bureaucratic colleagues) which is usually what is best for the Civil Service. Most of Sir Humphrey's actions are motivated by his wish to maintain the prestige, power, and influence he enjoys inside a large, bureaucratic organisation and also to preserve the numerous perks of his position: automatic honours, a substantial income, a fixed retirement age, a large pension, and the practical impossibility of being made redundant or being sacked. In fact, a good deal of the tension in their relationship comes from Hacker's awareness that it is the politicians who are liable to lose their jobs if civil service ineptitude comes to public attention.

In the current issue of The New York Review of Books there is an article by Philippe Sands on the inquiry undertaken by a blue-ribbon commission chaired by a senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot, on the origins of British involvement in the Iraq War. Although the inquiry has not yet been completed, it already has brought certain documents to light that point to the key role played by Prime Minister Tony Blair's Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, who firmly believed--right up until the last minute, when he was brow-beaten by advisors to President George W. Bush--that waging war in Iraq would be illegal without a clear mandate from the United Nations. In addition to the political pressures on cabinet ministers such as Lord Goldsmith, the documents reveal the civil service in all its glory, as if it were the reincarnation of Yes, Minister. Read it, weep.

Palladio Exhibit at National Building Museum

2010-09-15T13:46:00.003-04:00

Often we start a new quarter with a quick trip to the National Building Museum, the main attraction being a more or less permanent exhibition on the history of the capital called Washington: Symbol and City. The building itself, also known as the Pension Building, and the other exhibits always reward a close look, also.

This fall, a particularly good case can be made for visiting the Pension Building, thanks to a special exhibition called Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey, featuring drawings and models of buildings designed by the great Renaissance scholar and architect, Andrea Palladio (1508-1580). Palladio was revered by Jefferson, who, through works such as the Virginia State House, did much to popularize Palladio's distinctive version of classical design.

A nice write-up of the exhibition appeared in today's Roll Call under the by-line of Kaitlin Kovach. We'll be visiting the exhibition next Monday afternoon with the Autumn 2010 class of Glenn Fellows.

Michael Tomasky's Critique of the U.S. Senate

2010-09-14T09:35:00.008-04:00

The current issue of The New York Review of Books contains a piece by Michael Tomasky, "The Specter Haunting the Senate," that praises two recent books on the filibuster and cloture as they have been employed by that institution. The "specter" that haunts the Senate is, of course, the unlikely prospect of reform.

Mr. Tomasky clearly is one of those, like last quarter's WAIP guest speaker Thomas E. Mann of the Brookings Institution, who thinks of Congress as a "broken branch." The Washington Buckeye commented on Mann's presentation on August 18, 2010, and published an earlier post on the Mann-Ornstein book, on January 31, 2010. Just last month, we noted George Packer's lively critique of the Senate in a recent New Yorker, and all of these accounts of the lamentable condition of the national legislature need to be read against the urgent need of incumbents to keep the campaign contributions rolling in. On January 4, 2010, we wrote about Robert G. Kaiser's book, So Damn Much Money, about fund-raising, lobbying, and Congressional earmarks. It all makes for fascinating reading, parental guidance advised.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates: A Reposting with New Link

2010-09-09T13:34:00.002-04:00

Rufus Miles (1910-1996) was born in Columbus and is remembered for having been a senior federal administrator for many years. Here is his New York Times obituary.

It was Miles who famously observed that "Where you stand depends upon where you sit," which is usually understood to mean that if you know what's in the best interest of a particular agency or department, you know the opinions of its senior staff. It has come to be known as Miles's Law, and it works almost every time.

As usual, it's the exception that proves the rule. And Exhibit A is Robert Gates, who recently announced that he would be stepping down as Secretary of Defense sometime in 2011. Fareed Zakaria profiled Gates in his August 16 column in the Washington Post. Here's a Secretary of Defense who has the temerity to suggest that there's something terribly wrong when the Pentagon has ten times as many accountants as the United States has foreign service officers. And now, in today's (August 17, 2010) Post, Walter Pincus talks about some of the radical changes Gates is willing to contemplate in his quest to "change the Pentagon culture and to cap spending."

Bob Gates will be sorely missed.

September 9, 2010 update: Gates is the subject of David Ignatius's column in today's Washington Post.

A Washington Buckeye Wannabe

2010-08-20T09:57:00.002-04:00

President Barack Obama helps spell out "Ohio" with the Weithman family, Rachel, 9, Josh, 11, and mom Rhonda, in their home in Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 18, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

Reprinted from yesterday's Columbus Dispatch.

Congress back on track? Not yet, says Congressional Scholar Thomas E. Mann

2010-08-18T13:24:00.008-04:00

On Tuesday, August 17, the Glenn School's Washington Office hosted a reception at the Phoenix Park Hotel to honor the 15 participants in the Summer 2010 Washington Academic Internship Program. A number of internship supervisors, mentors, and local alumni were in attendance.

The program featured Thomas E. Mann, holder of the W. Averell Harriman Chair in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution and co-author, with Norman Ornstein, of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track, one of the textbooks in our public policy seminar.

Dr. Mann was educated at the University of Florida and the University of Michigan. He came to Washington forty years ago as a Congressional Fellow in the offices of Senator Philip A. Hart and Representative James G. O’Hara, and apparently he never looked back. He quickly became an expert on Congressional procedures and the history of the institution. He calls himself a “hardcore partisan” of Congress and of the legislative process generally, and he ranks among the wisest and most approachable of Washington's talking heads. Among the many accolades bestowed on Dr. Mann is the Glenn School’s Excellence in Public Service Award, which he won in 2006.

We asked him to share his thoughts about whether, a year and a half into the Obama Administration, Congress is getting “back on track.” Dr. Mann argued that while the branch is still "broken," the 111th Congress accomplished a great deal more than the public is inclined to give it credit for. The Washington Buckeye found that entirely persuasive, though one can imagine a legislature being so broken that a "Do Nothing" Congress might actually be preferable to a productive one.

Rufus Miles and Bob Gates

2010-08-17T08:43:00.004-04:00

The Empty Chamber

2010-08-13T13:03:00.003-04:00

I've always been a little ambivalent about the "broken branch" thesis. On the one hand, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein make a good case that things have gone downhill in both houses of Congress since the glory days of Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. George Packer makes the same argument, specifically about the Senate,in the current issue of The New Yorker.

Actually, no one has issued this indictment more eloquently than Senator Glenn. Looking back on his long career, he writes:

In my twenty-two years in the Senate, I had watched the legislative process change. There was always partisanship--that was the nature of the system. Although it produced disagreement and debate, it ultimately forged budgets and laws on which reasonable people could differ but that worked for most. In general, lawmakers performed their duties in an atmosphere of mutual respect.

This was no longer the case. By the 1994 election, we had single-issue candidates, the demonization of government, the sneering dismissal of opposing points of view, a willingness to indulge the few at the expense of the many, and the smug rejection of the claims of entire segments of society to any portion of the government's resources. Respectful disagreement had vanished. Poisonous distrust, accusation, and attack had replaced it.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems to me that maybe the good old days weren't all they're cracked up to be--and, as a wag once suggested--never were! Certainly, the vicious caning of Senator Charles Sumner, of Massachusetts, by South Carolina's Preston Brooks in 1856 (pictured above) hardly qualifies as "respectful disagreement."

On the third hand, you can make the case that what's wrong with Congress is that its powers have been usurped by an all-consuming executive branch whose mandate comes from what James Madison referred to as "the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." Or you could argue that Congress has simply abdicated. Either way, the explanation for Congressional irresponsibility starts to sound like the old saw about academic politics: it's vicious precisely because "the stakes are so low."

No doubt these issues will be rehearsed at the Phoenix Park next Tuesday evening, when the Glenn Fellows will have a chance to talk to Thomas E. Mann, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution.

The Billionaires and their Pledge

2010-08-08T07:30:00.003-04:00

Last week one of our summer 2010 Glenn Fellows, Sean Fitzpatrick, commented on the recent agreement by 40 or so billionaires to give at least half their money to registered charities. Steven Pearlstein commented in his column in Saturday's Washington Post. Not exactly Sean's point, I don't think, but also worth pondering.

In explaining the high rates of charitable giving in the United States, it's hard to overstate the importance of generous tax deductions that encourage philanthropy. For me the interesting question becomes, is our high rate of charitable giving a reflection of the tax code, or is the code an expression of our distinctive culture? Or does the influence flow both ways?

A Diplomat's Progress--Book Review

2010-07-30T10:12:00.003-04:00

This week the Summer 2010 class of Glenn Fellows is reading Samuel Huntington's famous Foreign Affairs article on "The Clash of Civilizations." As an introduction to the not-always-glamorous world of professional diplomacy, I have also assigned a book called A Diplomat's Progress, written by Henry Precht, a retired foreign service officer. Mr. Precht was born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Emory University. He joined the foreign service in 1961 and served in U.S. embassies in Italy, Mauritius, Iran, and Egypt. He was the Department of State’s Desk Officer for Iran during the revolution and hostage crisis when the Shah was overthrown, and he was deputy ambassador in Cairo when Anwar Sadat was assassinated. His nomination by President Jimmy Carter to the post of U.S. ambassador to Mauritania was vetoed by Senator Jesse Helms.

After leaving the foreign service, Mr. Precht served as president of the World Affairs Council in Cleveland, Ohio, where he also taught at Case Western Reserve University. A few years ago, he published A Diplomat’s Progress, a work of fiction consisting of a series of vignettes about a State Department official named Harry Prentice. It is an engaging work that reveals, as one reviewer has put it, the “grittier side of embassy life with a wry sense of humor and a bit of an edge.” To the extent that the work is autobiographical, A Diplomat’s Progress is rather remarkable.

For one thing, the “grittier” aspects of diplomacy are portrayed warts and all. In one of the vignettes, the young Harry Prentice and his wife attend a dinner party at the home of the foreign minister of Mauritius, during which the lecherous host assaults the drunken daughter of the Japanese ambassador. In a vignette set in Egypt, the protagonist must tend to a dead body and a suitcase full of drug money. In “Caviar and Kurds,” Prentice unwittingly leads the Shah’s secret police to an underground freedom fighter named Hassan, whom Prentice finds hanging from a lamppost the next day. In this account of embassy life, no good deed goes unpunished.

Most remarkable as an autobiography—and surely it must be regarded as partly that, in spite of the veneer of fiction—is the book’s unflattering portrait of its protagonist. Throughout A Diplomat’s Progress, Harry Prentice’s diplomatic efforts are undone by either his naivete or his cynicism. Typically, the reader is given a glimpse of a career diplomat preoccupied, not with the national interest, as one might suppose, but rather, with his own career advancement. At one point, for instance, Prentice seems to have been the unwitting accomplice of a Palestinian terrorist. What does he do about it? He gets up in the middle of the night to compose a somewhat Bardachian “balance sheet of possible courses of action.” There appear to be two:

First, the natural inclination of every Foreign Service Officer: Do nothing. Wait on events and react as necessary and as seems prudent at the time. . . . Alternatively, I could report my suspicions to the police. Playing it straight and admitting wrong might be partially redeeming. The key word was “partially.” The embassy surely would be informed and handle my future as if it had no value. The same with the Israeli authorities. I had to face it: Only I really cared about my future, not any American or Israeli career-building bureaucrat.

Glenn Fellows visit SCOTUS

2010-07-22T09:47:00.005-04:00

Yesterday the Glenn Fellows visited the Supreme Court of the United States. Afterwards, they had a conversation with a reporter who covers the Court, Lawrence Hurley of the Los Angeles Daily Journal. Here is a link to Lawrence's blog, Washington Briefs: http://washingtonbriefs.com/

During the seminar, we talked about Mann and Ornstein's indictment of Congress, The Broken Branch. And we welcomed Stacy Rastauskas, OSU's Assistant Vice President for Federal Relations, who aregued that lobbying is a noble profession. (Last quarter's speaker on this subject, Jane Hoover, formerly of Proctor & Gamble, said that she always thought of herself as being in the "education" business.) Coincidentally, Roll Call ran a piece today about lobbying that included a table listing the twenty biggest spenders during the first half of 2010. The listing reveals, not surprisingly, that intense lobbying activity, much as Madison anticipated, is a largely defensive maneuver on the part of threatened minority interests. The American Beverage Association, for example, is in ninth place on Roll Call's 2010 list. A year ago, before there was much talk about taxing sugary drinks, the American Beverage Association ranked 212th.

Escalator Outages

2010-07-19T09:19:00.010-04:00

First-time visitors to our nation’s capital, including many Glenn Fellows, routinely fall in love with the Washington Metro. It happened to me when I first rode the embryonic subway system in 1976. In those days Metro consisted of just a handful of stops on the Red and Blue Lines. But it was clean and fast, and it seemed to bespeak confidence in the public sector. With its classical allusions, Metro seemed a natural extension of L’Enfant’s ambitious city plan.

I was an aficionado in the early days. No more. The quirks that once seemed so charming gradually became annoying—and, ultimately, infuriating. Every regular Metro rider has his or her pet peeve.

For me, it’s the chronic problem of out-of-service escalators. Escalators are absolutely essential to Metro’s basic design, and yet they have been unreliable from Day One. We know this thanks to Zachary M. Schrag, author of The Great Society Subway (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), the authoritative history of the Washington Metro. Let Schrag pick up the story here:

Harry Weese [Metro’s chief architect] and his team had originally planned all vertical movement by escalator. In the course of the 1970s cost-cutting, some escalators were replaced with granite stairs, but every station entrance and mezzanine had at least two escalators. . . .

The fundamental problem with the escalators is . . . that they are complicated machines with hundreds of moving parts, run for nineteen hours a day and stepped on by their users. Like helicopters and photocopiers, they are inherently maintenance-intensive. As the architects planned the stations, the nation’s leading escalator manufacturers warned them to expect each escalator to be out of service for a ten- to twelve-day stretch each year. Based on this advice, the architects made room for three escalators at most street entrances, so that two could provide down and up service while the third was repaired. But a spare escalator cannot guarantee adequate maintenance. WMATA has struggled to find enough skilled mechanics to work twenty-four-hour shifts, and it has lacked funds to overhaul aging escalators according to schedule. Unsurprisingly, deferred maintenance has resulted in breakdowns, with up to one out of every five escalators out of service on any given day (Schrag, pp. 246-247).

Your faithful blogger respectfully disputes Schrag’s one-in-five estimate. I have been silently documenting Metro’s escalator performance for 25 years and have found that roughly one in three escalators are out of service on any given day.

Schrag is right that repair of a Metro escalator is a major undertaking. At Braddock Road, the Metro station in Alexandria that I know best, there are two escalators, one elevator, and no staircases. A few years ago the escalators—first one, then the other—underwent a complete overhaul. The job was supposed to take six months for each escalator. It took seven months, in fact, which meant that for a total of fourteen months riders had to endure two-way foot traffic twice a day on the escalator not then undergoing repair. You can build a McMansion is less time. Hell, the Phoenix Project that rebuilt the Pentagon after the attack of September 11, 2001, was faster than that.

Rationality and Public Policy Making (encore, 09/29/2009)

2010-07-13T17:55:00.005-04:00

It's week 4, which means it must be time to take another close look at Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide for Policy Analysis, a book that has always struck me as a kind of Rorschach test. While Bardach recognizes that policy analysis is "more art than science," he is, ultimately, an optimist. He thinks that public policy is improved when it is informed by rigorous empirical research. As a dyed-in-the-wool futilitarian, the Washington Buckeye is less sanguine about the prospects of rationality in the policy-making process.

The October 8, 2009, issue of the New York Review of Books contains a remarkable article that bears on the issue: "The Anarchy of Success," by William Easterly, an economics professor at NYU. The article is a review of two new books, Leonard Mlodinow's The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives, and Ha-Joon Chang's Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism. Unfortunately, the NYROB won't let me attach a link to Easterly's article because it is premium content.

Could it be that "the science of muddling through" is the best we can do?

Ohio in the Pacific

2010-07-08T11:13:00.003-04:00

I don't ordinarily pay any attention to Yahoo as a news source, but this morning the site is running an intriguing piece about Ohio-class submarines being dispatched to the Pacific, where one can imagine any number of ways that they might be deployed. One would love to know something about the decision-making process that led to this result.

KC-X Tanker Contract Inspires Intense Lobbying Effort

2010-07-06T12:00:00.003-04:00

You've probably heard the old joke about university faculty politics. Question: "Why are academic politics so vicious? Answer: "Because the stakes are so low."

It's funny, to be sure, but anybody who really believes that the most vicious kind of politics is to be found in university faculty clubs should be following the story that will be unfolding this Friday at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

Here's a link to the story, "Defense Firms Strafe Each Other," by Bennett Roth in today's Roll Call.

Pictured above is the KC-135 refueling tanker, a vestige of the Eisenhower era that is due to be replaced by either Boeing or the European Aeronautic and Space Company, the owner of Airbus.

Historian W. Roger Louis to Lecture on European Colonial Empires in Asia and Africa

2010-07-01T14:59:00.006-04:00

Glenn Fellows and others interested in international affairs might want to consider attending a lecture on Monday, July 12, by the eminent historian W. Roger Louis, the U.S. scholar who serves as editor-in-chief of The Oxford History of the British Empire.

For details, see the Library of Congress's announcement here.

Pictured above is the Gandhi statue in front of the Embassy of India on Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.

"Midterms May Mean Roster Shake-ups"

2010-06-29T09:30:00.006-04:00

Only in the pages of Roll Call would you ever see such a headline. What's it all about? It turns out that tonight is the 49th annual Roll Call Congressional Baseball Game, to be played at Nationals Park. The Democrats beat the Republicans in 2009, snapping an eight-game losing streak.

The story appearing under the above headline analyzes the November 2010 elections and their likely impact on Congressional baseball. According to Roll Call, the Democrats' long-term baseball fortunes may rest on the electoral fates of two Ohioans from highly competitive districts: John Boccieri of Ohio's 16th Congessional district and Steve Driehaus of Ohio's 1st.

Boccieri, who is listed as a catcher/pitcher, bats right, throws right, and, according to Roll Call, votes "switch," unlike most of his teammates, who are lefties. Driehaus, also a switch-voter, is that rare second baseman who bats right and throws left, which would seem to make for an awfully awkward pivot on the double-play.

The Republican team will be led by Joe Barton of Texas, recently famous for his apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward. In terms of voting behavior, the GOP lineup leans strongly to the right.

The bipartisan Washington Buckeye will maintain a scrupulous neutrality, of course, though he finds it hard not to root for the switch-voters on both teams.

June 30, 2010, Update: Democrats win, 13-5.

Universal Health Care Tends to Cut Abortion Rate

2010-06-28T10:31:00.008-04:00

The Summer 2010 Glenn Fellows currently are Reading Eugene Bardach's A Practical Guide to Policy Analysis and working up proposals for their own foray into public policy research and analysis. I hope we'll have a chance this Wednesday to talk about the following article, which appeared in The Washington Post on March 14, 2010:

Universal Health Care Tends to Cut Abortion Rate

By T.R. Reid, Sunday

Countless arguments have been advanced for and against the pending bills to increase health-care coverage. Both sides have valid concerns, which makes the battle tight. But one prominent argument is illogical. The contention that opponents of abortion should oppose the current proposals to expand coverage simply doesn't make sense.

Increasing health-care coverage is one of the most powerful tools for reducing the number of abortions -- a fact proved by years of experience in other industrialized nations. All the other advanced, free-market democracies provide health-care coverage for everybody. And all of them have lower rates of abortion than does the United States.

This is not a coincidence. There's a direct connection between greater health coverage and lower abortion rates. To oppose expanded coverage in the name of restricting abortion gets things exactly backward. It's like saying you won't fix the broken furnace in a schoolhouse because you're against pneumonia. Nonsense! Fixing the furnace will reduce the rate of pneumonia. In the same way, expanding health-care coverage will reduce the rate of abortion.

At least, that's the lesson from every other rich democracy.

The latest United Nations comparative statistics, available at http://data.un.org, demonstrate the point clearly. The U.N. data measure the number of abortions for women ages 15 to 44. They show that Canada, for example, has 15.2 abortions per 1,000 women; Denmark, 14.3; Germany, 7.8; Japan, 12.3; Britain, 17.0; and the United States, 20.8. When it comes to abortion rates in the developed world, we're No. 1.

No one could argue that Germans, Japanese, Brits or Canadians have more respect for life or deeper religious convictions than Americans do. So why do they have fewer abortions?

One key reason seems to be that all those countries provide health care for everybody at a reasonable cost. That has a profound effect on women contemplating what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.

The connection was explained to me by a wise and holy man, Cardinal Basil Hume. He was the senior Roman Catholic prelate of England and Wales when I lived in London; as a reporter and a Catholic, I got to know him.

In Britain, only 8 percent of the population is Catholic (compared with 25 percent in the United States). Abortion there is legal. Abortion is free. And yet British women have fewer abortions than Americans do. I asked Cardinal Hume why that is.
The cardinal said that there were several reasons but that one important explanation was Britain's universal health-care system. "If that frightened, unemployed 19-year-old knows that she and her child will have access to medical care whenever it's needed," Hume explained, "she's more likely to carry the baby to term. Isn't it obvious?"

A young woman I knew in Britain added another explanation. "If you're [sexually] active," she said, "the way to avoid abortion is to avoid pregnancy. Most of us do that with an IUD or a diaphragm. It means going to the doctor. But that's easy here, because anybody can go to the doctor free."

For various reasons, then, expanding health-care coverage reduces the rate of abortion. All the other industrialized democracies figured that out years ago. The failure to recognize this plain statistical truth may explain why American churches have played such a small role in our national debate on health care. Searching for ways to limit abortions, our faith leaders have managed to overlook a proven approach that's on offer now: expanding health-care coverage.

When I studied health-care systems overseas in research for a book, I asked health ministers, doctors, economists and others in all the rich countries why their nations decided to provide health care for everybody. The answers were medical (universal care saves lives), economic (universal care is cheaper), political (the voters like it), religious (it's what Christ commanded) and moral (it's the right thing to do). And in every country, people told me that universal health-care coverage is desirable because it reduces the rate of abortion.

It's only in the United States that opponents of abortion are fighting against expanded health-care coverage -- a policy step that has been proved around the world to limit abortions.

T.R. Reid, a longtime correspondent for The Post, is the author of The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Health Care.

Mr. Justice Scalia and the Moritz College of Law (another reposting, this time with a heretical update)

2010-06-24T08:22:00.006-04:00

I argued on August 18, 2009, in a post called “’Out Here’ in D.C.,” that Easterners are inclined to dismiss Midwesterners as provincials and that Glenn Fellows, though they have every reason to be professionally ambitious, forget or ignore this at their peril.

There could be no more dramatic example than that provided in Spring 2009 by Antonin Scalia, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. As Adam Liptak reported in The New York Times on May 11, 2009, Justice Scalia, speaking at American University in Washington, D.C., explained to an audience of law students that their odds of landing a clerkship with a Supreme Court justice were slim or none because these posts are reserved for students from America’s most prestigious law schools. According to Liptak, the “hard truth” is that “Over the last six years, the justices have hired about 220 law clerks. Almost half went to Harvard or Yale. Chicago, Stanford, Virginia and Columbia collectively accounted for 50 others." Liptak reports that “Justice Scalia said he could think of one sort-of exception to his rule favoring the elite schools.” To wit:

“One of my former clerks whom I am the most proud of now sits on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals" in Cincinnati, the justice said, referring to Jeffrey S. Sutton. But Justice Scalia explained that Mr. Sutton had been hired by Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. after his retirement and then helped out in Justice Scalia's chambers. "I wouldn't have hired Jeff Sutton," Justice Scalia said. "For God's sake, he went to Ohio State! And he's one of the very best clerks I ever had."

As one can readily imagine, Justice Scalia’s remarks inspired a kerfuffle in Buckeyeland. The Columbus Dispatch reported that Scalia was “not a big fan of OSU law graduates,” and the Ohio State Bar Association objected to the “insult” and issued a sharp, if not entirely persuasive, rejoinder, arguing that “Intellect, skill and fundamental integrity are not measured by the school someone attends. Birthright, money, LSAT scores and magazine rankings of law schools are not the standards by which this profession judges itself.”

My reading of this story is that Justice Scalia was conveying brute facts, which are not in dispute, and that his endorsement of Judge Sutton indicates that he understands that the prejudice in favor of elite law schools is ultimately not rational. True, he seems disinclined to buck the system, but I think it’s pretty clear that his “For God’s sake” remark was intended ironically. They learn that sort of thing at the elite schools, such as Harvard, where Scalia earned his law degree. They also learn not to harbor too many illusions about the quality of instruction at the nation's most prestigious institutions.

September 14, 2009, update. Further evidence that Harvard law graduates tend to be lovers of irony comes from an AP story that Lawrence Hurley cites in his Supreme Court blog, Washington Briefs. Elitist joke alert: Asked if too many of the justices came from elite law schools, CJ Roberts says no -- some went to Yale (AP).

May 13, 2010, update: I find it just fascinating that as our society has in some ways become more and more committed to diversity and level playing fields, it has in some other ways become remarkably complacent in the face of increased stratification. Yesterday's Washington Post explores some facets of this phenomenon here.

June 24, 2010, heretical update: I keep re-posting the Scalia story in hopes that it will provoke some conversation about how OSU alumni could help generate a more complex and and nuanced public image of The Ohio State University. Perhaps I have been too subtle. What I have been trying to say is that Northeast Corridor Buckeyes should heed the example of President Gordon Gee by celebrating OSU's many centers of excellence, rather than being fixated on NCAA football, the origin of the bedrock stereotype that is working--on the Supreme Court and elsewhere--to our disadvantage. There, I've said it.

Summer 2010 Glenn Fellows visit Capitol

2010-06-23T15:40:00.005-04:00

Left to right: Adrianna Braden, Sean Fitzpatrick, Haley Callahan, Zachary Taylor, Kelly Finzer, Drew Herrick, Mallory Treleaven, Lindsey Titus, Meredith Asbury, Shawn O'Meara, Helene Holstein, Andy Sager (partly obscured), Linsey Shay, Kelly Schultz, Oghogho Igodan.