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Trust Us, We’re the IRS

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IRS

I am a faithful subscriber to the Washington Post: morning after morning, it makes for merriment. Its editorial and op-ed pages, for instance, have been given over for weeks to the regurgitation of ACA defenses cranked up in New Haven or in the PR offices of the country’s health care lobbies (interspersed with an occasional George Will column). Then yesterday, the Post (printed version) conveniently supplied a long piece detailing “Five Myths About King v. Burwell”—written by a pro-ACA advocate in the litigation, who nonetheless earnestly professed to sort “fact from fiction” in the case. That was a good one.

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Burke, Historical Experience, and Change

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At the Federalist Society national student symposium, my colleague Josh Kleinfeld was the deserving recipient of the Paul Bator Award given to an outstanding law professor under 40. His beautiful acceptance speech focused on the importance of Burkean conservativism.  And Kleinfeld is correct: the right owes an enduring debt to Burke’s skepticism of ordering society according to the abstractions of the kind advocated by the French philosophes. That debt is all the greater, now that these types of philosophes have gone global.

But I do wonder whether one aspect of Burkean conservatism—deference to past historical experience—deserves quite as much weight today as it once did.  Burke had both religious and more instrumental reasons for valuing that experience. For Burke, history was “the known march of the ordinary providence of God.” More secularly, it was also the best repository of human prudence and wisdom and thus the best guide to policy in an uncertain world.

But the value of historical experience as a guide for policy depends on the technological and social rate of change and on the availability of alternative methods of sifting experience.

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James Buckley at 90: Still a Hero of the Republic

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I had the good fortune to be asked to review Saving Congress from Itself by James L. Buckley, a statesman I have long admired.  As I say in the opening of the review that appears in this week’s print edition of National Review: My first vote remains my best. It was for James L. Buckley’s reelection as a United States senator from New York. In six years in office, he had shown himself fearlessly principled, whether in calling for Nixon’s resignation in the Watergate scandal before any other conservative in Congress or in opposing a taxpayer bailout for New York City,…

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We the People of the United States: The Madisonian View

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In my last post, I argued that “We the People of the United States” is best understood as referring to a single people consisting of separate states.  It is not a single people in a single undifferentiated nation like France, but instead is a country that consists of individual states that are united together.

This interpretation of the preamble views it as adopting an intermediate view between the nationalist view of a single people in an undifferentiated nation and the states rights view of multiple peoples in multiple states.

If the preamble adopts an intermediate view, does it fit with the remainder of the Constitution and what specifically is that view?  The intermediate view of the preamble accords with the analysis of the Constitution adopted by James Madison in Federalist 39.  In that number, Madison was responding to critics who argued that the Constitution was a national document and should have been a federal one.  Madison wrote:

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Federalism’s New Defenders: Obamacare Supporters

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kaiser

Thirty amicus briefs have been filed in support of the government’s position in King v. Burwell. Tim Jost, a leading academic champion (after the late Jonathan Gruber’s self-inflicted defenestration, the leading champion) of the ACA, summarizes them here. This may be a bit of overkill (the justices generally don’t like to be bullied or harangued), but we’ll see.

Numerous briefs come from hospital associations, doctors’ groups, and of course America’s Health Insurance Plans. By helping the ACA over the hurdle, AHIP signed its corporate members’ death warrant in exchange for the individual mandate, risk corridors, and a few other placebos. AHIP had the railroad cars to the camps neatly lined up; now, some plaintiffs are messing—after NFIB, a second time—with the tracks: how dare they.

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Eggstraterrritorial Federalism

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chicken and egg

The Wall Street Journal, among other news outlets, reports that egg prices in California have risen sharply and are way out of line with prices elsewhere in the West. In 2008, California voters passed an initiative requiring chickens to have much, much bigger cages. California egg farmers protested about the attendant disadvantages. In 2010, the California legislature enacted a law requiring the layers of imported eggs—some four billion per year—to have equally spacious accommodations. The hens have since taken out home improvement loans and installed wall-to-wall carpets. For poorly understood reasons, however, there are fewer of them, and therefore fewer eggs, and therefore…

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Liberating the States and Their People from Federal Grants: A Conversation with James Buckley

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buckley

Now comes the great James Buckley to Liberty Law Talk to discuss his new book Saving Congress from Itself that argues federal grants-in-aid exemplify the obstacles currently posed to constitutional government. The key to our constitutional health must involve, Buckley declares, the elimination of these programs. The issue is more than just the overwhelming spending, which has soared from $24.1 billion in 1970 to approximately $640.8 billion in 2015. Buckley and I also discuss the obvious constitutional problems, namely, that through the so-called spending power Congress can impose laws on states that it otherwise possesses no constitutional authority to enact and enforce. As Michael Greve…

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How to Avoid Argentine Federalism

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James L. Buckley is a former U.S. Senator, federal judge, and real-life saint. The Federalist Society’s 2014 Annual Convention featured a presentation and panel discussion on his most recent book, Saving Congress from Itself. As the title suggests, Jim Buckley—even at age 91—is into tasks that are kind of biggish. His key proposal is to phase out any and all federal transfer payments to state and local governments.

Robert R. Gasaway (Kirkland & Ellis—once upon a time, Judge Buckley’s law clerk) chaired the panel composed of Senator Buckley, John Eastman (Chapman Law School), and yours truly. Pending FedSoc’s posting of the video, my humble remarks appear below. More fodder for my friend Linda Greenhouse, I suppose.

Saving Congress from Itself is a must-buy and must-read. I wish I could write like that.

 

God bless Senator James Buckley.

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Halbig and the Nonchalance of Six Small Words

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New legislation

The psychology of legislative draftsmanship involved in the six words at stake in Halbig v. Burwell—“an exchange established by the State”—reflects a short-odds gamble that did not hit. The bettors first wanted the IRS to rescue them from the consequences, and now they want the courts to do it.

The gamble was that states, enticed by subsidies for their citizens or intimidated by the threat of losing Medicaid funds, would establish healthcare exchanges. The Obama administration is surely right that the whole idea of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was that such subsidies be provided, and that the consequences that have ensued from those six small words were probably unintended.

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Cooperative Federalism is the Handmaiden to the Administrative State

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Texas State Flag

What does federalism have to do with the administrative state, and vice versa? Everything. Statutes typically confer authority on a federal agency (or several) in the first instance. However, practically all federal regulatory programs are “cooperative,” meaning they’re implemented by state and local officials. Entitlement programs from Medicaid to education are likewise run through states. So states will participate in the federal agencies’ process. Federalism isn’t shaped in once-in-a-generation enumerated powers cases; it’s shaped in millions of daily administrative interactions. How does that work?

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