The Supreme Court’s Most Impressive Achievement

by Stephen L. Carter

Bloomberg
June 29, 2012

The most fascinating aspect of the Supreme Court’s anticlimactic decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act isn’t the outcome. It’s that until the ruling was handed down, nobody outside the court knew what the outcome was going to be.

Imagine that. Smack in the middle of a city where leaks are a way of life, here was a pending action that pundits were proclaiming would determine President Barack Obama’s legacy, and the capital’s legion of political reporters was unable to ferret out the smallest advance hint of the court’s intentions -- even though the initial vote probably came three months ago. The justices themselves, their law clerks and all the personnel of the court cooperate in maintaining the veil.

In an era when we have become accustomed to a government that can’t keep its secrets, an institution whose members know how to keep their mouths shut is refreshing. The recent cascade of disclosures of national-security information from the Obama administration is both embarrassing and destructive. It is not, however, atypical. The old cliche is wrong: Washington doesn’t leak like a sieve. It leaks like a flood.

The current contretemps isn’t even the administration’s first episode of national-security leakage. Shortly before Obama decided on the Afghanistan surge, his consideration of one was leaked to the press. As analysts pointed out, the leak was almost certainly a device to pressure the White House to go ahead with the surge.

“Wires climb with secrets,” Carl Sandburg wrote in his poem “Skyscraper.” Had he been writing about Washington, he might have said instead that wires buzz with secrets -- because, for too many people who possess them, the great joy of having a secret seems to be the sharing. One reason to admire the court, even when one disagrees with it, is its ability to withstand the temptation to which other government bodies regularly yield.

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The Decline of Democracy

by Bret Stephens

Wall Street Journal
June 18, 2012

Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time. Everyone knows who said this, and everyone thinks it's true. But is it, really?

After last weekend I've begun to have my doubts. In Egypt, the ruling military junta reacted to the apparent victory of Muslim Brotherhood presidential candidate Mohammed Morsi by stripping the presidential office of its powers. That came just days after Egypt's top court dissolved the Islamist-dominated parliament, which had been freely elected only a few months ago.

How arbitrary. What an affront to the Egyptian people. Now let's hope it works.

Then there's Greece, which also had an election over the weekend. The Greeks are supposed to have made the "responsible" choice in the person of Antonis Samaras, the Amherst- and Harvard-educated leader of the center-right New Democracy party. Responsible in this case means trying to stay in the euro zone by again renegotiating the terms of a bailout that Greeks cannot possibly repay and will not likely honor.

Yet the more depressing fact about the election is that Mr. Samaras didn't even get 30% of the vote. The rest was divided among the radical-left Syriza (27%), the socialist Pasok (12.3%), the anti-German Independent Greeks (7.5%), the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn (7%), the center-left Democratic Left (6.2%) and, finally, the good old Communist Party (4.5%).

In other words, the Greeks gave a solid 46% of their vote to parties that are evil, crazy or both, even while erring on the side of "sanity" with parties that are merely foolish and discredited. Imagine that in 1980 Jimmy Carter had eked out a slim victory over a Gus Hall-Lyndon LaRouche ticket, and you have the American equivalent to what just happened in Greece.

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Fixing Citizens United

by Geoffrey R. Stone

Huffington Post
June 12, 2012

Any intelligent person following American politics these days should be deeply distressed by the ever-growing role of big money in our electoral process. The extraordinary concentration of wealth in the hands of relatively few Americans has completely distorted the nature of political discourse. As multi-millionaires, billionaires and powerful corporations are now free to spend unlimited amounts in order to dominate public debate, we have moved from a political system founded on the aspiration of one person/one vote to one increasingly founded on money/money/money.

Of course, there are those who say that money doesn't really matter. What matters, they say, is the quality of the candidates and the strength of their ideas. Unfortunately, in a world of high-stakes and high-cost media, this is nonsense. Speech matters. It shapes people's perceptions, knowledge and attitudes. Why else would businesses spend billions of dollars each year on commercial advertising? Corporations and billionaires are not stupid. They would not waste millions of dollars to fund an endless flood of political ads if those ads didn't pay off. They do. Money may not guarantee victory, but it definitely helps.

Imagine a presidential debate in which the candidates were invited to buy debate time. Instead of the debate time being allocated equally, each candidate would bid for minutes, so the candidate with the most money would buy the most minutes in the debate. What would we think of that? That is effectively what has happened to our political system. This is a disaster for our nation. It alienates voters, enables a coterie of highly-self-interested millionaires and corporations to distort our national political discourse, and causes elected officials desperately to curry favor with wealthy supporters, often at the expense of the public interest.

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The Harm in Free Speech

by Stanley Fish

New York Times
June 4, 2012

Jeremy Waldron’s new book, The Harm in Hate Speech, might well be called “The Harm in Free Speech”; for Waldron, a professor of law and political theory at New York University and Oxford, argues that the expansive First Amendment we now possess allows the flourishing of harms a well-ordered society ought not permit.

Waldron is especially concerned with the harm done by hate speech to the dignity of those who are its object. He is careful to distinguish “dignity harms” from the hurt feelings one might experience in the face of speech that offends. Offense can be given by almost any speech act — in particular circumstances one might offend by saying “hello” — and Waldron agrees with those who say that regulating offensive speech is a bad and unworkable idea.

But harms to dignity, he contends, involve more than the giving of offense. They involve undermining a public good, which he identifies as the “implicit assurance” extended to every citizen that while his beliefs and allegiance may be criticized and rejected by some of his fellow citizens, he will nevertheless be viewed, even by his polemical opponents, as someone who has an equal right to membership in the society. It is the assurance — not given explicitly at the beginning of each day but built into the community’s mode of self-presentation — that he belongs, that he is the undoubted bearer of a dignity he doesn’t have to struggle for.

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Δικαιοσύνη, Κράτος Δικαίου, Δημοκρατία, Φιλελευθερισμός, Ελευθερία της Έκφρασης

radiobubble.gr
retrospectiva / episode 73
2 Ιουνίου 2012

Mια συζήτηση του Βασίλη Σωτηρόπουλου με τον καθηγητή φιλοσοφίας δικαίου κ. Αριστείδη Χατζή.

Εξακολουθεί να υπάρχει απόσταση ανάμεσα στην ουσιαστική δικαιοσύνη και το θετό δίκαιο; Νομιμοποιείται η πλειοψηφία να αποφασίζει για τα πάντα σε μια δημοκρατία; Η ενσωμάτωση του φιλελευθερισμού στο ισχύον δίκαιο αφήνει περαιτέρω χώρο για περαιτέρω φιλελεύθερη πολιτική διεκδίκηση; Η άμεση δημοκρατία είναι συμβατή με το κράτος δικαίου; Είναι θεμιτό να είναι υποψήφιοι βουλευτές άτομα που έχουν καταδικαστεί για ποινικά αδικήματα; Νοείται η δημοκρατία να αποκλείει από τις εκλογές πολιτικά κόμματα; Είναι αποτελεσματική η ποινικοποίηση των ρατσιστικών απόψεων;

Μαζί με τον Χρήστο Γραμματίδη θέτουμε αυτά και άλλα ερωτήματα και συζητάμε τις πιθανές απαντήσεις με τον Aριστείδη Χατζή.



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