Morgantown’s Updated Non-Discrimination Ordinance

I am a born-and-raised West Virginian. My children are part of the tenth or eleventh generation of our family to be born here. We mostly come from the southern end of the state; I was born in Charleston. But my family now makes our home in Morgantown. I brought my beautiful bride here from her native Pennsylvania and we are blessed to be raising our children in one of the most thriving and vibrant towns in the Great State. I am a member of the Morgantown Human Rights Commission and helped to write the amendments to city code which City Council just passed to add protections for sexual orientation, gender identity and veteran status.

I was raised more or less socially conservative, entered adulthood with a right-leaning libertarian streak and was a registered Republican from the day I turned 18 (until the spring of 2016). I think federalism is important, I think individual liberty is important and I think that the constitution is important.

For a long time, I advocated for “preserving the republic as it was founded.” I thought that states’ rights were an important check on the federal government and that preserving individual liberty was the paramount goal of all levels of government.

But I eventually had trouble reconciling the ideals of our nation’s founding with its policies in practice. What was the value of preserving as founded a republic which vilely oppressed so many of its people even long after the abolition of slavery? So I came to view federal Civil Rights Acts and similar legislation which I had previously believed to be unnecessary intrusions of the federal government into state and private business, as necessary. As essential.

Laws such as these limit what private citizens can do with their property, with their businesses. They are violations of my previously sacrosanct notion of individual liberty. I have made the argument in the past that businesses should be allowed to discriminate; it’s their right to serve or employ whomever they choose. I would add that, if society believed that discrimination was bad, the private sector would take care of the discriminators on its own, by rewarding businesses which did not discriminate and avoiding businesses which did.

But there are only so many times you can hear personal stories of oppression, only so many times you can read empirical studies on the subject, without concluding that the private sector is not, in fact, taking care of it.
It is as socially unacceptable as it has ever been in this country to discriminate against black people, yet it still happens. I can no longer just hope from a position of privilege that the better angels of the American ideal will eventually win out while in the meantime leaving the oppressed and vulnerable to live their lives detached from the pursuit of the American Dream that my upbringing taught me was available to everyone.

It is easy for me, as a straight, white, cisgender, middle class, American male to tell you to buck up. We have this quintessentially American notion of being able to pull yourself up by your boot-straps. But how can we expect someone to lift themselves up if we permit others to hold them down?

It is also quintessentially American that if you work hard, you should be rewarded; that if you are willing and able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you should be free to do so. But this just does not describe the lived experiences of far too many of our neighbors. I wish it was not necessary to have a law preventing employers from discriminating against otherwise hard workers based solely on who they love. But it is. Now that this is the law in Morgantown, nothing would make me happier than there never being an instance of discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation, or veteran status which required us to enforce it.

I am sympathetic with people who argue they should have the right to run their businesses as they see fit. But if the specific right you are defending is the right to prevent someone from working or having a home based on who they are, my sympathy evaporates.

I still approach issues with a bit of a libertarian bent. I still think that it is important that public policy comply with the state and federal constitutions. I think rules like those just codified by our City Council do a good job of balancing the rights of all members of our community, while also respecting the requirements of the constitutions of West Virginia and of the United States.

I am proud of the members of our community who came out to one or more of the many meetings during which City Council discussed this issue and who bravely told their stories. I am proud of our City Council for unanimously approving this nondiscrimination ordinance.

I am still rooting for our better angels to win out; but, in the meantime, the Human Rights Commission is now able to help respond to instances of discrimination within our city.

WV Metronews wrote about the amendments to the ordinance here: http://wvmetronews.com/2017/10/17/morgantown-council-unanimously-passes-amended-human-rights-commission-ordinance/

Make Confederate Monuments History

I love studying history.  I love visiting historic places, reading about historic people and events, and discussing their applicability to our world today. Lets not erase or ignore our history.

My wife earned her undergraduate degree at Gettysburg College, and we love visiting that historic place, in particular.  I am glad that we as a country preserve the battlefields in Gettysburg and maintain a museum there.  As a white man from West Virginia, I had always thought of the monuments and statues on that and other battlefields mostly as museum exhibits.

There are many monuments in Gettysburg which were placed by states of the Confederacy, generally seeking to memorialize the soldiers from those states who died in that battle in 1863.  When I saw monuments like those I imagined them being placed in the years shortly after the war by people still mourning the loss of fathers and sons…. I saw them as a reminder that the Civil War had killed only Americans….and many of us, at that.

But there is more to it than that, of course. Look at the South Carolina monument.  It was dedicated 100 years after the battle, and its design is clearly in line with the contemporaneous campaign to redefine the Civil War as having been primarily about “states’ rights.”  In 1963, of course, southern states were proponents of the concept of states’ rights in order to support their desires to ignore federal civil rights laws.  In 1860, however, in its declaration of secession South Carolina wrote that “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution. The States of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa, have enacted laws which either nullify the Acts of Congress or render useless any attempt to execute them.” (Avalon)

South Carolina decided to secede from the union because northern states were choosing to ignore federal laws requiring the return of fugitive slaves.  That isn’t exactly consistent with the notion advanced in the 1960’s that they fought the war in order to allow states to have the right to ignore federal laws.

To me, the above comparison of the SC Declaration of Secession with the SC Monument at Gettysburg shows that it is important to consider the context in which civil war monuments are erected and not just assume, as I had always done, that they are simply historic markers to be associated primarily or entirely with the era of the civil war.

From FiveThirtyEight: 

Most of those monuments and other symbols date back not to the immediate aftermath of the Civil War but to the early 20th century, when many Southern states were imposing Jim Crow laws. Another wave of monument-building came during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and it hasn’t fully ceased — the SPLC database includes a monument to Confederate soldiers in Tennessee that was erected in 2012.

Looking at the context in which so many confederate monuments were erected makes it impossible to extricate issues of racism and oppression from whatever historical value the monuments might otherwise have.  I believe that non-white folks in this country are more than justified if they see more than just an innocuous nod to history when they look at confederate monuments.

Even if so many of the confederate icons had not been commissioned to be monuments to Jim Crow as much as to Jefferson Davis, there remains something uncomfortable about the way in which they honor the confederacy and its cause.  These are not monuments erected by the United States acknowledging the sacrifices made by people fighting for a defeated foe. These are not simply tributes to soldiers who died doing their duty, but are venerations of the provocateurs of secession and the leaders of rebellion; these are bronze and marble adorations of a cause which was righteously defeated.  These are not cenotaphs erected so that the past is not forgotten, they are shrines built by those who would like to see the past come again.  I believe that patriotic Americans can be justifiably uneasy when confronted with monuments apparently longing to revive a cause which sought to militarily devastate our country.

Still, I believe that is entirely appropriate to maintain statues or monuments to both sides of our civil conflict at places like the Gettysburg National Battlefield.  And I would neither make a sweeping declaration that every single confederate monument outside of a museum or battlefield should be removed nor would I support federal attempts to remove the monuments maintained by states and municipalities.  I would consider each monument on its own and with its own context before offering an opinion, but I don’t believe that my opinion really matters all that much.  I would defer to those who live in each community to deal with things as they see fit, although I would prefer to see political solutions rather than roving mobs tearing down statues.

That said, I would note that, regardless of their historical meanings, it appears that confederate monuments are becoming shrines for despicable hatemongers.  They are becoming rallying points for Nazis and White Supremacists.  Even if you don’t believe that these monuments should be historically associated with racism, they are more and more associated with hate today.

Moving the monuments to places like museums where they can be appreciated in historical context and moving them out of places of official veneration, like capitol grounds or city squares, could deprive agents of hate of powerful symbols which carry the imprimatur of the state, while also allowing the monuments to be given greater context and be accompanied by other appropriate historical items.

If you object to the characterization of confederate monuments as shrines to hate, then you should object to the way that these alt-right, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists are using them. You should want to see these statues moved to museums where they can be protected from hatemongers who would appropriate them as totems of racism and oppression.  If we continue to allow these despicable elements to rally around these statues, we will continue to see growing anger from civil rights advocates and others who will increasingly call for the destruction of the monuments altogether.

America has a complex history, which undeniably includes racism and slavery. I don’t want to erase our history, and that means that I also don’t want to ignore the parts of it that might make us uncomfortable.  Let’s talk about it.  Let’s talk about how it’s understandable that a black person might see that statue of Alexander H. Stephens Georgia placed in the US Capitol a little differently than a white person might see it. Let’s talk about how it can be hard to reconcile the evils of slavery with pride in your ancestors and pride in your home state.  Let’s talk about how over-the-top rhetoric in our politics makes everyone more defensive than they need to be about pretty much everything.

Want to find a way forward? Let’s try to have respectful conversations about this.  Want to preserve history?  That is literally what museums are for.  Want to see a monument you believe to be noble embraced by agents of hate and so be condemned by everyone else? Leave it there, and wait.

 

“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” –– Alexander H. Stephens, 1861

LinkedIn Articles

I stopped using this site in summer of 2016 and starting posting articles at LinkedIn.

I was laid off from my job of 8 years in July 2016, so I was cognizant of the risks of being too political while searching for a job and I also had lost most of my interest in discussing the national election as neither candidate was appealing to me.  So I went to LinkedIn and wrote mostly about Energy Industry issues.  If that sounds like something that you, the imaginary reader of this blog, would like to see, you can find it here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-ryan-miller/detail/recent-activity/posts/.

Due Process is all we’ve got

As an undergraduate majoring in Political Science I studied a lot of interesting policy issues, many in some serious depth in the more advanced courses. But the thing probably most sticks with me is something from the very beginning, from PoliSci 101.

We were discussing Lord of the Flies, and particularly this exchange:

“The rules!” shouted Ralph, “you’re breaking the rules!”

“Who cares?”

Ralph summoned his wits.

“Because the rules are the only thing we’ve got!”

But Jack was shouting against him.

“Bollocks to the rules! We’re strong – we hunt! If there’s a beast, we’ll hunt it down! We’ll close in and beat and beat and beat-” (p.114)

All I am hearing this week is “Bollocks to Due Process! If something scares us we will beat and beat and beat and kill it!”

Due Process is all we’ve got. It matters. Or, at least, it should.

“But we have to do something!” The unspoken part of that sentence is: “even if it doesn’t help…even if it makes things worse…even if it shreds the bill of rights.”  Cornyn’s plan is palatable, I think. Feinstein’s less so. But is it useless to note that neither would have actually done anything to prevent the Orlando massacre, even though we are using Orlando to justify these proposals? It probably is. Even if it doesn’t help, we MUST do something! Because it makes us feel better, and feelz are all that matters, really.

 

There is more at stake here than the vilified Second Amendment

The fifth amendment is the one that is most under attack this week, not the second. And that would scare everyone if they had any sense.

We are trying to ignore the Due Process clause of the 5th (“… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law…”);

…and to get around parts of the 6th (“…the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him…”) by making it the responsibility of the accused to produce proof of their innocence without being actually charged with anything specific enough to be clearly refutable and to require the accused to initiate a suit in order to prove their innocence or otherwise simply be presumed guilty…and, by all accounts, there is a backlog of tens of thousands of appeals to be removed from these lists, but the govt is in no hurry to resolve them with any speed;

….not to mention the obvious implications for the second amendment.

 

Slippery Slopes

I am curious how those who advocate these plans will feel about the government being in the hands of a Donald Trump or some future right winger who will no longer be constrained by the bill of rights. Whoever is appointed to head the department of justice can unilaterally choose to deny rights to any citizen he or she desires, with the only recourse being a nearly quixotic attempt to sue the federal government and win.

I am sure that when the next republican administration decides that it is necessary for the DOJ to act to prevent any medical licenses from being issued to abortion providers without any sort of justification everyone will be ok with that.

 

(These disjointed thoughts inspired by Hoppy Kercheval writing about this topic today: http://wvmetronews.com/2016/06/17/reasonable-and-constitutional-gun-control/)

 

Make America Great Again?

I happen to think that America is a rather great place already. Things aren’t perfect, and there are things that we can do to make them better, but we are doing pretty well for ourselves right now.  I was thinking about this recently, after I put my one year old son to bed, and was talking with my wife, who is carrying our second child (a little girl!).

I wondered to myself about the environment into which my children are being born, and found myself falling into the “I wish things hadn’t got this bad” train of thought.  But then I wondered, if things are so bad now, is there a time from our country’s past that I would have rather brought my children into?  Is there any place and time in the history of the planet that I would have rather have raised my family?

Seriously. Especially if you are a proponent of this “Make America Great Again” slogan, what time from the past would you rather be living in right now? When was America greater.  I am skeptical of the prospect that there is a better time to be chosen, but I am honestly open to hearing the arguments.

I am going to try to research some limited economic aspects of this question here today. I hope to try to evaluate other factors, including global geopolitical stability, the specific question of American prominence internationally, and the extent to which domestic policies in the US have allowed more or less liberty.

I am a white, middle-class male. There is some analysis to be made as to the differences between demographic groups historically, and I look forward to researching these questions from that perspective, as well.  The argument may be that even though things are good for me, that doesn’t mean they are good for every group. While that may be true, (1) I suspect things are still better now than they have been, even for minorities, and (2) the main proponents of “Make America Great Again” seem to be white middle class males, anyway.

Lets Look At The Economics Of It

I would dismiss out of hand any time or place prior to the Industrial Revolution, so nothing before around 1800.  There are countless scholarly sources supporting the dreariness of the world under the pre-industrial Malthusian system.  It is likely that the average person even in Eighteenth-Century England lived no better than had their neolithic ancestors. (I especially enjoyed the perspective of Gregory Clark in “A Farewell to Alms.”)

Since the Industrial Revolution, things seem to have only gotten better and better over time.

Average income in the United States is higher now than it was before:

( http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2008/05/04/average-income-in-the-united-states-1913-2006 )

To be clear, most income growth has been at the top of the economy:

( http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Income-Distribution.php )

But, as I look at that chart, no matter which quintile I am in, I do not see any point in the past that was any better than it is now.  Indeed, the improvement for the bottom quintile is small, but there are increases seen for every quintile.

The unemployment rate has been lower, but it’s always relatively low and relatively volatile:

( http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/unemployment-rate )

GDP Per Capita is always improving:

( http://visualizingeconomics.com/blog/2011/03/08/long-term-real-growth-in-us-gdp-per-capita-1871-2009 )

 

Bottom Line

I tend to like the Human Development Index (HDI). From Our World In Data (https://ourworldindata.org/human-development-index/):

 

Looking at this chart of HDI since about 1870, knowing that HDI measures quality of life, standard of living, literacy, I cannot see any point in time or any place where I would rather be.

You can look at some of my prior posts to see some indication about how the US is still dominating the world economically.

Economically, there has never been a better time to be alive. My children have more opportunity now than they would have had at any time previously. Things can get better, but there were pretty much all worse in the past. There is no time from these charts that I would like to Make America Return to Again.

An Open Letter to Speaker Ryan

The Honorable Paul Ryan
Speaker of the House
United States House of Representatives
1233 Longworth HOB
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Mr. Speaker,

Thank you for your service to your state and to our country. Your leadership has been important and will be even more so going forward.  Prior to switching my registration to Independent recently, I was proud to share a Party with you. As it is, I remain proud to have you serve as Speaker of the House.

Without undue puffery or bombast, I am writing to urge you to rise to the present moment and, while accepting the reality that Mr. Trump is the Republican candidate, be mindful of your role and attempt to serve as an ideological and constitutional check on both the Trump campaign and a potential Trump Presidency.

Indeed, your roles are diverse here. As perhaps the most prominent, most powerful elected Republican in the country, you have some large measure of responsibility for the soul of the party, and I do not believe that it is out of line to say so. It is simply a matter of fact.  In a more traditional election year, you may find yourself deferring to the nominee and supporting him fully. But this year, you must find a way to play your role supporting the party and opposing Mrs. Clinton while also leveraging your power to preserve some semblance of the philosophical underpinnings of the GOP.  Please, resist calls to simply fall in line. Stay the course and defend our values.

As Speaker of the House, you have the additional responsibility of defending the Congress against the continued overreach of the Executive. As the most important Legislator in the nation, you have a responsibility to preserve the constitutional power of the Congress against even your own party’s nominee. By resisting calls to fall in line, you re-affirm the superior place of the Congress to the President in our constitutional republic.

I believe that the expectation that the Speaker of the House bend his knee to any President, let alone to someone who is merely a candidate for President, is a ghastly development in the history of our country. Now is the time to draw the line and defend the role of the Congress.

There are many of us who would like to see you elected as President.  I understand that governing in general, and achieving political success in particular, is an exercise in nuance and compromise. Where is the line between dying on the #NeverTrump hill and taking a principled stand that consolidates support setting up both the conservative movement and yourself for continued electoral success? I wish that I knew. Unfortunately, it falls to you to find that line and to steadfastly follow it.

With your background and your intellect, you clearly understand the threats posed by Mr. Trump.  Please forgive me if I have seemed to lecture here.  I remain your fan, and hope to be able to vote for you for the Presidency someday in the future. But my support for you is dwarfed by my care for the country and for my children’s futures. Because of the threats posed by Trump to both of these, I will have a hard time ever supporting anyone in the future who fully embraced Trump during this campaign.  Perhaps I am and will remain in the minority on that point. So be it.

Mr. Speaker, I do not envy the responsibilities which now fall to you. The futures of the Republican Party and, indeed, of the United States of America may hang in the balance. But I believe that you are up to the task, and will rise to this historic moment.

Thank you for your service. Thank you for your time and your consideration. God Bless you, sir, and God Bless the United States of America.

Sincerely,

Matthew Miller
Montani Semper Liberi

Marijuana Money?

Hoppy Kercheval’s commentary today: http://wvmetronews.com/2016/05/18/high-times-big-money/

It’s a mere coincidence, but just as West Virginia lawmakers are struggling through a special session to figure out how to plug a $270 million hole in next year’s budget, the non-partisan Tax Foundation has released a study showing where states can find millions of dollars in new revenue—legalized marijuana sales for recreational and/or medicinal purposes.

“A mature marijuana industry could generate up to $28 billion in tax revenues for federal, state, and local governments,” the Foundation reports.

…

It’s difficult to imagine the West Virginia Legislature giving any serious thought to pot legalization. The more conservative House of Delegates would only pass the “brunch bill” legalizing Sunday morning alcohol sales if a county referendum provision was attached.

But other states are not so squeamish. At least 20 states will have some form of marijuana legalization measure on the November ballot. The Tax Foundation estimates that “If all states legalized and taxed marijuana, states could collectively expect to raise between $5 billion and $18 billion per year.”

That’s a temptingly large pot of money for states that are hard up for another steady stream of revenue.

 

I have no problems with legalizing marijuana. It should be as legal as alcohol. But it should be legalized in the name of liberty, not in an attempt to make it the salvation of the state budget.

I say that for two reasons:

First, if the underlying motivation isn’t simply liberty, its going to end up being legalized under an over-engineered regime of regulations that end up costing too much, creating opportunities for corruption and setting bad precedents.

Second, it will not be a long-term solution to any financial issues, and legalizing it with that expectation will set us all up for failure in a few years. Once it ends up legal nationwide, WV will run into the same problems that we have with everything else as we struggle to compete and the market prices of the item fluctuate and revenue we collect declines.

Legalize it. Tax is appropriately. Use the revenue for something good. But don’t run to it desperately searching for budget salvation. It shouldn’t be that, and it wouldn’t be that.

An Open letter to My Senator

12 May 2016

The Honorable Shelley Moore Capito
United States Senate
172 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510

Dear Senator Capito,

Thank you for your lifelong devotion to our state and for the good work you continue to do on our behalf.  It has been an honor to vote for you through the years, first for the House of Representatives when I lived in Charleston and now for the Senate.

As I write this, you and other Republican officials in Washington, DC, are meeting with Presumptive Republican Nominee for President Donald Trump.  I am in a woeful minority within our state, but I believe that Mr. Trump poses a special danger to our republic and should not be elected President.

I am loathe to offer you advice on the national political scene, and generally trust your judgment, but I am writing you to urge you not to embrace the candidacy of Donald Trump for President.

As a businessman, Mr. Trump has shown no regard for “the people,” for the country or for such things as private property rights. He has made a career as a crony-corporatist, trading money for favors to advance his own interests. While that makes for good business, it also makes him a hypocrite or a liar as he denounces political “insiders.”

As a candidate, Mr. Trump has shown disdain for the constitution.  He has demonstrated an utter lack of any grounding principles aside from seeking his own advancement.  He is running as a post-constitutional, post-conservative authoritarian, and I believe that he would represent a giant leap further down the path we are already on towards an executive whose power vastly exceeds that which the Founders envisioned and which our country cannot long endure.

And character clearly matters.  While a refusal to kowtow to political correctness is not disqualifying, the ability to be “Presidential” is a bona fide occupational requirement for President of the United States. To say that Donald Trump lacks this ability is an understatement.

Obviously elections are about choosing, not simply opposing. And governing is about making hard choices. In this case, opposing Trump may mean supporting former Secretary Clinton.  Clearly, Mrs. Clinton is not popular in West Virginia, and for good reason. I am not asking you to support her over Mr. Trump, only that you decline to either formally or informally endorse Mr. Trump.

I will oppose him actively, and if you are unable to do that, I still invite you to at least not openly advocate for him.

I registered as a Republican when I turned 18, a move that was very unpopular amongst my friends here in West Virginia at the time, as I am sure you can imagine. The rise of Trumpism within the Republican Party this Spring has led me to change my registration from Republican to Independent.  I cannot have my imprimatur on the nomination of Donald Trump for the Presidency.  Going forward, I expect to mostly support Republican candidates, but will have a hard time ever casting a vote in favor of anyone who supported Mr. Trump.

As someone who works in the Oil and Gas Industry, and someone who is attuned to the impact that federal pressure on the energy industry is having on multiple sectors within WV and beyond, I am very aware that a Hillary Clinton presidency may have on our state.  An EPA that continues its activism and an administration that continues to push things like the Clean Power Plan may eventually literally cost me my job.

But I wholeheartedly believe that even that is preferable to abandoning our country to the whims of Mr. Trump.  The Republican Party has a chance to elect a better nominee in 2020 to replace Mrs. Clinton, and that person would have the ability to begin to correct many of the administrative overreaches of the previous four years. But a one or two term Trump Presidency, in the aftermath of the two term Obama Presidency, and combined with the inevitable overreaction to elect an extremist democrat to replace him, will total up to literally decades of bad presidents.

I am not yet certain how I intend to vote this November. I hope to find a third-party candidate worth supporting. Or perhaps I will simply write-in someone such as yourself.  But I can never vote for Mr. Trump.

For the country, for the sake of my 1 year old son and my unborn second child, I ask you to oppose Donald Trump, or at the very least not to endorse him or openly support him.

Thank you, again, for your service; and thank you for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Matthew Miller

Trump and the Constitution

Donald Trump has probably never read any of the Constitution. Why would he have?  There have been myriad examples of policy questions which have come up during this campaign which, when posed to Mr. Trump, his answer reveals that he has clearly never thought about the matter before.

Which is not necessarily a bad thing. There are so many issues which fall under the office of the President which most people never need to consider.  It would be encouraging if he showed that he had cared enough to at least brush up on some of them a little bit before running for the Presidency, but he clearly doesn’t think that is important for him to do.

But his willful ignorance seems to extend to the Constitution, as well.  He has just never saw any reason to worry about what it says…or to think about what it means.  For many people, this is not a problem; indeed, for some, it is probably viewed as a positive.  Prior to this election season, I had believed that most such people were on the political left.  Clearly, that is not the case.

I do not believe that following examples require much in the way of explanation.  If you can read through the list and still believe that Mr. Trump has a governing philosophy which is based on (or even aware of) the Constitution, there is probably no way to convince you of the truth.

With regard to the First Amendment’s protection of Freedom of the Press/Speech:

*             February 26, 2016:

“We’re going to open up those libel laws so when The New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace, or when the Washington Post, which is there for other reasons, writes a hit piece, we can sue them and win money instead of having no chance of winning because they’re totally protected,” he said. “We’re going to open up libel laws and we’re going to have people sue you like you’ve never got sued before.” (http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/26/media/donald-trump-libel-laws/)

Trump added that, should he win the election, news organizations that have criticized him will “have problems.” (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/trump-threatens-to-weaken-first-amendment-protections-for-reporters/)

*             Indeed, Trump has a long history of filing frivolous libel suits in an attempt to silence critics:

“Donald Trump has been filing and threatening lawsuits to shut up critics and adversaries over the whole course of his career. He dragged reporter Tim O’Brien through years of litigation over a relatively favorable Trump biography that assigned a lower valuation to his net worth than he thought it should have. He sued the Chicago Tribune’s architecture critic over a piece arguing that a planned Trump skyscraper in lower Manhattan would be “one of the silliest things” that could be built in the city. He used the threat of litigation to get an investment firm to fire an analyst who correctly predicted that the Taj Mahal casino would not be a financial success. He sued comedian Bill Maher over a joke.

…And Ilya Somin cites further elements forming a pattern: Trump has expressed his wish to “have the FCC take some of his critics off the airwaves” and his regret that protesters at his events could not be dealt with in such a way that they “have to be carried out on a stretcher.” He also writes that should Trump proceed to appoint judges who strongly share his view of libel law, those judges “are unlikely to effectively protect other important speech rights and civil liberties.” And a late-January post from Patterico recalls Trump threats against the Washington Post (again), John Kasich, a t-shirt company, and a Jeb Bush PAC, to which might be added the Club for Growth, reporter Tim Mak, Scotland, Univision, and many more.”(http://overlawyered.com/2016/02/trump-libel-law/)

 

Trump repeatedly makes it clear that he does not see the value of protected speech. He wants to “open up libel laws” because writers are too protected by the constitution.  He would lack the power to actually do much with libel laws or curtailing the first amendment, at least in an formal way.  But entrusting the Presidency to him means that he has every regulatory and federal enforcement agency at his disposal to deal with those he considers enemies.  While he won’t be able to win a lawsuit against a newspaper for printing a protected story or shut it down for protected speech, he can use the IRS, FTC, EPA, FDA, FBI and the rest of the alphabet soup to make life difficult for the paper, or its investors or business partners.  As he has said in the past, simply causing the offending writer to have to spend money defending himself was enough for Trump to get his rocks off. So giving him the entire federal government to use to force his opponents to spend time and money defending themselves seems wildly irresponsible.

 

Skeptical? When the Washington Post published an article of which Mr. Trump did not approve, he lashed out not only at the paper, but at owner Jeff Bezos, and Bezos’ other company, Amazon:

“I have respect for Jeff Bezos, but he bought the Washington Post to have political influence. And I gotta tell you, we have a different country than we used to have. We have a different… He owns Amazon. He wants political influence so that Amazon will benefit from it. That’s not right. And believe me, if I become president, oh do they have problems. They’re gonna have such problems,” said Trump. (http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-attacks-jeff-bezos/article/2001298)

I will add that I doubt that Mr. Trump would understand the nuances of the law enough to realize that the latitude that he has to remove protestors from his presence at his private rallies doesn’t extend quite as broadly to many of the public appearances making and public places he would be visiting as President.

Would Mr. Trump appoint judges or Justices who share his lack of respect for the Freedom of the Press or Freedom of Speech?  Would such judges help to weaken our first Amendment protections? Any jurist who shared this mindset would almost certainly plan to overturn Citizens United.

With Regard to the First Amendment’s Protection of Freedom of Religion:

*             November 20, 2015:

“Nobody wants to say this and nobody wants to shut down religious institutions or anything,” Trump told Fox News, but the U.S. will have “absolutely no choice” but to shut down some mosques. Trump also said he was open to the idea of forcing Muslim-Americans to carry a special government identification card and forcing Muslim-Americans to register in a national government database. (https://reason.com/blog/2015/11/20/donald-trump-has-now-trashed-the-1st-ame)

*             December 8, 2015

“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on,” a campaign press release said.

Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski told CNN on Monday that the ban would apply not just to Muslim foreigners looking to immigrate to the U.S., but also to Muslims looking to visit the U.S. as tourists.

“Everyone,” Lewandowski said when asked if the ban would also apply to Muslim tourists. (http://www.cnn.com/2015/12/07/politics/donald-trump-muslim-ban-immigration/)

The First Amendment prevents the government from playing favorites with religions, and prevents interference with the free exercise of religion.  Suggesting that it is ok to close down houses of worship, require a database of religious adherents or use religion as a screen for visiting this country is clearly not reflective of an underlying respect for the Religious Protections afforded by the First Amendment.

Would Mr. Trump appoint Judges and Justices who would issue rulings which set precedents allowing the government to infringe upon religion?  You may be ok that it “just the Muslims” now, but once it’s the law, the next President can come after you.

With Regard to the Fifth Amendment

The Due Process guaranteed by the fifth amendment would also be a hindrance to Trump’s plans to target Muslims as discussed above.  It also would be a serious speed bump in an attempt to unilaterally deport millions of people, or to confiscate money being sent from the US to Mexico.

His interpretation of the portion of the fifth amendment dealing with the taking of private property has also always been a very liberal one.  You can read a decent history of it here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/08/19/donald-trumps-abuse-of-eminent-domain/

If he appointed judges or justices who share his lack of respect for due process and for private property, protections for all of us would be weakened.  The Kelo decision may never be overturned, regardless, but it certainly wouldn’t be if new justices shared Trump’s love of eminent domain.  And Civil Asset Forfeiture is becoming a huge problem in this country, as law enforcement abuse their power to steal from the accused.  Trumpian judges will not help to put an end to this problem.

With Regard to the Fourteenth Amendment

“I don’t think they have American citizenship,” Trump told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, in reference to the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants. “It’s not going to hold up in court, it’s going to have to be tested.”

If you need a little background on the 14^th Amendment:

On March 27, 1866, President Andrew Johnson sent a message to Congress vetoing the landmark civil rights bill it had just passed. Among the provisions “which I cannot approve,” Johnson wrote, was the first section, which stated, “All persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.”

Not only would this grant of birthright citizenship make citizens out of “the entire race designated as blacks,” Johnson protested, it would also make citizens out of “the Chinese of the Pacific States, Indians subject to taxation, [and] the people called Gipsies.” He wouldn’t sign it.

So the Republican-controlled 39th Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 over the president’s veto. As Sen. Lyman Trumbull (R–Ill.), the bill’s primary author, declared from the Senate floor, “the child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European.” Several months later, that same Republican Congress passed the legislation that became the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which, among other things, declared, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Upon ratification in 1868, the 14th Amendment’s Citizenship Clause enshrined the principle of birthright citizenship in the text of the Constitution. At the same time, it overturned the U.S. Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford, which held that persons of African descent could never be U.S. citizens. It was a magnificent achievement for the young Republican Party.

https://reason.com/archives/2015/11/10/trump-vs-the-constitution/

 

With regard to Article 1, Article 2, and Article 3 (that is, Separation of Powers)

*             December 10, 2015

“One of the first things I’d do in terms of executive orders, if I win, will be to sign a strong, strong statement that will go out to the country, out to the world, that anybody killing a policeman, a policewoman, a police officer, anybody killing a police officer: Death penalty is going to happen, okay?” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/10/donald-trump-wants-the-death-penalty-for-those-who-kill-police-officers/)

This manages to step on the powers or Congress and the Judiciary, along with the States (so add 10^th Amendment).

*             February 29, 2016

During the last Republican presidential debate in Texas, Donald Trump spoke of his sister, a liberal activist judge who he says would make a “phenomenal” Supreme Court justice, and defended her against criticism she has received “for signing a certain bill”—his words—from the bench. He then said his sister wasn’t the only judge who had “signed that bill”; more than one judge had “signed that bill.” (http://www.weeklystandard.com/trump-on-the-separation-of-powers-judges-sign-bills/article/2001315)

 

*             Trump acts as though the President can unilaterally do almost anything. Which is unfortunately becoming more and more true, but is not how it was intended, and is not quite how it is:

The real estate mogul has said that he would convince the Mexican government to pay for a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, forge close ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and stop U.S. jobs from being outsourced abroad. When asked how he will achieve these outcomes, Trump often points to his success in business, particularly his ability to negotiate.

But Trump, these scholars argue, is promoting an idea of the presidency sometimes referred to as the Green Lantern theory, named after the Green Lantern Corps, a fictional police force in DC Comics whose members wear all-powerful rings. The U.S. president, according to this theory, is often cast as a person with essentially a magic wand allowing him or her to shape outcomes.

Scholars say such a view ignores the role, incentives and power of members of Congress, the American public, private businesses and foreign governments, who can block or limit the goals of a president. (http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/scholars-doubt-donald-trumps-approach-presidency-n458011)

 

With Regard to the Second Amendment

Mr. Trump mostly says all of the right things now about the right to keep and bear arms (it’s his “whole thing,” after all).  But it is important to consider his history of support for gun control, along with his history of adapting his positions to suit the needs of the moment.

I do not believe that Mr. Trump would actively work against second amendment rights, but I am also not convinced he is a reliable defender of them.  That is, he may be persuaded to accept some gun control measure as part of a compromise with a future democratic congress.  Or, perhaps in the wake of a high-profile tragedy, may be persuaded to endorse gun control by forceful advocates and popular opinion.

I also wonder how important second amendment rights would be to him as he chose judges and justices.  Indeed, if he were to pick a judge who shared his opinions on the rest of the constitution, it is unlikely that judge would be a staunch defender of the second amendment while finding the rest of the constitution to be very open to interpretation.

 Blustery Forecast

All of this really means that Mr. Trump will either be prevented from doing almost anything that he wants to do, or that he will do so in violation of the constitution.  Which really just leaves us with his ability to bluster.

From Trump’s dangerous interpretation of America’s benefits from global stability  to his fundamentally flawed understanding of international trade and economics , there is little reason to have faith that the things he could do on his own would be things which were beneficial to anyone.  (I wrote the two posts linked in this paragraph, obviously, but you can find a better treatment of Trump’s massively flawed economic philosophy here: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/433214/united-states-trade-and-economic-realities

Trumponomics 2: Non-Monetary Values

As a businessman, it is not surprising that Donald Trump focuses so intently on bottom line dollar amounts when he considers foreign policy.  While I assume Trump has never actually prepared any financial statements himself, he should be aware that even there businesses account for non-monetary assets such as goodwill.  When calculating the benefits received by the United States as a result of our expenditures of both blood and treasure on foreign policy, simply counting dollars is woefully inadequate.

And Trump has shown that money is more important than Americans to him personally. When given the choice to produce things like ties or shirts here in the US or abroad, he chooses to employ foreign workers because he sees no value from helping out Americans.

Value in Security

From the NY Post:

 Donald Trump wants US allies to ante up if they want to continue under the “cloak of American protection,” according to his first detailed comments on his foreign-policy platform.

“We’re not being reimbursed for the kind of tremendous service that we’re performing by protecting various countries,” the Republican front-runner was quoted as saying.

While the world has changed dramatically since the Cold War, the notion of Spheres of Influence is not without some lingering value.  Is the US or the world better off if our allies are left unprotected? More realistically, is the US better off if our allies are forced to look to Russia or China for protection, becoming dependant on staying in the good graces of those countries?  What is the dollar value of having a country be a friend of the US rather than a puppet of Vladimir Putin?

Trump tries to argue that his views are not “isolationist,” preferring the term “America First.”   But if implemented as he wants, his plans would indeed be isolating, and dangerous.

All Americans benefit from trade.  And we all benefit from a more stable world. A world “under the cloak of American protection” provides the sort of stability that decreases the sort of situations which produce wars and terrorism and increases the number of markets and routes for trade. If you don’t like how unstable things are now, you are going to like the world Trump would abandon to its own devices even less.

 Value in Patriotism

When I shop, I prefer to buy items made in America, and most prefer to buy items made in my home state of West Virginia. If two products are equal, I would choose the one made here over the one made elsewhere.

This isn’t charity, its economics.

The concept of a Consumer Surplus has to do with the value a consumer receives in excess of the cost he must pay to receive it.

A brief example: if its 6 pm you haven’t eaten all day, you might be willing to pay $10 for a burger because you really want one. You can get a Big Mac for only $4, so if you make that purchase, you have received ten dollars in value for a cost of only $4. That’s a consumer surplus of $6. (Conversely, if you have just eaten two Big Macs, you may only be willing to pay 50 cents for a third, but since it still costs $4, you would not receive enough value in return for your money to justify the purchase.)

Most of the time, we do not make such calculations so explicitly, but we are making them subconsciously all of the time.

For me, there is some dollar amount value which I attribute to supporting a West Virginia company.  Take, for instance, a bottle of beard oil.  If there is a bottle of bear oil for sale for $10, and a bottle of comparable beard oil made in WV for sale for $13, I would choose the WV oil because even though the product is the same the fact that is made here makes it more valuable to me.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, has no such feelings. He would rather make his clothing in China or Mexico or Bangladesh than in the US, because doing so makes him more money. Not that there is anything wrong with that, but its telling about his priorities.

Trump will claim that its not his fault, its just too expensive to manufacture things here compared to China.  He likes to cite Chinese currency manipulation as his favorite reason as to why that is the case. But his solutions to that problem are all to make it more expensive to produce things overseas, by forcing China to stop manipulating its currency or with huge tariffs. Making production in China more expensive would not make production in the US any cheaper, only more competitive as compared to China.  So Trump could then choose to manufacture things in the US since it doesn’t make any difference to his bottom line.

Here’s the thing, though, Trump could choose to pay those higher production costs in the US right now. He doesn’t need the government to make China expensive in order to do that.  That is, under his plans, manufacturing in the US would not be any more profitable than it is now, there just wouldn’t be any other options.  If he would choose to make less money by manufacturing in the US if China wasn’t an option, why wouldn’t he just do that now?

Because he wants to squeeze every dollar he can out of everything he does, and that is his only motivation.  If he actually thought there was value in manufacturing in the US, he could be doing it now.   Defending him by claiming that would be “bad business” is not inaccurate.  But don’t then try to claim that he actually cares about American workers.  His priorities are clear.