On Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn

In the Senate today, Bernie Sanders and Tom Coburn got into an altercation over an attempt by Mr. Sanders to insert a single-payer amendment into the healthcare bill.  Mr. Coburn asked that the 767-page amendment, which would have been the ultimate Christmas present for Democrats, and anathema to Republicans, be read aloud on the Senate floor.  According to one reporter, the exercise would have taken eight hours.  This possibility prompted Mr. Sanders to withdraw the amendment, though not without some sharp words for his colleague.

This is part of a larger trend: a major, if subtle, Republican tactic to drum up popular opposition to healthcare reform has been to cite, as frequently and as loudly as possible, the huge numbers of pages of legislation that healthcare reform would consume.  In response, Democratic talking heads have used the Republican complaints about length as an example of the absurd, trite, and insubstantial nature of the Republican opposition to healthcare reform.

So the question: can the length of a bill be sufficient reason for opposing it?  I would like to submit that the answer is yes.  Arcane and lengthy legislation removes power from citizens in a variety of ways.

First, a 767-page amendment is difficult to read.  When Congress publishes thousands of pages of legislation a year, how is the average voting citizen supposed to keep up?  I am all for civic participation, and I would accept the proposition that the average American does not care enough about or invest enough time in the government, but it is simply not reasonable to expect working Americans to come to a considered conclusion about several pages of legalese for each day of the year.  In this way, by making legislation lengthy, it is almost guaranteed that only a tiny minority of the voting public will ever have any direct knowledge of what it contains.  Very few people will be able to perform primary evaluation of the legislation.  Very few people will actually know what it contains.

This forced ignorance of the American public has several pernicious consequences.  First, it is in part responsible for our current culture of partisanship.  When a voter cannot read the legislation, he turns to the news media to inform him.  Thus, by means of several mostly redundant thirty-second soundbites a day, he acquires in his mind a caricature of the legislation.  This image is further distorted by the almost inevitable intentional or unintentional bias of most popular media outlets, ranging from Fox News (intentional) to the New York Times (apparently unintentional).  In the end, the voter is reduced to chanting a slogan – “Healthcare is a right!” or “Universal healthcare is socialism!” – while having a thousand micro-debates on parts of the bill that never make it to the President’s desk, such as the “kill Granny” provision.

The same hapless ignorance that distorts the creation of legislation is also a danger to citizens once the legislation has been passed.  Consider the tax code: a frequent complaint against it is that its complexity enables rich citizens, who can hire lawyers, to make careers out of sifting through the tax code, understanding its complexities and loopholes, and in this way performing legal pirouettes so as to pay less taxes than even the poorest among us.  Meanwhile, the rest of us can never be quite sure that we’re not committing tax fraud – sure, I filed my 1040, but did I spend the extra twenty minutes tracking down Schedule 4149 to make sure that I’m eligible to file just a 1040?

This state of ignorance can be induced by any complex piece of legislation.  For example, suppose that healthcare reform passes: how will you determine what you must do to be in compliance with the law?  Will you read the entire piece of legislation?  Unlikely.  Have you read the entire tax code?  No… if you’re responsible, you’ve probably paid someone else to do your taxes, someone who has the time and resources to understand the tax code, or if you can’t afford this, you’ve done them yourself and hoped for the best.  In just the same way, if healthcare reform passes, the very same insurance companies that are taking your money now to offer you “protection” will switch their packs of lawyers from finding ways of denying you coverage to finding short, snippy tidbits of information they can give you about the new legislation (that come with no guarantees, of course).

In short, complex legislation, regardless of its intended effect, transfers power.  It transfers power from the citizens, who are the ultimate source of the law, to bureaucracies, both governmental and corporate, who have the time and resources to understand complex legislation.  Common citizens, ignorant of the law, are at a disadvantage against these organizations.

This is not an argument against big government.  One can imagine a tax law as simple as a flat tax that would produce the same level of income as the current gargantuan tax code.  One can imagine a brief charter for a governmental healthcare corporation.  This is simply an argument that, no matter one’s political beliefs, in a democratic society, all expression of the law must be comprehensible, so that it is subject to the evaluation of the citizens, because the citizens themselves are ultimately responsible for the justice of their society.

I do not say that complex legislation cannot work under any conditions; a society like China’s is well-suited for complex legislation.  The servile populace, under the iron fist of a sprawling governmental bureaucracy, has no hand in the justice of its own society.  The government, subsuming all power itself, also subsumes all responsibility.  The common Chinese citizen cannot be expected to understand the way his government works; he can only hope that it will be just to him, and reward or punish him according to his deserts.  He gives up his freedom of action and his political voice, and in return, he is freed from the responsibility of helping to provide his society with justice.

How nice it would be if in our country we didn’t have to worry our pretty little heads with understanding laws before they’re passed.  Help make this a reality!

Roman Polanski and the French

This time the cheese-eating surrender monkeys have gone too far.  In contemplating the recent detainment of Roman Polanski, the man who had sex with a thirteen-year-old girl, the New York Times cites the opinion of a former French cultural minister, Jack Lang:

“…for Europeans the development showed that the American system of justice had run amok.   ‘Sometimes, the American justice system shows an excess of formalism… like an infernal machine that advances inexorably and blindly.’”

In essence, Lang’s point is an argument that individuality should trump the laws.  Because Roman Polanski is a great artist, the venial sin of having sex with a minor ought to be forgiven.  After all, it’s been a long time, and it’s just a little law that was broken.  He’s paid his dues and then some, right?  The characterization of the American justice system as “running amok” (the Times’s, not Lang’s) and “an infernal machine” “inexorably and blindly” advancing seem intended to communicate the idea that the American justice system is behaving in an out of control way, and being destructive rather than creative.

This idea is exactly correct, if you consider that art and civility are being destroyed by that nasty business of the detention – much more nasty than coercive sex with minors.  It is not correct, however, if you consider that the American justice system is not so much “running amok” as doing exactly what its creators intended for it to do, which is to administer justice, blindly and dispassionately.  The justice system was intended to create justice, not to preserve corrupt artists.  It was intended to be blind!

Nonetheless, Lang and the Times seem to believe that at some point, the justice system should just stop if the art community and the good people of France tell it to do so.  Because it does not, it is “running amok”.  They seem to believe that it is the duty of prosecutors to wink and condone the sins of the great, rather than being so formal, and to weigh the balance of a person’s accomplishments before prosecuting his crimes.

The point is a good one if you believe that the rich, the powerful, and the talented should be above the law.  It suffers, though, if you believe that laws exist precisely to enforce a certain level of equality and decency that are apt to be discarded by those rich and powerful.  To the Times, I say “For shame!”  Recall the story of Charondas, dictator of Catana: in order to prevent the intimidation of the public by displays of force, he ordered that no citizen should be permitted to wear arms in public assembly, on pain of death.  One day, after suppressing a band of brigands who had been causing terror in the city, he rushed to an assembly on the subject, forgetting to disarm.  A citizen reproached him for breaking his own law, to which he responded, “I will rather confirm it.”  So saying, he drew his sword and slew himself.

Charondas, unlike Roman Polanski, acknowledged the supreme value of laws over the judgment of individuals, which is so often blinded by a moment’s vicissitude or the perspective of inflamed passions.  One might even argue that Charondas saw that, even if it appeared unjust that he himself should be punished for a law that he had not intended to break, the greater justice was that it be forcefully illustrated to all of the citizens that the law must always be obeyed.

Charondas had the humility of Socrates, another Greek who had great respect for the law: the story of “Crito” lays out Socrates’ reasons for accepting the capital punishment at the hands of his people despite the apparent injustice of the sentence.  Wikipedia summarizes the arguments with more clarity than I could possibly preserve.

Charondas and Socrates had the humility to put the laws over themselves even when the stakes were their own lives.  Polanski had the arrogance to put his own enjoyment above the laws for far lower stakes.  I will hope that the laws punish not just his original misdeed, but the damage his arrogance – or cowardice – has done to the idea of blind and equal justice across the board.

A footnote: the Times has recently come under fire (summarized here) for inadequate coverage of the Acorn scandal.  Its excuse then was that it was incompetent.  What’s the excuse this time?  How does a supposedly illustrious journalistic enterprise excuse this piece of wandering, rhapsodic crap?  Is this bag of bigoted anecdotes journalism?  Are you kidding me?