(1) I am glad that he said he was “humbled” by the nomination. It is a lie, of course, just as it will be a lie when President Obama says it next week, but it is the one lie politicians should — must! — keep telling. Perhaps, if they say it often enough, one day it will be true. But even when not true, it is an important concession to the authority of virtue, and places a subtle constraint on executive power.
(2) The man has a dishonest mien. I’m told by many respectable people that Mr. Romney does, in fact, believe what he is saying, and just can’t get past RomneyBot 3000. Now, I happen to think most of those respectable authorities are themselves dishonest hacks, and Mr. Romney’s record on honesty speaks for itself. But it will be the robotic demeanor, not the record, that costs him the election.
Very nearly everyone is confused about how the Ryan Medicare reform works. It’s not just you. Two-thirds of the people who are getting paid to talk about it in the news media have no idea what the plan is. I was confused this morning, and I’m still confused on some of the finer points. But I did my research, and I’d like to share it with you.
The Ryan plan has been through three versions.
First was the Path to Prosperity Prosposal, which Rep. Ryan put forward in December 2010 as an idea.
The Path to Prosperity was popular, and got picked up by the rest of the party. Some changes were made, compromises hammered out, and that became the House Budget that was passed in April 2011 (but never enacted into law).
Finally, there was the Ryan-Wyden plan. Ryan and a Democratic Congressman named Rep. Wyden came up with it as a compromise plan after the Democrats said that the Ryan Plan could leave seniors vulnerable. It was first presented in (I believe) December 2011.
The big problem for the last few days is that everyone is talking about the Ryan Plan, but nobody is talking about the correct Ryan Plan. Even on the news, people are talking about the Budget version from April, not the Wyden version from December. Ryan-Wyden is apparently not widely known, even though it ended up featuring prominently in the 2013 edition of the Path to Prosperity, completely replacing the original plan from last year. Perhaps the revision got so little attention because there was no budget battle this year. Hopefully that will change as the presidential race progresses.
Anyway, over on Reddit, they have a forum called “Explain Like I’m Five,” where people ask questions about big, complicated things, and everyone has to answer in simple, easy-to-understand terms, as if talking to a five-year-old. Today, someone asked about the Ryan plan. Here is my explanation of the Ryan-Wyden plan to reform Medicare, as I would explain it to a five-year-old (with more wonky sidebars where appropriate):
This appendix expands on my discussion, in Part IV, of the constitutionality of §939.75(2)(b)(1) of the Wisconsin Code if the Personhood Amendment passes ANDRoe v. Wade is overturned by the Supreme Court at some future date AND abortion-rights advocates are able to have §940.04struck down on an equal protection claim under the Personhood Amendment AND it is struck down in its entirety, rather than (as the Wisconsin Legislative Bureau suggested) in part. Obviously, this appendix is highly speculative. My series on Wisconsin Personhood began in Part I.
Before we say any more about 939.75(2)(b)(1), let’s remind ourselves, for the sake those readers who did not skip directly to the appendix, how 940.04 got struck down, giving us Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s potential Nightmare Scenario. This is from the white paper, page 12:
4. If adopted, what impact would the proposed state constitutional amendment have on § 940.04?
The Personhood Amendment does not present the same obstacles to renewed enforcement as the 2006 proposal. In the context of the proposed amendment as a whole, however, the reference to all people (including children prior to birth) being “equally” free raises troublesome difficulties in this regard.
This post is a direct continuation of Part IIIof my series on Personhood Wisconsin. I am not even stopping to breathe, much less to recap the discussion for those of you just joining us. If you want to catch up from the beginning, the series began in Part I.
We were just discussing Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s claim that enacting Personhood could lead to an essentially unlimited right to abortion in Wisconsin, even after Roev. Wade is overturned. I have termed this the “Nightmare Scenario.” In my previous post, I showed why the mere possibility of the Nightmare Scenario is not dispositive for the Personhood Amendment and its supporters. In this post, I aim to show why the Nightmare Scenario is much less likely than Bopp et al. contend.
The key to the Nightmare Scenario is the white paper’s claim that, under Personhood, there is arealpossibility that 940.04 could be completely struck down in a court challenge. This is actually true: if the lawsuit is brought, there is a non-trivial chance it will succeed. But, if 940.04 is struck down, what would happen to unborn children? Bopp et al. believe the Nightmare Scenario is the unavoidable outcome. On the contrary, the Nightmare Scenario – the return of a virtually unstoppable right to abortion – is not only avoidable, but is arguably the least likely outcome of a successful lawsuit against 940.04.
If you have not read my introduction to the Wisconsin Personhood initiative, please read that first.
You might also wish to read the second article in this series, which discussed Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s public claims about the Personhood Amendment. We now move on to its non-public claims.
This third post about Personhood Wisconsin is a lot more technical than the first two. It’s also a lot longer. It has no funny pictures. I am assuming that you are, by this point, familiar with the basic terrain, and that you know my feelings about the groups involved, so I will not restate them. Instead, I will dive right in.
Here’s the TLDR: Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s lawyers rely on a peculiar combination of unlikely presumptions and studied indifferences in order to reach their conclusion opposing the Personhood Amendment. Their white paper consistently presumes all the risks of a Personhood Amendment, no matter how unlikely, and studiously ignores or dismisses both the rewards of Personhood and at least one obvious counter-argument to their major claim. For these reasons, I consider its conclusions unreasonable. Wisconsin unborn children will be best protected by passing a Personhood Amendment, rather than leaving them to an uncertain future under the vulnerable pre-Roe statute currently on the books. That’s the long and short of it. If you are not feeling up to an extensive nitpicking of a fourteen-page legal opinion, you can leave now.
If you have not read my introduction to the Wisconsin Personhood initiative, please read that first.
This post deals with Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s public claims about Personhood. For a discussion of the (substantially different) arguments employed by its legal white paper, please see the later posts in this series.
Barb Lyons, director of Wisconsin Right-to-Life. Winner of the NRLC’s annual kindly-lookingness award in 2001, 2004, and 2006-2009 inclusive.
I want to lead this post off by noting, for the record, that we are all allies in the pro-life movement, and that Wisconsin Right-to-Life is emphatically a part of that movement. The organization has, in many cases, led the battle against abortion in Wisconsin, and has some very significant victories in its cap, including the Supreme Court milestone FEC v. Wisconsin Right-to-Life. I have it on good authority that the organization remains committed to the eradication of abortion in Wisconsin, without exception, without apology (for there can be no apology in protecting the innocent). Even if I didn’t have an friend in the organization who can speak for WRtL, the organization’s record speaks for itself.
I want to make the same statement about Jim Bopp, who will be mentioned frequently in my next post, because WRtL cited him to me as the lead author of their legal white paper on Personhood. I am young, and missed the pro-life battles of the 1980s, but I’m told that Mr. Bopp was there, crusading for the pro-life movement, always finding a novel way to advance a difficult cause – no matter how humbling the strategy. I know that he himself has worked on model legislation that would have enacted Personhood at the federal level, so he can hardly be counted an enemy of the Personhood movement. That landmark Supreme Court decision I mentioned above? Bopp was the lawyer who represented Wisconsin Right-to-Life in its free speech case against the FEC. Today, he mainly shows up in my mail in connection with the many clients – including the Susan B. Anthony List – whom he is defending against rapacious lawsuits by the vanguard of abortion.
So I ask all my readers to understand that, while I have sometimes become angry while researching this series, the following post is written in a tone of bafflement, not accusation. These are not Pro-Lifers In Name Only. Indeed, they are more than friends: the rest of us, especially the young who have not yet struck many blows for the cause, are manifestly in their debt.
However, the reasons they have articulated for opposing Wisconsin Personhood are not merely strange – they are highly questionable and deeply troubling. As I described in my last post, after reading the reasons against Personhood posted on WRtL’s website, I had a lot of questions, and, eventually, WRtL sent me its full legal white paper allegedly justifying its anti-personhood position. I do not believe that it does, but I’ll get there in my next post.
Before I go through the white paper, I wish to make quick work of the Personhood information displayed on Wisconsin Right-to-Life’s website. Some of this information is grossly misleading, bearing faint resemblance to the arguments made in the organization’s legal white paper. Overall, it represents a profound disservice to the pro-life public Wisconsin Right-to-Life serves. By greatly exaggerating the risks of a Personhood Amendment, Wisconsin Right-to-Life makes it impossible for the individual pro-lifer to make a fair judgement about the initiative. The website begins by claiming:
The battle for the soul of the pro-life movement is being waged between a pair of cheap office suites in the Milwaukee suburbs.
In the challenger’s corner, scrappy Pro-Life Wisconsin is working to pass an amendment to the Wisconsin Constitution that would recognize the equal rights of all human beings, from conception to dotage. In the champion’s corner, heavyweight Wisconsin Right-to-Life, standard-bearer for the pro-life cause, official affiliate of the National Right-to-Life Committee, and oldest pro-life org in the state, is campaigning to… block the law giving equal rights to the unborn.
What?
Pictured: The War for the Soul of the Pro-Life Movement, Brookfield theatre. Following a skirmish which, according to survivors, raged “from North Avenue to the horizon,” combatants called a cease-fire so they could grab pizza from that weird Italian place on Blue Mound Road at Thomas Lane.
I’ve written about this controversy before, but, even among pro-lifers, this is a fairly obscure conflict, so I’ll begin my series on Personhood Wisconsin with a recap.
This week saw some briefs filed in the lawsuit over Secretary of State Mark Ritchie’s attempt to unilaterally change the title of the Minnesota Marriage Amendment. The briefs are the first real meat in the case, and help clarify some of the questions I asked two weeks ago.
In the spirit of the moment, I’ll keep my comments brief (see image). The first document filed was an amicus brief from nineteen Minnesota professors of law, most of them actively involved in the campaign against the Marriage Amendment. The group is led by Dale Carpenter, of whom I am rather fond. Their file can be found here.
One of the things that makes it difficult to track the Divorce Revolution of the late ’60s and ’70s (and its many dire consequences) is the fact that, after California “started” the revolution on January 1, 1970, the effective date of the Family Law Act of 1969, it’s not really clear which states adopted no-fault divorce and when. Dates are hard enough to come by, and differing standards of what “counts” as no-fault divorce law makes it even harder to track.
I just read (well, skimmed) a very interesting little paper called The Effective Dates of No-Fault Divorce Laws in the 50 States, by Ashbaugh Vlosky and Pamela A. Monroe, published in the October 2002 issue of Family Relations. The article is under copyright, so, because American copyright law remains entirely dysfunctional and largely insane, I can’t share the whole thing with you. However, per the article’s terms of use and the U.S.’s Fair Use doctrine, I can share with you a single table. This one:
I’m going to leave it here for reference. Maybe one day some adventurous Wikipedian will come along and document it for the WP article on no-fault divorce in the United States. I will, of course, refer to it frequently, and, since no one reads this blog, it is mainly for my benefit anyway.
If you read this blog, you are probably already aware of the lawsuit the supporters of the Minnesota marriage amendment have filed against Secretary of State Mark Ritchie. As the local paper-of-record relates:
In late June, Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, a Democrat, said he planned to change the title of the amendment question on the November ballot from “Recognition of marriage solely between one man and one woman” to “Limiting the status of marriage to opposite sex couples.”
Supporters of the amendment, which would constitutionally define marriage as only the union of heterosexual couples, say Ritchie “unlawfully” changed the title.
This is an interesting little case. The politics of this are obvious (the Secretary of State wants the amendment defeated, and is changing the title to make it less attractive to the voters), but the law is not. Interestingly, it all revolves around Gov. Dayton’s “symbolic veto” of the amendment back on May 25. Let’s walk through the issues quickly.
is apparently not widely known, even though it ended up featuring prominently in the 2013 edition of the Path to Prosperity, completely replacing the original plan from last year. Perhaps the revision got so little attention because there was no budget battle this year. Hopefully that will change as the presidential race progresses.
