American Review | Global Perspectives on US Affairs

We've had the Washington Post arguing, on its front page no less, that the White House is in dire straits because it doesn't listen to Rahm Emanuel enough. This was in response to suggestions the White House could pull itself out of dire straits if it listened to Rahm Emanuel less. Then there was Sunday's New York Times, which concluded the White House was in dire straits because it listens to David Axelrod too much. 

You don't even need to disdain Mark Knopfler as much as I do to tire of all this talk about dire straits and the White House, particularly when under examination, things don't look too bad for the Obama administration. True, this is not a great time for Democrats: Americans have too little patience with incumbents at the moment, probably because too many Americans are out of work. The economy is still a little too sluggish in its recovery, the deficit is a little too large for anyone's liking, and Charles Rangel's dealings appear to be a little too shady. The party can expect a tough run in the mid term elections.

But if you look a little farther afield than the Times' condemnation of Axelrod, you'll see within its pages a perfectly cogent summation of Obama's political fortunes:

Polls suggest that the public is already on the president’s side. In a New York Times/CBS News survey early last month, respondents were twice as likely to say that President Obama was trying to work with Republicans as they were to say that Republicans were trying to work with President Obama (62 percent versus 29 percent). And by overwhelming margins, they said they wanted both sides to compromise some positions “in order to get things done.”

[...]

In the New York Times/CBS poll last month, 51 percent said they view the Democrats unfavorably, the highest since November 1994, when the Republicans swept into office. But 57 percent said they view the Republicans the same way, near the all-time high of 60 percent.

The paper quotes a Democratic pollster, Stanley Greenberg:

Greenberg ... noted that the energy behind Democrats in 2006 had been building for a year, beginning with anger over President George W. Bush’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq war. “The other side got demoralized as they watched our energy,” Mr. Greenberg said. This time, “our side is demoralized by the lack of progress. It’s almost independent of the energy on the other side.”

The Democrats have to do two things, he said. They have to show that they can govern successfully — passing some version of health care reform would be his preference — and then they have to frame the election as a choice for Democrats

Greenberg may be partisan, but his reading is accurate. This is not yet a Presidency on the ropes. For a start, as Matt Yglesias points out, Obama can lay claim to quite a few accomplishments from his first year in office. The President's approval rating, hovering around 51 per cent, is not nearly as high as it was during the heady months after he first took office, but it remains respectably positive. And most importantly, though commentators seem all too eager to elide this detail, health care, Obama's signature reform, is not dead yet. Rather than proving themselves unable to govern, Democrats are nearing the end of a long process of reform that nobody should have expected would be easy.

As my colleague Erin pointed out in an essay written for the USSC last year [PDF],  the Obama administration's approach "was not married to any particular version of health reform policy. Rather, it crafted an approach to the manner in which the policy would be shaped and political forces managed." In so doing, Erin argues, Obama has advanced this current attempt at reform closer to realisation than ever before.

Now that the Democrats have gotten over their Scott Brown-inspired shakes and realised that 41 Senate seats does not make a majority, this bill has every chance of making it as far as the President's desk. And while I would have preferred to see Obama campaigning six months ago for this legislation as hard as he is now, and while plenty of people around Washington pinpoint the length of time Max Baucus was permitted to seek the support of Senate Republicans (apparently Obama's fault), Obama has so far been reasonably successful in promoting a difficult and historic piece of legislative reform. Examining his administrations supposed failure is like complaining that, a hundred metres short of the finish line, a marathon runner has taken too long to complete the race. 

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But, in a 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court decided that I was wrong, and that Americans do have some right to own weapons for the purpose of self-defence. It's a right that is currently protected only against Federal-not state-interverntion and that must be balanced against the state's interest in protecting its citizens (which is why you won't see any D.C. residents buying nukes in the near future), but it is a right nonetheless.

So, given the current state of affairs, it's very difficult for a liberal to argue that things like the 1st Amendment or the 8th Amendment extend to the States, by virtue of the 14th Amendments equal protection clause, but somehow pretend the 2nd Amerndment does not. Indeed, the liberal touchstone of Roe v Wade hinges, in part, on the 14th Amendments equal protection requirement, as does the famed New York Times v Sullivan case, which prevented the Alabama courts from finding an anti-segregationist advertisement to be libelous. If states must respect a right to freedom of religion and trial by jury, why shouldn't they have to respect a right to self-defence? If we want to claim that the 2nd Amendment refers to Militia, that is, state-based organisations, how can we claim that this is one of the few Constitutional prescriptions that does not extend the "privileges and immunities" to citizens of the states?

It's a quandary Ben Adler discusses over at Newsweek:

What is going on here? For much of the nation's history, [founder of the Constitutional Accountability Center, Douglas] Kendall and his supporters argue, the right to bear arms was considered essential to citizenship. "Forty-two states in their state constitutions provide protections for the right to bear arms," says [UCLA law professor Adam] Winkler. "It is one of the longest-standing, most deeply entrenched rights in American history."

At the heart of the left-leaning dissenters' argument is a plea for consistency. For decades, liberals have insisted that the Constitution assumes—even if it does not explicitly spell out—a right to bodily autonomy. This right, long disputed by conservatives, is a basis for arguments in favor of abortion rights and gay rights. Liberals who support gun rights find a similar implied right to own weapons: after all, they say, what is the right to bear arms but the ability to protect your body from criminals as well as the government? "The right to bear arms gives you a mechanism to protect your bodily autonomy from attack," says Winkler.

The notion that the 2nd Amendment protects bodily autonomy is where I part ways with these scholars. It is true that defenders of the right to bear arms see it as a defence against government intervention in two ways; first, that it enables the people to rebel against a corrupt government, and second, that it frees a citizen from having to rely on government for his^[1] protection against criminals, rapists and murderers^[2]. But it simply does not follow that a right to keep and bear arms facilitates either of these interpretations of bodily autonomy. Owning a gun, in practice, does very little to protect a citizen from a criminal who has the element of surprise, strength, and determination, and it does little to actually protect citizens from bodily harm. All it does, rather, is escalate situations with some possibility for violence into a much more volatile circumstance ruled by right-by-might and no more certainty that the victim will be protected.

And given the state of the American-or indeed, other nation's-armed forces, the idea that a handgun could facilitate a citizen response to tyranny is laughable. Either the 2nd Amendment must protect a right to own tanks and stealth bombers (or at least machine guns and I.E.D.s), or it cannot practicably be considered a means by which individual citizens can keep their government in check.

But that doesn't mean the Court should not rule in favour of increased gun rights in McDonald. If D.C. residents have a right to keep and bear some arms for their own self-defence, so too should citizens in the rest of the United States. I would hope, though, that the Court would maintain a situation that allows hunters in West Virginia and Arizona to carry all the guns they like, while residents of Chicago and New York remain protected against those of their neighbours who would use arms for offensive, rather than defensive purposes. 

^[1] It's usually a he.

^[2] I think this is something tough for Australians to understand, because we like relying on government for protection against those kinds of people.

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See, according to well-established precedent, there was no clearly defined individual right to bear arms in the United States. That's because the Second Amendment reads, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." It's a poorly constructed, barely sensical sentence that rendered the country unable to definitively decide whether individuals could keep arms for the purpose of self-defence, or merely as part of a "well regulated Militia." The 1939 decision of United States v Miller, for instance, did little to clarify matters, finding that a sawn-off shotgun wasn't protected because it wasn't common military equipment. That is, the notion that it could be kept for individual self-defence was not broached.

That was dramatically changed in 2008, when the Court ruled in District of Columbia v Heller that Dick Heller, a police officer, could not be denied his right to keep a handgun in his D.C. home for self defence. The majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia, and it was the first time the Court had found a definitive individual right to keep and bear arms. For the first time, the United States was the crazy gun haven the rest of the world imagined it to be.

Or, no, actually it wasn't. The Heller decision, despite its sweeping overturn of precedent, was very limited in scope. It permitted bans on guns in places like schools and federal buildings. It permitted bans on criminals and mentally ill people carrying guns. And since the District of Columbia is regulated by the Federal Government, it had nothing to say about whether states or cities could maintain bans on guns. All the ruling really said was that a D.C. resident had to somehow be allowed to keep some sort of gun in his or her residence if they wanted to badly enough. Trust me: sitting where I am in Arlington, Virginia right now, it's going to be much easier for my next door neighbour to buy and carry a gun than it would be if he tried to do the same on the other side of the Potomac River.

The case the Court is looking at right now, McDonald v Chicago, is the one the Post says will cause Scalia such consternation, and that's because the plaintiff here seeks to, via the Fourteenth Amendment's prohibition on "State[s] mak[ing] or enforcing any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States," apply the Second Amendment's prohibition on Federal gun bans to the States. The Fourteenth Amendment has previously been used to require states to recognize rights to abortion, free speech, trial by jury, and not to be subject to cruel and unusual punishment. Scalia has a record of being none-too-happy with this notion that the Fourteenth Amendment applied the Bill of Rights protections to the States, though he has a similarly consistent record of being quite happy with individual citizens owning guns for reasons that have nothing to do with maintaining a militia. Here, he must choose between hypocrisy and doctrinal consistency. My guess is that he'll side with the former. But until the Court reaches its decision on this case, it's useful to remember that in most places in the U.S. people can own guns because the population around them thinks its OK for them to own guns. Not because of something Thomas Jefferson scribbled down a couple centuries ago.

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Cleveland nabbed the top spot as a result of poor ratings across the board. It was the only city that fell in the bottom half of the rankings in all nine categories. Many residents are heading for greener pastures. There has been a net migration out of the Cleveland metro area of 71,000 people over the past five years. Population for the city itself has been on a steady decline and is now less than half of it what it was 50 years ago.

Cleveland ranked near the bottom when looking at corruption. Northern Ohio has seen 309 public officials convicted of crimes over the past 10 years according to the Justice Department. A current FBI investigation of public officials in Cuyahoga County (where Cleveland is located) has ensnared more than two dozen government employees and businessmen on charges including bribery, fraud and tax evasion.

On the housing front Cleveland is dealing with thousands of abandoned homes. The city contributed to its foreclosure problem by providing down payments to many people that could not afford homes through the federally funded Afford-A-Home program. Cleveland led by Mayor Frank Jackson sued 21 large investment banks in 2008 who he felt were complicit in the subprime and foreclosure crisis that hit Cleveland hard. A federal judge dismissed the suit last year, but the city is appealing the ruling.

At least the river's no longer on fire, right?

I'm trying to organise a visit to Cleveland, and my friends in the city are protesting life round those parts actually ain't so bad. If I make it up there, I'll let you guys know. And to be fair to Cleveland, I was in Chicago, Forbes' 10th most miserable city, a couple weekends back, and things didn't seem so sorrowful round there, even with temperatures that failed to rise above freezing the entire duration of my stay.

But less flippantly, it's little surprise to see Cleveland on the Forbes list. Though the article's a year old now, this New York Times Magazine article gives a glimpse into how hard the housing crash hit cities like this one, and some of the problems holding back recovery.

But an even worse sign for Cleveland? These days, unlike the '90s, it doesn't even have local rap groups recording tributes to the day the government distributes welfare cheques:

Bone Thugs N Harmony - "1st of tha Month"

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