Not a Potted Plant

I’ve been instructed to report for jury duty this morning. No, lawyers aren’t automatically exempted from jury duty. We’re just like everybody else.

Now, unlike a lot of other potential jurors, I want to serve. I can not think of a better possible way to improve myself at my profession than to serve on a jury — to see what other lawyers do, and to hear and witness how jurors actually deliberate. Ironically, I just finished an MCLE class on jury selection. And obviously, I’m quite comfortable in the court; it’s a familiar environment for me.

And as it happens, I have some substantial documents that I can review while I’m waiting to be picked so if there is idle time — and from what jurors have told me before, there is plenty of that — it won’t be a complete waste of the opportunity to get work done.

Then there’s the issue of the fact that there are damn few things the government makes you do. You have to register for the draft. You have to file a tax return. And you have to serve jury duty once a year if you’re picked. I’ve been back in California six years and this is the first time I’ve even been summoned to make myself available to be picked. These are hardly onerous civic duties.

The issue is: will another lawyer want me on their jury? And the answer ultimately depends on things I’ve not even a glimmer of hope of controlling — what kind of case it is and what those attorneys think of having someone who will be capable of analytical thought and retention of evidence on the jury will do to the deliberations. Maybe they both want someone like that for their case.

 [ADDED]: After waiting around all day, I was finally excused from service at 4:30. I’ll have more detailed thoughts in a follow-up post.

* There seems to be a trend amongst other sub-bloggers here to emulate the Mindless Diversions format of a one-word-with-exclamation-point blog post title. At least this week there is. Now I’m part of the problem.

Our new place is ready! We saw it today.

Clancy and I may be pulling the trigger on our month-to-month rental agreement one month earlier than the landlords demanded us out. The question I had was whether or not I could give notice tomorrow and not be stuck with rent all the way through March because thirty days takes us to February 1.

In an earlier age, I might have had to go to the library. Or maybe to the state capital. Or maybe I would have had to consult a lawyer.

In the Internet age, however, I can simply go to Arapaho’s website and see what, precisely, state code is as it pertains to rental agreements.

[X]-[Y]-[Z](2) The landlord or the tenant may terminate a month-to-month tenancy by giving to the other at any time during the tenancy at least 30 days’ notice in writing prior to the date designated in the notice for the termination of the tenancy.
(3) The tenancy terminates on the date designated and without regard to the expiration of the period for which, by the terms of the tenancy, rents are to be paid. Unless otherwise agreed, rent is uniformly apportionable from day to day.

There is, of course, nothing new about being able to do this. This sort of thing is widely regarded as what makes the Internet awesome. But today? Today I am feeling the love.

Yesterday I read the Senate Gang of Eight’s proposal on immigration reform. (Since when was Marco Rubio in this group, which first formed before he was elected to the Senate?) It promises a “tough but fair” path to citizenship for an undocumented worker presently in the United States. I suppose that in order to pass political muster from some very, very loudly-shouting people, the path must of necessity be “tough.” And it also apparently will need lots of ineffectual toys and par for the course in the Senate, the guys who agreed on the package yesterday can’t agree today on what they agreed on yesterday. Continue Reading →

And so are a number of other countries (perhaps every last one, in their own way).

Steven Taylor* posts excerpts from and a link to an interview with an American political operative who has done some work in Israeli elections. He comments:

This struck me on a couple of levels. First, this is fundamentally what comparative political inquiry is: the systematic understanding of similarities and differences across cases to help produce a broader understanding of the political. Second, it is a good example of how groups of people like to think that they are somehow exceptional or unique when, in fact, they only think that because they don’t know all that much about other places. This is a mistake that Americans writ large make all time. Of course, everybody thinks that they, or their group, is exceptional (and maybe sometimes they are), but often our view of how special we are is derived from the fact that we only know one thing and we just assume that it has to be special.

There’s not much to disagree with there, that we can learn from other countries and they can learn from us. As Americans, we are often more enthusiastic about the latter than the former.

That said, when we do so, I think that there are ways in which we do have to consider that we are different (just as we should consider ways in which other countries are different from us). To use an example of international comparison that conservatives make, for instance, I don’t think that there is a whole lot that we can learn from Switzerland’s high rates of gun ownership and low rates of gun crimes. And when I take a position against learning from Scandinavian experience, it’s not political rhetoric. Even things that Scandinavian countries do that I like – such as Sweden’s voucher system – are mostly transferable to the US in my mind and imagination. Not that it wouldn’t work, or that it would, but it’s speculation. Ditto Finland.

A lot of my thirties has been spend learning the notion of context-dependent. While I am generally a supporter of gun rights here, if I were in Singapore or Japan, I’d likely not support a second amendment there. I used to glibly state “any nation that needs a draft to staff an army is probably not worth protecting,” but having learned more about the situations in some other countries (like Israel), I’ve learned it’s remarkably context-dependent. And my argument comes across like “any country that has to pressure people to get vaccinations deserves to be struck with polio.

Now, when I talk about the US as being exceptional, one thing I am not willing to argue is that we are exceptional in our exceptionalism. Being the ugly American that I am, there aren’t many countries I actually know enough about to know how alike or different they are than we are. That’s not to say I sink into absolute relativism and decline to make judgments, though I try to be less judgmental of them than I am of US.

In many ways, I don’t worry about when we are out of sync with the rest of the world. I mean, I look at our health care system and the fact that it’s different than elsewhere nearly isn’t as troublesome as the fact that it’s expensive and inefficient. I oppose the death penalty, but the fact that it is banned elsewhere doesn’t play much of a role, and so on. I have a not-admirable tendency to get irked when internationalists look at how we are out of step and seem to imply that such should be an indication that we are deficient. We are us. Exasperating, chaotic, diverse, gargantuan us. Unique, for better or worse.

To one of the points that Taylor specifically points to, I don’t really look at multi-party systems like what Israel has and envy it. I believe that there are definite advantages to the American two-party system. Which sometimes gets me looks like I am the American who is closed off to other options. Truthfully, there are some aspects of other systems I do like (the National/Liberal distinction in Australia, for example), though I am not sure how we would get from here to there. I do like New York’s fusion ticket… but the party apparatus destroyed that. So to an extent, it is very much the sort of status quo bias that Taylor has criticized. But I suppose it’s the small-c conservative in me that is skeptical of widespread electoral reform.

When I was in college, I took a constitutional design class. Within this class, we had to look at what exactly goes into a constitution and draft guidelines for a constitution of a fictional country. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, one of which is the extent to which a system of government should be tailored to the nation that it would govern. There is no single right system. Though I do sometimes think we might be better off with, say, a parliamentary system, there are certain aspects of our system that I believe to be very well tailored to the country that we are. The Senate being a good example. If I were writing guidelines from scratch, I might suggest something different (I have an appreciation for the German system). But I believe states, and representation of states even when out of whack with the population, has benefits for a country as large and geographically diverse as ours. I wouldn’t recommend it for a lot of other countries, but when some people look at this as an example of American anti-exceptionalism (we are different, therefore we are wrong… leaving aside that “federal republic” is an actual thing), I genuinely view it as a solid way of having building blocks of the whole**. The really small and unpopulated building blocks of the northeast? Well, I guess they’re grandfathered in.

The last two points bringing me back to my general support for federalism, where it becomes easier to try things on our shores with our people to then start expanding as they prove effective or limiting exposure when they prove not to be. Or not expanding, as priorities differ: if my state starts implementing bad policies, it’s easier for me to relocate to another state than to relocate to another country if the nation implements bad policies***. I am far more comfortable taking something that is working in New York and California and rolling it out nationally than I am taking something that is working for Japan or even Australia. (Some of this emanating from a view not typically associated with what Taylor is talking about: My belief that Americans can screw just about anything up, no matter how well it works elsewhere.) Continue Reading →

This is sort of a response (though not really a rebuttal) to Burt’s front-page post, and sort of my own meanderings. Burt writes:

Forgive me if I’m less than impressed with the notion that this would completely de-legitimize any Presidential election in which a Republican happened to win. After all, I can foresee that district-level allocation would result in fewer campaign resources being put in to a state certain to be divided — Virginia could be diminishing rather than enhancing its role as a key player in Presidential politics by splitting its 13 electoral votes roughly down the middle — if the Republican is going to get not fewer than 5 votes and the Democrat not fewer than 4, then only 4 and not 13 votes are in play, so it’s not as much of a prize.

You see, the fear on the part of Democrats, and the hope on the part of Republicans, comes from the fact that by virtue of controlling a majority of state legislatures at the point in the electoral cycle when redistricting happens, Republicans have gerrymandered themselves into a majority of Congressional districts. The assumption is that election results on a district-by-district basis will roughly parallel elections to the House. Which means Republicans will have a “locked in” advantage of thirty-three votes because the 2012 Congressional elections returned 234 Republicans and 201 Democrats.

In 2012, Barack Obama won 27 jurisdictions (26 states and D.C.) and Mitt Romney won 24, so that means that the Electoral College results of 255 votes for Obama and 282 votes for Romney, notwithstanding that the popular vote was very much in Obama’s favor. And that will be how every election for the remaining duration of the Republic will turn out. (There, I just spared you reading the article on Larry Sabato’s blog.)

The danger, it seems to me, is the redefining of the acceptable. No, Maine and Nebraska don’t make much of a difference. No, Virginia on its own won’t make much of a difference. But once the precedent is set, it’s really hard to take back. Perhaps the most optimistic things that can be said about it are that (a) it won’t spread or (b) that it will lead to a collapse of the electoral college as a whole. The former is hardly a ringing endorsement because the possibility that it might be wrong far could be catastrophic to the system. The latter depends on much to come to fruition, and supposes that the electoral college is so bad that it’s worth getting worse for the possibility of it getting better.

If put to referendum, I would vote to do away with the Electoral College tomorrow. But… I don’t consider it to be evil. I consider the cons to outweigh the pros. There are advantages insofar as it prevents a Republican from winning by running up extreme victories in the south and it prevents Democrats from winning by running up high totals in urban areas. It also forces candidates to spend time away from urban and suburban areas, which I do not altogether consider to be a bad thing. But the breaking down of an election to a select number of states has a distorting effect that outweighs those advantages.

There is also something to be said for election-by-district. There is nothing, in theory wrong with splitting votes by legislative districts. The parliamentary system works with a similar dynamic (a candidate can lose the “popular vote” but still wind up being Prime Minister). However, the totality of events and factors relating to Virginia in particular make their actions nothing short of reprehensible. It’s indefensible. I can come up with rationales for a lot of things, but not this. Gerrymandering may be old hat, and district-based allocation are nothing new, and holding a vote based on who is and is not in the state is not unheard of… but this is all of those things and more.

I am less skeptical than Burt is that the Electoral College is now and always. Because it sometimes advantages one party and sometimes the other, a couple rapid-succession flipped votes could lead to a consensus. Because one party is more predisposed to support it than another, if the supporting party is on the losing end and the opposing party has a long enough view to know that it won’t be to their benefit forever – or if they are given something in return (such as DC statehood), I could see it happening. And lastly, if few enough states become competitive, you might get the 3/4 of states you need right there. Or the NPV initiative could work and you’d only need enough states to get to 270 and large states Republican and Democrat have incentives here. All of this is unlikely, but not impossible. (We’re pretty much debating between a 0% likelihood and a 3% likelihood, but what are blogs for if not debating this sort of thing?)

The last thing I wanted to mention is that even if you put gerrymandering aside, district-based voting favors Republicans and will for the foreseeable future. The reason being that rural voters are not as Republican as core urban voters are Democratic. There are only a couple counties in the entire country that vote as Republican as DC does Democratic. I am relatively certain that if you look at individual precincts, you’d see more Republican ones, but wider margins in the Democratic ones (including some with no Republican voters, it turns out). So because of this, even without gerrymandering, there is a stacking of the deck in favor of Republicans. This is something that we should keep in mind: gerrymandering isn’t the only problem here. This is an area where the Republicans can act and the Democrats are simply incapable of responding in kind.

There are a number of ways to skin a deer. Debating between them is a rivalry of concepts of fairness, for which there is no singular, objective answer. But I struggle to come up with a single manner in which what Virginia is doing can be justified. The best we can hope for is that it fails. The next best thing is trying to keep it as contained as possible.

The 2013 Python Challenge is pretty much what you think it is. The state of Florida has bounties out on pythons in the Everglades. I heard about it tonight on Colbert. And when real life imitates The Simpsons, I’m thinking that things have crossed over from “difficult” to “ridiculous.” 

Note that this is the second time in as many weeks that the argument “The Simpsons tried that fifteen years ago and it wasn’t a good idea then either” has been used to address a public policy proposal which purportedly serious people were apparently serious about.

Future suggestions for posts chronicling real life imitating The Simpsons are welcome.

As proof and exemplar of my love for you, dear Readers, I offer the above video. Perhaps you were aware of it before today; I was not and I feel compelled to share.

See, way back in the early 1980’s, Lynda Carter was famous for playing the role of Wonder Woman. For some reason that must surely seem completely inexplicable in retrospect to her, she must have been concerned about being typecast as a sexy superhero. (Most recently, she voiced two characters in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim; not coincidentally, she is married to Robert Altman, the CEO of ZeniMax Media, Skryim’s producer.)

Ms. Carter therefore tried a few things to break out of the typecasting career cul-de-sec she saw herself headed down, including five variety shows in the then-prevailing fashion of Merv Griffin and Dinah Shore. (She hasn’t given up on the singing, either: she released her third album about a year and a half ago.) The above video is a relic of this, which I stumbled across while eating lunch at my desk today.

My mind is still reeling.

If you’re still reading this, I know you share my taste for the surreal. And no, I rather doubt that’s really KISS–I think it’s dancers* wearing the KISS makeup. And that’s not even the most bizarre sequence, in a video of a four-part song medley which I submit may very well be the most bizarre thing you see on the Internet today, if not all week.

You’re welcome.

* Now, I wouldn’t make any assumptions just because they’re inexplicably costumed with decidedly un-KISS-like flourescent-colored boas. But if that had been the real Gene Simmons, he would have at least spared a glance at Ms. Carter’s fantastic costume. These fellows clearly don’t care one tiny bit that the contents of Wonder Woman’s bustier were spilling out of that Vegas showgirl outfit, mere inches from their faces. You can draw your own conclusions from that.