Chick-fil-A, Citizens United, and Being Accountable for Your Speech

Thomas Jefferson would have said, the more speech, the better. That's what the First Amendment is all about. So long as the people know where the speech is coming from.”—Justice Antonin Scalia

        Fast food joints do not need a domestic policy. They don’t have to take positions on things like same-sex marriage, abortion, or gun control. I am pretty much OK if McDonalds never tells me whether or not they support the individual mandate. As long as they keep their opinions to themselves, I will be happy as one can be eating food that will kill me.
       However, if a fast-food chain does take a position on an issue, and that position contradicts my own sense of fairness or political morality, then I am probably going to take my business elsewhere. People are like that--hence the recent dust-up over Chick-fil-A President Dan Cathy’s comment  that his company is “guilty as charged” in opposing efforts to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples.
       Bully for Chick-fil-A. Many people support this position and will probably eat more Chick-fil-A sandwiches. Many others are outraged and will probably eat there less frequently, or not at all. The Chick-fil-A corporate office can say pretty much anything it wants to say. If they say things that make people upset, they will have to deal with the consequences, which may mean losing business. Presumably, Mr. Cathy wears big-boy underpants and can deal with the consequences of his speech.
       But here is a thought experiment: imagine what would have happened if Chick-fil-A had said the same thing anonymously. This is, of course, an absurdity: corporations cannot speak anonymously. Dan Cathy can post random anti-gay comments on discussion boards anonymously, but that is something very different. He can only speak in the name of his company if he uses the name of his company. There is just no way under current definitions of “speech” for a corporation can make an anonymous statement.
        Except that there is, sort of, in the bizarre world created by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in 2010. Under the terms of that decision, corporate donations to political causes are classified as protected free speech. Current laws allow institutions to donate to "super-pacs" with no disclosure requirements whatsoever. This allows corporations to do the logically impossible and speak, as corporations, anonymously.
          Which brings us to the current Republican filibuster of the Disclose Act, which would require political donations above $10,000 to be disclosed. Disclosure is already required, of course, for direct donations to political campaigns; the Disclose Act would apply the same standards to contributions to the super pacs that have emerged since 2010. This legislation is does not limit the ability of corporations to donate as much money as they please to political causes; it simply requires them to acknowledge those donations and accept the same political responsibility for speech-that-is-money as they already do for speech-that-is-speech. 

       But political responsibility is not currently on Mitch McConnell’s agenda. The Senate Minority leader calls the Disclose Act “nothing less than an effort by the government itself to expose its critics to harassment and intimidation.” Well, no, not really. Or at least, not entirely. We already have laws that protect people from harassment and intimidation. What disclosure laws expose the critics of government to (and its supporters as well) is criticism and economic pressure, which are simply other words for the exercise of free speech by other people. As Justice Scalia wrote in his concurring opinion in Doe v. Reed:

There are laws against threats and intimidation; and harsh criticism, short of unlawful action, is a price our people have traditionally been willing to pay for self-governance. Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.

       Let’s accept (since we have no choice) that institutional spending on political advertisement is a form of protected free speech. It does not follow that we should allow such speech to be anonymous. As a consumer, I have a right to know how the money that I give to a corporate entity will be used. And I have a right to criticize, and withhold support from, companies that support political agendas that I oppose. That's not harassment; It's democracy.

My Two Statues: Thoughts on Education and the Good Life

“Making money cannot be the permanent business of humanity, for the simple reason that there is nothing to do with money except spend it. And we cannot go on spending. There will come a point when we will be satiated or disgusted or both. Or will we?”—How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life

“Knowledge is capable of being its own end. Such is the constitution of the human mind, that any kind of knowledge, if it be really such, is its own reward.”—Blessed John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

Two statues grace the main campus of Newman University. Blessed John Henry Newman, our namesake, watches the the campus from the front of the administration building. Some two hundred feet to his left, in the plaza that was once McCormick Street, St. Maria de Mattias has her arm around a young woman, guiding her into the future. Walking across campus, I often think of our two statues and of what they represent to the profession of education.

        Though both were 19th century Catholic educators, Newman's two founders could not be more different. St. Maria devoted her life to teaching literacy and household management to poor women and girls in rural Italy. Everything about her curriculum was useful. Newman, on the other hand, was the 19th century's greatest advocate of the proposition that one should learn things for no other reason than that learning things is good. 

       Between St. Maria and Cardinal Newman lie most of the goals of the modern university. On the one hand, education must teach people how to do useful things. To justify society's investment, schools must prepare people to be useful to society. And, since America's founding, education has been the universally acknowledged ticket into the middle class.
        Modern education teaches people how to make a living. But, for most of human history--during which people worked with their bodies rather than their minds--this, was not the case. From ancient times through the end of the 19th century, societies have considered "an educated person" (of whom there were always very few) to be somebody who knew how to use leisure time for personal enrichment. An "educated person" was somebody who know how to live a good life.
       One of the central insights of How Much Is Enough? Money and the Good Life--a wonderful new book by British economists Robert and Edward Skideisky--is that education in Western societies has become very good at training people to enter the work force and very bad at teaching them what to do when they aren't working. Lacking any clear understanding of how to use our leisure time, most of us gravitate to the most passive and least enriching forms of entertainment. We watch hours of TV every day. We play video games. We obsess about our "like" count on Facebook. And when all this fails to satisfy us, we throw up our hands and say, “I’m bored.”
       People have a right, of course, to amuse themselves however they see fit, as long as they do no harm. It does us no good, however, to pretend that the above activities are on par with more meaningful leisure activities: reading literature, creating art, playing an instrument, gardening, jogging along a river bank, having deep conversations about interesting things, or even just thinking about stuff because some stuff is fun to think about. 
        A decent education, I believe, must prepare us to do all (or at least most) of these things. Of course, this means rejecting one of the central tenets of the modern liberal state, which is that all perspectives are morally and aesthetically equal. I, for one, am willing to make this sacrifice--to say without embarrassment that Sponge Bob and Shakespeare, Bach and Bieber, are separated by more than just the accidents of human preference. I am even willing to throw in a good word or two for exercise.
        For most of human history, education has done precisely these kinds of things—although only a privileged few have had access to it. The only things worthy of the name "education," Seneca famously remarked, are the "liberal arts"--or those that can be profitably studied by a free man (a liber) who does not have to worry about making a living.
        But one of the strongest tendencies of modern societies has been to view education purely as an end to something else, with the “something else” usually being to lift people out of poverty, train them for the work force, qualify them for good jobs, and, generally, help them make money. This is not a bad thing at all. Unlike Seneca's Romans, we have set a goal of educating everybody, not just the elite, and non-elites have a legitimate need to know how to make money.
        And up to a fairly definable point, money is a non-negotiable component of a good life. When that threshold is reached, however, we see almost no correlation between money and happiness. The person who makes ten million dollars a year is not guaranteed one iota of marginal satisfaction over the person who makes merely five million dollars a year.
        Most people, I think, understand instinctively that there is more to a good life than making a lot of money. And yet we are moving at light speed towards a model of education that focuses primarily preparing the student for eventual success in the workplace. For the third grader, this may mean less recess and more test preparation. For the college student, it means an impoverished core curriculum that cuts down times to graduation and makes sure that every person will become a productive member of society.
        But let's be careful. If the primary purpose of education is to prepare people to work, and the primary purpose of work is to earn money, we are at a dead end—for unlike education, money is not logically capable of being its own end. We encourage an irrational psychosis when, in the name of readying students to make a good living, we eliminate those aspects of education that themselves constitute living well.

Why Voter ID Laws Suck

“Voter ID, which is going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done.”
   --Pennsylvania State Representative Mike Turzai (R)

       Mike Turzai has been taking a lot of heat for suggesting that Pennsylvania’s new voter ID law may have more to do with keeping Democrats from voting than with preventing voter fraud. He didn’t say it quite this way, of course. However, neither he nor anybody else has ever presented even the weakest of evidence of voter fraud on a scale that could swing a presidential election. It is not difficult to draw from his words the conclusion that the primary purpose of voter ID is voter suppression.
       But we knew that. All Mike Turzai did was articulate what pretty much everybody already knows but has the good sense not to say publicly: Democrats benefit more than Republicans when people from the margins of society (i.e. those less likely to have driver's licenses) vote in large numbers. Voter ID laws (which Republicans usually enact) are designed to suppress this vote; motor-voter laws (which Democrats usually enact) are designed to encourage it. Everyone wants to make it easier for their people to vote and harder for the other side. It's, like, Duh!
       Both strategies (encouraging voting and discouraging voting) are equally political, but they are not equally problematic. Purely by accident, the Democrats are on the side of the angels. More participation by citizens in elections really is more democratic than less participation. In fact, that is kind of what democracy means. 
       But what about fraud? Isn’t it legitimate to require that citizens prove that they are, well, citizens? Of course it is, which is why every state requires people to register to vote in advance and to provide evidence of citizenship and residency when they do. People can lie, of course, and even forge documents. (They can even forge picture IDs—trust me on this; I’m a college administrator.) Those who do so are committing voter fraud and should be prosecuted.
        How many cases of voter fraud would you imagine that Pennsylvania governor Tom Corbett, the governor who signed the Pennsylvania law, prosecuted when he was Attorney General? That would be none. To me, this is one of the most important points in the debate. Voter ID laws have been presented as a solution to the problem of voter fraud. And yet, we already do have a solution to the problem, which is to prosecute those who register and vote fraudulently.  Before taking drastic measures to solve a supposed problem, one should at least try the non-drastic measures already available.

       But are voter-ID laws really “drastic measures”? Perhaps the most common statement I have heard in favor of such legislation goes like this: “I have to show my ID almost everywhere I go. I have to have show my license to drive, to cash a check, to buy insurance, and even to get opera tickets. Why shouldn’t somebody have to show an ID to vote?”
       This is a very good question, and it has a very good answer—one that gets to the heart of why I object to voter-ID laws. Driving, cashing checks, buying insurance, and going to the opera are not fundamental rights. Voting is. By requiring one to have a state-issued ID in order to exercise a fundamental right, voter-ID laws take us across a fundamental Constitutional threshold that I do not believe we should cross.
       As many as 750,000 eligible Pennsylvania voters—citizens all—could be prevented from voting under the current legislation. This is the potential cost of the legislation. Non-citizens, of course, will prevented from voting too. But there is no actual evidence that ineligible voters vote in Pennsylvania or that the current laws against voter fraud are insufficient to control any voter fraud that actually exists. Why would anybody in a free society want to accept the very real cost of suppressing eligible votes in order to solve a problem that does not appear to exist? Such a question is absurd, of course, if suppressing these votes is actually the point.
      The most eloquent rebuttal to voter-ID laws that I have heard comes from Pennsylvania State Senator Daylin Leach, who said, "If you have to stop people from voting to win elections, your ideas suck."
       Voter-ID laws suck.

"E Plebnista" vs "We the People"

       The original Star Trek series occasionally went, more or less boldly, into politics--perhaps most notably in the “The Omega Glory” episode which first aired on March 1, 1968. In this episode, Kirk finds himself on a strange planet caught in the middle of a war between a tribe of Asiatic village dwellers called the “Khoms,” and a group of wild nomads called the “Yangs.” (“Yankees” and “Communists,” get it). The Yangs are mostly barbarians, but they do evidence a (surprisingly familiar) past culture in their use of talismanic  “worship words” such as “Freedom,” “Liberty,” and “Justice for All.” 
        The greatest of all Yang worship words—known as the "E plebnista"—can only be spoken by a chief. In the dramatic climax (which does not explain why the Yangs speak English and carry around American flags), Kirk resolves the great conflict by recognizing that E plebnista is actually a corruption of “We the People” and giving the Yangs a good dose of high school civics. 

       Gene Roddenberry’s here point is worth remembering: when the Constitution is made the subject of adoration, and when its key passages are converted into acontextualized proof texts, we end up with a ridiculous form of ancestor worship instead of a participatory democracy. We ignore the flesh-and-blood Founders by converting them into two-dimensional deities and their ideas about self-government into a prescriptive list of commandments. “We the people” becomes “E plebnista.”

       For me, a sign that somebody has gone well down the E plebnista road to is the tendency to talk about the government as a “them” and the American people as an “us.” This is common on both sides of the political spectrum these days, depending on whose ox happens to be getting gored. 

       If we can learn only one single lesson from the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the lives of the Founding Fathers, it is that the government is an “us” not a “them.” But since we don’t always agree with each other, the “us” that is the government will sometimes act in ways we, as individuals, do not support. That’s how participatory democracy works in a large republic. When we insist on speaking of the government as something other than ourselves, we invalidate the right of people who disagree with us to take part in the democratic process.
       We miss the point badly when we try to guess what Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton would have thought about the individual mandate or the top capital gains tax rate. That is “E plabnista” thinking, or lookin to the Constitution as a religious text designed to provide us with a list of commandments to run our lives by. But the whole point of “We the people” is that we are, well, the people. The Framers gave us a process that we can use to create the kind of society that we want to live in; they never meant to give us “worship words” to keep in a box.