What the Supreme Court Must Do

I am inclined to believe that the federal health care law, including the "individual mandate," is constitutional. I can't see how it "fundamentally changes the relationship between individuals and the government," as Justice Kennedy suggested in a question from the bench during oral arguments. It seems like another regulation to me, and one that the government can impose under the commerce clause. The Court ought to rule in its favor.

But the Court must rule unanimously or almost so. This is the real test of Chief Justice Roberts' tenure, and I hope he knows it. Whether the law passes constitutional muster or not may make the difference in President Obama's term, but it probably will not affect the presidency as an institution. If Americans (like me) see yet another 5-4 decision, with the justice split along apparent partisan lines, however, the Supreme Court will be further damaged for the long term.

Especially after the particularly ridiculous decision in Bush v. Gore, in which no justice followed the principle he or she had articulated through the rest of his or her career, the Court has appeared no more disinterested or neutral than any of the other horribly divided political institutions in this country. Roberts must lead here, not as a partisan, but as a Chief Justice. He must find consensus.

Public Transportation and Good Government

Generally speaking, Republicans are not in favor of public transportation. It's expensive, takes a long time to pay for, provides more economic benefits for sectors that support Democrats (like union workers) than support the GOP. New Jersey's Governor Christ Christie is not an exception to this rule, and made his name in part by nixing a major cross-river tunnel to New York in 2010. His argument at the time -- one he stands behind -- is that New Jersey was responsible for far more than its share of the costs. 

Yesterday the Government Accountability Office issued a report on that decision which found that many of Christie's claims about the cost of the project were exaggerated, if not entirely false. Democrats, of course, have jumped on the report as evidence of Republican malfeasance. Paul Krugman joined that band wagon in today's New York Times with an op-ed called "Cannibalizing the Future." The Times editorial board added a comment of their own in the same edition.

The back and forth about the costs and Christie's estimates misses the essential piece. The GAO says that the tunnel would have achieved its primary purpose of decreasing the environmental impact of having so many people commute to and from New jersey, and would have provided a needed boost for the infrastructure of one of the most heavily populated places on the planet. Sometimes government must spend money -- yes, the money of "the people" -- to achieve its purpose. Road bills, public transportation bills, bills to fund better water and electrical service should all be no-brainers. Unless one refuses to call Alexander Hamilton a "Founding Father" one can not dispute that such things were the among the fundamental tasks of government when the Constitution was written, and they have been favored by such radicals as Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon ever since.

It's time to stop debating whether government should spend any money at all and get to the actual business of deciding how it should be spent.

Petroleum, Growth, Mobility and the End of the World

Anyone doubting that our entire political structure rests on petroleum need only follow the Republican Party's attacks on President Obama on the (very thin) premise that he is responsible for rises in oil prices. As the GOP has said in the past, when it was defending President Bush from such complaints, there is very little the White House can do about retail gas prices. But Romney and Santorum and Gingrich all know that we are all deeply dependent on cheap fuel, and it makes political sense to associate anxiety about that dependence with the incumbent.

But our reliance on gas goes way beyond this kid of superficial political chatter. Almost every assumption we make about our society rests on cheap gas. The "growth paradigm" requires abundant, easily accessible fuel not only for the transportation of people and goods, but the generation of electricity. All of our communication, relies, directly or indirectly, on refined petroleum either in the form of fuel or plastic. In turn, our educational system depends on the physical mobility of parents and children. Feeding ourselves no longer is possible using regionally-produced food, and therefore depends on long-haul transportation. Nothing, from the Super Bowl to our sewer systems, can function without petroleum.

Since petroleum is not infinite, this whole system is doomed to collapse. I say this not as a moral judgment but as a historical reality. It can't work forever. Our conversations, then, need to acknowledge that the paradigm on which all our other behavior rests is on the verge of failure. Continued insistence that all we need is to prop it here or there sounds like the same head-in-the-sand nonsense uttered by critics of Galileo's theory of heliocentrism.

It does not matter whether Al Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" about climate change is right in all the details; it does not matter whether Bill McKibben's apocalyptic descriptions of the near future will ever come to fruition. The fact is that we must begin to adjust. There is no "or else." The only options lie in how and when we adjust. The longer we wait to accept that the world has already changed beyond the functioning of our paradigm, the fewer choices remain available to us.

The Earth will continue to exist, but our world, as we know it will not. It's a matter of time.

Quote of The Day

"The less luxury there is in a republic, the more it is perfect." -- Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (1748)