The View from Right Field

Can Americans Be Trusted With Campaign Finance Disclosure? – An Update After the Brett Kavanaugh Hearings

Four years ago, I wrote a post asking “Can Americans Be Trusted With Campaign Finance Disclosure?”  I noted that, while some people want to limit political spending either by limiting how much people can contribute or by limiting how much candidates can spend, the First Amendment (at least as currently interpreted by the Supreme Court) doesn’t allow either of those.  Therefore, as I said back then:

“[T]hey fall back on disclosure of contributions.  If we can’t limit spending, they say, at least we can require contributions and spending to be disclosed.  In the words of Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis (before he was on the Court), ‘[s]unlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.’”

But, I asked, as I do again in the title of this post: Can Americans be trusted with campaign finance disclosure?  This question recently returned when a federal district court judge threw out a 37-year old Federal Election Commission rule dealing the disclosures that nonprofit advocacy groups have to make with respect to the names of their donors.  Without going into the technical detail of the case,¹ the judge’s ruling increases the number of people whose names have to be disclosed, even though the people aren’t making contributions to candidates, but just to groups that are making independent political expenditures.

What’s Worse? Fake News or the Cure

I find the panic about “fake news” a little overdone.  I understand there are a lot of news stories out there that aren’t true, but it’s been that way for a long time.  The National Enquirer has been at my supermarket checkout lane for decades.  That’s pretty fake news. 

If by fake news, you mean lies, they’ve been around for a long time, too.  Hitler lied about the Jews.¹  Stalin lied about Katyn Forest.  Vladimir Putin lies all the time.  Crimea.  Ukraine.  The shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight 17.  Anybody who believes Vladimir Putin isn’t paying attention.²

It could be, with the Internet, fake news today travels a little faster and gets a broader distribution, but so does everything else. 

Let’s Respect the Flag by Actually Singing the Star Spangled Banner

On Wednesday, the NFL announced a policy providing, as I understand it, that all players on the field when the National Anthem is played must stand and show respect for the flag and anthem.  Players who do not want to stand can stay in the locker room until after the anthem is played.

It has never been a big deal for me whether players stood or didn’t stand during the anthem.  I don’t watch football, and even if I did, I wouldn’t care.  There are more important things to worry about.  Plus the freedom to protest is a good thing.

Cuba’s Ladies in White Win the Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty

Everybody has heard of the Nobel Peace Prize.  Over the years, it has honored people for doing great things.  Teddy Roosevelt in 1906 for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War, George Marshall in 1953, Norman Borlaug in 1970 for the green revolution, and Lech Walesa in 1983. 

There have been deserving winners recently, too, such as Malala Yousafzai, a 15-year Pakistani girl, who won in 2014 after being shot in the head by the Taliban for going to school and writing about it, and Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese human rights activist, who won in 2010 but was not allowed to go to Oslo to collect the prize (surprise).  He also became just the second winner to die in custody.

Others, however, have been questionable, such as Kofi Annan and the United Nations in 2001.  (The people of Rwanda were not consulted.  See, inter alia, here and here.)  Three recent winners seem to have won mostly because they weren’t George W. Bush: Jimmy Carter in 2002,¹ Al Gore in 2007 (he should have won the presidential election in 2000), and Barack Obama in 2009 (George W. Bush was finally gone).  Also, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons won in 2013.  We have seen how successful they have been.

“The Post,” Richard Nixon, and an Historical “What If”

As a movie, The Post is going to be a blockbuster.  But you expect that with any movie starring both Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep (in alphabetical order).  As history, however, it leaves a little to be desired.  First, it was The New York Times, not The Washington Post, that had the scoop on the Pentagon Papers, and it was the Times, not the Post, that was sued by the Nixon administration.  The Supreme Court case is, after all, New York Times Co. v. United States.  However, it could be that the Times’s newsroom did not have a role for Ms. Streep, while the Post did.

Second, I have yet to see the movie, but I hope it makes it clear that the Pentagon Papers were about how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations misled the public about the Vietnam War.  The Pentagon Papers were not about Richard Nixon.  In fact, according to Henry Kissinger,¹ there was sentiment among some political types in the Nixon White House to let the Pentagon Papers be published to show how Kennedy and Johnson had messed up Vietnam.  Obviously, President Nixon did not take that approach.

“Free Societies” Versus “Fear Societies”

I recently came across a copy of an interview with Natan Sharansky¹ from 2011.  Mr. Sharansky talked about the demonstrations that were going on at the time in Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen, and Egypt.  (Remember the Arab Spring?  It had about as much success as the 1968 Prague Spring.)

In the interview, Mr. Sharansky explained the difference between what he calls “fear societies” and “free societies”:

“‘The reason people are going to the streets and making revolution [in these Middle Eastern countries] is their desire not to live in a fear society,’ Mr. Sharansky says.  In his taxonomy, the world is divided between ‘fear societies’ and ‘free societies,’ with the difference between them determinable by what he calls a ‘town square test’: Are the people in a given society free to stand in their town square and express their opinions without fear of arrest or physical harm?”

After the “Right to Deny Service” Case, What’s Next? Lawsuits Claiming the Services Aren’t Equal?

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear one of the “right to deny service” cases.  In this case, a Colorado court held that, under Colorado’s antidiscrimination law, a bakery could not refuse to sell a wedding cake to a same-sex couple who were getting married.  The baker claimed that being forced to provide a cake for a same-sex marriage violated his First Amendment rights of free speech and free exercise of religion.

I’ve always had two questions regarding to these cases.  First, why would anybody want to buy a wedding cake from somebody who doesn’t want to sell them one?  Why would they think they were going to get a good cake?

Could the Vietnam War Have Made a Difference? Consider South Korea and Taiwan.

We returned from a trip to Southeast Asia earlier this month.  Vietnam was on the itinerary, and things seem to be going well in Vietnam from an economic point of view.  According to The Economist, Vietnam has moved into the ranks of “middle income” countries.  There has been quite a change in Vietnam since 1995 when relations with the U.S. were normalized.  Given everything that has happened, people may wonder if the Vietnam War really made a difference.  The U.S. and Vietnam have reasonably close relations.  (We’re pretty much on the same side vis-à-vis China in the South China Sea.)  Vietnam’s economy is growing.  Maybe it really didn’t matter how the war ended.  Especially since the South Vietnamese government back then was a corrupt dictatorship.

But is that true?  Consider another way of looking at things.  Maybe it’s not so much where South Vietnam was, and what kind of government it had, in 1972 that is the question.  Maybe it’s where South Vietnam would be today if it had survived – and succeeded in its fight against the North Vietnamese.

Why Donald Trump Won

I didn't have anything to post today, so let me re-post this from Ann Althouse (I hope it is okay to do so):

"Why Trump Won

Because a man like Steve Martin won't fight for himself in a situation like this:

On Tuesday, the comic wrote in a since-deleted tweet, 'When I was a young man, Carrie Fisher was the most beautiful creature I had ever seen.  She turned out to be witty and bright as well.'

Campaign Financing Disclosure and Shutting People Up: In China and the United States

The Obama administration has rightly complained about a new law that China has passed with respect to foreign NGOs (non-government organizations).  According to the Associated Press, the new law subjects NGOs, inter alia,

“to closer financial scrutiny, requiring that they submit annual reports detailing their sources of financing, spending activities and changes in personnel.”

While the law was passed at the end of April, Secretaries John Kerry and Jacob Lew mentioned the law again in their recent visit to China.

The purpose of the law is pretty obvious: To subject foreign NGOs to more government scrutiny and to make it harder for them to do things the government doesn’t like.  In particular, if financing sources have to be identified, some of those sources may stop contributing to NGOs.  They may decide it’s not worth jeopardizing their business or other interests in China to do so.  If NGOs have less money, they can do less to help people in China – and they cause less trouble for a Chinese government that is becoming more hostile to dissent and disagreement.