Bad news for the millienials. Well, for pretty much all of us. Hattip to Instapundit.

Here are gobs of helpful links related to the “Fear the Boom and the Bust” video I posted earlier. I think after reading it all you qualify for three credits in economics.

The Suprme Court is currently considering McDonald v. Chicago, a case in which the appellant wishes to see the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution incorporated using the “due process” interpretation of the 14th Amendment endorsed in the Slaughterhouse cases over a century ago in 1868. Well, that is, unless the Court is willing to ressurect a different interpretation of the 14th Amendment that places emphasis on a substantive intepretation of the Priviliges & Immunities clause.

While the case is substantively interesting from an incorporation standpoint, and I encourage you to keep an eye out for the case once the USSC rules, I found this passage from a recent Reason.com article quite interesting. It is on whether the Court might resurrect the Priviliges & Immunities interpretation of the 14th amendment that the Court abandoned in the Slaughterhouse Cases (in short: they don’t expect the Court to revive the P&I interpretation). What I found interesting was the discussion of a possible Thomas seperate opinion where he would argue on behalf of the P&I interpretation in a concurrence to the presumed 2nd Amendment incorporating McDonald majority.

But no matter what the consensus is, a privileges or immunities victory will eventually have to be won in the Supreme Court, and in my read there is at best one person on the current Court who would vote for it. Justice Clarence Thomas, silent as always in this week’s hearings, has in the past expressed an interest in rethinking privileges or immunities. There’s a strong expectation on the part of some privileges or immunities fans that Thomas will write a concurring opinion uniting in the holding that the Second Amendment is incorporated, but with a separate set of privileges or immunities-based reasoning that could become a rallying flag for future arguments about the clause’s continued value.

While the substantive arguments in the case are fascinating and extremely important as a matter of social policy, take note of the raison d’être the article gives for writing the concurring opinion. As I’ve pointed out in class, the primary motivation for a justice to write a concurring or a dissenting opinion is the possibility that its reasoning could prove influentional (with the public, among legal scholars and the legal profession, as well as future generations)…and one day become the reasoning in a USSC case modifying or overruling the precedent that the justice disagrees with in the current case. And here we see that reasoning expressly acknowledged in this article. Cool.

Blanche Lincoln (D, AR) is out with a new campaign ad that is in the mold of the classic “Run against Washington” style used so effectively by congress critters over the years.

Also a common theme when your party is down in the polls and you are up for election is to run against the national party and emphasize your independence from it. Unsurprisingly, Lincoln does exactly that in asserting her independence from almost *all* of the Obama legislative agenda from the last year. There are no glaring misstatements of fact, though some important information is ommitted. For example, she doesn’t mention she was a “yes” vote on the Obamacare vote in December. She claims to have been a “no” vote on the “public option” health care…but that’s a bit misleading. While she did come to oppose the public option, the Senate bill which she voted on never had a public option…so technically she never voted on a health care bill with it in it. By the time a comprehensive health care bill reached the floor in the Senate, it contained no public option. Perhaps she is referencing some committee vote here, it is hard to say. A more straightforward way to put it would have been to say “I voted for a health care bill without a public option”…but this is a campaign ad afterall.
Enjoy:

Just a bucket load of awesome.

The wiki article on reconcilliation.

A description of the reconcilliation process by the House Rules Committee.

A crash course in reconcilliation.

A historical view on reconcilliation from National Review Online.

An analysis of the legislative process involved in reconcilliation.

Slate’s assessment of whether the Democrats have the votes in the House for a reconcilliation vote.

Republican Senator John Thune says Republicans are ready for reconcilliation.

…probably should have written about this just to balance out the ledger.

…the Democrats plan on passing Obamacare:

Lt. Governor Halter announced today that he will challenge sitting Senator Blanche Lincoln in the Democratic Primary for a chance to face the Republican nominee in the November 2010 elections.

“Washington is broken,” Halter said in a video on his campaign website. “Bailing out Wall Street with no strings attached, while leaving middle-class Arkansas taxpayers with the bill; protecting insurance company profits instead of protecting patients and lowering health costs; gridlock, bickering and partisan games while unemployment is at a 25-year high. Enough’s enough.”

Conventional wisdom suggests that Halter’s entry into the primary will ensure that Lincoln is a “yes” vote on reconcilliation for Obamacare and that she will tack back toward the “progressives” who make up the Democratic Party’s Left.

As this observer puts it:

“The more problematic aspect of Halter’s challenge is that it will push Lincoln left,” she says. “After all, he is running because he doesn’t feel that Lincoln has been a solid Democrat. Even if she wins the primary comfortably, this move left further weakens her for the general.”

But count me as a voice in the wilderness. I think these politicos are counting eggs not yet in the basket. First, while it is true that Halter has ties to progressive groups in Washington, D.C. and he is a likely supporter of Obamacare, note that he said nothing in his annoucement specifically about the bill or calling for reconcilliation to get it passed. Rather, he made a classic populist / outsider appeal in launching his bid.

And it it difficult to see a “pass healthcare now!” appeal gaining alot of traction with Arkansas voters. As the recent Arkansas Poll shows, Arkansas voters are opposed to Obamacare. This includes the public option, which has polled fairly well nationally when set apart from the bill being pushed through in congress.

Nearly half of all those surveyed – 48 percent – opposed a public option, with 39 percent supporting the creation by the government of “a new health insurance plan to compete with private health insurance plans.”

As Dr. Parry notes, the only demographic that registered support (and even that was rather tepid) were the uninsured, and they constituted only 15% of the poll’s sample. Since the Arkansas Poll is not oriented towards “likely voter” samples (754 adult Arkansans) such as Rassmussen, I would expect that this demographic is even smaller when we are talking about voters in the 2010 elections.

IOW, Halter has a strong incentive to avoid taking the Scott Brown route: targeting Lincoln on healthcare and making it one of his primary campaign messages. Rather, he is more likely to try and tap into voter angst over spending and partisanship. The simple fact of the matter is that, in Arkansas, Democratic primary battles aren’t particularly leftwing. While Arkansas is generally more acceptant of government spending (i.e. education) than many of her sister states in the South, there is little evidence that a sucessfull challenge to Lincoln could be mounted by rallying “progressives” in the Arkasas Democratic primaries. There just aren’t enough of those votes. Most of them are to be found within the city limits of Fayetteville (and the big university cities), Little Rock, and some of the eastern border towns. Too few to be had in order to tip the balance against the centrist Democratic votes that make up the bulwark of voters in Arkansas. It is important to remember that most registered voters in Arkansas are Democrats and that there are a considerable number of moderates and conservatives who identify with the Democratic party here. In fact, there are more Democratic party identifiers who call themselves “conservatives” than there are who call themselves “progressives” in Arkansas. True, the primary will tend to skew further Left than the median Democratic general election voter, but I don’t think it will do so enough to force Lincoln to substantially tack Left. Certainly not enough to change her vote on the defining political issue of this election cycle.

Furthermore, while Halter constitutes a quality challenger to Lincoln (he holds statewide office), I do not believe he has much of a chance in unseating Lincoln before she gets to a general election. He will be at a considerable fundraising disadvantage, and while some national money might be had from liberal organizations trying to push Lincoln on her healthcare vote, it is unlikely to even approach the $5,000,000 that Lincoln reportedly has at her disposal. Even progressives in Arkansas, upset over health care, are unlikely to turnout to vote for a certain or near-certain loser. Halter’s most likely impact on the race would not be to shift Lincoln to the Left (as that way lies doom for Lincoln’s hopes of retaining the seat), but rather it would cause her to spend significant monies from her campaign warchest in a primary contest. Further weakening her general election bid to keep the seat in the hands of the Democrats.

Thus I remain highly skeptical that Halter’s decision will alter Lincoln’s vote on health care. She has very little chance of retaining the seat as it stands now anyway. If she decides to abandon all hope and look to the Obama administration to reward her vote for Obamacare, that won’t have much to do with Halter. If she decides she can’t win but would like to maintain her viability in the state for future elective office, then Halter won’t influence that decision either. And if she decides to try and persevere until November, well, Halter’s primary challenge is still irrelevant because to have any chance in the general she has to vote “no” on Obamacare. It is too unpopular with Arkansas voters, and would give the Republican an easy campaign message to hammer on in the general. In that case she simply must hope that Halter falls short and that she has enough residual support in the state to eek out a victory over likely Republican challenger, Boozman. Ideally, her opposition to Obamacare would defuse some of the Right’s anger and intensity over the issue, holding Republican-voting turnout in the state–already likely to be higher than it has been in several cycles–to a minimum.

So any way you slice it and despite appearances, her decision on Obamacare isn’t likely to have anything to do with Halter’s primary challenge. If she thinks she has a chance in November, she’ll stay a “no” vote on Obamacare. If, on the other hand, she thinks Ambassador Lincoln has a nice ring to it…

If that rap video with K & H was a bit confusing to you…or you didn’t recognize some of the terminology..help is on the way!

A peek at life in 1905 San Francisco…

This is a funny paradoy of the Health Care Summit & C-SPAN. CAUTION: some bleeped-out curse words are used in this video so it may not be appropriate for younger viewers.

I’ve tried to round up some representative video clips from the Health Care Summit. Here are a few:

Obama opens the Summit:

A CNN compliation of clips:

Paul Ryan’s take on the scoring of the Senate bill:

Yes, this IS before my time.

errrr…or something.

Filming Of Congressional Reality Show Disrupts Committee Meeting

We know 2010 is going to be a good Republican year. The polls all suggest they’re going to pick up seats in both the House and the Senate. But how many seats can we expect?

The Margin of Error Blog does a fairly sophisicated projection of the 2010 midterms based on past seat pick-ups relative to the generic party ballot (i.e. whether you would support a Republican or a Democrat, generally speaking, in the upcoming election). Here is a brief explanation of how the regression-based estimate works:

What you basically have is that the generic ballot this far from an election almost always overestimates the percentage of the vote the party who holds the White House… In your case, the 49.7% the Dems would get of the House popular vote would actually be more like 46 (and an 8 point edge for the Pubs) on election day considering historical trends…

Here is a figure illustrating the point he is making (namely that the generic ballot overestimates the vote in a midterm election for the party in control of the White House). The shaded areas are years the Republicans control the White House. Note that the dotted line (representing the % of Democratic seats) is below the average district vote during those years…while it is well above it during Democratic years. In short: Democrats do better than the generic when there is a Republican president and they do worse when there is a Democratic president.

As for the analysis itself, again, briefly: regression analysis merely means fitting a straight line to a set of data points (the line that ‘best’ fits those points…or the line where the distance between it and the points is the smallest). So here we see the line fitted for all elections since 1946 and, since lines extend out to infinity, that provides a point prediction for the 2010 elections. IOW, we have a number for what we expect the vote share of the Demcrats to be in 2010 (i.e. the point on the line). The two larger dots in the graph that MOE blog singles out are the best & worst ‘points’ on the fitted line that predict what the Democrats will win in 2010. Note how low those points are on the graph relative to the Y axis, which represents the % of seats for the Democrats. Being in the lower left-hand quadrant of the graph means your party is performing badly on the generic and your predicted vote total for a given election is low. And the Democratic points in 2010 are two of the worst points for Dems in the graph.

He estimates Republicans could pick up as many as 60 seats in the House. This total not only gives them the House (and the speakership), but it would blow 1994, the Republican Revolution, out of the water (54 seat pickup). I have one reaction to this: wow.

With current polling in conjunction with Bafumi et al.’s paper predicting a Republican national vote between 53.6% and 54.7%, the Republicans could easily gain 50-60 seats from their current 178. Gains of greater than 60 seats also look quite possible. Even in the best case scenario for the Democrats, it would seem that holding the House would be very, very difficult.

It looks like a red blizzard is going to sweep through Washington in November.

Wow.

Megan McCardle gets to the crux of the representational issue when it comes to the possibility of the Democrats using reconciliation to pass Health Care. Money quote:

Of course, sometimes politicians have to do the right thing rather than the popular thing. But this cannot be a blanket authority to ignore the desires of one’s constituents.

Democrats have had plenty of time to make their case. They have failed to do so. The longer they have talked, the more firmly the voters have rejected their ideas. If Congress goes ahead anyway, they will pay a terrible political price.

Harry Reid’s paired down 15 billion dollar jobs bill passed in the Senate. Four Republicans, including the newly minted Republican Senator Scott Brown, MA voted for it.

“I came to Washington to be an independent voice, to put politics aside, and to do everything in my power to help create jobs for Massachusetts families,” Brown said in a statement issued by his office. “This Senate jobs bill is not perfect. I wish the tax cuts were deeper and broader, but I will vote for it because it contains measures that will help put people back to work.

LOL.