How To "Solve" All Known Human Problems: Spend Some Of The Infinite Free Federal Money

Are you somebody who laments the end of bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress?  You feel that politics has become so polarized that we just can't "get anything done" any more.  Why can't the Congress just get back to "solving problems" like it used to?

If you are one of these people, you will be glad to hear that a new bipartisan "Problem Solvers Caucus" has been formed in the Congress.  It consists of some 43 Congresspeople, roughly equally split between the two parties.  The leaders are Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ).  Gottheimer -- who narrowly took his Northern NJ seat from eight-term conservative Republican Scott Garrett in the last election -- has a website biography of himself that doesn't even mention his political party.  Instead, it rings with the clarion call for bipartisanship.  Sounds like he's your type of guy!

Josh’s approach to public service is rooted in his experience in both the public and private sectors. During his time working with President Clinton, Senator Frank Lautenberg, and Speaker Thomas Foley, he saw that, by seeking common ground, it’s possible to find a bipartisan path forward without compromising your core values. Josh firmly believes that it doesn’t matter if an idea comes from the Democratic or Republican side of the aisle, only whether it will help the communities and people of the Fifth District.

As its first task, the Problem Solvers Caucus has taken on Obamacare.  Here we have the ultimate polarizing partisan issue.  Not a single Republican voted for the Obamacare bills on their way to enactment back in 2010, and not a single Democrat has voted for any of the Republican-sponsored repeal/replace measures that have been under consideration by Congress this year.  And as a result, as premiums soar, insurers withdraw, and Obamacare otherwise craters, we are at an impasse with seemingly no resolution in sight.  Surely this is a clear example of a "problem" that is in desperate need of a "solution."  Call in the Problem Solvers!

And it turns out that the Problem Solvers have actually put forth their proposed solution (or more precisely, plural solutions) in a press release issued on July 31.  Here is a copy of the press release from the website of another member of the Caucus, Rep. Ryan Costello (R-PA).  Will it surprise you to learn that essentially every proposed "solution" consists of the exact same thing, namely throwing more and more of the infinite free federal money at Obamacare to keep it afloat and save its participants from having to pay the full cost of their "coverage"?  Some excerpts, with comments interspersed:

1. Bring cost-sharing reduction (CSR) payments under the Congressional oversight and appropriations process, but ensure they have mandatory funding. CSR payments are an important part of helping households earning between 100% and 250% of the federal poverty level afford to participate in the individual market. Bringing CSR payments under the appropriations process ensures that Congress can provide proper oversight.

The "cost sharing reduction payments" -- those are the insurance company bailouts that were provided for in the Obamacare law, but without appropriation, and then Congress declined to appropriate the money.  So Obama just went ahead and spent the money anyway without appropriation and in defiance of the Constitution.  A federal judge in the D.C. District Court declared the payments unconstitutional, but then declined to issue an injunction pending appeal.  Meanwhile, the Problem Solvers decline to tell us how much money they are prepared to throw at this.  But with a little research, we find that the amount of the CSR payments has recently been running around $7 billion per year, and with projections that the subsidies will rapidly escalate to around $12 billion annually by as soon as 2020.  By the way, President Trump has so far continued these blatantly unconstitutional expenditures, although to his partial credit he has said he will discontinue them as part of his strategy to get Congress to act on Obamacare repeal.  Thus, note that in the "Problem Solvers" press release, the phrase "bring CSR payments under the Congressional oversight and appropriations process" is the euphemism of the moment for "spend $120 billion or so over the next ten years of the infinite free federal money so that people don't have to take responsibility for themselves."  Problem solved!

2. Create a dedicated stability fund that states can use to reduce premiums and limit losses for providing coverage—especially for those with pre-existing conditions.

"Create a dedicated stability fund" -- another one of the literally infinite number of euphemisms for "throw some more of the infinite free federal money at it."  For this one I can't find any estimate of the cost.  $100 billion?  How about a trillion?  Problem solved!

3. Adjust the employer mandate by raising the threshold on the requirement for employers to provide insurance under the employer mandate to businesses of 500 employees or more. . . . Additionally, the definition of “full time” under the employer mandate should indicate that a full-time work week is 40 hours.   

Did you doubt that there is an infinite number of ways to say "throw some more of the infinite free federal money at it"?  This time it's "adjust the employer mandate" -- which of course means that fewer people will be insured through employers, which means that more people will head for the exchanges, which then means more of the "cost sharing reduction" payments.  Of course, the infinite free federal money will step in.  Problem solved!

4. Repeal the medical device tax. This tax adds a 2.3% sales tax on medical device supplies. The costs of the tax are passed on to consumers and it should be repealed. 

Well, that's roughly $3 billion per year that was a big part of the "scoring" that supposedly made Obamacare affordable.  But then, a lousy $3 billion per year is not even a rounding error when the money you are playing with is infinite and free.  Problem solved!

Read enough of this stuff and you start to understand what Rep. Gottheimer is talking about when he says "it doesn’t matter if an idea comes from the Democratic or Republican side of the aisle, only whether it will help the communities and people. . . ."  It means "Republicans can also come up with ways to throw around the infinite free federal money."  The people on the paying end will never notice!  What I can't believe is how many Republican Congresspeople are dumb enough to get schnookered into going along with these transparent dependency-creating vote buying schemes for Democrats.

Where is a single Congressperson from the Democratic side who will go along with any "solution" to any "problem" that involves spending less federal money?

What Is The Argument In Favor Of HUD?

I last visited the subject of HUD and its new Secretary Ben Carson back in May ("The Blob Goes After Ben Carson").  In recent months the news has been so dominated by fake and ridiculous stories (e.g., Russia!; accusations of racism against anybody else who doesn't toe the progressive line in every respect) that the subject of Carson and HUD has largely been wiped off the front pages, and even the inside pages.  But this week New York Magazine comes back with a long piece by Alec MacGillis titled "Is Anybody Home at Ben Carson's HUD?"  

Needless to say, MacGillis doesn't have one good word to say about Carson or what he is doing at HUD.  On the other hand, the Manhattan Contrarian and others have thoroughly documented why HUD -- and for that matter the whole subject of subsidized housing for the poor -- has been a disaster for the supposed beneficiaries, trapping millions of people perfectly capable of providing for themselves into a lifetime of government dependency.  What is the progressive answer to those reasonable objections?

The New York Magazine article does not devote a single word to trying to respond to the many perfectly reasonable criticisms of HUD and its program of government dependency.  Instead, it appears that the entire argument for maintaining the HUD mission and budget is that people once in dependency must always be maintained in dependency because they have been rendered helpless and any other alternative would therefore be cruel.  

A few excerpts.  First, MacGillis quotes Shaun Donovan, first HUD Secretary under President Obama:

[A]lmost 90 percent of our budget was to help people stay in their homes,” Shaun Donovan told me. “So when you have a 15 percent cut to that budget, by definition you’re going to be throwing people out of their homes. You’re literally taking vouchers away from families, you’re literally shutting down public housing, because it can’t be maintained anymore.”

You'll be "throwing people out of their homes!!!!!"  Without HUD subsidies these people are supposedly helpless.  Left unmentioned is that HUD subsidizes only about 3 million families in the U.S., which is something in the range of 2 to 3% of all families.  How are the other 97/98% somehow getting by?  

Then we get into the heart-rending stories of people seemingly incapable of tying their own shoelaces without some kind of HUD grant or handout:

In Glouster, Ohio, a tiny coal town that went for Trump by a single vote after going for Obama two to one in 2012, officials were counting on the grants to replace a bridge so weak that the school bus couldn’t cross it, forcing kids from one part of town to cluster along a busy road for pickup. “Without those funds, it would just cripple this area,” said Nathan Simons, who administers the grants for the surrounding region. . . .  On my travels through the Midwest I’ve seen how many federally subsidized housing complexes there are on the edges of small towns and cities, places very far from the Bronx or the South Side of Chicago. People living in these places rely on a functioning, minimally competent HUD no less than do the Section 8 voucher recipients in Jared Kushner’s low-income complexes in Baltimore. In an age of ever-widening income inequality, the Great Society department actually plays an even more vital role than when it was conceived.

OK, Alec, but what do you say to the fact that a place like Houston, with a minimal amount of HUD-subsidized housing (0.4% of the population) has far lower cost of housing and far less homelessness per capita than a place like New York, where over 5% of the population lives in HUD-subsidized housing?  What do you say to the fact that almost nobody ever moves out of HUD-subsidized housing and nearly all of the beneficiaries end up leading lives of government dependency?  What do you say to the fact that HUD-subsidized housing can never be bought or sold or mortgaged and leaves the beneficiaries in poverty for life, even when they receive an annual subsidy that can be valued at $50,000 or more?  What do you say to the fact that numerous HUD-subsidized projects need massive capital upgrades and there is no foreseeable source of the funds other than doubling or tripling taxpayer subsidies, as long as the projects remain in the HUD domain?  MacGillis does not address any of these questions.

Instead, we read about the horror experienced by the "housing experts" when their turf gets taken over by the rubes.

[T]o many HUD employees, the selection of so ill-qualified a leader felt like an insult. “People feel disrespected. They see Carson and think, I’ve been in housing policy for 20 or 30 years, and if I walked away, I would never expect to get hired as a nurse,” said one staffer at a branch office, who, like most employees I spoke with, requested anonymity to guard against retribution.

Well, these so-called "housing experts" have spent 50 years at HUD, spending a couple of trillion dollars or so of taxpayer money, and have never raised a single person out of poverty, while trapping a few million in dependency for life.  What kind of "expertise" is that?  Seems to me we could use a new approach.  Even something entirely random would be far better.  Doing nothing whatsoever and letting the whole thing die?  That would be great too.

UPDATE August 29:  I thought readers might enjoy this picture of HUD headquarters in Washington.  Doesn't it tell you all you need to know?

There's No Good Answer In Afghanistan

I don't comment much here on the subjects of geopolitics and foreign policy.  A big reason for that is that much of the information needed to comment intelligently is not available to people outside the government.  On the other hand, just because the government actors have access to far more information than us mere citizens does not necessarily mean that they can come with any good ideas of what to do in difficult situations.  Unfortunately, when there are no obvious good ideas of what to do, the prescriptions of the government actors almost always come down to the same thing, which is "give us more money and more personnel to keep doing what we are doing."  That is certainly a fair description of the Afghanistan situation.  

During the his campaign for President, Donald Trump did not make a big issue out of Afghanistan.  However, when he did address it, both during the campaign and before, he was clear that he thought the right answer was to get out promptly.  From a compilation at CNBC on August 21:

Five years ago to the day Monday, Trump called Afghanistan "a complete waste." He added: "Time to come home!" . . .  In a March 2013 tweet, he said the U.S. "should leave Afghanistan immediately."   "No more wasted lives," Trump tweeted. "If we have to go back in, we go in hard & quick. Rebuild the US first."

Seven months later -- and doubtless after having been worked over multiple times by his generals and his foreign policy advisors -- Trump has now agreed to keep on slugging it out for the foreseeable future in that godforsaken country.   Here is the full text of his August 21 speech on the subject.  Basically, he admitted that there is no alternative to continued efforts to suppress terrorist activity in Afghanistan:

A hasty withdrawal would create a vacuum for terrorists, including ISIS and Al Qaeda, would instantly fill just as happened before Sept. 11. And as we know, in 2011, America hastily and mistakenly withdrew from Iraq. As a result, our hard-won gains slipped back into the hands of terrorist enemies. . . .  We cannot repeat in Afghanistan the mistake our leaders made in Iraq. . . .  I [have] concluded that the security threats we face in Afghanistan and the broader region are immense. Today, 20 U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations are active in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the highest concentration in any region anywhere in the world.

Of course, what Trump didn't do in the speech was to give any real idea of what our ultimate goal is and whether there is any hope of ever actually achieving it and declaring the effort concluded.  It's just as well he didn't address those things, because the answers will not be anything that anyone wants to hear.  Goal?  The best we can hope for is to maintain a highly unsatisfactory status quo, where an official government (more or less entirely on our payroll) keeps a tenuous grip on some of the more important areas of the country, and the Taliban and other terrorist organizations do not completely take over and run the place as a world terrorist training ground.  Cost: $1 trillion and counting.  Hey, since it's now been about 17 years, that's less than $60 billion per year.  A bargain!

Actually, I don't mean to be too critical.  Also, I'm interested in whether readers think they have any better ideas.  A few thoughts:

• Trump's strategy does at least contain some substantial improvements over Obama's.  Obama's idea of pre-announcing the upcoming withdrawal date was always lunacy.  Of course the adversaries would just lie low and wait him out.  As soon as he was gone they were back bigger than ever.   
• Those advocating something dramatically different often say something like "go hard or get out." That's easy to say, but what does "go hard" even mean in practice?  This is not a situation where there is some formal army that can be defeated or captured and then the war is over.  Does "go hard" mean killing every single person in the country?
• And then there's the "get out" part.  Trump is absolutely right in reminding us that the reason we "got in" in the first place was that Afghanistan had been used as the site of the training base for the 9/11 attacks.  Would anyone tolerate allowing that to happen again?

After about 40 years of invasions and civil wars, there is essentially no industry in Afghanistan.  Not that there ever was much, but with constant fighting going on, nobody is going to undertake any project -- like a large factory or a mine -- that involves hundreds of millions of dollars in investment that can then immediately be lost.  So that leaves exactly two sources of real income (other than subsistence farming) in Afghanistan:  working for the Americans or NATO, and opium poppies.  More or less all of our "friends" in that country are on our payroll.  I'm not meaning to say that they are not necessarily sympathetic to our goals.  But when we leave, what do they have to fall back on?  Opium, opium, and opium.

And of course, a little-mentioned aspect of our mission in Afghanistan has been a massive effort to eradicate the production of opium.  Here's a write-up from Common Dreams back in 2014.  At that point, some $7 billion had been spent in the opium-eradication efforts.  The result?:

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, Attorney General Eric Holder and US AID head Rajiv Shah, Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John F. Sopko writes: "Despite spending over $7 billion to combat opium poppy cultivation and to develop the Afghan government’s counternarcotics capacity, opium poppy cultivation levels in Afghanistan hit an all-time high in 2013."  "As of June 30, 2014, the United States has spent approximately $7.6 billion on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan," the letter states.  "Despite the significant financial expenditure, opium poppy cultivation has far exceeded previous records," he writes, adding that this "calls into question the long-term effectiveness and sustainability of those prior efforts."

Is there any hope of ever making any progress on this effort?:

Though the crop has funded extremist and criminal groups and contributed to a public health crisis, many Afghans see opium poppy cultivation as their only option. A UNODC report issued last year stated that Afghan farmers cited as among the top reasons for their cultivation of opium poppy its high sales price, high income from little land, improving their living conditions, and poverty. 

In other words, no.

So is there any possible better strategy than the one Trump has reluctantly accepted?  The only one I can see involves accepting the opium trade and doing some kind of a deal with the Taliban.  I'm not saying that's a good answer either, but the alternative is $60 billion (and probably much more) per year, thousands of deaths, and a festering status quo.  Anyway, with the opioid crisis exploding back here in the U.S., and Afghanistan as the largest supplier of the non-synthetic part of that market, neither Trump nor any other President was going to accept that alternative at this moment. 

A New Level In The Rhetoric Of "Our Opponents Are Evil"

A recurring theme here is that, while Republicans think Democrats are wrong in their public policy prescriptions, Democrats think Republicans are evil.  The recent events of Charlottesville and their aftermath have helped move the rhetoric to a whole new level.  Previously, if you advocated that less dependency on "free" government food or healthcare subsidies would be a good thing for the country and even for its poor citizens, you were merely "cruel" or "heartless."  Now, any failure to get on board with each and every policy prescription of the extreme left, let alone any support for President Trump, brands you at the minimum as a "racist," if not a "neo-Nazi" or a "white supremacist."

The deep-thinking Michael Moore gave a good summary of the current talking points in a CNN interview a few days ago:

“If you vote for a racist, what are you then? Because it sure sounds like racism to me,” he told Lemon during the late-night interview, after Moore and Mark Ruffalo protested outside Trump Tower with the audience of his current Broadway show. “He’s absolutely a racist,” Moore added of Trump, saying later in the interview, “If you still support the racist, you are the racist.”

Maybe you thought that Trump's policy prescriptions were, on balance, better for the country than those of Hillary Clinton? Or maybe you thought that Trump would be a more competent steward of U.S. foreign policy?  Sorry, but these possibilities are no longer allowed.  You are evil -- racist evil!  

Or consider the thoughts of Democratic intellect Russ Feingold (recent loser in an attempt to reclaim a Senate seat from Wisconsin) in the Guardian on August 19, "How the Republican Party quietly does the bidding of white supremacists":

Let us finally rip off the veneer that Trump’s affinity for white supremacy is distinct from the Republican agenda. It isn’t. . . .  The lesson from Charlottesville is not how dangerous the neo-Nazis are. It is the unmasking of the Republican party leadership. . . .  Where are the Republican leaders who are willing to call out the wink (and the direct endorsement) from President Trump to the white supremacists and acknowledge their own party’s record and stance on issues important to people of color as the real problem for our country?

John Davidson, in a column at the Federalist commenting on Feingold's piece, captures the concept well:

Finally, finally, someone on the Left just came out and said it. Being a Republican is apparently no different than being a white supremacist. Supporting a lower marginal tax rate puts you in the same company as the Ku Klux Klan. Therefore, punching a Nazi is the same as punching someone wearing a MAGA hat. . . .  This is the logical endpoint of what social justice warriors have been arguing since before Charlottesville. Everyone who opposes their political agenda does so out of hatred and bigotry, and there’s little difference between the GOP establishment and fringe neo-Nazi groups.

OK, I understand the game, but what I can't understand is the lack of much attempt at push-back.  Just breathe the word "racist," with or without any basis, and corporate America runs for the hills.  CEOs abandon President Trump's business councils en masse.  Formerly sane right-side pundits (e.g., Bill Kristol, Charles Krauthammer) compete to distance themselves from any element of the President's agenda.

Who is left to point out that it is the left-side handouts-for-all agenda that has proved a disaster for everyone who falls into its clutches, and most especially for black Americans?  You literally can't find anything about that in any media source these days, "mainstream" or otherwise.  OK, a little of it persists at a few think tanks.  But mostly it is left to the lonely voice of the Manhattan Contrarian.  A few obvious observations, made repeatedly here over the years:

• Fifty years of the "War on Poverty," and the poverty rate remains more or less exactly where it was when the "War" started.  Except in Democrat strongholds, like New York, where "anti-poverty" programs are even more generous and pervasive, and therefore the poverty rate is up a full five points since the War on Poverty began, with no reason to believe it will ever go down -- at least until the "anti-poverty" programs are reduced or ended.  So-called "anti-poverty" programs are specifically designed not to lower poverty and reduce dependency, but rather to perpetuate poverty and increase dependency.  The poor are trapped in a lifetime of dependent poverty.  The only beneficiaries of this system are the government functionaries who make a comfortable and secure career without ever accomplishing anything they are supposed to accomplish.  The cost is about $1 trillion per year to accomplish nothing.
• The moral crusade of "healthcare for all" remains a disaster as an anti-poverty measure, and even worse as a public policy.  By definition, no amount of free or subsidized healthcare will ever raise any poor person out of poverty.  Not only have all attempts to demonstrate better health outcomes among those with free healthcare failed, it is obvious to anyone who looks that areas with pervasive Medicaid participation have dramatically worse health outcomes than areas with less Medicaid participation.  The recent full implementation of Obamacare, expected by all on the left to bring improved health outcomes, has in fact brought noticeably worse health outcomes.  Could it be because expanded Medicaid is paying for opioids for the vulnerable?  That's a very reasonable hypothesis, although there are not yet enough data to prove it.
• And then there's subsidized "affordable" housing, often characterized here as "the worst possible public policy."  Don't get me started.

The inheritors of the mantle of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and the KKK -- that is, Democrats and progressives -- now purport to claim the moral high ground with a program of handouts designed to keep black America in dependency forever.  How can any sane person concede the moral high ground to them?  Sure, Donald Trump is an imperfect vessel for the other side.  So?

Should The Democratic Party Be Abolished As A Symbol Of Oppression?

Following the events in Charlottesville last weekend, we are now engaged in a national orgy of banishing whatever can be identified as "symbols of oppression" from the past.  Everywhere they exist, statues of Confederate figures are being removed from public spaces.  In Congress, Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has called for removal of a dozen or so statues of Confederate figures from the U.S. Capitol.  (Funny, but there didn't seem to be any problem with them when she was Speaker not so long ago.)  Here in New York, we don't have much in the way of symbols honoring Confederate figures, but somebody figured out that two streets in Brooklyn are named after Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, so they have to go.  Governor Cuomo, feeling the politician's desperate need to jump on the bandwagon, has called for removal of a marker in Lower Manhattan noting that the City held a ticker tape parade in 1931 for French World War I military hero Henri Philippe Pétain.  A decade later in the 1940s, Pétain collaborated with the Nazis, so he is also a symbol of oppression and his marker must go.

While we are at this, why don't we do something about the biggest symbol of oppression of all?  I'm talking, of course, about the Democratic Party.  For a century and more, the Democratic Party stood for slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it proudly marketed itself as the "white man's party," contrasting itself with the Republican Party which it accused of seeking "negro supremacy."  The Democratic Party resisted civil rights legislation well into my lifetime.  Today, the Democratic Party claims to have put that legacy behind it, even as the jurisdictions where it has single-party control -- places like Chicago, Baltimore, St. Louis and Detroit -- are cesspools of poverty, violence, and government dependency.   Is there any reason why we should forgive the Democratic Party for its odious history, let alone for its current failures?  None that I can think of.

Let's just assemble a few data points in the racist history of the Democratic Party:

In the late 19th century, the Democratic Party gradually took control of each state in the South from the Republican reconstructionists, and over time proceeded to institute a regime of segregation and disenfranchisement of blacks.  Each state has its own sordid history, but consider this summary of events from North Carolina (from Sean Braswell at The Daily Dose, February 17, 2017, "When the 'White Man's Party' Rocked North Carolina"):  

In the years after the Civil War, Reconstruction Era Republicans in North Carolina were able to expand voting rights and political representation for African-Americans in their state. But, in 1898, the Democrats — then the party of white Southern conservatives — struck back with a “white supremacy” electoral campaign, and subsequent disenfranchisement strategy, that would devastate the state’s democracy for decades to come. . . .  Calling themselves the “white man’s party,” they threw down the gauntlet for the 1898 election, proclaiming “North Carolina is a WHITE MAN’s state and WHITE MEN will rule it " . . .

[After winning the election,] the Democrats immediately set to work on several measures, including a constitutional amendment, to disenfranchise Black voters. . . .  By February 1899, the amendment, containing a literacy requirement and poll tax (as well as a “grandfather clause” to ensure illiterate whites could still vote), had been passed, and was rapidly enforced to disenfranchise most of the state’s Black population.

In the early 20th century, we got that great Democratic and progressive icon Woodrow Wilson as President.  What is his record in the field of race relations?  For starters, Wilson segregated the formerly integrated civil service in the federal government.  From Paul Rahe at FEE, September 17, 2016, "Woodrow Wilson: This So-Called Progressive was a Dedicated Racist":

Prior to the segregation of the civil service in 1913, appointments had been made solely on merit as indicated by the candidate’s performance on the civil-service examination. Thereafter, racial discrimination became the norm. Photographs came to be required at the time of application, and African-Americans knew they would not be hired.  The existing work force was segregated. Many African-Americans were dismissed. In the postal service, others were transferred to the dead-letter office, where they had no contact with the general public. Those who continued to work in municipal post offices labored behind screens — out of sight and out of mind.

Wilson provides a treasure trove of racist quotations.  Here are a couple from this compilation:

• “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation—until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.”
• “Segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” 

Yet somehow Wilson remains a respectable figure, with his name all over Princeton University.

Franklin Roosevelt?  He gladly accepted the support of Southern segregationists in his presidential runs, and was the guy who appointed ex-Ku Klux Klansman and Democratic Senator from Alabama Hugo Black to the Supreme Court in 1937.  Black went on to write the Supreme Court opinion in 1944 upholding the confinement of Japanese-Americans in concentration camps during World War II.

And is this all ancient history?  Well, how about Robert Byrd?  He served as Democratic Senator from West Virginia from 1959 all the way to 2010, including two stints as Majority Leader in the 1970s and 80s.  In the 1940s he was a Grand Cyclops in the KKK, head of a chapter and active in recruiting.  Here are a couple of quotes from Byrd appearing in his Wikipedia biography:

• From a letter to Senator Bilbo of Mississippi in December 1944:  "I shall never fight in the armed forces with a negro by my side ... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds."
• From a 1946 letter to the Grand Wizard of the Klan:  "The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia and in every state in the nation."

In the 1960s, Byrd was a leader of the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

Also in my lifetime, we have the likes of Bull Connor -- long-time member of the DNC and Democratic Commissioner of Public Safety for Birmingham, Alabama -- who became famous in the 1950s and 60s for offering no protection to civil rights demonstrators against KKK violence, and then as the guy who jailed Martin Luther King.

Obviously these are just a handful of examples, of which I could come up with hundreds.  The association of the Democratic Party with segregation, racism, and oppression is long and deep.  At this point, there is no way that it can disassociate itself from that history.  If we are abolishing the symbols of oppression from our society, why should this not be the first to go?

Yet More "Diversity" Follies

Even as Google atones for its "diversity" sins by firing its one employee willing to speak honestly about the subject, we have a very similar morality play going on here in the New York legal profession.  We have just learned that New York lawyers or their clients or the judges or somebody have for decades been secretly conspiring to keep women from advancing professionally in the litigation sector.  Something must be done!

In July something called the Commercial & Federal Litigation Section of the New York State Bar Association, through a Task Force on Women's Initiatives, put out a big Report titled "Achieving Equality For Women Attorneys in the Courtroom and in ADR."   The members of the Task Force are all women, headed by one Shira Scheindlin.  

Have you heard of Judge Shira Scheindlin?  Probably you have, but then, you probably also confuse her with Judge Judy Sheindlin, of TV fame, who is no relation.  Shira Scheindlin was a federal judge on the Southern District of New York from 1994 (appointed by Clinton) until last year, when she retired to go to a private law firm.  All federal litigators in New York heaved a collective sigh of relief.  She seemed to have been born angry.  There was no more unpleasant or difficult judge to appear before.  Her biggest claim to fame as a judge was her series of decisions in a case called Zubulake, in which she singlehandedly multiplied the cost of civil discovery nationwide by setting rules making it impossible to put any reasonable limits on retaining and reviewing thousands (sometimes millions) of emails.  She also regularly made highly ideological decisions that got herself reversed by the Second Circuit.  In one notorious opinion, in 2013 she declared the so-called "stop and frisk" program of the New York Police Department to be unconstitutional.  The Second Circuit reversed in a critical decision and, in an unusual move, removed her from the case.  She was unrepentant.  

So in her newfound retirement, Ms. Scheindlin turns her hand to excoriating the New York litigation community for its alleged sins of lack of "diversity," particularly as it concerns women.  The Report collects statistics, both in New York and nationwide, on the under-representation of women as lead litigators appearing in court in trials and appeals.  Examples:

The results of the survey are striking:  Female attorneys represented just 25.2% of the attorneys appearing in commercial and criminal cases in courtrooms across New York; female attorneys accounted for 24.9% of lead counsel roles and 27.6% of additional counsel roles; the most striking disparity in women’s participation appeared in complex commercial cases: women’s representation as lead counsel shrank from 31.6% in one-party cases to 26.4% in two-party cases to 24.8% in three- to-four-party cases and to 19.5% in cases involving five or more parties. In short, the more complex the case, the less likely that a woman appeared as lead counsel.  The percentage of female attorneys appearing in court was nearly identical at the trial level (24.7%) to at the appellate level (25.2%). The problem is slightly worse downstate (24.8%) than upstate (26.2%). 

Notice the casual insertion into the statistics of value judgments about the results, tossed out without explanation and with the pervasive assumption that no reasonable person could possibly disagree.  The under-representation (presumably meaning anything less than 50%) of women in these roles is a "problem."  There is a need for "solutions."  Any lower representation is "worse."  Any somewhat higher representation is a "bright spot."  And so on.

Meanwhile, do you notice that the percentage of women in these lead litigation roles in court in New York seems to be right in the same range as the percentage of women in technical jobs at Google?  Check the stats at my post yesterday.  But there is this difference:  Google is one company.  Everybody reports to the same top management.  Therefore, it is at least a plausible hypothesis that a systematic under-representation of women in Google's ranks could be the result of centrally-directed discriminatory intent.  

Now try applying the analogy to the legal profession.  There are hundreds upon hundreds of law firms, and in New York City there are many dozens of quite large law firms (100 lawyers and up).  Could they really all be systematically discriminating against women?  Go to any of the large ones, and you will find that without exception they have some kind of internal "diversity" initiative dedicated to advancing women and various other minority groups within the firm.  Are all of those diversity initiatives in hundreds of firms simultaneously just a hoax to fool outsiders while systematic discrimination continues?  Moreover, clients don't typically hire the firm by brand name and then accept the lawyer that the firm happens to assign them.  Rather, clients pick the individual lawyer that they want to represent them as lead counsel.  Collectively, the number of clients in any given year is in the tens or hundreds of thousands.  Literally all of them -- and certainly every single one of the corporate law departments -- will say if asked that they do not discriminate in choice of counsel, and are doing everything they can to increase "diversity."  Could it really all be a sham?

Remarkably, among the large law firms, essentially all of them have gender diversity statistics that are nearly identical, or within a very narrow range.  All hire approximately 50% women and 50% men at the entry level.  All have about 30 to 40% women in the overall ranks.  And all have about 20% women in the partnership.  Within the partnership, almost always there will be more women in certain fields (e.g., trusts and estates, pension law, employment law) and fewer in other fields (e.g, corporate mergers and acquisitions, litigation).

Can you view these statistics and still believe that the cause of universal under-representation of women in certain areas is some kind of pervasive concealed bias, let alone a grand conspiracy?  Judge Scheindlin does not say in her Report, but she gave an interview that appeared in the New York Law Journal on August 10.  Excerpt:

Women are 50 percent of the graduating class at law school. They're getting offers at the big firms at the same rate as men, but then come the problems: Women are not getting the same opportunities to actually talk on their feet, to appear at courtrooms, to take or defend depositions. Something goes wrong once women arrive at law firms, and it's probably because the higher-ranking positions at firms are held by men and people tend to, unconsciously, work with people who look like them. Young men don't have to be more active or progressive. But for young women that isn't the case. Unless law firms make a conscious effort to bring them in and meet clients, go to court, take depositions, promote them and eventually make them partner, the gap is going to be hard to change.

Somehow, she seems to be unaware that those "conscious efforts" she talks about have been going on for decades.

For myself, I don't claim to have perfect knowledge of all the causes of "gender disparity" in the legal profession.  However, as a long time law firm partner, I did have the experience of working with many dozens of female associates (as well as an equivalent number of male associates) over the course of three decades.  It would have been hard not to notice the higher attrition rate among women over the years from the higher-pressure and longer-hour areas of the practice, of which litigation is one.  More than anything else, this attrition for women was associated with having children.  I have spent many, many fruitless hours in my life trying hopelessly to convince highly talented female associates that they really wanted to come back from maternity leave to the 12 hour days and over-the-weekend injunction motions and four weeks on trial in Kansas and leave their little kids at home with a babysitter.  It never worked once.  The number of women with children who stick with the high-end litigation business for a long term career is very few.  What I don't understand is why anybody feels guilty about that or thinks that it is important to change.