How lie detectors exacerbate border problems. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

How lie detectors exacerbate border problems

Matthew Yglesias

13 - 16 minutes

Probably the least important thing happening in the current immigration policy debate is that H.R. 2 — the border security bill that House Republicans wrote before they decided they didn’t want to work on any immigration reform — contains a provision requiring the Department of Homeland Security to hire additional polygraph examiners. On first read, that provision of the legislation tripped me up. I thought maybe they were concerned that asylum-claimants were lying and we could use polygraphs to smoke them out.

But that’s not it.

The issue, instead, is that before CBP can hire you for a law enforcement position you need to take a polygraph test. And, per this CBP recruiting video, if the results of your polygraph are inconclusive, you need to take a second test to try to pass.

The inclusion of this provision is an important little keyhole into the larger immigration debate, in part because it reveals the big lie at the center of the Republican Party’s positioning on the border. They would like to blame Joe Biden for problems at the southern border. And they think — or rather, Donald Trump thinks — that passing a bipartisan border security bill will make that harder to pull off. So now, on Trump’s orders, they need to pretend to believe that border security could be achieved by magic if only Joe Biden were sufficiently magical. The point about the polygraph provision in H.R. 2 is that this isn’t true. Border security involves actual material resources like border agents who need to be hired and trained. And there are various bottlenecks to hiring and training new border agents, including apparently a shortage of polygraph examiners.

Long story short, I think that Biden was too slow to come around on the need for substantive changes to asylum standards (I wrote about this in March 2021, in September 2022, and in July 2023), but it’s also the case that actual resources are needed. I’m glad that Senate negotiators brought the White House around to the correct conclusion here, and it’s infuriating that Trump and House Republicans now won’t take yes for an answer, but I do think this mostly serves to politically backfire on them as long as people in the media are clear about the clumsy political game they are playing.

But there’s also a specific question here. Why is the government relying so heavily on lie detector tests that most people seem to think don’t work?

As most people know, polygraph results are not admissible in most legal contexts. That’s because they are not considered scientific enough to constitute reliable evidence. Those of us who’ve seen “Anatomy of a Fall” know that in the French legal system you can apparently just introduce whatever kind of hearsay or gossip or passages from someone’s novel that you want (French lawyers confirm this is true) but in the United States that doesn’t fly.

You also might think that a reliable lie detector test would have enormous private sector value.

CBP wants to know whether or not its job candidates are lying in interviews, but don’t a lot of employers want this information? It turns out there is actually a federal law — the Employee Polygraph Protection Act — which bans most private sector employers from requiring polygraphs as a condition of employment. And yet this thing that’s banned in the private sector and considered unreliable by the judiciary, is mandatory at many public sector agencies including the CBP.

This is particularly a huge issue at the border, because as Elliott Spagat reported for the AP in 2017, about two-thirds of applicants seem to flunk the CBP polygraph screen.

The Border Patrol Union, which has become an influential force in right-wing politics, has been saying for years that this is a problem. So it’s mostly conservatives who’ve taken up the cause of polygraph reform. Representative Dan Crenshaw is a particular leader on this and he has a bill that “would remove the polygraph requirement for CBP applicants who have prior law enforcement experience or military security clearances.” This would expand some of the limited polygraph waivers the CBP currently offers, which are only specifically available for veterans with top-secret clearances.

And it really does seem odd that you have people flunking the CBP polygraph who’ve been cleared at other agencies. One could imagine a story whereby they just have an unusually low-quality applicant pool, but Spagat’s reporting definitely turned up stories of people who seem awfully legit but are getting bounced by the polygraph:

    David Kirk was a career Marine pilot with a top-secret security clearance and a record of flying classified missions. He was in the cockpit when President George W. Bush and Vice Presidents Dick Cheney and Joe Biden traveled around the nation’s capital by helicopter.

    With credentials like that, Kirk was stunned to fail a lie detector when he applied for a pilot’s job with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which guards 6,000 miles of border with Mexico and Canada. After two contentious polygraph sessions that lasted a combined eight hours, Kirk said, he drove home “with my tail between my legs,” wondering how things had gone so wrong.

In the coding of partisan politics, it’s right-wingers and the border agent union that complain about the polygraphs while it’s progressives who worry about low standards and corruption at CBP. But the weird thing about this is that Crenshaw’s position only really makes sense if polygraph testing isn’t reliable (which is sort of what he says), and this turns out to be exactly the liberal position about polygraphs.

Crenshaw in his press release says “The polygraph is an interrogation tool. It’s useful for me as an intelligence officer when I want to vet an asset. It is not useful legally. It is thrown out in court. It is not useful for hiring purposes, and this bill aims to fix that.”

To the extent that liberals disagree with Crenshaw, it’s about whether or not the polygraph is useful as an interrogation tool. But to be clear, a big part of the premise here is that a lie detector test can be a useful interrogation tool even if it’s totally fake. There’s a famous scene in The Wire where a detective uses a clearly fraudulent lie detector on a suspect who has reason to believe is guilty. The point of the fake machine is to trick the suspect into believing that the Baltimore Police Department’s evidence is stronger than it really is, so that he confesses.

You can see why investigators might find this kind of tool useful, but as you’d expect people on the left tend to worry that this kind of thing is abusive. The ACLU, for example, says it’s an engine for racial bias. As a criminal justice issue, this sort of comes down to how much confidence you have in the police. In the hands of our heroes from our favorite television show, it’s a great investigative technique. But if we think the cops are bad, then we worry about abuses.

The politics flip when it comes to CBP’s internal use, and the conservative viewpoint is that abusive investigators are unduly sweating earnest border cops. Again, Spagat’s reporting is relevant here:

    But others, including lawmakers, union leaders and polygraph experts, contend that the use of lie detectors has gone awry and that many applicants are being subjected to unusually long and hostile interrogations, which some say can make people look deceptive even when they are telling the truth.

    Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona said he suspects CBP examiners fail applicants to justify their own jobs. He said he worries applicants are being wrongly branded with a “scarlet letter” in the eyes of other potential government employers.

The whole discourse in this space is redolent with ironies. But the bulk of expert opinion seems to be that polygraphs are highly unreliable and this has been the consensus for some time. A big National Research Council study in 2002 concluded that the use of polygraphs in routine security screening is bad. Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists notes that infamous spies like Aldrich Ames had no problem passing polygraph tests.

Perhaps more tellingly, to Aftergood’s point, the polygraph itself really doesn’t even say whether or not a given candidate is lying. It’s just lines on a page that the polygraph examiner then interprets — with different qualified experts giving different interpretations of the same lines:

    A DOE security contractor who administered a 1998 polygraph test to Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee found him to be innocent of committing espionage, providing classified information to an unauthorized person, or intending to harm the United States. Unusually strong readings indicated an absence of deception. The test was reviewed by two additional polygraphers, who concurred with the finding. But then the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) examined the very same data and concluded that Lee had failed the test.

The American Psychological Association is against polygraphs, here’s a Vox article about why polygraphs are bad, and there’s even a whole website — AntiPolygraph.org collecting information about why polygraphs are bad.

Given all the bad press and often vehement language with which polygraphs are discussed, you might be surprised to learn that studies show them to be accurate as much as 85 or even 90 percent of the time. But as even bullish takes on the efficacy of polygraphs, like this 2003 article in the MIT Technology Review, concedes that this means that using them as a random screening tool is going to uncover a lot of fake spies for Bayes’ Law reasons. Now in practice, the fairly high level of discretion that the polygraph process gives to polygraph examiners leads to results that differ a bit from what a crude statistical analysis would expect. But the fact that different examiners reach different conclusions is part of the problem here. The intelligence community starting using polygraphs in the 1950s to reassure people that it wasn’t being penetrated by spies, and that’s mostly what it shows. But CBP started doing polygraphs much more recently, as a result of a 2010 law that passed in response to corruption concerns. So they seem to be much more active at finding people to flunk.

On the narrow question at hand here, I think that rather than hiring more polygraph examiners to address the hiring bottleneck, immigration hawks and civil libertarians should join hands to admit that polygraphs are kinda fake and we don’t need to be making it harder to hire border agents.

That being said, the corruption concerns that motivated the polygraph testing are not fake.

There is a lot of money to be made by smuggling people or contraband (usually drugs) into the United States of America. People are willing to run significant risks to their personal safety to reap the rewards of illegal cross-border traffic, and they are also willing to invest time and resources in things like digging tunnels and cutting through segments of border wall. It’s natural that under the circumstances there is also an interest in bribing border agents. Unfortunately, a lot of anti-corruption efforts — certainly including the emphasis on polygraph screening — seem to be motivated by the very specific concern that Mexican drug cartels will recruit people to go become border agents who then work on their behalf.

That kind of scenario, basically a southwestern version of “The Departed,” is certainly something that could happen. But in CBP’s own review of 120 major corruption cases, they only found five instances of infiltration. The most common scenario, in 56 cases, was for an employee to “self-initiate” corrupt behavior — offering illicit services to criminals rather than being recruited by criminals.

One issue the review notes is that corruption seems particularly common in “hometown” assignments where an agent is working close to where he grew up, in a community where he has wide-ranging contacts.

If you sent all border agents to far-off postings, that could be a potentially very effective anti-corruption measure. But realistically, if you tried to do that without making any other changes, recruiting would collapse. Lots of people from South Texas who join CBP wouldn’t want the job if it meant a posting to Buffalo. And if you had to try to exclusively recruit people from out of the region to go move to the Southwest border region, you’d be drawing on a much thinner pool of people — especially if you were trying to get a critical mass of people with Spanish-language skills.

Now of course you could pay a lot more. But not only would that cost money, you might end up in effect just draining people away from other law enforcement agencies. Is it better for America if a given person decides to be a border agent rather than work for the FBI or as a homicide cop in Chicago? That’s not obvious to me, though mostly I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone even try to estimate the relative value of different kinds of law enforcement roles.

So now we’re back where we started. There’s a rhetorical construct around “the border” whereby presidents could just secure it with willpower. But even if you go to a really low-crime state like Maine, there are still people getting murdered every year. There was a bank robbery in South Portland last week. Trying to get people to not rob banks is a worthwhile (and I would say fairly uncontroversial) policy objective. But it’s also a non-trivial problem that involves material resources and competing priorities. The border is at least in part like that. It would be nice to have more border agents and a higher standard for recruiting and conduct. Those are certainly achievable goals. But it would take money and it would take leadership and various other things. There isn’t a magic force field that a president can just turn on or off.

Karma mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

www.slowboring.com

20 - 25 minutes

I’m obsessed with the right-wing conspiracy theories about Taylor Swift, none of which I endorse. That said, if Trumpworld really does go through with their plan for a “holy war” against Swift, one piece of oppo I’d like to see is that I’m pretty sure her song “Karma” from the most recent album contains an uncredited interpolation of a part of the 2006 song “Music is My Hot Hot Sex” by CSS. I’ve seen this discussed on one Reddit thread and in one brief TikTok video, but the mainstream media doesn’t want to talk about it.

Just saying!

This week in good news: A look at Medicaid expansion in the South, the first image of newborn great white sharks, the labor market is now appropriately balanced for sustained growth, and in Phoenix we saw a transit construction project actually get done on schedule and on budget. The new tax bill seems pretty good to me — CTC expansion! The American Journalism Project is making some big grants for local news. And a new ADU bill dropped in Colorado.

Meanwhile, of course, the most important news of the week is this analysis of Taylor Swift’s travel schedule, outlining how she can make it back from her show in Tokyo to see the Super Bowl in Las Vegas.

TheElasticStranger: What can be done to remove the blight of vacant gas stations that presumably lie vacant because no one wants to assume the liability of cleaning up whatever might have happened during operation? Guessing there would be federal and state rules at play that makes this difficult. Should cities take on this task?

This is a fun topic because the name for the process is LUST (leaking underground storage tank) remediation, so you get reports like “Let’s Talk About LUST” from the Bipartisan Policy Center in 2019. Cities (and states) not only should take on this task, they in fact do take it on, largely with money provided through the federal LUST Trust Fund which was established in 1986 and modified in the 2005 energy bill.

According to the BPC report, there used to be some big problems with how LUST Fund money was managed that tended to make it hard to actually clean up and use these sites, but it’s been substantially improved over the years.

One thing that I have noticed in discussing local real estate issues is that a lot of citizens assume LUST remediation issues are a barrier to redevelopment when that’s not actually the case, perhaps repeating outdated information from an earlier era of LUST rules. Nicholas Decker, for example, named the former gas station by the Key Bridge in Georgetown as an example of this problem. But in fact, even though any project on that site would need to do remediation, the remediation costs are not the barrier to redevelopment. It’s just normal infill regulatory bullshit. Here’s a story from October 2022:

    Altus Realty has submitted a plan to build a structure that would house around 50 graduate students. The project plans were recently given to the DC Historic Preservation Office for construction. PGN Architects, who designed the potential structure, envision the building in line with previous concepts for 3601 M St. NW. 

    Over 10 years ago, Eastbanc had submitted plans for a 35-37 unit, five-story development while the Exxon station was still open. The plans went through design iteration after iteration, with size changes off and on over the next few years.

I don’t want to go off on another long rant about historic preservation, but for the record, we are talking about a derelict Exxon station here. There is no question of pulling down a historic structure and replacing it with a modern one. The issue is tearing down a derelict Exxon station that happens to be near some historic structures and replacing it with a modern one.

Even weirder, at the time the gas station closed back in 2018, Councilmember Jack Evans complained that “we’re running out of gas stations in the city.”

His idea wasn’t that we need policy solutions to promote the redevelopment of gas stations into higher value uses, it’s that we needed the government to prevent gas stations from going out of business. DC actually used to have a law that said you needed the approval of a government regulator, the Gas Station Advisory Board, before you could close a gas station. It was putatively illegal for a gas station to go out of business. Of course there was no way to actually make that work. If the station has no customers, it’s going to close. But there are essentially two reasons a business might close. It might be that sales don’t cover operating costs and you need to shut down. But it also just might be the case that it’s more profitable to turn the plot of land that your business is located on into something else. And the city really does have rules in place designed to discourage this from happening to gas stations.

There’s been lots of litigation and wrangling about these rules, but that’s the basic shape of the policy in Washington, DC. It’s true that to convert a gas station into apartment buildings or whatever else involves some remediation costs. But over and above those market forces, the city is specifically trying to discourage gas stations from closing and being turned into housing.

Cal Amari: What are some dumb, half-baked, but objectively fun ways to improve the functioning of congress and improve our health of our body politic?

I like the idea of building classic shared-room college style dormitories that Senators and Reps are required to live in while Congress is in session. Roommates would be semi-random (different genders on different wings, maximize bipartisan rooms, most senior members can be on the ground floor). This policy would discourage super wealthy/senior candidates who can't stand spartan living conditions, encourage friendships, build social capital, and produce wild parties among reps from different sides/regions producing a less partisan, more effective legislature. It satisfies the elitist in me who wants more congressional action/cooperation, and it satisfies my populist id who thinks it will be funny if politicians have to overcome shared restrooms.

I like this, but my main idea for improving the functioning of Congress is the very not-so-fun idea that politicians should get better pay and better staff.

An underrated piece of this doesn’t even relate to Congress, but to state legislatures, which serve as a kind of farm system for congress. A key argument of Andrew Hall’s book “Who Wants to Run?” is that when political officeholding is a low-paying job, only grim ideologues (or the corrupt) actually want to do it. What we want is to live in a world where a Republican candidate who figures out how to win a D+3 state legislative seat actually reaps substantial material rewards. In any given state, there are lots of individual human beings who voted for Donald Trump or Joe Biden in 2020, but who see themselves as ideologically somewhere between Trump and Biden. People like that could be running and winning in purple seats, but they tend not to run at all, in part because being a state legislator just isn’t that great of a job. In turn, reduces the pipeline of future Jared Goldens and Mary Peltolas.

For Congress, though, I think staff resources are probably the bigger issue than member pay, per se.

It’s not that there are not talented people working in Congress at the current pay rates. But they do tend to be young, and they tend to be more ideologically extreme than even primary voters, because they are people who place a lot of intrinsic value on the job. The relatively low pay itself is also, I think, a source of psychological distortion. Objectively, Sherrod Brown’s staff is probably better off if he loses and they have to go do something else. But also, if you’re working on the Hill and sincerely moderate, I think you face strong incentives to go work in the private sector where that would be welcome.

So, yes, members in a dorm. But also, replace the current relatively cramped congressional office buildings with giant gleaming towers. Hire personal assistants for the members.

Bring back something like the Office of Technology Assessment, complete with the ability to hire a limited number of people at salaries that are competitive with major tech companies. Make sure members can hire at least a few senior staffers at pay rates that make being a key staffer on Capitol Hill a better job than being a former key staffer who now works at a law firm. Pay the members themselves at a rate commensurate with that. I know that people hate these ideas. But I sincerely think that a Congress full of professional politicians, many of whom came up by winning tough races earlier in their career, and whose teams reap substantial rewards for winning and penalties for losing would end up doing a way better job of making their constituents happy.

Lost Future: Why did either the British or their colonies invent All The Sports? The Brits invented (or popularized the existing ruleset for) soccer, rugby, golf, boxing, cricket, field hockey, and tennis. The Americans invented/popularized basketball, baseball, and volleyball. (I'm skipping slightly less popular sports like American football and MMA here). The Canadians invented hockey. That covers every single major global sport- in looking at Top 10 lists, I couldn't find a major sport that *wasn't* invented by the Brits or their colonies. How did such a small % of the world's population invent literally all of them?

I think the story here is something like the British invented the idea of sports.

Lots of cultures around the world have some games that involve kicking a ball around. But it was British boarding schools (“public schools,” in their jargon) that decided it would be a good idea to have standardized rules for rugby football and association football that would be the same across schools and could be the basis for inter-school competition. That idea then starts getting applied to other things. English people did not invent the idea of playing a ball game on ice skates, but they did publish the first set of formal rules of bandy. Something broadly resembling field hockey is attested into ancient times but it was, again, 19th century British public schools that published a formalized rule code.

This habit — not so much inventing sports as promulgating formalized rule codes for sports — followed British colonists as they took over most of the world. Lacrosse is based on Native American games, but it was Anglophone colonists who created the rules of lacrosse, because creating standardized sets of rules for sports is a British idea.

The history of gridiron football starts in the late-19th century when McGill, Harvard, and Yale wanted to create a standard set of rules that all three schools could use for intercollegiate games. There’s some sense in which sports are a very ancient human tradition that is visible across all kinds of cultures. But the idea of young men traveling around and competing against each other in ruled-based games is both relatively modern and distinctly British. It’s both a somewhat arbitrary idea with links to the peculiarities of Anglophone elite education, and also something that arguably didn’t make much sense in pre-industrial societies, which just didn’t have the population scale or transportation infrastructure for it to have much application. But the idea, once it exists, turns out to be highly viral, and lots of people all around the world love the idea of formal sports leagues with common rulebooks, even if they differ in exactly which sport they play. The result, though, is that almost every set of formal rules reflects an Anglophone standardization process, regardless of what people were doing earlier.

Eddy: What do you wish you could change about the public high school curriculum that students conventionally receive for American government and US history? Whether in the substantive material covered or just how it's approached more broadly in its goals/framework? Or more specifically, how do you want your son to learn about or be taught American government/history as he gets older?

I sincerely think the highly politicized history curriculum battles that people enjoy talking about on the internet are one of the most overrated features of the American education system. My son is actually very interested in history, reads history books for kids, listens to history podcasts for adults, and is annoyed that his school’s third grade curriculum doesn’t include very much historical content. And I hope he gets his wish for more school history in the future, because it would make him happy.

But if you take your average student who, I think, doesn’t really care about history, I don’t think you can just fill their head with certain crucial historical facts and thereby produce good outcomes.

Something that I’ve written about a few times is that there’s a school of academics who seems to believe that if you tell people modern prosperity was based on slavery, that will make them have left-wing opinions and support reparations. Realistically, though, that set of facts seems just as likely to convince white kids that slavery and racism were really good and the people who agreed to dismantle those systems were suckers. Mainly, what I wish more people realized about history is that while history is a very interesting topic, it is probably not as relevant to explaining the present day as a lot of people are inclined to think.

Consider Poland and Bulgaria, two countries with wildly different histories whose economic situations were pretty similar on the day the Berlin Wall fell. Since that time, Bulgaria has prospered, but not nearly to the extent that Poland has.

Why has Poland grown so much faster than Bulgaria? I don’t think you’re going to find the answer by learning about the Jagiellonian dynasty or the Treaty of San Stefano.

What I’m saying is that I am both a history fan and something of a history skeptic. I like to read books and articles about history, I spend time perusing random Wikipedia articles about the past, and I’m always a little sad that huge swathes of human history rarely get the kind of popular press treatment that you see for World War II or the Civil War. But I also think there is a broad intellectual tendency to say (or claim) that the answer to present-day problems can be found by studying the past, which I don’t think is always true.

For schools, though, I really want them to teach kids how to read and write and how to do math. Part of learning to read and write, I think, is that kids need to be given reading material that they are interested in. For some students, that will be historical topics, which is great. And they should learn how to read and explore and how to write essays critiquing other people’s writing and so forth, but I don’t think it really matters what specific history they learn.

MB: To steal the question from the end of Ezra’s show: What are three books that have greatly influenced you?

I’m always changing my mind on this kind of question because which topics seem important is always shifting over time.

I read Francis Fukuyama’s book “The End of History” a long time ago, went through a span when I didn’t think that much about it, except as an artifact of 1990s culture, but I now think it’s really important and insightful about the current situation. I would put Susan Moller Okin’s “Justice, Gender, and the Family” as a kind of all-time classic intellectual influence, not just for its specific content, but for the idea of trying to inject consideration of gender roles and family life into Big Ideas conversations about political theory. Last, I’m going to put up Ed Glaeser’s “Triumph of the City” as an important work shaping my all-around views on urban issues.

Andy: I recently listened to a Jonah Goldberg podcast where be briefly mentioned the old days of blogging in the oughts and how everyone had sharp elbows back then. I guess you and him went some rounds, which he mentioned in passing. Anyway, he said he doesn't hold grudges and has retweeted you a few times recently and it got me thinking about two things:

1. Do you hold any grudges against Goldberg or other opponents from the glory days of sharp-elbowed blogging?

2. Do you see any room for a strategic alliance between people like you and people like Johah Goldberg and the Dispatch folks when it comes to Trump this election year? Obviously you have a lot of philosophical and policy disagreements with those in the Dispatch orbit, but if America, Free France and the UK can ally with Stalin for the greater good, surely the MY YIMBY slow-boring left, Dispatch Right and Andy eclectic commenter types (me) can try to focus our energies better? Is that a pipe dream?

I definitely do not hold any grudges about the olden days.

I do sometimes feel guilty about some of the elbows I threw back then. But then when I feel bad, I look back at the policy debates of that era and I feel like I was, in fact, correct. But there is a group of people on the left who looks at the set of conservative intellectuals who were enthusiastic about Bush and skeptical of Trump, and wants to just bash them over Bush-era stuff. That is not my mentality. I do find it a little bit vexing that the way the factional politics shook out, the conservatives who are most sensible on Trump are precisely the ones who were most excited about Bush’s nuttiest foreign policy ideas. But it is what it is, and I think we should try to get along in the present day.

In terms of a strategic alliance, I definitely want this to be possible.

If the United States had a proportional representation system, I would be thrilled to have the Dispatch Readers Party be the junior partner in the Biden coalition rather than the Jacobin Readers Party. But that’s not how American political institutions work. Part of how American political institutions work is that most bills need to be bipartisan. And on that level, the Biden White House has been way more successful in negotiating bipartisan deals with sensible Republicans than I ever thought possible or conservatives give him credit for. But that doesn’t generate the same kind of political dynamics as a coalition government in a multi-party system.

My broad view is that people who are genuinely torn between the two partisan coalitions need to try to think rigorously about how actual existing American institutions function.

The institutional reality of American politics is that the Supreme Court is overwhelmingly likely to tilt further right in the period between 2025-2028, and the Senate is also very likely to tilt right in the period of 2025-2028. Under the circumstances, the practical possibility of left-wing overreach is pretty constrained compared to the possibility of right-wing overreach. The specific area where executive branch discretion is at its maximum is in foreign policy, where Dispatch type people don’t even particularly agree with Trump. So in a practical sense, I would say President Joe Biden plus Chief Justice John Roberts plus a narrowly divided Congress is, in practice, a kind of centrist coalition government. In my view this is a bad, clunky set of institutions that generates bad vibes. But they are the institutions we have.

Sam: Thoughts on the Tracingwoodgrains FAA expose? Seems incredibly damning and really sad that a random blogger (a really good one though) had to do the legwork on something like this.

I basically agree with his take, though I am trying to use my somewhat-less-random-blogger status to get the Department of Transportation to comment.

Charles Ryder: I'm seeing endless talk in the discourse about the increasing unaffordability of cars in the US. Not just new cars, but also used cars (the price of the former must affect the latter). These high prices also have an effect on auto insurance, which feeds into operating costs. It's a real hardship for a lot of people living in a country not exactly known for quality transit. So, my question is: should the US consider importing cars from China? I'm pretty sure this would a politically untenable move at present, but what about the intrinsic merits of doing so, if the politics were to change?

I don’t have any big takes on the wisdom of importing cars from China, but I do think it’s worth noting that, factually, the price of used cars peaked in January 2022 and has been drifting downward ever since.

Now obviously if you last bought a car in 2015 and now go shopping for a car at 2024 prices, you will experience sticker shock and not be appeased by the knowledge that prices have fallen slightly over the past two years. But as a policy problem, I do think that this is basically solved. The price of new cars exhibited a more moderate increase that lasted longer and peaked in July of 2023 but has been falling for the past six months. Nominal incomes have continued to rise. So, barring some new negative shock to the world’s ability to produce automobiles, the affordability of cars and trucks is going to keep improving.

Slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential mailbag. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 17 minutes

Slightly contrarian, mildly annoying, somewhat influential mailbag

A slight shakeup of the format, but plenty of the parking content you crave

I was profiled in the Washington Post, and you might find the piece interesting.

Some nice stories! Brian Kemp is pushing housing reform in Georgia (which is also getting a huge new investment in solar panel manufacturing), while Kathy Hochul outlines a bunch of ambitious and specific YIMBY proposals for New York. There’s a housebuilding boom in New Zealand thanks to Jacinda Ardern’s ambitious land use reforms.

Elsewhere, a bunch of state-level Republicans have acted to clip the wings of far-right members of their legislative caucuses. The economic success of Malaysia, based on foreign direct investment and not involving any particular sweetheart trade deals, makes me more optimistic about the growth prospects of other mid-sized countries. They ended an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

Forward!

City of Trees: This week marks the 52nd mailbag! Any thoughts on what running them for a week has helped with for the site and for your writing?

They’ve been fun to do, they’ve given me a little more space to work on longer-form pieces, and the questions often inspire full columns, so I think the experiment has been a big success. I’m also always glad to have a way to generate some extra value for members that isn’t just walling more and more text off from the world, so I like having something that at least some people seem to enjoy participating in that works as a member exclusive.

That said, I do sometimes worry that the exercise may be becoming too repetitive, so this week I’m going to try offering longer answers to a smaller number of questions and see how that suits. We’ll still mix in some very short stuff, but there are basically fewer tweener answers.

TPM: I was delighted to read that you are going to attend a classical music concert. What are you going to hear at the National Symphony? And if you've already been, what did you think of it? Will you go back?

Kate (who has much more symphony experience than I do) and I are going to see Dvořák’s 7th in a few weeks, largely because that’s what’s playing when my dad will be in town to babysit.

JA: This is going to be a slightly trollish question. I love this substack, and I learn a lot from it. However, I worry that I suffer from some Gell-Mann amnesia when reading it.

I'm an economist, and I've found that a lot of your opinions on economic issues (especially monetary policy) are laid out with great confidence and yet very little knowledge beyond an intermediate undergraduate level. The most ridiculous offender was the article in which you proclaimed the optimality of nominal GDP targeting, despite the fact that you're probably not familiar enough with modern macro theory to articulate what the main counterarguments are. (Instead, it seems like this was just an idea that you got from Scott Sumner's blog...)

Are your hot takes in other areas (e.g. politics, housing policy, transportation policy) grounded on more expertise, or are they like your economics takes?

Gell-Mann Amnesia is the phenomenon where when you read a journalistic account of something you are truly an expert in, you realize that the treatment has all kinds of flaws. But then when you are reading about something you are not an expert in, you forget how bad the coverage of your specialty was and just assume it’s good. This is a real thing that happens to me every time I read about myself.

But I really don’t love this complaint about media (or about myself), and I think this question really illustrates why. Here we have a person with a PhD in economics complaining that my economics articles seem to reflect merely an “intermediate undergraduate level” of monetary policy. I fully accept that as a criticism and would not expect a person with an economics PhD to learn anything useful or interesting about economics from my columns. At the same time, a large majority of the population — including me — does not have an intermediate undergraduate-level education in economics. And most economics professors are neither willing nor able to write engaging and timely columns about national affairs. So I think that even according to this critical account of my work, I am raising the level of discourse with my monetary policy columns. And that is also the standard I try to set with my housing, transportation, and congressional politics takes. This is an unabashedly generalist site, and I both hope and assume that anyone curious about even deeper dives on these subjects will be able to pursue more specialist sources if that’s what they want.

To the specific charge that NGDP targeting is just an idea I got from Scott Sumner’s blog, I both plead guilty (that’s where I got it from), but also think this sort of illustrates the opposite of your point.

Sumner, after all, is a PhD-haver and college professor who specializes in monetary economics, so if the idea is that it’s important to be more deferential to experts, then where else should I get ideas from? On the other hand, lots of well-qualified PhD-havers and monetary economists disagree with him. This just shows that, unfortunately, macroeconomics is not the kind of subject where you see a convergence of policy opinions as people become more and more expert.

But it’s not like Sumner is alone on NGDP Targeting Island, and I just picked up an idea from a random blogger. Christina Romer has advocated for NGDP targeting. So has Michael Woodford. If you want to get your economics takes from a columnist who has a Nobel Prize in economics, Paul Krugman has advocated for NGDP targeting.

Now of course none of that is to say that there is a clear academic consensus in favor of NGDP targeting. Far from it. And if you ever catch me saying something like “a large majority of macroeconomists favor NGDP targeting” or something like that, then that would be crazy. I haven’t done a formal survey or anything, but my sense is that this is a very controversial idea among academics, and the fact that you don’t see any of the world’s central banks adopting an NGDP-level target speaks for itself to some extent. Something that happens from time to time is that I make mistakes — Wednesday’s post, for example, just did some bond math wrong in a way that someone more experienced in writing about bond markets wouldn’t have done. I was reaching into new subject matter and I made a mistake. It’s not a mistake I will make again, and more to the point, it’s not a mistake I would have made if I’d been better versed in bonds. But even if you think my monetary policy takes are bad, I don’t think you can explain the disagreement by saying “hey, this guy hasn’t gone to grad school.” Woodford and Romer and Krugman and Sumner and David Beckworth have all gone to grad school. People just disagree!

Romulus Augustus: You are a Dune fanatic. What is your main argument for not being an Asimov “Foundation” stan?

I like the Foundation books, but I think they really show their age in a way that Dune doesn’t.

Scottie J: You and Noah Smith often chide progressives for accusing those they disagree with of operating in bad faith. I am broadly sympathetic to your perspective on this, but I am curious as to how you define bad faith. Over the weekend you chimed in on a Twitter back and forth between Jonathan Chait and Shadi Hamid. You mentioned that you find Hamid's tweets "extremely annoying." Hamid seems like a pretty clear example of someone that often tweets in bad faith. He's trying to antagonize progressives and mock their concerns without trying to actually persuade anyone of anything. Am I completely off-base on this?

I like this question because I think it’s a good illustration of how I think about this — I sincerely have no idea whether or not Shadi Hamid tweets “in bad faith” because I am not a major consumer of Shadi Hamid’s tweets. What I have seen of his Twitter presence strikes me as pretty annoying, so I don’t follow him.

That being said, I’ve also been broadly familiar with his work on American foreign policy and democracy promotion in the Middle East going back to before Twitter existed. I’ve never found his arguments about this to be 100 percent convincing, but they’re not zero percent convincing either. This article he wrote last month connecting the dots between the Ukraine war and the lack of democracy in the Middle East is very interesting, for example. And I liked his 2014 book, “Temptations of Power: Islamists and Illiberal Democracy in a New Middle East” a lot. Since I’m actually more familiar with his longer-form work in this area than I am with his tweets needling liberals, I think I also end up with a somewhat different sense of where it is that he’s coming from.

One of the big issues in U.S. policy toward the Middle East is that there’s a persistent concern that if Middle Eastern regimes become more responsive to public opinion, the voters might make “bad” choices about policy.

Suppose a democratic Egypt were to tear up the country’s longstanding peace deal with Israel. A democratic UAE would maybe do the same thing. Democratic regimes might want to flex their nationalist credentials by kicking out American bases or conditioning intelligence cooperation with the CIA on America making some kind of policy concessions. Maybe from a left perspective, those are easy to give up on for the sake of democracy. But it gets worse. What if a more democratic Middle East means restrictions of rights for women and LGBT people? What if it means less tolerance for religious minorities? The tensions between democracy and liberalism aren’t new ideas to political theory, but the tensions can be particularly acute when we’re thinking about places where the median of public opinion is very distant from what’s considered a liberal ideal in the contemporary United States.

Hamid’s professional work involves a lot of grappling with these kinds of questions, and I suspect part of his annoyance with the Trump-era (and especially post-1/6) progressive discourse about democracy is that it strikes a specialist in this area as kind of shallow.

My friend Erica De Bruin is a political scientist who studies coups. She also used to work in the D.C. policy world. So when Trump/coup stuff got in the discourse after Election Day 2020, I was curious about her take and was glad The Washington Post published a piece from her. But her conclusion was that “coup” was the wrong shorthand for what was happening. Suffice it to say, the reaction from the peanut gallery to this was not kind, largely because people had already converged on the idea that the thing to say if you wanted to strongly condemn his election subversion efforts was to accuse him of attempting a “coup.” Nobody was interested in someone injecting persnickety disagreements, even if the someone in question is literally a coup scholar. She, I think, understandably chose to not spend the subsequent several months fighting on the internet with people about this and is instead publishing good, popular press pieces about things like coups in Africa.

But the point of this digression is that I think it’s actually not unusual for people who’ve studied foreign countries to find the #resistance discourse on the subject of American democracy to be a bit off. The difference is Hamid likes to needle people on Twitter about this.

Now as I say, I am not personally a huge fan of these tweets. But my guess is that they are offered in supremely good faith — that most people don’t realize they’re coming truly and deeply from the heart of someone who was thinking about the dilemmas of democracy promotion long before Trump came onto the scene and who’ll still be working on that topic when the discourse moves on to something else. But a lot of people don’t seem to want to just shrug and not follow people whose tweets they don’t enjoy. They instead want to come up with Big Reasons why the person is Officially Bad and they often reach for this “bad faith” idea to explain it. But I think it’s worth being shallower. Tastes differ and you can just not follow someone.

I’m going to close this out with something I can screenshot and that will surely annoy people on Twitter: I’m struck again and again by the fact that the Trump-era anxiety about American democracy among liberals has been paired with an increasing discomfort at the idea of subjecting institutions to democratic governance. Whether we’re talking about Covid NPIs or K-12 curriculum or content moderation rules, I think liberals are increasingly inclined to argue in favor of the importance of deference to credentialed experts — in part because, not coincidentally, education polarization means credentialed experts are likely to be liberals. I think Hamid is a bit under-alarmed about the procedural radicalism of the modern right. But a big theme of Slow Boring is that the fight to preserve democracy needs to include more willingness to pander to the actually existing views of the public and a bit less cultural avant-gardism. Just as a democratic future for Egypt would almost certainly entail more Islamist influence over policy than I personally would favor — after all, I’m a secular Jew — a democratic future for the United States of America entails an education system that inculcates values closer to those of the median voter than to those of the median working-age college graduate.

Justin P: You said towards the end of a “Bad Takes” episode about your bariatric surgery that you'd stopped losing weight and started gaining it. That strikes me as an astonishing admission about the effectiveness of a surgery that's going to mean lifelong changes for the kinds of foods you're able to comfortably eat. If the “environmental obesogens” hypothesis turns out to be true (there's a fair bit of evidence that it is) then has doctors pushing bariatric surgery to such an extent been a mistake?

I would just really dispute the premise that doctors are heavily pushing bariatric surgery. There are tons of people with obesity in the United States and only a tiny fraction of them seek surgical treatment for it.

Stepping back, the basic facts are:

I weighed nearly 280 pounds before my surgery.

About nine months post-surgery I bottomed out at around 215 pounds.

By one year post-surgery I’d rebounded to 225 and then stabilized there for a few months.

I gained five pounds during the Thanksgiving-Christmas era, so then for a New Year’s Resolution, I had to recommit to a healthy lifestyle and swiftly lost back those five holiday pounds on ten days of a 16:8 intermittent fasting protocol.

I’m now sticking with the 16:8, and we’ll see where that takes me.

I think those are pretty good results, though your mileage may vary. Beyond that, I’m interested in environmental obesogens and other hypotheses people have. But one point I would make is that the discourse needs to try harder to distinguish between the question of weight loss for people with obesity, which is very important for a lot of us in the contemporary United States, and the question of obesity prevention in future generations. The latter is really the win we want. No matter how bullish you may be about Ozempic or bariatric surgery, we know that “everyone gets fat and then gets surgery and medication to lose weight” is not an optimal solution.

And importantly, if we look at past eras with a much lower prevalence of obesity, we know that even back then people who were overweight really struggled to lose the pounds. The difference is that drastically fewer people were becoming overweight in the first place. So the question of how we get back to that kind of situation is important. But I do think the evidence suggests that overweight people can’t just copy what they see non-overweight people doing and expect to see the same results any more than you can tell alcoholics to copy the behavior of casual drinkers.

Ken Bowers: Back on December 27 writing about housing, you wrote: “The real policy challenge is developing a proposal that will reassure people who park their car on the street and who worry that more housing will lead to more parking scarcity.” That rings true, but I don't think there is an honest way around the fact that if you remove parking requirements and allow more density, curb parking will likely become more scarce. Yes, you can solve this with pricing, but I don't think that's what the incumbent residents have in mind. Setting aside whether easy curb parking should trump housing, have you seen any such proposals that you think are political winners?

To be clear, the reason I advocate for more focus on this is precisely because it’s not obvious what the solution is. Unlike the zany ideological anti-YIMBY arguments that take up a lot of time on housing Twitter, “if more people live near me that will increase competition for parking spaces” is broadly accurate.

Part of the solution is adopting the right political approach. It’s very unusual for a policy change to have zero downsides for everyone. The case for something like the ADU reforms that California has adopted in recent years is that all things considered, the benefits outweigh the costs. And part of how they assembled the coalition for that was a discussion in Sacramento about statewide policy change. This works because the benefits of abundant housing are broader than the costs of parking scarcity. So if you ask someone “would you rather have more housing in your neighborhood?” the answer may be “no.” But if you ask them “would you rather have more housing in every in-demand neighborhood?” that flips to a “yes.”

There are also more down-and-dirty ways to do coalition politics. Part of the land use reform that Kathy Hochul is proposing is to require upzoning near New York State’s commuter rail stations. I doubt she will be able to persuade many state legislators from Long Island and Westchester to embrace this. The hope is that a coalition of New York City Democrats plus a bipartisan coalition of members from upstate and western New York will just outvote them. The proposed change is clearly better for most of the people in the state and sometimes that’s how small-d democratic politics works — you forge a coalition and you beat the opposition. The key to making this work, though, is that you have to frame it to rural Republicans and Democrats from Buffalo and Rochester as a kind of boring technical issue that’s good for the state’s economy and tax base. What you don’t want to do is run around talking about how everyone on Long Island is being racist, because that will negatively polarize upstate Republicans into supporting the putatively racist Long Island NIMBYs.

The basic logic of “stay chill, build coalitions, and outvote the opposition” is in general just a bit underrated on the east coast.

One of the most ridiculous things, for example, is that New York City has not yet abolished regulatory parking minimums. The winning argument in this particular case is that especially outside of Staten Island, most New Yorkers do not own cars, so you have regulations that are bad for the economy, bad for the environment, bad for freedom, and bad for poor people that have no upside at all for a majority of the city’s households. You just need to acknowledge that the motivating concern here is a practical one about parking.

To get more specific, you need to delve into the details of the local situation, so I’ll talk about the place I am most familiar with: Washington, D.C.

D.C. is interesting in that daily car commuters are a minority of the city’s adults, but over 60 percent of households do own cars. Those cars need to be parked somewhere, and a lot of people park them on the street permanently while another big swathe do so at least occasionally. Some of the city’s parking is metered and some of it is wide open, but much of it is governed by neighborhood-based Residential Parking Permits. These RPPs are very cheap, and a reasonable concern RPP holders have is that more residents in their area will increase the number of RPP holders without increasing the number of RPP spaces. Things like bike lanes also drive concern about the reduction in the utility of RPPs. And of course, relaxing the city’s regulatory parking minimums would result in more scarcity of RPPs.

For a long time, high-minded urbanists have been pushing the city to raise the price of RPPs. That’s an idea that makes sense to me in the abstract, but I don’t think it’s proven to be a winner, and my current thinking is that the best path forward is to do the opposite of this — give every current RPP holder a permanent, free Residential Parking Permit and then stop issuing new ones.

Where will new residents park? Well, we should turn the RPPs into property that you can sell or transfer to other people. So if a new person comes to town, he either needs to park off-street or else he needs to get by without a car — which a huge minority of the city’s current households already do. This creates a situation in which scarcity of parking has financial upside for incumbent residents by increasing the value of your RPP. In this world, while there is still plenty of new construction that has off-street parking, the political economy switches away from requiring off-street parking. And while today my neighbors might say they are glad that it’s illegal for me to turn my garage into an ADU, in a world where parking scarcity creates financial upside for them, they might welcome this.

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Never mind hypocrisy, the West faces another challenge. By Daniel Drezner

www.chathamhouse.org

6 - 7 minutes

I am old enough and American enough to have lived through the series of different terms used to describe countries not considered to be part of the advanced, industrialized world.

When I was a child, they were called the ‘Third World’, reflecting both the Cold War mindset and the dismissive attitude of most policymaking elites. In the post-Cold War era they were called ‘emerging markets’, reflecting the more upbeat globalization mindset of the time as well as the slightly superior attitude of ‘the West knows best’.

Defining the Global South

Over the past decade the term has been the ‘Global South’, which reflects a convergence of a number of trends. The first is that the countries in the actual South are more heterogeneous than before. Any description of the Global South that includes Singapore or the United Arab Emirates, for example, is defining things wrongly. The second is that the term has lost the quasi-patronizing tone that it once had.

The third is that these countries matter for international relations more than ever. If this is an era of great power competition, then the great powers have to compete over something – and that something is the support of the rest of the world. Rising Sino–American tensions, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the explosion of violence in the Middle East means that countries such as India, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia have become pivotal to geopolitics.

Much has been written about the West falling behind Russia and China in wooing the Global South. Russia has been accruing allies there by playing on longstanding ‘anti-imperialist’ ties that date back to the Soviet Union. China has been attracting capital–starved nations interested in access to Beijing’s development loans.

    Diplomats from Moscow and Beijing have argued that US domestic instability shows its eroding ability to commit.

All of this has been happening as the United States has become more erratic in its foreign policy, see-sawing from Obama to Trump to Biden to maybe Trump again. Diplomats from Moscow and Beijing have exulted in US domestic instability, arguing that it shows America’s eroding ability to credibly commit.

It is difficult for the US to push back on this propaganda when the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for Prosperity stalls, and Congress is unable to approve more foreign aid. 

Accusations of western hypocrisy in its foreign policy have sounded more convincing in recent months. The same leaders who bang on about Russian war crimes in Ukraine have been more circumspect about Israel’s destruction of Gaza.

How concerned should policymakers in Washington, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Canberra and elsewhere be about the geopolitical hedging of the Global South? The Eagle View is more sanguine than most, for a number of reasons.

Russia and China face foreign policy headwinds

The first is that Russia and China can do all the wooing they want but both countries have their own foreign policy headwinds to face. Russia is running out of reserves to finance its war in Ukraine. The falling value of the rouble will make it more difficult for Moscow to exert much influence beyond a few fragile autocracies. China has been winding down its Belt and Road Initiative; most of its current loans are going to longstanding borrowers to keep them afloat. Russia and China may be investing to win friends in the Global South, but that is more difficult when their wallets are leaner.

    Western leaders would be mistaken to believe that acknowledging hypocrisy is the key to winning friends in the Global South.

Second, most countries in the Global South do not want to oppose the West. They do not want to oppose anyone. They simply want the freedom to set their own policies free of outside interference. India wants a strong partnership with the US – but it also wants cheap Russian oil.

Turkey does not want to antagonize Russia, but it is not leaving Nato either. Most countries in the Global South would jump at the prospect of becoming a key node between US-based and China-based supply chains. Some countries, such as Vietnam, Bangladesh or Morocco have already made the leap.

As for the hypocrisy charge, well, let’s be honest, it sticks for a reason. One can excuse residents of the Global South for being cynical when statesmen who repeatedly cite the ‘rules-based order’ suddenly go quiet if Israeli actions are a topic of debate.

The hypocrisy cuts both ways, however. It is difficult to reconcile claims of anti-imperialist sentiment with passivity in the face of Russia annexing territory it had previously recognized as belonging to another sovereign state. And while Israeli actions in Gaza merit investigation, it is worth asking why institutions dominated by the Global South – such as the UN Human Rights Council – pay so much attention to that country and so little to the rest of the world.

It would also be a mistake for western leaders to believe that acknowledging hypocrisy is the key to winning friends in the Global South. To make a real play for the Global South, western policymakers will need to do something much more difficult – stop acting like they are afraid of goods, services and migrants crossing their borders.

The Global South has embraced globalization at the moment industrialized democracies are having second thoughts. To win the hearts and minds of its members, policymakers need to fatten their wallets. 

The Case for Disqualification. By San Wilentz

The Supreme Court must decide if it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and bar Donald Trump from holding public office or trash the constitutional defense of democracy against insurrections.

Illustration by Anthony Russo

Illustration by Anthony Russo

Even as Donald Trump roars and intimidates with ever more violent threats, even as his lawyers warn that kicking him off the ballot in November would “unleash chaos and bedlam,” even as it becomes evident that we are not in the midst of a normal national election but an ongoing coup d’état by a charismatic despot, it is taking a long time for the public to understand the enormity of the events of January 6, 2021, and all that precipitated them.

In the moment, American historians were better equipped to grasp their profound political implications. Less than a week after the attack on the Capitol, Eric Foner, the preeminent authority on Reconstruction, pointed to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years after the end of the Civil War, which bars anyone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and who has engaged in insurrection from ever holding office again. Plainly, Foner said, then-president Donald Trump, along with other public officials, had sworn “an oath to defend the Constitution and, on Jan. 6, they violated it.” To bar them from public office, as the Constitution mandates, “would be the mildest of punishments” for “an uprising that left five people dead, threatened the lives of members of Congress, caused havoc in the Capitol, and sought to overturn the results of the presidential election.” Upholding the law of the land, Foner remarked, “would be an affirmation of the vitality of our wounded democracy.”1

Three years later the Supreme Court will now decide whether to sustain the recent decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state to follow the Constitution’s mandate, much as Foner suggested. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s lawyers and defenders, when not unsubtly raising the specter of mass violence, have groped for any escape route they can find. George W. Bush’s attorney general Michael B. Mukasey has floated the strange reading that the relevant section of the Fourteenth Amendment covers only persons appointed to office.2 In its filing contesting the Maine disqualification, Trump’s legal team tries to peddle the claim that the amendment bars persons “from holding specified offices, not from running for them or from being elected to them.”

No less risible, if somewhat more surprising, has been the alarm at Trump’s disqualification expressed by some law school academics and political pundits. By their reasoning, Trump’s misdeeds aside, enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment poses a greater threat to our wounded democracy than Trump’s candidacy. In the name of defending democracy, they would speciously enable the man who did the wounding and now promises to do much more.

Audio: Listen to this article.

Samuel Moyn of Yale Law School, for example, writing in both The New York Times and, less guardedly, the Trumpist magazine Compact, has described invocation of the Fourteenth Amendment as essentially a conspiracy, part of a plot by liberals to stifle dissent against their shoddy elitist hegemony, the latest “quick fix or short cut that would save liberals the trouble of winning” at the polls. The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson Sorkin cites a Colorado Supreme Court dissenter’s citation of a solitary, eccentric 1869 court ruling—a decision debunked and even ridiculed by historians and constitutional scholars across the ideological spectrum—to suggest that disqualifying Trump would deny him due process under the law. In any event, Sorkin writes, it would be much “sounder” to defeat Trump at the polls than to risk the chaos she presumes his disqualification would cause. To avoid political consequences, she would toss the law and leave the matter to politics.3

Kurt Lash of the University of Richmond claims, in a Times op-ed, that the constitutional basis for disqualification is at best iffy. Lash imputes ambiguity to the Fourteenth Amendment by placing great weight on the fact that during the congressional debate on its adoption in 1866, Senator Reverdy Johnson of Maryland, a former attorney general, wondered whether its disqualification section applied to the president. He downplays how, once corrected, Johnson told the Senate, “Perhaps I am wrong as to the exclusion from the Presidency; no doubt I am.” Meanwhile, in New York, Jonathan Chait, while raising issues of due process and the optics of disqualification so close to the election, also frets over whether Trump engaged in insurrection at all because he “was not trying to seize and hold the Capitol nor declare a breakaway republic,” as if that were the proper definition of the term. In fact, the federal indictment against Trump for January 6 covers his attempt to stage a coup over a three-month period.4

Finally, Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post, who also fears a Trumpist frenzy, has offered three rationales for the Supreme Court to overrule the Colorado court: that it is unclear whether Trump engaged in insurrection; that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment doesn’t cover US presidents; and that Congress must pass enabling legislation before Section 3 can be enforced. But the historical and constitutional basis for these claims is at best flimsy and for the most part nonexistent.5

Whether motivated by a clutching fear of Trump’s base, a perverted sense of democratic evenhandedness, a reflexive hostility toward liberals, or something else, these confident disavowals betray a basic ignorance of the relevant history and thus a misconception of what the Fourteenth Amendment actually meant and means. That history, meanwhile, has placed the conservative members of the Supreme Court in a very tight spot.

Over the past forty years the doctrine of originalism (along with its sibling, textualism) has been the cornerstone of the jurisprudence of the conservative majority that now dominates the Court. Concocted in the 1980s to roll back the constitutional precedents of the New Deal and Great Society eras, supposedly in the name of judicial restraint, originalism purports to divine the original intentions of the framers by presenting tendentious renderings of the past as a kind of scripture. This bad-faith invocation of the framers has become a ploy to justify overturning Roe v. Wade, gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965, eliminating commonsense gun regulation, and more. But now this originalist petard is exploding in the majority’s face. No degree of cherry-picking or obfuscation can deny the historical record of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is unequivocal: if Donald Trump engaged, in any way, in the insurrection of January 6, he is automatically barred from holding any public office, federal or state.6

Contrary to some of the pundits, the Fourteenth Amendment, including its third section, was not adopted to conciliate the North and South or, in Moyn’s words, to “stabilize the country after a civil war.” Along with the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, it was an attempt to formalize and consolidate a social revolution—the abolition of slavery—and, as far as possible, to crush, in national law, the implacable efforts of the defeated Confederates to undo that revolution.7 The amendment’s third section grew from debates initiated by the congressional Joint Committee on Reconstruction on how best to ensure that the chief Confederates would not recreate an oligarchic regime based on black subjugation and disenfranchisement.

As the legal historian Mark Graber has demonstrated, however, the third section’s framers and supporters also pointedly stated that they were not aiming its disqualification provision simply at those who had participated in what they called “the late rebellion.” Graber cites, among others, Senator John Henderson of Missouri, who observed that “the language of this section is so framed as to disenfranchise from office the leaders of the past rebellion as well as the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come.” Anyone who had violated a solemn vow to uphold the Constitution could never be trusted not to do so again; hence disqualification was the only reasonable course. The reasoning pertained not to any one era but to all time, providing the nation, Senator Waitman T. Willey of West Virginia declared, with a “measure of self-defense.”8

The need for that self-defense in the current moment belies the argument of Sorkin and others quaking before Trump and his followers that, in Chait’s words, to disqualify him “would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy.” The fact is that Trump has already attempted to negate American democracy and come perilously close to doing so; and he has stated publicly that he intends to do it again, up to and including, if returned to power, suspending parts of the Constitution that he is supposed to preserve, protect, and defend. It would certainly be a “sounder” solution (Sorkin’s word) if Trump were defeated in 2024, after which he graciously returned to Mar-a-Lago. But he and his supporters—most recently Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who is eagerly auditioning to be his running mate—have openly declared that this simply will not happen, no matter what the voters decide. They are no less implacable than the die-hard Confederate insurrectionists were after Appomattox. They represent precisely the kind of clear and present danger that the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment knew they were facing, a danger against which the normal mechanisms of electoral democracy are powerless. Only a constitutional remedy, those framers knew, would suffice. Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment is that remedy.

Trump’s ever-inventive lawyers, to be sure, have tried to confuse the issue by claiming that disqualifying their client amounts simultaneously to lèse-majesté and deep-state persecution. At Trump’s behest, they are throwing any argument into the mix to cause delay and to use the courts as a forum for his campaign. Although it persuaded a Denver judge, the claim that presidents are not covered by the disqualification clause does not pass the smell test, especially on originalist grounds, as the framers and the supporters of the amendment recognized that its phrase encompassing “any office, civil or military, under the United States” included the president and vice-president. Trump’s attorneys have the audacity to claim that their client was not an officer of the United States. Have they read the constitutional oath every president takes to “faithfully execute the Office” of the presidency? Do they really expect anyone to believe that the presidency is the one federal office whose occupant is not an officer of the United States?

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has yet to rule on Trump’s claims to presidential immunity from prosecution for any alleged crimes for which he was not impeached, a twisted reading of the Constitution that special counsel Jack Smith has reasonably said “threatens the democratic and constitutional foundation of our Republic.” Yet even if the appeals court were to rule in Trump’s favor, it would have no effect on his disqualification, as the constitutional bar is not based on any conviction for any criminal offense. Although insurrection is indeed a federal crime under 18 US Code § 2383, it became one only in 1948, and it is in any case irrelevant to disqualification under the Constitution. None of the ex-Confederates excluded from office after the amendment went into effect were prosecuted for insurrection. One public official has thus far been removed from office under the Fourteenth Amendment for participating in the January 6 events: Couy Griffin, a New Mexico county commissioner who was earlier convicted of trespassing, sentenced to fourteen days in jail, and fined $3,000. But one need not have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt to have engaged in insurrection in order to be disqualified from public office. Disqualification is a constitutionally imposed disability, not a punishment for a criminal offense.

The Trumpists would have it otherwise, claiming that unless Congress passes a law implementing the disqualification clause, it is inoperative. If successful, this line of argument would have to rest on a single strange ruling, the one cited by Sorkin, made by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase in the case in re Griffin in 1869.

A year earlier, presiding over the treason trial of Jefferson Davis, Chase counseled Davis’s attorney that as Section 3 of the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment was self-executing—meaning that it required no additional legislation to come into effect—its exclusion of insurrectionists effectively vacated Davis’s treason indictment. Just as no additional law was needed to abolish slavery after the Thirteenth Amendment, none was needed to disqualify insurrectionists from public office. What evidence survives suggests that the framers and supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1866–1868 assumed that it was self-ratifying in its entirety; there is no evidence suggesting they did not. Affirmation by a court of engagement in insurrection was sufficient for a Section 3 disqualification, as happened immediately after the Civil War and has happened as recently as 2022 in the New Mexico case. The involvement of Congress was not mandatory; to rule that it is now would raise serious and possibly devastating questions about this Supreme Court’s legitimacy.

In the Griffin case, however, involving a Virginia convict attempting to disqualify the judge who had presided over his trial because he had served in the Virginia legislature during the Civil War, Chase, in his capacity as circuit justice, suddenly changed his mind, asserting that Section 3 was moot, absent enabling legislation. No other judge or justice ever ruled this way again, whereas state courts pursued disqualifications under Section 3, assuming that the entire Fourteenth Amendment, and not just its other four sections, was self-executing. Congress never countermanded these disqualifications.

The attention recently given the disqualification clause has focused new attention on in re Griffin, and most experts have judged Chase’s revised ruling a botch, filled with contradictions and quite likely politically motivated and self-serving. Among other critics, the two conservative legal scholars who have argued most forcefully for Trump’s disqualification on originalist grounds, William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas, regard Chase’s decision as a joke that “should be hooted down the pages of history.” The Colorado Supreme Court ruling, in coming to the same conclusion, put the issue bluntly: if any of the nearly identically structured Reconstruction Amendments, including the Fourteenth, required additional legislation to go into force, “then Congress could nullify them by simply not passing enacting legislation. The result of such inaction would mean that slavery remains legal.”9 For the current Supreme Court to nullify Trump’s disqualification on so feeble and exceptional a precedent as in re Griffin would make another high court ruling based on the Fourteenth Amendment, Bush v. Gore, look like a paragon of dispassionate jurisprudence.

With the law and the facts against them, the Trumpists and the apologetic pundits alike have started pounding the table, trying to raise doubts about whether Trump engaged in any kind of insurrection at all. This has led to some diverting speculation and oddball debates over what, exactly, constitutes an insurrection. Chait claims that nothing less than a full-fledged revolution or Confederate-style secession fits the bill. Adam Serwer of The Atlantic demurs, reminding us of the Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’s Rebellion, Gabriel’s and Nat Turner’s uprisings, not to mention John Brown’s Raid, all described as insurrections in their time. Ross Douthat, in his Times newsletter, denies that January 6 matches any of those lesser examples, though he does hold up John Ganz’s identification of a fascist riot in Paris on February 6, 1934, as a possible instance of one. So much for American exceptionalism.10

To satisfy the Supreme Court majority, an originalist inquiry would be in order; but once more, originalism ends up working to Trump’s disadvantage. Graber has again done the essential work. Upon close examination of Anglo-American legal texts on treason and insurrection dating back to Edward III in the fourteenth century, but with special attention to American law from the founding through the start of Reconstruction, he has identified four elements that define an insurrection: 1) an assemblage of people; 2) engaged in resisting a federal law; 3) using force or the threat of force with intimidating numbers; 4) with a public purpose or, in the words of Justice Samuel Chase in 1800, an “object of a great public nature, or of public and general (or national) concern.” Engaging in insurrection need not mean actually being present to commit the violence or intimidation. On all four counts, the well-established facts of Trump’s activities and spoken words on January 6 and over the preceding weeks squarely fit an originalist definition.

In fact, there is a clear consensus on the basic facts of January 6, not least in the findings of the congressional January 6 Committee, though Jack Smith may well present more shocking details in his federal case against Trump. Moyn sees no such consensus, a major reason why he thinks the Supreme Court should reject disqualification out of hand. On December 22 he wrote:

What actually happened on Jan. 6—and especially Mr. Trump’s exact role beyond months of election denial and entreaties to government officials to side with him—is still too broadly contested.

The claim is bizarre. “Broadly contested” when bipartisan majorities in both houses of Congress voted to impeach and remove Trump from office? When two Colorado courts concurred that Trump had engaged in an insurrection? When even Trump’s lawyers in those proceedings did not contest the facts about the insurrection? When the remarks, soon after the insurrection, of Senator Mitch McConnell still resound? “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next.”

With oral arguments before the Supreme Court set for February 8, Trump and his advocates have outdone themselves, serving up the sophistry and chicanery contained in the amicus brief prepared on behalf of Senator Ted Cruz and 178 other MAGA members of Congress and filed on January 18. Seemingly a road map for the conservative justices to stop disqualification, the brief reads more like a game of three-card monte. After swiftly noting that Chase’s discredited ruling in Griffin is “not directly binding,” it then shuffles into treating the ruling’s “longstanding precedent” as if it were absolutely binding and claims that “Congress must pass authorizing legislation to enforce Section 3.” The brief twists Congress’s express authority to enforce the amendment to mean that the amendment itself is not self-enforcing.

The brief bids the Supreme Court to rule that because the presidential oath of office does not contain the words “support the Constitution” (the president swears to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution”), Trump is exempt from disqualification under Section 3. In claiming that the Colorado decision denies Congress’s authority to undo a Section 3 disqualification, it distorts the wording of the Twentieth Amendment, on presidential succession, to reach a conclusion for the ages: “A candidate may be elected President even if he is not qualified to hold the office.” In dealing that card, the brief’s authors appear not to notice that it gives away their entire game.11

These lawyers—indeed, all the academics and pundits quailing at enforcement of the Constitution—would profit from the words of Abraham Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War. The American people, Lincoln said, had established that they could successfully create and administer a democratic government. They had yet to establish, however, whether they could maintain that government “against a formidable internal attempt to overthrow it.” Now they were left “to demonstrate to the world that those who can fairly carry an election can also suppress a rebellion.”12

The conservative majority of the Supreme Court—and the historical legacy of the Roberts Court—have reached a point of no return. The law, no matter the diversions and claptrap of Trump’s lawyers and the pundits, is crystal clear, on incontestable historical as well as originalist grounds. So are the facts of the case, which in any event the Supreme Court is powerless to review. The conservatives face a choice between disqualifying Trump or shredding the foundation of their judicial methodology.

But the choice is far more profound than the Court’s consistency. In 2000 it disgraced itself by manipulating the Fourteenth Amendment to produce Bush v. Gore, a ruling that changed the course of history and was later described by Justice Antonin Scalia, who concurred in it, this way: “As we say in Brooklyn, a piece of shit.”13 Now the Court must decide whether it will honor the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and disqualify Donald Trump. If it does so, it may redeem in part the terrible judicial malpractice of 2000. If it does not, it will trash the constitutional defense of democracy designed following slavery’s abolition; it will guarantee, at a minimum, political chaos no matter what the voters decide in November; and it will quite possibly pave the way for a man who has vowed that he will, if necessary, rescind the Constitution in order to impose a dictatorship of revenge.

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Sean Wilentz is the George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of American History at Princeton. His books include No Property in Man: Slavery and Antislavery at the Nation’s Founding. (February 2024)

No Girls Allowed. By Ryan Broderick

Jan 26, 2024

Over the weekend, the always-excellent John Burn-Murdoch, over at The Financial Times, posted an alarming bit of demographic analysis that has now gone very viral. It’s from a column Burn-Murdoch wrote titled, “A New Global Gender Divide Is Emerging,” which shows a tremendous political gap forming between young men and women around the world.

Burn-Murdoch followed up the column with a lengthy thread on X hypothesizing as to what may be causing this gap and thousands of other users have offered up their own diagnoses, as well: Smartphones, video games, economic inequality, lack of education, an over-correction post-#MeToo.

Interestingly enough, though, the bulk of Burn-Murdoch’s reporting focuses on South Korea, the US, Germany, the UK, Spain, Poland, China, and Tunisia. Which, aside from China and Tunisia, were all countries I worked in, covering elections and far-right radicalization, in and around the time period those countries’ respective political gender gaps began widening. I’m not saying I have a tremendously in-depth understanding of, say, Polish toxic masculinity, but I did spend several days there following around white nationalist rappers and Catholic fundamentalist football fans. And, in South Korea, I worked on a project about radical feminists and their activism against the country’s equivalent of 4chan, Ilbe Storehouse.

In fact, between 2015-2019, I visited over 20 countries, essentially asking the same question: Where do bad men here hangout online? Which has given me a near-encyclopedic directory in my head, unfortunately, of international 4chan knock-offs. In Spain, it’s a car forum that doxxes rape victims called ForoCoches. In France, it’s a gaming forum that organized rallies for Marine Le Pen called Jeux Video. In Japan, it’s 2channel. In Brazil, it’s Dogolachan. And most, if not all, of these spaces pre-date any sort of modern social movement like #MeToo — or even the invention of the smartphone.

But the mainstream acceptance of the culture from these sites is new. Though I don’t actually think the mystery of “why now?” is that much of a mystery. While working in Europe, I came to understand that these sites and their culture war campaigns like Gamergate were a sort of emerging form of digital hooliganism. Nothing they were doing was new, but their understanding how to network online was novel. And in places like the UK, it actually became more and more common in the late-2010s to see Pepe the Frog cosplayers marching alongside far-right football clubs. In the US, we don’t have the same sports culture, but the end result has been the same. The nerds and the jocks eventually aligned in the streets. The anime nazis were simply early adopters and the tough guys with guns and zip ties just needed time to adapt to new technology. And, unlike the pre-internet age, unmoderated large social platforms give them an infinitely-scalable recruitment radius. They don’t have to hide in backrooms anymore.

Much of the digital playbook fueling this recruitment for our new(ish) international masculinist movement was created by ISIS, the true early adopters for this sort of thing. Though it took about a decade for the West to really embrace it. But nowadays, it is not uncommon to see trad accounts sharing memes about “motherhood,” that are pretty much identical to the Disney Princess photoshops ISIS brides would post on Tumblr to advertise their new life in Syria. And, even more darkly, just this week, a Trump supporter in Pennsylvania beheaded his father and uploaded it to YouTube, in a video where he ranted about the woke left and President Biden. Online extremism is a flat circle.

The biggest similarity, though, is in what I can cultural encoding. For ISIS, this was about constantly labeling everything that threatened their influence as a symptom of the decadent, secular West.

For our new International League Of Unfuckable Conservative Men, it is, increasingly, about labeling everything that threatens them as feminine and, thus, bad. This is why you only ever see them rant about women journalists — well, usually it’s just The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz tbh. This is also why they’re always angry about whatever wild shit random teenage girls are posting TikTok. And this why they invented the concept of “simping,” the minute sites like OnlyFans began giving direct financial power to sex workers. Because they see masculinity as unquestionable strength and anything that threatens that must be eliminated. And this why they’re all losing their minds over Taylor Swift right now.

Taylor Swift, an extremely affluent blonde, blue-eyed white woman who writes country-inflected pop music and is dating a football player headed for the Super Bowl. She should be a resounding victory for these guys. Doesn’t get more American than that. But due to an actually very funny glitch in how they see the world, she’s actually a huge threat.

Pop culture, according to the right wing, should be frivolous. Because before the internet, it was something sold to girls by corporations run by powerful men. Famous pop stars through the ages, like Frank Sinatra, America’s first Justin Bieber, or The Beatles, the One Direction of their time, would be canonized as Great by Serious Men after history had forgotten they rocketed to success as their generation’s Tumblr Sexymen. But from the 2000s onward, thanks to an increasingly powerful digital public square, young women and people of color were able to have more influence in mainstream culture and also accumulate more financial power from it. And after Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign was able to connect this new form of pop influence to both liberal progressive politics and, also, social media, well, conservatives realized they had to catch up and fast. And the fastest way to do that is to try and smash the whole thing by dismissing it as feminine.

Pop music? It’s for girls. Social media? It’s for girls. Democrats? Girls. Taylor Swift? Girls and also a government psyop. But this line of thinking has no limit. It poisons everything. If Swift manages to make it to the Super Bowl, well, that has to become feminine too. And at a certain point, the whole thing falls apart because, honestly, you just sound like an insane loser.

Unleash the power of bipartisan NRC reform. By Matthew Yglesias

Read time: 8 minutes

Unleash the power of bipartisan NRC reform

Two good bills that need to be reconciled

Every conversation about nuclear energy on the internet goes the same way. It starts with someone saying we need regulators to be friendlier to nuclear power plants, then someone else interjects that the real problem with nuclear is that it’s too expensive, to which the first person responds that the real reason nuclear is so expensive is that the regulatory burdens are too high.

Who’s right? I believe it’s the first person. But the only way to find out is to actually do the regulatory reforms.

While the environmental movement has, for the most part, set aside the irrational anti-nuclear worldview of the 1970s, it still fails to appreciate that a breakthrough in nuclear cost and technology would be really, really valuable. When discussing nuclear power, environmentalists tend to express incredible levels of optimism about the trajectory of renewable energy and batteries — such wild optimism that it renders the whole nuclear conversation irrelevant. But turn the conversation back to fossil fuels and suddenly it’s vitally important to block natural gas infrastructure or throw paint at the Mona Lisa. The impulse to do that kind of thing reflects, I think, a sound implicit recognition that it’s actually not true that we are on a glide-path to 100 percent renewables.

I’m just as annoyed by the people who are so certain that changing nuclear regulation is the answer that they ignore all the other levers. But we need to try every plausible lever, and nuclear definitely counts.

There’s been some good news on this front recently, though.

One is that Jeff Baran’s nomination for a slot on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was held up in the Senate and the Biden administration has agreed to withdraw it. The Biden administration says all the right things about nuclear and their signature legislation has lots of important provisions for the nuclear industry. But at the end of the day, the really boring, humdrum work of staffing the NRC is critical to resolving the regulatory bottlenecks, and this means they are hopefully getting pushed in a good direction.

There are also bipartisan NRC reform bills in both the House and Senate, and work is under way to try to reconcile them.

And I think this may be even more important than the administration withdrawing Baran’s nomination, because even a really great slate of commissioners will struggle to make positive change without a clear statement of support from congress.

The basic problem

Baran himself explained the problem well at an earlier confirmation hearing back in 2017, when he told the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee that “it is my job to focus on nuclear safety and security, it is not my job to weigh in on the pros and cons of the merits of nuclear power.”

To nuclear advocates, that line is part of the case against Baran. And as far as it goes, I agree with that case. But the fact is, he is offering a plausible read of the NRC’s statutory mandate. When the United States first built nuclear power plants, it did so under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission, which was really a military-first Cold War institution. Then, in 1974, the military and civilian sides of nuclear policy were split, and the NRC was created with the deliberate mission of being a less industry-friendly regulatory body. This was perhaps a uniquely bad moment to be birthing a new nuclear regulatory framework — degrowth ideas were intellectually fashionable, modern cost-benefit analysis wasn’t really in use anywhere, and climate change wasn’t on the policy agenda at all. The Clean Air Act was also written without climate change in mind, but the EPA and the courts have developed doctrine whereby climate impacts can, and do, factor into EPA regulatory decisions.

That’s not the case with the NRC, which promulgates nuclear safety rules without regard for the consequences of those rules for greenhouse gas emissions.

After the Fukushima tsunami, for example, the NRC enacted a bunch of new safety rules. But at no stage in the process does the NRC consider the question “will these rules cause nuclear plants to become uneconomical and shut down prematurely, generating more air pollution and leading to worse health outcomes?”

Any industry regulated on that basis of safety and security with no balancing test would rapidly become unviable, especially if it had to compete with rival industries offering similar products. The government inspects meatpacking plants to try to minimize the risk of food-borne illness. But we do not have a zero-risk stance, because that would make meat incredibly expensive. And if we selectively adopted a zero-risk stance only for pork, there would be massive consumer shift toward chicken and beef.

The body responsible for the regulatory framework does, in fact, need to have an opinion on the overall merits of nuclear power, because it has significant pros:

Nuclear power generates dramatically less air pollution than burning fossil fuels.

Nuclear power generates a much more stable flow of electricity than solar or wind.

Nuclear power requires a smaller geographical footprint than solar and wind.

Access to cheap electricity has a wide range of economic and human health benefits.

Obviously, it’s crucial to avoid nuclear meltdowns. But it’s also important to remember that nobody died at Three Mile Island. More people died as a result of higher electricity costs post-Fukushima than died as a result of radiation. Five people died last fall in a gas explosion that, while tragic, did not lead the country to shut down gas connections to homes. With all forms of energy, we need a balanced approach.

Two good bills

That brings us to our two competing bills in congress.

One, the Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy (ADVANCE) Act, has been introduced in the Senate by Shelly Moore Capito, Tom Carper, and Sheldon Whitehouse. ADVANCE would reduce the fees the NRC charges, which would help new nuclear startups; promote nuclear diplomacy to encourage outreach and technology sharing with friendly foreign countries that are interested in nuclear; facilitate nuclear development on brownfield sites; and, maybe most important, would have the NRC award prizes for successful deployments of advanced nuclear reactors.

The money is important, but the prize is also a kind of mission statement: If the NRC is handing out prizes for deploying advanced reactors, then the NRC is, by definition, in the business of licensing advanced nuclear reactors.

There’s a lot of in-the-weeds aspects to the brownfield idea, but it’s relevant, I think, mostly as a reminder that while there are lots of people who don’t want nuclear power anywhere near them, there are also plenty of places that would welcome it. If you used to have a coal plant that generated a lot of pollution (bad) but also jobs and tax revenue (good), and now all you have is a former coal plant that generates no jobs or tax revenue and the land is unusable, you might be better off with a new nuclear facility. It can hook into existing transmission infrastructure, and then big city libs (or whoever) can reduce their carbon footprint without actually building anything new.

Over in the House, meanwhile, Jeff Duncan and Diana DeGette have an even more ambitious bill called the Atomic Energy Advancement Act.

Their bill contains similar provisions around licensing fees and brownfields, but also specifically directs the NRC to update its mission statement “to include that licensing and regulation of nuclear energy activities be conducted in a manner that is efficient and does not unnecessarily limit — (a) the potential of nuclear energy to improve the general welfare; and (b) the benefits of nuclear energy technology to society.” Several provisions ask that licensing procedures be made “efficient” and “timely.” As is generally the case in the American system, there is inherently a good deal of uncertainly as to what an agency would actually do with this kind of directives. But my general view is that good legislation plus good NRC appointments can drive change and create an agency that wants to say yes to making reactors cheaper to build.

All energy sources matter

My dream scenario would be to mash these bills up in a both/and way, with the House’s strong language on directives to the NRC and the Senate’s prizes. And then, of course, to fill the Baran slot on the NRC with someone great.

Because while it’s possible that nuclear won’t pan out even with favorable regulatory treatment, it might pan out and it would be really nice if it did.

I’m worried that, in the wake of the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic financial commitments to clean energy, we’re losing focus on the crucial need for deployment. It’s not even really that the green movement is excessively focused on a renewables-only vision. Even the bill written by House liberals to facilitate renewable permitting is full of provisions that do the opposite of facilitating renewable permitting:

The Democrats’ permitting-reform bill would fill the coffers of groups that tie up projects. It calls for $3 billion in federal spending for the sake of “increasing the capacity” of nonprofits and local governments to participate in the environmental-review process. And it requires the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay the expenses of parties that want to intervene in regulatory proceedings but cannot afford to. In effect, the bill would subsidize objections to the projects that it means to accelerate.

That bill has some good provisions, too, but one point here is that there’s no “perfect” energy source. To run nuclear plants, you need to mine radioactive material, and you need to store waste, and you do need to be willing to run some non-zero safety risk. To run hydroplants, you need to dam rivers. To build utility-scale wind and solar, you need big swathes of land and you need to run transmission lines. Burning fossil fuels puts pollution in the air. Batteries have their own set of mining concerns. It’s tradeoffs all the way down.

But if you want to rely on electricity to power cars and heat homes, and you want to reduce the amount of fossil fuels that are burned to generate electricity, then you need to build a lot of zero-carbon electricity. You need regulatory reform for geothermal drilling. You need all the things.

Nuclear, though, is particularly promising as a legislative matter at the moment, because splitting the atom unleashes incredible amounts of lib-owning power that gets Republicans wanting to vote for things in a way that renewable transmission does not. Biden and most Democrats say they want to advance nuclear, and these NRC reform bills are the way to do it. I’m not saying the White House needs to loudly endorse them — that might be wildly counterproductive — but encouraging congressional leadership to encourage work on reconciling the bills and getting something done would be really helpful.

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