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How Publius Might Counsel Egypt

By Elvin Lim

As the situation continues to unfold in Egypt, and as the White House continues to walk a fine line between support for democracy and support for a new regime which may not be as pro-American as Hosni Mubarak‘s was, Publius, the author of the Federalist Papers may lend us some wisdom.

It may surprise some people, but Publius was no fan of democracy. “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention,” Publius wrote in Number 10. The mob cannot rule, though the mob may

Why a Democratic Egypt must Dismantle its Military Establishment

By Elvin Lim

Two contested frames are now emerging from the “chaos” in Egypt. Either the popular revolution has created chaos, including looting and the escape of inmates from prisons, or the government has constructed an image of chaos, so that its turn to emergency powers would be justified and necessary.

It is telling, and not a little sad, that both sides are courting the military – a fundamental and embedded institution of Egyptian life and politics. On the one hand, state television in Egypt depicted President Hosni Mubarak visiting an army operations center, showing that he

A GOP Front-runner Emerges

By Elvin Lim

The Republican party has traditionally been a more ordered, hierarchical organization, one in which the norm of waiting for one’s turn has been entrenched through the decades. When there is no consensus on the available candidates in the field, the runner-up to the last nomination contest becomes, by default, the front-runner. Today, Palin, Pawlenty, Thune, Huckabee, Gingerich, and Santorum are all names being mentioned. Yet no name stands out the way Mitt Romney‘s does.

Conservative Anger and Liberal Condescension

By Elvin Lim
The vitriol that liberals and conservatives perceive in each other is only the symptom of a larger cause. There is something rooted in the two ideologies that generates anger and condescension respectively, and that is why a simple call by the President for participants to be more civil will find few adherents.

Liberals are thinking, what is it about conservatism that it can produce its own antithesis, radicalism? Whether these be conservatives of the anti-government variety, such as Timothy McVeigh (Oklahoma City bomber) or Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), or conservatives of the anti-abortion variety such as Clayton Waagner, Eric Rudolph, or

John Boehner and Jared Loughner say: Read the US Constitution, but do they get it?

By Elvin Lim

The new House rules require that bills be posted online for 72 hours before they come to the floor for a vote.

If this is a nod to the Tea Party movement, either the nodders are naive or the Tea Party movement has no clue what the Constitution really means.

One needs quite a lot more than a public reading of the US Constitution to unpack its meaning. For to understand the Constitution is not only know what it says, but how it works.

The more the House succeeds as a check against itself, the less it would be able to be a part the original checks and balances the Framers invented. The checks they envisioned were mostly inter-branch, not intra-branch.

Consider the various rules the House has now adopted to constrain its own powers.

Here We Go Again

By Elvin Lim
A new year, a new Congress. But, in all likelihood, we shall soon be witnessing the same politics.

2010 was a year of promises. Promises to return to common sense, to the American creed, to a simpler and better time before old and tired stratagems were tried ad nauseam on seemingly insurmountable problems. The world was black and white (or red and blue), politics was dice play, and there was a right answer and a wrong answer.

So was 2008.

2009 was a year of hubris, of dissension within political ranks, and ultimately of political learning. A year when the promisers went about trying to fulfill their promises, only to find out that what was presented to the electorate as new had already been tried before, so that what was cast as novel during the elections was quickly cast by the opposition

The Repeal of DADT

By Elvin Lim

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” has finally been repealed. It is time now to look back on the hypocrisy of those who maintained a “separate but equal” philosophy regarding gays and lesbians serving in the military.

Remember the “unit cohesion” argument? That was a popular and prevailing argument in the 1990s. It appears ridiculous to most people today, but it is worth reminding ourselves that we have had our fair share of ridiculous convictions in our past. Consider “separate but equal,” the jurisprudential doctrine that upheld Jim Crow laws in the South for over half a century. There is actually a common thread linking “separate but equal” of the 1890s with the “unit cohesion” argument of the 1990s. Those arguing for racial segregation a century ago believed that people of different races should not interact with each other, and the nation’s highest court codified this belief.

Obama’s Silent Reset

By Elvin Lim

President Barack Obama, who had taken a backseat to allow the First Branch to set the health-care reform legislative agenda last year, has now moved into the driver’s seat of American government. An electoral shellacking was all it took to for a former constitutional law professor who once espoused the separateness and equality of branches to stop practicing what he once taught.

The irony is that it was united Democratic party control of all branches of government that allowed Obama the luxury of taking the back seat. When before, he could have relied on Pelosi and Reid, Obama has recently learnt that he can only rely on himself. The Oval Office is a lonely place, but he who realizes it quickly learns that as a result, it is also a powerful place.

Obama’s Deal with Jon Kyl

By Elvin Lim

Obama is a politician, and that’s why he’s made an estate tax deal with Jon Kyl in return for Kyl’s support for ratifying the START treaty.

As Senator Chuck Schumer has suggested, the Democratic party would probably benefit by allowing the Bush era tax cuts to expire, but this is not what Obama is proposing because he has something up his sleeve.

Consider if Democrats allowed the Bush tax cuts to expire. People would be angry for a few days, but then come 2011, Democrats would be in a better bargaining position to play chicken with Republicans. Democrats would then be able to dare Republicans to

WikiLeaks, Anarchism, and the State

By Elvin Lim

WikiLeaks affirms on its website that “democracy and transparency go hand in hand.” This may be true in the abstract, but in the world in which we live, it is not, because the only democracies we know of operate within the confines of the nation-state, and nation-states are not comfortable with transparency. That is why the campaign by the nation-states of the world to shut the site down is proceeding with such ferocity.

Individuals – at least those who live in states committed to the rule of law – enjoy a presumptive respect for our privacy. There is no reason why anyone or any institution should have access to details of our private life. We do not owe anyone a transparent account of our lives.

Why Racial Profiling is like Affirmative Action

By Elvin Lim

The Transportation and Security Administration‘s new video screening and pat-down procedures has given new fuel to advocates of racial profiling at airports around the nation. Opponents of racial profiling argue that treating an individual differently simply because of his or her race is wrong because discrimination, even for noble intentions, is just plain wrong. Let’s call this the principle of formal equality.

Oddly enough, this is exactly what opponents of affirmative action say. They typically argue that some other signifier, for example class, can be a more efficient, and less discriminatory way of achieving similar outcomes if affirmative action policies were in place.

Obama is Attempting a Reset

By Elvin Lim

For all the talk of a presidential reset button, the truth is that formal, public, dramatic resets don’t work. They never have. Not when Nixon fired Joseph Califano, or when Carter fired four of his cabinet secretaries. The American presidency works best when it works silently, and the power exercised is invisible. It doesn’t matter which party is in control of the White House; when foreign policy becomes issue number one, the executive becomes branch number one.

Something has crept up on us under an invisibility cloak. It is the new agenda in Washington. How quickly Washington has forgotten about jobs now that the elections are over. (Politicians won’t have to pander to voters for another year or so.) Check out any newspaper, or cable channel: the bait and switch from jobs to national security is nothing short of astounding. Washington is abuzz with talk of TSA pat-downs, the NATO summit, North Korea’ uranium-enriching facility, and, most prominently, ratification of the new START treaty.

Article 2 of the Constitution is a Paradoxical Thing

By Elvin Lim
These are deliquescent days in Washington. As the Democratic party works out a deal to keep both Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn in the leadership hierarchy, and the Republican party takes stock of what it means to welcome 35 new Tea Party members into its caucus, the President must be wondering, what now?

Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen are advising Obama to not seek re-election. Others are simply predicting a one-term presidency whether or not Obama likes it.

Beware the Claims of a “Mandate”

By Elvin Lim
Mandate claims in American politics are hogwash, and they are especially dubious in mid-term elections where an entire branch was not evaluated for re-election. Mandates imply that there is a clear date on which majorities are counted. There isn’t, because ours is a republic in which the staggered electoral calendar introduced the principle that republican “truth” would emerge from a conversation between different majorities at different cross sections in time. The president elected in 2008 is still around – so as far as the Constitution is concerned, the Democratic mandate from 2008 is no less relevant and carries over into 2011 as much as the Republican mandate from 2010.

Toward Equilibrium We Vote

Elvin Lim

When the dust has settled on the electioneering frenzy of these final days, 2010, the third “change” election in a row, will better be read as an equilibrium restoring election.

In the Senate, Democrats are about to hand back just over half of their recent wins (5 seats in 2006, and another 8 in 2008) to the Republicans. Most predictions for the number of seats the Republicans will pick up in the House hover around 50 because there are currently 49 Democrats occupying seats in districts that voted for McCain in 2008, and they are about to relinquish these seats. Put another way, Democrats picked up 31 seats in 2006, and another 21 in 2008, and they’re about to return just about every one of them back to the Republicans.

NPR’s Firing of Juan Williams

By Elvin Lim
If NPR values public deliberation as the highest virtue of a democratic polity, it did its own ideals a disservice last week when it fired Juan Williams without offering a plausible justification why it did so. On October 20, Williams had uttered these fateful words on the O’ Reilly Factor:

“…when I get on a plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they’re identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Anxiety and worry make for poor public reasons. Quite often discomfort is a façade for prejudice – an emotion that knows no reasonable defense.