The Other Side's Partisans

It took religious conservatives quite a while to get serious about screening and installing judges who were part of their movement. Up until then, there were plenty of judges appointed by Republican presidents, even while the liberal wing of the Republican Party was well in decline, who ended up infuriating the religious right. The important point was to assert control over the GOP judge-producing process so that they'd stop getting judicial technocrats and start getting their own ideologues. Now they've done that, and they're getting judges like Roberts and Alito instead of O'Connor and Souter.

I'm reading Matt's comment that "A party whose leaders realized that economic results were the most important driver of public opinion wouldn't have renominated a conservative Republican to head the Federal Reserve" and hoping we can at least stop appointing the other side's partisans and ideologues. Bernanke isn't as total a disaster as the Ayn-Rand-loving Greenspan, but I'd prefer somebody who won't see it as a minus if economic stimulus helps a Democratic president. I hope Democrats are waking up to what a problem this is.

Lee Fisher

In the wake of near-certain defeat, Lee Fisher, Democratic Senate nominee in Ohio, has turned over $100,000 of his money to the state Democratic Party. He ought to be thanked for making sure that the ship wouldn't go down with him. Current polling can be seen at right. If only Kendrick Meek could learn by example.

I haven't been following this race very closely. What exactly happened here? Some kind of huge divergence opened up in August and just kept getting wider. Was there some major news event, or did Fisher's campaign do something dumb, or what?

Coins Of Singapore

I'll support Nick's call for penny elimination below. Here in Singapore we're transitioning through the elimination of the 5-cent coin. (The penny, depicted at top right, was abolished well before my time.) Merchants will accept the 5-cent coin, but prices for lots of things are in 10-cent increments and it's slowly receding from circulation. At current exchange rates, the Singaporean dollar is worth 77 US cents, so we're basically moving into a system where the smallest coin is worth 7.7 US cents. We're enjoying the benefit of not fiddling around with insignificant coins, with no obvious drawbacks.

One of the nice things about the Singaporean system is that it's pretty well suited for transitioning through nickel elimination. Any value difference between any quantity our remaining existent coins can be bridged by some number of ten-cent coins. This works fine in the US system as far as penny elimination is concerned, because you can bridge any gap with some number of nickels. But in the future we're going to have trouble getting rid of the nickel, there's going to be trouble because if something costs 20 cents and you've got a quarter, there'll be no way to make change. Going straight decimal instead of messing with quarters would've had its advantages.

Pennied and Nickeled and Dimed.

In re: Ezra Klein's new discussion of the penny,

I believe that not only does a penny cost more to make than a penny, but a nickel now costs more to make than a nickel. So, I propose that we drop the penny and make a zinc-based nickel. When I say, "I propose", what I'm really saying is "I mostly agree with James Poulos". There are some transition concerns, and questions of which President gets bumped and such, but overall this plan makes sense.

This plan at least mitigates the problem of Big Zinc, but it doesn't do anything about Big Vending Machine, which has to figure out how to deal with the new currency.

A World Of Surprises

I can understand why Founders worried about uneducated popular sentiment driving a democracy to foolish decisions might set up a bicameral structure in which it's harder to pass legislation. That's the cooling-saucer idea of the Senate (though as far as I can tell, the cooling saucer metaphor is based on an apocryphal story). Under such conditions, it makes sense to make the upper house have six-year terms so it doesn't suddenly turn over. If you're going overboard, you might also have other elites at the state level choose the Senators, as was originally done.

But if you assume a world of sudden and surprising challenges which technocrats can solve, but which the people are generally confused about, creating barriers to passing legislation ends up making popular sentiment win at the expense of the technocrats. Rather than having the barriers to passing legislation keep uneducated popular sentiment in check, it keeps technocrats from implementing any of their solutions. For example, you might have a financial crisis or a climate crisis, and the solutions are kind of funny-looking, but they'll work with minimal pain. In a unicameral system existing policymakers could just push them through, but with bicameralism it's easier for them to get stuck, which popular sentiment supports.

I remember Yglesias and Bernstein going on a while ago about how the Constitution is actually structured to protect a bunch of interest groups at the expense of technocratic policy proposals. That's certainly going on here. I guess what I find interesting is that if you're in a rapidly changing world where new challenges come at you from every direction, rather than a steady and stable world, political structures designed to keep popular sentiment from exerting too much force actually help that sentiment attain its ends.