What Digby Said

On expecting the Grown-up Republicans to act like Grownups.

This has been another edition of What Digby Said.

Not a Day to Feel Good About The World

Persuing SCOTUSBlog (be patient, it may not load immediately today) as well as veteran Courtwatchers Dahlia Lithwick and Jeffrey Toobin, it looks like opinions on oral argument range between "the individual mandate is totally hosed" and "there's some small chance that the mandate will survive".

Let's just say there are days I've felt better about the world.

"Stand Your Ground"

Let me give an example of the phenomenon Jonathan Bernstein talks about here -- the limits of the advantages that poll-tested words give you. The "Stand Your Ground" laws implicated in allowing George Zimmerman to shoot Trayvon Martin without consequences are now facing widespread ridicule, and the opponents of these laws are calling them by that name. "Stand Your Ground" actually strikes me as a pretty good poll-tested phrase, but the negative publicity the laws are getting will eliminate the value of the phrase pretty quickly.

Perhaps the classic example of this is "welfare", which was considered a positive phrase when it was initially used for social programs that gave money to the poor. You can see why -- it involves people faring well, which sounds pretty nice. But when people came to have views about the laws themselves (driven in no small part by negative attitudes towards poor black people) the term got the pejorative connotations it has today.

All It Takes Is Five Votes

This Slate essay by Dahlia Lithwick previewing this week's Supreme Court argument on the health care sums up my fears perfectly:

The law is a completely valid exercise of Congress’ Commerce Clause power, and all the conservative longing for the good old days of the pre-New Deal courts won’t put us back in those days as if by magic. Nor does it amount to much of an argument.


So that brings us to the really interesting question: Will the Court’s five conservatives strike it down regardless?

If you look at the legal precedents, the case for the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is close to open-and-shut. The idea that the ACA's regulation of the "inactivity" is a novel and unconstitutional use of the federal government's power under the Commerce Clause doesn't really pass the smell test. But when has that stopped the courts conservative Justices when they really wanted to do something? The Justices and Court clerks have tremendous ability to use the tools of legal reasoning to achieve a desired result; they just choose to exercise that ability sparingly. You see their talents on display most clearly in the abortion cases that have reached the post-O'Connor Court, but arguably one can see it in Parents Involved and other contentious decisions. And the stakes here are high enough that the Justices will almost certainly be influenced by the political atmosphere surrounding the case.

Another way to put this is that after Bush v. Gore, I'll believe anything.

Malaria Is Deadlier Than Kony

Lots of people are talking about this Kony / Invisible Children business. Facebook was blanketed with status updates criticizing it before I had any idea what it was. I'm still not sure whether I think money given to the anti-Kony effort is better for the world than money spent on any number of other things. My guess is that it's better than spending the money on a box of Twinkies or making a donation to Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, but still well below lots of other stuff on the list of good things you could spend money on.

Anyway, one thing I'm pretty confident about is that you'll get better consequences out of money given to Deworm the World, to whom I gave $8000 last year, or the Against Malaria Foundation. The people at Giving What We Can, who work hard on figuring how how many years of life you can save for a given amount of money (and how many years of that life will be fully healthy), have selected and recommended these groups.

If you need a human-sized bad guy to get you interested, they may not have anything quite as perfect as a brutal African warlord who created an army of child soldiers. But creatures that spread terrible diseases by sucking human blood or which eat the food out of poor children's bellies are villains I'm happy to spend money against.