The Daily Parker

When I visit Half Moon Bay, Calif. (which I do about three times a year), I get up several hours before the family because (a) I stay on Chicago time and (b) they sleep later than I do anyway. I usually then walk down California Route 1 for about 1.5 km from the house to the Peet's Coffee so I can work without disturbing anyone.

Since my last visit the city has built a bike trail along the highway, making the trip immeasurably safer and less muddy:

Excellent. They even spent several hundred thousand dollars building this bridge over a drainage ditch:

Astute readers will notice something about this photo: either I took it standing in the drainage ditch or on some other bridge over the same ditch. Three guesses which one is true. In fact, the bike trail parallels the frontage road for about 400 m until it gets to this very expensive bridge, prompting even the most-boosterish citizens to ask why the trail doesn't just dump onto the frontage road before getting to the bridge.

Now the punchline: the trail ends 50 m farther up:

It's a pretty bridge, though. And I suppose it allowed the city to use up the state and Federal grants more completely, and it employed a few dozen Californians for part of the summer. So it's not completely stupid, right?

It turns out that yesterday's swearing-in failure really annoyed some people. Possibly the irony of having the GOP recite (most of) the Constitution and then allow people who had not been properly seated in Congress to vote on things was a bigger deal than the Speaker thought:

Rules committee Democrats are criticizing Drier's scheme, which they say needs to be addressed by the full House, not just the Rules committee. They propose a delay in the repeal hearings so the House can meet and figure out what to do. But in the new reality of Republican control, it's unlikely the Democratic concerns will move from political rhetoric to legislative action.

It's worth noting that Fitzpatrick and Sessions weren't the only ones to miss the swearing-in ceremony Wednesday. Rep. Peter DeFaizio (D-OR) skipped the ceremony to meet with veterans in his home district. He was sworn in on Thursday and his absence, and his absence on Wednesday caused none of the issues Fitzpatrick's and Sessions' did because he cast no votes before becoming a Constitutionally-recognized member of the 112th Congress.

Late Update: The process by which the mess Sessions and Fitzpatrick made will be cleaned up is coming into better focus. The full House will vote twice -- once on the rules for repealing the health care law, and once on "a resolution relating to the status of certain actions taken by Members-elect."

You know, it's not like we have the level of formality they have in the UK. When I toured Westminster Palace during the summer recess in 2009, the tour guide made a point that we could not actually sit down on the benches because that would be, you see, taking a seat in the House.

Update: The House GOP passed an "oops!" bill to fix the error, but now there's a question about whether the two guys were hosting an illegal fundraiser in the Capitol building.

It turns out my idle speculation yesterday about who would read the more unsavory bits of the Constitution on the House floor had some merit:

In consultation with the Congressional Research Service and others, the leaders of the House had decided to read a version of the Constitution that was edited to exclude those portions superseded by amendments — including amendments themselves — preventing lawmakers from having to make references to slaves, referred to in Article I, Section 2 as "three fifths of all other Persons" or to failed experiments like Prohibition. Members were not provided with the version before the reading began.

Representative Jesse L. Jackson Jr. (D-IL) registered a complaint he expanded on later in a prepared statement, essentially arguing that the House was whitewashing history and ignoring the blood, sweat and tears paid to achieve the amendments.

The reading included a classically-ironic fail by two Republican members who need to read more Marshall McLuhan:

[O]ne new member, Representative Mike Fitzpatrick (R-PA), who failed to be officially sworn in Wednesday, proceeded nonetheless to participate in the reading, one of the first official acts of House members in the 112th Congress.

At the time of the oath-taking, both Mr. Fitzpatrick and Representative Pete Sessions of Texas were elsewhere, watching the proceedings on television. They raised their respective right hands as the oath was administered, but that was not enough to make them official.

Both men were sworn in for real on Thursday afternoon. But before that happened, a Rules Committee hearing had to be halted because Mr. Sessions was taking part in it, and both men had cast votes on the floor. House leaders were conferring to see what steps might need to be taken to make things right.

Ha ha ha, harmless error, right? Maybe. But this isn't the first time the GOP have run over the formalities of taking power in their mad grabs for it. A couple of years ago, GOP staffers made changes to a bill after it was passed but before it was embossed and presented to the President, which some might call a minor coup d'état if one were into calling things as they really are.

Good thing (most) of the new Representatives swore to uphold the Constitution before reciting an edited version of it. I only hope they knew the difference.

Update: Washington Post columnist David Cole imagines the Conservative Constitution:

We, the Real Americans, in order to form a more God-Fearing Union, establish Justice as we see it, Defeat Health-Care Reform, and Preserve and Protect our Property, our Guns and our Right Not to Pay Taxes, do ordain and establish this Conservative Constitution for the United States of Real America.

Article II. The President shall faithfully execute the laws, except when, as Commander in Chief, he decides he'd really rather not.

Amendment 3. The right of Corporations, Hedge Funds, Business Leaders and Lobbyists to spend endless cash on campaigns and influence-purchasing shall not be infringed. The so-called right of Unions to associate shall be denied as fundamentally un-American and contrary to the agenda of the Chamber of Commerce.

Of all the eye-rolling things the new House majority has done in the past day, Speaker Boehner's squawking about taking the government back for the people grated the most. Given the Republicans' 20-year reign as the country's least popular option—if we had a parliamentary system we'd have had Democratic governments since 1992 without interruption—I wonder which people he means.

But by far the oddest thing they've decided to do, the House will today read the U.S. Constitution on the House floor. I'm not so much concerned with the cost of the exercise (about $1.1m), and in fact I think many of our representatives could use a refresher course. But given this is a Republican initiative, it brings up several touchy points. First, do they plan to read the entire document? If so, who gets to read the bits about "three-fifths of other persons?" How will they bring the requisite drama and pomp to the twelfth amendment, most of which has been superseded anyway? What about the 18th and 21st, which cancel each other out?

I'm so sorry I'll be on an airplane and unable to watch. I really do like the document, even if I'm pretty sure not to like the GOP's interpretation of it.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Milwaukee is bankrupt:

On the first anniversary of his installation, Milwaukee Archbishop Jerome Listecki announced Tuesday afternoon that the archdiocese will file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Listecki said the move was necessary to fairly compensate victims and continue the "essential ministries" of the church, and urged the faithful not to blame the victims.

Yes, Archbishop, blaming the children that priests raped for the Church passing the criminals around instead of surrendering them to the secular authorities would be in poor taste.

The story continues:

The bankruptcy petition will not include parishes, schools and other Catholic entities that are separately incorporated, he said.

Just before the news conference, a group of advocates for the victims of clergy sex abuse said bankruptcy allows Listecki to avoid depositions and questions under oath in court about the abuse cases.

"This is about protecting church secrets, not church assets," said David Clohessy, national director of SNAP, the Survivor's Network of those Abused by Priests. "The goal here is to prevent top church managers from being questioned under oath about their complicity, not 'compensating victims fairly.' "

Do you suppose Ratzinger will pass the plate in the Vatican to help the archdiocese?

Constitution scholar and writer Garrett Epps lays out the case for the constitutionality of requiring Americans to "maintain a minimum level of health insurance." Well, for starters, it doesn't:

This snappy apothegm is the logical equivalent of saying that the Defense Appropriations Act "requires that every United States citizen, other than those who leave the country, engage in accepting a minimum level of protection by the United States military." The provisions of the Health Care Act provide a benefit. The majority of Americans, who already have health coverage (and seem, by and large, to regard this coverage as worth bargaining for) will simply see improvements in their existing health care benefits, such as an end to lifetime benefit limits and the right to include older adult children on their policies. A significant number of others who are currently uninsured will become eligible for government-funded health insurance.

There will remain a small but significant number of Americans who can afford health care insurance but choose not to buy it. But contrary to the sound bite above, even they are not required to "maintain a minimum level of health insurance." If they wish to keep their uninsured status, they may do so by paying an addition to their income tax bills--ranging from as little as $695 for an individual taxpayer to $2085 for a family of six or more. The claim that the government is "forcing individuals to buy a commercial product" is worse than spin; it is simply false.

He sums up:

The doctrine under which the Act is being assailed quite simply constitutes a threat to most of the significant advances in federal law of the past 100 years: federal pension programs, national wildernesses and parks, consumer protection, environmental regulation, and most particularly statutory guarantees of civil rights.

It's not coincidental that right now Ron Paul laments the Civil Rights Act and that Haley Barbour speaks fondly the segregated South, that anti-immigrant extremists target birthright citizenship, or that right-wingers seek to wreck the Constitution with an old-South style amendment letting states repeal federal laws. A decision to void the Act would furnish a powerful precedent for those who would "restore" a libertarian dreamland that never existed, and that for most of us would quickly become a nightmare.

The next year will be interesting. The U.S. might become a 21st-Century nation. Or we might remain the only developed country without this basic protection.

A spokesman for Pat Robertson has clarified the Rev's stance on pot:

Dr. Robertson did not call for the decriminalization of marijuana. He was advocating that our government revisit the severity of the existing laws because mandatory drug sentences do harm to many young people who go to prison and come out as hardened criminals. He was also pointing out that these mandatory sentences needlessly cost our government millions of dollars when there are better approaches available. Dr. Robertson's comments followed a CBN News story about a group of conservatives who have proven that faith-based rehabilitation for criminals has resulted in lower repeat offenders and saved the government millions of dollars. Dr. Robertson unequivocally stated that he is against the use of illegal drugs.

Yes, faith-based rehabilitation for the criminals who use the Demon Weed will surely result in less economic deadweight loss and fewer ruined lives than, say, accepting that prohibition failed. (Whoops! I mean marijuana prohibition, which is obviously and totally unlike the 18th Amendment's prohibition of alcohol. I mean, everyone knows that was a disaster. Alcohol, as everyone knows, is safer than pot and more culturally relevant, so of course drawing a general lesson about drug laws from the 1930s isn't appropriate.)

Do you know why the Senate doesn't seem to get anything done? It might have something to do with the 63 filibusters they perpetrated in the current Congress. That's more filibusters than the Senate had from 1919 to 1982 combined, and two more than the previous record, which they set in the last Congress.

Drill down into the lists of individual cloture actions in each Congress, and you get a sense of just how obstructionist the Republicans have become.

Even Pat Robertson—yes, that Pat Robertson—can no longer pretend that U.S. drug policy has in any way succeeded:

The salient part:

We're locking up people that take a couple of puffs of marijuana and the next thing you know they've got ten years—they've got mandatory sentences and these judges, they throw up their hand and say, "Nothing we can do, it's mandatory sentences." We've got to take a look at what we're considering crimes, and that's one of them. I mean, I’m not exactly for the use of drugs, don't get me wrong, but I just believe criminalizing marijuana, criminalizing the possession of a few ounces of pot, and that kind of thing, I mean it's just, it's costing us a fortune, and it's ruining young people. Young people go into prisons, they go in as youths, and they come out as hardened criminals.

Wow. Decriminilization has forded the mainstream all the way to the other side.

The first official 2010 Census results are out today. As of April 1st there were 308,745,538 residents of the United States. California, the most populous, had 37,253,956; Wyoming, the least, had 563,626.

We have a decennial census in the U.S. because our Constitution mandates it. Every 10 years, we reapportion representation. This time, very much like the last time, Illinois, Missouri, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are losing a seat; New York and Ohio are losing two; Washington, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Georgia, and South Carolina gain one; Florida gains two; and in a sign of the Apocalypse, Texas gains four. Louisiana also lost a seat, most likely as a result of people fleeing after Katrina in 2005 (though the state did have a net gain of around 70,000 people). With these results, each member of the House represents about 711,000 people.

Oddly, only Michigan and Puerto Rico lost population since 2000. Nevada had the biggest proportional gain, its population increasing 35%. Texas had the largest numeric gain, of about 4.5 million. Other big gains include North Carolina (about 1½ m), Arizona (25%), Utah (23%), and Idaho (21%).

The Census has an interactive tool that has data back to 1910 for more information.