Democrats Lose Their Minds; Me and Toomey; Fair (to Middling) Harvard

They are really going out of their minds. Last week, Yale legal scholar Bruce Ackerman wrote in the American Prospect that, since seven Democratic hacks on the Florida Supreme Court were blocked from vetoing the public mandate in a settled presidential election, our system of constitutional government no longer obtains. Government, in fact, ought to come to a standstill until

George Bush is rolled out of Washington on a tumbrel. In Ackerman's words: "The president has not been independently elected. He is in the White House as a result of an unprincipled judicial decision that brought the electoral contest to a premature end... In our democracy, there is one basic check on a runaway Court: presidential elections... To allow this president to serve as the Court's agent is a fundamental violation of the separation of powers... When sitting justices retire or die, the Senate should refuse to confirm any nominations offered up by President Bush."

My favorite phrase here is "brought the electoral contest to a premature end." Oh, yeah?it was only mid-December! Why the hurry? We were just getting started!

Of course, you don't have to be a writer at the American Prospect to subscribe to the principle of If-my-guy-doesn't-get-to-be-in-the-Oval-Office-then-you-don't-get-to-have-your-Constitution. Last week, most Democrats and a few liberal Republicans, despairing of blocking President (Hear that, Mr. Ackerman? Le Pray-zee-dawng!) Bush's tax bill, seemed to be getting behind a compromise. They sought to include in the bill a "trigger" that would automatically eliminate the tax cuts should the surplus begin to fall. Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott said perhaps the first intelligent thing of his life when he rejected the proposal out of hand: "We're not going to fall for a trap," he explained, "where all Democrats have to do is spend more, then you lose your tax relief."

Lott's right. But the trigger idea's not just anti-Republican, it's anti-republican. It keeps tax hikes from coming to a vote. Maybe the precedent was set by those "non-political" base-closing commissions?in which cowardly congressmen bound themselves over to obey recommendations that they had nothing to do with thinking through. But whatever the genesis of this "trigger" idea, legislators increasingly seek ways to keep their fingerprints off of anything unpopular. I gave you a tax cut, says your senator, but that tax hike? It just...kind of happened.

A second, less constitutional point, is that a country should have a tax structure, not a tax lottery. Tax rates can change?and ought to?but always with the understanding that they're chosen by the people's representatives. When Bush signs new tax rates into law, those are the tax rates: rightly or wrongly, soundly or profligately, we the people chose them. They're not a goodie our masters have indulged us with for our good behavior.

Me and Toomey

It was thanks to the tax-cut mania that, last week, I got to do something I've never done before: interview (for television) someone I'd gone to college with. The producers decided to book as a guest Pat Toomey, the congressman from Pennsylvania's 15th District (Allentown/ Bethlehem). It promised to be interesting, since Toomey was among a handful of Republicans who were complaining that Bush's mammoth-and-inevitable $1.6-trillion tax cut was way too small.

I knew a little bit about Toomey. In 1998, he blew out his Democratic opponent with a disciplined campaign, and replaced the conservative Democrat Paul McHale, who'd retired after rendering himself persona non grata by trashing Hillary's health plan, and then voting, five years later, to Impeach the Brute. While not particularly senior, Toomey held assignments on three of the House committees?Banking, Small Business and Budget?that do the most important money stuff. Republicans who get those kinds of assignments tend to fit a stereotype: they're fat and aged Rotary Club guys, who build up a successful career in insurance or used cars, enter politics as a kind of hobby in their mid-60s, get nominated to Congress under preposterous small-pond circumstances ("My dentist was chairman of the town Republican Committee" or "Congressman Bloggs was renewing his policy one day and said, 'I'm retiring soon and you've got a good head for figures'" or "After I led the PTA's Rebuild the School Gym drive..."), and then serve two or three terms in Congress before retiring to Florida, without anyone outside their district's ever having heard of them.

Not Pat Toomey, as it turned out. In the course of the afternoon, the network e-mailed me some biographical information on the guy, and when it came up on the screen I almost collapsed onto my keyboard. The guy was a mere boy, still in his 30s, not much older than me. Born in Providence, he, too, was a New Englander. It was only when I scrolled a little further down that I discovered we had been at Harvard together. So I turned to my Almanac of American Politics to find out how a guy who was presumably just like me wound up at the pinnacle of American politics, a mover and a shaker. (Maybe I should have thought of that 10 years ago.) "After getting wealthy by creating an international financial services consulting firm," the Almanac wrote, "he moved to Allentown in 1990, where he invested in Rookies' Restaurants, which he helped to organize with his brothers. He entered government in 1994..."

I started doing comparisons, in order to figure what it was I had been doing as Toomey made his meteoric ascent through the corporate and political worlds. A depressing exercise: with the same tools, the same background, the same education, this fellow was jicama salad to my Kraft macaroni and cheese. He was having his first Power Breakfasts at a time when I still considered Maker's Mark the Breakfast of Champions. He was collecting big bonuses, while I was collecting returnable tonic-water bottles in order to scrounge the rent together. He was inventing new financial instruments while I was inventing excuses not to show up at my Kelly Girl data-entry temp job.

Yeah, and when I was tossing around loser-fallback ideas like, "Well, maybe I should just go to grad school," he had already earned his first million. By the time I was earning enough money to eat in (lousy) restaurants once in a while, Toomey owned several of them. And by the time I got my first real job, the guy had retired.

Fair (to Middling) Harvard

Toomey and I were at Harvard in the heart of the Derek Bok era, and I blame Bok for a lot of this. Bok was a promising legal scholar when he married Sissela Myrdal, daughter of the impeccably credentialed Swedish know-it-all Gunnar. In 1971, at the age of 41, he acceded to the Harvard presidency. And the rest is...well, not history exactly. More like bureaucracy.

While Sissela has made a career of writing books about things that seem rather obvious to most people (along the lines of Water Is Wet), Derek has tended to write about exactly the same topics, but in a more academic idiom (The Aqueous Qualities of H2O: An Inquiry into the Future of Mankind). His latest effort, out from Harvard next month, is called The Trouble with Government. Since I'm not going to read the book, I'll have to judge it by its cover, specifically, by the lengthy quotations on the back.

How's this for a platitude? "Whereas individual citizens may have firm opinions about important policy issues," Bok writes, "they forget that other voters often have sharply different views that vastly complicate efforts to forge a consensus." Ah! I believe Sly and the Family Stone put the same point a bit more pithily when they remarked, "Diff'rent strokes/for diff'rent folks." Bok's observation differs from Sly's only in that it introduces the language of hyperbole?firm...often...sharply...vastly?and goes on about five times as long.

Here's another: "While the well-to-do under [the American] system can readily take care of themselves, those in more modest circumstances have a much harder time of it." Well, that really makes American society an exception in the history of the world, doesn't it? Unlike other countries, this is one where those rich enough to live like rich people are rich enough to live like rich people, while (conversely) those not rich enough to live like rich people are not rich enough to live like rich people.

And finally: "As rational-choice theorists point out, citizens acting purely in their own self-interest may not even bother to vote, since their single ballot will have too little chance of affecting the outcome to justify the time and the effort required to inform themselves adequately and go to the polls." Sorry?is there anyone on Earth, besides Derek Bok, who doesn't realize this intuitively? One wonders how many tomes of rational-choice theory he had to read through before he arrived at this wisdom.