another "injustice" bites the dust

So on Thursday the Senate voted to expand the House of Representatives by two seats, with one going to the District of Columbia and the other to Utah. Apparently Utah is entitled to one because the Census hasn't been counting all those Mormon missionaries who are out of state but who permanently reside there.

DC is to get one because it has never had representation in Congress, and there mustn't be taxation without representation and so on. Harry Reid sees this as "moving to right a centuries-old wrong."

Be that as it may, it's an interesting question whether this can be squared with the Constitution. On the one hand, Article I, Section 2 says, "The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States," and of course the capital District is not a state (or State). On the other hand, the 23rd amendment (1961) grants DC a number of electors in the Electoral College "equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives in Congress to which the District would be entitled if it were a State." Lots of penumbras in there for the Supreme Court to work with!

My biggest worry about this is that if DC has a right to a Representative, I don't see why it isn't also entitled to two Senators. The GOP seems to be taking the view that the extra Utah seat makes up for the likely Democratic DC seat, but how are they going to prevent a creative Federal court from giving DC two Senators?

unread laws, boring version

I don't know about the rules in the US Congress, but in the British and Canadian Parliaments, a bill can't be voted on without being read aloud to the house two (or maybe it's three) times. I used to think that was weird, but I'm starting to see the wisdom in it.

Of course, they cheat nowadays by including other material "by reference," so that the bill just says, e.g., "The Massively Convoluted and Bloated Set of Miscellaneous Spending Plans Intended to Get the Country back to Work, presented to this House on 20 February 2009 by the Right Honourable Minister for Government Efficiency, and amended by the Amendments to the Massively Convoluted and Bloated Set of Miscellaneous Spending Plans Intended to Get the Country Back to Work adopted on 19 February 2009 by the Special Select Committee for Parliamentary Continuity and presented to this House and adopted on 20 February 2009, is hereby the Law of the Land." As tangled as that is, you can read it aloud two or three times in just a few minutes, while the MCBSMSPIGCBW is free to run to, say, 1200 or more pages, and the Amendments to several hundred more pages.

Here's a revolutionary idea to think about: a constitutional amendment stating that no bill, motion, resolution, or other item of business can be adopted by either house of Congress unless it, and all documents referred to in it, directly or indirectly, has first been read aloud twice to that house--once when presented, and once, as amended, before the vote on it.

Not likely to be politically viable at the moment (apparently), but maybe the day will come.

unread laws, funny version

Rob Long hits a home run with this column in the latest National Review, titled "Excerpts from the unread parts of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act" (subscription or registration required). If you doubt that the best way to make a very serious point is sometimes by being very funny, read this piece. Brilliant.

norm's grumpthink manifesto

What is grumpthink?

• It is a kind of thinking, as opposed to mere sentimentality and other mushy thought-substitutes. This flags it immediately as old-fashioned.
• It is critical thinking, in the sense that it doesn't tolerate sloppiness and imprecision, not even from friends.
• It is willing to be individualistic in its outlook, if not positively contrarian or even curmudgeonly. It is thus deeply opposed to groupthink in all its forms, including, for example, today's epidemic of Hopenchange.

Its name notwithstanding, it is not misanthropic. It smiles at human foibles and silliness even as it skewers them, but is capable of hot indignation at duplicity and hypocrisy.

Great exemplars of grumpthink include Hamlet, who employs grumpthink especially with Polonius, Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern; the entire text of Gulliver's Travels (though the final section, especially, verges on misanthropy); and William F. Buckley, Jr.'s "standing athwart history, yelling Stop." Masters of grumpthink include Evelyn Waugh, G.K. Chesterton, Winston Churchill, C.S. Lewis, the aforementioned WFB, Thomas Sowell, Roger Scruton, and Mark Steyn. As these examples suggest, grumpthink has an affinity with Christianity and with several recent forms of conservatism. To be fair, however, it has had some notable practitioners outside those traditions. One thinks of Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, H.L. Mencken, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell--not to mention the better writers at Saturday Night Live.

When is grumpthink called for? Any time people are doing misguided things in large groups--which is to say, any time. But the larger the groups, and the more misguided the things, the greater the need for grumpthink.

Events of the first weeks of the Obama administration and the 111th Congress suggest that the nation's and the world's need for grumpthink is now pressing and will remain so for the foreseeable future. They also suggest that grumpthinkers' mills will not lack for grist.

That's why I'm finally taking the blog plunge. The world cannot have too many people questioning the idiocies of our day. So I take my place athwart history and start yelling Nonsense.