Will, I’d trust you with my life. But not your principles.

You see, we speak of being anchored to our principles. But if the weather turns nasty you up with an anchor and let it down where there’s less wind, and the fishing’s better.

“And look,” we say, “look! I’m anchored! To my principles!”

—Sir Thomas More, “A Man for All Seasons”

I pray God I never do this to my principles. But when it comes to my blogging software, it turns out I am quite happy to look where the fishing’s better.

NOTE: This post was originally published at my Substack. The footnote links go there instead of to the bottom of the page.

My beloved daughter,

As you mature from a girl into a woman, you will naturally start to ask new questions about things that you have always believed. You will discover the answers to most of these by yourself, although I hope that your mother and I always be patient and eager to help. Many of your questions will be about small things, like how to be a good party host or why the economy sometimes has recessions or what in the world a boutonniere is. You will also have some big questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? What does it mean to do good and avoid evil? We have given you answers to these questions from Jesus and the Catholic Church, but you will start to ask whether our answers are correct.

After all, when you look around the world, you see many people who believe many different things. We are Catholics, but some people are Jewish, some Islamic, some Hindi. There are a thousand flavors of Protestant Christianity, of course. The other Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox, dwarfs Judaism and every single Protestant sect. Materialist atheists, who believe that there is no God, no Heaven, and nothing in the cosmos except matter, make up a sizable and growing chunk of the U.S. population. All these religions (and several others) (although not as many as you might think) have different answers to those big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Where are we going? What does it mean to do good and avoid evil?

So how can you know that your answers are right and their answers aren’t?

However, you are unlikely to encounter many actual Jews, Muslims, Hindus, or even Protestants. If anyone tries to actively evangelize you as you grow, it will most likely be a materialist atheist, and God bless them for trying to save your soul in their own funny way! But even they are fairly rare. The common religion in our country is very different. It is poisonous, not just to our Catholic religion, but to all sincere beliefs.

Let me give you an example.

A few weeks ago, when we were up at the cabin, I was floating on the lake with my book as usual, but the wind was strong and I had to give up on reading for a bit in order to keep my floaty close to the dock. I got to talking with one of our old cabin friends. (I won’t say which.) Our friend’s daughter has apparently started dating a Jew, and she is apparently doing this (among other reasons) because she thinks it will annoy her Christian mother, our friend.

Our friend sighed and shook her head at this point in her story and said, “Of course, it didn’t work.”

I, floating next to her, nodded thoughtfully, attempting to agree. “Oh, yeah, I’d take a serious Jew over the average Christian today, too.” (For reasons I’ll explain, I really do believe this. However, to you, I will add that it is still very far from the ideal.)

Our friend shook her head. “It’s not that. I told her, ‘It doesn’t matter, as long as he has faith.’ Who are we to say whether his beliefs are better or worse than ours, as long as he believes in something?” So our cabin friend doesn’t care what this young Jewish man believes. She cares only that he believes.

Our friend is a very normal American adult (and a perfectly average “Christian”). You will hear versions of this all the time, if you haven’t started hearing it already. I have seen variations on “As long as he has faith” and “Who’s to say our beliefs are better?” many times since my conversation at the cabin.

The average American considers herself a Christian, but is not a Christian. The average American follows a different religious system. Theologians and sociologists call it “indifferentism.” That is a fancy, Latin-sounding way of saying “doesn’t-matter-ism”. According to doesn’t-matter-ism:

1. no religion is better than any other,
2. all religions are equally valid paths to God or Heaven, and
3. the only important things in life are to enjoy things while still being nice to people; the rest doesn’t matter.

In doesn’t-matter-ism, it doesn’t matter what particular religious beliefs you have, because you don’t actually believe your own “beliefs.” You go to Mass or mosque or whatever simply because it’s a family tradition, or because you “get something out of it,” or because you like the people, not because you think Jesus Christ was actually the Son of God or that Muhammed was actually God’s final prophet. To you, those details don’t matter—not really.

There are Catholic doesn’t-matterists, Muslim doesn’t-matterists, and agnostic (even atheist) doesn’t-matterists. They think they belong to different religions, but they all believe exactly the same things about who we are, why we are here, where we are going, and what it means to do good and avoid evil. Specifically, they think (surprise) it doesn’t matter, because things will all work out for the best (as long as you’re nice). The differences between how they pray mean no more to them than the differences between how Italians and Mexicans make pizza. For them, religion is just there to be beautiful and make you feel happy and remind you to be nice to people.

Doesn’t-matterism is the dominant religion of American society. “It doesn’t matter, as long as he has faith.”

This is a pretty strange idea, when you think about it.

If you, someday, bring home a perfectly lovely young man who is very kind in every particular, but who believes with all his heart that the Sun revolves around the Earth (even though we know, from science, that the Earth revolves around the Sun), I would find that very weird. I might regard it as a simple eccentricity, since heliocentrism very rarely impacts your daily choices. But it would be still be weird, even if I let it go.

On the other hand, if your beau believed that the only path to a healthy life was by getting infected by a tapeworm once every few months (because “the tapeworms consume your negative ions, which prevents your heart-protective antioxidants from going out of balance”), I would be concerned, because I think tapeworms are dangerous, and his contrary beliefs could have a very big impact on your daily life. Still, I’m no doctor, so I would hear out his pro-tapeworm arguments.

My concern would escalate to alarm, however, if I mentioned my concerns to you and you replied, “Oh, Daddy, who cares what he believes about health as long as he has beliefs about health?!”

These beliefs about tapeworm-based health care are either true or false. I strongly suspect they are false, but I could be wrong. What I know for certain is that it matters whether they are are true or false. If he routinely ingests tapeworms, and you marry him and start ingesting tapeworms to “celebrate his beliefs” or to keep the peace or to set a “good example” for your tapeworm-eating kids, but his beliefs are false, then you will be sick and unhappy a lot of the time (because you’ll be full of tapeworms). You could even die! I care very much what your future boyfriends believe about health, not just whether they have beliefs about health—and pretty much everyone agrees with me! This stuff is serious!

Yet when we come to the most important questions of all—the questions that define for us how we live, how we die, and why any of it matters—many of our well-intentioned neighbors adopt a cold indifference. “It doesn’t matter, as long as he has faith!” I think our friends are just trying to be nice. By minimizing their differences, they avoid having to disagree with their friends about important beliefs, and they avoid having to worry about whether their friends are living good lives. That’s nice, right? But it is not kind. It is not honest. It is not human.

Humans (if you ask me) are made to believe true things and reject false things. The truth matters.

This is the nature of the world in which we live, which does not give two farts about whether you believe tapeworms are bad for you. Tapeworms are bad for you whether you realize it or not. Our world has many such dangers. We must learn the difference between true and false just to thrive in our dangerous world. Even babies learn real and not-real long before they learn the difference between good and evil.

Believing true things is not just a survival trait in nature; it also our nature, our human nature. Humans were designed by a good God to know and love the truth. Ultimately, He wants us to know, to love, and to serve the Truth, capital-T (which is God Himself). People who believe even the smallest falsehood (which, to be fair, is all of us) are impeded from this, our ultimate purpose. People who believe false things therefore cannot live as freely and as fully as people who believe true things. They are, in other words, unhappy.

Even if someone settles into complacency with a comforting lie (or even a dubious truth!), there is always an unsettling whisper, deep down, that reminds him: “You know better. You know this isn’t right.” It’s like the Adventure Time comic where Finn, Jake, and Ice King end up in the illusion-world created by the Lich:

You may recall (it was a long time ago) that everything in that illusion world was actually Lich-bugs, and our heroes were all being anesthetized so they could be eaten alive. Finn and Jake’s pursuit of the truth, although painful, was heroic. Our happiness, right now, today, depends on whether we are chasing the truth (wherever it might lead us), or hiding from it. The more important the questions are, the more our happiness depends on our quest for the truth. And there are no questions more important than the religious questions.

Religions themselves do not usually come out and embrace doesn’t-matterism. (A lot of mainline Protestants tried it, and now there are a lot fewer mainline Protestants.) Religions know that the truth matters. They are on fire for the truth (as they understand it); that’s what makes them religions. That’s why I find it much easier to respect and agree with a serious Orthodox Jew than a doesn’t-matterist Catholic. The Jew is playing for a different team, but at least he’s playing the same game. At least he cares about believing truth and avoiding falsehood!

Yet religious people have their own ways of hiding from uncomfortable truths, and I’m sorry to say that this includes many Catholics (although not Catholicism itself).

Many religious people are afraid they are wrong about the most important questions of their lives. Actually, let me rephrase that: every sane person is at least a little bit afraid that they are wrong about the most important questions. They want to protect themselves from that possibility.

There are good reasons for this fear. If we ever find out we are wrong about the big questions, then we have to change a great deal about our lives. If you learn that Christ did not rise from the dead, then you should stop being a Christian. That’s not my opinion; that’s Christian doctrine: “If Christ is not risen, then our preaching is in vain, and your faith also is in vain.” (1 Cor 15:14) But many of us have put down roots in our church communities, as friends and volunteers. We have set up our lives and our relationships around our beliefs. We choose our vocations based on our religion, marry people who share our religion, and raise our kids in our religion. (Everyone does all these things, even atheists and doesn’t-matterists.) So wouldn’t turning away from our religion destroy everything that is good in our lives? Wouldn’t it be better not to know? This is a reasonable fear! (I will have more to say about the usefulness of this fear in my next letter.)

There are also bad reasons to fear. Religious people, in particular, are often afraid that God will punish them severely for believing the wrong things, or even for having doubts. I have known many Catholics who think that their religious duty is to prevent their minds from even thinking thoughts that are contrary to Catholic teaching—or, at least, their understanding of Catholic teaching. (Their understanding is usually pretty bad, because they are so afraid of asking questions about it!) This aversion is not how the Catholic Church actually understands faith, doubt, or the motives of credibility, but enough people think it is that they are terrified of asking questions or (worse) getting unsatisfying answers.

If you give into these fears, hiding from your own best understanding of the truth because you fear the consequences of admitting it, you only doom yourself. Your doubts and fears will grow and grow, harder and harder to keep locked in a closet, until finally they burst out and swallow you whole. By that point, they won’t even have to fight you. By locking them away, you will have given them all the strength they need to sweep you away from everything you believe in—even if, in reality, your beliefs were true but you were just too scared of exploring them to find that out. There are many people in my prayers these days who followed just this path on their road out of the Catholic Church.

You must pursue the Truth wherever it takes you, even when it comes to the big questions of life, the universe, and everything. That is what you have been made for. I strongly and deeply believe that, followed honestly and to its conclusion, that journey will always bring you home to the Catholic Church and closer to God—yes, perhaps after some churn in the rapids—because that is where the Truth has always taken me.

We should model ourselves after the Apostles. All of them were Jews (some devout, others not) who believed normal Jewish things. Then along came Jesus, who promised to make them “fishers of men” and who had many strange sayings about the Sabbath and the Kingdom of God. Many departed, because they refused a Truth they found too strange to accept, but the Apostles, zealots for Truth, remained. “Lord, to whom else would we go? You have the words of eternal life.” (John 6:68) At first gradually, then all at once, the Apostles were not quite Jews anymore. They converted to the true faith because they were not afraid of chasing the Truth where He led, even as He led them across stormy seas and unimagined trials.

We worship a God who Is Truth itself, whose very Incarnation is the logos, the true Word. Never fear the truth, because, in fearing it, you fear Him. You can be certain that you will never be damned for following your conscience after doing your very best, to the limits of your Earthly ability, to honestly and humbly inform it. You need only fear surrendering to the gentle anesthesia of America’s ambient doesn’t-matterism. Embracing doesn’t-matterism would protect you from many conflicts, but it could not possibly be true, because these questions—who am I? why am I here? where am I going? what is good?—matter more than anything else in the world.

Love,

Dad

Retweets are not endorsements! I found these articles thought-provoking. There’s a good chance I agreed with something important in each, but maybe not, and, in any case, I absolutely do not endorse each and every claim made in each and every article.

“The kids are not alright – A look at US religious belief and practice,” by Brendan Hodge:

When you slice up the data in interesting ways, you get interesting results. It’s rare enough for surveys to go beyond mere religious self-identification (which is very close to statistically useless for detecting Catholics qua Catholics) to whether the subject actually attends Mass. It’s even rarer to see a survey approach the question generationally. These results are fascinating — and, very interestingly, they don’t show any significant decline in religious practice among young adults since the 1980s babies came of age.

In other words, Catholicism will bleed badly as the Silent Generation finishes dying and the Boomers start dying in earnest. The number of parishoners will shrink by… half? Three-quarters? Just eyeballing it there. But this graph suggests the decline won’t simply continue indefinitely until the Catholic Church vanishes from the United States; it will eventually hit a floor and stop.

Will this be the “smaller, purer Church… a Church that has lost much” that Fr. Ratzinger spoke of, long before he became pope? Or will it be a hellscape where the only Catholics left are the ones who argue angrily on the Internet — Mark Shea and Austin Ruse throat-punching each other in the corridor between universes for all eternity?

Dunno! We’ll find out. Speaking of which…

“Catholic Ideas and Catholic Realities,” by Ross Douthat:

…in a shrinking Church, the influence of its more committed members will wax, not wane. The diocesan ­fundraisers of the future will be hitting up populists and integralists, and perhaps even tradinistas, because the lukewarm cradle-Catholic donors of the present era won’t be available anymore. The parishes of the future will depend on benedictines for either renewal or survival. In a smaller, weaker Church, the influence of ideas that seem weird to the average Catholic today are likely to be magnified, as the Church becomes more an institution by, for, and of the weirdos.

I focus on the part about decline, but this article is better-known for the way it classifies the four current strains of Catholic intellectual thought: populists, integralists, BenOppers, and Tradinistas. (If these words are meaningless to you, you should probably read the article, if only to find out what Catholic intellectual discourse looks like these days.)

A columnist friend of mine (whom I leave anonymous, because she posted it on Facebook), points out that she doesn’t actually like any of the four camps, both because their loudest proponents are obnoxious (DENEEN MY OLD FRIEND) and because most of them seem to think the job of Catholic intellectuals is to Save Western Politics And Culture. In fact, our job is to save the few souls Christ gives us each a chance to help save, tho’ all Westernesse crumble into the sea.

I tend to agree, although I must make an exception for the BenOppers on both accounts. But maybe that’s just my BenOp sympathies showing. Let the reader decide!

Of course, all this somewhat depends on an assumption that the Catholic Church remains intact. On that, Douthat has a few other things to say…

“The Latin Mass in the Zero Sum Church,” by Ross Douthat:

Any sustainable decadence depends, by definition, on sustainability: A sense among the factions living with the stalemate that while they may not like each other, there will be enough to go around. Thus in Catholicism the muddling-through of the JPII era depended — for liberals who kept their heads down and stuck with the church as much as for conservatives who accepted the very partial restoration of authority — on the sense that things had somewhat stabilized after the shocks of the 1960s, that the condition of the faith was difficult but not exactly dire, and that every group had reasons to be patient, to live with one another and see what happened next. Whereas the pressures of the Francis era increasingly reflect a fear that stability is gone, that the bill is coming due, the money and numbers are drying up, and the only question is which faction will be left standing at the end. Intellectually this feeling can be a spur to creativity — the post-liberal arguments I try to limn in the First Things essay are definitely creative — but institutionally it’s how you end up with crises, breakage, schism.

This looks like another article about Catholicism, and… well, it is. But try reading it with my 2020 article about a new American Civil War in the front of your mind, and it takes on a much broader salience.

Hey, speaking of my 2020 article about a new American Civil War, remember when I said that Civil War was inevitable as long as we hated each other? Well, guess what!

We Hate Each Other: The Poll, by the University of Virginia Center for Politics (official title: “New Initiative Explores Deep, Persistent Divides Between Biden and Trump Voters”):

Overall, more than two-thirds support — and one-third strongly — emboldening and empowering strong leaders and taking the law into their own hands when it comes to dealing with people or groups they view as dangerous.

And their willingness to consider violating democratic tendencies and norms extends beyond the hypothetical and to a dangerous and alarming finding:

Roughly 2 in 10 Trump and Biden voters — or more than 31 million Americans — strongly agree it would be better if a “President could take needed actions without being constrained by Congress or courts” (as extrapolated from the results of this survey).

Roughly 4 in 10 (41%) of Biden and half (52%) of Trump voters at least somewhat agree that it’s time to split the country, favoring blue/red states seceding from the union.

Honestly, when I started telling friends in 2010 that thought it was very possible America could dissolve by 2040, they looked at me like I was a lunatic.

They don’t anymore! So ha!

“Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?” by Alasdair MacIntyre:

Incidentally, did it ever occur to you that the concept of “human dignity”–you know, the fundamental principle of law that most religious and non-religious people depend on in order to establish an agreed-upon foundation for a pluralist and humane society–was just kind of made up out of thin air less than a century ago, and that the content of this concept is an empty compromise at best, a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing at worst? Because now it can!

It has often crossed my mind that “human dignity” as used in most discourse is an empty phrase. Each religion and each ethical system has its own (usually incompatible) reasons for accepting human dignity. It’s fairly obvious that we settled on this phrase as a compromise in order to make the Universal Declaration of Human Rights work without having to agree on all the metaphysical details. When you refer to “human dignity” in a debate about (say) abortion or the death penalty or same-sex marriage, what you’re really doing is saying, “I know you believe human life and happiness is valuable, even though you believe that for completely different reasons. So, instead of debating those reasons, I am referring to that shared conclusion while you supply your own justifications for it.” It’s an empty phrase that each belief system invests with its own meaning. That much was not new to me.

But MacIntyre’s idea that this compromise might actually be misleading or in some ways dangerous… that was a new thought in my head.

MacIntyre offers “justice” as a replacement for “human dignity,” and I’m open to reading more about what he has to say on the topic in a space where brevity is less of a concern… but, based on what he says about it here, I think “justice” fails to have universal pluralist appeal for the same reasons “human dignity” does.

Now, getting back to the decline and fall of religion specifically…

The Pillar Survey on Religious Attitude and Practice, by The Pillar & Brendan Hodge… in five parts, sorry:

Part 1: Religion in America (Overview),

Part 2: Why Cradle Catholics Leave,

Part 3: A Close Look at the “Nones”/Atheists,

Part 4: Did Covid Have Long-Term Attendance Effects? (Yes.),

Part 5: Catholic “Hot Button” Issues

Instead of pulling a quote here, I’ll pull two particularly interesting charts. But this survey is swimming in fascinating charts. As you can see, a lot of it is Catholic-related… and a lot of it isn’t! So dig in, regardless of religious affiliation or sociological interest! The Pillar has collected data that answers specific, important questions that (to my knowledge) nobody has ever collected before… including the Pew Research Center, ordinarily the gold standard for religion surveys.

…demonstrating fairly conclusively that >80% of Catholics are either nuts or simply not paying the slightest bit of attention to their bishops. My Commonweal article (far and away the most financially successful writing I’ve ever done) lays out where I think the laity should be, and I really expected these numbers to be closer to my position. (“Never trust a bishop.”)

But perhaps it’s simply the case that the overwhelming majority of Catholics who stop trusting their bishops swiftly cease identifying as Catholic, thus cleansing themselves from the sample? Defecting from the Faith over untrustworthy bishops would be kinda weird in a historical sense. I can’t imagine medieval peasants trusted their incredibly corrupt bishops too much, but the peasants still radiated Catholicism. And yet, what happens if you combine Catholicism’s post-Council-of-Trent ultra-ultramontanist culture of “bishops = Catholicism” with the American “consumer choice” mindset? I guess you’d get a lot of people leaving the Faith as soon as they stopped trusting the bishops.

Maybe I should write an article about how to walk that tightrope, I dunno.

Hello Catholic parents! Your primary responsibility as a Catholic parent is to ensure that all of your children grow up to become Catholics in the dark green bar. Weekly Mass attendance is not ambitious; it is a bare minimum requirement for a practicing Catholic. And your mission as a Catholic parent is to raise a Catholic saint.

If one of your children is not inside the dark green bar, he or she is in a state of serious sin, will likely enter an invalid marriage, and is (but for the grace of God, in Whom we dare hope that all men are saved) on the direct path to Hell. (Even children who are inside the dark green bar may well be committing other serious sins; see, for example, the rest of the utterly terrifying Part 2 of The Pillar‘s survey!)

So, fellow Catholic parents, how many of these things are you doing monthly or more with your children? My number is one! And it looks like even you parents doing all 5 can still expect one out of every three of your kids to fall out of the Faith of Our Fathers!

Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

“A Note to Me,” by Erick W. Erickson (an Evangelical layman) (and after that horrible last share I’m going to just quote this Worthy Read in its entirety):

I got back from the mountains yesterday. On my last night there, I let people ask me anything on Instagram. One of the questions was, “What would you tell your 21-year-old self?” I can’t remember what I said, but it was limited in the number of characters I could type anyway. I’ve been thinking about that question and think I have an answer. Here’s what I’d say to my twenty-one-year-old self.

Self,

A long time ago there was a guy named Irenaeus. He died in France. His body is there. We have a lot of his writings. We know he studied under a man named Polycarp. We know Polycarp existed, lived, and wrote. We have his writings. Irenaeus tells us Polycarp was a friend to a man named Ignatius, whose writings we have. Both men existed. Both men lived. Both men studied under a man named John.

We know from Ignatius, Polycarp, and Irenaeus that the man John wrote the Book of John in the Bible. He was not just an eyewitness to history, but a direct friend of Jesus. We know also from Polycarp and Ignatius that the other apostles lived. They knew Paul. They knew Peter. All of these men, except John, were executed for accepting Jesus as the risen Lord.

So Self, in church they teach that you believe by faith. But you don’t have blind faith. Your faith is built on eyewitness testimony. Ignatius was carried into the Circus Maximus, disemboweled, and set upon by wild animals because he refused to recant a faith in Christ he acquired through direct interaction with the apostles. Polycarp climbed onto a pyre and was burned alive for the same reason. Their friend Clement, who is mentioned in the Bible, who studied under Peter and Paul, and whose writings we have, was tied to an anchor and thrown into the sea for the same reason.

From the writings of Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, and Irenaeus, we can put together just about the entirety of the New Testament from their heavy quotations of the New Testament letters and that’s all less than two hundred years from the resurrection. They knew the men who wrote the letters and provide direct, eyewitness testimony of what happened and all save John refused to recant and were executed because of it.

Self, you believe without having known the apostles. They believed having known the apostles and provide a chain of collaboration and eyewitness testimony back to the resurrection itself. When they said they have the hope of the resurrection, what the Greek word really means is that they had profound certainty in the resurrection. Your hope is not a desire, a wish, or an expectation, but a profound certainty in the resurrection based on a faith that is not blind but comes with a chain of custody of truth that goes back two thousand years that kings and emperors and dictators tried to exterminate.

So self, act like you have that profound certainty that others die for. Act like God matters more than your paycheck. Act like God matters more than your luxuries. Act like God matters more than your job. Act like God matters more than your comfort. Act like God matters more than your politics. Act like God matters more than your favorite politicians. Act like God matters more than your life.

Self, the path you are on — law school and legal practice — will change in a few years. When it does, remember God has a plan and it has been running for a few thousand years so act like it matters more than what you’re about to be doing.

Can’t think of a more fitting way to end Decline & Religion week than that.

Every year, we in West Saint Paul, Minnesota get our property tax notices in the mail. Every year, people ask the same questions in the West St. Paul Neighbors Facebook hellscape group. What the heck is going on with my property taxes? Is the city council robbing us blind? Or am I just house-wealthy and paying for it?

These questions are very reasonable! Property tax is weird.

It’s easy to understand a sales tax: I spent $100 dollars at Kohl’s Target, so I must pay an extra $7.60 to Mr. Government ($6.90 to Minnesota, $0.50 to West Saint Paul, and $0.20 to Dakota County).

It’s easy to understand an income tax: I made X dollars this year, so I must pay Y% of those dollars to Mr. Government. Figuring out X and Y takes a lot of math and reading IRS documents, which is why most people have tax preparers do it for them, but we all get the gist of an income tax.

Property taxes are harder. I don’t use a tax preparer for my income taxes, I normally do them by hand, so I’m pretty good at reading tax documents for a total layman… but even I find the property tax process weird and confusing. The city website features this earnest but devastatingly uncanny movie, but it’s not very specific. It took me years to work out this simple understanding of the process, and I’m still not certain it’s 100% correct. (If you see an error, please let me know!)

Property Tax is Actually a Bunch of Different Taxes Smushed Together

Here’s my property tax notice for 2022: https://gis.co.dakota.mn.us/content/tnt/42-01800-82-130.pdf

Don’t worry, I didn’t just post my private information online! In fact, property tax information (including the name of each property owner) is public information. You can look up the property tax info and deed owner for literally any address in West Saint Paul using Dakota County’s wonderful GIS tool, and pretty much everyone’s address is public through either TruePeopleSearch.com or TheRealYellowPages.com or (for a nominal fee) WhitePages.com. (The county auditor also has a public voter file with addresses, but I think you have to drive to get it.) This is a fun way to spend an evening if you’re as lame as me.

I looked through about a dozen property tax notices picked at random from around WSP, but mine’s pretty typical, so let’s walk through it. Dakota County officially believes I will owe a total of $3,826 in property tax next year. However, that number is actually a bunch of different taxes added together into one number. As you can see, I’m actually getting my property taxed by:

• Dakota County ($630)
• The City of West Saint Paul ($2,063)
• Minnesota Independent School District #197 (Mendota-Eagan) ($981)
• The Met Council ($58)
• “Other Special Taxing Districts” ($93), which is maddeningly vague but seems to be (based on this):
  • Metropolitan Mosquito Control District (since 1958!)
  • Metro Transit
  • South Metro EMS
  • Many Dakota County residents also pay into a watershed district, usually the Vermillion, but, as far as I can tell, no one in West Saint Paul is in a watershed.

All these different groups are taxing your property, all of them separate from each other. For simplicity, Dakota County collects all* these separate taxes in one big check—but, when your property tax suddenly goes way up, this makes it difficult to tell exactly who’s responsible. Did the schools get more expensive? The light rail line? Did South Metro EMS need a new ambulance? To figure this out, you have to go item by item.

How These Numbers Get Picked

The biggest line item by far is the tax for the City of West Saint Paul. This is also the line item that increased the most from 2021 to 2022. This is true not just for me, but for everyone whose property tax statement I looked at. West Saint Paul is the big ticket item.

So let’s take a look at how the City of West Saint Paul decided that I owe them $2063 this coming year.

The Levy Amount

Some people say that you should start figuring property tax by looking at your home value. This is wrong and backwards. The city neither knows nor cares what your property is worth when it makes the crucial decision: how much money is the city going to spend this year?

That decision was made in two city council meetings: on August 9th, 2021 (pp5-53), the city’s staff proposed a budget. On September 13th, 2021 (pp71-80), the city council voted to approve it. (Thank you to the West St. Paul Reader recaps for making this info much easier to dig up.)

The details of the West Saint Paul budget are fascinating, but that will have to be a separate blog post. The bottom line is: in 2021, the city had a budget of $45.9 million. Property taxes paid for $17.8 million of that. (The rest of the money came from other sources.)

In 2022, the city cut the budget to $39.0 million, reducing its total expenses. But West Saint Paul’s revenues are also falling, so it needs property taxes to cover more of the total. So, in 2022, West Saint Paul has decided that it needs $18.7 million in property taxes. (A 4.7% increase from last year.)

That’s the magic number: $18.7 million. The city has to raise that amount of money from the properties within the city. Ultimately, your personal city tax is based on that number.

But, first, there’s some math.

Property Valuation

In theory, the City could just say, “Okay, we need $18.7 million and we have 9,174 individual residential properties. Let’s share it evenly! Every property owner in the city must pay $2027!” This is essentially a head tax.

But this would be rejected by everyone as outrageously unfair. It would mean someone living in a tiny $170,000 house on Annapolis would be paying the exact same property tax as someone in a $486,000 mansion on Mainzer—and they’d both be paying the same tax as a landlord sitting on a property worth $22 million. The vast majority of us share an intuitive sense that this would not be fair: wealthier people should pay a greater share of the taxes. So we designed our property taxes to function as wealth taxes instead of head taxes.

Wealth taxes are tough, because wealth is hard to measure. What’s a house really worth? You can’t know until you sell it on a free and open market. This is a big problem for all sorts of wealth taxes. How do you decide how much Jeff Bezos is really worth? So much of his money is tied up in expensive art or investments in other companies or unique real estate or rocket ships—none of which has a universally agreed-upon monetary value. Indeed, this sort of problem has led other countries to abandon wealth taxes.

But America has refined the art of taxing property wealth to a near-science. Here in West Saint Paul, assessors from Dakota County drive around every year and use a bunch of rubrics to make a very educated guess at what each and every property in the area is worth. This educated guess is not final. If you think they’re wrong, you can phone them up and ask them to do a more detailed assessment; if you think they’re still wrong (and you can prove it), you can even take them to court.

Dakota County thinks my house is worth $302,400. I don’t really think my house would sell for that much, but it’s close enough, and I don’t really have the evidence to fight it, so I accepted this figure when they informed me of it last year. So $302,400 is my Estimated Market Value in the upper-right corner of my tax statement.

MN <3 Homesteaders

I live in my own home. Minnesota law likes people who live in their own home (aka “homesteaders”). In a variety of ways, Minnesota massively favors homesteaders, penalizing landlords (although landlords pass many of their extra costs on to renters, who are then screwed). On property taxes specifically, Minnesota gives two big legs up to homesteaders: the Homestead Exclusion and the Homestead Refund. The Homestead Refund (Form M1PR) is a (large) tax rebate you get for being a low- or middle-class homesteader; look it up next time you do your taxes, but I won’t go into it here.

The Homestead Exclusion is just a straight-up property tax deduction. It takes your Estimated Market Value and cuts it down. The smaller your house, the bigger the deduction, because the government does not want to drive poor people out of their houses. (Also, homeowners vote!) If you have a house worth $191,000, your Homestead Exclusion for 2022 is $20,050, so Dakota County has to tax you as if your house is only worth $170,950. My house is worth $302,400, so my exclusion is only ~$10,000, and Dakota County taxes me as if my house were worth $292,400. (The exact formula is set by state law.) Once your home is worth more than $413,800, the Homestead Exclusion phases out completely—the state assumes that if you live in a house that big, you can afford to pay full property taxes on it.

The bottom line is, in the eyes of Dakota County, my house is worth $292,376. That’s my Taxable Market Value.

City Staff Does Some Algebra

After doing all this hard work for every single property in Dakota County, the County informs West Saint Paul of the taxable value of each and every one of them.

Add it all up and you get a number, the total amount of property value in West Saint Paul. Let’s call it $2.65 billion. (It’s not $2.65 billion, because I’ve completely ignored a ton of property types, like commercial and apartment properties, which are taxed at higher rates… but $2.65 billion is a useful example number.)

So the city has $2.65 billion of property laying around, and needs to raise $18.7 million. What tax rate do they need to impose in order to get that $18.7 million? Easy! That’s seventh-grade math:

                total property value * tax rate = desired revenue

Or:

                $2,650,000,000 * [tax rate] = $18,700,000

Or:

                [tax rate] = $18,700,000 / $2,650,000,000

                = 0.7057%

(Again, this gets more complicated when you include the other property classes, which are taxed more than homesteads, but the basic algebra is the same, and that tax rate is correct.)

The residential homestead property tax rate for West Saint Paul for 2022 is 0.7057%. That’s how much the city has to tax each household in order to get the money it needs for next year. The tax rate is flat, so the wealthy pay more and the poor pay less, but it takes an equal slice of everyone’s wealth. (At least, assuming all wealthy people live in big houses and all poor people live in small ones.) Officially, this tax is neither progressive (which would mean hitting rich people harder, like the income tax) nor regressive (which would mean hitting poor people harder, like the sales tax).

My house’s taxable value is $292,376. 

$292376 x 0.7057% = $2063

…and, sure enough, $2063 is exactly how much I owe the city in this year’s taxes. That’s my bit of the $18.7 million.

Don’t Be Fooled

Sometimes, people who want to make some kind of political point about property taxes (pro or con) will try and argue that taxes really went down (in some clever nine-dimensional chess sense) when actually they went up (or vice versa).

For example, as we’ve seen, the West Saint Paul tax levy in 2022 grew 4.7%, from $17.7 million to $18.7 million. So, collectively, our taxes went up 4.7%.

However, the tax rate in 2022 only grew from 0.6966% to 0.7057%. That’s only a 1.3% increase. Some people try to argue that this means your taxes only went up by 1.3%. That’s not accurate. In reality, the city asked for quite a bit more money, but we had more “money” to give them already, so they didn’t need to raise the rates by as much to get what they wanted. (I put “money” in scare quotes because, of course, we don’t actually have the money our houses theoretically “created” this year. We don’t see a dime of that cash unless we sell our houses, and I, for one, intend to die in this house some time in the 2070’s, by which time I expect my house to be worth much less due to age and national population decline.)

Others will argue that your taxes didn’t really go up because the city demanded more money; they went up because your home gained value. Again, that’s not generally accurate. Your home’s value only determines your share of the taxes, not the amount. The levy size determines the amount. There are rare cases where a home’s value goes way up (or down) in value, much more than other houses in the neighborhood. If your home value does something crazy during the year, you may end up paying a bigger (or smaller) share of the $18.7 million than you did in the past, because the city now thinks you are significantly richer (or poorer) than you used to be. For most of us, though, with relatively average home value increases, we’re paying (more or less) the same share of the tax as before, but our taxes went up because the tax is just plain bigger.

(EDIT 17 November: Basically, if your city tax increase is exactly 4.7%, then that’s entirely because of the levy and not at all because of changes in your home’s value. If your city tax increase is 5.1% or 4.3%, you’re still very close, and the overwhelming majority of that increase is due to the city levy increase. The further away your city tax increase is from 4.7%, the more your home value appreciation is responsible. If your city taxes went up 9.8% this year, half of that is the city tax and half of it is because your home value went up considerably faster than the city average.)

So don’t be fooled: if you want to know whether the city raised or lowered taxes, the number you should be looking at is the size of the levy itself ($18.7 million), not the residential tax rate, not the value of your home, not the total value of all homes in the area.

(If you want to be really accurate and fancy about whether taxes are going up, the number you should truly look at is the size of the levy per resident. But our city’s population changes quite slowly, and census numbers usually lag by a couple years. Still, this can make a big difference! Using 2020 census numbers for both 2021 and 2022, I find a levy-per-resident of $864 in 2021 and $905 in 2022…  which works out to a 4.7% increase, exactly the same as if you look at the actual levy increase. But if we assume that our population went up by 100 residents in 2022, the new levy-per-resident is only $900, an increase of only 4.2%. It’d be cool if the city figured out a way to identify and publish this number.)

I should note that the West Saint Paul city government, to its credit, does not make these arguments. Some people in the city have done so (I won’t point fingers), but the city itself always prominently publishes the levy number and its percentage increase; the city never tries to hide the ball by talking about absolute rates instead. Moreover, West Saint Paul’s 4.7% levy increase for 2022 is actually the smallest levy increase since 2014. (See p64 of this document, ignoring the 2022 projection, which turned out to be a little off.) Our taxes are still going up significantly, but less than they have in recent years.

On the other hand, the city expects the 2023 levy to go up by 5.62%, which is closer to the ten-year average increase—and the size of the levy has clearly outstripped inflation, sometimes drastically, on average. (Inflation was well under 2% for nearly the entire 2010s; our property tax levy increases were held to that only once, barely, in 2012, under Mayor John Zanmiller.)

This Is Pretty Much How They All Work

Each of the government units listed on your property tax form goes through basically this exact same process. First, the County/School District/Council decides how much money they need next year. Then, they each add up the total amount of property value in their designated area. Then, they set a tax rate that ensures they get the money they’ve decided on. They apply that rate to the Taxable Market Value of your property, multiply, and, boom, that’s what you owe that government unit for the year.

Of course, every government unit on the list covers a different geographic area, so they all have different property values to work with. The Metropolitan Mosquito Control District covers the entire seven-county metro area, with millions of taxpaying residents, so they need only a very small amount of money per property to make their (already relatively small) budget work. On the other hand, Dakota County has a lot of property… but a lot of it is rural, so the average value of that property is relatively low compared to, say, ISD 197. This variation means every levy has to be calculated separately, with different property rates for each one.

A Couple of ISD 197-Specific Notes

ISD 197 has several different property tax levies, some of which are voter-approved and others which aren’t. These are all broken out into two line items on our property tax statements: “voter approved levies,” which we voted on at some point, and “other local levies,” which is just code for, “This is what ISD 197 is taxing you without your direct say-so.” I have not been able to locate a web page or report where ISD 197 transparently breaks down what each of these levies is, what each one costs, where they come from, and when they expire… but my Internet has been wonky tonight, so it could very well be out there and I just can’t find it.

First, I want to commend ISD 197 for a useful thing it does: while it doesn’t tell us the size of the levies per resident, it tells us the size of its levies per student (and does the same for individual levies). This is arguably the most useful way of tracking at a glance whether the district is increasing its spending because of increasing needs or if it’s just getting bloated.

Interestingly, the district collected $1,073 per pupil in 2021, but, if this West St. Paul Reader report is accurate about the total district budget, then the district spent $14,965 per pupil in 2021. This really shows that all the sturm und drang about the $224-per-pupil levy referendum was pretty small potatoes in the grand scheme of things; the vast majority of ISD 197’s budget does not come from property tax. (Most of it is from state income tax.)

Second, speaking of that $224-per-pupil levy we all voted on last November… it passed! This does not technically raise our taxes, because this was merely a renewal of a levy that was already in place (albeit at a slightly higher level, because the levy is adjusted annually for inflation).

However, when Dakota County put together these tax proposal sheets, it did not know whether the levy was going to pass or not. So they followed current law and assumed that the levy would fail. Therefore, our ISD 197 line item on this tax statement doesn’t include the levy. Now that the levy has been approved, the actual tax bills we receive next year will be adjusted to account for the continuation of the levy.

Bottom line: the average ISD 197 resident’s actual ISD 197 tax will be about $52 higher than what it says on this form. Mine will be $49 higher. You can compute your share here (enter your home’s Taxable Market Value into the box). So instead of paying $588.70 like my tax statement says, I actually expect to pay $637.70 in the coming year. (Probably slightly higher, but I’m too lazy to figure out the inflation component tonight.)

Property Taxation is a Terrible System

As far as I can tell, Dakota County in general (and each government within it) does a really good job administering the property tax system. Every county in Minnesota has a property tax, and every state in the Union has at least one jurisdiction that charges a property tax, too. As these things go, I have no complaints about how Dakota County, specifically, does it. In fact, I’ve had two interactions with Dakota County assessors since I moved here, and both of those interactions were excellent.

But it’s a pretty rotten system, when you get to thinking about it:

Property tax administration requires a vast national army of assessors to guess at the value of each and every property in the land. They do their best, but their guesses may or may not be accurate. Home value isn’t like income, where we know how valuable the income was because the number is literally printed on the paycheck. Instead, to tax home value, we have to employ essentially a separate detective force just to find out what exactly we’re taxing. This is expensive and inefficient. Politicians in Washington frequently remind us of the vast logistical difficulties and guesswork involved in wealth taxes… so why don’t we apply that same logic to the one wealth tax that just about every American, from the richest to the poorest, has to pay? (If you’re a renter, sorry, you’re paying property tax, too: your landlord just adds it to your rent. You get the tax without the homesteader benefits.)

The complexity of this system makes it non-transparent. That makes it difficult for voters to hold their elected officials accountable. Instead of being taxed a percentage of a concrete number you know really well and have a lot of control over (like your salary, or total household income), you are instead taxed based on a funny little number that jumps up or down based on impersonal market forces you neither control nor fully understand. Because of this wild movement, your absolute tax rates jump up or down, too—often without a clear or close relationship to the overall size of the levy! Many voters end up not understanding who they are paying taxes to, how much the taxes are, whether they’re going up or down for everyone or just them, or how any of it gets decided. Others have to read (or write) 4,500-word blog posts to get a handle on it.

We end up speaking in broad generics, like, “Hoo boy, West St. Paul taxes are getting pretty high, aren’t they? But at least we don’t live in Regular Saint Paul! They’d tax you double what we pay!” But this completely misses the fact that, actually, West Saint Paul city taxes are nearly twice as high as Saint Paul’s tax ($905/resident in WSP vs. $566/resident in SP). It’s just that our county taxes here in Dakota County are so low (less than half of Ramsey County’s) that it somewhat cancels out (and hides) how much West Saint Paul is actually charging us. This confusion, in my opinion, is largely due to the property tax system’s confusing structure. Despite everything Dakota County and West Saint Paul do to make that structure transparent to us, it’s just very hard to keep straight.

The property tax structure is not just confusing and obscure; it’s fundamentally dangerous. Taxes are generally taken from transactions: when you spend money or make money, you pay the taxman a small portion of it. You can factor those taxes into your planning before you spend or earn. When you buy a candy bar, you know to mentally add 7% or so to the sticker price. If you win the Powerball Jackpot, you know you’re only going to get about half the sticker price after the government gets its cut. And we have a whole bunch of safeguards in the rest of our tax system to ensure that, if you earn extra money, your taxes go up a little, but not more than the extra amount you actually earned. That way, you know you always have the money to actually pay the taxes.

But when you buy a house, how much are you going to owe in property taxes over the life of the property? Answer: who the hell knows? Literally no one. Might go up, might go down, might go way up. This isn’t just bad for financial planning; it can put the most marginalized members of our society on a knife’s edge.

Suppose you earn minimum wage, and you’ve spent your whole life scraping together a little nest egg to buy a small $50,000 house to call your own. You pay $210 in property taxes per year, and can just barely scrape that plus home maintenance costs together. And you are happy. But then there’s a housing frenzy in your area. It’s the Hot New Place To Live. HGTV comes to town and starts flipping houses left and right. Over the course of three years, your houses rises in value to $120,000, just because everyone wants to live in your cool neighborhood now. Now your property taxes are (this is true) $654/year. You can’t afford that!

You live on minimum wage. That wage hasn’t gone up. You don’t have any extra money coming in. You haven’t done anything to the house. It certainly hasn’t printed you extra money. Yet your taxes have more than tripled.

You can’t get blood from a stone, so you have no choice but to sell your house and move. But where? The whole neighborhood has gone up in price. You can’t stay here. You’ll have to find another neighborhood to live in. But how can you get to your job from a whole different neighborhood? Now you’re either paying for transit in both money and time, or you’re looking for a new job. You had a social support network in your neighborhood, but everyone else you know just crashed into the same problem, and they’re being scattered to the four winds.

And that’s how property taxes displace impoverished and minority communities, in a process we all know as “gentrification.” We spend all this time as a culture worrying about the community-shattering effects of gentrification (and how it reinforces racial segregation between neighborhoods), but never seem to notice that our state and local governments have direct and absolute control over one of the primary mechanisms driving it. (Between property tax and zoning codes ugh, it seems to be cities, more than any other entity, that drive ongoing segregation.)

Gentrification is even worse on renters. At least homeowners, when they are forced to sell, do generally get some of the benefit of home value appreciation, and they get to choose when and how they sell. When landlords sell, they pocket the profits and evict the residents, often with little warning.

In fact, the whole structure of property taxes is a bum deal for renters. Remember when we said that the property tax is officially flat? In reality, it’s not: it’s regressive. Renters (who are disproportionately poorer) inevitably end up paying the landlord’s property taxes (who else would?) and eat a large share of any property tax increase (although the exact tax incidence is hotly debated among economists). So renters are paying property tax, but indirectly, without the ability to challenge the valuation of their homes, without enjoying the benefits of the Homestead Exclusion, with far far smaller Homestead Refunds (seriously, the difference is stark)… and, usually, apartments are charged property tax at a higher rate than single-family homes to begin with.

Tax us when we sell our houses, heck tax the dickens out of it—that’s income!—but don’t tax us just for living in one. Housing is a basic necessity of life, and the only thing most of us do in a given year to earn this inefficient, regressive tax is keep breathing.

The state of Minnesota already has a state income tax… which means we already know the incomes of everyone in the state. Income taxes are easy to design as progressive taxes (our state’s is particularly progressive), everyone basically understands them, and people will always be able to afford them. Many other states already have local income taxes. I believe we should abandon property tax and fund our towns, schools, and mosquito control agencies through local income-tax-based levies instead.

Of course, it’ll never happen. The system is too big, too interconnected, too universal, and too complicated to transition to a new tax collection method, especially in an era of polarization, bureaucracy, and impotence. There are probably difficulties with local income tax that I haven’t foreseen. (Tell me about ’em in the comments!) But I couldn’t write a whole blog post about property taxes without at least mentioning the deep structural problems with it.

I hope this post leaves you with a better understanding of your West Saint Paul property tax statement!

UPDATE 19 November: The West St. Paul Reader just tackled property taxes as well, and (wisely) spoke to the lady in charge!

Interestingly, the city acknowledged an error in its numbers. The budget reported a levy increase of 4.74%, a figure I used throughout this article. The actual figure appears to be 5.15%. I am not updating the article body, because I think inline updates would be more confusing than clarifying, but it’s worth noting anyway that all my “4.7%” figures should be “5.2%” instead. I have not (yet) double-checked the city’s other reported finance figures.

I’ve seen enough: based on today’s oral arguments, the Supreme Court is going to strike down the Texas abortion law (SB8)’s mechanism for evading judicial review, which will lead to SB8’s quick death in lower courts.

Only question now (in my mind) is vote count. Could be anywhere from 5-4 to 9-0, but I think 7-2 (Gorsuch, Alito in dissent) is most likely. Thomas and Gorsuch are the most questionable votes. Of course, one should never infer too much from orals, because things can change a lot when the justices go back to write opinions, but it was hard to see how you could get 5 justices to sustain SB8 after the stripping Texas took at the podium today.

Again: the question the Court is deciding today is “can a state pass a law outlawing a constitutional right and use shenanigans to prevent courts from protecting that right?” not “is abortion a constitutional right?” The second question gets argued in Dobbs v. Jackson on December 1st.

The Texas law was designed primarily as a tricky way to force the Supreme Court to consider the constitutionality of abortion rights, and I supported the law for that purpose. (The Supreme Court itself has used shenanigans to avoid confronting the obvious & murderous falsehoods of its Roe/Casey precedents. Looking at you, Johnny Roberts. Shenanigans for shenanigans, I say.) But the Court’s decision to review Dobbs largely obviated the “need” for the Texas law, and SB8’s shenanigan is clearly so subversive of our constitutional order that that aspect of it had to get killed one way or another — so SB8 has been sort of a zombie since late May.

Of course, SB8 is still doing a lot of good! Statistics show that abortions in Texas have been cut in half since the law went into effect, from the mid-4000s/month to the low-2000s/month. (Don’t let anyone tell you that abortion bans don’t decrease abortions. They sure as heck do, even after accounting for mothers who travel out of the jurisdiction to abort, and have no negative impact on maternal mortality… as even a passing glance at Ireland under Amendment 8 proved.) Literally thousands of people are alive today because the Texas legislature acted to protect them from murder. Whatever legal shenanigans were involved in saving those lives, it’s quite a lovely outcome! And when the Supreme Court strikes the law down (as I am now convinced they will, and probably should), thousands of people are going to die because of that, too.

But as long as the Supreme Court makes the correct decision in Dobbs — and I think it will — the blood on our nation’s hands will be limited, or (if the Court moves swiftly in Dobbs and slowly on SB8) perhaps minimized.

First, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (the main Texas abortion case), the Supreme Court granted cert before judgment, and on a timeline of just 10 days before oral arguments (!!!). That’s seems to be the fastest since Bush v. Gore, over twenty years ago, and that case was almost constitutionally mandated to move that fast because of the impending electoral college vote. They apparently want to hear this case so fast because they view it as just that big of an emergency situation.

The Supremes will be considering only the procedural question in WWH (basically, “Can a state structure a law to evade pre-enforcement judicial review?”), and will not actually consider to what extent the Constitution protects the right to abort a child. The law will remain in force (under a 5th Circuit order the Supremes declined to overturn) while they consider this… but wowza, they will not be considering this for long!

Given the judgment, the timeline, and the perhaps-dire consequences for constitutional rights of all sorts across the country if they decide otherwise, I suspect that the Supremes will vote that the Texas law is subject to immediate judicial review, and that will lead to its swift suspension — because abortion is still considered a constitutional right in the courts.

Furthermore, I suspect that they want this done before they hear Dobbs in early December. Dobbs is the case where they will actually decide whether to uphold or overturn the right to abort a child, based on a Mississippi law that bans abortions after 15 weeks — a popular law that is nevertheless inconsistent with Roe v Wade and its descendants like the Casey decision. (Notably, Roe v. Wade itself is also quite popular. The best explanation for this contradiction in polls seems to be that most Americans have no clue what Roe or Casey actually said.)

Honestly, I expected something like this to happen fully a month ago, but the 5th Circuit’s (frankly, it seems to me) obstreperousness in this case (obstreperousness in the defense of innocent human life is still obstreperousness) has lengthened the timeline.

In part because the Supremes refused to touch the abortion question in the Texas case, I think it likely that they will ultimately uphold the Mississippi law in Dobbs, overturning Roe/Casey in the process. But that is still many months away, and very much in doubt. For next couple weeks, the simple procedural question is, does the very weird structure of Texas’s law successfully shield it from the courts’ injunctions?

In other news, Mitch McConnell gave a speech highlighting how much he loves Clarence Thomas’s abortion decisions, because they are clear, concise, and unquestionably correct pieces of judicial reasoning. (He’s right.) That part of his speech seems to me not to have been intended for his audience at the time, nor for the general public, nor even for Justice Thomas (who was present). It seems intended for the Court’s moderates (Roberts, Kavanaugh, perhaps Barrett).

There’s a widespread fear among Republicans that Roberts & Kavanaugh, who know full well that Roe/Casey are made-up nonsense (heck, so do Kagan and Breyer) will decide to uphold Roe/Casey anyway, sheerly out of fear of the backlash against the Court. McConnell is one of the best political tacticians out there; he understands where the wind is blowing better than anyone alive, and he knows how to maximize the odds of achieving his political objectives. This McConnell speech seems (to me) like a message: the way to minimize the overall backlash against the Court is to write like Justice Thomas and overturn Roe/Casey — take the left-wing backlash on the nose instead of trying to split the baby and get both right-wing and left-wing backlash at once.

Given that pro-life voters are traditionally more active and more motivated and more focused than pro-choice voters, that’s fairly plausible on its face, and McConnell seems to have licked his finger, stuck it in the air, and decided it’s still true.

Of course, no good judge would decide a case on which important rights and human lives hang on anything so crass and irrelevant as possible political backlash. The Court’s job is to follow the law, and let Congress worry about the politics. But John Roberts is not a good Supreme Court justice (alas how far he has fallen), and nobody’s sure about Kavanaugh, so it makes sense to speak to Roberts in the childish language he understands.

As always, I welcome your comments below (if the fickle Disqus box decides to show up today).

AMENDMENT XXIX

1. All Bills which raise or appropriate money, or which issue or limit the size of the public debt, or which fix the salaries of Officers of the Government of the United States, shall originate in the House of Representatives, and shall not be altered or amended by the Senate.

2. The Senate shall vote on all such money bills within one year, voting by the Yeas and Nays, and the affirmative vote of a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn shall cause the bill to be passed. If, after one year, this vote has not been taken, the House may present the money bill to the President of the United States for signature, in like manner as if it had been passed by the Senate.

3. These provisions may be enforced by judicial proceedings.

That’s right: today’s proposal is an Origination Clause! It dictates that “money bills” must come from the House of Representatives, not the Senate.

Now, the Constitution already has one of these. But the current Origination Clause is so old, musty, and irrelevant that you may have forgotten that it even exists:

THE CURRENT ORIGINATION CLAUSE (Article I, Section 7, Clause 1):

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

This Origination Clause failed, and we’ll get to that. But, first: why did the Founders give this special power to the House in the first place?

Let us turn, as we so often will, to the Federalist Papers. Federalist No. 58 considers the balance of power between the House and the Senate. It first notes that the People are represented by the House, which apportions representation (loosely) according to the general concept of “one person, one vote.” Meanwhile, the Senate represents the states, and apportions representation on the basis of “one state, one vote.”

This division between the People’s House and the States’ House is a crucial feature of the Constitution, to which we will return often. In our constitutional union, states (not the national government) are the primary, plenary policy-makers, and they are the immediate sovereigns of virtually all of us (unless you live in D.C., Guam, or one of the other federal territories). As we saw repeatedly during the pandemic, states can exercise vast powers that even our robust national government can’t dream of, like covid lockdowns. States are not mere land, as some like to say (the slogan is “land doesn’t vote, people do”). The Founders actually thought about making an upper house where representation would be based on property values, but rejected it because states, not land, needed representation. Nor are states mere provinces or administrative subdivisions of the National Government. States are the building blocks of Union, the political entities that forged the Constitutional compact in the first place, and which still govern most aspects of our lives today.

The Founding-era controversy over the Virginia Plan vs. the New Jersey is sometimes framed as a mere compromise for political expediency, which we should do away with now that the need has passed, but this fails to recognize the important insights the small-state advocates brought to the table. Their insistence on a bulwark for small states prevented the Virginia Plan from strangling federalism in the crib, and is directly responsible for our system where the states serve as “laboratories of democracy.” Because of state sovereignty, the diverse population of a vast nation can create diverse systems of law to suit their own local needs, instead of one-size-fits-all federal law trying to control 337 million people. We will explore this idea further when we discuss reforming the Senate. (By the by, the other thing the “obsolete compromise” view fails to recognize is that the Great Compromise is still a necessary political expedient. Ian Millhiser can tweet “abolish the Senate” all he wants, but good luck keeping the entire middle of the country in the Union if you do so!)

As crucial as the Great Compromise was, though, it was not without downsides, and Federalist No. 58 is about some of the Great Compromise’s risks:

It may be alledged, perhaps, that the senate would be prompted… to an adverse coalition; and as their concurrence would be indispensable, the just and constitutional views of the other branch might be defeated. This is the difficulty which has probably created the most serious apprehensions…

The Federalist‘s authors are suggesting that a small coalition of small states in the Senate, representing only a small fraction of the overall population of the United States, could band together and prevent just, equitable, and (above all) very popular legislation (in this case, reapportionment legislation) from coming into force. Some of this give-and-take is to be expected, and is indeed by design; the Senate’s equal representation of the small states is precisely intended to give the small states an effective voice against legislation that unjustly steamrolls them or their constituents. Given how easily the high-population states can silence the low-population states without this kind of affirmative action (consider how well-represented small states, small-state residents, and small-state experiences are in, say, Hollywood films or national news media), the low-population states needed a voice, and the Senate gave them one.

But the Founders did not intend for theirs to be an equal voice, and Federalist No. 58 makes that clear: in the matters that most affect the People, the People’s House is supposed to be in the driver’s seat. The Founders valued the States and their voices greatly, but their conception of the People as ultimate sovereign was the cornerstone of their political worldview. So how did the Founders put the House of Reps in the driver’s seat?

Well, one, the House’s sheer superior moral authority:

…it cannot be doubted that the house composed of the greater number of members, when supported by the more powerful states, and speaking the known and determined sense of a majority of the people, will have no small advantage in a question depending on the comparative firmness of the two houses.

But, also, the Founders gave the House the greatest weapon they could imagine to wield against the Senate:

A constitutional and infallible resource, still remains with the larger states, by which they will be able at all times to accomplish their just purposes. The house of representatives can not only refuse, but they alone can propose the supplies requisite for the support of government. They in a word hold the purse; that powerful instrument by which we behold in the history of the British constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people, gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government. This power over the purse, may in fact be regarded as the most compleat and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.

They’re talking about the Origination Clause, a clause so powerful that the Founding Fathers believed it gave the House an “infallible” upper hand in standoffs with the Senate. Indeed, Federalist 58 argues that Senators will be too embarrassed to hold out for long against the House, because the British House of Lords (on which they modeled the Senate) had for the most part capitulated to the House of Commons in a series of conflicts over several centuries:

…Or if such a trial of firmness between the two branches were hazarded, would not the one be as likely first to yield as the other? These questions will create no difficulty with those who reflect, that in all cases the smaller the number and the more permanent and conspicuous the station of men in power, the stronger must be the interest which they will individually feel in whatever concerns the government. Those who represent the dignity of their country in the eyes of other nations, will be particularly sensible to every prospect of public danger, or of a dishonorable stagnation in public affairs. To those causes we are to ascribe the continual triumph of the British house of commons over the other branches of the government, whenever the engine of a money bill has been employed. An absolute inflexibility on the side of the latter, although it could not have failed to involve every department of the state in the general confusion, has neither been apprehended nor experienced. The utmost degree of firmness that can be displayed by the federal senate or president will not be more than equal to a resistance in which they will be supported by constitutional and patriotic principles.

Meanwhile, in the actual Senate that actually exists:

Now, it is not especially fair to Sen. Mitch McConnell that he has become a totem of obstreperous, shameless, two-faced senatorial obstruction. McConnell is nothing special in the “obstreperous, shameless, two-faced obstructionist” department; Harry Reid and Tom Daschle were equally canny operators in their day, and the only reason Chuck Schumer hasn’t yet fully earned the epithet “obstructionist” is because he’s never yet led a Senate majority against a hostile White House and House of Representatives. (As a matter of fact, I’m rather fond of Sen. McConnell, one of the shrewdest generals on today’s political battlefield.) But there is no denying that McConnell is obstreperous, shameless, two-faced, and obstructionist. The House could threaten him and his caucus with money bills for decades and it wouldn’t move one Republican vote. McConnell gave only the tiniest bit of ground, at the last minute, temporarily, on the impending disaster of the debt default.

If I’m right (and I am right) that Schumer, Reid, Daschle, Lott, and the rest of them are/were equally shameless, then that only deepens my critique of the Founders. The Federalist Papers weren’t just talking the Origination Clause up for marketing purposes; they really thought it was going to be powerful. The high-population states considered the Origination Clause a key concession in the Connecticut Compromise. The big states would not have accepted equal suffrage of the states in the Senate–and, thus, the Constitutional Convention would have fallen apart–if the House had not been given this “money power.”

So if the Origination Clause is supposed to give the House a solid, reliable weapon against the Senate, forcing the Senate to yield in close contests, why do I routinely forget it even exists?

Simple: our Origination Clause sucks.

Elbridge Gerry saw it all coming. Mr. Gerry was a Massachusetts delegate to the Constitutional Convention, and the Origination Clause, about which Hamilton and Madison so rapturously wrote, was actually Mr. Gerry’s idea:

Taxation and representation are strongly associated in the minds of the people, and they will not agree that any but their immediate representatives shall meddle with their purses.

Elbridge Gerry, 13 August 1787

(Fun fact: Mr. Madison, despite his later participation in The Federalist, was not a fan when Gerry’s idea was introduced to the Convention.)

But Gerry’s proposal was much, much stronger than what ended up in the Constitution. His original text was:

All Bills for raising or appropriating money and for fixing the salaries of the Officers of the Government of the United States, shall originate in the first Branch of the Legislature, and shall not be altered or amended by the second Branch.

This is a fairly robust proposal. The House gets to write all the money bills, and the only thing the Senate is allowed to do is say yes or no. No amendments. Just yes, or no. Mr. Gerry’s original text is the basis for Section 1 of today’s proposed amendment.

(The biggest weakness in Gerry’s proposal is one he could not easily have anticipated: future Congresses and courts have construed the phrase “bills for” very, very narrowly, so that most bills that raise government revenue–debt issuances, fines, fees, and so forth–are not considered to “count” as “bills for raising revenue,” because the revenue is “merely incidental.” My text addresses that by changing “for” to “which” and expressly including debt.)

This proposal, arguably, doesn’t even make the House more powerful than the Senate. The Senate enjoys several enormous privileges in which the House does not get to participate. Particularly, the Senate has exclusive power to confirm presidential appointments to the executive branch, exclusive power to confirm judges, and exclusive power to ratify treaties. The House, despite being the more important house, closer to the People, has no corresponding powers of its own… except the Origination Power, which the Founders held in such high esteem, and which has turned out to be such a damp squib in practice.

Instead of Gerry’s text, the Convention eventually passed this instead, as we saw above:

All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

This text, in practice, has proved totally meaningless.

The Senate writes its own money bills all the time. Then, once it has written a money bill, it finds some useless, completely irrelevant House bill that’s D.O.A. in the Senate–but which technically passed the House. Then the Senate “amends” the House bill by replacing its entire text with the text of the Senate’s new money bill. Under the language of the Origination Clause, this is technically legal (the best kind of legal?); the Origination Clause allows amendments, without limitation.

For example, one of the more notorious cases of this was the passage of the Affordable Care Act. The Senate wanted to write its own version of the ACA, but it was clearly a money bill. So they grabbed a bill called the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009, a simple 6-page bill which dealt with homeowner tax credits for veterans, and replaced it with an all-new 2406-page “amendment” that the Senate had written to radically alter taxes and spending throughout the health care sector.

The Origination Clause does not work, it has never worked, and it renders the House of Representatives, the People’s House, the obvious primus inter pares of our entire Constitutional scheme… subordinate to, and obviously weaker than, the institutional oligarchy of the Senate.

Surely the Founding Fathers saw this possibility coming. Indeed, some did. Gerry himself thought that the Origination Clause that actually passed had been gutted of any real effect. Why did they gut such an important clause?

The Constitutional Convention was extremely anxious about the idea of sending unamendable money bills to the Senate. Indeed, John Francis Mercer, a Maryland delegate, “considered the exclusive power of originating money bills as so great an advantage, that it rendered the equality of votes in the Senate ideal and of no consequence.” This led the Convention to strike down Gerry’s original proposal and (eventually) replace it with the weaker one.

It’s important to explain this fear so that we can dismiss it. In Westminster Parliamentary systems, like the one the Founding Fathers had just rebelled against, money bills are extremely special. If the majority party in the lower house (this party is often called “the government” in Parliamentary systems) is unable to pass a money bill, it is called “loss of supply.” The government automatically falls. The Prime Minister must immediately resign and Parliament must hold new elections to resolve the crisis. This makes it, politically, almost impossible for the upper house to vote down a supply bill. And, in the British Constitution (as in Mr. Gerry’s proposal), the upper house can not amend a supply bill, either.

Eventually, the House of Commons figured out that the House of Lords couldn’t vote them down on supply bills, so the Commons started attaching totally irrelevant riders to supply bills — provisions they could not get through the Lords under ordinary circumstances, but which they could force through using a supply bill which the Lords could not practically reject and which they could not legally amend. The Commons then abused this authority to break the power of the Lords. The Founding Fathers (especially the small-state delegates) repeatedly and loudly worried about a strong Origination Clause having this same effect, and they had a point: the Senate was clearly based somewhat on the House of Lords, and look at the House of Lords today. Is it not “ideal and of no consequence,” just as Mercer predicted?

The thing is, our system does not have loss of supply, so none of these incentives have developed in quite the same way. Instead, our Congress just keeps on running after a money bill fails, leading to government shutdowns. We have these pretty routinely, often for precisely the reason the Founders thought would only be caused by a strong Origination Clause: one house gets really attached to a provision that is not actually relevant to the budget and refuses to pass a spending bill until they get their way. The other house refuses to go along with it. The government shuts down. (We’ve done this over Obamacare, DREAMers, and a border wall, among other things, all in the past decade.) Shutting down the government is extremely unpopular, and the voters start trying to figure out which side is to blame. Sooner or later, the voters make up their minds, then that side caves, a bill passes, and the government reopens.

We have these periodic budget crises even with a weak Origination Clause. A stronger Origination Clause would not encourage them any further–how could it? all the dynamics for periodic confrontation are already in place–but a stronger Origination Clause would strengthen the hand of the People’s House somewhat, giving them appropriate tools to counterbalance the awesome powers of the Senate, while putting the purse-strings more firmly in the hands of the People.

My Parliament-favoring friends will object that this proposal does not go far enough. Although I have made money bills unamendable by the Senate, the Senate can still reject them. If the Senate doesn’t like a provision in a money bill, won’t they just reject it and issue instructions to the House to amend, thereby thwarting the whole intent of the clause once again? Should we not remove the Senate’s power to reject the bill altogether? After all, James, you clearly based that “one year deadline” concept on the modern House of Lords’ suspensory veto, which also lasts up to one year. Why not go all the way?

I answer that it is true that the power of origination is not a trump card for the House… but it’s not supposed to be. It’s supposed to give the House the upper hand in negotiations, not unilateral control of the government. As my writing, even just in this article, makes clear, I think the Senate is really important! I think the Westminster parliamentary system is dangerously populist and, if stable, stable in part because of its tendency toward tyranny of the majority. You couldn’t pay me enough money to live under the system that murdered Charlie Gard for funsies or the one that says you have rights until we decide you shouldn’t lol. The U.K. swung wildly from market socialism to neo-liberalism in the span of just a few years in the ’70s and ’80s, while the delicate U.S. system weathered the same global economic storms with (what appeared to me to be) less financial, social, and psychic stress–because our system prevents a bare majority from going too far without minority buy-in, automatically slowing and moderating our major policy shifts. (Our system does concededly have more civil wars, so, y’know, trade-offs.) The Founders rejected a straightforward parliamentary system where the lower house controlled everything, and I think their decision was wise. A powerful Origination Clause is good, but the Senate should still have viable tools for resisting the House.

…while still leaving the House with a clear advantage. Removing the power of amendment does that. It is true that the Senate could obdurately refuse to pass every money bill that includes a provision they dislike. But we have two and a half centuries of experience with riders, poison pills, pork, and logrolling. We know from those experience that everyone in Washington is constantly running political calculus on every bill, trying to decide whether the parts their voters like are good enough to outweigh the parts their voters don’t like. We see daily how the power of amendment, even to force votes on doomed amendments, is a potent political weapon. Let the Senate continue running that calculus… but now without most of their tools in their arsenal. If Senators don’t like it, well, I’m guessing they won’t like it any less than the House doesn’t like being completely cut out of the loop on Supreme Court nominations. It’s about time we finally strengthened the House so the two halves of Congress stand on equal ground, as the Founding Fathers intended.

That explains Section 1 of my proposed amendment, which is the real meat of it. The other two sections are very straightforward, and exist mainly to prevent partisan or senatorial tricks. To remind you, here is my proposed text:

AMENDMENT XXIX

1. All Bills which raise or appropriate money, or which issue or limit the size of the public debt, or which fix the salaries of Officers of the Government of the United States, shall originate in the House of Representatives, and shall not be altered or amended by the Senate.

2. The Senate shall vote on all such money bills within one year, voting by the Yeas and Nays, and the affirmative vote of a majority of the Senators duly chosen and sworn shall cause the bill to be passed. If, after one year, this vote has not been taken, the House may present the money bill to the President of the United States for signature, in like manner as if it had been passed by the Senate.

3. These provisions may be enforced by judicial proceedings.

Section 2 forces the Senate to go on record for all money bills. They cannot pull the trick they often try, where they let a popular bill quietly die in a committee. They cannot delay the bills indefinitely. Nor can a minority of the Senate block a vote forever through the filibuster.

The House holds the purse-strings. The Senate may refuse them, but the Senate may not ignore them. The Senate can delay a bill for, at most, one year. Then there will be an up-or-down vote… or the House can deem the bill passed and send it to the President for signature. (Of course, if the President vetoes it, that makes the House’s position much harder, as it takes two-thirds to overcome a veto rather than a simple majority… but that is another reason to support gelding the veto.)

Section 3 settles a question that has been disputed for many years: if the Senate originates a money bill improperly, but the House does not object and the bill passes into law, may the courts strike down that law for being passed unconstitutionally? Section 3 says yes, the courts must uphold the Constitution over and against the incompetence or chicanery of the House of Representatives. This prevents various partisan political tricks where members of the same political party in the House and Senate conspire to work around the Origination Clause (and set bad Origination Clause precedents) for short-term political advantage. The courts will be watching.

The Origination Clause the Founders gave us was supposed to be a potent weapon. Instead, it’s a dead letter. Let’s restore their design, and strengthen the democratic half of Congress in the process, by amending in a new Origination Clause that is closer to Elbridge Gerry’s original vision.

AMENDMENT XXVIII
A two-thirds majority is not required to override a presidential veto.

As a result of this amendment, the relevant paragraph of Article I, Section 7 would be revised to read as follows:

Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States; If he approve he shall sign it, but if not he shall return it, with his Objections to that House in which it shall have originated, who shall enter the Objections at large on their Journal, and proceed to reconsider it. If after such Reconsideration two thirds of that House shall agree to pass the Bill, it shall be sent, together with the Objections, to the other House, by which it shall likewise be reconsidered, and if approved by two thirds of that House, it shall become a Law.

I put it to you that the central problem in the American system of government is that Congress is broken.

Congress is (according to the Constitutional plan) the branch that makes the laws, the branch that sets all non-emergency policies (through laws, through the power of the purse, through its power to issue debt, through its power to declare war), and the branch that exercises the most direct and effective oversight of the other branches (not to mention the other house of Congress!). This is because Congress is the branch that most directly represents the interests and will of the voters, who are the ultimate source of authority for the entire system. All our branches of government are equal, but the Founders also clearly designed Congress as first-among-equals.

Congress is (in reality) the weakest branch, least-among-equals. Most laws are made by the executive branch through the regulatory process, or by the judicial branch through creative “interpretation.” Congress is unable to pass laws of its own, and routinely struggles to have its laws followed when it does. Congress is a squib, a spent force, the fundraising arm of the two-party system, a soundbite theatre, a Twitter trending topic… but it isn’t a legislature, and has not functioned as one for some time.

The power vacuum left behind by Congress’s collapse has been filled by what pretty much everyone now calls The Imperial Presidency. The term was somewhat facetious when it was coined. It grows less facetious every year, as the Presidency grows annually to more closely resemble a monarchy–and not the charmingly impotent Elizabeth II kind! The Supreme Will of the President (exercised through clever technical abuses of overbroad statutes and legal tricks to delay or prevent judicial review) is increasingly the central governing principle of the United States. We’re maybe a generation from the President just donning purple and calling himself senatus princeps, if you know what I mean.

There are many reasons for this, and we will likely return to Congress’s brokenness and our modern Emperor-President many times in this series.

(Gerald Ford and the neo-reactionaries will cry, “No, it’s the imperial bureaucracy!” They have a point. We’ll come to that in future installments. For purposes of the presidential veto’s malodourous effect on the separation of powers, there is no relevant difference–and it’s worth noticing that, just like today, the collapse of the Roman Republic coincided with the exponential expansion of the Roman imperial bureaucracy.)

One important cause of Congress’s ennervation (and the Executive’s consequent empowerment) is the presidential veto.

The Founders conceived of the presidential veto for some charmingly quaint reasons. Federalist #73 (by Alexander Hamilton) explains:

The propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments, has been already suggested and repeated; the insufficiency of a mere parchment delineation of the boundaries of each, has also been remarked upon; and the necessity of furnishing each with constitutional arms for its own defense, has been inferred and proved. From these clear and indubitable principles results the propriety of a negative, either absolute or qualified, in the Executive, upon the acts of the legislative branches. Without the one or the other, the former would be absolutely unable to defend himself against the depredations of the latter. He might gradually be stripped of his authorities by successive resolutions, or annihilated by a single vote.

In other words, the presidential veto power is necessary, because otherwise Congress might gobble up presidential powers, even in violation of the Constitution. Hamilton is writing this, remember, several years before Marbury v. Madison would establish the Supreme Court’s formidable powers to defend the other two branches against attacks by the third.

Furthermore, Hamilton tells us:

But the power in question has a further use. It not only serves as a shield to the Executive, but it furnishes an additional security against the enaction of improper laws. It establishes a salutary check upon the legislative body, calculated to guard the community against the effects of faction, precipitancy, or of any impulse unfriendly to the public good, which may happen to influence a majority of that body.

Early in the Republic, the veto was used in this way: pretty rarely, pretty cautiously, and only to protect the Constitution or the prerogatives of the other branches, not to interpose the President in the legislative process.

Here is how the veto is actually used today:

(1) Sanctifying Abuses of the Law

When the President uses the powers Congress gave him to do something Congress did not intend and actually opposes, Congress often tries to fix it by passing a new law against it. The President, who enjoys exercising those powers Congress is trying to block, vetoes the new law. As long as the President can get the support of at least one-third of either house of Congress, he wins. Congress loses a little of its power to set the laws of the land; the President gains a little.

Headcount-wise, it is easier to impeach and convict the President of the United States than to override a presidential veto. Impeachment requires a majority in the House and two-thirds of the Senate. A veto override requires two-thirds in both. So if you really hate a certain presidential veto, and you’ve got the majority of Congress on your side, but you’re a few votes short of two-thirds in the House, the really smart and ruthless legislative party will impeach and convict instead. Those are the incentives we’ve set up.

(2) Squelching Embarrassments

When the President does something flagrantly illegal, but Congress supports him, Congress occasionally tries to fix it by passing a new law supporting it. The President, however, is embarrassed to admit that he has violated the law, and worries about the bad press he will get for needing to be “bailed out” by Congress, so he announces his intent to veto it and encourages the most loyal members of his own party to vote against the bill. (Sounds weird, but it’s word-for-word what happened with H.R. 2667 in 2013.) This leaves Congress with three options: it can hope someone else sues the President and wins, because Congress generally cannot sue the President; or it can impeach the President and remove him from office; or it can surrender, losing a little of its power to set the laws of the land, while the President gains a little.

(3) Getting Broad Powers While Evading Review

There are a lot of provisions in federal law that allow Congress to cancel certain extraordinary exercises of executive power. For example, the Congressional Review Act allows Congress to, by joint agreement, block problematic executive-branch regulatory laws from going into effect. The National Emergencies Act allows the President to declare national emergencies and take on emergency powers, but also gives Congress the ability to rescind those emergency powers by a joint resolution. The Immigration and Nationality Act gave the President the authority to cancel deportation procedures at his discretion, but gave Congress the power to override that discretion. The War Powers Resolution gives the President the authority to start a war without a Congressional declaration of war (as required by the Constitution), but gives Congress the power to stop any such war on review.

In theory, these provisions all give Congress a way to keep the Imperial Presidency in check, by giving broad and flexible powers to the president but allowing Congress to review and restrain the exercise of those powers.

In practice, however, whenever Congress passes a joint resolution cancelling a presidential action, guess what? The president vetoes it! Then he laughs in Congress’s face. The Supreme Court confirmed in INS v. Chadha (1983) that the presidential veto power applies to all exercises of legislative power, including these Congressional reviews. This ruling was, in my view, the correct legal ruling given our current Constitution. (That’s why I’m saying we should change the Constitution.) Remember when President Trump declared a “national emergency” in order to try to build his border wall? Congress voted to cancel that emergency… but, because they could not break Trump’s veto, it remained in force for the rest of his term.

Eventually, because it was obviously pointless, Congress more or less gave up even trying to disapprove presidential actions. The President gets to keep the broad and flexible powers Congress gave it, but Congress lost the ability to review and restrain those powers (which it was really counting on when it handed those powers over in the first place).

(4) President as Legislator-in-Chief

The Founding Fathers did not foresee the rise of political parties. In fact, they were terrified of political parties, because they knew that strong political parties would break their design of the Constitution. They weren’t wrong!

The Founders expected government officials would be loyal to themselves first, their branches second, and the American people third. A lot of our checks and balances are based on the idea that elected legislators and elected Presidents have few common political interests and are mutually jealous and suspicious of each other.

Political parties spoil this assumption. In fact, the President has strong political ties and shared interests with certain members of Congress, and vice versa. Loyalty to the party and the party agenda comes way ahead of branch loyalty, and sometimes even trumps loyalty to one’s self. (Just look at how Bart Stupak and the Blue Dog Democrats knowingly immolated themselves on the pyre of Obamacare, which was unpopular at the time, was definitely going to cost moderate Democrats their seats, and effectively wiped them out.)

The presidential veto makes him the single most powerful force the entire legislative branch. Wielding the veto, one single man, not even directly elected by the people, can prevent Congress from acting on any legislation, for any reason, until it meets his exacting conditions–or the conditions demanded by his political party. The President is, for the most part, able to dictate laws to the legislative branch… and, since before the beginning of living memory, that’s exactly what the President has done. The impossibly difficult veto overrides were few and far between a century ago… but they have become even fewer now, because the President wields ever-growing power within his party to punish any sitting legislator of his party who dares oppose him. (We’ve had two impeachment trials in the past four years, and we’ll likely have another if Republicans retake the House in 2022, albeit all unsuccessful. The last successful veto override? July 15, 2008, over thirteen years ago.*)

The results? Obvious: it is impossible to pass major domestic legislation in this country without a “trifecta”: single-party control of the House, the Senate, and, above all, the White House. This happens once a decade or so. (The other eighty percent of the time is spent in unbroken legislative gridlock.) The President then supervises members of his party in Congress in crafting a bill that is acceptable to “his” majorities in both houses without compromising his own re-election chances. Do I really need to attach links to sources for this, or have you all paid attention to at least one major piece of domestic legislation on at least one occasion in the past twenty years and therefore know how this works?

This assertion of control over the legislative process is, by far, the most important and common use of the veto today. (It is almost never actually exercised; an official White House veto threat is usually enough.) What a sad inversion! The Founders were afraid that, without the veto power, the Congress would swallow the executive branch and “the legislative and executive powers might speedily come to be blended in the same hands.” But, thanks in part to the veto power, that’s precisely where we’ve arrived… but with a monarchical presidency blending the powers, not the democratic-republican Congress!

(5) Ever-Deepening, Self-Sustaining Gridlock

The presidential election then, predictably, devolves into an extended debate about domestic policy… which is something the President, in our system, should not have any significant authority over in the first place, nor even any opinions save what he reports to Congress in his annual State of the Union letter (not speech) about how to improve the efficient functioning of the People’s government established by Congress. Since the presidential election ends up being about legislation rather than competence and good judgment (which is what presidential elections are supposed to be about), we end up with deep partisan polarization around whoever happens to President… which makes bipartisan deal-cutting even more difficult, because any bipartisan deal has to be made, first and foremost, with that president, the legislator-in-chief, and the despised enemy of the opposition’s entire voting base. What do you get? Gridlock! (And a lot of italics for emphasis.)

Rather than the People voting for Congress to enact an agenda and for a President to competently administer the government, the People vote for a President to enact an agenda, Sir Humphrey Appleby administers the government, and Congress sends out fundraising emails telling you that they need YOUR HELP TO STOP THE [opposition party’s] ATTACK ON GRANDMAS AND FREEDOM ITSELF. The People become demoralized and frustrated when this convoluted, wasteful system–which is essentially unworkable even at a small scale, but absolutely unworkable given our titanic federal government–fails to work and does not produce the results they voted for.

The veto does little good and much evil. Both parties can point to one or two cases where the veto delayed legislation they opposed for several years, but both parties can also point to dozens of cases where even a merely threatened veto strangled good legislation in its crib. So get rid of it!

The Good Parts of the Presidential Veto

AMENDMENT XXVIII
A two-thirds majority is not required to override a presidential veto.

You probably noticed that my proposed amendment does not actually get rid of the veto. All it did was get rid of the two-thirds override requirement. Everything bad about the veto comes from the fact that Congress has to come up with extra votes in order to ignore it. If Congress could simply vote again to bypass a veto, the veto is no longer a problem.

But why should it have to go through that rigmarole? The process set out by the Presentment Clause requires Congress to formally deliver a bill to the President, who then has ten days to veto it, which bounces it back to Congress, which then needs to schedule votes in both houses… the whole affair could easily take two weeks (allowing, among other things, pocket vetoes). Knocking out the two-thirds requirement makes this whole creaky, time-consuming process redundant, doesn’t it?

I don’t think so. The Founders were right, after all, about this: “faction, precipitancy, [and] any impulse unfriendly to the public good” may occasionally overtake Congress, especially in moments of great fervor and hurry. The Presentment Clause provides a cooling-off period before a passed bill becomes a law. The Veto Clause–even after my amendment gelds it–will still allow the President to send a bill back to Congress with objections, essentially saying, “Are you absolutely sure?” Overriding that veto will no longer be an impossible task for the President’s opponents… but it will force them to think a bit about whether they are really sure this legislation is a good idea.

This is often useful. Very often, an executive will recognize problems with implementing a bill that the legislators didn’t foresee, or didn’t fully understand. The executive’s warning can lead them to make useful changes, or simply reconsider a possibly-rash course of action, even if the veto is not binding. You can see this in cases around the country, where an executive veto plus a few days’ thought caused bills originally passed by veto-proof majorities to suddenly lose that support. I think this serves as a useful check on the legislative branch, in most of the ways the Founders expected… but without centralizing legislative power within the person of the President.

This “are you absolutely sure?” function is considered useful enough in England that it is the primary function of the House of Lords. Anything the House of Commons wants to become law will become law. The Lords’ sole function is to scrutinize each bill the Commons passes and offer advice on how the Commons can make it better (or why the Commons should get rid of it). They have explicit powers to delay legislation. And they can force the Commons to reconsider legislation. But they cannot block legislation outright. This has served both the Lords and the United Kingdom pretty well, which is why I’d like to see it continue in the United States.

For that reason, I think we should get rid of the two-thirds override requirement, but otherwise keep the presidential veto. Don’t erase it. Just geld it.

*UPDATE 4 October 2021: This article originally stated that the last veto override occurred in 2008. While veto overrides are very rare, they aren’t quite that rare. President Trump and Obama suffered one successful override apiece, in 2016 and 2021, respectively. The error was entirely mine.

Let’s recklessly start another series! Worthy Reads is going well, but I don’t want the blog to be taken over by my clippings from other blogs, so I’ve been saving up Worthy Reads for months without writing anything else. It’s time to fix that. In each entry of this series, I’ll propose an amendment to the U.S. Constitution for your consideration.

Except for this entry. Today’s entry is an introduction.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.

James Madison

James Madison famously believed that the Constitution required no Bill of Rights, because its fundamental structure was enough to secure the rights of the people. I think history has proved him wrong about that — but not entirely wrong. The structure of our government can, to a tremendous extent, shape its actions towards (or away from) the common good. By many measures, the most generous and popular Bill of Rights in the history of the world was contained in the Constitution of the Soviet Union… but the Soviet Union was structured in such a way that nothing its Bill of Rights said actually mattered or was in any way protected.

The fundamental insight of the U.S. Constitution, of Madison’s Constitution, is that the government serves the People best when it has some accountability to them (no dictatorships), but is not subject to the mob’s whim (no democracies), and when it forces competing interests to police one another and make compromises rather than allowing any single force or party to control all the levers of power at once (which means no parliament).

Thus Madison and the Founders gave us the best system of government yet devised: an elected republic, where the common people and their popular will were set against the aristocracy and institutional interests (the House vs the Senate); different states against one another (the Senate within itself); different population centers against one another (the House within itself); with the legislative and executive branches all at each other’s throats, jealously guarding their own power and prerogatives; as the judiciary refereed by common consent of the political branches. We also have a federal government with limited powers, locked in an eternal tug-of-war with fifty (or more) states, most of whom have broader powers than the federal government, but without the military or economic power to fully exercise it.

Or, at least, that was the idea.

The American government has failed in several key ways. The legal system we have is not the legal system the Founders envisioned. It’s not even close:

Congress (Article I) is a bicameral ATM that dispenses money created by the Federal Reserve, a quasi-governmental organization of private banks that everyone agrees must never be the subject of direct government intervention. A lot, and I mean a lot, of laws are passed without being read by the Congresscritters voting for and against them.

This is ultimately relatively unimportant because the President (Article II) is the Head of State and sort of the Head of Government, and has a Cabinet of Ministers with whom he isn’t supposed to talk too much for fear of having some influence on their behavior. Those Ministers, whom he appoints with Congressional approval, go on to make the laws described above, and to enforce the laws, and sometimes not, and sometimes run roughshod over the people because they can. This is only the President’s fault if he belongs to a party or belief unpopular with the aristocracy, more on this below, and is otherwise beyond his control because he’s not supposed to politicize his own Branch and anyway the thing’s too big.

Article III (the judiciary) writes amendments to the Constitution, beginning with the one allowing them to write Amendments ex nihilo and on their own, and decides national policy on issues of incredible importance under the guise of resolving cases and controversies. The Judiciary also decides on the relative balance of power of the federal and state governments, the limits of the other branches’ power, and whether actions undertaken by the other branches are acceptable enough to stand. Thus, the only unelected branch, other than apparently Article IIA, has the most direct and only unchecked decision on national lawmaking of all.

The President can go to war without Congress agreeing, or make treaties-that-last-as-long-as-his-Presidency without Congress agreeing, or refuse to enforce laws, or create whole new legal programs, and Congress cannot refuse to fund any of it because reasons. Additionally, the President cannot cancel any of the laws his Branch makes, even if directly in violation of the Constitution, unless Article III signs off or Article I signs off (and Article III signs off).

Thomas H. Crown, 2014

(Curtis Yarvin makes a similar point, but even more brutally, in his elucidation of the “ritual Constitution” and the “descriptive Constitution.”) UPDATE 18 June 2025: Turns out I did my own version of this in 2018, entitled simply, “The Constitution of the United States of America”. Naturally, I consider mine the best.

Partly (largely) this is our elected officials’ fault. A lot of this stuff happened because Congress wrote and passed bad laws, because they seemed like a good idea at the time, and now the laws are so thick and interdependent that pulling some of the bad laws down would be like pulling out the center brick in a Jenga tower. That’s an understandable fear, but inadequate to our predicament. It has allowed the Deep State they constructed to wrest the reins of governance away from them.

(SIDEBAR: People get uncomfortable about “Deep State” talk, because it sounds conspiratorial. This is easily cured. The Deep State is the subject of Yes, Minister and its sequel series Yes, Prime Minister, a popular British sitcom from the 1980s and Margaret Thatcher’s favorite program. Whenever you hear the phrase, “the Deep State,” replace it in your head with “Sir Humphrey Appleby” until the true nature of the Deep State has been drilled into your head enough that the replacement is no longer necessary.)

Partly this is our fault. We have in some ways betrayed the system we were given, especially in our long careless descent down the roads to democracy and tyranny (they’re really the same road). We lack the moral virtue and civic energy that the Founding generation felt was essential to successful republican governance; we belong to a shockingly supine and politically dull-witted century, as did our parents and our grandparents. (Blame radio, TV, and video games, I guess, in that chronological order.) We don’t teach civics; when we do teach civics, we teach them badly; and the current effective political control of America’s classrooms by a single partisan side (the Left) makes the teaching of political theory fraught anyway.

But also, partly, this is the Constitution’s fault. The Constitution has a number of mechanisms that do not function correctly. The government of mutual checks and balances they envisioned, therefore, has more or less dissolved into a mess. Some of these mechanisms never worked and were never going to work. Some of them worked for a while, then stopped working. Some of them were sabotaged in unexpected ways. Many of them failed because the Founders failed to account for the inevitable rise of political parties. Now, I love our Constitution. I love James Madison. I think the American system of government is an all-time great. The Founders were great men… but they were not angels. Geniuses… but not fortune-tellers. It is neither surprising that they failed to foresee every detail of how their incredible document would play out in reality, nor a betrayal to point out the few breakdowns and propose fixes. Hence this series.

I take as my starting point that amending the Bill of Rights to settle important substantive questions like “the national debt” or “abortion” is simultaneously impossible, pointless, and boring. It’s impossible because these are deeply divisive issues (that’s why people are trying to settle them by amendment), and you need about 85%+ public support to ratify a constitutional amendment. It’s pointless because, if you could ever get that much public support for your divisive policy question, you’d no longer need a constitutional amendment, because you’d have won the argument and all the relevant laws already. It’s boring because it’s just an extension of substantive political debates we already have all day every day. (Boring is not actually a bad thing for government–I’m not here to insult the 20th Amendment–but boring is bad for blogging.) The only time you can actually usefully add to the Bill of Rights is when you’ve just won a civil war and you can force your vanquished enemy to ratify your views at the point of a gun.

As another starting point, I generally reject constitutional amendments that rely heavily on judicial interpretation to be given effect, or which effectively hand legislative power to the judiciary. Everyone knows that writing, “Racist policies are unconstitutional” into the Constitution wouldn’t actually ban “racist policies”; it would merely ban whatever a judge (or entrenched bureaucrat) will label a “racist policy,” and we all know that judges (and bureaucrats) are fallible on their best days and downright evil on their worst, because they’re human. Everyone knows that handing the essential policy-making power over to them flies in the face of the separation of powers. Whether you’re more scared of conservative judges or progressive judges, we’re all scared of judges of some stripe or another, and we’d have to be pretty stupid to give them even more power.

Nevertheless, people love doing these two things. The New York Times recently ran a feature where they asked prominent law-and-politics people to propose amendments. All but one of these proposals (including one I really liked, by Xan Desanctis) was either “constitutionalizing a divisive policy argument” or “giving judges free rein to set policy,” sometimes both at the same time!

The National Constitution Center did a similar thing, except they let their teams rewrite the whole Constitution. Result? The majority of the work turned in by two of the three teams was this same unrealistic partisan score-settling, with some healthy judge-worship on the side.

Oh, well. Human nature, I guess.

This series will not have any of those. I will not pitch you a conservative Personhood Amendment, nor a progressive narrowing of the First Amendment. We’re going to try and be like James Madison, fixing the system in conspicuously non-partisan ways, so that the men (not angels) who run our government are nudged toward wisely and justly governing its subjects without specific directives from us, the Constitution writers, on what that means.

Let’s roll! First post tomorrow: “Geld the Veto.”

UPDATE: Read the rest of the series in my Roundup for Some Constitutional Amendments.

“Giving the Sickness A Name,” by Jeff Reimer:

A wily demon, acedia is difficult to pin down. It’s a trickster, a shapeshifter, a boggart. It goes out of focus when you try to look directly at it. The term itself defies translation: despondency, sloth, lassitude, ennui, melancholy—each displays an aspect, none the full image.

The desert monks who first wrestled the demon acedia to the ground did so by grinding through their prayers in the pitiless heat of the Egyptian wilderness. In doing so they became superbly intimate with their failures. Evagrius had a theoretical bent and began cataloging the modes and patterns of failure he and his fellow monks encountered. […]

Percy’s gaze turned outward in his subsequent work. In 1971, he said that Love in the Ruins “deals, not with the takeover of a society by tyrants or computers or whatever, but rather with the increasing malaise and finally the falling apart of a society which remains, on the surface at least, democratic and pluralistic.” By 1986, in fact, when asked by an interviewer, “Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?” he could answer, “Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom…gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the Communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems.” The interviewer follows up: “In connection with what is going on in the world?” Percy’s response: “Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia.”

This is my sly way of recommending Walker Percy’s Love in the Ruins. When I first read it, 15-odd years ago, I found it entertaining, but in some ways thought its parody-prediction of America had barked up the wrong tree; things Percy had predicted had not panned out. Unsurprising for a book written in 1968!

However, when I re-read the book last month, I was dumbfounded. Love in the Ruins is become more prescient over time… and proved itself, in 1968, a better interpreter of the American situation than I was in 2005.

Acedia, indeed.

“Was Ebola a Near-Miss?” by Lessons from the Crisis:

From 2021’s perspective, the advice given by UK public health authorities early in the covid outbreak reads like an attempt to sound confident and reassuring, full of what we now know to have been a lot of false assumptions built on almost very unreliable information.

We heard about the need to maintain open borders, that masks wouldn’t work, that the ‘world class’ NHS was well prepared to cope with plenty of PPE, that you couldn’t pass on the virus unless you had symptoms and above all that the most important thing to do was to wash your hands, all of which turned out to be disastrously misguided.

But imagine if covid had been contained in China and never took hold in the UK- would we have ever found out how wrong this all was? Or would we have been falsely reassured that everything was in order, and our health system stood ready to cope with disaster? Because I think this is what might have happened with Ebola. Almost every wrong ‘official’ belief of the early covid era was deployed with equal confidence against ebola six years previously.

“We say what? Answers to your questions about Catholic prayers,” by The Pillar:

Another interesting thing about the Our Father is that there’s a word that nobody knows what it means. ‘Give us this day our daily bread’ – that’s not really what the Greek says. The Greek word is “ἐπιούσιον” (epiousion) which doesn’t mean ‘daily’ at all, but the problem is that it’s a totally unique and untranslatable Greek term. It’s not used in any pagan Greek literature, it’s only used twice in Luke and Matthew. It’s used nowhere else. Even the Greek Fathers couldn’t agree on how to translate it. Literally, it means, ‘super-substantial.’ 

‘Give us this day our super-substantial bread.’

Now for some reason, everyone just kind of settled down with the term, ‘daily,’ but honestly, that’s not what the Greek says.

Fun stuff!

“The Central Bank Trap,” by Andrew Stuttaford (but really Nouriel Roubini):

Central banks have effectively lost their independence, because they have been given little choice but to monetize massive fiscal deficits to forestall a debt crisis. With both public and private debts having soared, they are in a debt trap. As inflation rises over the next few years, central banks will face a dilemma. If they start phasing out unconventional policies and raising policy rates to fight inflation, they will risk triggering a massive debt crisis and severe recession; but if they maintain a loose monetary policy, they will risk double-digit inflation – and deep stagflation when the next negative supply shocks emerge.

One of these days I’m going to write the blog post explaining, in layman’s terms, exactly how and why the national debt will destroy us. No one cares, of course, because we live in a democracy, and democracy is famously bad at long-term thinking. Democrats say, “We don’t need to worry about debt; sovereign nations aren’t the same as average families making a budget.” (The second half of that is true, but the first half absolutely does not follow.)

Republicans pretend to care about the debt to hurt the Democrats, then get in and vote for enormous, debt-financed tax cuts. This, in turn, really puts the lie to their claim that their problem with expanding Medicare/Medicaid is that we just can’t afford it. (I mean, it’s true, we absolutely can’t afford it, but if Republicans believed that, they wouldn’t have voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.)

But the debt doesn’t care. The debt will get us in the end, whether we admit it or not. It may take a first gouge out of our skin in the near future, if Stuttaford/Roubini is right about this.

“The Kids Were Safe the Whole Time,” by David Wallace-Wells:

It may sound strange, given a year of panic over school closures and reopenings, a year of masking toddlers and closing playgrounds and huddling in pandemic pods, that, according to the CDC, among children the mortality risk from COVID-19 is actually lower than from the flu. The risk of severe disease or hospitalization is about the same.

This is true for the much-worried-over Delta variant. It is also true for all the other variants, and for the original strain. Most remarkably, it has been known to be true since the very earliest days of the pandemic — indeed it was among the very first things we did know about the disease.

Useful not just for the obvious point it makes about kids, but the broader point it makes about risk assessment, intuitions, and how badly skewed they can become in the midst of a plague (especially once that plague becomes politicized).

There is, for example, no good reason to have K-12 kids mask this fall unless our new rule is that kids should always be masked and should always have been masked. Everyone who looks at this question and isn’t in politics, right or left, draws this conclusion soon enough. But it will probably be another eighteen months before this will be accepted as conventional wisdom, even though we already know it today. (Indeed, one of the most disappointing aspects of this pandemic is our discovery that the Centers for Disease Control, which we all once esteemed very highly, actually just follows conventional wisdom, not scientific data and cost-benefit analysis, in setting policy. Sadly true under both the Trump and the Biden Administrations.)

“Lockdown Bait and Switch,” by Matt Shapiro:

I am tired of people who are even now treating all things COVID as some kind of game or political football that needs to be moved 5 yards down the field. This whole “Actually, Lockdowns Not Only Save Lives, But They Have No Downsides” is transparent nonsense. It’s not that it is stupid, it is that it is a talking point from “smart” people that is meant to convince other “smart” people that all the “smart” people made the right decisions and are not only justified in their past decisions but fully vindicated in every possibly way by The Data, which is the great oracle that grants us the grace of life and the fullness of knowledge, praise be to The Data.

I watch as pundits still treat this like a game or, at best, a science experiment. The reality is that the efficacy of lockdowns is the single most important issue to human beings who operate and exist in the real world. People are making enormous life decisions about what to do next, where to live, how to educate their kids, and who to trust and much of it depends on how a state is going to approach this topic.

As Shapiro goes on to write, he is not anti-lockdown, when circumstances call for it. But he is anti-rewriting-history-in-ways-that-will-make-our-next-pandemic-response-worse, and there is an awful lot of that going around right now among the Noah Smiths of the world.

“Culture Wars are Long Wars,” by Taneer Greer:

American conservatives never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. They fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal their operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, America’s conservatives fought a political war over culture. Republicans used cultural issues to gain—or to try to gain—political power. Their brightest minds and greatest efforts went into securing control of judiciary, developing a judicial philosophy for their appointees, securing control of the Capitol, and developing laws that could be implemented in multiple state houses across the nation. No actual attempt to change the culture was attempted.

This was not thought necessary. Conservatives had the people. One decade they were called a “silent” majority; as the culture war heated up, that majority transitioned from “silent” to “moral,” but a majority they remained.

Yeah, I know, you already read this, just like everyone else, and it’s been a few weeks, so the conversation has moved on… but it was still a worthy read, especially if these ideas weren’t already familiar to you.

Incidentally, I think there is one and perhaps only one exception to this on the Right: the pro-life movement has genuinely waged a culture war, battling not just in the judiciary and the legislatures, but on the ground, in the streets, in front of abortion clinics, and in some of the largest charitable-aid networks in the country. Perhaps not coincidentally, abortion is one of the only issues where the “Moral Majority” of old has not lost the youth. The rising generation of secular, heteroflexible youth are roughly as supportive of abortion restrictions as their grandparents, and reflect a stable age gap that’s lasted several generations. That’s stalemate, but stalemate looks a heck of a lot like a win when all your other causes have gone the way the same-sex marriage debate has.

“I’m (kind of) changing my mind about CRT,” by Isaac Saul:

There are two things I want to dig my heels in on, even after reading all your feedback and continuing to look into these bills for the last week.

One, I do not think critical race theory is particularly dangerous on its own. On the contrary, it’s a really valuable and important piece of academia. Like any critical theory, it has its flaws, but in simple terms, it really is just an academic theory that explores the way race (and racism) are embedded in our society’s laws and structures. […]

Two, on the whole, I still believe these bills banning CRT are more dangerous than helpful. I haven’t seen one yet that I’d personally vote for. If K-12 students are being taught that they are inherently inferior, superior, or racist, based on their race — or otherwise being compelled to espouse those ideas — they are already protected by our country’s laws.

I liked this piece a great deal because, even though I think both those conclusions are completely wrong, even naive and shortsighted, Mr. Saul arrives at them through a process of very visible, reasoned thoughtfulness. Even though I disagreed with his conclusions, reading his piece softened my own attitudes toward Critical Race Theory* somewhat.

*I know we’re not supposed to call it that anymore, but, y’know, c’mon.

I am really proud of myself, because I resisted the temptation to anchor this week’s Worthy Reads around the little-noticed but pretty popcorn-worthy debate between Micah Meadowcroft and Curtis Yarvin. Their debate wasn’t really insightful enough (IMO) to earn a place here, but Meadowcroft scored some wonderful ripostes that I hope Yarvin himself appreciated.

(Yarvin then proceeded to miss Meadowcroft’s entire point… but he did so in a way that was so entirely at right angles to Meadowcroft that it was, itself, characteristically interesting. And look at me, I’m afraid to directly say a clearly nice thing about Yarvin in public! I’d much rather you think I was cheering uncomplicatedly for Meadowcroft, which itself provides evidence for a lot of Yarvin’s claims — claims I don’t think Meadowcroft would even dispute. Anyway.)

Briefly, without excerpts or commentary, here is that debate:

“We Are Going To Win,” by Meadowcroft

“You Are Going to Lose,” by Yarvin [was paywalled; isn’t now? huh]

“Roman Rhetoric and Florentine Politics,” by Meadowcroft

“The Real Great Reset,” by Yarvin

And that’s it for this week! See you later.