Yearly Archives: 2003

A Modest Proposal For Improving White House Press Conferences

Posted on October 2, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

I have a modest and practical proposal for improving White House press conferences.

Sooner or later, probably later, there's going to be another official press conference in the White House. Past form suggests that the Administration will wait as long as it dares before having one, but sooner or later they'll do it. And, past form also suggests that the White House will have worried about nothing, because the reporters will ask softball or inane questions, and will be so caught up in their own narratives, or competitive agendas, that there will be little follow-up probing on any evasion.

So, here's my suggestion: All the White House correspondents—especially the foreign ones whose easy questions can be counted on to break the flow of any serious attempt to follow-up—should club together. They should agree a list of questions that need answering, and draft them carefully to minimize the opportunity for a fudgy answer (this can never be eliminated—a good pol knows how to spin it). Then, the whole press corps should go to the press conference with a copy of the list in hand. Everyone would agree that if called on they would either ask a followup to the question previously asked, or ask the next question on the list. And nothing else.

It's nice to dream.

Posted in Politics: US | Comments Off on A Modest Proposal For Improving White House Press Conferences

Kim Lane Scheppele on the Dangers of Rushing the Iraqi Constitution

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

A transfer of sovereignty to a functioning Iraqi government is a prerequisite to an orderly US departure.

The official US policy is that the Iraqi constitution must be drafted before the US can transfer sovereignty back to the Iraqis:

Bush administration officials contend that if they transfer sovereignty before a constitution is drafted and a democratically elected government is seated, the interim political authority could prolong or subvert the process. “If a constitution has to be drafted before there can be a government, you bet we’ll get a constitution.”

Indeed, The US has a lot riding on getting the Iraqis to draft a new constitution quickly. So long as there is no Constitution, and no interim government either, bodies such as the IMF may not recognize the local authorities as a government to which they can give funds. And, so long as the US (or, if you prefer, the “coalition”) remains an occupying power, it has various obligations arising from International law.

Last week Colin Powell optimistically suggested the constitutional drafting might be completed within six months. That idea seems unlikely to survive its encounter with the reality of an Iraqi political scene that is divided and fractious.

Kim Lane Scheppele, Professor of Law and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, an expert in comparative constitutional law, is worried about the rush to design an Iraqi constitution, and she's graciously allowed me to reproduce a listserv contribution of hers on the subject:

having observed some constitutional drafting processes at close range and participated in a couple, it seems to me that it's important to start with the history of the place and the specifics of the culture and legal system. Toward that end, I've found the following sources helpful.

The Public International Law and Policy Group and the Century Foundation has produced a sobering report on the major issues involved in drafting a constitution for Iraq. The report can be found at:

http://www.tcf.org/Publications/iraq_report.pdf

The Iraqi constitution of 1990:

http://www.oefre.unibe.ch/law/icl/iz00t___.html

And the Iraqi constitution of 1925 can be found at:

http://www.geocities.com/dagtho/ iraqiconst19250321.html

(For those interested in constitutional borrowing, the 1925 Constitution begins, “We, the King …”

What seems to me most troubling about a future Iraqi constitution is that the country is a cobbled together collection of people and places without a common sense of history or (as far as I can tell) a common sense of the future. Iraq's own brief constitutional history (seen in the documents above) is not particularly promising as a place to start. By contrast, the Afghan constitution started with far more inspiring raw materials — in particular, a 1964 constitution that was a perfectly respectable modern constitution that actually functioned for nearly a decade. As a result, when the war ended in Afghanistan, the 1964 constitution could be restored and used as a starting point for the new drafters. Just where one starts to get a grip on constitutional issues in Iraq will be much harder because there is no such prior text that could provide a point of common reference if the drafting process produces deadlocks. This is one tough place to write a constitution.

Nation-building is hard work. Isn't it good that we have an Administration so fully committed to the project?

Posted in Law: Constitutional Law, Politics: International | Comments Off on Kim Lane Scheppele on the Dangers of Rushing the Iraqi Constitution

Unexpected Perils of Blogging

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Many law professors dream of having a theory of constitutional interpretation attributed to them. As it happens, that was never quite exactly my dream. But if—as just happened on a mailing list for teachers of constitutional law—someone had been going to credit me with stating 'the universal insight that explains constitutional law' and even promised to “steal it and use it without remorse, giving due credit, of course,” I don't think that I'd choose to be known for blogging the 'squint theory' of interpretation.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Unexpected Perils of Blogging

It’s OK to Send Them to Die in Iraq, But Please Don’t Encourage Them To Vote

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Now this sort of rot does make me mad. Someone named Andrew Ferguson, who is clearly an establishment journalist (“Andy Ferguson's ideas were, as usual, very subtle and secretly forceful” — Davd Brooks) and writes regularly for Bloomberg and is a contributing editor to the Weekly Standard, has written a column with the provocative title, Will the Dixie Chicks Ruin U.S. Democracy?.

Unfortunately, the title is the best part, as the article's thesis is that young people should be discouraged from voting, and that the Rock the Vote campaign, and the Two Million More in 2004 young voter registration campaign are—get this!—dangerous [sic] to democracy because they will bring out the yahoos. Mr. Ferguson, whose photo suggests he may have reached a certain age, is apparently all aflutter at the “specter of two million more children in turned-around baseball caps queuing up for the voting booth, as they nod drowsily to the thumps drilling through the earplugs of their portable MP3 players.”

“Young Americans,” Mr. Ferguson quotes the National Conference of State Legislators as concluding on the basis of a survey, “don't understand the ideals of citizenship; are disengaged from the political process; lack the knowledge necessary for effective self-government; and have limited appreciation of American democracy.'' Of course, without some comparison to other age groups we have very little idea of what to make of this fact, but never mind. (I tried to find the actual survey online, but failed. The http://www.ncsl.org/ web site was not responding.) In the end, if you really believe in democracy, that number matters when considering how much to increase the state education budget, not when deciding if you should encourage people to vote.

There are an enormous number of ways in which our democracy could be improved. Disenfranchising younger voters, or even discouraging their exercise of the franchise, is not remotely among them. If they're old enough to fight our wars, they're plenty old enough to vote.

Based on Mr. Ferguson's essay, though, I'd have say he's a pretty poor poster child for his age group's supposedly superior comprehension of democratic principles.

Update: The National Conference of State Legislators website woke up, and I found the survey. It seems voting participation rates and the belief that civic participation matters are noticeably lower for younger citizens than for older ones. Rather than blaming young people for their civic disenchantment, the National Conference blames…Mr. Ferguson and his age cohort:

The findings of this public opinion survey leave little doubt that Baby Boomers and the World War II generation have failed to successfully pass on the ideals of citizenship to the DotNet generation that is now coming of age. They have botched President Bush’s challenge “to teach what it means to be citizens.”

Posted in Politics: US | 4 Comments

The Campaign Against Word Pirates Surmounts A Small Snag

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Astoundingly thoughtful columnist Dan Gillmor, himself a pioneer Internet user, has started Word Pirates with David Weinberger, he of Joho the Blog. Gillmor & Weinberger intend Word Pirates “to remind people how some good words in our language have been hijacked by corporate and political interests.”

In the best traditions of the Internet, they opened the site up for public contributions. Unfortunately, someone decided to mess with the site by inserting code that took users somewhere gross, an act of “pure malevolence” which made Dan sad and angry.

The exploit got fixed, the site is back in business. It's a very nice concept, although the actual content is a little hit and miss as one might expect given its openness. Many of the contributions are more of the word purist, or nicety of usage, department than “important words [that] are being taken over for selfish reasons.”

The site is built around Blosxom blogging software. Thinking about it, I started to wonder if the site might have been better as a WikiWiki Web, in which subsequent users could modify or erase the contributions of earlier ones. From what I could see on my initial visit, the Word Pirates site only lets me comment on previous entries, not change them. It may seem counter-intuitive to suggest that just after the pages suffered such a nasty attack, in fact it is totally counter-intuitive, but somehow it works for Wiki's….

Posted in Internet | Comments Off on The Campaign Against Word Pirates Surmounts A Small Snag

Two Things I Wish I Could Do In Movable Type

Posted on October 1, 2003 by Michael Froomkin

Thanks to Henry Farrell sage advice, I've loaded up the Textile and Smartypants plugins, which are very nice indeed. I've had a very quick trawl through the plugin directories, and nothing else jumps out at me as both stable and necessary or even that useful unless I want to do complex things I probably don't have the time to do. (Suggestions welcomed.)

But there are still two features I really wish I had in Movable Type. First, a spell-checker. I am dyslexic and a terrible speller (Bad spellers of the world, untie! Dyslexia rules KO!). Second, the ability to queue up a post. Over at ICANNWatch, the Slash software lets me post stuff with a future date, and won't actually put it onto the web page until it's ripe. Movable Type will let me give something a future date, but will post it right away anyway.

Architecturally, that's understandable: Movable Type doesn't do anything in the background, which makes it much less temperamental than Slashdot, and conserves resources. But what if I was willing to run, say, a cron job looking for MT items due to post? There must be a way…

Posted in Movable Type | 2 Comments