Seems hardly an election cycle passes without several marijuana initiatives on the ballot. This season’s players are Washington, Alaska and the District of Columbia. The states would allow for retail pot shops, like those recently established by law in Colorado. D.C.’s ballot measure would merely legalize possession. And for what it’s worth, Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley recently announced he would himself vote for the Oregon ballot measure – to become the first US senator to ever support marijuana legalization.

The tide for pot legalization is rising nearly as fast as that for gay marriage – and, reassuringly, it doesnt depend on the learned liberalism of federal judges; it is rather the consequence of its popularity in an increasingly liberal electorate. Medical marijuana is now legal under state law in nearly half the states, and possession has been decriminalized in about one-third of all states.

Opposition to marijuana legalization is as lovely a dunce cap as a conservative ever wore. People who claim to fear government power, and who eschew a state’s paternalism toward its adult citizens, should arrive easily to the policy position of marijuana legalization. Not so for conservatives, whose fear of government power is somehow not triggered by the American gulag system, which has given the US the highest incarceration rate in the world, driven significantly by drug prohibition. Conservative esteem for “personal responsibility” is somehow inapplicable to the idea of letting adults decide what’s best for their minds and bodies. One hears conservatives babble about the need to “protect society” from the scourge of individual drug use, and wonders why they dont have a similar desire to protect society from individual decisions to go without health insurance, acquire firearms, or not save for retirement.

Conservatism, after all, is defined by its lack of principles. Compared to real political philosophies, such as liberalism, conservatism is ten pounds of crap crammed into a five-pound bag, thrown together by historical accident, and bound together by the perspicacious philosophical insight that everything was better in the old days. Except for slavery, women’s subjugation, Jim Crow, witch burnings, the Japanese internment, the eugenics movement and the McCarthy hearings, America’s past is a veritable touchstone of enduring values and right-mindedness – ah, the good ol’ days….

One day – hopefully soon – people who come out opposed to slam-dunk liberal policies like gay marriage and marijuana legalization will sound as loony as advocates for slavery and the repeal of women’s right to vote – policy positions so extreme that they have become publicly unspeakable, relegated to extremist movements like the Taliban or white supremacists. This is why elements within American conservatism are branded as the “American Taliban”: they espouse policies as comparably baseless, venal and backwards. Opposition to science – whether on the subject of evolution, global warming, or the safety and efficacy of medical cannabis – is indistinguishable from opposition to rationality itself. And once untethered from reality, human belief systems are free to wander among the fields and streams of mythology, leaving infinitely every viewpoint as valid as any other.

With the midterm elections fast approaching, a little-known and unfortunate quirk in the American electoral system merits attention. It may surprise you to learn that prisoners are counted as residents of whatever town, county, and-or state in which they are imprisoned. And since most states do not permit prisoners to vote, counting prisoners in this way artificially inflates the voting power of people who happen to live close to prisons. Upon incarceration, an American adult isnt merely stripped of the right to vote – his vote is taken from him and given, collectively, to people who share the prison’s political subdivision.

This policy reduces the electoral representation of cities and sends it out to rural areas where large prisons are most commonly situated. In some cases, the residents of sparsely populated areas have double the voting power of other voters – courtesy of the incarcerated, who havent even necessarily been found guilty!

This policy is worse than was the three-fifths compromise, itself a high-water mark for cynicism. While slavery was still legal in the US south, southerners wanted to have their pecan pie and eat it too. With respect to civil and political rights, they didnt want to regard blacks as human beings; but in order to gain more representation in Congress and more votes in the electoral college for presidential elections, southern politicians needed to maximize their headcount. And so for purposes of the US Census, if the South had its way, lawsy mercy, yes: blacks are people too!

North and South struck an unseemly compromise, which permanently mars the US Constitution: a slave was to be treated as three-fifths of a human being for purposes of apportionment. Of course slaves werent allowed to vote – the votes their bodies accrued went, perversely, to free white southern voters, who consequentially got 30% more Congressman and 30% more electors in the Electoral College.

Though their absolute numbers are smaller, US electoral practices with respect to prisoners are even more unjust. They are denied the right to vote in 48 of 50 states. (Maine and Vermont are the exceptions.) And yet they are counted as full-fledged residents of their place of incarceration – literally transferring their voting power, intact, to others. Since the federal prison system often shifts inmates across state lines, this practice serves to arbitrarily transfer voting power from states with high crime rates to states with large prison populations.

This practice isnt confined to the usual backward states. In New York City, prisoners incarcerated on Rikers Island are counted as residents of Astoria, inflating the voting power of that neighborhood’s residents on the City Council. Similar distortions are seen in municipal governing bodies all across New York State.

It was only recently that college students were finally treated as residents where they attend college, to allow them to participate in the politics of the place they spend most of their time. By a similar logic, prisoners who are allowed to vote should either be counted as residents of their place of incarceration, or of their last place residence. But for the 99% of US prisoners who are not allowed to vote, their voting power should not be arbitrarily bestowed on the people who happen to live near the prison. Instead, it should remain in the community where the prisoner last resided. Even better, if states insist on denying the right to vote to prisoners and felons, their representation should be accordingly diminished for purposes of federal elections.

Refs:

http://www.acslaw.org/acsblog/counting-on-prisoners-the-use-of-inmates-in-apportionment

http://www.prisonersofthecensus.org/faq.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/nyregion/07inmates.html?_r=3&

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

A departure from recent Attorneys General who mindlessly signed on to ever-increasing executive power – whether under the auspices of the Patriot Act, FISA or otherwise – Eric Holder took a stand for civil liberties: voting rights, gay rights, limits on police aggression, and human rights for undocumented immigrants. While previous AGs often sought to increase the power and reach of their office, Holder provided a well-needed retreat from the illiberal policies of his predecessors.

The contrast with Bush Duh’s first two AGs, John Ashcroft and Alvaro Gonzalez, is striking. The former was a renowned cipher who only became AG after losing a Senate election to a dead man – a feat never accomplished before or since. As AG, Ashcroft infamously defended the Patriot Act against all comers, championing, among other things, the government’s new power to search library records to discover the reading habits of individual Americans. (In fairness, Ashcroft took a stand against Stellar Wind, another surveillance program.)

Next came Alvaro Gonzalez, who only lasted two and a half years, and seemed out of his depth from day one. He spent his time in office defending expanded police search and seizure powers, and looking for legal justifications for torture. His prodigious talents prepared him for his current position, the dean of Belmont College of Law. If you’ve never heard of Belmont Law, that may be because it was only founded three years ago.

Comparisons with Clinton’s AG and Holder’s one-time boss, Janet Reno, are no less interesting. Reno was an aggressive, efficient cop in the Rudolph Giuliani and Elliot Ness style. The longest serving US AG in 185 years, Reno gets credit for the capture and conviction of five 1993 World Trade Center bombers, two Oklahoma City bombers, and the Unabomber; and for taking on Microsoft when it was the most valuable corporation in world history. But she is fairly criticized for using excessive force in the Elian Gonzalez matter and the siege at Waco.

Holder, by comparison, has shown leniency – for good and for bad. His “too big to jail” policy with respect to bankers led to zero prosecutions in the wake of the subprime mortgage market collapse. Under him, the DOJ’s prosecution of large financial services firms has fallen to its lowest level in 20 years. However his “Smart on Crime” program seeks to avoid harsh sentencing when the facts of a case do not merit such. He’s also backed off on enforcing federal marijuana laws in states where the drug was decriminalized under state law.

Serving as AG during the so-called war on terror, Holder has been faced with the constant temptation to expand the police power at the expense of personal liberty. Waging that war abroad, he’s been aggressive, penning the legal defense for the operation that assassinated Osama bin Laden, and for the use of drones to assassinate other terrorist leaders abroad, including US citizens. But domestically Holder has been reserved, criticizing Bush Duh’s implementation of the Patriot Act and use of electronic surveillance, and condemning torture. His Justice Department has nonetheless prosecuted six government employees for leaks (compared to just three prosecutions in all of US history before), and has electronically surveilled members of the press, denying the right of journalists to protect the identity of their sources.

Holder’s respect for civil rights and limits on the police power are a major upgrade over Bush Duh’s AGs. His aggressiveness in pursuing politically unpopular liberal causes – fighting Arizona’s ill-considered immigration law, and taking on voter ID laws and redistricting in the deep south – has been laudable. Overall, Holder has been a very good AG, and as his tenure draws to a close, it’s worth pausing to reflect on how fortunate the country has been to have someone with talent, tenacity and conscience in that office – for a change.