Welcome to your Monday open thread. So, the week starts anew. Lather, rinse repeat. What’s on the agenda this week?
I’m not sure whether to laugh or cry about this column from Fareed Zakaria. He’s apparently just now noticing that Republican policies are ideology-based and not reality-based.
Watching this election campaign, one wonders what has happened to that tradition. Conservatives now espouse ideas drawn from abstract principles with little regard to the realities of America’s present or past. This is a tragedy, because conservatism has an important role to play in modernizing the U.S.
Consider the debates over the economy. The Republican prescription is to cut taxes and slash government spending — then things will bounce back. Now, I would like to see lower rates in the context of tax simplification and reform, but what is the evidence that tax cuts are the best path to revive the U.S. economy? Taxes — federal and state combined — as a percentage of GDP are at their lowest level since 1950. The U.S. is among the lowest taxed of the big industrial economies. So the case that America is grinding to a halt because of high taxation is not based on facts but is simply a theoretical assertion. The rich countries that are in the best shape right now, with strong growth and low unemployment, are ones like Germany and Denmark, neither one characterized by low taxes.
Hey, it’s better late than never. Maybe having a pundit other than Paul Krugman saying it will make it stick.
If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend this piece by the New York Times on Clarence Thomas and his ongoing ethics problems. The latest revelations are about a very wealthy friend of Thomas who is doing favors for Thomas. Of course, cases of interest to the donor, Harlan Crow, have come before Thomas in the Supreme Court with no recusals by Thomas.
The two men met in the mid-1990s, a few years after Justice Thomas joined the court. Since then, Mr. Crow has done many favors for the justice and his wife, Virginia, helping finance a Savannah library project dedicated to Justice Thomas, presenting him with a Bible that belonged to Frederick Douglass and reportedly providing $500,000 for Ms. Thomas to start a Tea Party-related group. They have also spent time together at gatherings of prominent Republicans and businesspeople at Mr. Crow’s Adirondacks estate and his camp in East Texas.
In several instances, news reports of Mr. Crow’s largess provoked controversy and questions, adding fuel to a rising debate about Supreme Court ethics. But Mr. Crow’s financing of the museum, his largest such act of generosity, previously unreported, raises the sharpest questions yet — both about Justice Thomas’s extrajudicial activities and about the extent to which the justices should remain exempt from the code of conduct for federal judges.
Imagine that, the Supreme Court has decided it’s exempt from the ethics rules that bind other judges. Think Progress points out that other judges have had to resign for similar conflcts, most notably Abe Fortas. Time will only tell if the increased scrutiny will stick to Thomas, but he has proven to be pretty resilient in the past.