Category: Government, Policy, & Politics

Texas’s H.B.2 statute imposed regulations that yielded no health benefit but made abortion a lot harder to get. The Supreme Court wasn’t fooled.

As Breyer noted, “When directly asked at oral argument whether Texas knew of a single instance in which the new requirement would have helped even one woman obtain better treatment, Texas admitted there was no such evidence in the record.”

Source: The Rules for Abortion Are Still Rules—Not Loopholes

Source: How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

Republicans and Democrats of 2016 have neither intelligible boundaries nor enforceable norms. As a result, renegade political behavior pays.

What we are seeing is not a temporary spasm of chaos but a chaos syndrome. Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. … Like many disorders, chaos syndrome is self-reinforcing. It causes governmental dysfunction, which fuels public anger, which incites political disruption, which causes yet more governmental dysfunction.

The core idea of the Constitution was to restrain ambition and excess by forcing competing powers and factions to bargain and compromise. … They were visionaries, those men in Philadelphia, but they could not foresee everything, and they made a serious omission. Unlike the British parliamentary system, the Constitution makes no provision for holding politicians accountable to one another. … So Americans developed a second, unwritten constitution. Beginning in the 1790s, politicians sorted themselves into parties.

Continue reading How American Politics Became So Ineffective – The Atlantic

Source: Why We Need to Take the ‘Fire’ Out of ‘Fire Department’

Firefighters don’t actually fight that many fires these days. It’s time to re-think how we deliver costly emergency services.

In 1980, according to the National Fire Protection Association, the nation’s 30,000 fire departments responded to 10.8 million emergency calls. About 3 million were classified as fires. By 2013, total calls had nearly tripled to 31.6 million, while fire calls had plummeted to 1.24 million, of which just 500,000 of were actual structure fires.

Source: The Weaknesses of a Popular Primary System – The Atlantic

four goals that a [presidential] selection system should ideally be able to achieve:

(1) It should promote candidates with presidential character,

(2) the accession to power should be seen as legitimate,

(3) the executive should have qualifications for the office, and

(4) “highly ambitious” people should be prevented from taking office.