Comments by lordsutch

I can only figure the Paul/Santorum strategery is to be the last anti-Romney standing. Because that strategy worked out so well for Huckabee in 2004.

M.S.: I'm just confused what makes you think Boehner can't deliver a few dozen GOP votes if Obama puts the full-court-press on the Democrats to pass something. There are at most 100 GOP members who are genuinely vulnerable to primary challenges, and most of them are relatively new (i.e. more likely to be conservative anyway).

As for Boehner getting deposed, as long as the Republicans who are vulnerable have enough political cover - which they now have, because they passed the Boehner 2.0 bill - they have no reason to get rid of Boehner. As long as his fingerprints aren't all over the compromise (hence why guys like Cantor were doing all the public heavy lifting before) he's clean.

Having said that the center/left hysterics are playing right into Boehner's hands on this by convincing Democrats that they have to commit electoral suicide by supporting a compromise well to the right of what they ought to be bargaining for. The Republicans thank you for your support.

We do see something effectively like this in electronics; the FCC RF emissions standards for electronics are harmonized to be essentially the same as the Canadian, EU, Japanese, etc. standards, so cell phones and laptops and TVs and the like can essentially be universal goods (to the extent that universal 100-250V power supplies are common even in things that aren't very portable). And the FAA's standards for aviation are essentially duplicated in the EU, Canada, etc. with some minor exceptions too. Probably the lack of regulatory consistency in health care has to do with the relative lack of international trade in health services, along with disparities between countries (even in pharmaceuticals, which are traded across borders) regarding narcotics laws and who pays for drugs - and thus whether or not pharmaceutical companies are seen as a public utility (the Canadian/British model) or mostly private concerns (the US model).

nkab asks "Tell me, dear Economist, how is that much different in substance with the US Congress rule book on how a Congressperson would wish to speak on the podium?"

Well, I'm not the Economist, but the Constitution of the United States includes something called the "speech or debate clause," in Article I, Section 6, which reads: "for any Speech or Debate in either House, they [the representatives and senators] shall not be questioned in any other Place." This, coupled with Supreme Court decisions which have rejected the doctrine of prior restraint, would suggest that any senator or representative can rise and ask any question or make any statement they choose without legal liability or censorship.

A similar privilege is accorded to members of most other legislatures in democratic countries in the developed and developing world alike.

The impression I got from the documentary was that the coalition agreement wasn't finalized until after Cameron met with the Queen; Cameron says he told the Queen something to the effect of "I intend to form a government, but I'm not exactly sure what that government will be yet." (I don't remember the exact quote, but that was the gist of it.)

I think the arithmetic was such that a Lib-Lab coalition while a minority government (315 seats) still couldn't be outvoted by the Conservatives on their own (306 seats). If you assume that the SDLP would have tacitly supported the coalition and the SNP and PC would have stayed out of things, the Tories wouldn't have the numbers to bring down a Lib-Lab government even with DUP backing.

It seems to me the simplest way to explain the ruling is that judges' decisions are guided by the law and not "the precautionary principle." Salazar's moratorium exceeded the legal authority delegated to DoI/MMS by Congress, because the law requires that agency decisions be grounded in empirical findings and expert research. The findings in reports commissioned by DoI did not rise to the level to justify the blanket nature of the ban. See e.g. the analyses of the decision posted by various contributors at the Volokh Conspiracy.

Now, if you think the job of judges is to be magical fairies of righteousness, or to substitute airy principles for the laws passed by Congress, I suppose the ruling could be confusing.

I think chgb is confused; France's system is not a "PR vote" but a majority-runoff system. And this is a classic example of a pathology of the majority-runoff design: Bayrou, who was the least disliked candidate (technically, the "Condorcdet winner") is not even in the runoff because he didn't place first or second in a single-ballot format. That said, a better way to explain it would be that Bayrou is preferred to both Sarkozy and Royal. An outcome that would be preferred by Royal voters to Sarkozy winning - Bayrou winning - cannot happen; similarly, an outcome that would be preferred to Sarkozy winning - Bayrou winning - also cannot happen. Thus either Royal's or Sarkozy's supporters are going to be more disappointed by the outcome than a Condorcet process (which comes closer to satisfying Arrow's conditions, but can be imperfect too), which would have made Bayrou the winner. The tradeoff in majority-runoff is that the other group of supporters will be happier that their candidate wins instead of Bayrou, and at least there is a guarantee that the winner got a popular majority at some point. The Condorcet criterion prefers "middle" outcomes over extreme ones - even if that support for the middle is somewhat tepid.Comment originally posted on April 24, 2007 6:03 AM