The Great Debate

President Barack Obama made the middle class the focus of his State of the Union address on Tuesday. He was lauded by some as fighting for jobs and opportunity, and even for launching a “war on inequality” equivalent to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1960s War on Poverty. He was assailed by others for showing his true colors as a man of big government and wealth redistribution.

Yet the initiatives Obama proposed are striking not for their sweep but for their limited scope. That reflects both pragmatism and realism: Not only is the age of big government really over, so is the age of government as the transformative force in American society. And that is all for the best.

Wait a minute, you might reasonably object: What about healthcare? What about the proposals for minimum -wage increases, for expanded preschool, for innovation centers, for $50 billion in spending on roads and infrastructure? Surely those are big government and aim, effectively or not, for transformation?

Healthcare and the changes under the Affordable Care Act are significant, and for now they have expanded the scope and cost of government However, those costs appear to be growing more slowly than expected, at least according to the Congressional Budget Office. While healthcare costs are increasingly untenable, the issue is one of healthcare costs for society as a whole. Recent legislation means government bears more of them, but someone will bear them no matter what.

So while healthcare is billed as an expansion of government, it is more a continuing issue of cost and delivery of something that has to be paid for by someone and at some cost.

There are deep ironies in the current case against Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Before a 5-4 Republican majority of the Supreme Court opens the door to stronger voter suppression laws by overturning it in Shelby County v. Holder, the justices ‑ and the informed public ‑ should consider how effective Section 5 has been. Highly unusual political conditions made the act’s passage and renewals possible, and there would be almost insuperable difficulty in replacing it now that those conditions have changed.

Since 2009, I have been compiling a comprehensive list of voting rights incidents. (I have also served as an expert witness in such voting rights cases as those challenging the 2011 Texas redistricting laws.) The list now has 4,141 incidents: legal cases brought under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act; legal cases brought under Section 5 of the act; objections by the Justice Department under Section 5 and “more information requests” issued by the department as part of the Section 5 process, if they resulted in pro-minority changes in election laws; and 14th Amendment cases.

Unpublished, as well as published, cases are included in the statistics below only if they resulted in changes in the election laws that helped minorities. Some are recorded in printed opinions, but many resulted in informal or court-approved settlements. In other instances, merely filing a lawsuit led to the changes in election laws that minority plaintiffs sought. This is a far larger number of incidents than in any database referred to in the Shelby County briefs.

Now that Pyongyang has conducted its third nuclear test, the international community must accept what it cannot change: North Korea is a nuclear-arming state.

No sanctions, no carrots, no rhetoric, no threat, no military act is likely to change this fact. The question now is how to minimize risks. First, we need to take a deep breath before we leap to any new policy.

The impulse to push the North’s nuclear toothpaste back into the tube will remain. But sanctions have repeatedly failed. For reasons known only to itself, China — the one country that can effectively pinch North Korea both economically and politically — continues to provide Pyongyang with energy and foodstuffs. Beijing’s policy will likely continue.

In 1988, Michael Dell was a 23-year-old wunderkind who sold cheap computers directly to “end users,” which is what he called his customers. He arranged an initial public offering to raise cash and attract top-tier engineers and managers while basking in the light of transparency.

Dell was so small that the IPO wasn’t mentioned in the New York Times. At around $12 million, or $23 million in 2013 dollars, the book value of Dell’s common stock likely would have been too low to entice a modern-day Goldman Sachs, one of its lead underwriters. But Dell’s IPO was a winner. In two months, its stock price jumped from 19 cents to $8.50 per share. By the end of the year, it had made $159 million in sales.

Last week, Dell announced a stunning $24.4 billion leveraged buyout. If the plan manages to survive, it will allow Dell to reboot his ailing company free from the public glare. The deal is the largest of its kind since 2008, but it’s also notable because it marks the waning of the public company era.

Valentine’s Day is a time when couples go out for romantic dinners and exchange gifts, while singles meet up in bars, hoping to make some bad decisions. Valentine’s Day is also a day when people with crazy ex-boyfriends or -girlfriends are reminded of how thankful they are for anti-stalking laws.

Every state has made stalking a crime. These laws help protect people who might otherwise live in fear. Yet labor unions have successfully, and disconcertingly, lobbied to be exempt from anti-stalking laws in at least four states – California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and Nevada.

“The most glaring examples of union favoritism under state laws,” notes a 2012 U.S. Chamber of Commerce report, “tend to occur in criminal statutes and allow individuals who engage in truly objectionable behavior to avoid prosecution solely because they are participating in some form of labor activity.”

February 1913 marked a turning point in U.S. history. One hundred years ago this month, the states ratified the 16th Amendment, clearing the way for adoption of a federal income tax. Two decades before, in 1892, the Populist Party had first put a progressive income tax on the national agenda.

The income tax faced steep conservative opposition. Since it was enacted, in fact, the political wars over income tax have never stopped. Conservatives battled against it when it was first proposed and have continued the struggle ever since. Now, Tea Party conservativism has given that fight new force.

The economist Joseph Schumpeter called tax systems the “thunder of world history.” Because if you dig beneath the rhetoric, tax systems reveal the underlying direction in which societies move. The saga of the income tax says a great deal about changes in America.

Last month, Elle magazine published a letter to columnist E. Jean seeking marital advice. “I suspect,” confided the reader, “he’s putting something in my coffee.” If that weren’t enough, her skin showed alarming reactions to the usual lotions. Would a hidden camera catch hubby in the act? The reader was advised to get an attorney posthaste and check her bank accounts: “A husband who tampers with a wife’s moisturizers,” warned E. Jean, “will tamper with her money.”

Poison is an ancient method of dispatching a spouse or lover. But when we think of plots involving philters and powders, a female usually springs to mind, like the fabled Black Widow. Is poison becoming egalitarian in an age when more women hold the power and the purse strings?

Men are still by far the deadlier species, regardless of method: the U.S. Justice Department reports that in 2008 they committed seven times more murders than women and made up 60.5 percent of poisoners from 1980 to 2008. Of 130 poison homicides between 2000 and 2010 listed in the Wall Street Journal’s “Murder in America” database, 71 of the identified killers were male, while 62 were female. During the same period, women pulled the trigger in firearms killings more than 5,000 times. Like men, they overwhelmingly prefer guns. Women are a bit more likely to choose poison, but the numbers are so negligible they hardly justify the stereotype of the female poisoner. You are far more likely to be knifed by a woman than poisoned by one, through slightly less likely to be defenestrated.

Urbanists were excited by President Obama’s election in 2008, as it heralded the first time in a century that a president would come from a major city. And Obama was not just a resident of Chicago, he had worked as a community organizer. On the campaign trail he promised groups such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors that – after years of neglect under Republicans – his tenure would feature federal cooperation with, and attention to, cities.

So they were dismayed when Obama picked Ray LaHood, a Republican congressman from Peoria, Illinois, for Secretary of Transportation. It appeared that Obama had subjugated urban interests to his desire to appear bipartisan.

That was especially worrisome because federal transportation policy was overdue for a change. Democrats, and a handful of Northern Republicans, are becoming concerned about the nation’s massive infrastructure deficit, and are calling for a transportation policy envisioning bolder solutions. As the price of gasoline rises, climate change wreaks more havoc, and the millennial generation returns to the cities that their parents forsook, there is an increasing demand for alternatives to new highways, such as bicycle lanes, sidewalks, trains and buses. Urban policy wonks feared that LaHood ‑ who announced his retirement earlier this month ‑ would not promote these views.

If the Supreme Court strikes down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, the focus will turn to Congress and the question of what legislation it should enact in place of Section 5. An equally compelling question is what will happen to the scope of congressional authority over elections.

In City of Boerne v. Flores (1997), the court identified the Voting Rights Act as the ideal piece of remedial legislation, perfectly tailored to address the harm of voting discrimination and therefore an “appropriate” use of congressional authority. The court made this determination without discussing the combined authority of Congress under the 14th and 15th Amendments to regulate state and federal elections. The decision focused only on authority granted under the 14th Amendment.

The Shelby County case now gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to consider congressional authority over elections in aggregate. If the court invalidates Section 5, it would be a clear rejection of broad congressional authority to regulate state and federal elections. This outcome would be problematic, however, because the court has never considered the importance of Section 2 of the 14th Amendment on the scope of congressional authority over elections.

An aura of excitement and predictability surrounds the president’s annual State of the Union speech: A few days of hyped drama and TV punditry build to a political Woodstock featuring generals, justices, senators, Cabinet secretaries and House members, all under one roof. Up in the balcony, the First Lady plays host to a few iconic citizens who recently shared a heroic moment of fame with America.

Environmentalists are on higher-than-normal alert this year, after President Barack Obama made a sweeping inaugural promise to tackle climate change, an issue he had largely avoided during his first term.

If the president reprises that theme in Tuesday’s speech, he’ll join a long list of predecessors warning that we’re leaving a mess for future generations. And if past is prologue, the green talk and pageantry may be the only things delivered on the president’s lofty words.