I’d like to do two things with this post. First, I’ll present one of the better arguments I’ve seen for why Libertarians should vote for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama. Second, I’ll look briefly at the debate earlier this week.
The argument for why Libertarians should vote for Romney can be found here. It’s a very short, but very insightful read. The basic premise of Ted Frank’s argument is that, if Obama is reelected, he will be able to appoint a successor to Kennedy and/or Scalia on the Supreme Court, who are both in their late 70’s and likeliest to leave the court. The author argues that if that happens, then it is game over the for the Libertarian movement because of the present composition of the court. Per Frank:
· “There are four justices on the Supreme Court ready to hold that the First Amendment does not bar Congress from regulating political speech against incumbents.· There are four justices on the Supreme Court ready to hold that the Second Amendment does not create any individual rights against the government.· There are four justices on the Supreme Court ready to hold that the Commerce Clause creates no constraint on Congress's regulatory powers.· There are likely at least four justices on the Supreme Court ready to hold that the government can choose to discriminate on the basis of race if "diversity" is at issue.”
I view these as very legitimate concerns, as we’ve already seen these come to fruition with opinions held by Obama’s two appointees, who are among the justices mentioned above. The 5-4 rulings that are upholding personal rights would consistently morph into 5-4 (or worse) rulings cutting those rights down. Remember, these are lifetime appointments.
One natural counter to this argument is that Romney has already held up Bork and Roberts as examples of the kinds of justices he would nominate. Frank is not concerned about this, but I see it as an important counterpoint. The problem here is that Bork, and Roberts to a degree at times, are advocates of Supreme Court deference to the will of the elected majority. Here’s the thing, though. The Supreme Court was designed to uphold the Constitution and as a check against the tyranny of the majority over the minority. In other words, it has to be able to make unpopular rulings to honor the principles of the Constitution that defend the rights of the people against the power of the government.
While another Roberts could not be counted on as a reliable vote as Scalia or Thomas at checking government power, one of them would be more reliable at doing so than another Obama appointee based on everyone’s rulings to this point. Kennedy is a wild-card on a lot of rulings and Scalia consistently limits government power. Roberts still generally limits government power, but is much more of a wild-card in the wake of his Obamacare ruling. The Obama appointees consistently uphold government power over the people. There is no reason for us to expect Obama to change his philosophy in future appointees.
So, here’s the bottom line on Frank’s argument. I think it’s a very compelling case that Libertarian-minded voters should seriously consider in swing states (I’ll explore why I single out swing state voters in a future post). The importance of the Supreme Court is highly underappreciated. I understand that a vote for the lesser of two evils is still a vote for evil, but I also think Obama appointees replacing Kennedy and/or Scalia on the Supreme Court would present an existential threat to the Libertarian movement. Conceding the battle against the two-party monopoly in 2012 in the swing states to allow the war continues into the future may indeed be the best course of action here. I don’t like the idea, but life is full of choices, some without appeal.
I don’t want to spend too much time talking about the debate because you’ve no doubt heard a lot about it already and I’ve already gone on for a while, but here are my impressions. Expectations for Romney were set very low by just about everyone, myself included. Romney was overall the clear winner and surprised a lot of people. He stormed out the gate and caught Obama off-guard, putting Obama into a hole that he was never quite able to get out of. Obama managed to prevent the debate from turning into a total landslide, but he clearly lost. On an absolute basis, Romney performed very well, but his performance looks even better when viewed in a relative context to both expectations and Obama’s performance.
All that said, the impact of Romney’s debate victory has been dampened considerably with the news of a drop in U3 unemployment under 8%. Note that U6 did not change, but that’s not what’s getting headlines. I will be very interested to see how the future revisions come in, as I expect large and negative revisions…after the election. We also saw an increase in food stamp recipients after the market close on Friday (when nobody was paying attention), which was decidedly less friendly to the Obama case. The Obama camp did a masterful job of using the press as a tool and highlighting the good while downplaying the bad. This should be no surprise.
There’s still a month to go to the election with two more presidential debates, a vice-presidential debate, numerous economic data releases, and a lot of global tension. The race is tight and it should be a wild one.
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