Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Can Cannabis Cure Budget Woes?
The South is dry and will vote dry. That is, everybody sober enough to stagger to the polls will.
— Will Rogers
This week’s musings pertain to a leafy plant with the Latin name of Cannabis. It is a magical plant. When properly ingested or smoked, it can produce pleasurable physical affects on its user. But the didacticism of this column is about the fiscal, as distinguished from the physical, virtues of the plant. It is a column about common sense of which this country has precious little. It is a column about economics and compares the cost of leaving the leafy thing as an outcast in society or taking steps to help it gain respectability.
As might be expected, there are many ways of calculating the cost of treating the plant as something illegal to possess and it is beyond the scope of this column to choose between various studies. A “column on AlterNet published by Paul Armentano in 2007 states that it costs $1 billion annually to incarcerate U.S. citizens for criminal violations associated with our little green friend commonly known as marijuana. Referring to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics for 2005, Mr. Armentano says in 2005 there were 33,655 state inmates and 10,785 federal inmates incarcerated for marijuana offenses. Mr. Armentano further cites FBI reports that state that police arrested an estimated 786,545 people in 2005 on marijuana charges of which 88% were for possession only. Mr. Armentano was then the senior policy analyst for the NORML Foundation in Washington D.C., an organization devoted to educating American about marijuana and marijuana policy and his figures may be high.
A working paper entitled The Cost of Marijuana Prohibition on the California Criminal Justice System published in July 2010 by the Rand Drug Policy research Center analyzes more recent statistics and the works of Harvard economists, Jeffrey Miron and Dale Gieringer. According to the Rand paper, in 2005 Miron “estimated the dollar value of criminal justice resources being spent enforcing laws against marijuana production distribution and use” at $7.7 billion for the entire U.S. In 2010 those figures were revised upward to $13.7 billion of which $1.87 billion was California’s share. Mr. Giering, dealing exclusively with the California cost, comes in at a cost of $204 million and the Rand paper puts California’s cost in the range of $280 to $370 million per year. Whichever set of numbers is most accurate, the least of them is a large amount of money spent because of the leafy plant’s status in society. The cost of enforcing the laws is not the only cost associated with societal attitudes towards the plant. It is the other side of the equation-the amount of money that would be generated if marijuana were legalized and taxes and license fees imposed on those selling the product. In the United States, however, a puritanical instinct prevails, and communities and states are quite willing to cut off their noses to spite their faces.
In California, a state facing a 6 billion dollar budget shortfall for the current fiscal year and a $19 billion deficit for the 2011-2012 fiscal year, proposition 19, a ballot measure that would have legalized the personal use and possession of small amounts of marijuana, was defeated. Here is a sample of revenues the California voters rejected. Colorado, where medical marijuana sales are legal in a number of cities and towns provides Californians an insight into what they rejected. Fort Collins, home of Colorado State University (that permits its students to carry concealed weapons on campus) anticipates total receipts by year’s end of more than $250,000. Colorado Springs, home to Focus on the Family, is earning more than $50,000 a month in sales tax revenues. Boulder, home of the University of Colorado (whose students remain unarmed on campus pending the outcome of a lawsuit filed by those seeking six gun campus privileges) , anticipates receiving more than $400,000 in 2010. In addition to the amounts received by local communities, the state has received $2.2 million in tax revenue in 2010 and an additional $8.5 million in fees.
According to Donald Boudreaux, a professor of economics at George Mason University, prior to the advent of the personal income tax in 1913, liquor taxes accounted for one-third of the federal tax revenues. Those revenues dried up with passage of the 18th Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Boudreaux suggests that the 1933 repeal of the 18th amendment had less to do with congress’s belief that prohibition was silly than with its need for the revenues provided by taxes on liquor sales. Following prohibition’s repeal, liquor taxes as a percent of federal government revenues jumped from 2 percent in 1933 to 9 percent in 1934 and 13 percent in 1936. Perhaps some day citizens will awaken and marijuana prohibition will go the way of liquor prohibition and sales and other taxes and fees will rise. So will the spirits of much of the populace. Don’t hold your breath. Christopher Brauchli can be e-mailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Sharia Returns to Oklahoma
We are under a Constitution, but the Constitution is what the judges say it is, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.
— Charles Evans Hughes, May 3, 1907 Speech
Oklahomans now have a reason to really be mad. Before the recent election they were mad because of something they thought might happen some day even though it had never happened anywhere in the country. Now something bad has actually happened and unlike folks in Iowa, there is probably nothing they can do about it. I’m speaking of the 70% of the Oklahoma voters who on election day passed a constitutional amendment outlawing, among other things, the use of Sharia law in Oklahoma. Two days after the election Federal District Court Judge Vicki Miles-LaGrange said the amendment might run afoul of the U.S. constitution and said the state election board could not certify the results of the general election until after a November 22 hearing on a preliminary injunction.
Many Oklahomans took this as a sign that a judge had taken it upon herself to substitute her judgment for the will of the voters and at least one of them suggested that she be recalled. He probably hoped Oklahomans could imitate Iowans. He’s in for a disappointment, but first, here’s what happened in Iowa.
Iowa has a Judicial Merit Selection system. Judges in Iowa are appointed by the governor from among a group of lawyers recommended to the governor by a non-partisan commission. Periodically the judges stand for retention. The only question before the voters is whether the particular judge should be retained. The system has been applauded by those who believe that selection of judges should not be influenced by expensive campaigns involving contributions to the campaigns from those who may some day appear before the judicial officer receiving the contribution. The system is opposed by those who believe that a contested election involving lots of money contributes to a healthy democracy the way the infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars into the rest of the electoral process insures that the best candidate is elected.
The Iowa election demonstrated that even in retention elections where there is no competition, it is possible for the public to get involved in a meaningful way by contributing huge amounts of cash to those opposing a judge. Here’s why the Iowa justices were not retained by the voters.
In a unanimous ruling two years ago, the Iowa Supreme Court struck down a law that defined marriage as between a man and a woman. That decision made Iowa the first state to permit same-sex marriage. That upset those opposed to same sex marriage and they began a campaign to get rid of three of the Supreme Court justices in Iowa who were up for retention in 2010. Led by a group known as “Iowa for Freedom” (a group that supports most freedoms although not a freedom for homosexuals to marry whom they wish) and supported by $700,000 in contributions from inside and outside Iowa, they succeeded in getting the three justices up for retention removed from office in an election in which the only question was whether they should continue to serve. Bob Vander Plaats, who organized the group and directed the ad campaign against the judges, said this was a way to remind judges that “the people are watching their decisions closely and ultimately have final say over their government. “It’s we the people, not we the courts.” The people, he believes are more constitutionally literate than the courts. Iowa was not the only state affected by large infusions of cash in the 2010 election cycle.
Chief Justice Thomas Kilbride of Illinois was also on the ballot in an uncontested election where the only question was whether or not he should be retained. A pro-business group known as the Illinois Civil Justice League wanted him out and spent more than $1 million to convince voters to oppose his retention. In ads it ran it said he not only was anti-business but sided with sex-offenders and murderers, the kinds of things political opponents usually say about each other in contested elections but less frequently about someone who has no opponent. Justice Killbride raised $2 million to defend himself and was ultimately retained by 66% of the voters.
The lessons from Illinois and Iowa are that judicial retention elections are becoming increasingly ugly and are beginning to look like contested political contests instead of non-partisan judicial retention elections, a fact that will please those who want judges to enjoy the hurly burly of political life that those involved in the political process enjoy.
Oklahomans will probably suffer a bit of penal envy in that there is no way they can punish Judge Miles LaGrange at the polls. As a federal judge, she is not subject to recall. She can only be impeached by the U.S. Senate. And as if that weren’t bad enough, Oklahomans are once again threatened by the possible advent of Sharia law in Oklahoma courts. All in all, it has probably taken some of the fun out of the last election for them. Christopher Brauchli can be e-mailed at brauchli.56@post.harvard.edu. For political commentary see his web page at http://humanraceandothersports.com
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Sharia Leaves Oklahoma
You’re doin’ fine Oklahoma!
Oklahoma OK.
—A line from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical,
Oklahoma
Now that the election is over it’s time to look at one state that was able to take a very important step, a step for which is has received precious little publicity notwithstanding the step’s importance. It is the state of Oklahoma. With a 70.8% approval, the good citizens of that state have passed what is known as Oklahoma State Question 755 with the catchy name of “Save Our State” that can be viewed at a website with that name.
Upon seeing that title, one’s first assumption is that the Question is whether or not the two U.S. Senators from Oklahoma, Senators James Inhofe and Tom Coburn, should be recalled. The state would certainly be better off without either of them as would the rest of the country. That was not the question before the voters, however, and upon learning the nature of the question one learns that State Question 755 was a question with national significance.
Those who regularly appear in court in Oklahoma and in other state courts around the country are all too familiar with the first question that the judge usually asks when the proceedings begin. The question the judge asks the participants in the litigation is whether they want Sharia law or state and federal law to apply to the particular dispute they are having. There is no default rule so if the parties are unable to agree on what law to apply there is no set method in most states for resolving the dispute. It is entirely possible that the decision is left to the judge.
Rex Duncan, a member of the Oklahoma State Legislature who elected to leave the legislature in order to run (successfully) for District Attorney in Osage and Pawnee Counties in Oklahoma, came up with a creative solution to this problem that, like the anti-immigration statute enacted in Arizona, is almost certain to be copied in forward looking states around the country. In the spring of 2010, Representative Duncan persuaded his colleagues in the state legislature to adopt House Joint Resolution 1056 that placed before voters the question of whether they should amend the state Constitution to require the courts to “uphold and adhere to the law” as provided in the Oklahoma and United States Constitutions as well as the U.S. Code and federal regulations and Oklahoma statutes and rules.” It forbids courts from considering or using international law or Sharia law.
Before the legislature voted, Representative Duncan, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee, favored his colleagues with a brief history lesson. He said that “The whole point of the Revolutionary War was so Americans would not be under the thumb of foreign rulers. . . . My legislation would allow the voters to prevent judges in Oklahoma from undermining our democracy and legal system in the future.” He said his proposal constituted a preemptive strike against Shania law coming to Oklahoma and “While Oklahoma is still able to defend itself against this sort of hideous invasion, we should do so.” Representative Lewis Moor, a co-author of the bill said: “I don’t think we should accept or encourage Sharia law in any way, shape or form.” Another sponsor of the Resolution, Senator Anthony Sykes said: “Sharia law coming to the U.S. is a scary concept. Hopefully the passage of this constitutional amendment will prevent it in Oklahoma.”
Supporters of the law took no chances that State Question 755 would not pass handsomely. Brigitte Gabriel, an international terrorism analyst and president of ACT! For America.org explained in a press release for the benefit of those who didn’t know, the genesis of Sharia and how it specifically impacts women. She did not address the question of how frequently Sharia law is being applied in the United States since that was adequately addressed by the sponsors and authors of the legislation. She did say that her group wants “to make sure that the people in Oklahoma are educated about what Sharia law is all about and its ramifications. We are not taking any chances with this initiative passing marginally. We hope it passes with great victory.” John Swails, director of the Center of Israel and Middle East Studies at Oral Roberts University, came out in support of the measure. In explaining his support he cited a little known fact (by perhaps anyone but him) that supporters of Sharia are beginning a campaign to have the U.S. embrace Sharia.
The Oklahoma newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle, unaware of the problems Mr. Duncan and friends see, said, “There is no need for this law because judges exclusively use state and federal law to guide their decisions.” The paper said it was nothing more than a “feel-good measure.” The measure passed overwhelmingly and the state of Oklahoma was, as the measure’s title promised, saved. The title of the measure notwithstanding, a non-Oklahoman would be hard pressed to understand why that would make anyone feel good.