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Can States Decline to Enforce Federal Laws?

Mother Jones

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As long as we’re on the subject of shiny new gun laws, Steve Benen points out yet another offering from the great state of Texas:

Perhaps the most controversial of the gun-related items, HB 1076 would ban state agencies from enforcing any new federal gun laws, including background checks. The bill passed the Republican-led House on a largely party line vote Monday, but legal experts say the attempt to “nullify” possible future federal laws likely wouldn’t pass the scrutiny of the U.S. Supreme Court.

“That’s absurd beyond the word absurd. I like the author personally but that’s just pure political grandstanding,” said state Rep. Lon Burnam (D-Fort Worth).

This is actually a little more interesting. This legislation doesn’t claim that any new gun law would be unconstitutional, it merely says that no state officers will enforce it. If the feds want it enforced, that’s up to them.

I’m not really sure what the legal status of such a law would be, but I don’t think it’s self evidently absurd. The intersection of federal law and state enforcement is fairly complex, and states have considerable discretion about where and how they apply their resources.

In any case, I wonder what we’d all think about the constitutionality of this bill if it dealt with, say, federal marijuana laws instead of federal gun laws?

UPDATE: Jonathan Adler confirms via both email and blog post that this Texas law would probably be constitutional. “States can’t obstruct, but they don’t have to help,” he says. More here.

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Can States Decline to Enforce Federal Laws?

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Apparently Voters Don’t Know Much About the People They Vote For

Mother Jones

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California has recently enacted two electoral reforms. In June 2010, we passed an open primary initiative that allowed the top two finishers to go on the general election, even if both are from the same party, and a few months later we passed a second initiative that created a nonpartisan commission to draw district lines in congressional races. Supporters of these initiatives hoped that they would push Californians to vote for more moderate candidates.

Over at the Monkey Cage, a team of researchers reports on a study suggesting that the open primary law failed to accomplish this. Their methodology strikes me as a bit iffy, so I’d take it with a grain of salt, but I was interested in what their data said about why the open primary system seemingly failed to change things:

While voters are generally quite moderate and were willing to cast crossover votes (roughly 12% of our participants who voted for a major party candidate did so), they largely failed to discern ideological differences between extreme and moderate candidates of the same party, particularly if they were challengers

….Of particular interest in the second graph—which includes only Republican candidates—are the respondent placements for District 24. Abel Maldonado is a well-known moderate politician in California….His potential constituents rated him at roughly 5.25 on the 7-point scale. However, they gave almost the same rating to his fellow GOP challenger Chris Mitchum, a little-known actor and Tea Party candidate.

Again, I’d take this with a grain of salt. It’s one study, the sample sizes are fairly small, and it’s early days for open primaries. Still, I’d like to see further research specifically on the question of how accurately voters assess candidates. Certainly it’s my sense that plenty of primary campaigns are brutal affairs in which it’s crystal clear who the more extreme candidates are. But maybe that’s true only in the high-profile races that tend to get national coverage. In others, maybe voters really don’t have much of an idea of who’s the centrist and who’s out on the fringe. I’d certainly be curious to see this studied further.

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Apparently Voters Don’t Know Much About the People They Vote For

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Members of Congress With Daughters Vote Better on Women’s Issues

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Responding to Rob Portman’s change of heart on gay marriage after he learned his son is gay, Anil Dash tweets:

Eventually one of these Republican congressmen is going to find out his daughter is a woman, and then we’re all set.

Actually, this does make a difference. Remember this chart, showing how members of Congress vote on women’s issues?

Sure, the effect is small, but among both Democrats and Republicans, members of Congress tend to vote better on women’s issues if they have more daughters. Along the same lines, it’s instructive to look at which Republicans in the Senate voted for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. Personal experience makes a difference even here.

Mother Jones
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Members of Congress With Daughters Vote Better on Women’s Issues

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Extreme weather and GMO crops devastate monarch butterfly migration

Extreme weather and GMO crops devastate monarch butterfly migration

It’s not so much the butterfly effect as the butterfly affected: We knew monarchs had it bad as of late, but there was some hope for their winter migration — until scientists conducted a census.

JaguarFeather

In just two years, the annual migration of North American monarch butterflies has declined by 59 percent, and scientists are blaming extreme weather and “changed farming practices,” according to the New York Times. In other words, monster storms and monster Monsanto.

The area of forest occupied by the butterflies, once as high at 50 acres, dwindled to 2.94 acres in the annual census conducted in December, Mexico’s National Commission of Natural Protected Areas disclosed at a news conference in Zitácuaro, Mexico. …

The latest decline was hastened by drought and record-breaking heat in North America when the monarchs arrived last spring to reproduce. Warmer than usual conditions led the insects to arrive early and to nest farther north than is typical, Chip Taylor, director of the conservation group Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas, said in an interview. The early arrival disrupted the monarchs’ breeding cycle, he said, and the hot weather dried insect eggs and lowered the nectar content of the milkweed on which they feed.

That in turn weakened the butterflies and lowered the number of eggs laid.

But an equally alarming source of the decline, both Mr. Taylor and Mr. Vidal said, is the explosive increase in American farmland planted in soybean and corn genetically modified to tolerate herbicides.

The milkweed monarchs used to feed on in the corn belt is, well, a weed, and farmers have handily knocked it out while also expanding farmland by millions of acres each year. As milkweed-free farm land expands, food for monarchs disappears. Mexico claims to have cut back on deforestation in the monarchs’ migratory home, but we haven’t done our part on this side of the border. There’s no stopping drought and Roundup-Ready crops at this point.

Monarchs are one of the only insects capable of such a long-distance migration. Here, this cool German gif will tell you all about it:

If the monarch migration drops another half acre next year, scientists say, the butterflies may not be able to recover and the migration will end. If you live along the monarch’s flight path (and almost all of us do), planting milkweed in your garden couldn’t hurt. But also maybe book a flight to Mexico if you really want to see these guys doing their butterfly thing before it’s all gone.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Extreme weather and GMO crops devastate monarch butterfly migration

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It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

It’s too hot and muggy to work this century

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It’s getting too hot to get any work done.

Think back to summer. No, no, don’t think about the good times. Instead, try to remember what it was like when it was too stinkin’ hot to get any work done.

Humans don’t work so well when it’s stinking hot. And that means that as the globe warms around us, we’re doing less work. How much less? According to results of a study published Sunday in Nature Climate Change, humanity’s summertime productivity has already fallen 10 percent since before the Industrial Revolution. And it’s going to get worse.

Using middle-of-the-road future temperature and humidity projections, experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated that our productivity during the hottest months could drop by an additional 10 percentage points by 2050. More extreme warming would lead to more extreme impacts.

From Reuters:

A more extreme scenario of future global warming, which estimated a temperature rise of 10.8 degrees F (6 degrees C), would make it difficult to work in the hottest months in many parts of the world, [lead author John Dunne of NOAA’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in Princeton] said at a telephone briefing.

Labor capacity would be all but eliminated in the lower Mississippi Valley and most of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains would be exposed to heat stress “beyond anything experienced in the world today,” he said.

Under this scenario, heat stress in New York City would exceed that of present-day Bahrain, while in Bahrain, the heat and humidity could cause hyperthermia — potentially dangerous overheating — even in sleeping people who were not working at all.

All of which points to one thing: Less work, more party!

Right?

Oh. The hyperthermia thing.

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Want to Tackle Income Inequality? You Need to Go After Capital Gains.

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Greg Sargent calls our attention to a new study on rising income inequality today. The question at hand isn’t how much inequality has increased over the past couple of decades, it’s where the increase has come from. The study is from Thomas Hungerford, an analyst with the Congressional Research Service, and the chart on the right tells the story:

Wages, interest, and taxes have contributed to a lowering of income inequality.
Business income and retirement income have contributed to an increase in income inequality.
Capital gains and dividends have contributed more to the rise of income inequality than everything else put together.

As Hungerford put it in an interview, “The reason income inequality has been increasing has been the rising income going to the top one percent. Most of that has come in capital gains and dividends.” Sargent relates this to the current sequester talks:

This finding is directly relevant to the current debate, because Obama and Democrats want to offset the sequester in part by closing loopholes enjoyed by the wealthy, such as the one that keeps tax rates on capital gains and dividends low. Dems want to do this in order to prevent a scenario where the sequester is averted only by deep spending cuts to social programs that could hurt a whole lot of poor and middle class Americans. Republicans oppose closing any such loopholes and want to avert the sequester with only deep spending cuts.

If higher rates on capital gains were bad for growth, Obama’s proposal might be a bad idea. Maybe higher inequality is just the price we pay for a vibrant economy. The problem is that there’s very little evidence that low rates on capital gains have any effect on economic growth at all. In fact, you can make an argument that current rates are too low. It’s possible that higher rates might benefit the economy.

Bottom line: If you care about rising income inequality, you should care about capital gains because that’s mostly where the skyrocketing income increases of the past couple of decades have come from. And while the fiscal cliff deal raised rates on capital gains and dividends slightly, there’s still plenty of room for them to go up more. Done within reason, this is very unlikely to have a negative impact on economic growth, and it would be about the fairest possible way to increase revenues.

Hungerford’s full paper is here.

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Want to Tackle Income Inequality? You Need to Go After Capital Gains.

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Quiz: Can You Diagnose America’s Sickest Presidents?

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All in all, America’s presidents have been a sickly lot. Yet John Sotos, a California cardiologist who has spent more than a decade investigating and posthumously diagnosing their infirmities, from ague to Alzheimer’s, has found that a long medical history isn’t necessarily a barrier to making history. “The three best presidents we’ve had—Washington, Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt—were all visited by serious illness,” he says. “I wonder if there is something in that experience which humbles a man, and raises his decision-making to a higher plane.”

Ready to play doctor? Take this short quiz on some notable presidential afflictions.

var quiz = jQuery(‘#quiz_container’).quiz(‘0AqqLuNX4MRr1dERSOGd4YjJoZDlJdjhrb3FIeHJKR0E’); //your published spreadsheet key or URL goes here
Like this quiz? Wanna build your own? Check out our open-source quiz builder here!

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Quiz: Can You Diagnose America’s Sickest Presidents?

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