Category Public Policy

Should the Supreme Court be Televised?

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Kevin Drum wrote a post yesterday on the Supreme Court that I don’t totally agree with. He takes offense to Justice Antonin Scalia’s “arrogance” when he says”:

I’m against it because I do not believe […] that the purpose of televising our hearings would be to educate the American people. That’s not what it would end up doing. If I really thought it would educate the American people, I would be all for it. If the American people sat down and watched our proceedings gavel to gavel […] they would be educated. But they wouldn’t see all of that.

Your outfit would carry it all, to be sure, but what most of the American people would see would be 30-second, 15-second takeouts from our argument, and those takeouts would not be characteristic of what we do. They would be uncharacteristic.

But now what we see is an article in a newspaper that’s out of context with what you say is — (Bolding Drum’s)

That’s fine, but people read that and they say, well it’s an article in the newspaper, and the guy may be lying, or he may be misinformed. But somehow when you see it live, an excerpt pulled out of an entire — when you see it live, it has a much greater impact. No, I am sure it will miseducate the American people, not educate.

Drum has issue with Scalia’s disregard for the American public’s capacity to learn from the Supreme Court being televised. He admits that of course the media will take the most controversial snippets and the American public will just see small parts of it, but concludes:

So what? Nobody thinks that’s a good reason to limit access to any other branch of government. Politics is a messy game. It’s often unfair. That’s life, and in a democracy the public should get to see it unfold regardless of whether you think they’re smart enough to appreciate it.

I’m not sure I agree with this. The Supreme Court has to be as far above politics as we can make it. Over the past few decades, it has become more and more partisan, which is not good for the American people. We need justices who are  free to judge cases purely on the law, not play politics. At the Supreme Court level, justices cannot escape politics but putting them on TV would just exacerbate the problem.

It seems the same as the Federal Reserve Board meetings. These institutions make decisions that are extremely important to the country and we must protect them from politics in any way we can. One of those ways is keeping them off TV.

Graph of the Day: Obama’s Tax Plan vs. Romney’s Tax Plan

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

Courtesy of Naomi Robbins via Ezra Klein at Wonkblog, here’s how individuals at different income levels would fare under Obama and Romney’s tax plans. It’s not pretty:

 

Imagine if Americans saw this and believed it, would Romney even have a chance? Alas, that’s a pipe dream. Even those who do see it will believe the numbers were just manipulated and there’s no way Romney could have a tax plan like that. But those numbers come from the non-partisan Tax Policy Center and are not manipulated. Romney’s tax plan really is a massive tax cut for the rich.

Do Fire Drills Work?

Danny Vinik Leave a comment

So, I was woken up this morning at 5:30 am in my GW dorm to the fire alarm going off. While I can’t say for sure it was a drill, no fire trucks arrived and security seemed well aware that there wasn’t a fire. Did I mention it was 5:30 in the morning?

Now I was certainly not happy to be awake, but what may have annoyed me most was the whole idea of a fire drill. Do these things really work at all? I’m very skeptical.

In some places, I see the value of fire drills. In schools or camps where teachers and counselors keep attendance and can make sure everyone is accounted for, they are very valuable, especially with younger kids who would panic and run around aimlessly.

But in a dorm of a few hundred college kids? There’s no way for anyone to do a headcount. At South Hall (the dorm I’m in), there are two staircases and everyone slowly filed through them and out the doors and moved away from the building. There wasn’t much to it. In fact, there was nothing to it.

If a real fire were to happen in the dorm, everyone would head right for those stairs, even if we hadn’t had a drill. They would probably move a lot quicker and there’d be a good bit more pushing, but a fire drill just isn’t going to reduce people’s panic if there was an actual fire. In fact, fire drills have begun desensitizing students to the alarm. Everyone now just assumes it’s a drill, slowly gets their things together and heads outside.

At Duke, many kids don’t even bother coming outside, assuming there isn’t an actual fire. If the school didn’t conduct fire drills, the opposite would be true. Students would assume it was a real fire and would head outside quickly. And since in that hypothetical world where there are no drills, it’d be a good thing the students assumed it was a real fire and moved quickly since it would be a real fire.

And this is without bringing up the fact that this was at 5:30 in the morning and everyone in their building had to get to work in just a few hours. Imagine doing this in an apartment building full of adults. People would be furious.

I tried to find a study on whether fire drills like this (not school fire drills) actually work. I came up empty though. If anyone can point me to a study or present me with a good reason that shows me the value of them, I’m all ears. But I just don’t see what this morning’s drill accomplished. In fact, I think it actually makes fires more dangerous because of the desensitization.

Oh, and the number of fires has been steadily decreasing for years so these drills are becoming even more pointless. (Image via)