Meritocracy

MITHRIDATES
There is a long history of racial and gender discrimination in this country. For a generation, liberals and conservatives have debated whether affirmative action policies attempting to remedy this are good, right, and moral or counter-productive, wrong-headed, and racist themselves. Both groups (once their heads are removed from their nether regions) would no doubt agree that the best society would be one where all were treated equally, all groups were well-represented in important roles, and all this came about naturally without any identity-based policies to promote such an outcome.
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And we finally have signs of this. Distinguished luminaries from the right and left have claimed that liberals supported Obama in part because of white guilt. For me it was all about identity politics. I don't have any guilt over slavery. It's just that the guy has a white mother like I do.

But we know for sure that good old-fashioned Republicans would never engage in such identity politics and are committed to selecting leaders solely based on their merits. Which is why it's so comforting to note that since the Democrats nominated the first black Presidential candidate, the Republicans simply went about picking the most qualified VP candidate to run against Obama, the most qualified person to lead the opposition to Obama, and now the most qualified person to respond to Obama's address to congress — all without regard to gender, race, or ethnic background.

If it were the Democrats, doubters might suspect that they were playing identity politics, but with the Republicans we know it's just meritocracy pure and simple, and that it had nothing to do with fear of putting white men up against a black candidate and President.

We're almost there as a society. Almost.

State-Level Turkey-Pardoning: Is It Legal?

PHUTATORIUS
The eyes of the nation continue to be fixed on now-just-Governor Sarah Palin, who amused and bemused us last week with her high-profile turkey-pardoning pronouncement and subsequent "Faces of Death 2008" video-shoot. While I swallowed my dinner back down I had occasion to wonder: does a state governor really get to pardon a turkey?

I don't mean to pile on Ms. Palin. Well, I do — but not today. Today I'm thinking about federalism, the Constitution's Supremacy Clause, preemption, and what could happen to America's turkey factories (er, growers) if the chief executives of the Several States continue to go around relieving the nation's gobblers from their late-November obligations. This wasn't just an isolated incident in Alaska, after all: the governors of Alabama, Minnesota, Missouri, and North Dakota all made news this year with similar gestures of clemency.

This is all well and good, a break from politics for a bit of "levity," as Governor Palin said. But when you consider that these governors probably don't have the legal authority to put these turkeys back on the streets, it all starts to look a bit sinister. It's well-established, under the law, that the federal and state governments operate distinct, parallel criminal justice systems. Indeed, it's constitutionally axiomatic (by which I mean, "everybody but Sarah Palin should know") that the governor of a state can't use his/her pardon powers to excuse a person from federal charges.

With that in mind, and when you consider that Thanksgiving is a national holiday, one can't but conclude that these soft-on-poultry governors are acting in blatant excess of their constitutional powers. It's an open-and-shut case. Sure, all this seems "cute." The people smile and nod while these state officials take aim at the core of our constitutional system. A turkey wins its freedom today, and this seems like a laudable result. But what of tomorrow? What powers will these ambitious governors feel emboldened to arrogate to themselves tomorrow?

The Law is the Law. Unless the President of the United States intervenes to save them, these turkeys must die. For the sake of our nation, these turkeys must die.