on politics

As we draw closer to a decision on nominees, some thoughts. My mother is going to vote for Hillary even though I don't think she loves her. My father is enthusiastically in favor of Cruz, to the point of trying to become a Cruz delegate to the RNC. I can no longer read my brother's thoughts on politics. My sister generally leans moderately rightward, but I think is in favor of Hillary because she supports the idea of a female president and doesn't like the Republican field.

I like Rubio the best of the candidates, but I don't like Rubio all that much. To suggest how much I dislike the rest of the field, I think I consider Clinton the second best option, and I don't trust her at all to govern the country.

The things I most value in a president are flexibility, openness to new ideas, pragmatism about working within the constraints of the political process combined with an idealism about the power of that process, and suspicion of the tyranny of the majority. The first several ideas are the reasons I'm a moderate, the latter idea is the primary reason I'm a moderate Republican. Rubio best exemplifies these traits out of all the candidates; Clinton doesn't exemplify any of them except the pragmatism about actually governing. None of the other candidates seem to exemplify any of these traits, and Trump is the slow motion national disaster that won't go away.

So I will participate in the electoral process as I always do, but I don't expect to find it particularly satisfying. There have to be people out there in this country who are better than this slate of candidates, there really do. I would like to know how we convince them to run.

(no subject)

Here, at ghost_lingering's request, some thoughts on the passing of Justice Antonin Scalia.

After Justice Roberts (obviously), Justice Scalia was the justice on the Supreme Court I most admired. (Kagan is third. My feelings about Justice Kagan are weird and ideologically inconsistent and probably have something to do with her vocal identification as a Jew and something to do with her sense of humor.)

I admired Scalia's rigorous and unorthodox conservatism, which was not my own conservatism in many respects, but which was often not the kind of conservatism liberals love to hate. I've heard many of my liberal friends, over the past fifteen years (the age of my consciousness of judicial matters), say that they were surprised to find that they didn't disagree with a particular Scalia opinion. I've never heard them say that of Alito. Scalia thought before he made a decision, and he thought hard and he held himself to as high a standard as he held litigants.

I admired his writing ability, his gift for distilling an argument in an opinion to its meat, to making the complex seem straightforward without hiding its complexity. He was unquestionably the best writer on the court (Kagan now takes his place, I think, perhaps another reason I admire her in spite of our ideological differences), though I'm told that his effort to explain his writing techniques to the public in a massive tome on legal writing were at best a mixed success. And I especially appreciated that Scalia's writing gifts pushed the other justices to do better. There was often a special section in recent opinions from the left-leaning justices dedicated just to responding to Scalia's dissent, and in cases where I didn't care enough to read all of the court's paperwork, I found that just reading this was enough to get to the heart of the legal question.

It is true that there are culture war issues that I strongly disagree with where he came down, and agree with those who feel he caused harm by his stances. But I also feel an appreciation for his struggle, for the difficulty posed by the tension between a love of freedom and an aspiration to live a godly life as one sees it. I don't think he always balanced that tension as well as he could have, but I think his life's work dwelled in that balance.

And I admired his love for the law and the Constitution and the passion with which he served those causes. Scalia was a giant on the court and his presence will be deeply missed, I believe, by thoughtful people on both sides of the aisle.