Tacit Powers and Missing the Point

The supreme court succession now seems to be signed and sealed, but I've got a couple of questions that are unresolved. First, why did Jusitice Souter resign? The standard answer seems to be that he hated D.C., he wanted to go back to New Hampshire (click your heels three times), and the desire to be replaced by someone with a liberal slant (mission accomplished), which was likely while Obama is in office. This leads me to the second question: is there any precedent for strategic resignations in the supreme court? As far as I can tell, Art. 3 of the American constitution does not include influencing the future composition or decisions of the court as one of its powers. On the contrary, it seems to expect justices to serve until they are no longer able or invalidate themselves with bad behaviour. That they would manage their tenure strategically seems to be a blindspot.

Strategic resignation is not a new phenomenon in general. There are plenty of examples of national leaders resigning with the ground laid for particular heirs, as in Uzbekistan, Egypt, or N. Korea. This happens all the time, and it was probably even more common when royal dynasties were still going concerns, but those decisions tend to be (at least de facto) extra-constitutional. Is this a regular occurrence for the US supreme court, and does it have any legal/constitutional backing?

The second burr in my saddle is the resolution of Ulla Schmidt's vacation plans. The German health minister got in trouble recently for flying to Spain, having her chauffeur drive her official, armoured Mercedes to meet her in Spain, and then looking foolish when the car got stolen. She has been cleared of wrongdoing, because it is legal for ministers to use their official cars for private purposes, as long as they pay tax on the private use. Her party's leader has now reinstated her place in the "competence team" (read, shadow cabinet) for the barely noticeable election campaign.

I'm still outraged and want blood! Don't get me wrong, I think it's reasonable for ministers to use their cars for private purposes. If I had one provided, I wouldn't be able to justify having a private car too, and I would just use the one. I also think that the rules are fine: the minister is responsible for compensating the taxpayer for private use. Fair enough. The source of my outrage is the environmental impact of flying and having a car and driver meet you there. According to this calculator, I reckon her flying to Spain (assuming she flew alone and on a normal commercial carrier) generated 400 kg of CO2 emissions. Fine. It's too far to bike, and I probably would have flown myself.

Her car, though, is an armoured S-class Mercedes. According to this site, a late model S-class will get 12.7 L/100km (18.5 mpg). This, however, doesn't account for the extra weight of the armour, which is about 20%, so let's call it an even 15 l/100km, which is probably generous. Let's say the drive was 5200 km, which is the distance from Berlin to Alicante (return); that gives us a return trip gas consumption of 862 litres (not including the weight of the chauffeur, his kid, and the luggage). Just driving there and back cost 1996 kg of CO2. So, even though Ms. Schmidt's choice to use her car was legal, it unnecessarily released 2 tons of carbon dioxide. And Germany is supposed to be able to brow beat emerging countries and the Yanks into cutting their emissions at Copenhagen later this year? With what credibility? What ever happened to leading by example?

She may not have acted illegally, but she immorally polluted the environment, which belongs to all of us. I'm f*ck!ng fuming, but not as much as Ms. Schmidt's car, which I helped pay for in the first place.

United We Stand, Divided We Fall?

Today I was going to use Sarah Palin as a vehicle to bash the current state of the Republican party, but I quickly had the unpleasant feeling of beating a dead horse. Luckily, something else caught my eye.


As a polyglot living in a foreign country and studying spontaneous social order, it's hard to get around language. Language is the original spontaneous social order. There's a well-worn debate about how the EU should manage the fact that it has 23 official languages and should arguably have more. Leaving the technical, short-term efficiency arguments aside (i.e. how much easier would it make communication in the EU, and how much money would be saved, if there were a single language or a lingua franca), I'm torn between two longer term arguments for and against a single European language.


The long-term argument in favour relates to the potential to build a common identity. Showing cavalier disregard for standards of semantic rectitude, Americans would probably call this the "more perfect Union" argument, and it goes something like this. Most people, if they were sitting on a bus in Belgium, couldn't tell the Flemish from the Walloons. Ditto Catalans, Castellians, Basques. The same even applies across countries, which is clear if you've ever been to a big European tourist event (e.g. Oktoberfest, Love Parade, Bastille Day) and have heard the variety of languages spoken by spectators/participants. Similarly, many Europeans have pretty similar palettes with variation at the margins. Not everyone in Europe will enjoy regional delicacies like Swabian sour tripe or Czech fried cheese, but spaghetti, baguettes, schnitzel, kielbasa, and paella are welcome pretty much everywhere. Europeans used to fight about money, religion, borders, and ideology. Now they have a common currency, secularism (more or less), Schengen, and trans-European political parties. One of the few elements of European identity that still serves to create "otherness" and let Europeans make scapegoats of each other is language. Serbo-croatian is, for all intents and purposes, one language for everyone who doesn't speak it or is only learning. This is a very controversial statement, however, for native speakers. Greeks worry about Macedonian and Bulgarian migrants, but they would be hard pressed to identify these Balkan bugaboos if they all spoke a common tongue. In short, you can't understand people unless you understand people; a common language would unify European identity and induce greater social harmony. And if you agree that a common language would be a good thing, choosing which one should be a simple coordination problem.


The other side has banal and interesting variants. The banal form rails against monoculture and wishes to celebrate diversity. This is often accompanied by vapid sentiments amounting to a desire to use tie-dye as a social Leitmotif. The more interesting argument is pretty evolutionary. The Slovaks have a fantastic saying that, "With every language you learn, you gain a new soul." This is true in many ways. Every language seems to be able to express things that are ineffable in others. "Transitoriness" totally misses "Vergänglichkeit". "Whimsical" is not even a poor man's "rigolo". Thinking about words as organisms and semantic meaning as genes, you would want a certain amount of diversity to maintain a healthy population. Harmonizing language would restrict the number of possible ideas and their combinations. If you've ever tried to read Goethe or Rimbaud in English (never mind Shakespeare in German), you'll know what I mean. For much business and government, this is likely to be splitting hairs. A health care mandate is close enough to a Gesundheitsvorsorgeverpflichtung as to make no odds, but there's a lot of humanity that exists outside the technical categories. If we encourage politicians to harmonize their communication in the interest of harmony or efficiency, they might be inspired to encourage everyone else to do the same. Would this be the ideational equivalent of burning down rain forests or letting the Great Barrier Reef die?


And though I'm not concerned with being 'a good liberal' in anybody else's eyes, I can't for the life of me decide which is the better liberal argument.