Opinion
Lawrence Journal-World l LJWorld.com l Sunday, February 14, 2016
Dems take aim at Citizens United
EDITORIALS
Action warranted City officials have a responsibility to local taxpayers to make sure The Oread redevelopment agreement is being properly carried out.
T
he city of Lawrence has taken an important step in holding the developers of The Oread hotel to the terms of a redevelopment agreement that calls for a large percentage of local sales tax collected in the Oread taxing district to be rebated to the developers. Last week, the city declared the Oread Inn development group to be in default on that agreement because it hadn’t abided by the section requiring mutual assistance in carrying out the agreement and its intent. Hours later, attorneys for Oread Inn declared the city to be in default because it had been withholding tax rebates due to the developer since June. The Oread Inn response also referred to the city’s decision to declare default as “aggressive.” Many local residents would applaud “aggressive” action on this matter. It’s a positive sign that the city believes the redevelopment agreement gives it the legal basis to terminate the agreement if it doesn’t receive additional cooperation from the developers. The city specifically has been concerned that Oread Wholesale, which is listed as a tenant of The Oread, has improperly manipulated sales tax data to inflate city rebates on the project. Officials also have been dissatisfied with the response they have received to questions raised in a city audit of the Oread operation. An attorney for Oread Wholesale responded by calling the city’s process “flawed and improper” and maintained that Oread Inn and Oread Wholesale have “acted with integrity.” An attorney for Oread Inn chastised the city for being unwilling to pursue “discussions” to resolve the situation “and instead wishes to pursue an aggressive agenda that will most likely result in litigation between the parties.” It’s unclear what kind of “discussions” the attorney was referring to, but the city had spent several weeks trying to obtain information and resolve this matter. Given the city’s history with Thomas Fritzel, who heads Oread Inn, Oread Wholesale and other entities in the Oread district, it’s understandable that officials would be hesitant to try to pursue this situation in an informal manner. The kind of trust it would take to resolve this issue with a handshake simply doesn’t exist between Fritzel and the city. The legal battlelines on this issue have been drawn. That doesn’t mean this case necessarily will end up in court, but it may set the parameters for productive discussions to resolve this matter without pursuing litigation. If it is confirmed that the developers have sought and received unwarranted or illegal payments, they should be required to repay that overage plus an added sum in recognition of their wrongdoing. It’s unfortunate this situation has arisen, but, as Interim City Manager Diane Stoddard said in a letter outlining the default declaration, the city has the right “to take those actions necessary to ensure that the terms, provisions and intent of the redevelopment agreement are carried out.” If that means the city needs to get a little “aggressive” in its pursuit of this case, so be it.
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Washington — Bernie Sanders, greedy for power to punish people he considers greedy, has occasioned 2016’s best joke (reported in Bloomberg Businessweek): “In the Bernie Sanders drinking game, every time he mentions a free government program, you drink someone else’s beer.” But neither Sanders’ nor Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the First Amendment is amusing. Both have voted to do something never done before — make the Bill of Rights less protective. They favor amending the First Amendment to permit government regulation of political campaign speech. Hence they embrace progressivism’s logic, as it has been explained separately, and disapprovingly, by two eminent economists, Ronald Coase and Aaron Director: There is no reason the regulatory, redistributive state should distinguish between various markets. So, government that is competent and duty-bound to regulate markets for goods and services to promote social justice is competent and duty-bound to regulate the marketplace of ideas for the same purpose. Sanders and Clinton detest the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which they say their court nominees will promise to reverse. It held that unions and corporations — especially incorporated advocacy groups, from the National Rifle Association to the Sierra Club — can engage in unregulated spending on political advocacy that is not coordinated with candidates or campaigns.
George Will
georgewill@washpost.com
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The decision simply recognized that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in incorporated entities to magnify their voices by speaking collectively.” The decision simply recognized that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they come together in incorporated entities to magnify their voices by speaking collectively. Opposition to Citizens United is frequently distilled into the slogan that “corporations are not people,” to which Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., adds this example of progressive insight: “People have hearts. They have kids. They get jobs. They get sick. They cry. They dance. They live. They love. And they die.” And a few teach at Harvard Law School, as Warren was able to do only because Harvard did not die: It is descended from the first corporation chartered in colonial America. Surely she learned in law
school something she can relearn by reading “Are Corporations People?” in National Affairs quarterly by Carson Holloway of the University of Nebraska, Omaha. The concept of corporate personhood, he says, is not an invention of today’s conservatives. It derives from English common law and is “deeply rooted in our legal and constitutional tradition.” William Blackstone, the English jurist who richly influenced America’s Founders, said corporations are “artificial persons” created to encourage socially useful cooperation among individuals and are accorded certain rights so that they can hold property and have lives, identities and missions that span multiple generations. Early in America’s history, many forprofit corporations were less important than the nonprofit educational and religious corporations that still produce America’s robust civil society of freely cooperating citizens. If corporations had no rights of personhood, they would have no constitutional protections against, for example, the arbitrary search and seizure by government of their property without just compensation. And there would be no principled reason for denying the right of free speech (the First Amendment does not use the word “person” in guaranteeing it) to forprofit (e.g., The New York Times) or nonprofit (e.g., the NAACP) corporations. In his attack on the Bill of Rights, Sanders voted to exempt for-profit media corporations from government reg-
ulation of corporate speech. Why? Because such corporations, alone among for-profit and nonprofit corporations, are uniquely altruistic and disinterested? Please. In 2007, in a Cato Institute lecture, Judge Janice Rogers Brown of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit warned us: People who are eager to weaken protection of private property in order to enable government to redistribute wealth will also want to weaken constitutional protections of free speech in order to empower government to redistribute ideas. Since then, college campuses have been responsive to people eager to regulate what others say, hear and see. Now, in the name of campaign finance reform, progressives like Sanders and Clinton want to expand government’s regulatory reach to political speech. Both are ardent for equality and, as Brown foresaw, the argument for economic equality easily becomes an argument for equalizing political influence. The argument is: Government regulates or seizes property in the name of equity, so why not also, for the same reason, regulate the quantity, content and timing of speech intended to “influence elections”? Progressives, with their collectivist itch, are ever eager to break private institutions to the saddle of the state, and to fill private spaces with regulations. Do they consider government uniquely altruistic and disinterested? Please. — George Will is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.
OLD HOME TOWN
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From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Feb. 14, 1916: years “The first concrete ago to become a part IN 1916 of the new Kansas river bridge was mixed this morning. With sand and crushed rock on the site the actual work of building the bridge has commenced. With a large turning crane or ‘whirley’ elevating the sand and stone into a crib continually a large amount of concrete is being turned out…” — Compiled by Sarah St. John
Read more Old Home Town at LJWorld.com/news/lawrence/ history/old_home_town.
Pro-choice not the same as pro-abortion “Are you anti-abortion?” That question, from a colleague, caught me by surprise. After all, she knows I’ve written a number of pro-choice columns. “I know you’re prochoice,” she added, reading my mind. “But I was wondering if you’re anti-abortion.” I knew where this was coming from. She had just finished reading the first draft of my next novel, a World War II epic in which a character wrestles with whether to abort the child of a man who brutally raped her. I reminded my colleague not to confuse the character’s opinion with mine. One reason you write fiction is to put yourself into the minds of people who are not like you. Still, her question intrigued me because it suggested a seldom-heard perspective, a third way, if you will, in the eternal battle between pro-choice and prolife. We are taught that there are those two ways only. Indeed, where abortion is concerned, that’s the fundament of every policy debate and political speech. But it seems ever clearer to me that it’s a false dichotomy, a narrative of hard, diametrical opposi-
Leonard Pitts Jr. lpitts@miamiherald.com
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The most ardent proponent of abortion rights favors life, after all, if only because he or she has one. So the very language of the debate creates false distance.”
tion that, while it makes for great headlines, fails to acknowledge the mushy middle ground where many, if not most of us, reside. “Are you anti-abortion?” As I was fumbling with my answer, my colleague reminded me that she, too, is pro-choice. But in the same breath, she noted that one of her kids is expecting and even when the baby was only a zygote, her feeling was, “That’s still my grandchild.” In other words, she already loves it. That resonated with me.
How many baby bumps — wife, daughter, daughterin-law — have I put my ear to or touched in awe, wondering who this new person will turn out to be and what things she will bring into life? Baby love is not exclusive to pro-life people. Nor, for that matter, is being “prolife.” The most ardent proponent of abortion rights favors life, after all, if only because he or she has one. So the very language of the debate creates false distance. The iconography does, too. In recent years, abortion foes have taken to brandishing gruesome placards of dismembered fetuses to make their point. Those things never come close to persuading me. They never leave me feeling anything but angry and assaulted. The most effective antiabortion placard I ever saw took a different approach, a tacit appeal to shared humanity and common conscience. It said simply: “Abortion stops a beating heart.” Boom. There you go. No need of weighty, philosophic discussions about the soul or when life begins. I wanted to reject that sign the way you reflexively reject
anything that doesn’t agree with you, but I never could. Decades later, it is still with me. I think maybe that’s because even on so heated an issue as this, it conceded — indeed, banked upon — my humanity. There’s a lesson in that. I am pro-choice because I think a woman should have the ultimate say over her own body, period. I am prochoice because I don’t want to see pregnant women drinking whiskey laced with gunpowder or sticking knitting needles in their uteruses. I am pro-choice because I abhor the idea of some harried mother who can’t feed or clothe the children she has being sent to prison (death row?) for ending a pregnancy. But my colleague’s question reminded me that, for all we pretend otherwise, this issue is not and never has been stark or either/or. And that the diametrical opposition we hear so much about rises from headlines and political speeches, but not so much from life. “Are you anti-abortion?” my colleague asked. My realization and my words were simultaneous. “Yes,” I said, “I guess I am.” — Leonard Pitts Jr. is a columnist for the Miami Herald