the government is spying on you

The Justice Department's reports to the U.S. Congress on the surveillance court's activities show that the Bush administration made 5,645 applications for electronic surveillance and physical searches through 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available. In the previous four years, the court received a total of 3,436.

The 11-judge panel modified 179 of the Bush administration's requests. By contrast, only one was modified in the preceding four years. The court has reportedly handled almost 20,000 applications since it was set up, and has rejected only a handful.

Reasons for the modifications were not stated and could range from minor alterations to more substantive changes.

The highly classified court was set up by the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the wake of Cold War spy fears and President Richard Nixon's misuse of U.S. intelligence agencies to spy on the anti-Vietnam war movement and other political dissidents.

changing tact

Lexington

A heretical proposal
Dec 8th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The Democrats (and abortion rights) might be better off if Roe v Wade were overturned

AS A general rule, Republicans are much happier with American exceptionalism than Democrats. Conservatives celebrate the right of every God-fearing American to carry a semi-automatic in his Kyoto-busting SUV while liberals protest that Europe is greener and safer. But when it comes to abortion, it is the Democrats who are the American exceptionalists.

Most rich countries other than the United States have solved the abortion problem by consulting the electorate—either through the legislature or through referendums. This led to vigorous debates and, broadly, the triumph of abortion rights. Because abortion was legalised democratically, pro-lifers accepted the fact that they had lost and abortion became a settled right. By contrast, in America, abortion is a fundamental right of privacy protected by a 1973 Supreme Court judgment—Roe v Wade.


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Few objective outsiders—if it is possible to be such a thing on abortion—would argue that relying on judges rather than popular will has helped American politics: no other comparable country has such destructive culture wars. Roe left a large chunk of the country feeling disenfranchised by the court; it also established a cycle of attack and counter-attack that has debased everything that it has touched, especially the judiciary.

A prime example is the Roe-obsessed confirmation process for Supreme Court nominees. Samuel Alito, Mr Bush's new candidate, claims that the fact that he once advised the Reagan administration on how to overturn Roe will have no bearing on his behaviour on the court. No less disingenuously, liberal senators pretend they are trying to gauge Mr Alito's legal philosophy when they are trying to catch him out on Roe.

All this is bad for America; but, in political terms, Roe has been particularly disastrous for the Democrats. The Republicans have generally had the better of the abortion wars (something most liberals admit as long as nobody from NARAL Pro-Choice America is in the room). Roe has proved a lightning-rod for conservatives; and many moderates dislike the Democrats'Roe-driven defence of partial-birth abortions. So consider a heretical proposition: why on earth don't Democrats disown Roe?

Merely to mention this in public can be dangerous. Yet there are two obvious reasons for the party to do it. First, abortion rights command broad popular support in the United States, just as they do in Europe. Gallup polling since the mid-1970s has consistently shown that about 80% of Americans want abortion to be legal—either in all circumstances (21-31%) or in some circumstances (51-61%). Without Roe, abortion might be slightly restricted, but certainly not banned, as conservatives want.

Second, Roe is a pretty flimsy decision. The idea that the constitution protects “the right to privacy” was already something of a stretch when Justice William Douglas discovered it in the Griswold v Connecticut case in 1965. Ruling that the state government could not stop married couples from purchasing contraception, Douglas wrote that the right to privacy exists because the “specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.” It was these penumbras and emanations that were stretched still further in 1973 when the court ruled on Roe.

Some Democrats say that they regard “a woman's right to choose” as analogous to a black person's right to vote—a basic human right that cannot be gainsaid by the electorate. This is far from convincing. The constitution is as clear about the right to vote—thanks to the equal protection clause—as it is murky on the right to abortion. And abortion isn't a clear-cut moral issue in the way that the franchise is. Bill Clinton never felt any need to argue that black voting should be “safe, legal and rare”.

A better argument in defence of Roe is that some states might well outlaw abortion. The Centre for Reproductive Rights claimed in 2004 that 21 conservative states were highly likely to do so and nine somewhat likely. But this presumes that public opinion has been frozen in aspic since 1973. Laura Vanderkam of USA Today points out that many of these “anti-Roe” states may well vote in favour of abortion rights: seven have Democratic governors, one (Rhode Island) is firmly in the Democratic column, and many others (Colorado, Ohio) cannot be relied upon to ban it. Moreover, the states that are most likely to vote to ban abortion—such as Mississippi and North Dakota—already have very few abortion clinics in any case: women who want abortions in those states already have to travel huge distances. Crossing state lines would not make that much difference.

Stubborn as a mule
The main reason, alas, why Democrats will stick by Roe is simply because it is a totem in the culture wars. Why should pro-choice forces surrender any ground? That argument makes sense if you want to defend “choice” right into the ninth month, as some zealots do. But for most Democrats who merely want to keep abortion legal under most circumstances, that right would be more secure if it carried democratic legitimacy.

Embracing the democratic process would send a powerful signal that the Party of the People has rediscovered its faith in the people. Relying on judges to advance the liberal agenda allowed conservatives to seize the mantle of populism. Roe has given Republicans a free ride: they can claim to oppose abortion in the comfortable knowledge that it will never be banned. But imagine if Roe were overturned. How many Republicans would vote for a ban on abortion that only one in five Americans support? The conservative coalition would be split asunder.

History is full of great generals who won their wars by staging strategic retreats. Field-Marshal Kutusov allowed Napoleon to occupy Moscow, tempting him to over-extend himself. The Democrats might emulate that aged Russian's wiliness—and stage a strategic retreat to the high ground of popular opinion.

making matters worse

bush still wants the cia to torture people. is the cia somehow limited to torturing 'enemy combatants', or can they torture whoever they want? like you. i'm being serious here, people. this government has shown it has no problem saying one thing and doing something else. it wrote memos saying the geneva convention doesn't apply to it. it tortured prisoners in iraq, and may be holding them secretly in other countries where it can torture people. why can't they spirit you away to, say, armenia and pull out your fingernails? this is the kind of authoritarian government the soviets promulgated so well. we only barely shut down bush's plan to force americans to rat on each other, the way they did in the ussr. hasn't anyone read '1984'? the republicans are taking us there. doesn't anyone know anything about the fall of the roman empire? all empires die. america will be no exception. the republicans are accelerating the process, though.

showing america cares

Putting families first
Nov 24th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Children are being taken into care too quickly and for too long


THE budget bill passed recently by the House of Representatives includes around $50 billion in spending cuts, many of them aimed at federal programmes for the poor. This includes trims of around $5 billion in child support, $600m for children in foster care and around $700m in food stamps. A similar bill from the Senate contains $34 billion of cuts with far fewer swipes at social-welfare programmes, but both bills include between $60 billion and $70 billion in tax cuts that disproportionately favour the rich. Child advocates are enraged. As states consider reforming their child-welfare systems, big cuts in social services are not helpful.

Tales of missing, starved, abused and even murdered children in adopted homes and foster shelters are alarmingly common. Some escape the attention of over-burdened social workers; others are shuttled from one foster-care placement to another for years on end. Last year, a Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care concluded that, because of the way federal funding works, children were plucked from their families too soon and left to fester in the system for too long. And although judges play a critical role in moving children to safety, family courts are among the most under-funded in the system, with few incentives to attract top lawyers and judges and little collaboration between the courts and child-welfare agencies. Dependency lawyers tend to be overworked and underpaid, with predictably bad results for the children they represent.

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More than 500,000 children are in foster care in America, most of them black or Latino. They remain in the system for an average of three years. These children, typically placed in the state's care after suffering abuse and neglect at home, often endure a demoralising parade of indifferent caseworkers, lawyers, judges, teachers and foster parents, who offer little real support in their quest for a stable home. For those who cannot return to their birth parents, the situation is grim: in 2003, 119,000 children in America were waiting to be adopted, 67% of whom had been in foster care for more than two years, according to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).

When such children “age out”, or turn 18, as 18,000-20,000 do every year, they are suddenly cut off from all special services such as housing and counselling. Studies show that they disproportionately drop out of college, become homeless and unemployed, turn to drugs and alcohol and spend time in jail.

The federal government pays around half America's $22 billion child-welfare bill, according to the Urban Institute; the rest comes from state and local governments. But states have not been held accountable for how they spend this money. In an extensive three-year audit of state child-welfare systems, the HHS found that not a single state was in compliance with federal safety standards. When it came to the seven federal standards used to assess children's programmes, some of which are almost embarrassingly basic (eg, “Children are first and foremost protected from abuse and neglect” and “Children receive adequate services to meet their physical and mental health needs”), 16 states did not meet any of them, and no state met more than two. The federal agency is now running a second round of audits, to assess whether states are now complying with their own improvement plans.

“We are spending a great deal of money to damage children,” says Marcia Robinson Lowry, director of Children's Rights, an advocacy group. There are no real consequences for states when they fail to meet federal targets, she argues, so class-action lawsuits are the only recourse. Children's Rights has represented foster children in 13 court cases in the past decade. Most of these have ended in a court-ordered settlement that sets the group as a watchdog over a state's mismanaged and overburdened social-services department.

But using the courts to solve America's child-welfare problems is expensive and inefficient. The best answer, many think, is for states to spend money on keeping families together, by investing in services such as child care and counselling, rather than putting children in care. This would require allowing states to use federal funding in different ways. Most federal dollars now begin flowing to states only when children are removed from their families, giving states a perverse incentive to keep children in foster care, explains Carol Emig, the director of the Pew Commission. Instead, the commission suggests that states need a little more federal money to cover all children, not just poor ones, and the flexibility to create a range of services that might keep children from entering care or help them leave care safely.

Such a change carries quite a price-tag: $5 billion over ten years. But advocates say it will bring long-term savings by producing better educated, less delinquent children and more united families. If states safely reduce their foster-care rolls, they can then reinvest dollars earmarked for foster care in other child-welfare services. Meanwhile, federal reviews will hold states to their programme promises. President George Bush has proposed, alternatively, that states should convert their foster-care entitlement programmes into block grants. That would give flexibility at first but, over time, it would amount to a cut in funds.

States and cities can already apply for waivers from federal funding restraints; some 20 states have waivers now. Advocates of flexible funding point to Illinois, a waiver recipient, where the foster-care population has been cut in half and adoptions have more than doubled since 1997. And in late October officials in New York City announced that the number of children in foster care has dropped to around 18,000, half of what it was six years ago. Once home to one of the worst foster-care systems in the country, the city now works to keep families intact and help them look after their children rather than taking the youngsters away. As a result, “the spigot coming into the system has been narrowed”, explains David Tobis, director of the Child Welfare Fund, a local organisation. The money saved from federal entitlements—an estimated $27m in the fiscal year that began in July—will be put back into preventive services.

October also saw Arnold Schwarzenegger, California's governor, sign into law a number of bills to help the state's foster children—more than 80,000 of them. Most of the new laws will help teenagers when they turn 18, by making sure they stay in college and have somewhere to live.

Amid all the horror stories, it can be easy to lose sight of the people who make foster care work. After describing the madness of waiting all day at court to represent a client, only to receive five minutes of a distracted judge's time, one social worker goes on to describe some of the good foster parents she has met. Her voice grows tender when she describes one couple who have taken in a young, physically disabled child. “You tend to hear about the system's flaws”, she explains. “But there are also so many other amazing things.”