The Atlantic Takes On Huckabee Over Claim That States Can Ignore SCOTUS

On Tuesday Mike Huckabee told right wing radio host Hugh Hewitt that states have the right to defy the Supreme Court should they rule in favor of nationwide marriage equality. Huckabee has said the same whackadoodle thing in the past (as have Bryan Fischer and others), but this time his remarks have gotten wide notice due to his potential bid for president. Yesterday the Atlantic dissected Huckabee's claim:

That's not an entirely novel idea, as Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas, should know. In 1957, the state believed it could block the Little Rock School Board from adhering to the Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. President Eisenhower disagreed, and dispatched troops to show Governor Orval Faubus how wrong he was. Faubus is not an historical model most contemporary politicians would be willing to follow. Huckabee's legal analysis seems off, too. What happens when a court rules against such a marriage law is that a specific provision—a clause that defines marriage as involving one man and one woman, for instance—is defined as unconstitutional. That doesn't invalidate the entirety of a state's marriage laws, so the rest stand and there's no need for the legislature or governor to act. By analogy, Loving v. Virginia didn't invalidate all of the Commonwealth of Virginia's marriage laws; it just meant interracial unions were no longer prohibited. Presumably, a state could avoid having to sanction gay marriages by simply eliminating civil marriage altogether. That's been suggested in Oklahoma, for example, but no state has actually done so.

The above-linked piece concludes that Huckabee's idea is "a ticket to dissolving the union, all in the name of preventing same-sex unions."

The Atlantic Maps The Protests

The Atlantic is tracking the anti-American protests exploding across many nations today. The map is being updated as reports come in.

The Tyranny Of New York

Conor Friedersdorf writes in an Atlantic piece titled The Tyranny Of New York:

New York City's role on the American scene isn't unhealthy merely because it attracts creative, ambitious people with its dynamism, or because its residents have a healthy ego about the relative merits of their city. The problem is that along with those inevitable traits of great cities, Manhattan and certain of its surrounding boroughs happen to dominate American media, finance, and letters so thoroughly that even the most impressive achievements of other cities are routinely ignored while New Yorkers talk about local matters of comparatively smaller consequence, either tempting or forcing the whole nation to eavesdrop on their chatter depending on the day. [snip] New York is a great city, but in America today, someone who seeks out the best television or novels or magazine writing or art or newspaper reporting is confronted with an even greater degree of NYC centric stuff than is justified. The city is a legitimate giant, yet its shadow somehow reaches much farther than it should. It thereby deprives other cities of the light they need to grow half as tall.

Aren't the French similarly "tyrannized" by Paris? The British by London? Etc?

Uninventing Suburbia

Over at The Atlantic, Richard Florida thinks the current economic crisis will result in the most radical redrawing of the physical American landscape since the onset of the Industrial Age.

The housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by” date. The bubble encouraged massive, unsustainable growth in places where land was cheap and the real-estate economy dominant. It encouraged low-density sprawl, which is ill-fitted to a creative, postindustrial economy. And not least, it created a workforce too often stuck in place, anchored by houses that cannot be profitably sold, at a time when flexibility and mobility are of great importance.

So how do we move past the bubble, the crash, and an aging, obsolescent model of economic life? What’s the right spatial fix for the economy today, and how do we achieve it?

The solution begins with the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy. Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, encouraging people to buy bigger houses than they otherwise would. That means less spending on medical technology, or software, or alternative energy—the sectors and products that could drive U.S. growth and exports in the coming years. Artificial demand for bigger houses also skews residential patterns, leading to excessive low-density suburban growth. The measures that prop up this demand should be eliminated.

If anything, our government policies should encourage renting, not buying. Homeownership occupies a central place in the American Dream primarily because decades of policy have put it there.

I recommend reading the entire (very long) article. There's some fascinating stuff there about mega-cities and urban sprawl, and about which cities are best poised to weather the next few years. Surprisingly to me, the author thinks New York City will do much better than most.