Is there a battle royale between Democrat heavyweights Jared Polis and Tim Gill?
Perhaps not, but it's hard to overlook the major schisms developing in Lakewood between Polis' and Gill's proxies. After Dems have fought for 20 years to repeal “Don't Ask, Don't Tell,” you'd think Dems everywhere would be elated to support a gay military veteran running as a Democrat. Problem is, Brian Carroll, a gay veteran, chose to take on Rep. Andy Kerr in a primary in a newly drawn district (which also includes Rep. Ken Summers), a move which has exposed major fault lines in CODA's braintrust.
Those with a rudimentary knowledge of Colorado politics know Polis and Gill/Ted Trimpa, along with Rutt Bridges and Pat Stryker, are the driving force behind CODA and the Dem's resurgence in the state. But how does it look when Trimpa (Gill's hit man), One Colorado Director Brad Clark, every gay legislator, and several liberal lobbyists including Adam Eichberg and Will Coyne (who now represent One Colorado) host a fundraiser for Kerr? Although those are some heavy liberal hitters, it's worth asking where are the operatives from Polis' inner circle?
A key operative for Polis' 2008 primary upset win versus Joan Fitz-Gerald, Andy Szekeres, has been running operations for Carroll. Szekeres isn't some hum-drum underling either. He was named one of the top 3 Democrat fundraisers…nationally.
The timing of the fundraiser, Nov. 9, is the night before Carroll's announced kick-off of Nov. 10th, making it clear that the Gill and Trimpa bunch aren't raising dough for the general election nearly a year away. There are several rumors floating around why Carroll chose to challenge Kerr, some signs point nationally, others more local. One possibility is that Steve Harvey, a Jeffco Democrat, liberal blogger, and classmate of Carroll's in the Center for Progressive Leadership pushed him to run. Harvey ran last year against Rep. Jim Kerr and could be described as the liberal's answer to Matt Arnold. Other signs point to the Polis and “Professional Left” crowd who have dreamed of this opportunity for years.
Time will tell exactly why Carroll is running, and perhaps Szekeres is acting on his own, but it's hard to ignore a fight pitting Polis vs. Gill.
will write a nice follow up diary now.
Andy Kerr Won’t Have Primary Challenge After All.
he finally was convinced to not primary a three term legislator? Kudos to him
Though Brian is a friend of mine and a fellow 2011 Colorado Leaders Fellow with the Center for Progressive Leadership, Andy Kerr earned my unequivocal respect and support during my legal externship in his office when he was Assistant House Majority Leader in the 2009 legislative session. I never encouraged Brian to run, and, in fact, wrote him a letter emphatically encouraging him to support Andy instead, and run when Andy is term limited in 2014. I did so not as a matter of personal loyalty to Andy, but as a matter of what makes the best sense for the Democratic Party and the Progressive Movement. Andy Kerr has done an exceptional job for his district and the people of Colorado; we should be focusing our energy on seeking to remove those who have not.
Amusing – but as entertaining as it is to get the mention, we all know that liberals don’t have an answer to Matt Arnold!
🙂
Who else has gone toe-to-toe with Colorado Ethics Watch (CEW, pronounced “sue” – it’s what they do) and taken them to the cleaners, winning a judgment and award of attorneys’ fees for CEW’s “frivolous, groundless, and vexatious” complaint?
http://www.clearthebenchcolora…
(Granted, it’s taking a while to actually collect…)
http://www.clearthebenchcolora…
at least we got some good news last week
What good news did you have in mind?
better than the alternatives, or the guy he succeeded. It wouldn’t have been possible without CTB
Agreed. Boatright appears to be a solid pick and by all indications will make a very good Colorado Supreme Court justice – his statements on the role of the judiciary
are very encouraging.
Boatright will also be thrust into some high-profile cases (most prominently, the redistricting & reapportionment cases) very quickly, too.
http://www.clearthebenchcolora…
Though the judicial goal is indeed to interpret the law rather than to act with unfettered caprice, pretending that that goal is some straightforward exercise of unambiguous mechanical interpretation is simply untethered from reality.
Here’s a discussion of some of the complexity involved in legal interpretation: The Social Construction of Legal Reality.
wrong link. Here’s the essay I was referring to.
…or a sophist.
Judging from the linked essay, one is both.
Is this the kind of muddled thinking that passes for analytic thinking in law schools these days?
Explains a lot, if so.
Yeah… it would be nice if one could write it well.
Liberal answer to Matt Arnold? Not so much.
you have nothing to offer but a substanceless dismissal (based only on applying labels rather than applying arguments), devoid of any trace of either reason or evidence mobilized in support of it. Yes, you’re right: We’re as different as night and day.
You’ll notice that my posts here attack no one, but rather offer points of view explored and argued using bodies of thought and knowledge. I address the ideas stated rather than attack the individuals stating them. Again, that’s the real political divide: I know plenty of conservatives who I respect for their ability to engage in robust civil discourse in pursuit of ever-improving understanding and ever-improving self-governance, and I know plenty of liberals who are blind ideologues; it’s not about what our tentative current understanding is, but rather what our commitment is to allowing it to grow and improve under the lathe of reason and knowledge.
I don’t care who’s a conservative or who’s a liberal. I consider it a shame for all of us that our public discourse degrades into little more than a combination of insulating our own blind ideologies from any other points of view and taking empty pot-shots at those expressing other points of view. I read and consider all arguments, including, for instance, Chicago School (or “Monetarist”) economics (e.g., Milton Friedman), and many others who have perspectives very different from mine, because none of us individually understands this complex and subtle world of ours all that well, but when we engage in a robust collective enterprise of trying to, our understanding grows much richer and deeper.
I continue to invite all others of all ideologies to engage in such a process, as reasonable people of goodwill, with enough humility to recognize that we are all in the process of learning rather than having achieved a state of omniscience, willing to subject our imperfect tentative beliefs and precipitous false certainties to the challenges of competing arguments and anomalous information. It’s up to you rather you wish to accept such an invitation, or prefer to remain embedded in the ritual of competing ideologies defended and advanced mostly by angry sniping.
I would never suggest that it is a trivial one, or something that occurs in some centralized way. But, obviously, what we seek to do, how we seek to do it, the choices we make, affect the quality of our lives, individually and collectively. We all, presumably, respect the social institutional innovation represented by the U.S. Constitution, a feat accomplished by a group of people covening for that purpose. That is an act of “writing it well.”
The people who did so were saturated in Enlightement era thought, in the notion that we can apply reason to the challenge of self-governance, mobilizing a combination of classical thought and recent British and French social philosophy (particularly that of Locke and Montesquieu). Others much like those Founding Fathers in their attitude toward such challenges have continued to explore the social systems that philosopers of their day were just beginning to analyze in any systematic way. Thus, we have a body of relevant economic theory (both micro and macro), of evolutionary theory as a applied to human social and technological systems (e.g., Meme Theory and Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shifts), complex dynamical systems analysis, epidemiology (which can be applied to the spread of cognitions as well as viral infections), network analysis, and numerous other tools.
To begin to explore such bodies of thought, you can read works such as Gaia: A New Look At Life On Earth, by James Lovelock; The Web of Life, by Fritjov Capra; The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins; The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, by Thomas Kuhn; The Nature of Technology, by W. Brian Arthur; Wonderful Life, by Stephen Jay Gould; Economic Analysis of Property Rights, by Yoram Barzel; Beyond the Miracle of the Market, by Robert Bates; Governing the Commons, by Elinor Ostrom; Markets and Hierarchies, by Oliver Williamson; The Strategy of Conflict, by Thomas Schelling; Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, by Douglass North; and, of course, thousands of other books that explore these various aspects of our complex dynamical social and technological systems.
Or, for a particular synthesis of these and other threads of analytical and theoretical social systemic reasoning, and some perspective into the social and political implications of these bodies of thought, you can explore my essays on the topic, such as the one I posted as a diary here (The Politics of Consciousness) or the other essays linked to at Catalogue of Selected Posts.
Or, you can simply announce once again your arbitrary belief in your own superiority, and claim that as a rhetorical victory. It’s all good.
The central dimension of legal interpretation that you seem to simply define out of existence is the issue of inherent ambiguity, involving, for instance, semantic drift (the change in meaning of words over time), aggregation and negotiation of language by multiple authors, unanticipated multiple possible meanings, and imperfectly defined terms.
A related issue is that of “framing.” The concept of “framing anomalies,” developed by Kahneman and Tversky, for which I believe they won a Nobel Prize in Economics, involves the power of how something is framed to determine how people react to it. This is in a sense the opposite of the phenomenon that anything encoded in human language has an imperfectly definite meaning; it involves the opposite phenomenon of two different statements with identical meaning having different emotional and cognitive impacts on an audience due to the way in which they are framed (e.g., “30% will die” vs. “70% will be saved”).
People who seek to discuss and address our linguistically-based social institutional landscape without paying any attention at the imprecisions inherent in language are not participating in a well-informed way. Your mantra that there is a fixed “law” that involves no ambiguity has no basis in reality. Just to take a few simple examples, what is “due process”? What constitutes “the general welfare”? What breadth of activities implicate “interstate commerce”? There are no fixed objective answers to these questions.
The power of our legal system, and of our Constitution, is based to a large extent precisely on these areas of ambiguity, because it allows the document to adapt to changing historical circumstances, without which it would gradually become as foolish an anachronism as any prehistoric religious text is doomed to eventually become. 200 years in the modern era does not attenuate it quite that much, but it is becoming attenuated, and it is through the ability to interpret it in the light of current realities that it is able to retain its relevance and power.
More importantly, there is no alternative to interpretation. There is no unambiguous objective meaning that requires no interpretation. It simply doesn’t exist. The canons of legal interpretation had no choice but to evolve in recognition of this fact, and to develop pragmatic solutions to it. The debate is not over whether to interpret the law faithfully, but rather how to interpret the law faithfully. It is a shallow rhetorical ploy, unfortunately better at fooling its dogmatic adherents than at fooling anyone with any knowledge or expertise, that your prefered method of interpretation is the one and only right method of interpretation. Ironically, most of those who are adamant about this supposed unambiguous objective law that should be blindly applied without interpretation are also those who have the weakest and shallowest actual understanding of the substance of the law.
What we have in place is a sophisticated institutional system by which legal interpretation occurs. What you want to replace it with is some reductionism to whatever you and your ideological brethren declare the law to mean, in the absence of any analysis. And that would not preserve our Constitution; it would destroy it. Because a Constitution that is whatever any ideologue wants it to be is no constitution at all. And, ironically, it is not the jurists who painstakingly analyze the law who are guilty of reducing it to such relativism and irrelevance, but rather the dogmatic lay people who insist that they know what the law is, when all they know is their own arbitrary ideological belief.
As much as I enjoy the read Brian is a very close personal friend of mine and I would do anything to support him. This is no battle of the heavy weights as written.
I look forward to helping Brian out with whatever he needs.
– Andy Szekeres
run in primaries versus incumbents, or at least I thought I saw a PSA about that.
Why is your party so dismissive, so quickly of Brian? Shouldn’t they let the primary process play out, instead of picking winners and losers before the horses are even out of the gate?
There is nothing un-democratic about encouraging or discouraging someone to run, in the absence of threats or bribes. There is no ethical or moral requirement that if someone expresses an interest in running, no one say to them, “I don’t think that really serves the goals you and I are both dedicated to pursuing.” This is all part of a health democratic political process.
when participants reduce it to “a horse race,” confusing the means for the ends, and trivializing something that is far from trivial. This is an error committed equally by the Right and the Left, and one that is as eggregious as any other that either side complains about. (As I frequently write, the real political divide isn’t between the Right and the Left, but rather between blind ideologues of every stripe, and reasonable people of goodwill working together to do the best we can to meet the challenges of a complex and subtle world.)
That doesn’t mean that the strategic demands of political competition can be wished away, or that it is wise to disregard them. It means, rather, that they should always be subordinated to the ultimate goals that they serve, which, I would hope, is the improvement of the arrangements by which we coexist, in order to better liberate and channel the energy and imagination of each and the genius of the many.
So, I don’t care whether the “horses” are in the gate or out of it. I care whether we are moving in the direction of being a wiser, more compassionate, more effective polity. Clearly, we are not doing so if we undermine the integrity of the rule of law and our Constitutionally framed political processes. Advising potential and actual candidates about what to do in service to shared goals undermines neither.
If that is “trying to affect the outcome of the horse race before the horses are even out of the gate,” then so be it, because a part of what politics legitimately and inevitably is is the determination of which horses enter the race.