We know what she will do on the court

Letter to the editor in today's NY Times:

Amy Coney Barrett on the Court: What’s at Stake

To the editor:

Trustworthy people tell us that Amy Coney Barrett is smart and nice, as if that decides the question whether she should be made a Supreme Court justice. 

But the court has had plenty of smart, nice members who were terrible justices, just as there have been great justices who were neither. What the Supreme Court requires is good judgment and a sense of justice, neither of which is particularly correlated to being loved by friends or to loving one’s family.

We don’t know much about Judge Barrett’s judgment or sense of justice, and she did her best at her confirmation hearings to keep it that way. 

What we do know is that she has been aggressively promoted by radical movement conservatives and that she was chosen by a president who has dedicated himself to putting such conservatives on the court.

To think she is anything other than a radical movement conservative assumes that the people who have promoted her are incompetent in advancing their agenda. And whatever one may think of them or their agenda, they have been anything but incompetent in advancing it.

Can we at least stop pretending that there’s any question about what she’ll do on the court?

Larry Kramer

San Francisco

The writer is president of the William & Flora Hewlett Foundation 

and former dean of Stanford Law School.

Biden's flawed infrastructure plan

Randal O'Toole (Biden's tired old infrastructure plan):

...A large part of the [Biden] plan is based on getting people out of their cars and onto transit and bicycles. American cities have been trying to do this for the last fifty years, spending $1.5 trillion subsidizing transit, and it hasn’t worked anywhere. 

The plan calls for connecting low-income workers to jobs by building more transit, yet people can reach far more jobs by automobile than by transit while auto ownership, not transit subsidies, is the key to getting people out of poverty.

The plan is based on assumptions about transportation dollar and environmental costs that are fundamentally wrong. Transit, the plan says, saves money while cars impose a burden on low-income people and produce too many greenhouse gas emissions. 

In fact, when subsidies are included, American transit systems spend five times as much moving a passenger one mile than the average automobile. Ignoring subsidies, average transit fares are still more than the average cost of driving per passenger mile. 

Transit also uses more energy and emits more greenhouse gases per passenger mile.

The only token acknowledgement of the changes brought about by the pandemic is the use of the word “resilient” in the plan. But the planners seem to think that transit is resilient as it proposes “expanded public transit systems, giving more Americans an affordable, efficient way to get around without their cars.” 

In fact, as Hurricane Katrina, the Camp Fire, and other natural disasters have shown, highways and private motor vehicles are far more resilient than mass transit.

Just look at the current pandemic: transit agencies are in financial crisis, but the highways are there when we need them 24/7. 

As of August, transit ridership was still down by 65 percent, while driving was down only 12 percent. None of this is taken into account by the anti-auto parts of the plan...

Rob's comment:

O'Toole summed it up best several years ago: "All you have to do is mention the words 'public transit' and progressives will fall over themselves to support you no matter how expensive and ridiculous your plans."

See High-speed rail? Oh no, Joe!

See also For many low-income families, cars may be key to greater opportunity and Mobility: Right or privilege?