Repeal that law school

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

When the University of Massachusetts agreed in 2010 to acquire the Southern New England School of Law, there were skeptics aplenty.

The decision to take over the small private institution and transform it into a state-run facility, rechristened the UMass School of Law, was disparaged by critics who said the merger was unnecessary, unrealistic, and unwise.

Two University of Massachusetts trustees, Richard Lawton and Kenneth MacAfee, warned at the time that the law school proposal "stinks of political motives," and claimed it would "prove to be an embarrassment to our UMass brand."

The Pioneer Institute analyzed the plan — which was premised on the assertion that a weak private law school could be made bigger, better, and more competitive without costing taxpayers a dime — and rated it "virtually impossible."

State Senator Stanley Rosenberg (now the Senate president) was openly dubious about assurances that Massachusetts could assume the operation of a law school without siphoning funds from existing campuses. The state's "higher-ed system continuously makes commitments for which there are inadequate resources," said Rosenberg. "We have to stop doing this."

Editorial pages across the political spectrum tossed cold water on the idea. "This is a baleful time to entertain the creation of a public law school," argued the Boston Globe, mistrusting the rosy assumptions on which UMass was relying. The Springfield Republican bluntly labeled it "one of the worst ideas to come down the pike in years."

Now, five years later, the University of Massachusetts School of Law has a record it can be judged by. And as recent reporting on the school's performance by the Globe's Laura Krantz makes clear, the skeptics were right all along.

Proponents of the merger offered pie in the sky. They claimed they could transmute a collapsing fourth-tier law school into an impressive state institution that would toughen its admissions standards while doubling its enrollment. Though it would charge lower tuition and fees than any law school in the area, it would make so much money that within three years it would be remitting more than $1 million annually to the state — and still be left with a surplus that would total $4.4 million by 2015.

Enrollment, which was supposed to surge to 559 students, has been shrinking: There are just 72 students in the incoming class, and total enrollment is only 213. Tuition at UMass Law is indeed among the lowest anywhere, about $24,000 for in-state students. The price tag is lowered even further, to $19,000, for applicants who score above the 50th percentile on their LSATs.

Not even magicians Penn and Teller could have turned a failing bottom-tier
private law school into a successful, competitive, inexpensive
profitable public one.

Perhaps the law school's business plan, to echo the old punchline, was to make up in volume what it loses on each student admitted. Its losses are certainly impressive. According to figures supplied by UMass, the law school ran a deficit of more than $3.8 million last year, and expects to lose another $3.9 million this year.

But what about that burgeoning multimillion-dollar surplus UMass Law was going to be socking away by now? What about the $1 million-plus it was going to be remitting to the state? What about the endlessly repeated pledge that taxpayers weren't going to lose a dime on the deal? What about the Brooklyn Bridge you bought? Sorry, chumps. You were duped.

"The original fiscal projection is clearly not sustainable and is being updated annually," outgoing UMass president Robert Caret admitted in a letter to the American Bar Association last year. Yet no amount of "updating" can fix what's wrong with UMass Law School. It was a bad idea from the outset, and it won't improve with age. Beacon Hill should have heeded the skeptics five years ago. It's not too late to do so now.

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Campaign contributions and double standards

From the files of Jeff Jacoby at The Boston Globe

Under the First Amendment, Massachusetts may not privilege
some political speakers over others — not even labor unions.

What does Massachusetts have against the First Amendment?

A lawsuit filed in Superior Court by two family-owned companies — 1A Auto Inc., an auto-parts vendor in Pepperell, and 126 Self Storage Inc., a storage-unit rental firm in Ashland — challenges state campaign-finance rules so crazily lopsided they should be equipped with grab bars.

Massachusetts law has long banned businesses from contributing to political candidates or parties, but under rules dating back to the 1980s, labor unions are free to spend up to $15,000 per year in direct political contributions with no disclosure required.

Labor unions can also set up PACs — political action committees — to funnel money to candidates and parties they support. Businesses in Massachusetts aren't allowed to do that either.

The sheer unfairness of such regulations speaks for itself. Whatever your view of unions or businesses — or of any interest group — there should be only one standard for determining whether they can engage in political expression.

In 15 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, businesses and unions alike are prohibited from making direct campaign contributions. Nearly twice as many states permit both to contribute on equal terms.

If you didn't know better, you might think it a no-brainer that a state like Massachusetts — a cradle of American liberty, the home of such free-speech champions as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Louis Brandeis — would be in the second group, holding the marketplace of ideas open to all comers.

Instead Massachusetts is one of a handful of states that blatantly discriminates, blocking campaign contributions from businesses while clearing the way for unions to get involved in electoral contests. The $15,000 no-disclosure loophole is especially egregious. "More than any other state," argues Jim Manley, a senior litigator with the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, a pro-bono legal group representing the plaintiffs, "Massachusetts' campaign contribution restrictions are tilted in favor of unions and against businesses."

This isn't the first time the state has faced legal action over its disregard for First Amendment freedoms

In McCullen v. Coakley, a case decided last June, the US Supreme Court unanimously struck down the Massachusetts "buffer zone" law, which prohibited even peaceful speech or silent protest within 35 feet of abortion clinics.

The justices rejected the state's claim that the sweeping ban made it easy to preserve public order. "A painted line on the sidewalk is easy to enforce," the court observed dryly, "but the prime objective of the First Amendment is not efficiency."

Massachusetts was likewise rebuked by the high court in 1995, when the justices slapped down attempts to force organizers of the South Boston St. Patrick's Day parade to include a gay and lesbian group among the marchers.

Such behavior "grates on the First Amendment," wrote Justice David Souter. Government "is not free to interfere with speech for no better reason than promoting an approved message or discouraging a disfavored one."

An even earlier free-speech landmark, the 1978 case of Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, is especially relevant to the new lawsuit over contributions. Massachusetts had made it illegal for businesses to give money to ballot initiative campaigns.

The Supreme Court ruled that under the Bill of Rights, no such ban could stand: There is "no support in the First or Fourteenth Amendment . . . for the proposition that speech that otherwise would be within the protection of the First Amendment loses that protection simply because its source is a corporation."

The key teaching of the Bellotti case — that the First Amendment does not allow political speech restrictions based on a speaker's corporate identity — is not one that the Supreme Court has backed away from.

If anything, it is even more secure today than just a few years ago. Massachusetts cannot get away with treating political spending by organized labor as so sublime that unions can donate $15,000, no questions asked, to a single candidate, while individual donors are held to $1,000 — and businesses are deemed too impure to be allowed to donate one red cent.

Nor can the state justify its green light for union-financed PACs, while it warns businesses against giving anything to a PAC, not even a business name.

"Massachusetts needs extraordinarily good reasons to discriminate against businesses' political speech," the plaintiffs' lawyers contend, "and there is no reason good enough to justify Massachusetts' total ban."

Will Beacon Hill once again dig in its heels and defend an unconstitutional law? Or will it this time defer to the Constitution — and rectify its campaign-finance injustice voluntarily, before it's forced to do so in court?

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We worship our politicians - and we despise them

We worship our politicians - and we despise them from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Mourners line the street outside City Hall in Boston on
November 3, 2014, as the hearse bearing the body of former
Mayor Thomas Menino passes en route to funeral services
in Boston's Hyde Park.

Of course it was only by happenstance that former Mayor Thomas Menino died just days before the 2014 election, and that his funeral at Most Precious Blood Parish in Hyde Park coincided with the closing hours of all the campaigns whose outcomes would be decided on Tuesday. But that unplanned juxtaposition couldn't have illustrated more vividly the emotional extremes we resort to when it comes to political figures.

A newcomer watching the local TV news broadcasts in Boston early Monday morning might reasonably have concluded that the former mayor had been a hero of mythic proportions, a saint and a superstar whose goodness was unbounded and whose shortcomings were nonexistent.

Hours before the funeral began, the coverage was already wall-to-wall Menino. Reporters and camera crews were stationed not only at Faneuil Hall, where Menino had lain in repose on Sunday, and at the church where his funeral Mass would take place, but also at various locations along the route to be followed by the procession bearing Menino's remains through the city.

Bystanders were interviewed, and praised the late mayor unstintingly. Dignitaries were seen as they arrived to pay homage. Archival video clips showed Menino in moments of triumph and celebration. Appreciation and admiration overflowed for the politician who had ruled City Hall for two decades.

Then the stations went to a commercial break, so that viewers could be told how rotten politicians are.

With the election just a day away, one campaign spot followed another, and the bottom line in most of them was that the other guy stinks. If all you knew about the candidates running for governor and Congress were what you picked up from their opponents' ads, you would be revolted.

Who could possibly want to vote for such vile cheats and greedy liars and haters of the common good? Why, they're nothing but lackeys in the pocket of Wall Street, or stooges who ask "How high?" when Barack Obama tells them to jump. Richard Tisei is a right-wing hater of veterans! Seth Moulton is a hypocrite backed by out-of-state billionaires! If Charlie Baker wins, everyone else loses! If Martha Coakley wins, taxes are going up, up, up!

And then it was back to the tear-floods and sigh-tempests for Menino.

Voters worship politicians — or despise them. We extol them as demigods who can accomplish everything we crave — or revile them as crooks, drunk with power and self-aggrandizement. Scandals involving public officials seem never-ending. So do the outpourings of acclaim and adoration when powerful officeholders retire or die.

The fulsome Menino coverage, interspersed with so many pre-election attack ads, was a neat demonstration of the public's bipolar response to those we entrust with political power.

In a different way, the coverage also illustrated the contrast between the importance society and the media attributes to the death of politicians vs. the much more common shrug of insignificance when someone whose life wasn't consumed with politics is laid to rest.

Watching the TV news early on Monday, I learned that Menino's wasn't the only funeral Mass at Most Precious Blood Parish that day. More than once, I heard a reporter or anchor mention that another burial was taking place first, which was why a hearse could be seen there long before Menino's cortege had made its way to Hyde Park.

Whose funeral? Apparently no one thought that detail was important enough to mention.

Her name was Mary Ann Carty. She was 75 and had been sick for years, but her physical weakness took nothing from her personality — or from her passion for Irish culture. She had been one of the founders of Cumann na Gaeilge, the Irish Language Society of Boston, and remained an active member more than 40 years later.

Another funeral Mass - for Mary A. Carty of Hyde Park - took
place at Most Precious Blood Parish on Monday morning.
But no news account even mentioned her name.

"My God, she was sassy," her friend Molly Hester, a 24-year-old graduate student in mechanical engineering who shared Ms. Carty's love of Gaelic, told me on Monday.

"She had such a great sense of humor. We would sit and have a pint together — I would drink Guinness and she would have a Sprite."

Another friend described her as "a great soul," dryly funny and possessed of a remarkable memory — and always happy to "geek out" about the most effective ways to teach Irish.

Was Mary Carty's death newsworthy? Granted, she wasn't the longest-serving mayor in Boston's history. She didn't wield political power. She wasn't a celebrity.

But she lived and was loved and left her own mark on this town. She and Tom Menino resided in the same neighborhood, died on the same day, and lay before the same altar as the prayers for absolution were said.

Within hours of each other, they were buried in the same cemetery. Her passing may not have merited Page 1 coverage. Would it have been so hard to mention her name?

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Running from the 'R' word

Running from the 'R' word by Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

The five gubernatorial candidates — Charlie Baker, Martha
Coakley, Scott Lively, Evan Falchuk, and Jeff McCormick
posed for a photo before the start of the WBZ-TV debate.

If Attorney General Martha Coakley uttered the word "Republican" even once in last Yuesday night's televised gubernatorial debate, I missed it. For a Democrat hoping to win the highest office in one of the nation's bluest states, it was a mystifying omission.

After all, most Massachusetts voters, most of the time, would rather crawl through broken glass than vote for the candidate with the "R" after his name. The GOP's brand in this state could hardly be more toxic.

That is why Charlie Baker's second campaign for governor has so clearly been built on a strategy of being the sort of Republican Massachusetts voters can feel comfortable with — the sort of Republican who supports a socially liberal, activist government, but who promises to run it more efficiently and economically than it's been run under Deval Patrick.

Baker found opportunities last night to show the kinder, gentler persona he hopes will win over skeptical Bay State Democrats. He told Coakley graciously at one point: "No one is challenging your record as a child advocate across a long and distinguished career in public service."

That was deft and diplomatic, considering that an independent political action committee strongly backing Baker has been running a TV ad that brutally challenges Coakley's record on exactly that ground: She "tried to silence children's advocates," the spot intones; "Martha Coakley failed our most vulnerable citizens."

Nothing so harsh came out of Baker's mouth last night. Instead there was plenty of forgettable boilerplate about how Beacon Hill in recent years "took its eye off the ball" and how the next governor should be a "weed-whacker" focused on data, preventing mismanagement by keeping "a firm hand on the tiller."

When he did say something strong and quotable, it was an eight-word pledge: "Taxes under a Baker administration will go down."

Will voters believe that? Should voters believe anything these candidates say? Running for governor in 2006, Patrick insisted that property taxes would go down on his watch. Eight years later, property taxes area whole lot higher.

Baker's political mentor, former Governor William Weld, vowed in 1990 to vigorously resist then-Senate President Bill Bulger and the culture of corrupt cronyism he embodied. Then he won the Corner Office and reinvented himself as Bulger's best pal.

So take it all with large dose of salt, voters. Debates like Tuesday night's can be entertaining. But as a road map to the next administration, they are woefully inadequate.

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Casinos and repealing casino laws

For casinos -  and for repealing the casino law from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Read the Jacoby Files at the Boston Globe

On Election Day, I plan to vote for Question 3, the ballot initiative to repeal the Massachusetts casino law. Not because I oppose Massachusetts casinos — I don't — but because I strongly oppose the law.

If Question 3 passes, casinos would once again be illegal in Massachusetts. There would no longer be a need for a powerful gaming commission to pick and choose among applicants for one of the coveted licenses to operate a casino in the state. For Massachusetts residents with a yen for slots or roulette, the nearest legal options would remain in Connecticut, Rhode Island, or Maine.

I realize that support for Question 3 is concentrated among voters with moral, social, or public-policy objections to casinos. Slot machines (which take up most of the space in casinos) are designed to be addictive, luring players into gambling compulsively until their money is gone.

Rarely do casinos supply the economic growth hormone that promoters glowingly predict. The short-term stimulus provided when a casino opens in a distressed community tends to fade over time.

Instead, as 33 experts note in a report published by the Institute for American Values, "the presence of a casino drives out established local businesses and attracts other gambling-linked businesses, such as payday lenders, pawn shops, auto title lenders, and check cashing stores."

There are other costs. Where casinos go up, research shows, volunteerism, civic participation, and family stability decline. Property values suffer. Crime increases. So does bankruptcy.

Those are undeniably serious concerns. But they don't add up in my mind to an argument for prohibiting casinos — just as the serious harms associated with alcoholism, football, automobiles, and pornography don't add up to a case for shutting down liquor stores, the NFL, interstate highways, and adult film studios.

Gambling isn't my thing, but if it's the way you choose to spend your time and money, more power to you. Life is messy and sometimes tragic, but generally it's better to err on the side of freedom, markets, and choice — not to let the fact that some people choose unwisely become a justification for empowering government overlords to choose for us.

So why will I vote for a ballot measure that would return Massachusetts to casino prohibition? Because the state's traditional ban on casinos, though unreasonable, is far less damaging than the 2011 law that modestly expanded gaming at the cost of drastically expanding government control.

If that law had simply freed casino developers to operate in Massachusetts on roughly the same terms that apply to owners of newspapers or service stations or restaurants or roofing firms — i.e., regulated for compliance with standard safety, wage-and-hour, antidiscrimination, and environmental laws, but otherwise free to use their own judgment — there would be no reason to repeal it. Instead, Beacon Hill created a process in which almost every detail must be decided, approved, or dictated by the government.

Everything in this process depends on the goodwill — or the blind eye — of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. Who gets those lucrative monopoly casino licenses? What is the legal status of nearby communities? Which vendors can casinos do business with? Whom can they hire as employees? What will the new facilities look like? How will the construction be financed? Who sold the land the casinos will be built on?

An artist's rendering of the $800 million casino complex that
MGM Resorts wants to build in Springfield, Massachusetts.

Spend some time poking around the gaming commission's website to get a sense of just how intricate and intrusive the state's involvement in the casino business is under the current law. The lists and scope of regulations, applications, fees, and deadlines seem almost limitless. Want to mop floors or wait tables at a Massachusetts casino?

You'll have to pay the government $75 and fill out a 13-page Gaming Service Employee registration form that demands to know everything from the color of your eyes to where you were living five years ago.

If you're a higher-ranking "key gaming employee," such as a slot machines manager, the registration form runs to 29 pages, and the filing fee is $1,000.

This isn't reasonable regulation, it's Big-Brother-as-control-freak. By enmeshing itself so deeply in every aspect of bringing casinos to Massachusetts, the state has guaranteed not an ethically pristine process that all of us can trust, but endless manipulation, charges of bad faith, and temptations to corruption.

Already the chairman of the Massachusetts Gaming Commission has had to recuse himself from key decisions because of behind-the-scenes entanglements and allegations of bias.

With billions of dollars at stake, and state officials holding the strings, this mess can only get worse. There's no fix for such a wholly politicized gaming law. Let's repeal it now, while we still can.

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Don't count on an election day tsunami

Don't count on an election day tsunami from the files of Jeff Jacoby at the Boston Globe

Iraq War veteran Seth Moulton, left, defeated nine-term
US Rep. John Tierney in last week's primary, becoming the
first Massachusetts Democrat in 22 years to oust a sitting
member of Congress from his own party.

DEMOCRAT SETH MOULTON'S defeat of US Representative John Tierney in the 6th Congressional District primary last week came right on schedule.

The political newcomer, an Iraq War veteran with three Harvard degrees, was the first Massachusetts candidate in 22 years to vanquish a sitting congressman from his own party.

It last happened in 1992, when upstart Marty Meehan booted incumbent Chet Atkins in the Fifth Congressional District, then went on to win the seat in November. It was 22 years before that, in the Third Congressional District primary in 1970, that Father Robert Drinan, an antiwar liberal, toppled fellow Democrat Philip Philbin, who had first been elected to Congress in 1942.

So if history is any guide, it will be around 2036 the next time a member of the Massachusetts congressional delegation is overthrown in a primary election. Maybe even in a general election: That hasn't happened since 1996, when Peter Blute and Peter Torkildsen, the last Massachusetts Republicans to serve in the US House, were ousted after just two terms.

Critics of legal limits on congressional terms routinely claim that such restrictions aren't necessary. "We already have term limits," they say. "They're called elections."

But in the Bay State as in most states, members of Congress generally keep their title for as long as they wish. Except for open seats, elections are rarely more than a formality. Incumbents and their courtiers pay lip service to the people's right to choose their leaders. Yet in reality they view electoral challenges as a kind of blasphemy.

The establishment scorned Moulton for presuming to take on a nine-term incumbent. "He doesn't represent a threat to Tierney, who's doing everything right to represent his district," a Washington-based Democratic strategist told the Boston Globe last summer, then added condescendingly:

"Someday, he'll have a bright future." A phalanx of political insiders lobbied for Tierney's re-election. In a column published just days before voters rejected Tierney's bid for renomination, Barney Frank dismissed as "fanciful" the notion that a newcomer like Moulton might prove more effective than the 18-year insider.

Even at the Democrats' "unity" breakfast the morning after the primary, Moulton was treated coolly. The party's new Democratic nominee was sidelined for an hour and 45 minutes before finally being introduced to the audience.

It's not hard to understand why so many members of Congress come to regard incumbency much as medieval kings regarded the crown — theirs by divine right. The Economist noted recently that while 30 percent of Europe's monarchs have been replaced since 2012, less than 4 percent of US House seats are seriously competitive in the November midterms. Kings and queens aren't as hard to extricate as congressional incumbents.

But wait! Maybe this year will be different! Pollsters report that Congress has never been as despised as it is right now. In one national survey, 72 percent of likely voters say it would be better for the country if most incumbents were defeated this November. In another, only 29 percent of voters think their own representative deserves re-election. According to Gallup, public confidence in Congress is at an all-time low, with a pitiful 7 percent of Americans expressing confidence in the national legislature.

Ten weeks before Massachusetts Democrats jettisoned Tierney, Virginia Republicans, even more dramatically, ejected Eric Cantor — the first time any House majority leader has been defeated in a primary. Two other GOP incumbents, Ralph Hall of Texas and Kerry Bentivolio of Michigan, have also lost to primary challengers. Could this be the writing on the wall? Are voters readying a November 4th massacre?

For all the evidence of public disgust with Congress, House incumbents typically have little
trouble holding onto their seats. Even in "anti-incumbent" years, re-election rates
are about 90 percent.

On both left and right, there are voices suggesting as much. "I think we've heard an offshore warning, and I think a tsunami could be coming," MSNBC's Chris Matthews said after Cantor's defeat in June. In the Detroit News, editorial page editor Nolan Finley foresees "an anti-incumbent wave that could become a kick-the-bums-out tsunami by Election Day."

It's a sweet dream. But don't count on seeing it come true.

No matter how disgusted Americans get with Congress, no matter how vehement the nation's "anti-incumbent" mood, roughly nine out of 10 US representatives who seek re-election win it. Over the last three decades, Congress's plunging approval rates notwithstanding, the re-election rate for House members has dipped below 90 percent only twice.

Gerrymandered districts, polarized voting blocs, and weak (or nonexistent) challengers are more than enough to keep most members of Congress safe. No "tsunami" endangers Capitol Hill.

Tierney's defeat isn't a straw in the wind, but an exception to the rule. Expect another in, oh, 22 years.