Andrew Sullivan said the other day that it was a “scandal” that the District of Columbia “had less democracy than Kirkuk,” a Kurdish city in northern Iraq. Sullivan is upset because Sen. Sam Brownback, the chairman of the D.C. appropriations subcommittee in the Senate, criticized a legal opinion made by D.C. Attorney General Robert J. Spagnoletti. Last year Spagnoletti advised Mayor Anthony Williams that a gay couple married in Massachusetts could file a joint tax return in the District.This was apparently not a binding opinion, as Chief Financial Officer Natwar Gandhi has final authority over the matter. Still, Brownback is upset that the District is taking a step towards recognizing gay marriage, and Williams is upset that Brownback said he was upset, because this could jeopardize the District’s $8 billion budget that must be approved by the senator’s subcommittee. Sullivan is upset that Brownback is threatening the sanctity of “democracy” in the nation’s capital.
Personally, I’m upset with Attorney General Spagnoletti, not for his gay marriage-tax return opinion, but for a blatant act of extortion he committed this week. Yesterday pharmacy chain CVS “settled” antitrust charges trumped up by Spagnoletti after the company acquired a small pharmacy in the District’s Palisades neighborhood. Spagnoletti said the acquisition was an illegal attempt to monopolize the Palisades pharmacy market. The “settlement” requires CVS to pay $350,000 to a charity that “will use the money to help needy city residents buy prescription drugs,” and another $125,000 into the District’s “antitrust enforcement fund”—presumably to help needy antitrust lawyers fabricate future cases against other city businesses. CVS will also accept “price constraints” on its Palisades store for three years.
Is this the type of “democracy” that Andrew Sullivan wants to see more of in the District? Judging by the friends he keeps, it is. One of Sullivan’s favorite D.C. politicians is David Catania, a councilman who recently left the Republican Party and became an independent. In June 2004, Sullivan called Catania “a friend and a bit of hero” for being “an inclusive, tax-cutting, bureaucracy-terrorizing, rising political star.” After leaving the GOP, Sullivan again praised Catania for “car[ing] deeply about personal freedom and urban policy.”
Catania sounds like a great guy, except that in reality he’s an economic populist who champions central planning. In just the past week Catania’s made headlines for two pieces of legislation that can hardly be deemed pro-personal freedom: Catania’s “Big Box Store Amendment Act” would ban construction of any Wal-Mart, Target, Home Depot, or similar store within the District. Catania said the ban was about “protecting District jobs and promoting economic diversity,” because the big-box retailers “have a history of belittling workers and crushing local merchants.”
Catania’s other legislative proposal fits nicely with Spagnoletti’s CVS litigation: Price controls on prescription drugs. This week the D.C. Council’s health committee, which Catania chairs, unanimously approved a measure that would make it illegal for pharmaceutical companies to “overprice” their products. Catania wants Mayor Williams to use eminent domain to force drug companies to license their drugs at a rate unilaterally determined by the city.
If David Catania is Andrew Sullivan’s concept of a political hero, then the prospect for District residents (myself included) is indeed bleak. In the name of thwarting federal tyranny, we must accept a Cataniaesque “democracy” that subjects all economic decisions to a vote of the city council. My “personal freedom” to shop at Wal-Mart must give way to political demagoguery.
Sullivan said D.C. needs as much “democracy” as Kirkuk. I wonder whether the rulers of Kirkuk have a greater respect for individual rights than the rulers (and pundits) of D.C.
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I agree that the Judge has no founding for his statist rulings on CVS. But I fail to see how this is a logical argument. Whether or not Sullivan supported Spagnoletti on this issue in spite of the Judge’s other transgressions is irrelavent. If anything this seems like one big strawman.
Kirkuk illustrates one of the fundamental defects of democracy: it cannot define “the people” but must take it from some external source. Kirkuk is no more democratic than Johannesburg twenty years ago; the definition (here, “Kurdish”) automatically builds in the answer. Never mind the recent Arab settlers in the area, or even the Armenians resident there (and elsewhere in Iraq) since the Turkish genocide in which the Kurds assisted, there are other groups like Assyrian and Chaldaean Christians who have been living in the area at least as long as the Kurds. For them, it’s no democracy.
And that’s a lesson which can also be applied to countries’ capital areas: in a true sense, their “people” are not only the physical residents, but also the others represented there. Any local democracy cannot compel the outside without losing the democratic aspect, just as Rome ceased to be effectively democratic for those of its citizens who couldn’t participate since they didn’t live in Rome (and never mind all those non-Romans).
Keeping stores small might not be such a bad thing.
DC’s major problem is they won’t allow ANYTHING to be build in the District.
Sigma, what is the basis for that statement about the size of retail outlets? Can you prove that the Big Box stores are more ineffcient and will suffer great economic losses in the near/far future? If you can, I’ll sell my house to short walmart,target, etc.. stock and I’ll gove you 10% of my profits.
Of course, but what do you think about that?,
P.M.Lawrence:
Not quite. It is quite simple to define people as those who are citizens of the democratic state – citizens being those who have an enduring legal residence there.
Exclusive rights to vote (such as were the case in ancient Rome) based on denial of citizenship status are not reflective of the form of democracy advocated by those to who you are addressing your post.
Democracy is a decisionmaking system for the citizens of a particular jurisdiction and therefore by definition acts in their interests, and theirs alone. This can sometimes have negative impacts on those who reside in other jurisdicitons but that is not a fault of democracy but rather a feature of the natural state of nature in which the interations are guided only by the principle of “might is right”. Democracy did not create the natural state into which it now exists and can only therefore look to ‘modify’ the natural state for those within its jurisdiction and control by the creation of laws and property rights.
Ouytside of governments there are no property rights or laws – only the balancing of powers and national interests.
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