I’d forgotten about the Bush administration’s idiosyncratic take on states’s rights and air pollution until I read about how we’re going to start heading in a non-insane direction:

President Obama on Monday will direct federal regulators to move swiftly to grant California and 13 other states the right to set strict automobile emissions and fuel efficiency standards, two administration officials said Sunday evening.

The directive makes good on an Obama campaign pledge and marks a sharp reversal from Bush administration policy. Granting California and the other states the right to regulate tailpipe emissions is one of the most dramatic actions Mr. Obama can take to quickly put his stamp on environmental policy.

Around Wednesday of last week I got myself into a funk about the daunting politics of getting the environmental policy we need. This is a welcome reminder of how important it is just not to have an administration that tries as hard as it can to make things as bad as possible.

The other day I wrote a bit about drug and crime policy ideas that the new administration could adopt. Mark Kleiman, a legitimate expert on the subject, has his own informative take up. Crime’s been gone as a political issue for years now, but substantively it still counts as something we ought to worry about. As he says, this is a big deal:

The U.S. has twice the homicide rate and five times the incarceration rate of Canada or Western Europe. We keep 2.3 million people in cells, and criminal violence sent 1.8 million people to the emergency room last year. Crime shapes where people live and work. It perpetuates concentrated poverty. African-Americans are about six times as likely as others to be murdered, and to be incarcerated. Alcohol and tobacco are the two largest public-health problems as measured by morbidity and mortality; the illicit drug trade creates violence and enforcement against that trade accounts for more than a fifth of all incarceration, again with an especially heavy toll among young poor black men.

Meanwhile, we appear to be looking at—optimistically—a period of several years before we can return to full employment. That will almost certainly mean more crime and more prisoners unless we find some smarter policies.

Minderbender asks:

It strikes me that, at least in my own experience, not all urban areas are the same. Downtown Chicago and parts of lower Manhattan have gorgeous, interesting buildings, and I don’t find them oppressive or ugly, even though there aren’t that many trees.

Meanwhile a lot of the new towers I see going up are hideous, and midtown Manhattan makes me hate the city/myself/everyone. Which leads me to ask: how important is aesthetics in urban policy? Should we be willing to subject new development to aesthetic review, even though that might threaten to make dense development more expensive? Is there a good way to go about doing this so that the review boards don’t get taken over by people with an agenda (probably an anti-density one)? Is it worth paying extra for public buildings so that people find them attractive, or are other needs simply more urgent?

I think this is an important issue, since I certainly agree with the premise that not all “urban areas full of tall buildings” are the same from an aesthetic point of view, and having a viable aesthetic is important to making density politically viable. This is arguably an externality situation, since living in an ugly building doesn’t cause you to suffer the full effects of its ugliness, and residents or tenants of an attractive building don’t capture the full benefit. But this is one of these cases where the existence of a real market failure doesn’t mean that there’s a good regulatory solution. Aesthetic issues do come up through existing processes for neighborhood airing of grievances, so it’s not as if this hasn’t occurred to anyone—there’s just only so much that can be done.

One regulatory issue that does need to be considered, however, is whether you’re making it economically viable to do interesting architecture. In downtown DC we have a very strict limit on the height of buildings. Under the circumstances, to build anything other than a pretty basic box structure would represent an enormous economic loss to the developer. Consequently, the buildings are uninspired as individual works and collectively they’re extremely monotonous. Even if we held the currently permitted level of density constant but allowed for more variation in heights we might see more interesting buildings getting made as architects could work with a greater variety of shapes without costing the client enormous sums of money.

And last, I do think this is a reason for public agencies and non-profit institutions to commit to aesthetic excellence in their own structures. The public sector probably shouldn’t try to get too imaginative or cutting-edge, but ensuring a high-level of classic style should be a priority. Non-profits—museums, universities, etc.—can handle the innovation. That said, there are often clashes between architects’ ideas of what buildings should look like and the ideas of people who want to see livable urban areas. Aesthetics matters, but it matters insofar as it contributes to livability, not as a totally independent consideration.

Washington Post editorial page wisely notes that the past few months’ worth of Senate appointment chaos should serve as a reminder that appointed senators are a bad idea. We ought to do special elections.

This also reminds me of the reverse problem, namely that in the event of (God forbid) a mass-casualty terrorist attack on the U.S. Capitol, the requirement that members of the House of Representatives be replaced via special election could produce a disaster. In other words, if someone managed to somehow kill almost the entire congress during a State of the Union address we wouldn’t be able to stand-up a new House to authorize the needed response measures. The only reasonable course of action would be some kind of extra-constitutional rule by presidential decree and it might be difficult or impossible to actually return to the rule of law.

Ideally, then, the ordinary rule would be to replace Senators or members of the House via special election but to have some kind of special proviso for filling seats with appointees in case of a mass-casualty event.

Cap and trade or carbon tax legislation will, I’m convinced, be an integral element to any serious climate policy. But as Brad Johnson reminds us there’s quite a lot that responsible regulatory policy can do, and already the Obama EPA is making a difference in halting the construction of new coal plants.

By the time of William C. Redfield’s resignation in 1919, the wheels had really fallen off Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. The Versailles Treaty had failed ratification in the Senate, the 1918 midterms were a big win for the Republicans, Wilson had suffered strokes and alienated longtime political allies, Attorney-General Mitchell Palmer was undertaking the most serious violations of civil liberties in American history, the Spanish Flu pandemic had killed tons of people, etc.

Not known to have participated in this in any noteworthy way was Congressman Joshua W. Alexander of Gallatin, Missouri. Alexander was born in Ohio in 1852, but moved to Missouri as a child and attended public school and college there, becoming a lawyer and setting up his law practice in Gallatin in 1875. He became president of the Gallatin Board of Education, and then joined the Missouri House of Representatives, rising to serve as its Speaker in 1887. He then briefly served as mayor of Gallatin and then was a judge from 1901 to 1907 when he entered congress. As a member of the House of Representatives he was dispatched to be the American delegate to the International Conference on Safety of Life at Sea which was formed in the wake of the sinking of the Titanic. When Redfield resigned, Wilson tapped Alexander as his replacement and he helmed the department—doing, as usual for Commerce Secretaries, nothing important—throughout the remainder of the Wilson Administration.