I've noticed a tendency among certain commentators on the left to cite certain statistics as if they illustrated essential truths when in fact they conceal or ignore the most important information. Mark Twain famously said "[t]here are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." The value of statistics is that they enable large amounts of information to be summarized in a form that preserves essential data and eliminates the extraneous. In the hands of unscrupulous or sloppy debaters, statistics can be used to present meaningless information as if it's actually significant. I've noticed the trend in a number of areas lately.
1) Executive Orders. When someone on the right complains about Barack Obama's use of executive orders to encroach upon legislative authority or otherwise exceed his constitutional remit, you can count on someone on the left to point out that Obama has issued significantly fewer executive orders than any of his recent predecessors. The American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara has compiled a tally of executive orders issued by every president going back to Washington.
But the objection of course is not to the number of executive orders. There is nothing inherently wrong with executive orders per se. In fact they are how the president directs the executive branch to implement his policies. So long as those policy decisions remain within the president's constitutional authority there's nothing wrong with them. The problem is that Obama frequently uses his executive orders to make material changes to congressional legislation like Obamacare or to abuse prosecutorial discretion by granting de facto amnesty to whole classes of illegal aliens.
2) Signing Statements. Presidential signing statements are often talked about in a manner similar to executive orders. As with executive orders, signing statements are morally neutral, deriving their character from their content. Lawrence Tribe has said that signing statements are "informative and constitutionally unobjectionable." The controversy arises as presidents use signing statements to announce their judgment that, notwithstanding the President's assent, certain provisions of an act of Congress are constitutionally infirm and, therefore, not binding upon the President. The American Bar Association has said that presidents should veto legislation that contains unconstitutional provisions.
While the ABA's position has the advantage of consistency, it is often impractical in the modern era. These days Congress often passes massive bills or thousands of pages long which may contain individual provisions that are constitutionally objectionable. Sometimes these provisions are deliberately and cynically attached with the knowledge that the President will be presented with a Hobson's choice of signing them into law or vetoing the entire bill. Presidents frequently use signing statements to extricate themselves from such a dilemma.
Ideally Congress would limit its activity to those powers specifically granted it in Article I of the Constitution. This would result in much shorter bills and fewer constitutional disputes. But until such time as it does, we can count on presidents' resorting to signing statements to defend their constitutional prerogatives. The problem comes when signing statements devolve from an imperfect response to congressional overreach to an unconstitutional assertion of authority to alter legislation based merely on policy choices at odds with Congress.
3) Obamacare Enrollments. During the drafting, the legislative horsetrading and the rollout and implementation of Obamacare, advocates for and against became fixated on the issue of counting enrollees as if that would determine or signal the success or failure of the legislation. A lot of time has been spent arguing over the significance and the reliability of enrollment statistics.
In fact the number of people enrolled in Obamacare is a virtually meaningless statistic. A person's insurance card in and of itself has no curative powers. It's sole measure of value is the extent to which it affords access to actual care. British and Canadian newspapers provide almost daily evidence that there is very little connection between universal coverage and universal care. Closer to home the metastasizing VA scandal is proof that, just because the government says you're entitled to care, doesn't mean you'll actually get any.
4) Judicial Activism. This isn't really a case of statistics. It's just another example of a lazy argument raised by progressives whenever the courts invalidate a law they happen to like. Judicial activism is a phrase popularized by conservatives who objected to justices on the Earl Warren and Warren Burger courts imposing progressive policy and cultural changes upon the country under the guise of judicial review.
When courts began rediscovering the written Constitution in the nineties, they began reigning in federal excesses, invalidating legislation favored by progressives. Progressives in turn cried foul, asserting that conservatives were hypocrites for applauding this conservative version of judicial activism. But the essence of judicial activism is not in the invalidation of laws, it is in the imposition of the personal opinions, attitudes and philosophies of the judges in place of a faithful application of the law.
Part of a judge's job is to resolve conflicts between laws. When there is a conflict between congressional legislation and the Constitution, the Constitution is supreme and any statute that conflicts with it cannot be valid. To declare a law unenforceable because it conflicts with the Constitution is not judicial activism. It becomes judicial activism when judges look to authority outside the Constitution or twist the plain meaning of its words. To progressives the Constitution is less an objective written charter of government than a judicial enabling act empowering judges to substitute their own personal morality for the decisions of the elected branches.
Federal judges are appointed for life and, save for the extraordinary remedy of impeachment, are unaccountable to the people they serve. This is important because it insulates judges from external political pressure. But it means that we have to rely on the judges' own self-control and ethics to protect their deliberations from internal political pressure. The courts are like the military, a very undemocratic institution entrusted with the protection of democratic self-government. In their own way political judges are as dangerous to the republic as political military officers. Progressives like Obama reject this idea. Even before he was elected Obama said that he regarded empathy as a critical judicial attribute as if judges should tailor their decisions based on the socio-economic status, sex or ethnicity of the litigants.
If we had an energetic news media, serious about doing its job, these rhetorical sleights-of-hand would be challenged and debunked early on. But many media figures are either ideologically aligned with the progressives or too concerned with their very impressive hair to take on that task. So it remains to the consumer of news, the citizen, to be aware of these tricks and to focus on information that's really relevant.
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