Address your e-mail to
the editors to [email protected]. Please include your address and daytime phone
number (for confirmation only).
A Nation
Divided
In addition to reading the
inner workings of my heart as it relates to tax rates for married couples, Rob
McIntyre ("E-Mail to
the Editors," May 7) takes issue with my arithmetic. While he is sadly
mistaken in the former instance--all marriage penalties are, like God's
children, equally dear to my heart--he may be right for all I know in the
latter. I do know, however, that my numbers have a source that has nothing to
do with my admittedly arthritic arithmetic skills. If McIntyre has a problem,
he should consult the December 2, 1996, "Taxing Issues" column in
Barron's titled "Marry in Haste," by the noted tax lawyer Joseph
Gelband. In other words, consider it fact checked.
As for
Andrew Sullivan's and Katha Pollitt's comments ("The Breakfast
Table"), given Sullivan's tenure at TNR , including but not limited
to his brilliant editing there of Stephen Glass, I will take his comments as a
compliment. I will resist the urge to reply to my Nation colleague Katha
Pollitt's comments about me and the mother of my daughter, whom she so
knowledgeably characterizes without ever having been introduced.
Slate
is not the place to air intra- Nation feuds, despite
Katha's verbal incontinence. I find it sad, moreover, to read the same tired
tripe over and over from the pen of a writer who once appeared on her way to
being a great poet and gave it all up to write a single column, over and over,
for the past 15 years.
-- Eric Alterman
Tale of
the Tape
Regarding
the May 21 "Today's Papers": If Richard Nixon's "but it would be wrong" is
really the classic example of what Safire calls "tickling the wire," how do you
explain the fact that no hush money was raised or paid as a result of the March
1973 Watergate-era tape to which you refer? Nixon detractors say the desultory
comments about raising money were the operative (as they used to say) part of
the conversation; Nixon defenders (of which I, as director of the Nixon
library, of course am one) stress that the president said it would be wrong and
that (if memory serves) "the White House can't do it." Seems that the only way
to resolve such ambiguity is to see what actually happened as a result of the
taped conversation. Ditto, one imagines, with Hubbell.
-- John Taylor
Affirmative Track-tion
As a
former track wannabe and somebody with several postgraduate degrees, I took
exception to this egregious statement in the May 21 Today's Papers:
Letting slower white
American runners into races just because they're white Americans is precisely
analogous to letting blacks and Latinos with poor SATs and low grades into
colleges just because they're blacks or Latinos.
There is
only one criterion on which to judge road racing: time posted. You
cannot argue about home field advantage, equipment differences, or help from
teammates. You are arguing there is only one criterion (because it is
precisely analogous) for determining a good college student: SAT scores. In a
road race you look to see who finished first, and in determining who is
eligible for race entry, you go by the unbiased clock.
-- Clay
Craighead
Viagravation
I have this overwhelming need
to respond to a remark you made in the May 20 edition of Today's Papers. The remark was in response to the Washington
Post front-page story about a possible bias by insurance companies with
regard to payment for Viagra vs. oral contraceptives. You state that, since the
second paragraph "says that more than half of Viagra prescriptions are being
subsidized by health plans, and the sixth paragraph says that slightly more
than half of all birth control pills are," there isn't really any bias, and
"why do we need this story?"
I submit
to you that you are overlooking a key fact in this statistic and that is the
amount of time it took to get each of those plans to subsidize the drug in
question. How long have birth control pills been available by prescription? 20
years? 25 years? Yet only slightly more than half of all birth control pills
are subsidized by health plans, according to the Post . By comparison,
how long has Viagra been available--a month? How wonderful for impotent men
that in that short space of time, it has already reached approximately the same
level of subsidization by health plans.
-- Michele
Harvey Centreville, Va.
Antitrust and the Law
In his piece "Microsuits," Jacob Weisberg shows he knows more about current
politics than about legal history. He states, "The question whether regulation
of commerce is a state or national affair was supposed to have been settled in
1789."
Of course, this question was
by no means "settled" with either the Constitution (1787) or the Bill of Rights
(1789). As there were few firms large enough to cross state lines into federal
jurisdiction in the 18 th century, the nation's founders generally
assumed the states would govern the economy. Nineteenth century common law
restraint-of-trade prosecutions fell to the state courts, as did the earliest
antitrust cases. Federal antitrust suits could not exist until Congress enacted
a federal antitrust law in 1890 and, even after, the question of jurisdiction
remained. Since the Constitution only permitted the national government to
regulate "commerce," whole areas of economic life were outside federal
jurisdiction. This was the essence of the 1905 E.C. Knight case, which
held manufacturing beyond the authority of federal courts. The U.S.
Supreme Court did not enable wholesale federal intervention by defining
"commerce" more broadly until the New Deal cases such as NLRB vs. Jones and
Laughlin (1937).
Of
course, the fact that state prosecutions have a long history does not mean they
are desirable. On the other hand, on the basis of Weisberg's article, I'm not
certain why he finds diverse legal climates so disturbing. Are we to discount
such antitrust prosecutions because the attorneys general are ambitious? This
seems a mighty high standard for any policy. Though it may be inefficient, I
think it reasonable that each locality can set the legal conditions of its own
economic life, as American states do with regard to taxation, infrastructure,
and a thousand other economic issues.
-- Andrew Wender
Cohen Legal history fellowUniversity of Wisconsin-Madison
Address your e-mail to
the editors to [email protected]. Please include your address and daytime phone
number (for confirmation only).
