The Freedom Bulletin

Governor Deval Patrick signed a bill reforming Massachusetts’s alimony laws yesterday. The bill, overall, will decrease the amount of alimony people have to pay to their ex-spouses, limiting payments to a set amount of time based on the length of the marriage.

This bill, while it doesn’t go as far as I would, is a step in the right direction. I don’t think there should be such thing as alimony or spousal support at all. The way I see it, no adult has a right to be financially supported by another adult, and there is no reason why one person should be required to continue financially supporting another just because they have in the past. If one person agrees to financially support another, fine, but this is a favor, not a right, and the giver has a right to withdraw it at any time.

I’ve heard many supporters of alimony argue that stay-at-home spouses contribute just as much to the marriage as those who have jobs, and that they are making a big sacrifice by giving up their careers to take care of the house and/or children. Yes, housework does require some time and effort. But in my experience as a single person who both takes care of my house and has a full-time job, commuting to my job and spending the day in an office is way more tiring and time consuming than doing the cleaning, cooking, shopping, and laundry that I need to do. If I could choose between working full-time and not having to do any chores around the house, or doing all the chores and not having to work, I would definitely choose the second. Each type of work is work to some extent – I’m not trying to say that spouses who stay at home do nothing but sit around all day. But having a job – unless you have an unusually easy job – is simply more time-consuming and stressful than working around the house. For one spouse to be the breadwinner and the other to stay at home is just not an equal division of labor.

And yes, staying home for a long time is an impediment if you decide to go back into the job market at a later date. But it’s not exactly a sacrifice to receive the material goods you need for free, instead of having to work for them. Plus, unless someone forced you to stay at home, you don’t have a right to demand restitution for this because it was your own choice.

For one spouse to be allowed to live off the money of another is a windfall that they did nothing to earn. Even if someone freely chooses to do such a favor – and many people are pressured into it against their will – they should also be free to change their mind and stop the financial support at any time. Alimony punishes people for doing a favor for their spouse, and rewards people for having received financial support that they did not earn. If anything, the spouse who received the financial support should have to pay alimony as a way of repaying the favor that they received!

So while eliminating lifetime alimony is a good start, I hope alimony laws are changed even more in the direction of equality and justice.

Note: To make it easier to keep track of things, I created a brief “who’s who” of the people involved in this case.

During the Sal DiMasi trial we’ve heard from various people involved in state government and gotten an inside look at how the legislative process works. But none was as high-profile as today’s witness, Governor Deval Patrick himself.

The courtroom was completely packed for the governor’s testimony, as you might expect, but all the spectators, reporters, and supporters of the three defendants had to wait quite a while. For almost the first hour of court, prosecutors and defense lawyers argued about a defense motion filed yesterday to strike a portion of Leslie Kirwan‘s testimony, when she said that if she had known that DiMasi received legal fees for promoting the interests of Cognos, she would not have approved the performance management software contract and would have sought legal advice. Judge Mark Wolf ruled that he would deny the motion, at least for now.

At 9:50, Kirwan, the state Secretary of Administration and Finance, took the stand to continue her testimony from Wednesday. On cross-examination by DiMasi’s lawyer, Thomas Kiley, she said that the Cognos software contract (which allegedly was included because of bribes paid to DiMasi) was not the only non-emergency item included in what was supposed to be an emergency bond bill in 2007. A $4.5 million data and automated citation system for police was included as well. Additionally, she admitted, when asked by Kiley, that during her interactions with DiMasi when he mentioned the idea of buying the software, there was “nothing heavy handed…no ‘I”ll give you this, you give me that.’” Moreover, DiMasi’s urging was not the sole reason for choosing Cognos as the vendor for the software; the Information Technology Department (a subdivision of Administration and Finance) strongly recommended it, and Kirwan’s staff had input into the decision as well. In fact, during her grand jury testimony, she had said she “did not feel influenced” by DiMasi’s interest. Today she did not directly admit that but just said, “I made the best decision that I could under all the circumstances facing me.”

On re-direct examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Theodore Merritt, she reiterated that DiMasi asked her about performance management software “in his official capacity as speaker of the House” and that it stood out to her because “he reached out to me personally.” However, once the software was purchased, no one from his office followed up with her about implementation.

At 11:30, after a 15-minute recess, Governor Patrick finally entered the courtroom and took the witness stand, wearing a dark suit, light blue shirt, and green tie. Merritt conducted his direct-examination. Speaking calmly, the governor explained that he initially conceived of the 2007 emergency bond bill as a way to fund transportation projects in order to get matching federal grants which otherwise would have been forfeited. Every Monday afternoon, he had legislative leadership meetings with DiMasi, Senate President Therese Murray, Lieutenant Governor Tim Murray, Kirwan, and others. DiMasi “wanted to add to the bond bill authority to bond for performance management software” and described how valuable it would be for tracking state agencies, projects, and programs. Patrick agreed and was interested in the concept as well. “Not in the emergency bond bill initially, but it was something we were interested in,” he said. More than once, DiMasi reminded Patrick of the software idea and asked how it was going, but he never mentioned the company Cognos.

In the spring of 2007, Patrick began having difficulty getting proposals through the legislature, such as additional funding for police and life sciences. Rep. Michael Capuano arranged a breakfast meeting at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston between the governor and the speaker. They discussed, in Patrick’s words, “what I wanted to see moved, what the speaker wanted to see moved.” Patrick mentioned life sciences and a data center in Springfield; DiMasi, as usual, mentioned the performance management contract, saying ,”Don’t forget, that contract’s important to me.” The governor told his staff, “If we could do it within the rules, then go ahead.”

A lighthearted moment happened when an email that Patrick had sent after this meeting was shown on monitors. The sender was “Sally Reynolds,” which Patrick explained was his code name, a combination of his grandmother’s and grandfather’s names. “You’re gonna need a new one,” Judge Wolf quipped.

Merritt then asked, “If you knew that Speaker DiMasi had received money from legal referral fees derived from Cognos in return for pushing Cognos’s interests, would you have acted any differently as governor?” Patrick replied, “Yes…we wouldn’t have proceeded.” He answered similarly when asked what he would have done had he known that DiMasi’s financial advisor (Vitale) was receiving $500,000 in exchange for him taking official actions, adding that he may have gotten advice from the state ethics commission.

After the deal was signed, Patrick’s staff brought up concerns about “the integrity of the process,” and he referred them to the Inspector General’s office. He spoke with DiMasi shortly after an article was published in the Boston Globe about this. “He was angry and upset about the article and said he believed our staff had leaked information to the Globe about the Inspector General’s review,” said Patrick. When the speaker asked him to tell the press that DiMasi had no interest in the contract, he said “we couldn’t do that because it wasn’t accurate.”

DiMasi’s other lawyer, Bill Cintolo, took the podium to cross-examine the governor. “I have a very loud voice,” he warned him, to laughter from the gallery. “In the private sector, your talents would have commanded a considerably higher salary than you received as governor?” he asked. “I hope so,” Patrick replied, to more laughter. Cintolo drew attention to the fact that it is extremely common for people to donate to campaigns, and that often, “after those contributions are made, they seek to do business with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Cintolo displayed records showing that Cognos had made a contribution to Patrick’s inauguration fund, and Patrick agreed that as a general matter, “Sometimes things happen after something occurs but not because something occurs.” In other words, Patrick approved the Cognos contract after the company made their contribution, but not because of the contribution.

DiMasi never said, “I am asking about this contract because I’ve been paid by Cognos to do that,” nor did he say “I’m getting paid for this; you gotta do it,” or “Do this for me and I’ll do life sciences for you.” Instead, it was Patrick’s decision to approve the contract. “You would ultimately make a decision on the merits?” Cintolo asked. “Sure,” he replied. He also agreed that he replied to DiMasi’s suggestions with “I’ll consider it” as opposed to “I’ll do it,” and that his staff vetted the performance management idea and he concluded, “This is pretty good.”

Later, countering the prosecution’s assertion that the state had not signed another $15 million performance management software deal, Cintolo brought up that there is currently a proposal in the Senate for that type of software. “I think so but I’m not sure,” said Patrick.

After an hour and 15 minutes on the stand, Patrick left, and court adjourned until Tuesday.

Read more about the governor’s testimony at the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, NECN, and AP.

Bad:

One word: Massachusetts. The other voters of my state actually thought it would be a good idea to re-elect Governor Deval Patrick, Secretary of State Bill Galvin (who ruled that it was an emergency that Massachusetts only had one senator), Attorney General Martha Coakley (who charged Alexander Pring-Wilson with first-degree murder), and all of the incumbents in Congress. They also thought it would be a good idea to elect Steve Grossman as treasurer and Suzanne Bump (a Democrat whom even the Globe didn’t endorse!) as auditor…and, I almost forgot, to defeat Question 3 and keep the sales tax at 6.25%.

Barney Frank’s victory speech. Although I completely disagree with him politically, I had some respect for Frank as a person before he made this speech. No more. Although he won, and although his opponent, Sean Bielat, was nothing but classy during the campaign, Frank said the following delightful words: “I was very much disappointed in the tenor of the campaign…At least in Massachusetts, we have repudiated unreasoning anger, vituperation, anonymous smears, and that has to be said…the collective campaigns that were run by most Republicans were beneath the dignity of a democracy, and I am delighted than they were repudiated.” He then bashed Bielat for criticizing the odd shape of the district and gave a lecture about how the district was originally gerrymandered by a Republican. You need to watch the speech to understand how incredibly obnoxious it was.

Harry Reid is keeping his seat.

Proposition 19, the California ballot initiative to legailze marijuana, failed.

Good:

Republicans took the House of Representatives! They gained 60 seats, the most since 1948. Nancy Pelosi will no longer be the Speaker of the House, and Barney Frank will no longer be the chair of the financial services committee.

Kelly Ayotte won the Senate race in New Hampshire.

Rand Paul won the Senate race in Kentucky. His dad must be so proud! I am so happy that the two of them will be serving on Capitol Hill together.

The races in Massachusetts were closer than ever before. For example, the Governor’s race was 49% to 42%. Bill Hudak, one of my favorites whom liberals call a radical “kook,” got 43% of the vote. And Question 3 to cut the sales tax got 43% of the vote, while the previous two attempts to eliminate the income tax got only in the 30s. At least all of the races were competitive, instead of Democrats being assured victory and Republicans as unlikely to win as third party candidates are in normal elections.

Question 1. Although the alcohol tax would not be my preferred one to cut if it was my choice, at least Massachusetts voters got rid of one tax.

If you live in Massachusetts, and you are sick of our state’s current trend of higher taxes, more spending, and more laws restricting people’s actions and taking away our freedom, please vote for Charlie Baker. Baker is not perfect. I wish, for example, that he supported Question 3 (to roll back the sales tax to 3%), and that he opposed the individual mandate in principle.

But, Baker is a heck of a lot better than our current governor, Deval Patrick. In addition to supporting a progressive income tax and thinking it is okay for illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition rates, Patrick decided, instead of spending less, to raise the sales tax in the middle of this horrific recession. And, due to the unfortunate voting system that is used in America, which makes it almost impossible for independent or third party candidates to win, Baker is the only viable alternative to Patrick. He has some ideas that would truly make our state a better place, such as requiring doctors to actually make their prices public and to cut spending by at least $1 billion (PDF). To paraphrase Baker’s most recent ad, if you want change, change governors.

A video of Baker’s rally last weekend with New Jersey governor Chris Christie at Memorial Hall, Melrose, MA:

Paul Loscocco, the running mate of independent Massachusetts gubernatorial candidate Tim Cahill, dropped out of the race today and endorsed Republican Charlie Baker. In a somewhat sad series of events, Cahill’s campaign manager and senior advisor also quit last week, but Cahill declares that he will stay in the race.

In addition to being sad, this turn in the gubernatorial race illustrates why our electoral system, plurality voting, is simply bad. Plurality voting, which is used in almost all elections in the USA and in most of the world, means that in each race, you vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes wins.

Although this is probably the simplest voting method, it’s far from the best. A result of this system is that independent and third party candidates are maligned for “taking away” votes from the major party candidate who is the most similar to them.

I support Baker in the governor’s race, but I’m not happy that so many of my fellow Baker supporters constantly bash Cahill, almost more harshly than they criticize Baker’s chief opponent, Democrat (and incumbent) Deval Patrick. Of course, it makes sense for Baker and his supporters to wish Cahill wasn’t running, since if his ideas and image are indeed more like Baker’s than Patrick’s, then his presence in the race hurts Baker.

But the only reason this makes sense is because of the stupid voting system that is in use. Adopting a better system, such as Borda count, range voting, or my personal favorite, instant runoff voting, would get rid of this problem by allowing people to express their true preferences without inadvertently helping their least favorite candidate.

I want Baker to win but I also admire Cahill’s decision to run as an independent, and I wish there was a Libertarian in the race, so that these views would get more exposure, even if he or she had no chance of winning. In the Massachusetts Senate special election, I liked independent/libertarian Joe Kennedy the best based on platform alone, but I recognized that he had no chance of winning, so I supported Scott Brown, whom I like, too. I wish that I could have these opinions without feeling torn between two camps (Republican and libertarian), and without the members of the two camps angrily insulting each other. I wish that I, and everyone else, could vote in a way that expresses our true preferences. With a different voting system, we could.

This February, Governor Deval Patrick announced that health insurance companies would be required to submit proposed price increases to the Insurance Commissioner 30 days in advance of taking effect. Last month, the Commissioner, Joseph Murphy, rejected 235 of the 274 price increases that insurance companies proposed. Six companies – Blue Cross Blue Shield, Harvard Pilgrim, Tufts Health Plan, Fallon Community Health Plan, Health New England, and Neighborhood Health Plan – are suing the Commissioner, claiming that they will be forced to operate at a loss if they are not allowed to increase their prices as planned. A hearing took place on Thursday in Suffolk County Superior Court, with the six companies seeking an injunction against the state to allow them to raise their prices.

I think both sides have good points. I am all for price ceilings on goods with inelastic demand – necessities that people are going to buy no matter what the cost. I believe that allowing companies to charge whatever they want for necessities such as medical services amounts to extortion. If someone needs a medical product or service to live, then they don’t exactly have a choice about whether to buy it, so the transaction is not voluntary like most transactions in an unregulated market, but actually qualifies as coercive. For this reason, I believe that the government has a right (and if prices are really ridiculous as they are with health services, even an obligation) to set and enforce price ceilings on goods with inelastic demand.

But the insurance companies sure had a point when they argued that they themselves don’t have much control over the cost of health services. The exorbitant cost of health insurance is caused primarily by the prices that doctors and hospitals charge. It is doctors and hospitals, the underlying cause of health insurance prices, who should be subjected to price ceilings.

I am no fan of Patrick, but I appreciate that he is finally trying to do something about the ridiculous cost of medical services. Price ceilings are something that, unfortunately, few politicians have considered as a solution to this problem. I salute Patrick’s willingness to try something that resembles price ceilings; I just wish he would focus on doctors and hospitals, who are the real cause of the problem, instead of insurance companies.

Justice is dead in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Judge Thomas Connolly just dismissed a bid by the MassGOP to stop the swearing-in of newly-appointed “senator” Paul Kirk. It kind of blows my mind how many evil things happened in the past couple of days. First, both houses of the state legislature passed the senator-appointment bill, and Deval Patrick signed it. Then he asked for an “emergency” to be declared and Secretary of State William Galvin agreed. Now, Paul Kirk has been appointed “senator” and he is set to be sworn in in Washington D.C. at 3:15.

The MassGOP filed an injunction against Patrick last night, and I attended the hearing on it this morning. I will share my observations, with my opinions in italics.

I arrived in courtroom 1006 in Suffolk Superior Court a little before 8, when the hearing was scheduled, but it did not start until about 9. Assistant Attorney General Peter Sacks represented Governor Patrick, while Attorney James P. O’Brien and Chairman Jennifer Nassour represented the GOP.

Both sides gave brief arguments for their points of view. O’Brien first listed the facts of the case. He pointed out that the legislature, although they passed the hypocrisy bill (my term, not his), did not have the two-thirds majority required for an emergency preamble making the bill take effect immediately instead of in 90 days. He also noted that according to the State Constitution, emergency bills must be subject to a referendum. This bill was not, since the deadline for referendums is August 5.

By declaring an emergency anyway, Patrick ”establishes a dangerous precedent” and causes “irreparable harm” to the people of Massachusetts, O’Brien argued. “The job of the governor is to protect the Constitution, not to circumvent it.”

Connolly was skeptical of O’Brien’s claim that Kirk’s appointment would cause “irreparable harm.” He incredulously asked if the harm was that we would have a senator sitting. That would be harmful to the few people in this state who actually believe in liberty, especially if Kirk’s appointment enables Obama’s health socialism bill to pass, but I digress. O’Brien responded, sensibly, that it would set a harmful precedent for the governor to “maneuver and utilize the Constitution in an inappropriate manner.”

Then Sacks argued his side. He said that the emergency succession bill is subject to a referendum, with a deadline of 30 days after the bill was filed. The deadline that the GOP used, according to Sacks, is the deadline for initiative petitions. He argued that the GOP had not shown that the public interest would be helped by granting their injunction and that the GOP’s motion was moot because Kirk has already been appointed. “I don’t feel that anyone is being deprived of any rights by this appointment,” he said. Really? Just to name one, if the health socialism bill passes because of “Senator” Kirk’s vote, that would deprive people of the right to choose whether or not they want health insurance.

Connolly repeated that the GOP must show that the appointment would cause irreparable harm. O’Brien replied that if the injunction is needed to preserve the law (which it is), proof of irreparable harm is not needed. Sacks insisted that the injunction would not serve the public interest (it sure would if liberty is in the public interest), and therefore shouldn’t be passed even if it is needed to protect the law.

Connolly took the motion under advisement and considered it for about four hours before making his (in my opinion wrong) decision.

I got the impression from this hearing that Connolly is probably a Democrat and never seriously considered the GOP injunction. The injunction should have been granted for a simple reason: there is no emergency. Because there is no emergency, Patrick should have no right to declare an emergency. No one is in danger if Massachusetts has only one Senator. No one will die because of it. It’s one thing for people to have different opinions, but how can the Democrats deny obvious facts? It simply isn’t an emergency, and I don’t see how a rational, thinking being could believe that it is.

This kind of tyranny is exactly what the Constitution of the United States was designed to prevent. The separation of powers is supposed to ensure that no one faction gains complete power and that the majority does not take away the rights of minorities. In Massachusetts, however, the legislative, executive, and judicial branches – all dominated by Democrats – demonstrated today that they are in cahoots, ganging up to take away the people’s liberty and oppress the minority who disagree with their views.

Call me immature, but whenever I refer to Kirk from now on, I will put the word “senator” in quotes. Paul Kirk is not my senator. He was appointed illegitimately and illegally.