Mark Kleiman Says I Show My Red Team Loyalties by Criticizing Republicans

The other day Mark Kleiman cited my
criticism of an alarmist New York Times story about
the menace that e-cigarette fluid poses to the children of America.
I would say he cited it favorably, because he
agreed with what I said, except this is the way he expressed
his agreement: “Libertarians, like stopped clocks, are right twice
a day.” From my perspective, Kleiman is occasionally right as well,
especially when he writes as a dispassionate drug policy analyst
rather than a partisan Democrat.

Speaking of which, Kleiman cannot resist delving back into our
argument
about rescheduling marijuana, the substance of which was never
clear to me. He continues to claim my discussion of the issue
betrayed a “misunderstanding of the Controlled Substances Act,”
although he has
never actually explained what I got wrong. I gather that
Kleiman was offended by the headline over my
January 31 post about a CNN interview with President Obama:
“Obama, Who Evidently Has Not Read the Controlled Substances Act,
Denies That He Has the Power to Reclassify Marijuana.” Kleiman
reads this as “an accusation that the President ‘had not read’ the
law,” and he takes umbrage at the suggestion. But the headline
actually was intended as a joke, since I’m pretty sure Obama knows
the executive branch can reschedule marijuana without an act of
Congress, although he suggested otherwise in the interview. “What
is and isn’t a Schedule I narcotic is a job for Congress,” he

told Jake Tapper. “It’s not something by ourselves that we
start changing.” In my view, that reply was, at the very least,
evasive and misleading, and I suspect Kleiman would agree if Obama
were a Republican.

So perhaps Kleiman is simply projecting when he charges me
(again) with blind partisanship, saying “Sullum and his colleagues
play for the Red Team,” which “reflect[s] the partisan bias of the
people who pay the bills at Reason.com.” Which people are those?
Kleiman, as usual when he implies that people who fail to agree
with him do not really believe what they say, does not get into
specifics. Furthermore, his charge that I am a loyal follower of
the Republican Party does not jibe very well with his charge that I
am a rigid libertarian ideologue, since it is not really possible
to be both. But the really telling thing about Kleiman’s claim that
I “play for the Red Team” is the evidence he cites:
my March
19 column titled “Don’t Republicans Abuse Executive Power?” In
case Kleiman missed it, my answer was yes. Here are some clues from
the column, which discusses the ENFORCE the Law Act, a bill
approved by the House of Representatives earlier this month:

While the bill’s name is ridiculous and its mechanism is
dubious, the basic premise of its supporters, almost all of whom
are Republicans, is correct: As the House Judiciary
Committee’s report on the bill puts it, Obama has engaged
in a “pattern of overstepping [his] constitutional bounds.” But so
did his Republican predecessors—a fact the report seems designed to
obscure….

The most striking aspect of the executive excesses cited by
Republicans may be what they leave out. Why no mention, for
example, of the way Obama misused money meant for financial
institutions to bail out the car industry? Perhaps because this
blatantly illegal diversion of congressionally allocated
funds was initiated by George W. Bush.

Partisanship likewise helps explain why the committee report
explicitly eschews discussion of presidential abuses justified in
the name of national security. Those include some of Obama’s most
troubling power grabs, such as
routinely collecting innocent people’s phone
records, going to war without congressional
authorization, detaining terrorism suspects indefinitely
without trial, and killing people he unilaterally
identifies as enemies of America. But as Bush showed, national
security is a bipartisan excuse for ignoring the law.

In the same column, I defended Obama against the charge that
exercising prosecutorial discretion in drug cases violates his duty
to “take care that the laws be faithfully
executed.” According to Kleiman, all of this amounts to
Republican cheerleading. 

One final thing: Kleiman claims “Sullum rather lost his temper”
when he accused me of financially motivated insincerity. Similarly,
in the comment thread of an
earlier post, Kleiman said I “react[ed] badly.” If you go back
and read
the exchange (especially the second paragraph of Kleiman’s

January 31 post), you can judge for yourself who lost his
temper and behaved badly.