Functional Repeal!

The case of whether to allow interstate wine sales over the internet (I simplify here) was argued in the Supreme Court yesterday. The Times coverage shows promise that the 21st Amendment will be fuctionally repealed (perhaps bad if you care about small things like “separation of powers,” but good if you want to buy sweet California hooch online!):

If the Supreme Court argument Tuesday on interstate wine sales proves to be a reliable roadmap to the eventual decision, consumers who want to order wine directly from out-of-state wineries will soon be able to do so with the court’s blessing.

The justices appeared notably unmoved by the arguments offered by New York and Michigan in defense of laws that prohibit the direct shipment of wine from other states while permitting in-state wineries to ship their products to their customers’ homes.

Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick sort of summarizes the oral arguments and offers a pretty coherent explanation of the issues:

Today’s case before the Supreme Court looks incredibly interesting at first glance. After a drink, it looks unbearably boring. Weirdly, after three more drinks, it starts to look interesting again. Like that guy at the Sigma Nu Party sophomore year. Still, one’s tempted to remind all the wine-o-philes who have shown up today that this case is going to be about the dormant “commerce clause.” The words “impudent little Zinfandel” will trip off nobody’s tongue today.

Michigan and New York allow their respective in-state wineries to ship their wines directly to customers. Both states make it virtually impossible for out-of-state vineyards to do the same. So, that was the interesting part. The states justify their tough-on-wine stance by stating that wine is different from other products that properly move about freely in interstate commerce. And they find textual justification for this idea in the 21st Amendment, which provides that “The transportation or importation into any State, Territory, or possession of the United States for delivery or use therein of intoxicating liquors, in violation of the laws thereof, is hereby prohibited.” The 21st Amendment effectively repealed Prohibition in 1933, and for a time the courts treated it as though it gave the states power to regulate any and all alcohol, for any and all reasons, unencumbered by the commerce clause or any other discernible legal doctrine.

The commerce clause, or more precisely today, the unwritten or “dormant” part of the commerce clause, is a fuzzy little doctrine that bars states from enacting protectionist, discriminatory measures against interstate commercial activity. That was the deadly boring part. Things liven up again when you understand that this case comes down to two weird constitutional doctrines duking it out for world dominance and that everything will turn on whether you read the 21st Amendment as more compelling than the commerce clause or less so.

See also: Todd Zywicki’s Wine Wars: The 21st Amendment and Discriminatory Bans to Direct Shipment of Wine; a better summary of oral arguments; and even more commentary along with a link featuring some relevant cases (.doc file).

Forced Eviction for Squatters!

Pale Male, the famous red-tailed hawk who nested on a building on Fifth Avenue overlooking Central Park, is being kicked out. The building’s residents (some of them, anyway) objected to the pigeon carcasses and hawk poop, so Pale Male’s nest has been removed:

A nest constructed a decade ago by red-tailed hawks 12 stories above Central Park, creating an unlikely wildlife habitat that has delighted bird lovers from around the world, was removed yesterday, apparently by workers for its host co-op apartment building.

City officials and naturalists reacted with anger, even though there appeared to be little legal recourse for the nest’s destruction.

Experts said that the fate of a family of uncommonly large and resilient birds, which have reproduced prolifically from the nest, had been thrown into doubt. So was that of the nest’s most famous red-tailed resident, Pale Male, who arrived at the building in 1993 and, according to detailed records kept by several bird-watchers, has sired 23 youngsters.

“I am so outraged that they would do this without so much as a by your leave,” said Mary Tyler Moore, who has lived for 15 years in the co-op at 927 Fifth Avenue, at 74th Street, where the nest was built in 1993 above a cornice in clear view of Central Park.

“These birds just kept coming back to the edge of the building, and people kept coming back to see them,” said Ms. Moore, who recalled at first craning her neck outside one of her windows to look up at the bottom of the nest. In more recent years, she said, she has strolled frequently across Fifth Avenue to Central Park for a better view.

“This was something we like to talk about: a kinder, gentler world, and now it’s gone,” Ms. Moore said last night.

Exactly why the nest was destroyed was unclear. A man who answered a call to 927 Fifth Avenue’s management office last night said no one was available for comment.

But Ms. Moore said other residents of the building had objected to large bird droppings and, occasionally, the carcasses of pigeons – which hawks prey upon – that landed on the sidewalk in front of their lobby. She said her husband had attended a recent co-op board meeting, and had been informed of its all-but-unanimous decision to remove the nest, even though he had objected to the move.

The Perils of Rent Control

An update on the case mentioned here last week. “Queens Landlord Convicted in Plot to Kill Two Tenants”:

A Queens landlord was found guilty yesterday of trying to plot the murder of two tenants paying $400 a month for an apartment in his building, so that he could rent out their apartment to new tenants for at least $1,500 a month.

A jury in State Supreme Court in Queens found the landlord, Juan Basagoitia, 50, guilty of hiring two other tenants in the building to kill William Lavery, 35, and his brother, David Lavery, 40, who had lived in the three-bedroom apartment on the third floor since childhood.

The brothers, who were badly injured in the attack but survived, legally assumed the lease in recent years from their father, George Lavery, who first took the apartment in 1964 at the same rent.

On March 4, 2003, the two hired tenants, David Robles, 37, and Danny Machuca, 30, broke into the brothers’ apartment, on Ithaca Street in Elmhurst, and beat and stabbed them. The two attackers were arrested shortly after the attack and were found guilty in recent months.

After their arrests, they told the police that Mr. Basagoitia had agreed to pay them $2,500 to kill the brothers. Mr. Basagoitia, 50, a Bolivian immigrant who bought the building in 1997, was then arrested also.

After a two-week trial, the 12-member jury found Mr. Basagoitia guilty on several charges, including first-degree attempted murder and assault, conspiracy and burglary. He could face life in prison when he is sentenced on Jan. 12, said the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown.

The landlord seems to have relied on a defense along the lines of, “I never intended to hurt them, just rough them up a little”:

Last night, Stewart Orden, a Manhattan lawyer, insisted that his client, Mr. Basagoitia, was a “hard-working immigrant” who was guilty only of “setting the ball in motion” by hiring the two men to scare the brothers, not harm them.

“My client only wanted the two men to intimidate and frighten the tenants,” he said. “He wanted to scare them, but never anything more than that.”

Mr. Orden said he believed the jury was influenced by a stereotype of the “so-called landlords from hell,” the proverbial New York City landlord willing to sink to any level to push out rent-controlled tenants.

“The apartment was worth about $2,000,” he acknowledged. “There’s no doubt my client wanted cash, and wanted them out to obtain fair-market value. But there’s a difference between scaring someone, or even beating them up, and wanting them killed.”

The brothers’ father, George Lavery, 69, said last night in a phone interview that he was happy with the verdict. His sons live elsewhere in Queens now, he added. He said that their former apartment was being rented at market value, but that the brothers were planning to sue Mr. Basagoitia.

“If he’d have hired the right guys, professionals, my boys would be dead now,” he said, referring to the landlord. “Thank God he didn’t.”

I sense a Law & Order episode coming on (if they haven’t already done this show!).

Bonus Points: Frank Bruni’s “Dispute at Ritzy Address Is Emblem of NYC Rent Control Debate,” New York Times, April 13, 1997 (reprint); The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics’ “Rent Control” entry.

I Want to be Your Shiksa . . .

Not sure if this rises to the level of the Sunday Styles Article That Makes You Want to Leave New York (like other Sunday Styles articles in the past — see below for more on that), but it comes close. This time it’s non-Jews using the Jewish online dating site JDate to score hot Jewish singles:

[D.] Coppola, 22, a real estate salesman from Brooklyn, is looking for a confident, intelligent and open-minded woman who shares his love of walks in the park, sushi and home cooking. He had some luck meeting women through Internet dating sites like AmericanSingles.com, but they were rarely good matches. Then he found what he now considers an online gold mine — JDate, a Web site that bills itself as “the largest Jewish singles network.”

Although he is Catholic by birth and upbringing, Mr. Coppola has long preferred to date Jewish women. “If a girl walks by in a bar, and I’m attracted to her, it always turns out she’s Jewish,” he said. “My friends say I have Jew-dar. I thought I’d go with the odds.”

Mr. Coppola is one of a growing number of gentiles who have lately signed on to JDate, which was established in 1997 as a service for bringing Jews together. The number of non-Jews on the site is difficult to estimate: 50,000 of its 600,000 members identify themselves as religiously “unaffiliated,” but they include Jewish members who don’t want to identify themselves as “secular” or with any particular sect. But interviews with people who use JDate suggest that gentiles have become an increasingly visible presence in recent years (full disclosure: this reporter is one of them) on a site that was designed to promote mating within the tribe.

The article goes on to note that generally, one’s reasons for using JDate “seem to come down to the old idea of the nice Jewish boy or girl”:

Agnes Mercado, a Catholic administrative assistant from West Hollywood, had never even met a Jew until she immigrated from the Philippines 15 years ago. But in October, a little over a year after the death of her Jewish boyfriend of 13 years, she placed an ad on JDate that read, “I am a gentile looking for my mensch, are you out there? I want to be your shiksa and your partner for life.” Ms. Mercado, 40, said that her late boyfriend had been “a kind soul” and that she believes his Jewish upbringing gave him a good character. She has just started seeing a 44-year-old Jewish man she met through the site, and is willing to convert if things get serious. “If I have kids, I would want to raise them Jewish,” she said. “It’s so ancient and full of traditions that make sense to me.”

. . .

Traditional stereotypes are alive and well, according to Robin Gorman Newman, the author of “How to Meet a Mensch in New York” (City & Company, 1995) and a dating coach with several non-Jewish clients who say they prefer to date Jews. “A lot of girls think that Jewish guys know how to treat women, so they want one,” she said. “On the flip side, non-Jewish guys think that Jewish women will take charge and make their lives easier.”

I’ve heard intermarriage equated to something along the lines of “carrying out what Hitler failed to do.” Some sound similar warnings with this particular JDate phenomenon:

To some Jews, of course, the issue of intermarriage is not at all funny. The most recent data available, from the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001, show that 47 percent of Jews who married after 1996 chose a non-Jewish spouse, an increase of 13 percent from 1970. If the trend continues unabated, some fear, it could lead to the end of the American Jewish community.

Jonathan D. Sarna, the author of “American Judaism: A History” (Yale University Press, 2004) and a professor of the subject at Brandeis University, argues that while gentiles who marry Jews may embrace Jewish traditions and pass them on to their children, such commitment is unlikely to last more than a generation in a mixed family. “Jews are much more in danger of being loved to death than persecuted to death,” he said.

And although some Jews object to non-Jews using J-Date (“Get your own site!”), the goyim seem unperturbed:

Mr. Coppola, the real estate salesman, said no one has ever admonished him for being on a site created to encourage Jews to meet and marry other Jews. Still, he does not advertise his background in his written profile.

Because he is not Jewish, he lets women contact him. “I respond, ‘You probably figured out by now I’m not Jewish,'” he said, adding that his status as a gentile has not seemed to be a problem: he has gone on about one date a week since he joined JDate a year ago, and has had several monthlong relationships.

But Mr. Coppola concedes that he does sometimes wonder if he is trying to become a member of a club that does not want him. “I feel a rabbi is going to knock down my door because I feel I’m doing a disservice to Jewish culture,” he said.

Now, on that category of Sunday Styles Article That Makes You Want to Leave New York. I remember two big ones. The first was “Where the Girls Are, and the Commute’s Easy” (blog post, abstract link), in which Manhattanites did the reverse Bridge and Tunnel commute to look for mates in Williamsburg — “earthy” artists who were also “Carhartt Guys” who (working from memory here) will cook you tenderloin for breakfast. Ugh.

The other article, “Partying Like it’s 1999,” (reprinted story, abstract link) dealt with unemployed Wall Streeters who supplemented generous severance packages with unemployment checks, using them to party on Monday nights until 4. They called themselves the “405 Club,” after the $405 weekly unemployment checks. I know at least one lifelong New Yorker who pointed to these two articles in particular as part of why she wanted to leave!

The Shrunken Slugger

If you hadn’t already heard the news about New York Yankee Jason Giambi, whose leaked grand jury testimony revealed that he lied about his steroid use, the tabloids’ righteous indignation is hard to miss.

The Daily News headline screams, “Bronx Bum,” and the lead story doesn’t mince words:

Shrunken slugger Jason Giambi was exposed yesterday as a steroid-using liar who betrayed the Yankees and all baseball fans.

The Post builds on the “bum” theme in its headline, actually calling on the Yankees to “Boot the Bum,” which also the paper’s official editorial position:

It’s simple: Jason Giambi must go.

Now.

He has disgraced the Yankee pinstripes and made a mockery of everything that is wonderful and good and pure about the game of baseball.

So now it’s up to George Steinbrenner. Say what you will about the man, he has only ever put one thing above winning: class. And now Major League Baseball and the fans – indeed, the nation – need to know what class really means.

It means throwing the bum out on his ear. Empty out his locker, change the locks to the clubhouse door, and let him go to court if he wants the rest of the $80 million on his tainted contract.

Giambi has said publicly that he never took steroids – which means he’s a cheat and a liar.

Steinbrenner shouldn’t stand for a man like that on his team.

And if Giambi was really a man – if he had character, not just brawn – he wouldn’t let George do it. He’d quit first.

He’d come out in public and admit what he’s done – not tell the truth behind closed doors then try to weasel out of it. He’d say he’s sorry, pay the price for his actions and hopefully use some of his ill-gotten gains for good.

That’s what a Yankee would do.

The Major League Baseball Players Association – to its eternal shame – has protected and coddled its overpaid, overjuiced stars for years, fighting tooth and nail to stop drug testing. The League stuck its head in the sand when every fan of the game knew it was a problem.

So it’s up the Yankees to take the lead.

Giambi’s lawyers will surely sue, the union will surely mewl, and the professional handwringers will tell you a thousand reasons why it can’t be done.

But do it – and the fans will stand up and cheer. They will understand that at least one owner loves the game as much as they do. One owner cares enough to say “Not on my team.” You cannot lie and cheat and steal the trust of the fans if you want to call yourself a Yankee.

As you ponder your decision George, think of Lou Gehrig, think of Thurman Munson, think of Derek Jeter. What would decent men like that have you do.

Lead the way, George – and restore the Pride of the Yankees.