On Point Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes his On Point column most weekdays. He is also an author and freelance writer. Reach Vincent Carroll at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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Is Gov. Bill Ritter poised to advocate collective bargaining for state workers as a means to inject more competition into government services? This seemingly absurd — but attractive — possibility was suggested in a recent “New Democrat Update” from the Colorado DLC, or Democratic Leadership Council.

The DLC commends Ritter for flirting with collective bargaining, calling it an opportunity to forge a new deal with state workers involving salary bonuses similar to profit-sharing and competition “as an important tool to improve the cost-effectiveness of state services.”

Democrats should heed “the experience of those governments where private sector firms, public agencies and employee unions get opportunities to bid on work,” the DLC continues. “For example, in Indianapolis, competition yielded a 25 percent reduction in the cost of city government without hurting service quality . . . .

“It worked, in part, because the mayor and union leadership negotiated a fair deal with employees. .. . . when union members lose their jobs through competition, they are either hired by the winning private contractor, placed in another city job or retrained and placed in a private-sector job. . . .

“Once required to compete, the Indianapolis union began negotiating for gainsharing. Typically, workers collect 10 to 25 percent of savings when they drive costs below their bid price.”

If the public employee unions, Ritter and Democrats in charge of the legislature could agree on a similar concept for the state, it might indeed be revolutionary — even to the point of justifying collective bargaining as part of the deal.

But now a word from the real world: Colorado has a legislature that in its first year working with a Democratic governor couldn’t even keep its mitts off a longstanding mandate that RTD bid out a percentage of its bus service. Lawmakers changed the requirement that RTD “shall” offer a percentage of bus routes to private businesses to the voluntary “may,” and replaced a contracting floor with a ceiling.

These are the guys we’re supposed to believe might sign off on the transformation of state government into an incentive-based system involving the most creative, efficient providers — when that appears to be the very last thing they’d ever want to do.

Two camps

A pop quiz: In the paragraph quoted below, taken from a New York Times article on the Bush administration’s depressingly stubborn attempts to justify abusive tactics during CIA interrogations, the reporters use two condescending words.

For a grade of “A,” identify them.

“The policies set off bruising internal battles, pitting administration moderates against hard-liners, military lawyers against Pentagon chiefs and, most surprising, a handful of conservative lawyers at the Justice Department against the White House in the stunning mutiny of 2004. But under Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Bradbury, the Justice Department was wrenched back into line with the White House.”

If you identified “most surprising,” congratulations. If you failed to note them, too bad. It means you probably share the preconceptions of the Times writers and consider conservatives indifferent to individual rights.

In fact, conservatives fall into two camps on the question of civil liberties; one group tends to defer to state power — former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales being the stellar example — while the other leans just as strongly in favor of individual rights.

It so happens that liberals are divided into similar camps on fundamental rights, too — most notably free speech. A growing number of liberals are willing to allow government to dictate the terms of political speech during campaigns, for example, and to indulge radical students dictating the boundaries of permissible speech on college campuses.

Fortunately, many other liberals still side with individuals, not government or mobs, in debates over free speech — although you can bet the Times would never declare that fact “most surprising.”

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at Carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com

READER COMMENTS

"If you identified “most surprising,” congratulations. If you failed to note them, too bad. It means you probably share the preconceptions of the Times writers and consider conservatives indifferent to individual rights."

Hard to run from that disgusting track record on this issue Vincent. It's a little too late to change the spots.

You are a most surprising moron.

1984

It was surprising that conservatice lawyers at Justice were willing to oppose a Preznit who treasures loyalty above competence. The story played out so that those who were against legalistic justifications for torture are no longer employed by the administration.

Is that surprising?

Jay, So your point is that people should never change? Althoug your assertion is shallow and transperant.

8:44, Support your assertion. Only fools and the immature post such statements.

R & L, Not the point. Prove your statement on "loyalty above competence" ( as if they were mutualy exclusive).

My point VB, is the conservative track record of assault on civil liberties over the last 6 years is clear enough that to imply differently is simply political hackery at it's finest. Vincent says that "preconceptions" or as I like to call it "frank acknowledgement" of said track record makes one biased. Nothing could be further from the truth. You can't run from your track record...although the far right attempts to do so with each election cycle.

If you see a different track record by all means make your case.

VB:

Easy

www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/washington/04interrogate.html?ref=washington&pagewanted=all

"If President Bush wanted to make sure the Justice Department did not rebel again, Mr. Gonzales was the ideal choice. As White House counsel, he had been a fierce protector of the president’s prerogatives. Deeply loyal to Mr. Bush for championing his career from their days in Texas, Mr. Gonzales would sometimes tell colleagues that he had just one regret about becoming attorney general: He did not see nearly as much of the president as he had in his previous post.

Among his first tasks at the Justice Department was to find a trusted chief for the Office of Legal Counsel. First he informed Daniel Levin, the acting head who had backed Mr. Goldsmith’s dissents and signed the new opinion renouncing torture, that he would not get the job. He encouraged Mr. Levin to take a position at the National Security Council, in effect sidelining him...

Mr. Bradbury soon emerged as the presumed favorite. But White House officials, still smarting from Mr. Goldsmith’s rebuffs, chose to delay his nomination. Harriet E. Miers, the new White House counsel, “decided to watch Bradbury for a month or two. He was sort of on trial,” one Justice Department official recalled.

Justice Department colleagues say Mr. Gonzales was soon meeting frequently with Mr. Bradbury on national security issues, a White House priority...

As he had at the White House, Mr. Gonzales usually said little in meetings with other officials, often deferring to the hard-driving Mr. Addington. Mr. Bradbury also often appeared in accord with the vice president’s lawyer...

Mr. Bradbury appeared to be “fundamentally sympathetic to what the White House and the C.I.A. wanted to do,” recalled Philip Zelikow, a former top State Department official. At interagency meetings on detention and interrogation, Mr. Addington was at times “vituperative,” said Mr. Zelikow, but Mr. Bradbury, while taking similar positions, was “professional and collegial.” ...

While waiting to learn whether he would be nominated to head the Office of Legal Counsel, Mr. Bradbury was in an awkward position, knowing that a decision contrary to White House wishes could kill his chances...

In any case, the White House grew comfortable with Mr. Bradbury’s approach. He helped block the appointment of a liberal Ivy League law professor to a career post in the Office of Legal Counsel. And he signed the opinion approving combined interrogation techniques.

Mr. Comey strongly objected and told associates that he advised Mr. Gonzales not to endorse the opinion. But the attorney general made clear that the White House was adamant about it, and that he would do nothing to resist.

Under Mr. Ashcroft, Mr. Comey’s opposition might have killed the opinion. An imposing former prosecutor and self-described conservative who stands 6-foot-8, he was the rare administration official who was willing to confront Mr. Addington. At one testy 2004 White House meeting, when Mr. Comey stated that “no lawyer” would endorse Mr. Yoo’s justification for the N.S.A. program, Mr. Addington demurred, saying he was a lawyer and found it convincing. Mr. Comey shot back: “No good lawyer,” according to someone present.

But under Mr. Gonzales, and after the departure of Mr. Goldsmith and other allies, the deputy attorney general found himself isolated. His troublemaking on N.S.A. and on interrogation, and in appointing his friend Patrick J. Fitzgerald as special prosecutor in the C.I.A. leak case, which would lead to the perjury conviction of I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, had irreparably offended the White House.

“On national security matters generally, there was a sense that Comey was a wimp and that Comey was disloyal,” said one Justice Department official who heard the White House talk, expressed with particular force by Mr. Addington.

Mr. Comey ...argued that government lawyers must uphold the principles of their great institutions.

“It takes far more than a sharp legal mind to say ‘no’ when it matters most,” he said. “It takes moral character. It takes an understanding that in the long run, intelligence under law is the only sustainable intelligence in this country.”

Mr. Gonzales’s aides were happy to see Mr. Comey depart in the summer of 2005. That June, President Bush nominated Mr. Bradbury to head the Office of Legal Counsel, which some colleagues viewed as a sign that he had passed a loyalty test.

Soon Mr. Bradbury applied his practical approach to a new challenge to the C.I.A.’s methods.

The administration had always asserted that the C.I.A.’s pressure tactics did not amount to torture, which is banned by federal law and international treaty. But officials had privately decided the agency did not have to comply with another provision in the Convention Against Torture — the prohibition on “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment.

Now that loophole was about to be closed. First Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and then Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured as a prisoner in North Vietnam, proposed legislation to ban such treatment.

At the administration’s request, Mr. Bradbury assessed whether the proposed legislation would outlaw any C.I.A. methods, a legal question that had never before been answered by the Justice Department.

At least a few administration officials argued that no reasonable interpretation of “cruel, inhuman or degrading” would permit the most extreme C.I.A. methods, like waterboarding. Mr. Bradbury was placed in a tough spot, said Mr. Zelikow, the State Department counselor, who was working at the time to rein in interrogation policy.

“If Justice says some practices are in violation of the C.I.D. standard,” Mr. Zelikow said, referring to cruel, inhuman or degrading, “then they are now saying that officials broke current law.”

In the end, Mr. Bradbury’s opinion delivered what the White House wanted: a statement that the standard imposed by Mr. McCain’s Detainee Treatment Act would not force any change in the C.I.A.’s practices, according to officials familiar with the memo.

Relying on a Supreme Court finding that only conduct that “shocks the conscience” was unconstitutional, the opinion found that in some circumstances not even waterboarding was necessarily cruel, inhuman or degrading, if, for example, a suspect was believed to possess crucial intelligence about a planned terrorist attack, the officials familiar with the legal finding said.

In a frequent practice, Mr. Bush attached a statement to the new law when he signed it, declaring his authority to set aside the restrictions if they interfered with his constitutional powers. At the same time, though, the administration responded to pressure from Mr. McCain and other lawmakers by reviewing interrogation policy and giving up several C.I.A. techniques.

Since late 2005, Mr. Bradbury has become a linchpin of the administration’s defense of counterterrorism programs, helping to negotiate the Military Commissions Act last year and frequently testifying about the N.S.A. surveillance program. Once he answered questions about administration detention policies for an “Ask the White House” feature on a Web site.

Mr. Kmiec, the former Office of Legal Counsel head now at Pepperdine, called Mr. Bradbury’s public activities a departure for an office that traditionally has shunned any advocacy role."

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haven't heard much from anyone disagreeing. good post.

They don't know how.

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