Jamal Greene: belief

Transcript context

…What do you think of the critique made by many supply-side progressives, such as Ezra Klein, that there’s an accretion of too many veto points in our legal system? No one would say that snail darters have absolute rights, but they have some claim to a level of review before you can build something that pushes them out. If you have a lot more — let’s call it non-racist federalism — a lot more intermediate layers of rights, you just accrete more and more reviews, more delays. Things don’t get built. Things don’t happen. We can’t fix global warming as a problem because it takes seven years to get your wind farm approved. Isn’t having a proliferation of the number of rights in the middle actually the problem we face? Well, no, I don’t think so. When I talk about rights federalism, I don’t mean creating more rights in the sense in which we associate rights with a certain kind of absolutism, and that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, rights are not just about things that courts say. Rights are grounded in political negotiation, and the number of sites where that political negotiation is possible should be greater. I think that that gives people leverage in political negotiation in ways that they don’t have when you say, okay, you’ve got a kind of absolute free speech right that applies the same way everywhere, and anyone who wants to stop something speech-grounded, let’s say, can invoke this absolute, universal speech right. I think that’s as destructive, more destructive of government effectiveness. Government effectiveness is itself something that can and should be understood in rights terms, but we have a right to democratic participation and to the fruits of that participation to bear fruit. How long does the median political negotiation take in terms of months or years?…

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