For all I know, Cordova isn’t being fully honest. Maybe she sent something provocative to Weiner. Maybe she had somehow indicated her receptiveness to these sexual messages. But even if she had, and particularly if she hadn’t, I think Weiner’s behavior was disturbing.

What he seems to have done, or tried to do, is to turn political admiration into sexual admiration. In the case of Meagan Broussard, whose first contact with the congressman was the word “Hottttt,” the exchanges began with sexual admiration. But still, it looks like Weiner found women who admired him for his strident, media-savvy liberalism, and sought to make those relationships sexual. If that description is accurate, I would say that he is guilty of corruption. Let me explain.

When we talk about political corruption, we usually mean that a politician has received, in exchange for his or her political actions, rewards other than those that are sanctioned in a democracy—that is, public approval and votes. Generally these inappropriate rewards are financial. But Anthony Weiner tried to get a different sort of reward for his political behavior: sexual admiration and whatever sexual satisfaction he got out of these explicit exchanges. These are not the rewards that, in a democracy, are due to politicians who behave in ways that citizens approve of. For failing to respect that, I think Rep. Weiner deserves at least some of the condemnation that has come his way, even though his critics fail to note this aspect of his behavior.

Now, you might say, doesn’t that just mean that Weiner is guilty of using his celebrity to get sexual attention? Don’t most celebrities do that? Maybe so. But I’d say there’s a difference between political celebrity and movie-star or sports-hero celebrity. We should hold politicians to (dum dum dummm) a higher standard. The relationship between representative and represented is sacred, and only certain types of exchanges are permitted. By trading political admiration for sexual gratification, Anthony Weiner corrupted that relationship.

The Harvard Political Review presumes that students’ conclusions are at least somewhat interesting and relevant to other people—mainly other students. But I don’t think that the main purpose of this magazine is to provide political analysis to a waiting world. The HPR’s purpose is not primarily to educate our readers, though that would be a happy byproduct of publishing a magazine, but to educate ourselves. My four years with the HPR have been a continuing education, and not just in politics.

The first lesson I learned was that it can never hurt to ask. The HPR’s bread-and-butter articles—the news analyses that appear in the Covers, U.S., and World sections—require interviewing people much more knowledgeable and important than we are. In my first couple articles for the magazine, I resisted this requirement; I recall that one of my articles relied on only one interview. I thought as Singhal does: Why should anyone listen to my questions and contribute to my little article?

I got over those doubts—partly by failing to correct people who assumed I was a Kennedy School student, and partly by growing more confident that I actually had questions worth answering. Singhal would have us wait until some magical moment at which we become People Worth Talking To. But the process of becoming such a person is gradual.

Another lesson I learned from the HPR is that, if students are audacious enough to publish their work, they had better be prepared to defend it. Several times, we have had interviewees contact us and complain that we misrepresented their views. Sometimes we were totally in the wrong; sometimes not. It’s important to understand these experiences as educational, in addition to embarrassing. In Singhal’s view, student political expression is inherently arrogant and unproductive, but I think that these interactions were both humbling and helpful.

A final lesson arises from the fact that, believe it or not, sometimes people will actually like what students have written. In the Internet age, you can’t just put ideas out there without considering what will happen if they’re taken seriously. We learned this lesson last fall, when we published our report on the federal budget. We vaguely hoped that this project would get some mainstream attention, but it was still a shock to learn that we’d been invited to appear on Fox News. Rather than worrying about whether we deserve to be listened to, the more relevant issue for the student writer is how to react when we are, in fact, listened to. While I understand the impulse to wonder whether a mere college student has anything worthwhile to say about politics, the right response to that concern is to find something worthwhile to say, not to refrain from saying anything.

For most of us, our interest in politics began at a very young age; our first political expressions were no more profound than “My parents are Democrats/Republicans, so I am, too.” Since then, we’ve seen the Bush-Gore recount, September 11th, the Iraq war, Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 election, and health care reform. We have learned some things along the way, as all politically engaged citizens have. But it’s been a process—there were no sudden revelations that transformed us from political neophytes to first-class wonks. If students don’t talk to each other about politics, that learning process will be stunted, and apathy and ignorance can take hold. Surely a little presumption is a fair price to pay to avoid that fate.

Sam Barr ‘11 is the Editor-in-Chief Emeritus.

Let’s start with what Dylan gets right. He is absolutely right about this: “One reason why higher economic classes’ interests are so overrepresented in government is that rich people vote at disproportionately high rates, and poor people vote at disproportionately low rates.” He is also right about this: “[L]ower voting rates among the poor aren’t just a result of choice.” There’s obviously a certain conception of choice here which libertarians and the like wouldn’t support. But all I take this to mean is that there are costs to voting which the poor bear more heavily than the rich. And because, as the libertarians well know, people respond to costs and benefits, the poor vote less frequently than the rich.

So Dylan wants to equalize those costs. He wants everyone to face the same cost-benefit analysis when they decide whether to vote, so that they truly can be said to have made that choice or not. One way to equalize costs would be to require everyone to vote, and levy some small punishment for failure to vote.

But, as Dylan notes, proposals to require voting are likely to get nowhere. Not only would Republicans reject the idea as a partisan scheme, but even non-partisans and Democrats are likely to be a little worried. If you force everyone to vote, aren’t you going to get a lot of uninformed voters? (Or more than there already are?)

If we can’t actually get a compulsory voting law, what can we do? The traditional answer is that we should lower the costs of going to the polls. Dylan gives a summary of this line of thought: “Voting is expensive. It involves taking time off work, which, if one’s employer isn’t flexible enough to allow paid voting breaks, lower-income people may not be able to afford missing. Voting also involves transportation costs, which, while trivial for wealthier individuals, impose a real cost for others.”

But this analysis misses what political scientists have found to be important, if not the most important, costs associated with voting: cognitive costs. As this paper by MIT professor Adam Berinsky shows, electoral reforms which are aimed at lowering the costs of casting a ballot (e.g. absentee balloting, vote-by-mail, early voting, and Internet voting) increase the socioeconomic bias of the electorate. That’s because most voters are occasional voters: They vote, say, only in presidential elections, and maybe some midterms if they remember. These electoral reforms make it easier for those voters to remember to vote and to actually do it. But they don’t seem to affect habitual non-voters; they don’t bring more people into the voting population. Habitual non-voters tend to face cognitive costs associated with voting, which is just to say, they don’t vote because they aren’t engaged with politics and don’t know much about it. And that group is disproportionately poor, because wealth and education are directly related to interest in and knowledge about politics. If the fine for failing to vote is low enough, these people might rationally decide to pay it rather than be drawn into the political world, about which they know and care little.

Of course, equalizing wealth and educational opportunities so that political engagement is more evenly distributed could be just as politically difficult as passing a compulsory voting law. But there are other things we can do. In Get Out the Vote, political scientists Alan Gerber and Donald Green summarize a series of experiments and conclude that the most cost-effective GOTV tactic is door-to-door canvassing. Getting one additional voter who would otherwise not have voted costs about $30 via door-to-door canvassing. So a $3 million investment could net an additional 100,000 voters. Of course, if we’re concerned about the socioeconomic makeup of the voting population, then we’ll need to target this investment effectively. I suspect that many GOTV operations are geared towards populations which are disproportionately likely to vote.

This is all very speculative and rough, of course, but the point is that all is not lost. We don’t need compulsory voting, which we aren’t likely to get, in order to increase the socioeconomic representativeness of the electorate.

A history concentrator writes a counterfactual narrative in which Hitler is successfully assassinated. Would this be equal in “academic quality” to a “research-intensive, written analysis”? A wag might suggest that history is research-intensive, written analysis.

A government concentrator writes about personal experiences growing up in Egypt, or Zimbabwe, or China. Would this be equal in “academic quality” to an analysis of the conditions under which countries transition to democracy?

An economics concentrator writes about her family’s struggles in the Great Recession. Would this be equal in “academic quality” to A.K. Barnett-Hart’s thesis about CDOs, which was praised by Michael Lewis?

How about the natural sciences? I can’t even imagine.

Of course, non-traditional theses can be entirely appropriate in some fields, but I would appreciate some more clarity about what The Crimson has in mind. Do the editors believe that the theses imagined above should be allowed? Frankly, I think those essays sound really interesting, but I’m skeptical of the idea that they would be appropriate theses. I tend to think that the purpose of a thesis is to show that you can do the sort of work that is done in your department. Maybe you think this makes students into monkeys, imitating their professors. Well, then don’t write a thesis. It doesn’t have to be for everybody.

There could be a year-long independent writing option for seniors in which they work on essays like the three I imagined. That would be great. But those essays would not be theses because they wouldn’t be disciplinary, and they shouldn’t qualify their authors for departmental honors. We can have academic pluralism, we should make sure that students have experiences that are most beneficial to them, but we still need to call a spade a spade.

First, let me say that his criticisms of the political media are entirely valid. All the coverage of Obama’s fashion is unnecessary. Dhruv calls this coverage “objectifying scrutiny of her every fashion decision.”

No, I’m sorry, “her every questionable fashion decision.” Dhruv can’t help himself. Later in the article, he calls Obama’s outfits “tawdry” and “undignified.” This isn’t an article about a substance-free media. This is about his visceral distaste for Michelle Obama.

Dhruv tries to hide that fact, but he can’t. This paragraph needs to be quoted in its entirety:

Perhaps it is a little crass to lament the tendency of fashionistas across the land to behave as if they were coerced at gunpoint into a compact to swoon over Mrs. Obama’s every outfit, no matter how tawdry or undignified (sleeveless may or may not be trendy—hell if I know—but it is not puritanical to value decorum). And perhaps it is a little crass to bemoan such national embarrassments as the scuttled attempt to fund Mrs. Obama’s pet project by cutting food stamp funding or her preposterous assertion that obesity is a matter of national security (if obesity is a national security issue, then quite literally anything can be a national security issue). Perhaps it is a little crass to engage in ad hominem attacks against someone whose only crime was to marry a future president. But was that really Mrs. Obama’s only crime?

Thus does Dhruv spend a hefty chunk of his column pretending to disapprove of silly right-wing attacks on Michelle Obama. But he doesn’t disapprove. He could have started with the final “perhaps it is a little crass,” and proceeded from there. But he had to get his digs in! Still, the next paragraph promises to get at the substance of Obama’s “crime.”

Shorn of a real job since her husband’s election but eager to maintain the guise of productivity, Obama has busied herself with her “Let’s Move” initiative. Perhaps it can be forgiven that every First Lady arrives at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. with the expectation that she is to jettison any erstwhile frumpiness [seriously?] in order to fulfill her new role as the nation’s flagship fashion icon while fruitlessly championing some innocuous initiative. The fulfillment of this expectation is little more than a public nuisance. But when the First Lady begins to dabble in legislative activism, it contributes to a more nefarious phenomenon—the institutionalization of the Office of the First Lady as a power center in American government.

So Dhruv offers this distinction at the core of his argument: There are First Ladies who fruitlessly champion innocuous initiatives. Then there are First Ladies who “dabble in legislative activism,” which is “nefarious.” One wonders where the line is between championing something and being an activist for it. Apparently the line is a partisan one: Dhruv scorns a litany of Democratic First Ladies, conveniently neglecting Betty Ford (well, she’s a liberal anyway, right?), Nancy Reagan (Just Say No!), and Laura Bush (literacy advocate and international emissary).

Furthermore, I really don’t see why the First Lady’s “unelected status” is cause for complaint. There are thousands of people in positions of influence in Washington who were not elected, and many thousands more who were not even appointed by anyone who was elected. Surely the institutionalization of the First Lady’s office is not as “nefarious” as the institutionalization of lobbyists and the revolving door.

The reality is that we will never know what “degree of influence” a particular First Lady (or future First Man) possesses. Spouses get unique access to the most important decision-maker of all, even more access than David Koch. Should we bug the president’s bedroom to make sure there’s no unelected, unappointed influence going on? This can’t be what Dhruv means, but one struggles to find, then, what he really does mean. He admits that the First Lady has no “formally-mandated power” but then promptly suggests that Michelle Obama has “a formal role in the governing of this country.”

Dhruv ends with an attack on an alleged hypocrisy: Michelle Obama wants influence, but also wants to remain free from criticism. There is no evidence for the latter claim, so Dhruv puts it in the passive voice: “we are frequently urged to keep a presidential candidate’s family off limits.” Does he really think that a serious-minded dissent from Michelle Obama’s agenda would be deemed “off limits”? That seems very unlikely to me. What people deem off limits is the sort of blind animus propagated by the right-wing media, who find Michelle Obama uniquely irritating. The point of the whole “family is off limits” routine is that even presidents are entitled to some privacy in their personal lives. So, criticism of the president’s date nights? Off limits. Criticism of the First Lady’s initiatives? In bounds.

And the second is no better. This goes back to an exchange I had with Alex Sherbany a couple months ago. I suggested that one response to the “revolving door” phenomenon was to raise public sector pay. Alex pointed out that “public sector employees get paid more on average than private sector employees, for less work.” I then commented on his post, noting that the report he cited included a disclaimer that disavowed any direct comparisons between the public and private sectors. I said, “the industries just aren’t directly comparable. They do different things. You have to compare apples to apples: people in both sectors with the same levels of education and experience.”

Now, a report has come out from the Economic Policy Institute which “shows that Wisconsin public employees earn 4.8% less in total compensation per hour than comparable full-time employees in Wisconsin’s private sector.” (This apparently includes non-wage benefits, which are generous in the public sector. See also similar findings for Chris Christie’s New Jersey.)

Obviously the most important term is “comparable.” The EPI report held constant “education, experience, organizational size, gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship, and disability.” We can see why at least controlling for education is important from the fact that “59% of full-time Wisconsin public sector workers hold at least a four-year college degree, compared with 30% of full-time private sector workers.” As Alex said, the relevant comparison is not between high school teachers and investment bankers. It’s between, say, UW-Madison professors and Beloit College professors.

One wrinkle is job security, which is non-quantifiable yet quite valuable to workers. Public sector workers enjoy more job security than private sector workers. But just because job security is valuable to workers doesn’t mean it’s a budget-buster. States pay their workers in salaries and benefits, not in “expected pay” after accounting for the possibility of being fired. And the fact is that public workers’ salaries and benefits are not overly generous given the types of people working in the public sector and the types of jobs they are doing.

One gets the sense that this union-provided job security is really what rankles Wisconsin’s Gov. Walker and his supporters. The governor won’t accept the benefit cuts which unions are offering because he wants a bigger prize—to destroy the job security that unions provide by destroying their collective bargaining rights.

One last thing. I’m a little confused by the political aspects of this debate. Public school teachers, perhaps the most prominent and scapegoated public sector workers, seem actually to be a fairly popular group of people. Seventy-one percent of national adults in a 2010 Gallup poll said they have “trust and confidence in the men and women who are teaching children in the public schools.” Support was a little higher still among public school parents. Do people have trust and confidence in teachers’ ability to teach, but also believe they’re overpaid drains on the public coffers? Maybe they do. And of course I’m no fan of opinion polls, especially on questions that people are unlikely to have thought much about. Yet my general sense is that Americans on the whole are pretty favorable towards teachers.

So, can anyone clarify where the political advantage of blasting teachers comes from? I guess you could say “we’re blasting teachers’ unions, not teachers,” yet the fact remains that teachers themselves love teachers’ unions and the implication of blasting teachers’ unions is that your child’s very own teachers are overpaid drains on the public coffers.

As Koppelman points out, slippery-slope arguments are empirical, not logical. That is, just because A could logically lead to B, and B is objectionable, doesn’t mean that A is objectionable unless there is some reasonable probability of A’s leading to B. Koppelman argues that there’s really no chance Congress will mandate the purchase and consumption of broccoli—though federal subsidies to meat and corn and sugar producers probably do make you somewhat less likely to eat broccoli, and that’s no good.

Here I want to point out a simple asymmetry in this constitutional debate over the mandate: While slippery-slope arguments have been prominent on the anti-mandate side, they have been uncommon on the pro-mandate side. And yet, if the Supreme Court actually strikes down the individual mandate, its logic—particularly if it relies on the popular activity/inactivity distinction—will actively threaten federal laws that most people do not want to see threatened. There will be a reasonable probability of challenges to many popular statutes—and once the Supreme Court has endorsed the constitutional doctrine offered by the anti-mandate advocates, it will be hard-pressed to reject those challenges. The slippery slope, in other words, lies on both the right and left sides of the mountain.

Professor Mark Hall, in his forthcoming University of Pennsylvania Law Review article, notes that the logic of an anti-mandate ruling could threaten agencies like the FDA (regulates the failure to put nutrition labels on food items) and the EPA (regulates the failure to purchase pollution-reducing equipment). It would retroactively nullify the 1792 bill requiring able-bodied men to purchase a firearm. It would render unconstitutional the common Republican proposal to compel people to purchase stocks—that is, their proposal to privatize Social Security. It would even threaten (logically, though of course not empirically) the Civil Rights Act, which forbids the owners of private businesses from failing to serve potential customers on the basis of their race.

That last case is particularly helpful because it illustrates just how nebulous this boundary between activity and inactivity really is. Should the behavior of a racist store-owner who wants to bar blacks be construed as activity or inactivity? On the one hand, he might have to take positive actions—perhaps he hires a private security guard to stop unwanted people at the door. On the other hand, we could construe his action as a failure to sell. Some people come into his store, and he won’t sell to them. Congress says, he must sell to them. Is that not a regulation of inactivity?

An anti-mandate ruling would be dangerous precisely because the mandate itself is so minor. As Ezra Klein says, it could be construed as a tax credit: If you show the IRS that you purchased health insurance, then you get a tax credit, and if you don’t, you don’t. The idea that Congress can’t give out tax credits on the basis of certain activities (and thus fail to give tax credits for inactivity) would threaten an untold swath of federal laws.

But is any of this likely? Are such slippery-slope arguments simply logical, not empirical? I hope so. But the thing about the Supreme Court is that it is somewhat bound by logic—more so, at least, than the political branches.

So the slippery-slope argument cuts both ways. I don’t find the Broccoli Objection compelling on its own merits, but when one considers that an equally if not more convincing slippery-slope argument could be made on the other side, its persuasiveness really takes a dive.

Other than those digs, Samuel Coffin has a thoughtful reply to my last post. He argues that I engaged in “bad originalism” in order to make originalism look bad. Of course an originalist can accommodate airmail and the air force, he says. (Samuel doesn’t address my questions about the Bill of Rights.)

Look, one of the supposed virtues of originalism is that it provides a clear answer to constitutional questions. Originalists imply that you can simply look up the constitutionality of this or that law; it’s all there for you to discover. As Eric Posner writes, this makes originalism seem “simple, commonsense, and nonpartisan.” Now we discover originalism isn’t so simple. Clearly I engaged in a type of originalist logic: The framers never provided the power to do X, therefore X is unconstitutional. Apparently this is “bad originalism,” and good originalism leads to better conclusions, e.g. the air force is okay. One wonders whether liberals are the only people who engage in “motivated reasoning” (reasoning from results to principles) or whether perhaps originalists do that too—starting from results that they know they have to endorse in order to avoid looking ridiculous, and then constructing their constitutional theory to accommodate those results.

There are basically two species of originalism. The first is original-intent originalism, which says the Constitution means whatever the authors intended it to mean. Did the authors intend to give Congress power to establish an air force? To prohibit it from conducting warrantless wiretaps? Surely not! This is apparently “bad originalism.”

The second originalist theory is original-public-meaning originalism. This theory says the Constitution means whatever the general public would have understood it to mean when they ratified it. This seems to be the theory under which Professor Rappaport, whom Samuel quotes, is operating.

Professor Rappaport’s reply makes my point for me. He says:

“The Army and Navy are not limited by the actual or the type of weapons that were employed in 1789. There is no reason to believe that the terms “Army” or “Navy” would have been understood this way. [Note the appeal to original public meaning.] Just as new technologies such as balloons and canons would have been easily assimilated into the Army without a second thought about whether they were really part of the Army, so could airplanes and jets.”

So the air force has what Samuel calls “an underlying basis in the constitution.” The Constitution would have been understood to mean that Congress may legitimately provide for mail delivery, the armed forces, etc., using whatever means are appropriate. Now we are extracting a goal or principle from the actual words of the Constitution, or at the very least, we are assuming that the public of 1787 would have extracted goals and principles. The Constitution didn’t mean post offices and post roads, even though that’s what it said. It meant mail delivery.

Now, what about the Commerce Clause? What goal or principle does that affirm? I’m sure the historians don’t fully agree on this subject. Is it unreasonable to suggest that the Commerce Clause stands for the proposition that Congress may regulate the national (aka interstate) economy in the national interest? Over 100 law professors don’t think so. Yesterday they released a letter stating, “One of the Framers’ primary goals was to give Congress the power to regulate matters of national economic significance because states individually could not effectively manage them on their own.”

Maybe this is bad history; I’m not really qualified to say. But my point is that, if originalism can accommodate the air force because we’re supposed to abstract the text away and look at the goals and principles, then a plausible case can be made that originalism permits a broad reading of the Commerce Clause, the General Welfare Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause. It all depends on how you reconstruct the goals and principles that the public of 1787 was affirming. So now originalism, which is all about finding clear and unambiguous answers, involves a messy historical debate which no side can ever definitively win. To resolve the debate, judges and everyone else will inevitably be informed by their own personal preferences—which was supposedly the Warren Court’s sin, against which originalism was a reaction.

As for Tom Coburn’s hypothetical about the government forcing people to eat vegetables and exercise, I would say this: The choice not to eat vegetables and not to exercise may have some long-term impact on the national economy, but the choice not to get health insurance has a much larger and more direct impact (unless you also forgo health care, which almost nobody would actually do). I’d also point out that the decision not to purchase health insurance is an economic decision with immediate economic consequences for the individual and society, whereas dieting and exercising are not economic acts, no matter the effects they might have on economic matters way down the road.

The headline at CNBC: “Survey: U.S. doctors fear healthcare reform.”

The headline at the Wall Street Journal: “Survey of U.S. physicians finds pessimism on future of health care.”

The reality: This poll was conducted through a “fax-response methodology,” which means it didn’t survey a random sample of American doctors. It took a self-selected sample of the most passionate doctors, the ones who felt inspired to return a fax.

But you’d never know that from the media reports. CNBC and the WSJ only tell readers that the poll was conducted by fax; the fact that this tarnishes the poll’s credibility is not noted. You can only access the full polling report by going to the HCPlexus website (a company that “makes management products for physicians” and which sponsored this poll) and filling out a personal-information form. But once you get the report, and you scroll to page 33 of 36, you’ll learn that “the cohort of respondents could represent some bias.”

Look, I’m not the biggest fan of polls and their role in the media even when they are statistically valid. But can we at least set statistical validity as the bare minimum required to get a poll any sort of media attention?

Note, I’m not saying that American doctors aren’t skeptical of health care reform. I’m just saying that this poll can’t tell us that.

Wyatt correctly notes that the enumerated Congressional powers in Article 1, Section 8, do not include workplace diversity requirements and cap-and-trade. I would like to know how far Wyatt wants to go with this line of argument. The following questions are posed with all earnestness, and I hope Wyatt will respond.

Section 8 gives Congress power to “establish Post Offices and Post Roads.” Is Congress allowed to provide for airmail? Do we need a constitutional amendment permitting Congress to provide for airmail?

Section 8 gives Congress power to raise an army and a navy. What about the air force? Do we need a constitutional amendment for that, too?

Lest you think all my examples are airplane-related, Section 8 also gives Congress power to “coin Money.” May Congress also print paper money, or do we need a constitutional amendment for that?

I also wonder what Wyatt thinks of broader constitutional phrases.

The First Amendment, for instance, prohibits Congressional restrictions on the freedom of speech. But the framers and ratifiers were probably thinking of pamphleteers. Do we need a constitutional amendment to extend freedom of speech to the Internet?

The Fourth Amendment says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” The framers and ratifiers surely never envisioned wiretaps. Do we need a constitutional amendment declaring that a wiretap is a search?

The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishment.” Do we need a constitutional amendment clarifying that, these days, “cruel and unusual” means something different than it did in 1791?

I imagine, based on his column, Wyatt will say that amendments are needed for each and every change to the Constitution as it was written and ratified.

In my view, though, the Constitution enshrines principles and goals, not only means. The framers wanted Congress to provide mail delivery and the armed forces. So they prescribed the means that were known to them. It is no perversion of the Constitution for Congress to raise an air force.

If that’s true, one should apply the same sort of reasoning to other parts of the Constitution. And I don’t think Wyatt disagrees that the Constitution must be updated. He takes the view that the only legitimate way to update it is through amendments. But that may not be true if the Constitution is seen as a document espousing principles and goals, not just certain means.