A Good Day (originally aired March 2, 2005)
Josh's replacement works with Rep. Matt Santos and Josh to arrange a clandestine Democratic defense against the Speaker of the House's efforts to delay a vote on funding stem-cell research (1). Toby meets with a group of students who want to eliminate voting-age requirements (2). President Bartlet hosts a dinner attended by a longtime rival, who presses him on budget deficits and the growing amount of U.S. publicly-held debt held by foreign investors (3). Kate handles a tense situation with Canada (4) that raises other issues and threatens to escalate.
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Federal Funding for Stem Cell Research (last updated March 3, 2005) (back to top)
Following a decision by President George W. Bush in August 2001, the federal government does provide funding for research on embryonic stem (ES) cells developed according to certain criteria but does not provide funding for research on or the development of entirely new ES cells.
At the same time, the federal government does not restrict research on ES cells that is not federally funded, allowing states and private individuals and companies to fund and conduct such research. California took a major step in such research in 2004, after voters approved Proposition 71, which established a state medical-research institute (the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine) and authorized the state to sell $3 billion in general-obligation bonds to fund research. This referendum won the support of a clear majority, with 59 percent of voters approving the measure, 41 percent of voters against it, and 6 percent not voting.
Embryonic stem cells have been controversial in recent years, first because of their derivation from aborted fetuses, and then because of their connection with a particular kind of human, non-reproductive cloning. Stem cells in general are unspecialized cells that can self-renew indefinitely and that can develop into more mature cells with specialized functions, and embryonic stem (ES) cells are derived from an early-stage embryo.
Whether the federal government should fund the development of such cells grew into a major policy question in recent years, culminating with President George W. Bush's decision on August 9, 2001 to allow federal funding for research on then-existing stem cell lines as long as the lines were derived from embryos that were already destroyed and that had not been created specifically for research.
"We should allow federal funds to be used for research on these existing stem cell lines, where the life and death decision has already been made," Bush said in his first major non-inaugural public speech as president (on-line here). "Leading scientists tell me research on these 60 lines has great promise that could lead to breakthrough therapies and cures. This allows us to explore the promise and potential of stem cell research without crossing a fundamental moral line, by providing taxpayer funding that would sanction or encourage further destruction of human embryos that have at least the potential for life."
Since then, the National Institutes of Health has funded research to increase the availability of stem cell lines for research, so that 22 human ES cell lines were available for purchase by approved researchers in the third quarter of 2004, compared to one or two lines in early 2002. It has also provided grants for investigators.
Sources: President Bush's August 9, 2001 speech announcing his decision on stem cells is on-line here. The National Institutes of Health maintains information on stem cells and on the stem cell registry here.
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Voting-Age Requirements (last updated March 3, 2005) (back to top)
In this episode, a group of children urge Toby to eliminate or lower the voting-age requirement.
All 50 states as well as the federal government set 18 as the minimum age for voting, though they could lower that age through legislative changes. Some state legislatures have considered making such changes, though none have actually done so.
One example from early 2004 involved a proposal by a California state senator, John Vasconcellos, to lower the state voting age to 14, with younger citizens getting a fraction of a vote until they reach 18. The proposal was not successful.
As for extending the voting franchise to 18-year-olds, that began to spread as an idea during World War II largely on the basis that if someone was old enough to be in the military or to be drafted but without much legislative success. Nonetheless, by 1954, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower publicly supported the idea and called for an amendment to the United States Constitution, Georgia was the only state that had successfully lowered its voting age to 18.
Proponents of teenage suffrage gained ground in the 1960s, earning support from President Lyndon B. Johnson and then Richard Nixon. In 1970, Congress passed a law that would lower the voting age requirement in all elections to 18. This law was upheld in part by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 decision that said Congress could lower the age requirement in federal elections without a constitutional amendment, but not in state elections. Faced with the administrative difficulties in coordinating a two-tiered voting age system, states then called for an amendment to the United States Constitution. This amendment was approved by Congress in March 1971 and ratified by enough states within three months, the quickest turnaround time for a constitutional amendment.
In 1968, there were 11.6 million people under 25 years old who could vote. Four years later, with the Twenty-sixth Amendment in place, there were suddenly more than twice as many, or 24.6 million. Voter turnout among 18-24-year-olds in the presidential election that year was 49.6 percent.
Sources: Information about California Senate Bill 1606 (2003-04) can be found on-line via the California Senate's website on-line here. The National Youth Rights Association, which promotes lowering the voting age, is on-line here. Wendell W. Cultice, Youth's Battle for the Ballot: a history of voting age in America (Greenwood Press, 1992). Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: the contested history of democracy in the United States (Basic Books, 2000). Oregon v. Mitchell, 400 U.S. 112 (1970), the Supreme Court case upholding the Voting Rights Acts Amendments of 1970 as to federal elections, but not to state elections (on-line here). Voter turnout data is from the Census Bureau and is available here.
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Budget Deficit Concerns (last updated March 2, 2005) (back to top)
President Bartlet discusses the budget debt with a longtime rival and expresses his concerns about budget deficits in a press conference.
Bartlet's concerns about the budget deficit and about his inability to balance the budget echo efforts by the Clinton administration to balance the budget. In 1998, the budget was balanced for the first time in 29 years, thus ending a battle over deficit spending but opening a new debate over what to do with the budget surplus. That debate ended as the federal government went again into deficit spending by the end of 2001, in part due to an economic recession, the tax cut enacted in the summer of 2001, and the war on terrorism.
As the federal government continues to run budget deficits, the federal government's debt has continued to grow. The debt was $7.0 trillion as of the end of 2003, about half of which was owed to the Federal Reserve banks and to other parts of the federal government, such as the Social Security Trust Funds that currently take in a surplus, and about a quarter of which was owed to foreign and international governments and investors. The federal government spends billions each year on net-interest payments based on such debt; the Bush administration spent about $177 billion in such payments in fiscal year 2005.
As suggested by President Bartlet's longtime rival, foreign and international investors have taken on a larger share of the U.S. debt, raising concerns about the economic power that such investors potentially could wield. Foreign and international investors increased their share of the privately-held debt from 20 percent to about 51 percent as of June 2004, as reflected in the graph below.
Sources: Data on budget deficits and on the amount spent on net-interest payments is from the White House's Office of Management and Budget's FY 2006 budget, on-line here. Information on foreign ownership of federal securities is from Table OFS-2 in the December 2004 Treasury Bulletin, on-line here.
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Canada-US Relations (last updated March 3, 2005) (back to top)
Kate handles a tense situation that threatens to US-Canada relations. In the course of dealing with the situation, several points of contention between the two neighbors arise:
- Softwood lumber dispute. The United States has challenged Canada's exports of softwood lumber several times since the early 1980s, arguing that Canadian programs conferring harvesting rights on government-owned forestlands constituted a subsidy. In 2002, the U.S. Department of Commerce determined that such programs did constitute such a subsidy and calculated that subsidy to be 19.34 percent ad valorem. This decision was challenged by Canada under the North American Free Trade Agreement. A NAFTA panel in August 2003 agreed with the U.S. decision about Canada's programs but found that the amount of the subsidy had not been properly calculated. The United States and Canada continued in 2003 and 2004 to have disputes about how the benefit should be calculated.
- Prescription drugs. Many people have turned in the United States in recent years for their prescription-drug needs to Canada, where the price of many prescription drugs is controlled by the Canadian government's Patented Medicine Prices Review Board. About 12 million prescription-drug products with a value of about $700 million entered the United States from Canada in 2003 via Internet sales and trips to Canada, according to a report by the Department of Health and Human Services' Task Force on Drug Importation, which was published in December 2004.
Many of these imports were in violation of U.S. federal law, specifically 21 USC 384, which currently allows only pharmacists and wholesalers to import prescription drugs, among other things, into the United States. Individuals are not allowed to import prescription drugs directly. Federal law also bans the importation of any prescription drug that is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
How to deal with the growing cost of prescription drugs - and whether greater importation from Canada should be allowed as a partial solution - was a campaign issue in 2004. In the second presidential debate, Sen. John Kerry accused President George W. Bush of blocking legislation that would have allowed more importation of drugs from Canada and of preventing Medicare from negotiating lower prices on bulk purchases of drugs. Bush said that he had not blocked the importation of drugs and that greater importation might endanger consumers because imported drugs may not face the same kind of regulation as in the United States.
- Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The United States blocked certain beef imports from Canada for many months after the first U.S. case of mad cow disease, technically known as bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), was identified in December 2003 in a non-ambulatory dairy cow that is believed to have originated from a dairy farm in Alberta, Canada. The United States announced in December 2004 that it would allow certain beef imports beginning in March 2005, though some would continue to be blocked.
- International Military Action. Canada did not back the United States' efforts to get United Nations support for military action in Iraq in March 2003. Canada was not considered part of the "coalition of the willing" that some in the United States recognized in March 2003 (lists and maps of members are on-line here). Many Canadians do not support President George W. Bush and a Gallup poll from September 2004 found that two-thirds of Canadians wanted to see Sen. John Kerry win the 2004 presidential election, compared to a fifth of Canadians who wanted to see Bush re-elected.
Sources: Decisions in the Matter of Certain Softwood Lumber Products from Canada, NAFTA File USA-CDA-2002-1904-03, are available on-line here. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Task Force on Drug Importation is on-line here and its December 2004 report is available on-line as a PDF here). The United States Department of Agriculture has information about BSE on-line here.
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West Wing: Santos discusses a lawsuit about intelligent design
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