Democracy in America

THIRTEEN to five. That was the lopsided vote by which the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the immigration-reform bill it has been working on for the past few weeks. All ten of the committee’s Democrats voted for the bill, along with three Republicans, in spite of much greater scepticism in their party on the subject. If that sort of margin were repeated on the Senate floor, the bill would waft through the chamber with about 70 votes in favour.

Whatever the margin, the Senate’s approval looks a safe bet. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader, promised not to oppose a floor debate, currently slated for next month.

THE first outraged tweet I saw about it came from the Associated Press's Ron Fournier: the Department of Justice (DOJ) had "tracked Fox News reporter via key card and seized personal emails. #Chilling @AP". That turned out to be a little off-point. The DOJ had checked the visit log of Fox News reporter James Rosen as he was entering and leaving the State Department one day in 2009, and that of State Department officer Stephen Kim, to back up the suspicion that Mr Kim had leaked information from a top-secret intelligence report on North Korea which had just been distributed that day, and which led to Mr Rosen's article a few hours later.

THE New York Times had a nice discussion group the other day between legal experts on how to solve the problem of 501(c)(4)s. Basically, this category of non-profits is supposed to cover groups like the Sierra Club, the NRA, and the AARP, which have clear public-benefit programmes (environmental defence and research, gun-use education, and support and social organisation for seniors) but also naturally want to engage in lobbying and some political activity in pursuit of their causes.

A REPORT released earlier this month by the Census Bureau found that in 2012, for the first time, voting rates of black Americans exceeded that of whites: 66.2% of eligible black voters cast ballots in the last presidential election, compared with 64.1% of whites (in 2008, the numbers were 64.7% of blacks and 66.1% of whites). Beneath those top-line numbers, however, lie significant gender-based disparities in voting. More than 70% of black women voted, while just 61.4% of black men did. Black women voted at higher rates than white men and women; black men's voting rates appear to be lower.

THE scandal over the Internal Revenue Service targeting conservative non-profit organisations for extra scrutiny comes at an inauspicious time for the Obama administration. When Obamacare goes in to full effect in January, the IRS will be vested with an array of new powers. Americans will be required to prove to the agency that they have a "qualifying" health plan, or pay a penalty. The IRS is also charged with passing confidential tax info to the Department of Health and Human Services, which will determine eligibility for new health-care subsidies. Americans will be required to report changes to their lives that might affect their eligibility for subsidies.

WHEN the authorities want to obtain journalists’ phone records as part of an investigation into a crime, the Department of Justice’s guidelines state that their request should be “as narrowly drawn as possible”. What is more, they should try to persuade the journalists concerned to hand over the records voluntarily before getting a judge’s approval to seize them, unless doing so was likely to undermine the investigation. So it came as some surprise to the Associated Press (AP), a news agency, to discover that the Justice Department had quietly obtained records of more than 20 phone lines used by its reporters and editors in New York, Washington and Hartford, Connecticut.

KEVIN DRUM looks to have set the topic for the day with his article in Mother Jones on the economics of our robotic future. The argument is a good recap of several points that have also turned up in speculation by others, including Paul Krugman and my colleague, on what happens once artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence and robots start replacing us not just in manual labour or repetitive processing tasks, but in, well, everything.