Cass Sunstein

To impeach or not to impeach. That has been the question vexing congressional Democrats since they took control of the House of Representatives last November. The push to begin proceedings became more urgent in April after then-Special Counsel Robert Mueller detailed several instances in which President Trump potentially obstructed justice, and over 90 House Democrats have now publicly expressed support for impeachment. The number is likely to increase this week as Mueller testifies about his findings before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees. But as “Impeach!” has become a mainstream rallying cry for Trump’s opposition, the intention of the constitutional provision that allows Congress to remove the president from office has been largely misconstrued, says Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law professor, constitutional scholar, and Obama administration veteran. Sunstein’s 2017 book Impeachment: A Citizen’s Guide has taken on new relevance since the release of the Mueller report — so much so that an updated version was released last month to break down how the special counsel’s findings factor into the debate over whether to impeach President Trump.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Throughout his testimony in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday, and despite multiple efforts to divert him, former special counsel Robert Mueller was focused on just the two issues that were the topics of his official report: Russia’s interference with the 2016 presidential campaign and possible obstruction of justice by President Donald Trump. Both Republicans and Democrats disliked it, and found it weak, when Mueller answered their lengthy questions by referring to that report. “I rely on the language of the report,” he sometimes said.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: George Orwell’s “1984” is the greatest fictional account of authoritarian leadership — the most astute, the most precise, the most attuned to human psychology. One of its defining chapters explores the Two Minutes Hate, which helps establish and maintain Big Brother’s regime. As Orwell describes it, the Hate begins with a flash of a face on a large screen. It is Emmanuel Goldstein, “the Enemy of the People.” His is “a clever face, and yet somehow inherently despicable,” and also unmistakably foreign. It produces fear and disgust.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  Suppose that in the coming decades, Americans have a moral awakening with respect to the consumption of meat. Suppose they conclude that eating meat is a grievous moral wrong, above all because it promotes cruelty to animals, but also because it contributes to environmental problems, including climate change. That could happen. Many observers think that with the rise of plant-based meat alternatives such as the Impossible Burger, people will eventually be shocked and outraged that their parents and grandparents used to raise animals for food, allow them to suffer, and then eat them — without the slightest moral compunction. If so, political candidates would undoubtedly be called to account for their onetime eating habits.

Life is complicated. And many D2C brands — and increasingly, more traditional companies trying to keep up with digital natives — succeed because they help eliminate the pain points or friction that behavioral economists simply call sludge. (Remember how tedious e-shopping was before one-click ordering? Or when you had to buy the whole CD?) But Cass Sunstein, now the Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School, says Americans are still buried under billions of hours of time-wasting annoyances.  Sunstein, a former White House paperwork reduction reformer, recommends companies conduct regular sludge audits to make sure they’re eliminating as many pain points — and as much friction — as possible.  Still, such a task isn’t easy. He tells D2C FYI why simplifying is so complicated

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  Since the April release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report, debate has escalated among Democrats in the House of Representatives over the question of impeachment. A lot of the discussion has focused on political questions. Which party would benefit? Is it a serious problem that impeachment proceedings would be, as Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has suggested, “divisive”? Is impeachment a criminal or a “political” proceeding? It certainly isn’t a criminal proceeding, and it has an inescapable political component. But under the Constitution, impeachment is fundamentally a question of law, not politics. If, after assessing the facts, the House concludes that a president — Democratic or Republican — has clearly committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” then impeachment isn’t optional. In that event, the House has a duty to act, regardless of any potential political fallout.

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Supreme Court term that ended this week had a large number of high-profile cases. But many of its decisions involved the relatively technical field of administrative law, which sets out legal restrictions on the power of federal agencies. It has profound effects on people’s lives, and it is often the subject of intense judicial debates. The court’s most far-reaching ruling settled a long-disputed question: If an agency issues an ambiguous regulation – involving clean air, food safety or civil rights – who gets to sort out the ambiguity? The agency or a court?

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and co-founder of Facebook Inc., endorsed federal privacy legislation and greater regulation of political advertising, even as he cast governments as too slow to address many of the internet’s thorniest problems. In an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado on Wednesday, Mr. Zuckerberg said the company was racing to solve problems such as misinformation and how best to police online content. He expressed hope that governments would ultimately build a framework for tackling those matters....Speaking with Cass Sunstein, a Harvard professor and an occasional Facebook consultant, Mr. Zuckerberg expressed frustration both with calls to break up the company and with the U.S. government’s handling of Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election.

On stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mark Zuckerberg addressed a range of topics that have put the company in the center of a political firestorm, from election security to content moderation and monopolistic power. In conversation with Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg said he wants to create more external standards so that private companies are not making morally complex decisions by themselves.

Mark Zuckerberg can't think of a single reason to break up Facebook, even as lawmakers call to dismantle or regulate major US tech platforms. In a conversation Wednesday at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Zuckerberg said being big is actually a benefit in the fight to prevent the spread of misinformation and deal with election interference. "The question that I think we have to grapple with is that breaking up these companies wouldn't make any of those problems better," Zuckerberg said in a conversation with Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein. "The amount that we're investing in safety and security is greater than the whole revenue of our company was earlier this decade when we went public, so it just would not have been possible to do the things we're doing at a smaller scale."

As public trust in Facebook’s ability to wield its power responsibly has fractured in the face of a series of privacy breaches and other scandals, the company has been facing fresh calls for regulation from numerous quarters of the federal government. But on one of the biggest issues leading to that breakdown of trust, its response to foreign election interference, Facebook has made significant progress, according to Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who made a rare public appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival on Wednesday...In a discussion with Harvard Law School professor Cass Sunstein, Zuckerberg invited regulators to set industrywide privacy standards and take a harder line with foreign interference in elections while pushing back against calls to break up Facebook.

It can often feel hopeless to be an activist seeking social change on an obscure issue where most people seem opposed or at best indifferent to you. But according to a new book by Professor Cass Sunstein, they shouldn’t despair. Large social changes are often abrupt and unexpected, arising in an environment of seeming public opposition. The Communist Revolution in Russia spread so swiftly it confounded even Lenin. Seventy years later the Soviet Union collapsed just as quickly and unpredictably. In the modern era we have gay marriage, #metoo and the Arab Spring, as well as nativism, Euroskepticism and Hindu nationalism. How can a society that so recently seemed to support the status quo bring about change in years, months, or even weeks?

An article by Cass Sunstein: The Office of Legal Counsel can be seen as the Navy Seals of the U.S. Department of Justice. It consists of a relatively small, and quite powerful, group of lawyers who provide legal advice to the president and the Cabinet departments, often on the very hardest questions. If the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security disagree about a legal issue, OLC, as it is called, might well be asked to settle their dispute. If the question is whether Congress can require the president of the United States to hand over his tax returns, or whether the president can fire members of the Federal Reserve Board, or whether executive privilege applies to conversations not involving the president personally, or whether the president is immune from criminal prosecution – well, there is a good chance that OLC will have the final word, at least within the executive branch. This helps explain why Robert Mueller deferred to a crucial judgment of the OLC, to the effect that the president is immune from criminal prosecution as a matter of constitutional law. The special counsel was criticized for following the office’s opinion, but he was right to do so. Robert Mueller is a straight shooter.

Many faculty members at HLS focus their research on aspects of consumer law and protection.

An article by Cass Sunstein:  If we are living through historic events, would we know? In 1965, Arthur Danto, a philosopher at Columbia University, argued that it is impossible to tell, when you’re in the midst of things, whether an event is going to be deemed “historic” by future historians. If something happens – Russia successfully reclaims Crimea, for example, or Pete Buttigieg declares that he’s running for president – its ultimate significance will be determined by causal chains that cannot possibly be anticipated, and by an assortment of events that have yet to take place.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein:  New Zealand’s Labour coalition government has done something that could prove historic. Led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, it has produced the world’s first “well-being” budget, focused explicitly on a single goal: using its limited funds to promote the well-being of its citizens.  Among other things, a lot of money will be devoted to three problems: mental illness, child poverty and family violence.

A book review by Samuel Moyn: Whenever I need to drive somewhere, I use Waze. The app saves me a lot of trouble, because it aggregates information to which I have no access and even plans how to distribute the traffic rationally to avoid clogging the roads. It has a lot of pop-up ads, but I try to ignore them because they seem a minor annoyance...But whatever its drawbacks, Waze marks a triumph for “navigability,” the ungainly term that Cass Sunstein uses in his new book, On Freedom, to describe how easy or difficult it is to get from here to there and, in the metaphorical sense, to achieve a goal once you’ve set one for yourself. For Sunstein, government ought to be more like Waze, helping people fulfill their desires and dreams, especially when they themselves are blocking that fulfillment. But any inquiry into navigability is inseparable from a much bigger theory of where our desires come from and how society fits them together not just with others’ but also into a common scheme of life. For too long, liberals have abstained from inquiring into what people want and have ignored how most obstructions come from neither the state nor the self but from a deregulated market and an unreformed society in which oppression is the rule.

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Parody and satire are a legitimate part of public debate. Doctored videos are all over the place. Some are funny. Some are meant to make a point. Arguments of this kind are being made to support Facebook’s decision not to take down the doctored video of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in which she was made to appear drunk or otherwise impaired. One version, posted on the Facebook page Politics WatchDog, was seen over two million times in just a few days. There is no question that many viewers thought that the video was real. Acknowledging that it was fake, Facebook said, “We don’t have a policy that stipulates that the information you post on Facebook must be true.”

An op-ed by Cass Sunstein: Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently released an important memorandum that makes terrific sense. In principle, it should improve the EPA’s performance -- and receive bipartisan applause. In practice? Well, that might be another story. The background is provided by two Supreme Court decisions. In 2009, the court ruled that whenever a congressional enactment is ambiguous, the EPA has the authority to consider the costs of its regulations and to weigh them against the benefits.