The Odd Clauses by Jay Wexler Page B

difficult has “no basis.” And there are “no substantial legal barriers” or “technical problems” with metric conversion. Nonetheless, thirty years after the board issued those conclusions and then disappeared forever, the United States remains the only country in the world (with the possible exception of Myanmar) that has not converted to metric.
    This is not to say, of course, that we Americans never use the metric system. Our fifths still contain 750 milliliters of booze, and our soda comes in two-liter bottles. Illegal drugs are regularly sold by the gram and kilogram. We run five-kilometer races and measure the dilated cervixes of women in labor in centimeters (not generally at the same time). Still, though, most of our daily measurements remain in the traditional system. Our lumber is sold as two by fours (actually one and a half inches by three and a half inches), and our guns (other than the 9mm) are calibrated in inches. Sammy Hagar has a difficult time driving fifty-five miles an hour. We measure increasing global temperatures caused by Bush administration environmental policies in Fahrenheit and Roger Clemens’s steroid-tainted urine in gallons. Al Gore and I measure our fluctuating weight in pounds and ounces. Sometimes, we even report the measure of force exercised by our Mars landers in pounds-seconds.
    So let’s return now to the question we started with. Whom should we hold accountable for the Mars climate orbiter fiasco? My hunch is that most Americans blamed NASA, but what I’ve tried to suggest here is that much of the blame—maybe most of it—really should fall on Congress—or, more precisely, all the Congresses that failed to adopt the metric system as our official standard of measurement over the past couple of hundred years. The 1975 Congress that passed the wimpy Metric Conversion Act must get the brunt of the criticism for utterly failing to exercise its constitutional power under the weights and measures clause and creating a wishy-washy agency basically designed to fail to do its dirty work instead. Note that before we can assign Congress any blame for failing to implement some policy, we have to be sure that implementing that policy was in Congress’s power in the first place. On the issue of the metric system, that requirement is easily met.
    Notice too how the existence of administrative agencies that exercise what rightly might be called legislative power under the Court’s lenient “intelligible principle” test complicates the issue of political accountability. Some of the blame for the Mars climate orbiter disaster has to be laid at the feet of the members of the Metric Board itself, for the board clearly had the power to do more to help the country transition to metric. And since the members of the board were appointed by Presidents Ford, Carter, and Reagan and could also be removed and replaced by these presidents, we should remember to include these three leaders on our list of people who deserve some blame for what happened out by the angry red planet.
    The Mars probe problem illustrates an issue of immense concern to any country that calls itself a democracy. Critical to the legitimate functioning of any democratic state is the ability of citizens to hold elected officials accountable for their actions. We hold these leaders accountablein all sorts of ways—when we discuss issues with friends, when we evaluate the accomplishments of past leaders, when we speak up on talk radio shows or at town hall meetings, when we write letters and editorials, and, most importantly, when we go to the polls and vote.
    When we do these things, we should always remember that Congress is the primary lawmaking body in the United States. It might not always seem that way, since Congress regularly lets executive branch agencies make critical policy decisions. We may be inclined to blame the EPA, for example, when our air becomes dirty, or