Something very important that I did not get to in my earlier post: Chief Justice Roberts voices in a number of places in the majority opinion that the Supreme Court is not "consder[ing] whether the Act embodies sound policy." He ends the opinion by stating that “the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the
Affordable Care Act” because “[u]nder the Constitution, that
judgment is reserved to the people.”
That's fine but it's only fine if something very important is overlooked. As Paul Mirengoff notes:
The legislature and the executive represented to
the public that the mandate is not a tax. Ordinarily, the use of labels
is not particularly relevant, and perhaps labels should not carry much
weight here.
However, when the labels affixed, and the
framing used, by the people’s branches clearly are designed to make
legislation palatable to the people, it can be argued that deference to
democracy does not militate in favor of stretching to reject the labels
and the framing through the “fairly possible” test. Here, the president
and his fellow Democrats labeled and framed the exaction for not
purchasing health insurance as a penalty because taxes are unpopular.
Of course, the chief justice argued that the individual mandate is a tax, not a penalty as it had been called when it was brought before the American people.
In addition:
If the mandate
had been struck down as a penalty, the people’s representatives could
then try to enact it as a tax. This remedy would vindicate democracy
because the mandate would then be enacted or rejected without the
earlier deception, in the form and under the label that is required for
it to pass constitutional muster.
It's seems as though Roberts has taken for granted that what was passed by Congress and what came out of the Supreme Court was in essence the same thing. It is not. The arguments the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress used to convince the American people that the law was needed (and they never really did convince the people in the first place) and what they eventually passed out of Congress is at odds with what the Supreme Court said what the law is. Written law by definition cannot have two different meanings at the same time. So in effect, the people, in one way or another, have been deceived.
I'm back and boy, did I pick some week to take a break. So I guess the Supreme Court issued some important ruling on Thursday... .
I'm just starting to dive into the amount of material already written about NFIB v. Sebelius, otherwise known as the Obamacare decision, so it will probably take at least a few posts to begin to parse everything out. But I am already taking away a few important things:
In a 5-4 decision, Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Ginsberg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, found that the individual mandate portion of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, among other major provisions of the law, is constitutional because it emanates from Congress's taxing power under the Constitution (Article I, Sec. 8). The only section struck down (by a 7-2 majority) was the federal government's plan to withhold Medicaid funding from the states if they choose not to comply with that plan.
Roberts, along with Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito -- Ginsburg issued a dissent, which was joined by the other three liberals, in which she argued that the individual mandate was constitutional, even under the Commerce and Necessary and Proper Clauses -- smashed the Left's Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause arguments. But for Roberts and the majority, instead of the government being able to compel citizens to do commerce, they can now compel citizens to transfer money so that it can be taxed. I have already read a number of conservatives jumping for joy with Roberts' demolition of the main liberal arguments in favor of Obamacare, but this truly is a distinction without a difference. (As Tommy DeSano has written, "Every tax has at its core the prerequisite of a transfer of money or value. Thanks to the ObamaCare ruling, not transferring money or value may
now be taxed, the precise opposite of what a tax has been in the history
of jurisprudence.")
Charles Krauthammer and George Will, along with numerous other conservative commentators, have tried their best to twist out some kind of originalist or conservative reading out of what Roberts did in his majority opinion, but this really misses the forest for the trees. Roberts may have stopped a leaking hole in a dam with some chewing gum , but he also helped prepare the explosives at the base of that very same dam.
Jonah Goldberg has rightly called the liberal and conservative arguments that praise Roberts for his "apolitical" stance in siding with the liberal wing of the Court as BS:
In other words, if five conservative justices rule according to their
well-known convictions, it’s illegitimate. But if Roberts twists himself
like an illustration in the Kama Sutra to find a way to uphold the law,
then that amounts to “leadership.”
Rich Lowry offers this devastating indictment of the effectual truth of what the Supreme Court did on Thursday:
Obamacare as passed by Congress didn’t pass constitutional muster.
Obamacare as passed by the Supreme Court didn’t pass Congress — and
might not have passed Congress had it been presented for an up-or-down
vote festooned with yet another tax.
As Rich notes, the tax argument was something that the Obama Administration vociferously denied when selling the plan to the American people. The Administration's lawyers only used this argument in mid-March of this year when they argued their case in front of the Supreme Court--of course only on the off days from their other argument that it was not a tax but a penalty.
Trying to write the next Marbury v. Madison or not, Chief Justice Roberts has done great damage to the Constitution.
This country may have just had a new birth with this decision (of course, we won't know more fully until after the elections in November). But it still remains to be seen whether that birth is in freedom or something more akin to tyranny.
In a piece that was screaming to be written, Steven Hayward turns the tables on the arguments about the supposed extreme views of the Republican Party (this argument has been around at least since Barry Goldwater's run for president in 1964). As Hayward sees it, the more important questions is this: would FDR, Truman, JFK, or LBJ be able to be nominated by today's Democrats? Here is Hayward's evidence, starting with what would most definitely be apostasties for the modern-day party:
Start with Franklin Roosevelt. Despite his New Deal
programs, he piled up a considerable record of statements that would be
anathema to contemporary liberal orthodoxy. “The lessons of history,
confirmed by the evidence immediately before me,” he told Congress in
1935, “show conclusively that continued dependence upon relief induces a
spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the
national fiber. To dole out relief . . . is to administer a narcotic, a
subtle destroyer of the human spirit.” A liberal can’t talk about our
welfare state that way today.
FDR opposed public employee unions. In a 1937 letter to a
public employees’ association, FDR wrote: “All Government employees
should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually
understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. . . .
Militant tactics have no place in the functions of any organization of
Government employees.”
On JFK, who
proposed significant reductions in income tax rates. In a 1961
speech, Kennedy argued that “it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates
are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.
. . . The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget
deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy which can
bring a budget surplus.” (Emphasis added.) John Kenneth Galbraith
mocked JFK’s speech, calling it “the most Republican speech since
McKinley.” Galbraith also warned, “Once we start encouraging the economy
with tax cuts, it would sooner or later become an uncontrollable
popular measure with conservatives.” He was right; 20 years later,
Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp, and other “supply-siders” pointed to Kennedy’s
example, much to the dismay and outrage of liberals.
And Hayward rightly notes that if the Republican Party is extreme and out of the mainstream, why then are they "enjoying their highest watermark in 80 years in terms of the number of elected officials on all levels?" Odd. But maybe not considering the implicit argument in these charges of Republican extremism. Maybe the thing left unsaid is similar to what the Daily Mirror reported about the American People shortly after President Bush won in 2004 -- that is, how can all of these people who support the Republicans be so dumb?
While attending the first-ever gay pride event at the White House, several gay-rights activists let President Reagan know that they are his number one fan:
Always glad to see civility on display at the White House.
Jonathan Tobin at Commentary notes that more and more people -- including even the New York Times -- are seeming to take notice of the emerging pattern of fabrications and outright falsehoods in President Obama's autobiography, Dreams From My Father:
Never let it be said the New York Times is afraid to tackle an
unflattering story about President Obama, even if it’s often a delayed
reaction. The paper’s political blog The Caucus deigned to notice today that the new biography of the president by David Maraniss uncovered the fact that much of Dreams From My Father, the highly praised Barack Obama autobiography, is either fabricated or exaggerated.
One of most despicable falsehoods put forth by Obama came during the 2008 election when he told the story of how his mother was denied coverage by insurance companies near the end of her life, prompting her early demise:
The fables Obama seems to have told about his alienation, his
girlfriends and the rest of his over-intellectualized voyage of
self-discovery actually pale in comparison to the whopper he told when
running for election in 2008 that his mother died because she had been
denied coverage and treatment of her disease. Scott revealed that in
fact the expenses relating to her cancer had been paid by her insurance.
Though she had a separate and totally unrelated dispute relating to
disability coverage, Scott’s research proved that Obama’s statement
during the 2008 presidential debate was fiction:
For my mother to die of cancer at the age of 53 and have
to spend the last months of her life in the hospital room arguing with
insurance companies because they’re saying that this may be a
pre-existing condition and they don’t have to pay her treatment, there’s
something fundamentally wrong about that.
It bears repeating that the president knew this account was false
because he served as his mother’s attorney in all her dealings with the
insurance company.
When the Times ran that story (on page 14 rather than on the
front page), the White House chose not to deny the truth of Scott’s
reporting. But that didn’t stop the Obama campaign from refloating the same falsehoods
about Ms. Dunham having perished for lack of insurance coverage in an
autobiographical campaign film narrated by Tom Hanks. Not only has the
president never apologized for lying to the American people about his
mother’s plight, he rightly assumed that even though the truth was
uncovered by the New York Times, neither that paper nor the
rest of the mainstream media would follow up on it as they undoubtedly
would had a Republican ever tried to sell the voters such a transparent
whopper.
Even if the film was narrated by Morgan Freeman, it still wouldn't have made any of this more true.
The Democratic Party is facing an awkward problem Thursday because white supremacist David Duke has endorsed a leading candidate in the Democratic Party’s primary race for a New York House seat.
Duke says he’s endorsing Charles Barron, the leading candidate for the new 8th district primary on June 26, because of their shared enmity toward “zionists.”
Barron is an African-American city politician who has been slammed as an anti-white racist and as a Jew-hater. However, he’s already got the endorsement of the retiring Democratic congressman, Rep. Edolphus Towns.
This made me laugh out loud:
[Duke] now portrays himself as a supporter of “diversity,” and as a non-violent proponent of laws that encourage whites and African-Americans to live separately.
“In an election of limited choices, I think Charles Barron is the better choice [because] there is no greater danger facing the United States of America and facing the world than the unbridled power of zionist globalism,” Duke declared in a June 21 video.
[...]
“I certainly disagree with Barron’s extreme racist, even violently, anti-white rhetoric,” he said, while blaming “Jewish extremists” for racial divisions.
African-Americans and whites “want the same thing — they want the right to associate together in their schools and communities,” he said.
And I thought only the Republican Party was the home of racists, bigots, anti-intellectuals, etc.
The Beach Boys will soon celebrate their 50th Anniversary by going on tour, playing material from their newly-released album That's Why God Made The Radio. In the Spring issue of the Claremont Review, Michael Anton writes on The Beach Boys and Smile, their infamous album that was never released. As Anton argues, Smile was "the pinnacle artistic achievement of a lost civilization, the
middle-class, baby-boom, sun-soaked, clean-cut, work-hard-play-hard,
bungalow-and-car culture of post-war Southern California." To fully appreciate what The Beach Boys were trying to accomplish with Smile, the listener must come to understand what California was like in the early twentieth century, the time that Murry Wilson, the father of Carl, Dennis, and Brian, first moved there:
[The Wilson family] came for the jobs but soon learned to appreciate the region's
many other charms. [The journalist Carey] McWilliams, who migrated west the same year as [Murry]
Wilson, was struck immediately by the landscape, "above all by the
extraordinary greenness of the lawns and hillsides. It was the kind of
green that seemed as though it might rub off on your hands; a theatrical
green, a green that was not quite real." Of course, it wasn't quite
real. At least, it wasn't natural. That green was the product of William
Mulholland's "rape of the Owens Valley," the massive project to
irrigate the bone-dry Los Angeles Basin later immortalized in Robert
Towne's screenplay for Chinatown. L.A. in its natural state, as God intended, is the color of straw eleven months of the year.
And
then there was the weather: mild, dry, predictable, and clear 329 days a
year. Angelinos worshiped the sun with a fervor not seen since the
Temple of Ra. Novelist Eugene Burdick—yet another member of L.A.'s class
of '22—described that beneficent god thusly: "This is not the almost
tropical sun of Hawaii or the alternately thin and blistering sun of
Arkansas or the moderate bourgeois sun of France. This is a kind sun, a
boon of nature, a sun designed for Utopia."
Now fast forward some decades to the Smile sessions:
Instead of a series of discreet songs of more or less the same length, the longer tracks on Smile
are interspersed with snippets, instrumental bridges, and goofy,
near-throwaway vocals—techniques the Beatles would not utilize (and even
then not fully) until three years later with their last album, Abbey Road.
Brian was also experimenting technologically with tricks well ahead of
their time and that contemporary audio equipment could scarcely handle.
He borrowed from the movies the technique of cutting and splicing tape,
something hardly ever done in music before "Good Vibrations" and usually
only to cover up mistakes. Brian elevated "modular recording" to an art
form, allowing the music to turn on a dime in ways impossible to
achieve if the songs had to be played straight through in one take. Sgt. Pepper—with
its array of jump cuts, sound effects and multi-track overlays that
could only be accomplished in a studio—has gone down in rock history as
the first album to blast away the boundaries of traditional stage pop in
ways that made it absolutely unperformable in a live act. Smile,
which was written and recorded earlier, was even more sonically
inventive. Had it been released on schedule, undoubtedly Wilson's
masterpiece would have earned that honor.
Anton on the often-times strange lyrics of Van Dyke Parks:
As to the lyrics, that's where the trouble really hit. Parks's
idiosyncratic and whimsical words fit the overall tone perfectly even if
they don't always—or often—make sense. The overarching theme is
America, a deliberate reaction or response to pop music's then-reigning
British Invasion. The lyrics cover the nation geographically from
Plymouth Rock to Hawaii, and historically from the Pilgrims through the
Chicago fire, the Wild West, the railroads, and the Gilded Age. Snippets
of standards from the Great American Songbook are woven in throughout,
as are various pop culture jingles and theme songs. The words don't so
much tell a story as set a mood, one that is often just plain silly.
"I'm gonna be 'round my vegetables / I'm gonna chow down my vegetables"
isn't exactly "Fall in love—you won't regret it / That's the best work
of all—if you can get it."Yet despite their incomprehensibility, the lyrics for Smile
remain fresh because of the music's optimism and exuberant innocence.
That beneficent Southern California sun shines through in every word.
Though penned in the mid '60s, there is scarcely a trace of the
America-bashing then sweeping the intellectual and artistic classes. The
Boys—and especially Brian—certainly succumbed to the carnal temptations
of the time. But they never bought into the dystopic New Left vision of
"AmeriKKKa."
In 2004 Brian Wilson finally got back together with lyricist Van Dyke Parks and put together an album that approximated something like what Smile would have sounded like were it released in 1967. In 2011, the Smile Sessions were finally released and listeners got to experience all the work that was put into the making the album, which still to this day was never finished.
Below are some of the songs discussed by Anton, the first of which is "Our Prayer":
"Heroes and Villians":
"Vega-tables":
It's interesting to think what would have been if Smile was completed and released in 1967, before the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper was released.
As you may have heard this afternoon, the House Oversight Committee voted to charge AG Eric Holder with contempt, which means that if additional DOJ documents concerning the Fast and Furious scandal aren't given over to Congress, the full House will vote on the contempt charge sometime next week. The Obama Administration has now brought itself into the matter by claiming executive privilege (a horrible thing when used by the Bush Administration), meaning that AG Holder would not have to turn over the documents in question. This move, however, would not stop the contempt charges from moving forward, but it would bolster the DOJ's case.
Andy McCarthy at NRO thinks that way that executive privilege is being invoked by the Obama Administration is outside of the bounds of the Constitution:
I don’t think there is (or, at least, that there should be) an
executive prerogative of “effective government decision-making” that
allows a department or agency created by Congress to deny Congress
information on the ground that disclosure would compromise its
congressionally-prescribed mission. That is a judgment for Congress to
make, weighing the need for the information against the risk of
compromising a mission the executive would not have in the first place
absent congressional authorization.
This should be a political question, not a legal one. And for that
reason, I’m not very concerned about congressional excess. To be clear,
I’m not saying that the Justice Department must indulge every individual
member of Congress who wants information — when I was at the U.S.
attorney’s office, we routinely turned down such requests, and rightly
so.
I am talking about when Congress collectively acts the constitutional
body created by Article I, including through its designated committees
with subpoena power. If the majority holding sway in Congress were to
make a frivolous or politicized request that risked the successful
completion of a critical Justice Department investigation in order to
score political points, that majority’s gamesmanship would be exposed by
the minority and the executive branch; the irresponsible members would
be punished at the ballot box. If, on the other hand, the majority were
aggressively pursuing information because it was necessary to probe a
matter of patent public significance — e.g., providing guns to violent
drug cartels that predictably result in murders, including the killing
of a federal law enforcement agent — the voters would support the
majority and punish those who tried to stonewall.
Executive privilege is legitimate, and certainly has its place when
it comes to the president’s constitutional duties. But it is far less
compelling when asserted in an effort to keep from Congress information
about the conduct of a government department that the Constitution does
not require and that owes its existence to Congress.
I really don't know too much about the ins and outs of these matters, but McCarthy seems to present a strong case here.
Even if Holder is found in contempt by the House, it will then be handed over the courts, which will probably require years to sort out. But even if goes that far, the public will no doubt view the Obama Administration in a less than favorable light. And they will be wondering why it took the MSM so long to report on a story of such importance.
UPDATE:
John Hinderaker has weighed in on this in a long and substantive post that really sheds some light on this whole debacle. Please read the whole thing.
I knew that the MSM really simplifies things when they report on complicated issues for public consumption, but after reading this post, it really makes me question whether they really even care about looking into this at all.
Last week marked the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break in. This remains one of the chief scandals in American politics in which everyone seems to think they know what happened, but the truth is that we still don't know that much about the purposes or reasoning behind it all. Steven Hayward explains more about this:
Watergate remains the Jack the Ripper of political scandals, with many
unanswered questions and inexplicable anomalies—and a pattern of
anomalies, as my late great teacher Harold Rood taught us, usually add
up to something that is not random. Above all, just what the heck were
the burglar/buggers after? The infamous “call girl ring” story
remains alive, though the favorite theory is still that the Nixon
campaign wanted to see what information Democratic National Committee
chairman Lawrence O’Brien might have had about Nixon, and particularly
Nixon’s connections to Howard Hughes or to a Greek tycoon, Thomas
Pappas, whose secret contributions to Nixon’s campaign would have been
embarrassing if publicly revealed. Maybe so, but here’s one of the
anomalies: According to some accounts, O’Brien’s office was never bugged
(other accounts say a bug was planted, but didn’t work), and the
burglars were caught far from O’Brien’s office on that fateful night.
The original bug the burglars thought had malfunctioned—but which had in
fact been removed—had been placed in the office of a low-level
subordinate employee who was seldom at the office. Maybe the
burglar/buggers were just incompetent? Perhaps. After all, why did
veteran CIA agent James McCord do something as stupid as tape a door
open a second time, which would be an obvious tip off to Watergate
security? This has always unfolded onto a Hollywood-like conspiracy
theory that the CIA was behind the whole thing, because The Compnay (sic)
thought Nixon was trying to exert too much control over the agency,
which Nixon disliked. A faction of the military is also alleged to have
helped exploit Watergate as a means to derail Nixon’s arms control
efforts. (This was, coincidentally, the line the Soviet press adopted.)
“If we didn’t know better,” Nixon remarked on one of the famous tapes,
“[we] would have thought it was deliberately botched.”
Of course, as Hayward points out, the damage Watergate did to constitutional government was vast. We still live in the rubble caused by Watergate, which has manifested itself in the usurpation of executive power by administrative agencies and Congress alike. And the other thing caused by Watergate is the still too pervasive respect and adoration heaped upon Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward for outing the crook that was Nixon. As Hayward notes, the FBI was already many steps ahead of their reporting.
Bill McGurn has a good piece in the WSJ on Attorney General Eric Holder and his increasingly precarious position amidst the gathering storm regarding the Fast and Furious scandal and the national security leaks at the White House. McGurn luckily has a ready answer to Senators McCain, Graham, and Libermann regarding their talk of the old political standby of appointing a special prosecutor:
Perhaps after a few years and gazillions of tax dollars, a special
prosecutor would give his results. What purpose, however, is served by
keeping those answers to a prosecutor instead of to the American people?
The proper vehicle for getting answers is Congress, using its oversight
powers to conduct hearings and get the appropriate officials on the
record and under oath.
Thank you. It just seems that stuff is asserted all the time in politics that masquerades as common sense, but it's not. And it's advice from someone who actually seems to be familiar with the Founders' designs.
David Brooks had an interesting column over the weekend titled "The Follower Problem." Brooks sets out by describing the symptoms of the problem of the lack of "just authority." This can be seen when one compares the monuments of times past -- e.g., the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials -- to today's monuments The new MLK monument leaves out the principles of natural law and natural right that suffused his teachings. The proposed Eisenhower monument shows Ike in his youth, simply forgoing to explain any reason of his importance whatsoever. Here is Brooks giving his diagnosis:
Some of the reasons are well-known. We live in a culture that finds it
easier to assign moral status to victims of power than to those who
wield power. Most of the stories we tell ourselves are about victims who
have endured oppression, racism and cruelty.
Then there is our fervent devotion to equality, to the notion that all
people are equal and deserve equal recognition and respect. It’s hard in
this frame of mind to define and celebrate greatness, to hold up others
who are immeasurably superior to ourselves.
While the first paragraph is definitely true, the second paragraph is more complicated. Brooks is right in his assessment of how most people today think about equality. Today's equality is one of ends, not of beginnings as it was for the Founders. Brooks then rightly differentiates today's ideas of equality to those of the past, while further describing the seeming paradoxes of what it takes to rule and in turn be ruled:
Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we
are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are
extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them
and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only
really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.
I won't delve too much into this but to describe democratic principles (or better yet republican principles) as paradoxes as Brooks does misses the cohesive unity that brings all of this together.
Brooks then strangely misses something of large importance in his analysis when he equates Occupy Wall Street with the Tea Party:
You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties
that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies
and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world
should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority
is suspect and each individual is king.
I will agree that Occupy Wall Street falls into the category that Brooks describes, but the Tea Party certainly does not. The Tea Party was all about returning to the moral authority of the Constitution, which is built upon the moral principles of the Declaration of Independence. Far from the vast majority of Tea Parties thinking in the Hobbesian way Brooks ascribes to them, they believed in the authority of the laws of Nature and Nature's God, reason and revelation. To equate both of these things together as Brooks does is oddly an error in moral reasoning -- the same error which prompted Brooks to write the column in the first place.
Here is Brooks with the source of the problem as he sees it:
I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a
followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their
institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much
worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted.
It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that
they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do
with rising distrust than anything else.
I think he is right to assign a larger measure of cynicism to people today as compared with people in the earlier portion of the twentieth century, but it's not simply that alone. And it's not as though those institutions have not given Americans reason to distrust them in the first place. The administrative government bequeathed to us by the early Progressives has fostered growing inefficiency, lack of democratic controls, and overall a paternalism to the State. Rather than cynicism and vanity or vainglory (which Hobbes saw was the chief vice in men) being the cause it, however, is the symptom of a larger problem which is caused by the breaking away from the constitutional government handed down by past generations. Constitutional government of course requires a constitutional people -- a moral people who have the requisite virtues necessary for self-government. The Constitution certainly requires a moral people, but the Constitution itself engenders virtues if it is followed.
Over the weekend, when asked about his reactions to President Obama's actions, Romney responded with this gem:
“Well, it would be overtaken by events if you will, by virtue of my
putting in place a long-term solution with legislation which creates law
that relates to these individuals such that they know what their
setting is going to be, not just for the term of a president but on a
permanent basis,” said Romney.
Asked if he would leave Obama’s
policy in place while he worked out a long-term policy, Romney replied,
“we will look at that setting as we reach that.”
If you were looking for anything that sounded coherent, keep looking.
Troy Senick at Richochet gives Mitt Romney some much needed advice in
how he should have (and still can) handle President Obama's unilateral change of our nation's
immigration laws:
[The constitutional] line of argument has two great virtues for Romney. First, it's
correct. Second, it fits into a broader narrative. This comes from the
same president who upended the conventional role of secured creditors in
the auto bailouts, who eviscerated the traditional constitutional
understanding of the recess appointment power, who continuously walks
all over traditional protections of religious liberty, and who -- one
hopes -- will soon be found to have trespassed across constitutional
boundaries with Obamacare.
That's the line of attack: not that a
professional politician is motivated by political considerations, but
that a former law school lecturer who rose to prominence criticizing the
legal excesses of the previous administration won't allow his authority
to be cabined by something as quaint as the Constitution of the United
States.
Instead of preening about the other side playing politics (isn't the job of a politician to practice politics?), Romney should rise to the level of a constitutional argument. It would serve him and the people well.
I was just reading John Hinderaker's thoughts on President Obama's desicion to unilaterally change the nation's immigration laws when I came to this:
Do Democrats mind seeing the United States turned into a banana
republic? Not particularly. Evidently, their only concern is their guy’s
re-election. Still, at least a few of them must have pondered what the
Obama Doctrine will mean under a Republican administration.
It would be interesting to see what would've happened if President Bush would've done an end-around Congress and unilaterally decided to change federal law. It would be interesting to see how they would react were a President Romney to do something similar (I would hope, however, that he would never do anything of sort). I have a feeling that Democrats would not have liked it very much under Bush and would have been drawing up impeachment charges on the spot (remember, this was also during the days when dissent was the highest form of patriotism).
President Obama yesterday announced that his administration will block the deportation of hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who do not present a national security risk. They will then become eligible to request a temporary relief from deportation and apply for work authorization. John Yoo has some thoughts on the precedent that will be created by this move:
President Obama's claim that he can refuse to deport 800,000 aliens
here in the country illegally illustrates an unprecedented stretching of
the Constitution and the rule of law. He is laying claim to
presidential power that goes even beyond that claimed by the Bush
administration, in which I served. There is a world of difference in
refusing to enforce laws that violate the Constitution (Bush) and
refusing to enforce laws because of disagreements over policy (Obama).
Under
Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution, the President has the duty
to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." This provision was
included to make sure that the President could not simply choose, as
the British King had, to cancel legislation simply because he disagreed
with it. President Obama cannot refuse to carry out a congressional
statute simply because he thinks it advances the wrong policy. To do so
violates the very core of his constitutional duties.
Lincoln famously argued that as President, he did not have the duty to enforce the principles of the Dred Scott decision. He saw that the principles established in that case violated the Constitution because they reversed the compromises over slavery that were anchored in directing that peculiar institution toward the path of its ultimate extinction. But he never argued that he could simply by executive order not enforce the Compromise of 1850 because he may have disagreed with the policies enacted.
UPDATE:
The Editors at NRO have pretty damning evidence on the tacit 180 turn the President has done regarding his circumvention of the nation's immigration laws:
Though apparently a little fuzzy on the
subject of judicial review, President Barack Obama is supposed to be a
constitutional scholar of some sort. On the subject of his decision
yesterday to unilaterally enact sweeping changes to U.S. immigration
policy on nothing but his own say-so, we would like to introduce Barack
Obama to Barack Obama, who during a Univision interview just last year
affirmed: “America is a nation of laws, which means I, as the president,
am obligated to enforce the law. . . . There are enough laws on the
books by Congress that are very clear in terms of how we have to enforce
our immigration system that for me to simply through executive order
ignore those congressional mandates would not conform with my
appropriate role as president.” A little softness in the polls and one
executive order later, the president has reversed himself.
In his latest letter, the Ohio Farmer argues that the Constitution properly understood, is color-blind. As Lincoln said, the central proposition of the United States from which all minor thoughts radiate is the principle that all men are created equal. Therefore, the understanding of equality is paramount in order to understand the American Republic. Here is the farmer on equality as the Founders understood it:
The meaning of equality had been the central question for Americans ever
since our Founders first declared in 1776 the self-evident truth that
"all men are created equal." In previous letters, I have noted that the
Founders understood equality to mean that everyone has the same natural
rights – that is, everyone has the same God-given rights to life,
liberty, and property. We should all be free from violence to our life
and health, be free to run our own lives, and be free to enjoy the
fruits of our labor. Obviously, slavery violated all of those principles
and had to be abolished if America was fully to live up to them. In
1865, as a result of the Union victory in the Civil War, it was
abolished by the 13th Amendment.
But did the 14th Amendment to the Constitution have this principle enshrined at its core? As Justice John Marshall Harlan (the sole dissenting vote in Plessy v. Ferguson, which constitutionalized segregation) wrote:
But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this
country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no
caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor
tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all
citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most
powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his
surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the
supreme law of the land are involved. It is therefore to be regretted
that this high tribunal, the final expositor of the fundamental law of
the land, has reached the conclusion that it is competent for a state to
regulate the enjoyment by citizens of their civil rights solely upon
the basis of race.
I will let the farmer take it from here:
So when the 14th Amendment declares that every person should have "equal
protection of the laws," it means that the law must treat everyone the
same without regard to race. The only exceptions would be the
commonsensical ones, when it is necessary for government to consider
race in order to protect citizens' natural rights, as, for
example, when police departments must hire an undercover officer of a
specific race to infiltrate an ethnic gang. But these are practical
exceptions that do not apply to Homer Plessy's case in 1896 or to
college admissions today.
Plessy was later overruled in the Brown cases in the 50s, but as Edward Erler has argued, Brown did not actually overrule the principles established by Plessy because
[a]ccording to Brown, Plessy was only in error insofar
as it was inconsistent with the authority of modern psychology, which
had demonstrated that a "feeling of inferiority" is a fact of
inferiority from the point of view of equal protection analysis. Modern
psychology had proven that such feelings were generated in segregated
grammar schools, but no evidence was adduced to show the same "feelings"
were produced by other segregated settings. Shortly after the Brown
decision, the Court invalidated segregation in a variety of public
places, including golf courses, beaches, buses, and parks. These were per curiam decisions citing Brown
as the authority. But where were the psychological studies that
demonstrated that segregated golf courses and beaches generated
"feelings of inferiority?" Was it merely assumed? Or had the Court seen
the futility of relying on modern psychology? Brown was still the authority and the Brown
opinion had, by a wholly unnecessary and tortured argument, replaced
the authority of the Constitution with the authority of modern
psychology. Equal protection rights—at least in the context of grammar
school education—were now wholly subjective, depending upon a "feeling
of inferiority."
A correct understanding of equality would have let the Court ground its argument on a much more solid philosophical footing -- namely, the natural law and natural right principles enunciated by the Founders in the Declaration, whose principles are universal and are true regardless of the time and place in history. Thankfully, Justice Clarence Thomas understands this and interprets the Constitution in light of the principles of Declaration.
Today President Obama stopped in Cleveland and gave an almost hour long campaign speech about how President Bush and Republicans from 2001 to 2008 absolutely ravaged the country and that he just needs more time to get out of the mess they made. Don't think about the fact that Obama was a member -- though largely a absent one -- of the Democratic majority in the Senate (Democrats held the House too). Forget about the 2006 election. But let's join Obama in his willful abandonment of taking any responsibility for what was done by Democrats on the federal level. Let's look at that city that has had been enacting Democratic policies (though with one break) for the last forty plus years: Cleveland.
Here's Kevin Williamson on Cleveland and what has been accomplished by Democrats without any opposition to speak of:
Like our investment in Solyndra, Cleveland spends but doesn’t have
much to show for it. Its public schools spend about as much per student
as it would cost to send them down the street to the tony University
School, where 100 percent of the graduates attend a four-year college,
many of them as National Merit scholars. But Cleveland’s schools,
despite their spending, don’t get University School’s results, or even
those of the more modest Benedictine high school, which spends about
half what Cleveland’s public schools do and manages to send 96 percent
of its graduates to college. Benedictine does this while operating its
own busing system, incidentally.
Funny thing about Cleveland: It is every bit the distillation of
urban dysfunction that Detroit is, but it doesn’t have Detroit’s mythic
status as a lost city. Which means that Cleveland isn’t even all that
good at being our crappiest/second-crappiest city. Hell of a backdrop,
Mr. President.
Deep, thoughtful, and all-around political heavyweight, Meghan McCain has come out with a new book titled America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom. The book, co-written by comedian Michael Ian Black, is about Meghan and Michael (the blurb on the back of the book tells us that Meghan is a " single, twentysomething, gun-loving, Christian, Republican writer and blogger" while Michael is "a married, forty-year-old, gun-fearing, atheist, Democrat comedian, the son of a lesbian former Social Security employee") traveling the country to find some common political ground that, though unsaid, of course, has been stamped out of today's politics by those dastardly right-wing conservatives.
Betsy Woodruff at NRO has taken the time to read through this weighty tome and finds that
...perhaps the most frustrating aspect of this book is that McCain and
Black set themselves up as proxies in the culture war, voluntary
standard bearers for the two halves of American political culture that
they perceive. Though McCain, the designated conservative, emphasizes
throughout the book that she doesn’t buy Republican “orthodoxy” on
everything — including gay marriage, global warming, marijuana
decriminalization, and how superfun it is to go to strip clubs — she
seems to think that her friendship with Black is somehow remarkable,
proof that there’s still hope for America.
Meghan also displays her deep theological knowledge -- on par with St. Thomas Aquinas, Pope John Paul II, and the Cookie Monster -- throughout:
This book might be for you also if you’re interested in McCain’s
thoughts on theology: “God for me is found everywhere; in my family, in
the desert, in first kisses, in smiles, in laughter, in friendship, in
cheesecake, in red wine, and above all else in love.”
But Meghan and Michael find their ultimate political messiah in that man who bankrupted the City of Cleveland while he was Mayor, Dennis Kucinich:
The book reaches its emotional climax in our Dynamic Duo’s
penultimate stop, Washington, D.C. There, after a 45-minute conversation
with Representative Dennis Kucinich (D., Ohio), McCain and Black bond
over their shared admiration for the former presidential candidate;
Black becomes “a convert to the Kucinich Way,” and McCain calls Kucinich
“a living example of an antidote to the problems in politics right
now.”
Who knew that the problem with America is that we don’t have enough Dennis Kuciniches?
No doubt, this book will be the standard political text that Ivy League professors, think-tanks, and first-grade teachers alike will be using in the next hundred years to analyze the politics of the early-twenty first century.
...that Ronald Reagan delivered his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in which he famously called Mikhail Gorbachev to tear down the wall that divided East and West Germany, the wall that seperated democracy and tyranny. Before it was delivered then Deputy National Security Advisor Colin Powell called it "a mediocre address and a missed opportunity." The National Security Council thought that the entire paragraph calling Gorbachev to action be removed entirely.
It's interesting to remember that after the Gettysburg Address was delivered, it too was panned by many critics as being too short, and the Chicago Times, at the time an organ of the Douglas wing of the Democratic Party, called it a collection of "silly, flat, and dishwatery utterances."
Here is the speech in full so that you can judge for yourself:
Thank you very much. Chancellor Kohl, Governing Mayor Diepgen, ladies
and gentlemen: Twenty-four years ago, President John F. Kennedy visited
Berlin, speaking to the people of this city and the world at the city
hall. Well, since then two other presidents have come, each in his turn,
to Berlin. And today I, myself, make my second visit to your city.
We come to Berlin, we American Presidents, because it’s our duty
to speak, in this place, of freedom. But I must confess, we’re drawn
here by other things as well: by the feeling of history in this city,
more than 500 years older than our own nation; by the beauty of the
Grunewald and the Tiergarten; most of all, by your courage and
determination. Perhaps the composer, Paul Lincke, understood something
about American Presidents. You see, like so many Presidents before me, I
come here today because wherever I go, whatever I do: "Ich hab noch
einen koffer in Berlin." [I still have a suitcase in Berlin.]
Our gathering today is being broadcast throughout Western Europe
and North America. I understand that it is being seen and heard as well
in the East. To those listening throughout Eastern Europe, I extend my
warmest greetings and the good will of the American people. To those
listening in East Berlin, a special word: Although I cannot be with you,
I address my remarks to you just as surely as to those standing here
before me. For I join you, as I join your fellow countrymen in the West,
in this firm, this unalterable belief: Es gibt nur ein Berlin. [There
is only one Berlin.]
Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this
city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire
continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across
Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guard towers.
Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there
remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same -- still a restriction
on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men
and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin
where the wall emerges most clearly -- here, cutting across your city,
where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this
brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing
before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his
fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.
President von Weizsacker has said: "The German question is open as long as the Brandenburg Gate is closed."
Today I say: As long as this gate is closed, as long as this scar
of a wall is permitted to stand, it is not the German question alone
that remains open, but the question of freedom for all mankind. Yet I do
not come here to lament. For I find in Berlin a message of hope, even
in the shadow of this wall, a message of triumph.
In this season of spring in 1945, the people of Berlin emerged
from their air-raid shelters to find devastation thousands of miles
away; the people of the United States reached out to help. And in 1947
Secretary of State -- as you’ve been told -- George Marshall announced
the creation of what would become known as the Marshall plan. Speaking
precisely 40 years ago this month, he said: "Our policy is directed not
against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty,
desperation, and chaos."
In the Reichstag a few moments ago, I saw a display commemorating
this 40th anniversary of the Marshall plan. I was struck by the sign on
a burnt-out, gutted structure that was being rebuilt. I understand that
Berliners of my own generation can remember seeing signs like it dotted
throughout the Western sectors of the city. The sign read simply: "The
Marshall plan is helping here to strengthen the free world." A strong,
free world in the West, that dream became real. Japan rose from ruin to
become an economic giant. Italy, France, Belgium -- virtually every
nation in Western Europe saw political and economic rebirth; the
European Community was founded.
In West Germany and here in Berlin, there took place an economic
miracle, the Wirtschaftswunder. Adenauer, Erhard, Reuter, and other
leaders understood the practical importance of liberty -- that just as
truth can flourish only when the journalist is given freedom of speech,
so prosperity can come about only when the farmer and businessman enjoy
economic freedom. The German leaders reduced tariffs, expanded free
trade, lowered taxes. From 1950 to 1960 alone, the standard of living in
West Germany and Berlin doubled.
Where four decades ago there was rubble, today in West Berlin
there is the greatest industrial output of any city in Germany -- busy
office blocks, fine homes and apartments, proud avenues, and the
spreading lawns of parkland. Where a city’s culture seemed to have been
destroyed, today there are two great universities, orchestras and an
opera, countless theaters, and museums. Where there was want, today
there’s abundance -- food, clothing, automobiles -- the wonderful goods
of the Ku’damm. From devastation, from utter ruin, you Berliners have,
in freedom, rebuilt a city that once again ranks as one of the greatest
on Earth. The Soviets may have had other plans. But, my friends, there
were a few things the Soviets didn’t count on: Berliner herz, Berliner
humor, ja, und Berliner schnauze. [Berliner heart, Berliner humor, yes,
and a Berliner schnauze.] [Laughter]
In the 1950’s, Khrushchev predicted: "We will bury you." But in
the West today, we see a free world that has achieved a level of
prosperity and well-being unprecedented in all human history. In the
Communist world, we see failure, technological backwardness, declining
standards of health, even want of the most basic kind -- too little
food. Even today, the Soviet Union still cannot feed itself. After these
four decades, then, there stands before the entire world one great and
inescapable conclusion: Freedom leads to prosperity. Freedom replaces
the ancient hatreds among the nations with comity and peace. Freedom is
the victor.
And now the Soviets themselves may, in a limited way, be coming
to understand the importance of freedom. We hear much from Moscow about a
new policy of reform and openness. Some political prisoners have been
released. Certain foreign news broadcasts are no longer being jammed.
Some economic enterprises have been permitted to operate with greater
freedom from state control. Are these the beginnings of profound changes
in the Soviet state? Or are they token gestures, intended to raise
false hopes in the West, or to strengthen the Soviet system without
changing it? We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom
and security go together, that the advance of human liberty can only
strengthen the cause of world peace.
There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be
unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and
peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek
prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek
liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate!
Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
I understand the fear of war and the pain of division that
afflict this continent -- and I pledge to you my country’s efforts to
help overcome these burdens. To be sure, we in the West must resist
Soviet expansion. So we must maintain defenses of unassailable strength.
Yet we seek peace; so we must strive to reduce arms on both sides.
Beginning 10 years ago, the Soviets challenged the Western alliance with
a grave new threat, hundreds of new and more deadly SS-20 nuclear
missiles, capable of striking every capital in Europe. The Western
alliance responded by committing itself to a counter-deployment unless
the Soviets agreed to negotiate a better solution; namely, the
elimination of such weapons on both sides. For many months, the Soviets
refused to bargain in earnestness. As the alliance, in turn, prepared to
go forward with its counter-deployment, there were difficult days --
days of protests like those during my 1982 visit to this city -- and the
Soviets later walked away from the table.
But through it all, the alliance held firm. And I invite those
who protested then -- I invite those who protest today -- to mark this
fact: Because we remained strong, the Soviets came back to the table.
And because we remained strong, today we have within reach the
possibility, not merely of limiting the growth of arms, but of
eliminating, for the first time, an entire class of nuclear weapons from
the face of the Earth. As I speak, NATO ministers are meeting in
Iceland to review the progress of our proposals for eliminating these
weapons. At the talks in Geneva, we have also proposed deep cuts in
strategic offensive weapons. And the Western allies have likewise made
far-reaching proposals to reduce the danger of conventional war and to
place a total ban on chemical weapons.
While we pursue these arms reductions, I pledge to you that we
will maintain the capacity to deter Soviet aggression at any level at
which it might occur. And in cooperation with many of our allies, the
United States is pursuing the Strategic Defense Initiative research to
base deterrence not on the threat of offensive retaliation, but on
defenses that truly defend -- on systems, in short, that will not target
populations, but shield them. By these means we seek to increase the
safety of Europe and all the world. But we must remember a crucial fact:
East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are
armed because we mistrust each other. And our differences are not about
weapons but about liberty. When President Kennedy spoke at the City Hall
those 24 years ago, freedom was encircled, Berlin was under siege. And
today, despite all the pressures upon this city, Berlin stands secure in
its liberty. And freedom itself is transforming the globe.
In the Philippines, in South and Central America, democracy has
been given a rebirth. Throughout the Pacific, free markets are working
miracle after miracle of economic growth. In the industrialized nations a
technological revolution is taking place -- a revolution marked by
rapid, dramatic advances in computers and telecommunications.
In Europe, only one nation and those it controls refuse to join
the community of freedom. Yet in this age of redoubled economic growth,
of information and innovation, the Soviet Union faces a choice: It must
make fundamental changes, or it will become obsolete. Today thus
represents a moment of hope. We in the West stand ready to cooperate
with the East to promote true openness, to break down barriers that
separate people, to create a safer, freer world.
And surely there is no better place than Berlin, the meeting
place of East and West, to make a start. Free people of Berlin: Today,
as in the past, the United States stands for the strict observance and
full implementation of all parts of the Four Power Agreement of 1971.
Let us use this occasion, the 750th anniversary of this city, to usher
in a new era, to seek a still fuller, richer life for the Berlin of the
future. Together, let us maintain and develop the ties between the
Federal Republic and the Western sectors of Berlin, which is permitted
by the 1971 agreement. And I invite Mr. Gorbachev: Let us work to bring
the Eastern and Western parts of the city closer together, so that all
the inhabitants of all Berlin can enjoy the benefits that come with life
in one of the great cities of the world. To open Berlin still further
to all Europe, East and West, let us expand the vital air access to this
city, finding ways of making commercial air service to Berlin more
convenient, more comfortable, and more economical. We look to the day
when West Berlin can become one of the chief aviation hubs in all
central Europe.
With our French and British partners, the United States is
prepared to help bring international meetings to Berlin. It would be
only fitting for Berlin to serve as the site of United Nations meetings,
or world conferences on human rights and arms control or other issues
that call for international cooperation. There is no better way to
establish hope for the future than to enlighten young minds, and we
would be honored to sponsor summer youth exchanges, cultural events, and
other programs for young Berliners from the East. Our French and
British friends, I’m certain, will do the same. And it’s my hope that an
authority can be found in East Berlin to sponsor visits from young
people of the Western sectors.
One final proposal, one close to my heart: Sport represents a
source of enjoyment and ennoblement, and you may have noted that the
Republic of Korea (South Korea) has offered to permit certain events of
the 1988 Olympics to take place in the North. International sports
competitions of all kinds could take place in both parts of this city.
And what better way to demonstrate to the world the openness of this
city than to offer in some future year to hold the Olympic games here in
Berlin, East and West?
In these four decades, as I have said, you Berliners have built a
great city. You’ve done so in spite of threats -- the Soviet attempts
to impose the East-mark, the blockade. Today the city thrives in spite
of the challenges implicit in the very presence of this wall. What keeps
you here? Certainly there’s a great deal to be said for your fortitude,
for your defiant courage. But I believe there’s something deeper,
something that involves Berlin’s whole look and feel and way of life --
not mere sentiment. No one could live long in Berlin without being
completely disabused of illusions. Something instead, that has seen the
difficulties of life in Berlin but chose to accept them, that continues
to build this good and proud city in contrast to a surrounding
totalitarian presence that refuses to release human energies or
aspirations. Something that speaks with a powerful voice of affirmation,
that says yes to this city, yes to the future, yes to freedom. In a
word, I would submit that what keeps you in Berlin is love both profound
and abiding.
Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most
fundamental distinction of all between East and West. The totalitarian
world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit,
thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship. The
totalitarian world finds even symbols of love and of worship an affront.
Years ago, before the East Germans began rebuilding their churches,
they erected a secular structure: the television tower at Alexander
Platz. Virtually ever since, the authorities have been working to
correct what they view as the tower’s one major flaw, treating the glass
sphere at the top with paints and chemicals of every kind. Yet even
today when the sun strikes that sphere -- that sphere that towers over
all Berlin the light makes the sign of the cross. There in Berlin, like
the city itself, symbols of love, symbols of worship, cannot be
suppressed.
As I looked out a moment ago from the Reichstag, that embodiment
of German unity, I noticed words crudely spray-painted upon the wall,
perhaps by a young Berliner, "This wall will fall. Beliefs become
reality." Yes, across Europe, this wall will fall. For it cannot
withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand
freedom.
And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read,
and I have been questioned since I’ve been here about certain
demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one
thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked
themselves that if they should have the kind of government they
apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing
again.
Brad Birzer at the Imaginative Conservative (via Steven Hayward) has reprinted an essay by Russell Kirk on the recently deceased Ray Bradbury that is definitely worth your time. A good excerpt:
Bradbury is not writing about the gadgets of conquest: his real concerns
are the soul and the moral imagination. When the boy-hero of Dandelion Wine, in an abrupt mystical experience, is seized almost bodily by the glowing consciousness that he is really alive, we glimpse that mystery the soul. When, in Something Wicked This Way Comes,
the lightning-rod salesman is reduced magically to an idiot dwarf
because all his life he had fled from perilous responsibility, we know
the moral imagination.
"Soul," a word much out of fashion nowadays, signifies a man's animating
entity. That flaming spark the soul is the real space-traveler of
Bradbury's stories. "I'm alive!"—that exclamation is heard from Waukegan
to Mars and beyond, in Bradbury's fables. Life is its own end—if one
has a soul to tell him so.
The moral imagination is the principal possession that man does not
share with the beasts. It is man's power to perceive ethical truth,
abiding law, in the seeming chaos of many events. Without the moral
imagination, man would live merely from day to day, or rather moment to
moment, as dogs do. It is the strange faculty—inexplicable if men are
assumed to have an animal nature only—of discerning greatness, justice,
and order, beyond the bars of appetite and self-interest. And the moral
imagination, which shows us what we ought to be, primarily is what
distinguishes Bradbury's tales from the futurism of Wells' fancy. For
Bradbury, the meaning of life is here and now, in our every action; we
live amidst immortality; it is here, not in some future domination like
that of Wells' The Sleeper Awakens, that we must find our happiness.
Bradbury, a man who famously never got a driver's license and who wrote stories that many label as "science fiction," was nonetheless working within the moral universe populated by such writers as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkein -- a world of unchanging human nature and where good and evil indeed exists.
A former governor said the following about the current state of the Republican party:
"Ronald Reagan would have, based on his record of finding accommodation,
finding some degree of common ground... [he] would have
a hard time if you define the Republican party — and I don’t — as
having an orthodoxy that doesn’t allow for disagreement, doesn’t allow
for finding some common ground."
The person who said this was former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. You would normally expect this kind of talk from Democrats -- certainly not from a Republican. And the implicit idea in this statement that Mitt Romney is somehow to the right of Reagan is laughable. As Troy Senik at Ricochet notes, this is surely an odd observation considering that
...our last presidential nominee was John McCain, the baton major in every
bipartisan parade that marched through the United States Senate for a
decade. And this time around it's Mitt Romney -- not exactly the second
coming of Barry Goldwater.
Before McCain became the rigid ideologue and ultra-conservative Republican nominee in 2008, he was praised for his independence and willingness to go against the GOP on any number of issues, much to the delight of the MSM. At the same time Democrats nominated Barack Obama, John Kerry, and Al Gore -- none of which I remember being lambasted by the media as being too rigid in adhering to their own principles.
Edward Klein, the author of The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House,takes a look at the presidency of Barack Obama through the eyes of America's foremost historians. He writes that at the first of what would be three dinners, Obama told the dinner guests (Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Robert Caro, Robert Dallek,
Douglas Brinkley, H. W. “Billam” Brands, David Kennedy, Kenneth Mack,
and Garry Wills) that
“The weird thing is, I know I can do this job. I like dealing with
complicated issues. I’m happy to make decisions.…I think it’s going to
be an easier adjustment for me than the campaign. Much easier.”
Never known for his humility, President Obama has gone on to find that the exact opposite is true. (But I wonder what about campaigning was the hardest for him: was it the implementation of strategies and plans or was it meeting, talking with, and swaying the average voter?)
But after the third dinner -- which occured in July 2012, right after the debt ceiling fiasco --, Klein met with one of the historians who told him the following:
“There’s no doubt that Obama has turned out to be a major enigma and
disappointment,” the historian told me. “He waged such a brilliant
campaign, first against Hillary Clinton in the primaries, and then
against John McCain in the general election. For a long time, I found it
hard to understand why he couldn’t translate his political savvy into
effective governance.
“But I think I know the answer now,” he continued. “Since the
beginning of his administration, Obama hasn't been able to capture the
public's imagination and inspire people to follow him. Vision isn't
enough in a president. Great presidents not only have to enunciate their
vision; they must lead by example and inspiration. Franklin Roosevelt
spoke to the individual. He and Ronald Reagan had the ability to make
each American feel that the president cared deeply and personally about
them.
“That quality has been lacking in Obama. People don’t feel that he’s
on their side. Obama doesn't connect. He doesn't have the answers. The
irony is that he was supposed to be such a brilliant orator. But, in
fact, he’s turned out to be a failure as a communicator."
[...]
"More than that, Obama might not have the place in history he so eagerly
covets. Instead of ranking with FDR and Reagan and other giants, it
seems more likely that he will be a case-study in presidential failure
like Jimmy Carter."
Apart from a lot of nostrums about the president having to show that he cares deeply and personally about each person (is that really the president's job anyway?) this is very interesting. Obama, the most liberal president in our nation's history, has apparently not been able to act with the necessary liberal virtues needed to be a "great" president. Also, and I may be really stretching this, this realization may get the historians to open their eyes and re-evaluate what defines a good president. They should start by reading this.
Michael Greve at Liberty Law Blog has an interesting idea about how to fix the debt crisis:
...there’s something to be said for deficit reduction by inaction, however
ham-fisted or ill-timed it may be in any particular case. In fact, to
break the democratically generated debt spiral, we may need to
institutionalize a fiscal cliff on a permanent basis. Imagine the
following rule: if the projected federal debt for any given year exceeds
(say) 1.5 percent of GDP, there will be an automatic tax
increase sufficient to cover the excess debt, unless two-thirds of each
legislative branch say otherwise and the President consents.
Draconian? Sure. The sort of prescription Grover Norquist or GOP leaders would urge? Of course not. But there has to be some way of confronting voters with the costs of the transfer state they appear to cherish. Spending
restrictions will never curb the impulse to consume future generations’
production now. You have to re-align taxing and spending decisions—in
other words, send current voters and taxpayers the full bill for current
consumption.
Is that going to happen? Probably not. That’s all the more reason to
view the coming cliff with mixed feelings and, perhaps, as a net plus.
The coming fiscal cliff, which got Bill Clinton into trouble with his own party earlier this week, is probably a good thing, because it will finally force us to be serious about reigning in the debt. Maybe using the threat of automatic tax increases, a particular anathema to conservatives and something Democrats would publically balk against for the middle class, would actually cause everyone to start to take this a little more seriously. And it has to be remembered that even Ronald Reagan's compromise with Democrats in 1982 over the budget (the compromise was a 3-1 ratio between cuts and spending) did ultimately become a simple 1-1 ratio of cutting to spending, which, unfortunately, was not what was promised.
In a press conference today, President Obama said that the "private sector is doing fine." James Pethokoukis, along with the entire private sector, disagrees:
1. Private-sector jobs have increased by an average of just 105,000
over the past three months and by just 89,000 a month during the entire
Obama Recovery.
In 1983 and 1984, during the supply-side Reagan
Boom, private sector jobs increased by an average of 292,000 a month.
Adjusted for population, that number is more like 375,000 private-sector
jobs a month
2. If the labor force participation rate for May had
just stayed where it was in April, the unemployment rate would have
risen to 8.4%. As it is, the U.S. economy is suffering is longest
sustained bout of 8% unemployment or higher since the Great Depression.
3. Private-sector GDP rose just 2.6% in the first quarter, after rising a measly 1.2% last year.
By contrast, private-sector GDP rose 3.8% in 1983 and 6.5% in 1984 during the supply-side Reagan Boom.
4. The U.S. stock market is down 7% since early April.
5. Real take-home pay is down over the past year.
6.
That first-quarter GDP report also showed that after-tax corporate
profits dropped for the first time in three years. Major red flag.
No,
Mr. President, the private-sector isn’t doing fine at all. And it
certainly isn’t ready to deal with a fiscal cliff of tax hikes or a
continued deluge of new regulation.
I wonder if Obama will be pounded by the MSM for being out of touch with regular Americans? Doesn't look like it:
UPDATE:
President Obama has now backtracked on his previous statement and now says that '[i]t is absolutely clear that the economy is not doing fine." What was absolutely not clear earlier today now is crystal clear.
Also, something I did not touch on before in the President's remarks was this aside:
And the most important thing I think we can do is make sure that we
continue to have a strong, robust recovery. So the steps that I’ve
outlined are the ones that are needed. We’ve got a couple of sectors in
our economy that are still weak. Overall, the private sector has been
doing a good job creating jobs. We’ve seen record profits in the
corporate sector.
This theme has popped up from time to time, but I think the President might actually believe that the private sector is composed solely of CEOs and millionaires. This surely is a very odd, stereotypical, and sophomoric view of how the economy works. The private sector is not just filled with fat cats wading in swimming pools filled with money a la Scrooge McDuck.
Perhaps the best thing that came out of Gov. Scott Walker winning his recall election on Tuesday night was seeing MSNBC anchors and pundits trying to deal with the news.
This story by Stanley Kurtz on NRO needs to be read. Kurtz supplies evidence that President Obama joined the New Party, an ultra leftist party that was openly hostile to both Democrats and Republicans and openly repudiated capitalism, in 1996. Both his State Senate campaign in 1996 and his presidential campaign in 2008 have denied that Obama ever was a part of or joined the New Party. But here is a section from the minutes from a meeting of the New Party on January 11, 1996 that says otherwise:
Barack Obama, candidate for State Senate in the 13th Legislative
District, gave a statement to the membership and answered questions. He
signed the New Party “Candidate Contract” and requested an endorsement
from the New Party. He also joined the New Party.
Of course, the media has largely ignored this story. Ben Smith from Politico spent about 10 minutes of his time looking into it and promptly smeared Kurtz for ginning up conspiracy theories. From the substantial and well-documented evidence Kurtz has put together, this does not seem like it's just some ravings by an Alex Jones-type figure.
Matthew Continetti has really hit a home run with this short article in the upcoming Weekly Standard. Continetti argues that arguments of efficiency currently being voiced by the Romney campaign are fine but are ultimately insufficient. Here is how Romney should frame his economic argument:
...Cast the graphs aside, and reject the distinction between efficiency
and equality. To support markets is not to reject fairness but to
embrace it. One supports free enterprise not only because it improves
the bottom line, but also because it is the only economic arrangement
compatible with the equal rights of citizens. A government that tries to
correct inequalities of result inevitably will interfere with our
rights to life, liberty, and property. It will, for instance, unfairly
favor some businesses over others—usually the powerful and politically
well-connected.
Consider the laborer. He is endowed with the natural rights to use
his skills as he likes and to dispose of his earnings as he sees fit.
The duty of government is to protect his rights of safety and conscience
and the property he creates through his labor. By exercising these
rights, he improves his condition. Or as Lincoln put it in his 1859
speech to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society, “The prudent,
penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus
with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own
account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help
him.”
Too often Republicans and conservatives see the misuse of the principle of equality by the Left and then reject it wholesale. This is a shame. The Founders and Lincoln believed in equality, but their equality was an equality of natural rights based on our unchaining human nature. They believed in equality of opportunity while modern liberalism teaches equality of results (an irony is that modern liberalism uses the logic of natural rights while rejecting the substance of the natural rights teaching).
A tyranny can be efficient. FDR once famously praised Mussolini because the trains in Italy ran on time. The problem revolves around the ends that efficiency is directed towards. Working within the universe of natural rights and natural law makes those ends worthy of the moral beings that we are.
We will soon know whether Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will remain in the state's highest executive office or Tom Barrett, the Mayor of Milwaukee and who ran against Walker in 2010, will take the reigns. Only two times in our nation's history as a sitting governor been recalled, with the last being Governor Gray Davis of California in 2003.
In case you don't know too much about Mayor Barrett, here are some excerpts (via John McCormack) from an in-depth interview in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that sheds some light on the man and his plans once in office:
Barrett has said he doesn't want to raise taxes beyond the levels
they were at when Walker took office. He said he would look at undoing some tax cuts
passed by Walker, including the business tax cuts mentioned above,
since he says they've been ineffective in creating jobs. He said he
would consult with businesses to ensure the changes are not unduly
harmful, but he has not said which taxes he might raise.
"I'm going to be very mindful of the cost of these because they explode in the out years," Barrett said of Walker's tax cuts.
Barrett has criticized Walker's property tax caps but has not said
whether he would loosen them or by how much. The mayor wants to restore
tax credits for low-income families that were eliminated by Walker and
Republican lawmakers, saying the governor broke his no tax increase
pledge to the neediest families.
He has not said where he would get the money to do that.
On Healthcare:
Walker provided about $1.2 billion more in state money over two years
for the state's health care programs for the needy. But that wasn't
enough to keep pace with rising costs, so the administration also made
cuts to the BadgerCare Plus program taking effect July 1. Those cuts
will lead to sharply higher premiums for tens of thousands of
participants and more than 17,000 leaving the program or being turned
away.
Barrett has said that he wants to undo those changes before they take
effect. But said he doesn't yet know what changes that would take by
lawmakers or where he would get the money.
On Labor issues:
Both Walker and Barrett said that going forward they didn't
anticipate raising or lowering the increased amounts that public
employees now pay for their pension and health care benefits.
Barrett has said he wants to restore union bargaining for public
employees that was repealed by Walker and Republican lawmakers. He said
he was focused on that and hadn't considered what to do about cases
where the repeal of union bargaining has allowed the state to save on
overtime costs or allowed schools to save money by bidding out their
health insurance.
