Author Archive
The Buck Stops with Obama
Today Politico Arena asks:
Do you feel safer from terrorism today than you did the day before? Assess Obama’s response.
My response:
Can the GOP Recover Its Principles?
Today, Politico Arena asks:
How helpful is it to the GOP to have its chairman say the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?”
My response:
If GOP chairman Michael Steele means it, it’s very helpful for him to say that the party’s “credibility snapped” while in power and it became “just another party of Big Government?” You first have to recognize a problem if you want to solve it.
For better or worse, we’ve had two major parties for most of our history, and that’s not likely to change any time soon. At least since the New Deal, the Democratic Party has been the party of government, especially over economic affairs. By contrast, since the Goldwater revolution of 1964, the Republican Party has claimed to be the party of individual liberty and limited government, although that claim was often undermined by calls for restricting certain personal liberties, and the party was slow, as were parts of the Democratic Party, in supporting the civil rights movement. But broadly speaking, in our recent history the two parties have been distinguished, nominally, by their different conceptions of the proper role of government.
At no time was that contrast more sharply drawn than during the Reagan administration. Yet even then there were internal struggles between the Reagan people and the Bush people. Recall that when Bush ’41 became president, he called for a “kinder and gentler nation,” which was a slap at Reagan’s limited government principles. And eventually, of course, he broke his “no new taxes” pledge.
After Bush lost the presidency, the Gingrich “Contract with America,” leading to the Republican take-over of Congress for the first time in 40 years, was supposed to return the party to a principled, limited government path. It did so briefly, in those heady days of 1995, but by the end of the year the siren song of government power was calling and the party started its slow slide, at the end of which it was barely distinguishable from the Democratic Party.
Thus, it was no accident that in 2000 the party selected as its standard-bearer George W. Bush, who had been utterly absent from the intellectual ferment of the Goldwater-Reagan years. Not unlike his father, Bush ’43 stood for “compassionate conservatism,” a slogan ripe with promise for government programs. And the Republican Congress, now rudderless, was anxious to supply them. If the party stood for anything, it was incumbency protection. What better example than the McCain-Feingold campaign finance “reform” bill, which Bush signed while saying he thought it was unconstitutional. What’s the Constitution among friends?
But rudderless, unprincipled government could not go on forever, and so in time it came crashing down upon the Republican time-servers — and the real party of government took over. Immutable principles, however, such as you can’t get something for nothing, favor no party, and so Democrats too are facing, or will soon face, the harsh realities that flow from abandoning political and economic discipline. If the Republican Party can recover the fundamental principles that are captured in the nation’s founding documents, and take them to the people, it will then fall to us to decide what we want. And if we too believe in something for nothing, we will have no one to blame but ourselves for the consequences that follow. But at least we will have had a choice, which we have not had in recent years. So, yes, Mr. Steele’s call for a return to principle is helpful.
Taking Terrorism Seriously
Today Politico Arena asks:
What’s in a name? Does it matter whether or not it’s called “war on terror? Is Obama’s approach any better or worse than Bush’s?
My response:
It matters whether or not it’s called “war on terror,” because war, whether declared or not, changes the legal regime — from law enforcement, aimed primarily at investigating and prosecuting domestic crimes after the fact, to protecting a people from acts of war before they happen by means unavailable outside of war. In discharging his duty to protect the nation, President Obama has moved slowly, inconsistently, and often begrudgingly from the law-enforcement to the war paradigm. Al-Qaeda has shown no such confusion or irresolution. Just this morning, for example, the Washington Post reports that at its web site yesterday, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula ”called for ‘every Muslim’ to kill ‘every cross-worshiper who works at the [British and American] embassies.’”
So how did Obama treat the Christmas Day bomber al-Qaeda sent us? The way his mentor, Franklin Roosevelt, treated the German saboteurs who landed on our shores? No — Abdulmutallab was “lawyered up,” read his Miranda rights, and encouraged to talk through his lawyer, like any common criminal. Some say that approach — like calling him “the underwear bomber” — reduces a terrorist’s stature. That’s fine for the playground (as if the terrorists were seeking simply to join the community of nations). This is the real world.
And in the real world you don’t make excuses for why the dots weren’t connected, as Obama’s homeland security adviser, John O. Brennan, did yesterday on the talk shows. You find out why they weren’t. And a good place to start this morning is with Gordon Crovitz’s piece in the Wall Street Journal. Rarely, he writes, does intelligence come to us “on such a silver platter.” Abdulmutallab’s father, a respected banker, reported his concerns to the American Embassy not once but three times, twice in person. And the son had a U.S. visa, which could easily have been discovered. He paid for his ticket in cash, and had no luggage. But the criteria U.S. intelligence agencies use for determining when to put a suspected terrorist on a watch list or a no-fly list, Crovitz shows, are adapted from a landmark law-enforcement case, Terry v. Ohio, concerning local traffic stops: “Mere guesses or inarticulate ‘hunches,’” the standard concludes, ”are not enough to constitute reasonable suspicion.” Is it any wonder that the dots were not connected. They won’t be until we start taking this war seriously.
Attending to Business
Today, Politico Arena asks:
Flight 253: Do you agree with Janet Napolitano that “the system worked.”
My response:
But for a faulty detonator, NPR reports this morning, and the quick action of a Dutch passenger, nearly 300 people would have met a flaming death near Detroit on Christmas day. And homeland security secretary Janet Napolitano assures us that “the system worked”?
More than eight years after 9/11, and we still don’t have measures in place to keep people with explosives from boarding planes. Instead, we’re now told that we must sit in our seats during the final hour of a flight with not even a paperback book in our laps. Had Ms. Napolitano said that “the system worked as expected,” she would have been right, ironically. To be sure, there have been successes in the war on terror: The Wall Street Journal notes editorially this morning that there were 12 terror incidents, including thwarted plots, on U.S. soil this year. But this latest incident, in the area (airline security) that affects most Americans, and the administration’s response to it, do not give confidence.
The one main reason we have government at all is to better protect us from domestic and foreign threats than we ourselves, acting alone, could do. But as planes were flying to the twin towers, the Pentagon, and the Capitol, Mr. Bush was reading to elementary school children. Perhaps Mr. Obama should turn his attention from taking responsibility for the nation’s health care — the market and private charity can handle that, if he’d just get out of the way — to taking his main responsibility more seriously.
The Politicization of the Law
Are law and politics separate realms? That’s the ideal. But Adam Liptak, Supreme Court reporter for The New York Times, raises questions today about whether it’s any longer the case. Drawing on a study published last month in The Vanderbilt Law Review and summarized in the autumn issue of The Green Bag, which collected data from 1882 through 2006, he notes that, beginning around 1990, Supreme Court clerks “started to take jobs that reflect the ideologies of the justices for whom they worked.” That’s “cause for concern,” says one of the study’s authors, NYU law professor William E. Nelson, “because it’s a further piece of evidence of the polarization of the court.”
In particular:
Clerks from conservative chambers are now less likely to teach. If they do, they are more likely to join the faculties of conservative and religious law schools. Republican administrations are now much more likely to hire clerks from conservative chambers, and Democratic administrations from liberal ones….
The Clinton administration hired 96 former clerks, but only 16 percent of them came from the chambers of the four most conservative justices…. Of the 89 former clerks hired by the administration of George W. Bush, on the other hand, 68 percent came from those four chambers.
More striking still is what the study shows about the legal academy. From about 1940 to 1990, “about a third of all clerks became law professors,” with little correlation to the justices ideological leanings. (N.B.: “conservative” justices were few and far between until late in that stretch.) But more recently “only 19 percent of clerks from the four most conservative justices … joined the legal academy and only 7 percent went to one of the top 10 law schools” as ranked by U.S. News & World Report. And “a significant minority joined the faculties of religious or conservative law schools.” (“Conservative law schools,” I should note, may be close to an oxymoron.) By contrast, “clerks for the other five justices followed the historical pattern, with 34 percent joining the legal academy, about half of them at the elite schools.”
All of which, the study says, reinforces the idea that the court is “a superlegislature responding to ideological arguments rather than a legal institution responding to concerns grounded in the rule of law.” And that, Liptak concludes, “is not easy to reconcile with the view that that law and politics are, or at least ought to be, different realms.”
It’s good to have all of this drawn together, but it’s hardly surprising to anyone who’s been watching the law schools, the courts, and the law over the years. Liptak points to an important source of this change: “The rise of the organized conservative legal movement, including notably the Federalist Society,” which resulted in turn from “the sense among conservatives that law school faculties are overwhelmingly liberal.”
It’s no accident, therefore, that the change became noticeable around 1990. The Federalist Society came into being only in 1982. Over the next several years it would slowly influence the legal debate — in the law schools, and later among lawyer practice groups — and influence future clerks along the way. And it was only during the Reagan administration that Republicans began to approach nominations to the Court more seriously and systematically, from an ideological perspective.
But those efforts were not the root cause of today’s politicization of the courts and the law. They came about because the law schools, the courts, and the law were already long politicized – albeit in only one direction, which gave a deceptive picture. When all three institutions were marching only one way, toward the modern administrative state, it seemed that there was little dissension, and hence little politicization. But in truth, the politicization of the law — politics replacing law — had begun much earlier, with the Progressives; it was institutionalized by the New Deal Court; and it continued until the late 1960s and into the 1970s, when conservative and libertarian legal scholars began to call for separating politics and law. See here for a more detailed treatment of those developments, and here for the roots of our politicized law in the Progressive Era.
Recklessness in the Senate
This morning, Politico Arena asks:
“The Senate health care vote: An ‘awesome achievement?’”
My response:
Far from being an “awesome achievement,” as Paul Krugman exclaims in this morning’s New York Times, the Senate’s 1:00 a.m. health care vote marks a new low in government recklessness. Even Krugman admits that “it’s a seriously flawed bill” and “we’ll spend years if not decades fixing it” – like we’ve “fixed” Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, presumably. To put it simply: Would any responsible person handle his own affairs the way the Senate has handled this affair?
For starters, no one knows, much less understands, what’s in this bill. For months, we’ve been fed ever-changing bits and pieces supposedly contained within its 2,000-plus pages, only to find that a “manager’s amendment” has emerged from Harry Reid’s secret enclave. The promises that the bill will expand coverage while reducing health care costs and the federal deficit are simply laughable. Just this morning the Washington Post‘s Dana Milbank reported that yesterday the Congressional Budget Office said “it goofed and overstated the cost savings from the bill by half a trillion dollars.” When you have to resort to starting taxes next year but holding benefits off until 2014, among other such budgetary gimmicks, you know you’re dealing with one gigantic fraud.
The Wall Street Journal notes this morning that according to the National Journal‘s composite of all health polling, some 51 percent of the public is now opposed to this scheme. As the details seep out over the coming months, and taxes kick in, one can only hope that November 2 will be the day of reckoning for this reckless bunch.
Obama’s Copenhagen Speech
Politico asks, “Was he convincing?”
My response:
In Copenhagen this morning, President Obama convinced only those who want to believe — of which, regrettably, there is no shortage. Notice how he began, utterly without doubt: “You would not be here unless you, like me, were convinced that this danger is real. This is not fiction, this is science.” The implicit certitude is no part of real science, of course. But then the president, like the environmental zealots cheering him in Copenhagen, is not really interested in real science. Theirs, ultimately, is a political agenda. How else to explain the corruption of science that the East Anglia Climate Research email scandal has brought to light, and the efforts, presently, to dismiss the scandal as having no bearing on the evidence of climate change? If that were so, then why these efforts, or the earlier suppression of contrary or mitigating evidence that is the heart of the scandal?
We find such an effort in this morning’s Washington Post, by one of those at the center of the scandal, Penn State’s Professor Michael E. Mann. Set aside his opening gambit — “I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested” — this author of the famous, now infamous, “hockey stick” article seems not to recognize himself in Climategate. That he then goes after Sarah Palin as his critic suggests only that on a witness stand, confronted by his real critics, he’d be reduced to tears by even a mediocre lawyer. One such real critic is my colleague, climatologist Patrick J. Michaels, who documents the scandal and its implications for science in exquisite detail in this morning’s Wall Street Journal.
But to return to the president and his speech, having uncritically subscribed to the science of global warming, Mr. Obama then lays out an ambitious policy agenda for the nation. We will meet our responsibility, he says, by phasing out fossil fuel subsidies (which pale in comparison to the renewable energy subsidies that alone make them economically feasible), we will put our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings, and we will pursue “comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.”
Mark that word “legislation,” because at the end of his speech the president said: ”America has made our choice. We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say.” But we haven’t made “our choice” — cap and trade, to take just one example, has gone nowhere in the Senate — even if Obama has made “our commitments.” And that brings us to a fundamental question: Can the president, with no input from a recalcitrant Congress, commit the nation to the radical economic conversion he promises?
Environmental zealots say he can. Look at the report released last week by the Climate Law Institute’s Center for Biological Diversity, “Yes He Can: President Obama’s Power to Make an International Climate Commitment Without Waiting for Congress,” which argues that in Copenhagen Obama has all the power he needs under current law, quite apart from the will of Congress or the American people, to make a legally binding international commitment. Unfortunately, under current law, the report is right. I discuss that report and the larger constitutional implications of the modern “executive state” in this morning’s National Review Online.
There is enough ambiguity in the president’s remarks this morning to suggest that he may not be prepared to exercise the full measure of his powers. But there is also enough in play to suggest that it is not only the corruption of science but the corruption of our Constitution that is at stake.
All the News That’s Fit to Subsidize
Today, Politico Arena asks:
NPR v. Fox News?
My post:
Do I sense a bit of chutzpa in Politico’s report today that NPR executives have asked their top political correspondent, Mara Liasson, to reconsider her appearances on Fox News because of what the executives perceive as the network’s political bias? The request would be impertinent if NPR itself were beyond reproach, ideologically, but “fair and balanced” it is not. It’s a playpen for the left, subsidized by the American taxpayer, exceeded in its biases only by Pacifica Radio, another tax subsidized playpen straight out of the late ’60s.
There’s nothing wrong with a news organization tilting left or right, of course: let the public then decide, as the Fox News numbers show the public is doing. (And that, plainly, is what’s behind the White House efforts to marginalize the one network that’s had the audacity to criticize it systematically.) There is something deeply wrong, however, with asking the public to subsidize that tilt. NPR and its listeners would be screaming, and rightly so, if the taxpayers were subsidizing Fox News. Is it any different in their case? And please don’t say that NPR’s news is “news” — we’re all adults here. There’s a reason conservatives, mostly, and libertarians want to reduce the reach of government. It’s because so much of life — from news to education, religion, health care, the arts, and so much more — is fraught with values about which reasonable people can have reasonable differences. For that, there is only one answer: freedom, including freedom, as Jefferson put it, from having to subsidize views one finds abhorrent.
Have the Greens Failed?
Today’s question at “Politico Arena“:
“Have the greens failed?”
My response:
If the greens have failed, it’s not for lack of trying. For years now, in everything from pre-school programs to “educational” ads aimed at adults, they’ve been “greenwashing” our brains. In September the Wall Street Journal reported that the EPA was focusing on children: ”Partnering with the Parent Teacher Organization, the agency earlier this month launched a cross-country tour of 6,000 schools to teach students about climate change and energy efficiency.”
Yet for all that effort, the public isn’t buying. As Politico notes this morning: ”The Pew Research Center found that by last January, global warming ’ranked at the bottom of the public’s list of policy priorities for the president and Congress this year.’” And “Independent voters and Republicans ranked it last on a list of 20 priorities, while Democrats ranked it 16th.” Meanwhile, “other polling suggests Americans are growing more skeptical of the science behind climate change, with those who blame human activity for global warming – 36 percent – falling 11 percentage points this year, according to Pew.” And that was before “Climategate” came to light.
At bottom, the greens face three basic problems. First, by no means is the science of global warming “settled” — if anything, the fraud Climategate surfaced has settled that question. Second, even if global warming were a settled science, the contribution of human activity is anything but certain. And finally, most important, even if the answers to those two questions were clear, the costs — or benefits — of global warming are unknown, but the costs of the proposals promoted by the greens are astronomical.
So how do they respond to all of this? Politico cites Greenpeace executive director Phil Radford: “‘Obama’s problem is not his position on the climate issue but, rather, his will,’ says Radford. ’The question is how much the president will lead.’ Americans have ‘overlearned’ the lessons of Kyoto, where President Bill Clinton agreed to a treaty that he never submitted for ratification because it faced near-unanimous rejection in the Senate, Radford said. ’They’re using that as a reason to hide behind Congress instead of to lead Congress.’”
There you have it. It’s all a matter of will — indeed, of belief. The president needs simply to will this through, the people (and Congress) be damned. We, the anointed, know what’s right, what needs to be done. Is it any wonder that the greens are failing, at least where the people can still be heard?
Today’s White House ‘Jobs Summit’
Today’s Politico Arena asks:
The WH Jobs Summit: “A little less conversation? A little more action? ( please)”
My response:
“Climategate” and Government
It was “Open Mic” this past weekend at Politico Arena:
My post:
Brad Smith is to be commended for encouraging Politico Arena contributors to comment on the emerging “Climategate” scandal. And it is noteworthy that both he and Walter Russell Mead, the first to respond to Brad’s invitation, have taken a “let’s-see-the-evidence” posture toward the matter, discounting neither the global warming thesis nor the evidence that there may be less to the thesis than its promoters have been saying.
Yet to listen to how the promoters have discounted their critics over the years, one would imagine that the science on the matter were settled. In fact, one hears often enough that the science is settled to believe that many of them believe it — until a story like this breaks. Then we see the scramble to shore up their belief system. It’s an old story, documented years ago by Thomas Kuhn in his provocative volume, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Fortunately, we haven’t yet reached the stage of the Lysenko scandal, which set Soviet genetics back several decades. But we delude ourselves if we believe that the politicization of science is not inherent in government entanglement as such. Since that entanglement of government and science is not likely to end soon, the antidote is transparency. Climategate may be just the spur we need to open the books on global warming, especially given the draconian remedies its promoters are prescribing.
Reforming the GOP
This morning, Politico Arena asks:
Do you take Glenn Beck’s “new national movement” seriously? Is the GOP establishment letting itinerant celebrities and talk show stars set the party’s agenda?
As Winston Churchill understood, democracy is messy (and, as in his case, sometimes ungrateful). Glenn Beck is no William F. Buckley Jr. But then, “Joe the Plumber” probably never read National Review, which like most other journals of “high opinion” was never self-sustaining. Liberals today, their noses in the air Obama style, look across America from the vantage of the famous New Yorker cover and see pitchfork brigades, forgetting that those who fill the brigades generally love America, which is more than can be said of some of the baggage that has surrounded Obama.
There is a problem in the Republican Party, to be sure. Nominally the party of limited constitutional government, it recently gave us two presidents from the same family – one standing for a “kinder and gentler” government, the other for “compassionate conservatism” — plus a career Senate nominee for president, none of whom ever really understood the party’s core principles, much less nourished them as they must be nourished from generation to generation. As a result, the party has been hollowed out intellectually and spiritually, and into that vacuum, which nature abhors, has poured an assortment of people, most from outside the party.
The struggle in democracies between intellectual rigor and populism is as old as that between Socrates and the sophists. We all know the dangers of populist demagoguery. But there is also great danger in rule by elites, which are hardly immune from demagogy and outright fraud (witness the “accounting” in the current health care debate). Achieving that balance is often difficult and messy. But I for one am encouraged by this populist movement to reform the Republican Party. I know, for example, that at the Orlando rally The New York Times referenced this past Saturday, people passed out copies of the Cato Institute’s pocket Constitution, which includes the Declaration of Independence and my preface relating the two documents with respect to their underlying principles. The people who attended the April 15 tea parties and the September 12 march on Washington were ordinary Americans who understand that something is fundamentally wrong, constitutionally, with the direction the country has taken over the past two decades, at least. They see the Republican Party, in our two-party system, as the more likely institution for changing that, but not as the party is presently constituted. Still, there are people within the party who give hope and are ready to take over. Populists working outside the party, together with those of us who do “politics” (broadly understood) for a living, may just be the spark that enables that to happen.
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