Broad political movements are going to have none of the coherence that we demand of ourselves in ideological movements like libertarianism. The Tea Party has some people with views that libertarians reject and many that we embrace. Occupy Wall Street has a lot of people with views that libertarians reject and some that libertarians embrace—freedom from police abuse being one. (Such a favor the NYPD officer who pepper-sprayed female protesters did to OWS by driving attention and sympathy its way.)

That’s all caveat to sharing an image created by James Sinclair that’s making waves on the Facebook. It makes a hopeful statement, I think, about the Occupy Wall Street movement and its potential or actual kinship with Tea Partyism. There’s something wrong in the country, and this image suggests that there might be consensus on the framing of what’s wrong: the unity of government and corporate power against people’s freedom and prosperity.

There are plenty of reasons to reject the possibility of alliance between Tea Partyism and OWS, but not necessarily good ones. The easiest out is to pour this new wine into old bottles and characterize OWS as dirty hippies using retrograde protest tactics. Many are kinda like that. But that stuff was a couple of decades ago. No, wait—four decades ago. These kids have no direct knowledge or experience of, say, Kent State, and older observers might be too prone to fitting them into a pattern that doesn’t exist for them.

To the extent the substance of their grievance is, or can be turned to, corporations’ use of government power to win unjust power and profits for themselves, that’s a grievance I can sit in a drum circle for.

Tea Party, Meet Occupy Wall Street. OWS, Tea Party. is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Slate worked itself into a lather yesterday over the insidious education policy implications of Michele Bachmann’s Iowa Straw Poll victory:

As recently as a decade ago, Republicans like George W. Bush, John McCain, and John Boehner embraced bipartisan, standards-and-accountability education reform…. Now we are seeing the GOP acquiesce to the anti-government, Christian-right view of education epitomized by Bachmann…. Against a backdrop of Tea Party calls to abolish the Department of Education and drastically cut the federal government’s role in local public schools….”

To support this narrative, Slate asked Bachmann what the federal government’s role was in education, to which she replied, “There is none; Education is a matter reserved for the states.”

Oh, whoops, sorry. Got that last quote wrong. That wasn’t Bachmann‘s answer, it was the answer of the FDR administration.

This answer rests squarely on the Tenth Amendment, which reserves to the states and the people powers not expressly enumerated and delegated to Congress by the Constitution. It was published by the federal government in 1943, under the oversight of the president, the vice president, and the speaker of the House.

Though it might come as a surprise to Slate‘s writers, our nation was not founded on state-run schooling. And, until very recently in historical terms, the idea that the federal government had a role to play in the classroom was unthinkable. It may have required some theorizing to evaluate the merits of Congress-as-schoolmarm prior to the feds getting involved in a big way in 1965, but now… now we can just look in the rear-view mirror (see chart below).

With nearly half a century of hindsight, advocating a federal withdrawal from America’s schools does not seem “anti-government.” Just anti-crazy.

Slate.com vs. Tea-Party/Christians/Bachmann is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Is it the Senate’s turn to take a crack at the debt ceiling?

My response:

Speaker Boehner has both the Constitution and convention on his side — “money bills” arise in the House. In fact, the Constitution is his strongest ally in his struggle to win the support of recalcitrant Tea Party members. They revere the document, after all, and no one has put the point better than Charles Krauthammer in this morning’s Washington Post.

Boehner’s bill, just to be clear, is a far cry from what this debt-ridden nation needs. As my colleague Chris Edwards put it yesterday, even the revised plan “doesn’t cut spending at all.” It “cuts” only from the CBO baseline, which assumes constantly rising spending. If Congress were serious about addressing our deficit and debt problems, Edwards says, it would have “to start abolishing programs, privatizing activities, and making other lasting reforms.”

Absolutely. But now step back and look at the larger context at the moment. As Krauthammer says,

We’re in the midst of a great four-year national debate on the size and reach of government, the future of the welfare state, indeed, the nature of the social contract between citizen and state. The distinctive visions of the two parties — social-democratic vs. limited-government — have underlain every debate on every issue since Barack Obama’s inauguration.

And the terms of that debate have shifted radically since the Tea Party came on to the scene. The “cuts” in the Boehner plan are modest, to be charitable, but there are no new taxes, which in an earlier day would have been taken as essential. And the focus in Congress and in the nation, as long as the Tea Party keeps up the pressure, is not on new programs but on eliminating old ones — when that is possible.

But right there we bump up against constitutional realty. As Krauthammer puts it, “you cannot govern from one house alone.” We’re light years beyond living under the substantive Constitution, which authorizes only limited government, not the out-of-control welfare state that got us into this mess. But we still live under the procedural Constitution, which means that Reid and Obama can block Boehner’s modest plan. Posturing aside, that’s not likely at this late date. Yet if Tea Party members overplay their hand, they play right into Obama’s hand, politically, going into 2012, when the battle over real change will be waged.

No war — and that’s what we’re in — was won in a day. It took 80 years for John Locke’s ideas about liberty to find their way into the Declaration of Independence. It took another 90 years for those ideas to bring an end to slavery. The limited-government ideas that the Tea Party has brought back to the surface are just now being felt in Congress. This is no time to abandon them. But neither is it a time to set the course of events back, perhaps irretrievably, by employing them unwisely. Take what you can, and live to fight another day, on the battlefield that lies just ahead.

We’re In This for the Long Haul is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

The American welfare state has been in crisis for decades. Many of the problems faced in 1995 fight have become less tractable problems today. John Samples comments in yesterday’s Cato Daily Podcast.

One notable difference between 1995 and today, Samples says, is that the GOP of 1995 kept Social Security off the chopping block for spending cuts.

Subscribe to the podcast here (RSS) and here (iTunes).

Parallels to 1995 in Spending Fight is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has offered the president a way to raise the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion without having to cut spending. The WaPo reports that “McConnell’s strategy makes no provision for spending cuts to be enacted.”

This appears to be an epic cave-in and completely at odds with McConnell’s own pronouncements in recent months that major budget reforms must be tied to any debt-limit increase.

House Republicans should obviously reject McConnell’s surrender, and they should do what they should have done months ago. They should put together a package of $2 trillion in real spending cuts taken straight from the Obama fiscal commission report and pass it through the House tied to a debt-limit increase of $2 trillion. Then they shouldn’t budge unless the White House and/or the Senate produce their own $2 trillion packages of real spending cuts, which could be the basis of negotiating a final spending-cut deal.

For those who say that House tea party members won’t vote for a debt increase, I’d say that $2 trillion in spending cuts looks a lot better than the alternative of having Democrats and liberal Republicans doing an end-run around them with McConnell’s no-cut plan.

For those who say that House members are scared of voting for specific spending cuts, I’d say that they’ve already done it by passing the Paul Ryan budget plan. I’d also say that you can’t claim to be the party of spending cuts without voting for spending cuts.

Obama’s Fiscal Commission handed Republicans ready-made spending cuts on a silver platter—Republicans will never get better political cover for insisting on spending cuts than now.

McConnell’s Cave-In and Boehner’s Opportunity is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Or at least, that’s what The Daily Caller says a Republican pollster says:

A year may have passed since Obamacare passed, but conservatives are still angry as hell about it.

Expect the legislation to play a large role in the 2012 elections, according to John McLaughlin, who recently conducted a series of focus groups for the research group Resurgent Republic. The group is run by some of the country’s best-known Republicans.

“My guess it it’s going to be a big election issue next year,” McLaughlin said in an interview…

When it comes to President Obama’s health care law among these voters, the perception of these voters has hardly changed: the intensity remains strong and they still want it repealed, McLaughlin said.

ObamaCare‘s overall numbers don’t look any better, either.

Conservatives, Tea Partisans Still Really, Really Angry about ObamaCare is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

How will yesterday’s largely symbolic Senate vote rejecting the Ryan FY 2012 budget plan affect the 2012 political fortunes of Republicans, especially those facing possible Tea Party-fueled primary challenges?

My response:

Yesterday’s Senate vote was simply an effort by Democrats to capitalize on the outcome of Tuesday’s NY-26 election. It changed nothing on the ground. Responding to that election, most congressional Republicans, far from deserting the Ryan plan, have only rallied more strongly behind it.

And well they should, because there’s nothing worse in politics than disarray, as wayward moderate Republicans will likely discover in 2012. What 2010 showed was that deficits and debt are dominating our politics like never before. Democrats haven’t come to grips with that. Like Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) yesterday, they castigate the Ryan plan for ending Medicare “as we know it.” Yet they have no plan of their own.

One can criticize the Ryan plan from a number of perspectives, but at least it’s moving in the right direction. If Republicans stay on course, they should do well in 2012. Columnists like the Post‘s E.J. Dionne may continue to delude themselves into thinking that NY-26 marked the end of the Tea Party. I doubt it. But if he’s right, we’re really in trouble.

On the Politics of Deficits and Debt is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Now that Rep. Ron Paul is again a presidential candidate, his constitutional views will come under increasing scrutiny, as happened yesterday when he was interviewed by Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. Not surprisingly, critics immediately leapt on Paul’s “crankish view” that Social Security, Medicare, and other such programs are unconstitutional. Even Wallace seemed taken aback, citing the document’s General Welfare Clause:

The Congress shall have the Power to lay and collect Taxes … to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.

“Doesn’t Social Security come under promoting the general welfare of the United States?” Wallace asked, incredulously.

One does not have to agree with everything Paul has said or stood for over the years to grant that he has a point, and a very important one. It’s a mark of how widespread our constitutional misunderstanding is that so many Americans take it for granted, at least until the Tea Party came along, that most of what the federal government does today is constitutional.

In a nutshell, the Constitution was written and ratified to both authorize and limit the government created through it. It was designed to do the latter not through the Bill of Rights — that was an afterthought, added two years later — but through the doctrine of enumerated powers. Article I, section 8, grants the Congress only 18 powers. Nothing for education, or retirement security, or health care: Those responsibilities were left to the states or to the people, as the Tenth Amendment makes clear.

So what about the General Welfare Clause, the first of Congress’s 18 powers? To be sure, the clause was inartfully drafted, like several other provisions in the Constitution. But it was understood by nearly all as granting Congress the power simply to tax (in limited ways: see the full text). The terms “common Defence” and “general Welfare” were meant merely as general headings under which the 17 other specific powers or ends were subsumed.

In fact, the question came up almost immediately, during the ratification debates, and in early Congresses as well, so we have a rich record of just what the General Welfare Clause meant. Here, for example, in Federalist #41, is James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution:

Some, who have not denied the necessity of the power of taxation, have grounded a very fierce attack against the Constitution, on the language in which it is defined. It has been urged and echoed, that the power “to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts, and excises, to pay the debts, and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States,” amounts to an unlimited commission to exercise every power which may be alleged to be necessary for the common defense or general welfare. No stronger proof could be given of the distress under which these writers labor for objections, than their stooping to such a misconstruction…. Had no other enumeration or definition of the powers of the Congress been found in the Constitution, than the general expressions just cited, the authors of the objection might have had some color for it…. But what color can the objection have, when a specification of the objects alluded to by these general terms immediately follows, and is not even separated by a longer pause than a semicolon?

Indeed, as was often asked: What was the point of enumerating the 17 other powers if Congress could do anything it wanted under this single power? The Framers could have stopped right there. They didn’t because they meant for Congress to have only certain limited powers, each one enumerated in Article I, section 8. And taxing for the general welfare limited Congress even further by precluding it from providing for special parties or interests.

Nor does it change anything to note, as Wallace did yesterday, that the Supreme Court upheld the Social Security Act in 1937 — as if that settled the question. As a practical matter it settled things, of course, just as Plessy v. Ferguson settled the “separate-but-equal” issue in 1896, only to be reversed in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, and Bowers v. Hardwick settled the issue of homosexual sodomy in 1986, only to be reversed in Lawrence v. Texas in 2003. It’s well understood that the 1937 Court, cowed by Franklin Roosevelt’s infamous Court-packing threat, simply reversed 150 years of understanding and precedent concerning the doctrine of enumerated powers. And that removed the Constitution’s main restraint on federal power — not by constitutional amendment but by judicial fiat.

But it’s not been “extreme liberals” alone, Wallace went on to say, who’ve read the Constitution as the 1937 Court did, noting that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia recently told a congressional gathering: “It’s up to Congress how you want to appropriate, basically.” To be sure, from fear over “judicial activism,” many conservative judges have bought into the New Deal’s constitutional revolution. Perhaps the most that can be said on their side is that the Court cannot alone, this late in the day, reverse these mistakes.

In fact, this unconstitutionality cannot be undone overnight even by the Congress. Here again there are practical concerns, as Paul has recognized. Vast numbers of people have come to rely on these welfare schemes, however unsustainable they are in the long run, as has become increasingly clear. If constitutional fidelity can serve to spur fiscal discipline, however, we may yet slowly work our way out of our present and long-term fiscal dilemma. But that felicitous result will not happen until we admit both our infidelity and our indiscipline — the two are intimately connected.

By reading the General Welfare Clause in isolation, therefore, Wallace and others turn the Constitution on its head. Rather than a document aimed at limiting government, it becomes a document authorizing unlimited government. And let’s be clear: The basic issue here is nothing more — nor less — than legitimacy. Do we live under the Constitution, or don’t we? If Ron Paul’s views on this fundamental question are “cranky,” so too were those of Madison, Jefferson, Washington, and the rest of the Founders we revere.

Ron Paul on the General Welfare Clause is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

George Will makes a good point in his latest column: Democrats maintain a peculiar “conviction that whatever government programs exist should forever exist because they always have existed.” Will’s observation centers around the shameless Democratic attacks on Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) proposal to reform Medicare and Medicaid.

According to Will, “Ryan’s plan would alter Medicare. But Medicare has existed in its current configuration for only 46 of the nation’s 235 years.” Actually, “current configuration” isn’t quite accurate. For example, Medicare’s prescription drug component added by Republicans, which Ryan voted for, went into effect only five years ago.

Regardless, I agree with Will that so-called “progressives” have a “constricted notion of the possibilities of progress”:

The hysteria and hyperbole about Ryan’s plan arise, in part, from a poverty of today’s liberal imagination, an inability to think beyond the straight-line continuation of programs from the second and third quarters of the last century. It is odd that “progressives,” as liberals now wish to be called, have such a constricted notion of the possibilities of progress.

Yes, Ryan’s plan displays “imagination” and I would add that it took political guts to suggest the reforms knowing that the left would nail him to the cross. However, let’s not forget that Ryan’s plan would also further cement these twin pillars of the federal welfare state. For all the silly accusations that Ryan is proposing to “privatize” Medicare, his plan repeatedly states that his aim is to “save” it:

Letting government break its promises to current seniors and to future generations is unacceptable. The reforms outlined in this budget protect and preserve Medicare for those in and near retirement, while saving and strengthening this critical program so that future generations can count on it to be there when they retire.

I wasn’t born yesterday, so I understand Ryan’s assurance to “those in and near retirement” that Medicare as they know it won’t be touched. However, I can’t square Ryan’s reference at the outset of his plan to the “timeless principles of American government enshrined in the U.S. Constitution – liberty, limited government, and equality under the rule of law” with his intention to strengthen “this critical program so that future generations can count on it be there when they retire.”

Now that Ryan’s plan has taken its inevitable beating from demagoguing Democrats, the GOP appears to be upping the “save Medicare for future generations” rhetoric.

Here’s tea party favorite Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as reported by Politico:

‘I understand the benefits that Medicare brings to America. It should be a part of our country,’ Rubio added. ‘I want Medicare to exist in a way that is unchanged for people that are in Medicare now. I want Medicare to exist when I retire. I want Medicare to exist when my children retire. And I don’t want Medicare to bankrupt itself for our country. And Medicare, as it’s currently structured, will go bankrupt.’

If that’s what Rubio, Ryan, and the rest of the congressional Republicans desire, then thank you for being honest. But please stop wrapping the intention to maintain for eternity a gigantic federal welfare state in the mantle of individual liberty, limited government, and the Constitution.

Support for the Eternal Federal Welfare State Is Bipartisan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Osama Bin Laden’s death marks a significant achievement in the fight against al Qaeda. It also highlights the fact that our ostensible objective for continuing the war in Afghanistan has been achieved. Although some lawmakers have been quick to claim that bin Laden’s demise proves that our nation-building mission is showing signs of success, others recognize that this momentous achievement justifies scaling down our presence in Afghanistan. Indeed, rather than expansive counterinsurgency campaigns, targeted counterterrorism measures would suffice.

It is encouraging that Republican members of Congress are questioning the mission. Senator Richard Lugar (R-IN), ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed his concern yesterday:

[Senator Lugar] said Afghanistan no longer holds the strategic importance to match Washington’s investment. He cited recent comments from senior national-security officials that terrorist strikes on America are more likely to be planned in places like Yemen.

Lugar raised concerns that U.S. policy on Afghanistan is focused more on building up its economic, political and security systems. “Such grand nation-building is beyond our powers,” he said bluntly.

Most poignantly, he summed up the problem as such:

With Al Qaeda largely displaced from the country, but franchised in other locations, Afghanistan does not carry a strategic value that justifies 100,000 American troops and a $100 billion per year cost, especially given current fiscal constraints.

These realities have neither shifted the GOP establishment’s talking points on defense, nor the Obama administration’s “stay-the-course” policy in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, this debate, especially among Republicans, is important. As my Cato colleague Ben Friedman has pointed out in original research, the Tea Party Republicans that swept into office last November may have good instincts, but have done little to shift the overarching debate about the efficacy of nation-building. Perhaps increased calls for rethinking the mission will have to come from senior GOP types like Lugar. As my other Cato colleague, Gene Healy, trenchantly notes, “There was always something odd about conservatives jumping from ‘they hate us because we’re free’ to ‘if we make them free, then they won’t hate us.”

Cato scholars have been making the case for de-escalation from Afghanistan for the past several years. Hopefully, more Republicans will recognize, as most libertarians already do, that it is inconsistent to espouse talk of fiscal responsibility and limited government at home while engaging in social engineering and nation-building abroad. More republicans should recognize that there is nothing conservative about wasting taxpayer dollars on a mission that weakens America economically and militarily. As Cato founder and president Ed Crane has argued, it’s time for the GOP leadership to return to its non-interventionist roots.

Since 9/11, America’s mission in Afghanistan has evolved dramatically. It’s gone from punishing al Qaeda and the Taliban to paving roads and building schools. To imagine that the U.S.-led coalition can create a functioning economy and establish civilian and military bureaucracies through some “government in a box” highlights the ignorance and arrogance of our central planners in Washington.

Let’s hope that the landmark death of Osama bin Laden brings a swift end to our ongoing investment and sacrifice.

Bin Laden’s Death and the Debate over the U.S. Mission in Afghanistan is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Given that Planned Parenthood’s online donations have shot up over the last two months, is Mike Pence (R-Ind.) correct to say it could — and should — operate without taxpayer funds?

My response:

Given that many Americans believe that abortion is murder, of course Planned Parenthood, the nation’s leading abortion provider, should not be publicly funded. (And please don’t say that no taxpayer funds go for abortions: money is fungible.)

Democrats think that almost everything should be publicly funded – education, health care, retirement, the arts. What’s next? News? Entertainment? Oh, I forgot: NPR and PBS. But only that programming that meets their exacting standards. FOX News? Faget about it! Where you from? Kansas? And they wonder why there’s a Tea Party.

‘We’re All In This Together’ is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

• “One of the first rules of negotiating is never to threaten to do something unless you are prepared to do it.”
• Policymakers and pundits assume the U.S. is so dominant that we’re prepared to fight multiple fronts at once, and that it won’t affect our security.
• Candidates for office should prepare to raise money, not rely on taxpayer subsidies.
• More market liberalization could help prepare Japan for any other natural disaster.
• Are Tea Party-backed Republicans prepared to go the distance on spending cuts?

Monday Links is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank rounds up a lot of bills introduced into state legislatures by conservatives, some of them a bit odd, and blames them all on “the Tea Party.” “Tea Party” has sort of replaced “neoconservative” as an all-purpose pejorative for liberals. Meanwhile, a tiny AP story down in the small type among the nail fungus ads reported some real Tea Party-style news. The Miami Herald covered it in more detail:

Voters swept Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez out of office by a stunning margin Tuesday [88 percent], capping a dramatic collapse for a politician who was given increased authority by voters four years ago to clean up much-maligned county government but was ushered out in the largest recall of a local politician in U.S. history.

The spectacular fall from power comes after two years of missteps, ranging from granting top staffers big pay hikes to construction of a publicly funded stadium for the Florida Marlins to implementation of a property-tax rate increase that outraged an electorate struggling through an ugly recession….

Tuesday’s vote served notice that the public is thirsting for widespread reform at County Hall, long dominated by entrenched politicians and insiders. County Commissioner Natacha Seijas was similarly recalled Tuesday in a resounding defeat. For 18 years she represented a district that includes Miami Lakes and Hialeah and was widely regarded as the most powerful politician on the commission.

The two ousters come on the heels of Dorrin Rolle’s defeat in November, which marked the first time a sitting county commissioner has been defeated in 16 years.

More than 200,000 people cast votes in the election.

Miami is no right-wing hotbed. Obama got 58 percent of the vote there. This should worry tax-hikers everywhere.

The Tea Party, Real and Imagined is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

In a March 4 article for National Review Online titled, “Mitch Daniels’s Obamacare Problem,” I explain how Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels (R) is undermining the effort to repeal ObamaCare, and how he might do even more damage to that movement as the Republican nominee for president.  My article came under fire from Daniels’ policy director Lawren Mills (in the comments section of my article), Grace-Marie Turner of the Galen Institute, and Bob Goldberg of the Center for Medicine in the Public Interest.

Today, NRO runs my response.  An excerpt:

In brief, the trio believes that Daniels’s expansion of government-run health care is a conservative triumph. I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation…

Daniels has an ObamaCare problem that could hurt the repeal movement if he doesn’t deal with it. Turner is creating more ObamaCare problems. This isn’t the first time conservatives have danced with the devil on health-care questions (see Massachusetts), but with health-care freedom now at its moment of maximum peril, that needs to stop. It will probably, however, take more than just the usual voices of protest to stop it. Tea Party and traditional conservative groups should perhaps spend less time attacking congressional Republicans over relatively minor tactical disagreements, and more time educating the governors, state legislators, and (yes) policy wonks who are actively implementing ObamaCare in their own backyards.

I’ll be speaking tonight at a Capitol Hill event sponsored by the Galen Institute (among others).

Mitch Daniels and ObamaCare, Round Two is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Over at the Fordham Institute, Senior Fellow Peter Meyer continues the assault on logic that Fordham has insisted on perpetrating when it comes to national curriculum standards. Writing about a New York Times story on the deceptive curriculum “guidelines” manifesto released by a number of national-standards supporters earlier this week, Meyer declares that:

Contrary to popular belief (especially in some Tea Party circles), a national curriculum, done properly, does not threaten local control.  As we learn in this story, plenty of folks, including Randi Weingarten and our own Checker Finn, have signed on to a “common curriculum,” which its proponents say will constitute only about half of a school’s “academic time.”

Maybe I’m missing some very small but incredibly powerful wrinkle in the logic here, but it seems to me that by definition forcing local districts to use national standards must threaten local control. Indeed, it must not only threaten it, it must actually defeat it. And this is in no way changed by the curriculum having to account for “only about half” of a school’s time: Hours formerly controlled locally are now controlled nationally, which is inescapably a major incursion on local control.

Maybe in some dimension white is black, black is white, and ants are really walruses. But in this dimension, as far as I know, the laws of reality and logic must still apply — even to national curriculum standards.

Not Possible in This Dimension is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

A lot has happened since President Obama introduced his last budget in February 2010. His party took an historic “shellacking” at the polls for its big government policies, his Fiscal Commission recommended serious spending cuts, and European governments have illustrated the severe problems of deficit spending.  

Given all this, did the president adopt a more frugal and prudent approach in his new budget yesterday? Not at all–the spending levels in his new budget are virtually the same as the unsustainably high spending levels in his February 2010 budget.

The chart shows Obama’s proposed spending for FY2012 from last year’s budget, and his proposed spending for the same year from his new budget.  His new budget proposes slightly more discretionary and entitlement spending for next year than did his last budget!

• Last year, Obama planned to spend $1.301 trillion on discretionary programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $1.340 trillion.
• Last year, Obama planned to spend $2,107 on entitlement programs in FY2012, but now he plans to spend $2,140.

So take that Tea Party!

Obama claimed in his “Budget Message” yesterday that “taking further steps toward reducing our long-term deficit has to be a priority,” but looking at his actual budget numbers shows that isn’t true.

For more budget numbers, see my NRO summary.

Obama Shellacking and the Federal Budget is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

First, the good news: Last night, civil libertarians had a rare excuse to pop champagne when an effort to fast-track a one-year reauthorization of three controversial Patriot Act provisions–set to expire at the end of the month–failed in the House of Representatives. As Slate‘s Dave Weigel notes, the vote had been seen as such a sure thing that Politico headlined its story on the pending vote “Congress set to pass Patriot Act extension.” Around this time last year, a similar extension won House approval by a lopsided 315-97 vote.

Now the reality check: The large majority of representatives also voted for reauthorization last night: 277 for, 148 against. The vote failed only because GOP leadership had sought to ram the bill through under a “suspension of the rules”–a streamlined process generally used for the most uncontroversial bills, limiting debate and barring the introduction of amendments–which required a two-thirds majority for passage. Given last week’s developments in the Senate, it’s still a near certainty that the expiring provisions will be extended again before the end of the month. In fact, there’s a Rules Committee meeting today to get the bill back on the House floor. Also, while the defection of 26 Republicans who voted against reauthorization is the first real pushback against leadership we’ve seen since the GOP took the House, some of the talk that’s circulated about a Tea Party backlash against the surveillance state seems premature. As Weigel notes, just eight of the 26 Republican “no” votes were incoming freshmen, and many representatives prominently associated with the Tea Party were on the other side. Some of the resistance seems to have been generated by the fast-track approach, as there haven’t been any hearings or mark-ups on Patriot legislation.

That said, the tide does seem to be shifting somewhat. The failure of the fast-track vote means that we may see the reauthorization introduced under rules that would allow amendments aimed at remedying the civil liberties problems with the three expiring provisions, or with the still more controversial Patriot expansion of National Security Letter authority, which under current law does not expire. For those just tuning in, the sunsetting Patriot provisions are:

Lone Wolf

So-called “lone wolf” authority allows non-citizens in the U.S. who are suspected of involvement in terrorist activities to be monitored under the broad powers afforded by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), even if they are not connected to any overseas terror group or other “foreign power.” It was passed after FBI claimed the absence of “lone wolf” authority stymied efforts to monitor the infamous “20th 9/11 Hijacker”–but a bipartisan Senate report found that this failure was actually the result of a series of gross errors by the FBI, not any gap in government surveillance powers. Moreover, Lone Wolf blurs the traditional–and constitutionally significant–distinction between foreign intelligence, where the executive enjoys greater latitude, and domestic national security investigations. The way the statute is written, Lone Wolf authority is only available in circumstances where investigators would already be able to obtain a criminal terrorism wiretap. Given of the sweeping nature of FISA surveillance, that more narrow criminal surveillance authority should be employed when the special needs imposed by the involvement of a “foreign power” are not present.

Roving Wiretaps

Roving wiretap authority allows intelligence wiretap orders to follow a target across multiple phone lines or online accounts. Similar authority has been available in criminal investigations since 1986, but Patriot’s roving wiretaps differ from the version available in criminal cases, because the target of an order may be “described” rather than identified. Courts have stressed this requirement for identification of a named target as a feature that enables criminal roving wiretaps to satisfy the “particularity” requirement of the Fourth Amendment. Patriot’s roving taps, by contrast, raise the possibility of “John Doe” warrants that name neither a person nor a specific “place” or facility–disturbingly similar to the “general warrants” the Founders were concerned to prohibit when they crafted the Fourth Amendment. Given the general breadth of FISA surveillance and the broad potential scope of online investigations, John Doe warrants would pose a high risk of “overcollecting” innocent Americans’ communications. Most civil liberties advocates would be fine with making this authority permanent if it were simply modified to match the criminal authority and foreclose the possibility of “John Doe” warrants by requiring either a named individual target or a list of specific facilities to be wiretapped.

Section 215

Section 215 expanded the authority of the FISA Court to compel the production of business records or any other “tangible thing.” While previously such orders were limited to narrow classes of businesses and records, and required a showing of “specific and articulable facts” that the records sought pertain to an agent of a foreign power, Patriot stripped away those limits. The current law requires only a showing of “reasonable grounds” to believe records are “relevant” to an investigation, not probable cause, and has no requirement that people whose information is obtained be even suspected of any connection to terrorism. And the recipients of these orders are barred from Proposals to restore some of the previous checks on this power–requiring some demonstrable connection to terroris–initially received bipartisan support last year, but were torpedoed when the Justice Department objected that this limitation would interfere with a secret “sensitive collection program.” Several senators briefed on the program have expressed concern that this sweeping collection authority was being reauthorized without adequate public understanding of its true purpose.

So those are the sunsetting provisions–though a lot of the debate last year very justifiably centered on the need to reform National Security Letters, which we know to be constitutionally defective, and which have already been subject to serious abuses. One reason reform keeps getting postponed is that Congress is busy and tends not to make time for these issues until the sunset deadlines are right around the corner–at which point a reliable band of pundits and legislators imply that absolute bedlam will ensue unless every single surveillance authority is extended–meaning reform will have to wait until later, at which point it will be an emergency all over again. Once you start looking at the numbers, though, all these Chicken Littles begin to look faintly ridiculous.

The Lone Wolf provision is such an essential intelligence tool that it has never been used. Not a single time. And again, by the terms of the statute, it only applies under circumstances where a criminal wiretap warrant would already be available if Lone Wolf authority didn’t exist. Roving authority is granted by the FISA Court an average of 22 times per year, and in many (if not most) of those cases it never actually has to be used–surveillance is limited to named facilities. To put that in context, the FISA court issued 1,320 electronic surveillance orders in 2009, and that was the first time in 5 years the number fell below 2,000. So we’re talking about maybe 1 percent of FISA surveillance, which judging by internal oversight reports, is a good deal less than the portion that ends up sitting untranslated for months anyway. Similarly, there were 21 business records orders under §215 issued in 2009–and remember, that authority doesn’t disappear if this provision sunsets, it just reverts to its narrower, pre–Patriot version, where the court needs to see actual evidence that the records have some connection to a suspected terrorist. Surveys by the Inspector General’s office found no instances in which a major case development resulted from 215 information. The idea that we’d somehow be in grave danger if these provisions lapsed for a few months just doesn’t hold up, but there’s no reason Congress can’t pass a two-month extension while they consider some of the reforms already on the table, just as they did last year.

So let’s stop living in a state of perpetual panic. Some of these provisions we’d be better off without. Some, like roving wiretaps, just need minor tweaks to close loopholes for misuse. Some–I’m looking at you, National Security Letters–require substantial reform. Many of these changes ought to be common sense, and have attracted bipartisan support in the past. But let’s stop kicking the can down the road and saying we’ll debate the proper limits on the surveillance state when there’s time. It’s important enough that Congress can make time.

Patriot Reauthorization Vote Fails… Now What? is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Reports the Los Angeles Times:

A House GOP push to permanently extend expiring provisions of the Patriot Act is running into opposition from conservative and “tea party”-inspired lawmakers wary of the law’s reach into private affairs.

Congress has made a practice of kicking the Patriot Act can down the road, but it could be that the new crop of legislators isn’t inclined to go along.

Julian Sanchez has blogged here about the complexities of this government surveillance law. His podcast on the topic, released yesterday, is titled “The Patriot Act Sneaks to Renewal.” Maybe it can’t sneak through after all…

Patriot Act Extension Runs Into Conservative Opposition is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Lindsay Graham isn’t alone when he imagines an emerging “isolationist wing” of the Republican Congress. Pundits have lately both lamented and celebrated the arrival of a Tea Party foreign policy, where deficit fears restrain military adventures and Pentagon spending.

I wish there were such a thing. My op-ed in yesterday’s Philadelphia Inquirer shows that there isn’t.  I report there on research that I did (really research that intern Matt Fay did) on support among Republicans in the House and Senate for cutting defense spending and getting out of Afghanistan. I found little.

I also tested the idea that the Tea Party is restraining Republican militarism, by comparing the 101 freshmen that largely claim adherence to that movement to other Republican members. Freshmen are not more dovish than the rest, suggesting that the Tea Party reflects Republican politics more than it guides it. A post I put up yesterday on the National Interest‘s Skeptics blog illustrates this point with charts.

As Tad DeHaven notes, Congressional Republicans, including leaders in both Houses, have increasingly said that they would support defense cuts as part of a deficit reduction package. But those taking that position remain a minority of their party–fifteen percent by a generous accounting, comprising roughly equal fractions of new and old members. And the cuts that the minority of Republican want are likely to be cosmetic, trimming fat and chasing efficiencies, not taming the beast by taking on less missions and cutting force structure. For these reasons, it’s not surprising that the symbolic spending cut resolution up for a House vote Tuesday exempts the nearly two-thirds of domestic spending labeled as “security,” as I discussed in another Skeptics post.

GOP support for indefinite war in Afghanistan is stronger. Only ten Congressional Republicans are obviously against that war, and not one is a Senator or a freshman. That last bit bears repeating: none of the 101 new Republican members of the House and Senate are clearly against the war in Afghanistan.

The difference between new and old Republicans on these issues is that the new members are less likely to have firm positions. They got elected largely without expressing coherent views on defense issues. Since then, many seem to be reading the tea-leaves and keeping quiet about those matters.  But they will soon be tied into positions as they justify votes. So the coming months are crucial in determining how a big chunk of Republicans vote for some time.

I am not optimistic that many will side with those of us that would like to vastly scale back our foreign policy. In the Skeptics post I explain why:

The GOP has been in the habit, probably since the 1970s, of out-hawking the Democrats and equating military aggressiveness with support for the military and American virtue. Whether that is winning political strategy I’m not sure (yes in 2004, no in 2008), but it is at least a powerful habit, reinforced by decades of neoconservative warbling, whose authors are now ensconced in the nation’s most prominent op-ed pages and think tanks.

Beyond that, military spending bestows its munificence in many districts, generating bipartisan support. But, on the left, the prospect of spending caps creates countervailing interests. Caps force defenders of other domestic spending to be dovish on defense. Health care’s cost competes with the Navy’s, especially under budget caps. That’s not as issue on the right.

The most important force keeping Republican fond of military adventure, however, is common to Democrats: international opportunity. We have expansive foreign policies because we can. Balancing is weak. The costs of adventurism are few and diffuse. For Europeans alive 100 years ago, foreign policy failures could bring conquest and mass death. Even successful wars would kill many sons and consume a considerable portion of societal wealth. For most Americans, especially since the draft ended, foreign policy disasters bring marginally higher tax rates. Ideologies justifying expansive policies—liberal internationalism on the left, neoconservatism on the right—grow popular because they justify the behavior this structure allows.

Doves say that the United States cannot afford its foreign policy. The problem is that it can, even when recessions make the load a bit harder to bear. Unsustainable things end. The United States can afford to do all sorts of foolish things.

Tea Party Isn’t Mellowing GOP Militarism is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

Is there anything inappropriate about Justice Scalia’s speaking about the Constitution before Rep. Michele Bachmann’s Tea Party Caucus, as the New York Times editorial board suggests? Is it time to drop the fiction of a judicial monastery with justices detached from the political process?

My response:

There is nothing inappropriate about Justice Scalia’s speaking today before the congressional Tea Party Caucus — or any other group, for that matter, that is well within the mainstream of American politics. As POLITICO reports, Rep. Bachmann’s event is open to all members of Congress, and several Democrats have said they’ll attend.

The complaint by the editorial board of The New York Times –  that “the Tea Party epitomizes the kind of organization no justice should speak to” –reflects nothing more than that corner’s refusal to accept the legitimacy of the Tea Party, notwithstanding last November’s elections. When the board goes on to condemn the Tea Party’s “well-known and extreme point of view about the Constitution,” it might better direct its wrath at James Madison. After all, as the principal author of the Constitution, he’s the Framer who promised in Federalist 45 that the powers of the new government would be “few and defined” — the “extreme” view the Times editorialists regularly condemn.

In deciding cases, judges and justices need to be detached from politics, of course: They belong to the “non-political branch.” But that hardly precludes them from talking about the Constitution in political contexts. If anything, it is the Congress that needs to be more attentive to the Constitution its members take an oath to uphold. That, in fact, is the root of our problem today. And we have the Tea Party to thank for noticing it.

Justice Scalia Speaks to the Congressional Tea Party Caucus is a post from Cato @ Liberty - Cato Institute Blog