Freedom Line Blog

Here’s an update from the New York Times about how the Obama Administration is implementing the DREAM Act without waiting for Congress to actually pass the measure into law.

The decision would, through administrative action, help many intended beneficiaries of legislation that has been stalled in Congress for a decade. The sponsor of the legislation, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, has argued that “these young people should not be punished for their parents’ mistakes.”

The next paragraph explains the motivation:

The action would also bolster President Obama’s reputation with Latino voters as he heads into the 2012 election. Just a week ago the leaders of major Hispanic organizations criticized his record, saying in a report that Mr. Obama and Congress had “overpromised and underdelivered” on immigration and other issues of concern to Latino voters, a major force in some swing states.

At least the Times is honest.  We’re still waiting for the White House.

California Democratic Governor Jerry Brown appointed Michael Rossi, former Bank of America executive and GMAC subprime mortgage guru, to be his unpaid “jobs czar.” Brown hopes that Rossi will be able to tell Brown how to revive the state’s sagging economy.

It’s telling that Brown chose a career Big Business executive instead of a successful entrepreneur.  The two types of people – and their skill sets – couldn’t be more different.

Rossi’s path to success involved managing large corporate structures that focus heavily on exploiting government-created revenue streams, such as subprime mortgages that but for government-owned Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s guarantee would never have been made.  It also doesn’t help that today BofA is announcing its second straight year of layoffs (3,500 employees this year alone).

It would be far better for Brown to enlist the help of an entrepreneur with success starting and growing businesses.  As the Kauffman Foundation showed in a study released last summer, “new firms add an average of 3 million jobs in their first year, while older companies lose 1 million jobs annually.”

Here’s the Kauffman Foundation’s explanation:

Most notably, during recessionary years, job creation at startups remains stable, while net job losses at existing firms are highly sensitive to the business cycle.

“These findings imply that America should be thinking differently about the standard employment policy paradigm,” said Robert E. Litan, vice president of Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation. “Policymakers tend to focus on changes in the national or state unemployment rate, or on layoffs by existing companies. But the data from this report suggest that growth would be best boosted by supporting startup firms.”

If Governor Brown wants to create jobs he should consult the people creating jobs – not those managing a declining workforce.

In what can only be described as a near-criminal lack of discretion, ATF management saw fit last Sunday to promote three agents who supervised the Phoenix office’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking fiasco to senior positions in Washington, D.C.

The three supervisors have been given new management positions at the agency’s headquarters in Washington. They are William G. McMahon, who was the ATF’s deputy director of operations in the West, where the illegal trafficking program was focused, and William D. Newell and David Voth, both field supervisors who oversaw the program out of the agency’s Phoenix office.

H/T: Townhall

Kudos to the Heritage Foundation for drawing attention to this analysis from the Brookings Institution about President Barack Obama’s unprecedented use of the waiver process to bypass Congress and rewrite education law:

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law. The NCLB waiver authority does not grant the secretary of education the right to impose any conditions he considers appropriate on states seeking waivers, nor is there any history of such a wholesale executive branch rewrite of federal law through use of the waiver authority.

It’s always nice when liberals deign to give advice to conservatives on whom should be admitted to the next Tea Party rally.  Commenting on excerpted parts of Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s book Fed Up!, Kevin Drum of Mother Jones thinks Rick Perry is wrong to think that it’s unconstitutional for the federal government to regulate banks, consumer financial choices, the environment, guns, civil rights, a minimum wage, and create programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

At least Drum acknowledges that Perry makes certain exceptions for federal regulations on racial discrimination since that fulfills “the intent behind the passage of the Reconstruction Era amendments.”

What makes liberals like Drum gasp is the fact that Perry thinks that, as James Madison argued in Federalist 45, “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined.  Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.”

But if a secondary source won’t cut it for Drum, here’s the text of the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

If they cared to, Drum and other liberals would look in vain to find an enumerated grant of power to the federal government to regulate the items on the list above.  That’s why they rely on activist judges to read into the Constitution federal powers that do not exist.

The Tea Party – like Perry, Michele Bachmann, and other constitutional conservatives – know their Constitution and the meaning behind it.  If liberals like Drum are aghast, it’s only because a grassroots movement is forming to challenge nearly 80 years of unconstitutional jurisprudence.

Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry announced his candidacy for President of the United States today during a speech in South Carolina.  Though the text of the speech is worth reading in its entirety, here’s my pick for the best line:

I’ll work every day to make Washington, D.C. as inconsequential in your life as I can.

If Perry’s campaign can reduce that sentiment to a bumper sticker, he might be able to sow up the GOP nomination by Labor Day.

The Fix notes that Big Labor is looking awfully small in recent election cycles.  Citing organized labor’s unsuccessful primary attacks on Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), and this week’s failure to recall enough Wisconsin Republicans to take back the state senate, one Democratic strategist speaks the obvious – if anonymous – truth.

“The unmistakable lesson is that every time labor makes it about labor, they lose,” said one senior Democratic strategist granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It’s a messenger problem.”

With public employee unions eating up ever larger amounts of taxpayer money, it’s no wonder the majority of non-union members are revolting at the thought of strengthening labor’s hand.  In reality, the unnamed source mentioned above doesn’t quite draw the right lesson from Big Labor’s election problem.  It’s not just the messenger – it’s the message of more money in a tight recession that’s the problem.  Unless unions get on-board with the national belt-tightening, they’ll experience a lot more rejections in the elections to come.

Politico reports that Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer has formally petitioned the United States Supreme Court to overturn the 9^th Circuit’s opinion that important parts of the state’s tough immigration law (SB 1070) violate the U.S. Constitution.

Brewer said in May that she was “frustrated” by the court’s ruling and planned to appeal it.

“The bottom line is, is that everyone knows that the 9th Circuit has a reputation of being very, very liberal,” she said. “After deliberating and thinking about it, I said, ‘Let’s just go to the Supreme Court.’”

As usual, the outcome will probably hinge on the moderate views of Justice Anthony Kennedy.

Heaven help us.

From Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post:

* Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is getting involved in the presidential race — sort of. He’s emailing supporters asking for money to run ads in Iowa defending his budget and urging 2012 candidates to support it. The Democratic National Committee has been painting Ryan’s budget as “extreme” in Iowa ads, Ryan wrote that he wants to launch a “counter-attack.” It’s an unusual move for a non-candidate.

Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) earned his position today by naming three conservative workhorses to represent the Senate GOP in the new “Super Congress” charged with eliminating more than $1 trillion in federal spending.

Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) is getting the lion’s share of attention because of his former leadership of the conservative Club for Growth, and his opposition to the debt deal that created the committee he’ll serve on.  But McConnell deserves some serious thanks from the Tea Party for also naming Senators Jon Kyl (R-AZ) and Rob Portman (R-OH).

Both Kyl and Portman own reputations as serious policy wonks who know how to get substantial conservative victories in government negotiations.  (Kyl is an expert on foreign affairs, defense, and tax issues, while Portman served as President George W. Bush’s OMB Director and Free Trade Representative.)

For his part, Toomey is no slouch when it comes to putting skins on the wall.  (Under Toomey, Club for Growth helped illuminate the economic records of several Republican candidates, helping to identify which were in line with less government.)

All told, the Tea Party should be very pleased that Leader McConnell has named a terrific trio to grow the federal government down in a smart and lasting way.

The Washington Examiner reports that GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman is trying to retrace the steps Senator John McCain (R-AZ) took to the 2008 nomination.  Citing his moderate stances on just about everything, Huntsman and his advisors (many former McCain hands) avoiding the conservative-dominated Iowa caucuses and hoping for “a good showing” in the New Hampshire primary.  Thereafter Huntsman hopes to win the South Carolina and Florida primaries with a pure economic message.

What a riot.  McCain was the undisputed national security candidate last time around, and was able to paper over many of his moderate-to-liberal heresies with a compelling military background.  By contrast, Huntsman has been a well-connected ambassador to the Far East (China and Singapore), and has never served in uniform, let alone suffered torture.  Moreover, McCain won the New Hampshire primary by 6 percentage points over Romney.  Alternatively, Huntsman wants a “good showing”?  Hopefully, that’s more than the 1.8 percent he’s polling nationally, or else he won’t make it to South Carolina.

The truth about the Huntsman campaign is that it features a candidate in search of a constituency.  Anyone in the Republican Party who is repelled by the Tea Party and trusts Wall Street more than Main Street is already voting for Mitt Romney.  Huntsman is a slightly different version of the same formula.

If history is any guide, the GOP tends to give the presidential nomination to the next guy in line.  In 2008 it was John McCain.  In 2012, it will be Mitt Romney.  Only a big name with big money like Texas Governor Rick Perry or Michelle Bachmann seems poised to spoil the party.  Refusing to campaign to an entire wing of the Republican base by skipping the Iowa caucuses isn’t at bottom a campaign strategy – it’s an acknowledgement that Jon Huntsman is the answer to a presidential question no one is asking.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the costly human waste that even worthy wars can bring:

As their Chinook was about to land, Afghan and U.S. officials said, a lone insurgent shot it out of the sky with a rocket-propelled grenade, or RPG, in the deadliest attack endured by the American military in a decade of war in Afghanistan. Thirty American troops, including 22 SEALs, died in the crash, as did a civilian interpreter and seven Afghan commandos.

Each of the dead was the son or daughter of a family who raised a child willing and able to defend freedom at the most demanding level possible.  And while we say a prayer for each of these brave souls, it’s hard not to feel an extra tinge of anger that none of the 39 highly trained professionals killed had a fighting chance against a lone shooter with perhaps no more skill than is sufficient to operate a video game controller.

Whether it’s an Improvised Explosive Device (IED) killing and maiming members of a military convoy or an RPG ambush on SEAL Team Six (the outfit who killed Osama bin Laden), these kinds of deaths defy one’s sense of proportionality.  Rudyard Kipling saw his own share of disproportionate death as a writer in India during Britain’s Imperial rule, with similar misgivings (from the poem “Arithmetic on the Frontier”):

A scrimmage in a Border Station-
A canter down some dark defile
Two thousand pounds of education
Drops to a ten-rupee jezail.
The Crammer’s boast, the Squadron’s pride,
Shot like a rabbit in a ride!

Writing for Human Events, gun advocate Neil W. McCabe documents how the Washington Post was aware of ATF’s “gun walking” program before the operation led to the death of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry on December 14, 2010.

The AK-47 that killed Terry was sold by Lone Wolf Trading.

That means that the reporters working on the Dec. 13 story for months were completely aware that the bureau was getting its statistics from the undercover operations that allowed the guns to pass through the normal controls.

What they should have also known is that this ill-conceived project was a completely irresponsible abrogation by sworn law enforcement officers and their leaders.

They should have known that it was a dangerous contamination of public servants and members of the free press working together toward the political goals shared by both the platform of the Democratic National Committee and the paper’s editorial board.

Finally, they should have known that they were sitting on top of one of the biggest stories of anyone’s career, titled, “As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. government agents clear, and expedite to crime gangs, guns tied to crime south of border.”

McCabe also shows how the Post continued to report ATF’s scandal as though the deliberate “walking” of guns across the border wasn’t verified, even though the Post had been given detailed statistics by ATF about the numbers of guns flowing across into Mexico.  (How would ATF know unless it was green-lighting the transfers?)

How ironic it is that the newspaper most identified with bringing down a president for abusing the public’s trust acted as the PR firm for an administration whose actions actually killed an American citizen.

No wonder the Post couldn’t be bothered to pick up the story until after CBS and Fox News took it mainstream.

Byron York eviscerates the common liberal meme that former President George W. Bush was worse on spending and taxes than President Barack Obama.  After showing that Bush’s tax cuts increased federal revenues and shrank deficits while Obama has increased the national debt at twice Bush’s pace, York ends with a resounding rebuke of the common “eight years of Republican rule” canard.

None of this is to say that George W. Bush had a good record on spending. He didn’t, and he’s fair game for criticism. But is it honest to condemn reckless spending in “eight years of Republican rule” when Democrats controlled the Senate for four of those years and the House for two? Is it honest to talk about the “cost” of the Bush tax cuts when federal revenues increased significantly while they were in effect? And is it honest to refer to Bush’s ballooning deficits when deficits actually trended down for much of his presidency — at least before Democrats won control of Congress?

Of course Obama partisans would like to pin the president’s troubles on Bush. But they should get their facts straight first.

U.S. News & World Report summarizes a great one-page handout from the office of Senator John Barasso (R-WY):

At Tuesday’s GOP Senate caucus lunch, the lawmakers said that they will renew their efforts, supported by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In a memo Barasso handed out to the lawmakers, he claimed that the administration in July only has put in $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs by proposing 229 new rules and finalizing 379 rules. Among those he cited were EPA, healthcare reform, and financial regulatory reform rules.

If you’re a Tea Party activist, or someone looking for a compact fact sheet describing the growth in government, check out Senator Barasso’s handout. (pdf)

Dan Walters, the dean of California political journalists, is sounding the alarm over a series of moves by the state’s Democratic machine to restrict conservative access to statewide ballot initiatives.

As California Democrats see it, conservatives are poised to unleash a torrent of ballot measures to rein in government spending and regulations, as the state continues to suffer double-digit unemployment and annual budget deficits.  With Democrats controlling all levers of government, there’s only one area where their tax-and-spend liberalism could be challenged: at the ballot box.

To eliminate that threat, Democrats in and outside government are pushing to criminalize paying signature gatherers per name collected, and issuing radio ads linking petition-signing with identity theft.  Last week, Democratic Governor Jerry Brown vetoed the criminalization measure, but others are waiting the wings.

The motivation behind the Democrats’ ploy is protecting the public employee union members who live off legislative largesse, be it sweetheart pension deals, deferred compensation, or over-generous overtime pay.

With Californians waking up to the fact that economic growth isn’t possible without serious reforms, it’s becoming clearer by the day that the liberal Democrats running the state are not governing in the taxpayer’s best interest.  So to the statist’s mind, it’s far better to cut off debate than face reality.

Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton, writes in TheHill that the “Penny Plan” by Rep. Connie Mack (R-FL) is a “simple and creative” way to balance the budget.

…since the “balanced” solution of both increased revenues and spending cuts is supported in virtually every poll by substantial majorities of all voters, including large numbers of Republicans, Democrats need to find a spending cut formula that they can live with. The Mack Penny Plan seems a good place to start — it is simple, it makes common sense, and with some adjustments protecting the poor and the unemployed, it could be seen as fair even to many of the most liberal Democrats.

Ignoring Davis’ call to undermine the elegance of Mack’s Penny Plan by creating vague exceptions for the poor and unemployed – as I wrote recently, the attraction of Mack’s plan is its uniform treatment of all budget items – it’s welcome news that a high-ranking Clintonista can sense good policy when he sees it.

Earlier in his column Davis warned his fellow liberals that it would be “a moral stain on our generation if we leave this red-ink legacy for generations to come to deal with.”

Davis is right.  Let’s hope he urges his fellow Democrats to back Mack’s Penny Plan so we can get on the road to fiscal solvency as soon as possible.

There are few things more annoying than trying to compete against someone who won’t play the game.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) expresses the frustration of many conservatives who want a real debate about the purposes of government and our ability as a nation to fund them.  Ryan rightly chides President Obama for failing to engage in specifics about how to focus policymakers’ attention on the debt, not just its ceiling.

It is mystifying to me that the president continues to shut out Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” proposal as a middle ground between bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid and eliminating them altogether.

One would think The One could see a Clintonian moment when presented.  But rather than see Ryan’s willingness to preserve the social safety net for what it is – a path to a long-term bipartisan solution – the president can’t see past his own partisan nose.

Yet instead of laying out his own vision, President Obama continues to offer speeches instead of specifics.  Lots of us want a debate about the ends of government, and how we structure our economy to pay for it.  If the leader of the Democratic Party won’t engage in a serious debate about it, maybe the Democrats should get someone who will.

The International Business Times chronicles another blow to the meaning of American citizenship:

The Illinois DREAM Act would make undocumented students eligible for private college scholarships and would allow them to enroll in state college savings programs. The California DREAM Act, signed last week by governor Jerry Brown, granted undocumented immigrants at public universities greater access to privately funded scholarships. The California state legislature is debating a more controversial measure to allow undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition, which Brown has signaled he supports.

George Soros, the leftwing hedge fund billionaire and part-time Hungarian Bond villain, announced last week he’s opting out of the regulatory straitjacket he demanded of his industry.  Taking advantage of a little-known loophole in the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, Soros is evading the kind of “transparency” he championed for others.

Per Michelle Malkin:

Under Title IV of Dodd-Frank, hedge funds were required to abide by new registration and reporting requirements in an attempt to better police systemic risk (not that the feckless Securities and Exchange Commission has ever been able to fulfill that mission). To evade the regulations, Soros and other firms have used a recently passed rule allowing so-called family offices to shield themselves from both registration and disclosure rules that would have subjected Soros Inc. to a new “Financial Stability Oversight Council.”

But what would Soros want to hide?  More Malkin:

Soros and his family shelled out $250,000 for Obama’s inauguration, $60,000 in direct campaign contributions and untold millions more to liberal activist groups pushing the White House agenda.

…

Over the past year, Soros provided coveted support for Obama and the Democrats’ Byzantine financial “reforms” under the sweeping Dodd-Frank law. He preached to financial publications around the world about the need for increased regulatory controls over his industry. And in November 2008, while paying obligatory lip service to concerns about going too far, he submitted a statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that recommended: “The entire regulatory framework needs to be reconsidered, and hedge funds need to be regulated within that framework.”

That is, unless you’ve got creative lawyers and a disingenuous president’s ear.