Freedom Line Blog

If only the indicted former Illinois governor could have passed on the chance to be first elected official to do business with the Obama White House political machine he too might be just another “coincidence” in need of rationalizing.  At first, Blagojevich seemed to be a bad Sopranos version of a big state governor.  The hair, leather jackets, and the boyishly insincere claims of innocence made it easy to dismiss him as a buffoon unskilled in the art of negotiating political favors.  (FBI tapes of him dropping f-bombs while daydreaming about running a nonprofit or a cabinet department didn’t help either.)

Then came revelations that Democratic Senate candidates Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff of Colorado were offered varying types of political compensation not to run against Obama’s preferred incumbents.  Now it sounds as if Arlen Specter – the party switching moderate Sestak defeated – is signaling he’d like a sweetheart deal after Keystone State voters refused to renew his contract.

Sources tell ABC News that Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, has informed the White House that he would like to consider remaining in public service after his Senate term ends at the end of this session, and White House officials are keeping an open mind about possible job openings for him.

So, THAT’S the difference!  Blago should have “informed” the White House that “he would like to consider” increasing his public service to include Washington, D.C. – perhaps after the governor nominated President Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett to fill his Senate seat.

Hey, distinctions are helpful.  They’re also dubious if the following report from ABC News is true about Specter’s motivation:

Some who know Specter say he’s eager to go out with a bang — to have a more majestic career-ender — and not to be known in perpetuity as a party switcher, an inquisitor of Anita Hill, or as a leading advocate on the Warren Commission of the single-bullet theory.

Would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad is many things – traitor to America, attempted mass murderer – but ABC News might be spinning news of his reluctance to kill himself a bit too far.

“Times Square Bomber Wimped Out on Suicide” screams that outlet’s headline.  Of course, I clicked on it.  Apparently, Shahzad’s handlers with the Taliban released a prerecorded tape of Shahzad in full terrorist mode proclaiming jihad to be an obligation on all Muslims.  That he used a series of timers to ensure he’d be clear of the death toll his bomb-laden van would bring is then juxtaposed to highlight his hypocrisy.

I for one am glad Shahzad “wimped out” instead of making sure his plans were carried out to the letter.  Put another way, would ABC News be trumpeting his follow through if he’d stayed to detonate the bomb personally?

Ridicule can be effective, but not when it motivates the next Faisal Shahzad to finish a job everyone should be too afraid to complete.

Loyal readers may recall CFIF profiled then-candidate Charles Djou’s special election campaign for Hawaii’s first congressional district.  Since winning the seat in May Djou has gone from a hard-working underdog to a targeted incumbent working hard to get reelected in the heavily Democrat district.

During his two months in office, Djou voted against the Democrats’ overhaul of the financial industry, for the repeal of the military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and praised President Barack Obama on the floor of the House for pursuing a trade agreement with South Korea.

If Djou pulls out a win in November, he’ll continue the Aloha State’s history of not voting out an incumbent member of Congress.  Faced with the prospect of the alternative, conservatives everywhere should be praying for at least two more years of Charles Djou in Congress.

Of the 18 bills proposed by Britain’s Coalition Government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats none may be as immediately consequential as the Academies Bill.  Filed in May just days after the Coalition took power, the Academies Bill allows any public school rated as “outstanding” by the central government to be approved automatically for privatization.  The stated goal is to move authority for running the school from local bureaucrats to private individuals; be they groups of parents, charities, or religious institutions.

The schools are allowed to use whatever methods necessary to meet the national testing requirements, but they can only charge the amount of the voucher each student gets from the central government.  If the school can deliver the desired results for less than the voucher, they get to keep the money left over.  Oh, by the way; this nationwide program starts this September.

The Coalition’s motivation for this and other decentralizing initiatives results from two realities: cutting spending to reduce the deficit, and giving more power to everyday citizens.

As conservative presidential contenders start to ramp-up their 2012 campaigns, I hope they are paying close attention to these striking policy developments.  The economic crisis coupled with the incompetency of our own overgrown governments may be just the combination necessary to mark a new birth of freedom in America.

Even though the ink is barely dry on the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Arizona’s new illegal immigration law, Attorney General Eric Holder is already speculating about what to do if (i.e. when) his challenge fails: play the race card.

In legal terms, the Justice Department’s current lawsuit is a “facial” challenge, meaning that the DOJ alleges Arizona’s SB 1070 is unconstitutional “on its face,” or by its own terms.  Since SB 1070 mirrors federal law, only the most liberal application of the preemption doctrine would consider identical versions of the same statute to be in conflict, thus requiring federal law to preempt SB 1070.

Because Arizona’s the law is valid on its face the DOJ’s current lawsuit will lose, and SB 1070 will be allowed to go into effect.  Then Arizona law enforcement will be able to ask a person about their immigration status if the person is stopped because of reasonable suspicion she is engaged in criminal activity.  According to Holder, a few months after implementation the DOJ would then challenge SB 1070 “as applied” by law enforcement because officers would allegedly ask for immigration papers from a person because of his race – even though SB 1070 explicitly prohibits the officer from doing that.

But in order to get enough empirical evidence to prove systematic racial profiling, the DOJ will have to closely monitor the situations where Arizona officers apply SB 1070.  To do that will require Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)to cooperate with Arizona officers checking a suspect’s immigration status; something the ICE chief is loathe to do.  Moreover, since nearly all of the illegal immigrants in Arizona are Hispanic, nearly all of the suspects questioned and verified will be Hispanic.  Does the near universal application of SB 1070 to these suspects prove racial profiling?  Or, on the other hand, does it prove merely that a particular subset of the Arizona population contains a statistically outrageous number of illegal immigrants?

Both the current lawsuit and this new proposal by the Attorney General are fools’ errands in sloppy litigation.  Eric Holder is 0-for-Everything as the nation’s top prosecutor.  Hopefully, President Barack Obama will let him get back where he belongs: challenging valid laws for the sake of liberal causes as a private attorney.

In a shameless attempt to post a Chris Christie item before CFIF Senior Fellow Troy Senik (whose recent ruminations on the possible tax advantages for LeBron James of signing with the Miami Heat no doubt swayed the King to move to South Beach), I submit this news item on the sweeping privatization proposal by the New Jersey governor’s deficit reduction task force.  According to its calculations, the commission claims it can save Garden State taxpayers $210 million per year if services like state parks, psychiatric hospitals and turnpike toll booths were run by private vendors.

Can you imagine either of President Barack Obama’s deficit reduction commission co-chairs echoing their New Jersey peer Richard Zimmer with, “The question has to be, ‘Why do you continue to operate in a manner that’s more costly and less effective?’ rather than, ‘Why change?”

Chris Christie: Change You Can Invest In.

Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.  With a level of spin only a well-heeled campaign operative could rival the IRS is trying to allay small business owners’ fears of an “avalanche” of new1099 reporting requirements that life under the new rules won’t be so bad.

With an assist from CNN, here’s IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman’s attempt to slather lipstick on a pig:

The IRS will have broad leeway to interpret the rules — and it’s already showing signs that it will look for ways to staunch the paperwork flood.

In a late May speech before the two payroll industry trade group, IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman announced a major exception to the new rules: The IRS plans to exempt transactions made through credit and debit cards. A separate reporting requirement kicks in next year that will cover card transactions and help the IRS spot unreported payments made through those channels, “so there is no need for businesses to report them as well,” Shulman said. “Whenever a business uses a credit or debit card, there will be no new burden under the new law.”

Geez, Doug, I can’t tell you how much better I feel knowing that no matter when and where I swipe my business card I don’t have to report it because you already know about it.  What a relief!  Now that you can spot every single transaction I make, I’m sure the helpful agents at the IRS won’t hold it against me if I forget to include one of those payments on my tax return; right?

I mean, you’re trying to help small business owners by relentlessly monitoring all of our electronic transactions; aren’t you?  After all, you’ve got “broad leeway” in interpreting your new powers…

After watching and listening to the John Fund segment below, ask yourself when it becomes appropriate for many of the Democrats to be impeached for the way they’re systematically destroying the legislative process.

Yes, he CAN!  President Barack Obama managed to pull off a rare feat this week: convincing conservative Americans to voluntarily contribute more money than they owe to the government to help it fund a program.  The problem for the president is that thousands of Americans from all 50 states were sending the checks to Arizona to fight the Obama Justice Department’s legal challenge to SB 1070, the state’s new illegal immigration law.

Most of the donations were between $10 and $100; precisely the types of contributions that propelled Obama to victory while giving his campaign team reason to brag that his support was wide and potentially very deep.  Faced with a similar kind of widespread movement arrayed against him, will Obama see the nationwide backlash he’s loping towards before it’s too late? 

Do conservatives want him to?

Any reader familiar with Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia knows his professional reputation is etched with the cuts of (seemingly) a thousand harshly worded dissents.  In fact, they are so clear and compelling there’s a book called Scalia Dissents that catalogues some of his most pointed opinions.

Justice Clarence Thomas takes a different approach.  His most intriguing opinions usually come in the form of concurrences, agreeing with the conservative majority’s result, but not its process.  The most recent example was his unchallenged concurrence to the Chicago gun rights case (McDonald v. City of Chicago).  In it, the Court’s clearest thinking – and best writing – justice observed that “due process” of the 14^th Amendment guarantees nothing more than the process due a person before taking his life, liberty or property.

In other words, the government can deprive a person of any one or all three, it just needs to establish a scheme for doing so.

Thus, if it’s true that there are certain fundamental rights – like the 2^nd Amendment’s guarantee to carry a weapon for self-defense – that cannot be infringed by states and localities, conservatives and liberals will have to look somewhere other than the due process clause to protect them. Justice Thomas found the mechanism in the 14 Amendment’s privileges or immunities clause.  Not only does it fit with the intent of the amendment’s framers, it boasts the honor of not confusing the process of depriving rights with the substance of those rights.

All lawyers should strive to be so helpful.

I can think of no one better to ring in the Fourth of July than our 40th president, Ronald Wilson Reagan.  Happy Birthday, America.

Near the end of Deroy Murdock’s column discussing the insanity of the federal government’s upcoming incandescent light bulb ban in favor of a mercury-laden replacement comes the iconic gem above.

It’s a detailed “how-to” label design provided ever so helpfully by the Federal Trade Commission to guide bulb packagers.  I don’t know whether to be relieved that the bureaucracy is trying to be this helpful in its mandates or crestfallen that taxpayer money is going to finance this kind of project.

That’s the contention of Slate’s Steve Kornacki, who heard more than an aw-shucks defense of the late Senator Robert Byrd (D-WV) from the former president.  Byrd was a former Klansman who Clinton seems to think rode the changing tides of racial (in)tolerance to an unbroken 51 year Senate career.

But to hear Clinton tell it, Byrd’s Klan membership — and, more broadly, the ghastly record on racial issues that marked his first three decades in Congress — was more the product of a cynical career calculation. He knew it was wrong but figured it would help him get ahead, and then, when he finally did establish himself in Washington, he tried to make up for it by using his power for good. (A similar portrait of LBJ emerges in Robert Caro’s exhaustive biographical series.)

Watching Clinton today, I couldn’t help thinking that the former president, intentionally or not, was also talking about himself and his own approach to politics. Like LBJ, Clinton never really saw the point in making principled-but-unpopular stands in election years. The important thing, he seemed to believe, was to be in office and to make as many right decisions then as politics would allow.

Ah, the courage to be conniving.  Thanks to Kornacki’s insight, Americans can relearn a lesson they’d probably prefer to forget: When it comes to rationalizing bad behavior by politicians, Bill Clinton is the undisputed master.

While it may mark me a heretic to praise both an Englishman and a Liberal Democrat on the eve of the eve of the Fourth of July, I hope my recent paean to Everyday Americans evens the ledger.

I think it has to be said that Britain’s Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is the most fascinating politician in the English-speaking world.  Unlike his rival for that title in the United States, Clegg has already made a positive contribution to the politics of his country.

Yesterday, Clegg announced the launch of a government website called “YourFreedom.”  It’s part of Clegg’s commitment to radically reduce the size of government in Britain in a direct reversal of the Labour Party’s thirteen years of increasing control of nearly everything Brits do.

I’d tell you more about it, but Clegg does better than I ever could:

What was once mostly a little used device is now becoming the Democrat majority’s favorite way to pass legislation.  So-called “deem and pass” – the highly controversial maneuver that greased the skids for ObamaCare’s passage – was used late last night to pass a $1.1 TRILLION dollar budget.  The corruption of the legislative process was doubly dirty because the non-voted measure was added to an emergency war spending bill.

And just in case you’re wondering, this is the main operating budget for the federal government this year.  House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) sent up a smoke signal a few days ago that this kind of “budget enforcement resolution” might happen; especially since Democrats think American voters are too stupid to realize that “passing” a bill is the same as “voting on” a bill.

November can’t get here fast enough.

Never underestimate the speed and focus possible when the politicos in charge of government set their minds to getting something done.  Less than four days after the United States Supreme Court said that the U.S. Constitution’s 2^nd Amendment applied to states and municipalities like Chicago, the Second City’s aldermen rose to the challenge.

Unfortunately, they responded by deliberately passing a law to discriminate against gun owners to the maximum extent the Constitution might allow.  (Lost amid most of the coverage this week on the result in McDonald v. City of Chicago is that Justice Alito’s plurality opinion announces only that the 2^nd Amendment right to bear arms applies to Chicago.  It leaves to lower courts the careful work of figuring out which gun control laws are in fact unconstitutional.)

Let’s try a mind experiment.  Suppose a controversial Supreme Court opinion came down applying a universal right guaranteed in the Constitution against states and municipalities that had to do with, oh, let’s say…racial discrimination.  If the losing city in the decision responded in less than four days with an ordinance that deliberately tried to see how far it could still discriminate and pass constitutional muster, would that city council be lauded for its activism?

Maybe there’s a North Coast bias.

Before leaving office, then President George W. Bush allowed his State Department to take North Korea off the department’s list of “State Sponsors of Terror.”  Earlier this year, an international panel concluded that North Korea was responsible for firing on and sinking a South Korean warship, killing 46 sailors.  Today, President Barack Obama’s State Department said this:

State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said during a regular news conference that the sinking was the act of one state’s military against another’s and not an act of terrorism. Thus, it is not ground to put North Korea back on the U.S. terror blacklist.

“It is our judgment that the sinking of the Cheonan is not an act of international terrorism and by itself would not trigger placing North Korea on the U.S. state (sponsors) of terrorism list,” he said.

But Crowley assured head-scratching journalists that if North Korea complies better with “sponsoring” terrorism, the regime will be rewarded.

“We will not hesitate to take action if we have information that North Korea has repeatedly provided support for acts of terrorism,” Crowley added.

So, it sounds like there are two reasons for no relisting North Korea on the “Sponsors of Terror” list.  Both require quibbling with definitions.  First, when a sovereign nation’s military kills members of another sovereign nation’s military, it is not an act of terrorism.  Okay, but it is most certainly an act of war.  Is the Obama State Department implying that North Korea engaged in an act of war?  If so, it seems like there should be consequences for such an act above and beyond concluding that it doesn’t meet an overly technical definition of terrorism.  (Anyone think the South Korean sailors weren’t terrorized as they died?)

The second reason is that “sponsoring” terrorism apparently requires a sovereign nation to have “repeatedly provided support” for acts of terrorism.  But when did sponsoring something require “repeated” support?  Is the local car dealership not a sponsor of a Little League team unless it “repeatedly” sponsors them?  At this point, does “repeated” mean twice, or more than twice?  And is North Korea staying off the list because they did an act directly instead of just “sponsoring” it?  Just tell the North Korean government what it has to do to get back on that list, Mr. Crowley!

People are dying to know.

These days, it seems like war is only the extension of politics by other means; except that even the means are political.

Last week, President Barack Obama minimized conservative harrumphing after firing General Stanley McChrystal by appointing General David Petraeus as his replacement.  Though politically savvy, CFIF Senior Fellow Troy Senik correctly notes that reassigning Petraeus may be a pyrrhic victory since most of the conditions for successfully implementing his counterinsurgency strategy are missing.  When he gets in country, Petraeus’ biggest enemy won’t be the Taliban or a corrupt Karzai government; it’ll be trying to deliver a victory conservatives can stomach on a timetable and troop count demanded by liberals.

Heading back to Washington the war on rationality gets even rougher.  This morning four out of five Supreme Court right-of-center justices voted to extend the Second Amendment’s guarantee of an individual’s right to own a gun to the several states.  The result produces two effects.  First, complete government bans on gun possession are unconstitutional.  Second, eight of the current justices are now on record supporting a liberal theory of constitutional jurisprudence: Substantive Due Process.  Only Justice Clarence Thomas opted for a textually supported, historically rooted commonsense reading of the Fourteenth Amendment.  Since no one tried to dispute his reasoning, it can be assumed that everyone accepted his conclusion – they just didn’t like his premises.

The only element these storylines have in common is one man bearing quiet witness to the power of clear thinking.  While the political class may be unable to sustain a coherent framework for addressing pressing issues, it is a comfort knowing that at least some of those they appoint are capable – and willing – to tackle important matters with precision and daring.

Well, not actually.  But reading this list of queries makes one pine for a Senator Will on the Judiciary Committee when its members meet on Monday to begin Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s confirmation process.

Here’s a sampling:

• In Federalist 45, James Madison said: “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.”

What did the Father of the Constitution not understand about the Constitution? Are you a Madisonian? Does the doctrine of enumerated powers impose any limits on the federal government? Can you cite some things that, because of that doctrine, the federal government has no constitutional power to do?

• Is it constitutional for Arizona to devote state resources to enforcing federal immigration laws?

• Is there anything novel about the Arizona law empowering police officers to act on a “reasonable suspicion” that someone encountered in the performance of the officers’ duties might be in the country illegally?

• The Fifth Amendment mandates “just compensation” when government uses its eminent domain power to take private property for “public use.” In its 2005 Kelo decision, the court said government can seize property for the “public use” of transferring it to wealthier private interests who will pay more taxes. Do you agree?

• Should proper respect for precedent prevent the court from reversing Kelo? If so, was the court wrong to undo Plessy v. Ferguson’s 1896 ruling that segregating the races with “separate but equal” facilities is constitutional?

If you ever nursed the idea that taxation isn’t a form of punishment, President Barack Obama is here to disabuse you.  A day after Congress passed massive new regulations on the financial industry, the president today called for passage of a 10 year, $90 billion tax on banks and hedge funds to pay for the 2008 financial bailout.  To quote the president:

“We need to impose a fee on the banks that were the biggest beneficiaries of taxpayer assistance at the height of our financial crisis — so we can recover every dime of taxpayer money,” Obama said in his weekly radio and Internet address.

And yet the tax/fee/legalized theft won’t be levied on just “the biggest beneficiaries.”  It will hit every bank with assets over $50 billion and hedge funds with more than $10 billion.  That means even the financial institutions that have already repaid their bailout debts will be hit with the 0.15% increase in the cost of doing business.

But remember: businesses don’t pay taxes (or fees) – people do.  Keep that in mind when your monthly service fees jump through the roof.