Freedom Line Blog

In my column just up today at this site, one item I mention is the administration’s hijacking of the Common Core educational standards. Well, here’s a WSJ video interview just out, with Lindsey Burke of the Heritage Foundation, that discusses the issue at length. Well worth viewing.

Over the weekend at NRO, Andy McCarthy took a verbal Bowie knife to the gut of Attorney General Eric Holder — and deservedly so. I have written about Holder’s thuggish reign here numerous times before. Here’s McCarthy, or part of McCarthy’s summary, of the lawlessness and racialism of Holder:

Eric Holder rode in on the stench of Marc Rich and will ride out on the stench of Al Sharpton. He’s spent the three-plus years in between branding Americans as “cowards” on race matters; investigating the CIA; coddling CAIR and the New Black Panthers; green-lighting voter fraud; swaddling Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in the Bill of Rights; and converting the Justice Department into a full-employment program for the Lawyer Left and its Gitmo boutique. But now he’s hit the big time.

This week, our esteemed attorney general canoodled with Reverend Al at the annual convention of the “National Action Network,” home base for the infamous huckster (that would be Sharpton, not Holder — sorry for any confusion). It is difficult to imagine another attorney general in American history sucking up to such a race-mongering charlatan.

Do read the whole thing. This man is a hater. He has no business being in law enforcement.

I blog about this at the American Spectator today: Conrad Black has a great essay against out-of-control federal prosecutors, in which he highlights a case I wrote about a few weeks ago.  (Sorry for the internal links, but they are well worth following. Please do check out my post and the Black column.)

What I want to note here is that these stories are a continuing manifestation of a problem of overcriminalization and rogue prosecution that I have written about here at CFIF several times. See here and here.  This is an important issue. It’s especially important when lawless people, like those now in charge, run the top ranks of the Justice Department.

Today at The American Spectator I blogged at length about how Eric Holder’s Justice Department uses flagrant racial double-standards in enforcing the law.

The same habit infects the news media, and apparently some police departments as well: If the perpetrators are black, it is A) not news, and B) sometimes not investigated, much less prosecuted. J. Christian Adams has a new example here. In this case, a motorist was targeted by a black biker gang. Result: Nada. Adams writes:

Boyd tells me he contacted the crime beat reporter at the Birmingham News and told her about his story. “Not newsworthy,” was her response. Boyd also tells me that law enforcement officials told Boyd they “don’t mess with the Outcasts of Alabama.”  Comforting.

Had the attackers been the Confederate Hammerskins, and the victim been different, we all know (at a minimum) the Birmingham News would have covered the story. DOJ lawyers would be checking on the contract air carrier from Washington to Birmingham. I’ll wager even Soledad O’Brien would have spent at least one show on the attack.

It is precarious when the law, and attention from the media, are so out of balance. When state law enforcement officials flinch from prosecutions of the black Outcasts of Alabama, and national media organizations ignore some violence while elevating other incidents to month-long stories, the rule of law suffers.

Shame on the Birmingham News. Shame on any police who don’t follow up on such cases. Shame on all of us for letting race affect how we deal with important issues and events, in any direction.

Along with reformist former state official Bradley Byrne, I explained yesterday at the Mobile Press-Register how Medicaid is taking over the entire Alabama General Fund budget, and how ObamaCare makes it worse. This might have some bearing, tangentially, to the Supreme Court case on ObamaCare (the part argued last, about states being commandeered into ObamaCare Medicaid expansions).

Federal and state governments share Medicaid costs, but Obamacare by design will add millions nationwide to state Medicaid rolls while picking up the added costs only in the short term….

Before the $81 million error was discovered and before Gov. Bentley was forced to prorate the state’s budget (making across-the-board cuts due to revenue shortfalls), and even without full implementation of Obamacare, the state General Fund’s budget for Medicaid had doubled in just two years. To put this into perspective: During this two-year period, our court system was cut by a third, our criminal prosecutors’ offices by 14 percent, our Forestry Commission by 17 percent and our economic development by 5 percent. Medicaid went from consuming 20 percent of our General Fund budget two years ago to 36.5 percent this year. It is on track to consume the entire General Fund by decade’s end.

This is a big deal. And Alabama is hardly unique. It adds practical weight to the states’ arguments that they are being coerced into something they can’t afford.

All the candidates have been victimized, and it’s really bad for republican (small ‘r’) government. I explain it here.

After reading the transcript of today’s oral argument, I thought the justices seemed extremely chilly to the idea that the Anti-Injunction Act should bar the court’s consideration of the ObamaCare “mandate” case until the mandate actually goes into effect — thus making my most recent post dead wrong (if my interpretation today is right), thank goodness. A few months ago, I had dismissed the AIA argument; last week, however, I wrote that Anthony Kennedy might find it a convenient dodge. But after today, it doesn’t look like anywhere near a court majority will do so. Judging from Lyle Denniston’s summary at Scotusblog, which I read after forming my opinion on the justices’ behavior today, it seems as if that eminent court-watcher agrees.

So, if this interpretation is correct, then we do get to move on to the most important question, which is the question on the merits of whether the mandate itself is constitutional. There are three different sorts of challenges to its constitutionality; the ultimate disposition of these challenges is very much up in the air — and there are millions of Americans who care deeply enough about this case that the tension of waiting for the court’s decision will be decidedly uncomfortable.

For what it’s worth, my prediction on the ultimate outcome of the ObamaCare case this term, even before oral arguments are made this coming Monday, is as follows:

Anthony Kennedy accepts his former law clerk Brett Kavanaugh’s ludicrous argument that the Anti-Injunction Act bars court jurisdiction on Obamacare until the mandate and its penalty are actually implemented. He does so while dropping rather clear, even if implicit rather than explicit, hints in his bare-majority opinion that if the case were able to reach the merits, he would find the mandate unconstitutional.

It might even be some sort of plurality opinion.

I know this contradicts my prediction from several months ago right here. There, I dismissed the argument on the Anti-Injunction Act. I still think it is eminently dismissable. But that doesn’t mean Kennedy won’t latch onto it. It provides a handy way to punt the issue away, which is why I think Kavanaugh provided it, knowing his former boss as well as he does. Kavanaugh’s logic was extremely tortured… but Kennedy delights in tortured logic. Alas.

Bobby Jindal and school reform both won big today in the LA House of Reps.

This bears celebrating, as it is expected to pass the state Senate as well. Already, the vast bulk of New Orleans public schools are charters; this bill would spread various forms of choice statewide. Charters in New Orleans post-Katrina have been remarkably successful.

Back in January, attorney Robert Smith wrote a great piece at The American Spectator explaining the importance of Sackett v. EPA, in which the federal agency told landowners they didn’t even have the right to gain access to federal courts to challenge EPA’s administrative ruling that the Sacketts’ property was a “wetland” (which it manifestly is not). Today, the Supreme Court came down like a ton of bricks on the EPA and its Obama overlords. It didn’t just rule in favor of the landowners (thus sending the case back to lower courts to be heard on the merits); it did so without dissent. As in the Hosanna-Tabor case implicating religious liberty, even the four liberal justices ruled against the administration.

This is important. It means that property rights still matter, despite the manifold attempted deprivations thereof by the Obama administration.

Thank goodness.

On Saturday, Rick Santorum is favored to win, albeit narrowly, in the Louisiana primary. But the actual delegate allocation from Louisiana could range from a wide Santorum win to, oddly enough, a significant victory for Ron Paul who barely is even bothering to campaign in the primary.

How could this be?

Well, here’s how it works: The primary will be determinative for only 20 of Louisiana’s 46 delegates. Those 20 will be allocated in accord with the proportion of the vote won by each presidential candidate — assuming that a candidate gets at least 25 percent of the vote. ANY votes for all candidates who do not cross that 25 percent threshold will be added together and their proportion of the whole will be allocated as UNCOMMITTED delegates. Three other officially uncommitted delegates will be the state’s members of the Republican National Committee.’

All other delegates, all 23 of them, will be chosen at a state convention not held until June 2. Moreover, the delegates to that state convention will not be chosen in any way, shape or form as a result of the primary this Saturday. Instead, they will be chosen at caucuses to be held throughout the state on April 28. So it is perfectly feasible, for instance, for Ron Paul to get less then 10% of the vote on Saturday, and thus to win not a single one of the 20 delegates chosen this week, but still to win the vast majority of the other 23 delegates on June 2.

Word on the ground is that Paul is extremely well organized for the caucuses. It might be that the only way to defeat him is for the Santorum and Gingrich organizations to join forces, at least in tactical alliances if not formally, at each of the caucuses.

But here’s the deal: If Santorum wins a narrow victory on Saturday and gains, say, 6 delegates to 5 each for Gingrich and Romney… but Gingrich later drops out and his Louisiana campaign organization folds into Santorum’s, then the caucus rules (which are too complicated to explain here) are such that Santorum could come close to sweeping the other 23 delegates on June 2. (Obviously, the same would be true if Gingrich and Romney joined forces, but that isn’t going to happen.)

This is another example of how Gingrich’s presence in the race directly hurts Santorum. Everybody has been calling Louisiana a “proportional allocation state,” giving the impression that even a Santorum popular vote win would not do much to bolster his overall national delegate position. But because slim majorities or even pluralities can have outsized influence in caucuses, the truth is that half of all the Louisiana delegates are very much up for grabs and could swing very strongly in one direction or another. Gingrich’s continued presence in the race could swing almost all of those 23 to Paul; his withdrawal from the race would swing them mostly to Santorum. And since Paul is thought, in the long run, to be in far more friendly to Romney, those delegates in the end would probably be likely to move Romney’s way in a contested convention.

It’s all highly convoluted. But the arithmetic is undeniable: Gingrich’s presence hurts Santorum. This is not to say whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; it’s just a straight analysis of how the rules combined with the arithmetic combined with the situation on the ground are likely to play out.

I’m not much good for keeping up with social media and modern technology, but I’m now up on Twitter for anyone who wants to follow. I’m at @QuinHillyer. And if you follow, please re-tweet me often!

Thanks.

Quin

Elsewhere tomorrow I’ll have an extensive analysis explaining why Newt Gingrich’s argument on delegate arithmetic doesn’t hold water. Here, though, just as pure math, not as advocacy, let me note that Mitt Romney’s message today that he won “more delegates” than anybody else last night (once he counts Samoa and Hawaii) is not really relevant.

For Romney to win the nomination, he needs to win 50% of all delegates. Right now he’s at about 53% of those awarded so far. But the key thing is, last night he didn’t win anywhere near 50%. Instead, he won just over a third of them. He needs to win something like 48% of all the remaining delegates to take the nomination. If he keeps winning less than that 48%, then it doesn’t matter if he earns a small plurality in a multi-man race; all that matters is that he is falling behind the pace he needs for a first-ballot convention victory.

By general agreement, if Romney doesn’t win on the first ballot, he’s almost assuredly toast, because he will be seen as such damaged goods (having blown every advantage) that the party would coalesce behind somebody else. Again, that’s just an assumption, not advocacy. But if the goal is a first ballot victory, then yesterday was a big setback, even after factoring in Samoa and Hawaii.

(By the way, the numbers above are approximate, for illustrative purposes. I know they aren’t precisely the numbers, but as the real numbers are a moving target anyway, I just went from memory of the summaries I’ve read earlier today.)

Unlike Rick Santorum, Newt Gingrich doesn’t do much to alter his basic speech from event to event — but, judging from the comments all around me, he still manages to hold the interest of, or even entertain, his audience.

Speaking last night at an antique car museum in the heart of the (white) blue-collar area of Mobile, AL, Gingrich used the backdrop to make the obvious point that gasoline sure was a lot cheaper back when those cars were on the road. He then moved into what already is becoming a familiar, but instructive, litany of Barack Obama’s transgressions against reasonable energy policies — including Gingrich’s favorite new target, namely Obama’s recent embrace of yet another new form of bio-fuel:

“I don’t think [the museum owner] has a single algae car!”

Gingrich told a humorous story about when oil shortages in the late 1970s briefly created rationing systems in which drivers could buy gasoline only on certain days, depending on whether their license plates ended with an odd number or an even one. He said his friend  (and mine) David Bossie, now president of Citizens United, remembers being 13 years old and having his father send him out each morning with a screwdriver to switch the license plates back and forth between the family’s two cars, depending on which one needed gas.

Gingrich said conservatives and liberals naturally react differently to “laws so dumb that fathers enlist 13-year-old sons to break them” (that’s actually a very close paraphrase; I didn’t get the exact words of the quote). Conservatives, Gingrich said, would naturally want to get rid of such a dumb regulation. Liberals, he said, would insist we need to hire some license-plate police.

Gingrich moved on from energy to foreign affairs long enough to say that Defense Secretary Leon Panetta “should resign tonight” if Panetta really believed that a U.S. administration need more “permission” from foreign powers than from the U.S. Congress when deciding whether to use American force.

He blasted Barack Obama for having, in the same fortnight, apologized to Afghanis for mistaken Koran burnings even after Afghanis killed innocent U.S. troops — in other words, showing outsized deference to radical Islam — at the same time he was moving ahead with violations of religious liberties (especially of Christians) within the United States via his mandate on insurance coverage of abortifacients. He accused the administration of being “disrespectful and bigoted… about [against] Christianity…. We are tired of you denigrating our culture, our religion, our beliefs.”

Back to energy, Gingrich went on at great length (as Santorum had earlier in the day in Mobile) about the vast new energy supplies found in North Dakota — and he noted that Barack Obama in his recent press conference spent lots of words denigrating “drilling” as a solution for energy problems, only to shortly thereafter  claim credit for great new supplies of natural gas. But, asked Gingrich rhetorically, how does Obama think the new gas was found?

The answer, of course, is drilling — in areas that would never even have been explored had Obama succeeded in an attempt he made as a senator in 1987 to end the U.S. Geological Survey’s task of keeping and developing an inventory of fossil fuel potential. “This is a case study,” said Gingrich, “in cognitive dissonance.” (AND, whispered my wife, “cognitive dissidence too!”)

Finally, Gingrich moved onto the political outlook for his presidential campaign. He belittled Mitt Romney’s sales pitch about the importance of a businessman’s managerial ability in the Oval Office. “You don’t need a manger in the White House,” said Gingrich. “You need a visionary leader…. As it says in Proverbs, “without vision, the people perish.”

At the public dinner in Mobile Thursday night for the Alabama Policy Institute, a terrific state think tank, Rick Santorum gave a cogent and thoughtful explanation of his “JFK/throw up” line that got him in so much trouble last week when talking about separation of church and state. A woman sitting next to me had voted for Obama in 2008, but she said she thought he handled the question very very well. He self-deprecatingly and with good comedic timing said “the language that I used was, at a minimum [HIS emphasis], inarticulate.” He said his overstatement came from “years of frustration” with the establishment’s enshrinement of “absolution separation of church and state” (in Kennedy’s formulation) as sacrosanct. That said, he said he agreed with much of what JFK said in his famous Houston speech on the subject in 190, that it “resonated very well with me.” But he said JFK’s “absolute” language amounted to “a reversal of the concept” originally planned by the founders. They meant not to protect the state from the church, but to ensure the free exercise of all religions and no religions in the public square. Madison said that giving everybody an equal chance to be heard in the public square, to freely exercise their consciences, was “the perfect remedy” for “how we shall live together. Kennedy, he said, “went too far” by saying he would not even take advice from people that was rooted in faith.

On other topics, Santorum repeatedly blasted federal interference with local education (and thus very memorably blasted the federal hijacking of the Common Core state standards initiative); he pledged to increase trade and improve relations within the Western Hemisphere, promote manufacturing,and  “put constraints on the judiciary that thinks it is pre-eminent.” On the latter, he rejected the idea that we have a “living Constitution” :  “Living and breathing are done by people, not by documents.”

He spoke at length about his signature achievement in the 1990s in leading the fight to reform the Aid to Families with Dependent Children welfare program. Noting that the reforms saved a on of money for the feds and significantly reduced the welfare rolls, he insitsed that those two achievements alone do not define success. “Poverty rates fell to the lowest levels in history. A drastic change occurred not just in the budget of Washington but also in the lives of millions of Americans.”

Other topics: Also on judges, he spoke of having worked really hard with Bama’s Sen. Jeff Sessions to help confirm controversial (but superb) Judge Bill Pryor to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, and spoke again of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment to the Constitution that includes a spending limit.

But all of that came in Q and A with a local panel. His 15-minute speech focused very strongly on the overarching theme of liberty. All those at my table said he spoke eloqently on the subject. Alas, my notes cannot do justice to his speech, because I was not scribbling fast enough to capture the best sense of it. One of the best lines: “A limited government… means unlimited opportunity for everybody in our society.”

There: Those were the highlights.

Rick Santorum spoke in Mobile tonight at a dinner for the Alabama Policy Institute. I got a private five-minute interview with him before the dinner. Here’s how it went:

Q: “This is narrowcasting. You look at the [exit] polls and you are doing great among some groups but you are not doing well among two groups: single women, and people making over $100,000 and a lot of them are just over 100 thou, small businesses, not manufacturers but retailers. What do these groups not understand about your economic message that you would like them to understand?”

Santorum: “My economic message is, we’re cutting corporate taxes for everybody to a flat tax at 17 /12 percent, we allow complete expensing — a very very simple and fair tax code that allows the small business guy and the large guy to pay the same rate at the same simple tax form that they have to fill out. That to me is about as pro-small business — and the same thing is, we cut the top rate [on individuals] to 28 percent so those who are not corporations but file under the individual returns will have a tax rate of just 28 percent. Make it a very very simple tax code as far as deductions are concerned, just five deducations. Again: simplicity, predictability, all of those things are very growth-oriented and with lower rates. I’ve also pledged in this campaign that I’ll repeal every single one of Barack Obama’s high-cost regulations that cost over $100 million…..

[segue: crosstalk about single women and “media narratives”]…

I am about equal opportunity. If we give people the opportunity to rise in society, then people will be able to rise by themselves. We’re talking about lower taxes and less regulation and a society that is nurturing. And people say, ‘well, you’re just for families,’ well, families are important to our country, families are important so we have stable communities where moms and dads are together raising children — and that’s a good place for people to live, not just those families but single women and others.

—-

Q: “The second narrowcast question is, is there anything that people on the Gulf Coast might want to know about you, any national interest you’ve perhaps that might have particular local relevance to people in Mississippi and Alabama?”

Santorum: “Energy is obviously a very important issue. We believe the Gulf is an area that has tremendous promise, underutilized, all sorts of opportunities out there for expansion of oil and gas exploration; and the administration has not opened up and has not supported  opening it up. And that’s opportunity for jobs, here along the Gulf Coast.

You know, I think one of the other things that I know is important here is national security. And I’m the only person in this race who has said I will not cut the Defense Department. Flat-out, absolutely no way. In fact, it’s the only department I pledge will have an increase in spending, because we want to make sure that the benefits and salaries for men and women in uniform continue to go up as they should be with inflation…. and assuming no nuclear Iran, we are looking at a defense budget that is going to go up, modestly, and we’ll invest in making sure we will be the best trained, best equipped, and the best led military in the world — by far.”

Daniel Henninger has an absolutely superb column today at the Wall Street Journal about how Rick Santorum finally is hitting consistently on, and doing well with, a central theme of freedom. As readers here know, this (freedom, not Santorum’s embrace of it) has been my theme as well. As in:

If ObamaCare is allowed to stand, Cuccinelli said, “The government’s power to intrude on our lives for our ‘own good’ will be virtually unlimited. Some may be willing to put up with that now, when the government is doing something they like. But what happens when it starts to impose things on them that they don’t like? Then, it will be too late…. In 1788, James Madison spoke of the need for the Constitution. He said, ‘There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power, than by violent and sudden usurpations.’ Yes, parts of our health care system need to be fixed…. But there are better solutions than giving up our freedom.”

Actually, way back in 2007 I was arguing the same thing — and even back then, it was the argument against the individual mandate that spurred my “theme is freedom” insistence:

The other day on MSNBC, the inimitable Tucker Carlson was being berated by some guests who were incredulous that he could even think to oppose the health-insurance mandates that are central to the newest version of Hillarycare.

At first sounding almost apologetic, but by the last word sounding more firm about it, Carlson mounted what actually is the perfect defense. “Look,” he said, “I just happen to believe in freedom.”

Ah, yes, freedom. At my Episcopal grade school, we were accustomed to singing a guitar hymn in chapel whose refrain included these lines: “The thought it was so dear to me, the daring possibility, of freedom. (Oh, oh, freedom. Oh, oh, freedom. Oh, oh, oh.)”

Conservatives would do well to remember that freedom is indeed a daring possibility, and our best defense against almost every big-government, nanny-state, Washington-knows-best scheme of the left. In one sense, it is the answer to all questions, the solution to almost all problems of statecraft, the ideal to which all other civic ideals must bow.

All too often, we conservatives get lost in the weeds of complex arguments and wonkish debates — when all we really need to remember, both to better ground ourselves philosophically and to win political debates in the minds of the American voters, is that the theme is freedom.

I know nothing about this guy running for Senate from Rhode Island, and I don’t care. This is an absolutely fantastic ad! You gotta watch it! (Five-year-olds of the world, unite!)

Great piece today by the unfairly fired former IG of the Corporation for National and Community Service, Gerald Walpin, and his former top aide Jack Park, also a longtime former assistant Attorney General in Alabama. Walpin and Park explain why it is a very suspicious thing, and against the public’s interest, that the Obama administration is hobbling Inspectors General throughout many parts of the federal government. This should be a bigger issue than it has been so far. It’s important.

At The American Spectator, I posted this report about what a sleepy election day this is in Virginia. One further thought: Virginia is being ignored in this election. No candidate visits. No national press spending money in the VA hinterlands. Thus, Virginia suffers from its absurdly high hurdles against candidate qualifying. Virginia and other states should learn a lesson from this: Rigging the game in favor of the establishment is counterproductive.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is absolutely right to vow to try to convince the VA legislature to change the law for the future. The hurdles against candidacy should not be so high, and perhaps write-in balloting ought to be allowed……