Freedom Line Blog

As I noted here at CFIF when she first became chair of the Democratic National Committee, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) is to demagoguery what Harold Stassen was to presidential campaigns: an avid, enthusiastic participant in the game, but not very effective at it.  Yuval Levin yesterday at NRO blitzed her for a recent example of her barely skilled mendacity.  The same day, at Michelle Malkin’s site, Doug Powers made mincemeat of another of the congresswoman’s lamest hits.

Stay tuned for more of the same from this left-wing prevaricator.  Because she be illin all the time, except instead of not being able to walk straight, she just can’t talk straight.

In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting yesterday, the Supreme Court obliterated the Obama administration’s ludicrous position (with apologies to the Chamber of Commerce, which lost its usually perspicacious way on this one) that a state may not withdraw a business license from employers who knowingly or intentionally hire illegal aliens. The whole controversy was nonsense.  The Chamber and Obama had argued that federal law prohibits states from sanctioning employers in that way, even though — get this — the law they cited explicitly allowed states to enforce rules against hiring illegals through “licensing and similar laws.”  In pursuit of its extremely pro-immigration ideological agenda — which will be put to an even bigger and more politically explosive test in another Arizona case next year — the administration argued that the exact words of a federal statute should be ignored in order to read that statute as preventing state action meant to dovetail with and complement, not undermine, those very same federal immigration laws. Writing for a 5-3 majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that no ambiguity exists at all: “the plain wording of the clause,” “on its face,” supported Arizona’s contention that it was operating entirely within the law.

As Ed Whelan noted at Bench Memos, Roberts got in a very sharp dig at the dissenting justices (and at the administration) by noting that two dissents read the clauses at issue in completely different ways. His footnote is worth quoting, with my bolded emphasis added:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR creates an entirely new statutory requirement: She would allow States to impose sanctions through“licensing and similar laws” only after a federal adjudication. Such a requirement is found nowhere in the text, and JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR does not even attempt to link it to a specific textual provision. It should not be surprising that the two dissents have sharply different views on how to read the statute. That is the sort of thing that can happen when statutory analysis is so untethered from the text.

As The Washington Times argued last December, a decision in favor of Arizona in this case means that in the more explosive case next year, “the administration’s argument… falls apart.” The Washington Times’ conclusion also stands: “States retain certain authority unless Congress expressly says otherwise. Arizona is right to insist that the Constitution is meant to limit federal power.”

Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation notes some solace for businesses worried that they could lose their licenses over a mere mistake in hiring, rather than willful or flagrant violation of immigration laws: “As the Chief Justice pointed out, there is no sanction against employers for merely hiring unauthorized workers. The state law’s sanctions are only triggered if an employer hires such a worker intentionally, knowing that they are not authorized to be employed. An employer acting in good faith need not have any fear of being sanctioned, especially since they enjoy a safe harbor from liability if they use the federal E-Verify system to check on prospective employees.”

In a different piece, this from the Washington Examiner, von Spakovsky gives evidence of the practical reasons that the states’ authority in this regard is so important: The administration is flat-out refusing to enforce immigration laws on its own.

One can be moderate on the overall subject of immigration, supporting streamlined processes for legal immigration, while insisting that the law actually be enforced against those who break it. Culturally, too, legal immigrants (it stands to reason) are more willing to acclimate to American society and to our language, more willing to become more fully Americans as earlier waves of immigrants did; illegals tend (by my observation) to be more separatist, less assimilated, and even resentful. Is it too much to ask for the federal government to allow states to take reasonable steps to guard against the worst abuses from waves of unassimilated aliens, if the feds themselves won’t do it?

My friend Jack Park, lawyer extraordinaire who has worked for the Alabama Attorney General’s office, for a federal IG’s office, and at the Heritage Foundation, among other places, explored what would likely happen if, down the line, horrible judicial nominee Goodwin Liu — blocked this week via filibuster (i.e. a “no” vote on cloture) — were to receive a straight up-or-down vote on the Senate floor. The nomination is so problematic — i.e., Liu is so radical, that Park thinks he might go down anyway. Here’s what Park writes:

With all of the focus on Democrats’ inability to cut off debate on the nomination of Goodwin Liu for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one wonders whether this very controversial nomination might have gone down to defeat on the merits if it had come to that.  It would certainly have been close.

The vote on cloture was 52-43, with those opposed including Senator Ben Nelson (D-NE), a very likely “No” vote on final passage as well.  Next, three Republicans (Hutchison, Moran, and Vitter) did not vote; count them for 46.  While Senator Hatch may have voted “Present” consistently with his views on the propriety of judicial filibusters, he would certainly have voted “No,” so, count him for 47.  Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) voted to cut off debate, but the Wall Street Journal reported that he would vote “No” on the merits; he makes 48.  Senator Murkowski (R-AK) was the only Republican who voted not to cut off debate; one would hope that she would not vote to give Liu any say over Alaska; count her as 49.

Senator Reid would have had to keep all of the remaining sheep in line but one in line.  If the vote came down 50-50, Vice President Biden could have broken the tie, but he would have had to have been somewhere other than an important beer summit or at a foreign leader’s funeral.

Still, Senator Reid would have to hold folks like Senators Baucus and Tester, both Democrats from Montana, which lies in the Circuit, in line.  It is one thing to inflict a nominee like Liu on another Circuit, but, as with Murkowski, it is another to give him a lifetime appointment in yours, where you have to answer to the voters.  Baucus did not vote on cloture, and Tester is up in 2012.  Plus, Senators McCaskill (D-MO) and Bill Nelson (D-FL) are both up in 2012.  Either of them or Tester might well have wandered off.

Finally, even if Senator Landrieu (D-LA) is not up for reelection until 2014, she would have to be careful about her voting record.

In short, it would have been very close.

The more I think about it, the more it rankles me that President Obama wants to extend FBI Director Robert Mueller’s term by two years, and that the opposition to this proposal has been so muted. On principle, the extension is an awful idea (even apart from the bitterness of longtime agents, as reported in today’s WashPost), and principle should not take a back seat to admiration for the person of Mueller.

Here’s the deal: By almost all accounts, Mueller has done a superb job as FBI Director. Because of that record, Congress seems to be assessing Obama’s extension request in terms of whether Mueller should be kept on.  But that’s the wrong standard. The question should be not about Mueller, but about whether Mueller should be kept on. Or, better, whether an FBI Director — any FBI director — should be kept on beyond the statutory ten-year limit. So far, only Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican, has spoken up from the Hill to raise this point. Ever so hesitantly, Grassley said the re-appointment might set a “risky precedent.”

Might? Try “would.” There are excellent reasons why, by law, the FBI chief is limited to a single, ten-year term. Those reasons are laid out in this statement by the ACLU (yeah, I know, an oft-suspect organization). Take out the tendentious second paragraph (except the first sentence of it, which is fine) of the official statement, and I agree with every word of what remains. This is the key point:

It was for good reason that Congress chose to limit the tenure of future FBI directors. By setting a 10-year term, Congress sought to protect both the FBI director from undue political influence and our democratic institutions from allowing an unelected official to hold the power to examine the lives of Americans, including political leaders, for longer than is appropriate.

The rampant abuses under J. Edgar Hoover showed the dangers of letting one, unelected man gain such a major foothold in a position with great power, and with so much public acclaim, that elected officials are loathe to dismiss him. Yes, of course there is oversight authority to which the FBI Director answers in theory, but congressional oversight can be notoriously weak and executive oversight can be obviated by the very fact that the director serves the executive and can therefore use his own accumulated power to the executive’s political (or other) benefit.

It made perfect sense to create a term of up to ten years for the director, so he would be semi-immune to the politics that comes with Cabinet-level appointments by every incoming president.  It made even more sense to limit that term, by law, so that the separation from democratic accountability would not be impregnable.

The CNN story linked above ends with the statement that Mueller is “on the cusp of being officially irreplaceable.” That statement should give every Madisonian cringe. One of the understandings that underlie a republic is that no man is irreplaceable. It is not merely a cliché to say that we are a nation of laws and not of men. Any time any man, even a Mueller or a Petraeus or a MacArthur,  becomes seen as irreplaceable, the dam against over-accumulation of executive power is broken. (I myself don’t worry much about accumulation of legislative power, because by its very nature it is dispersed and because frequency of elections allows the public to weigh in.)

Conservatives who do not object to Obama’s request for a new law giving him this “one-time” term extension for Mueller are failing to remember their basic principles.

Finally, on a practical level, allowing a potentially re-elected Obama to appoint the new FBI director right after his re-election could shift a huge power to a president newly unmoored from electoral pressures Do we really want to give Obama such carte blanche? Forcing Obama to appoint a new director this year, as scheduled, would ensure that he appoint somebody moderate and competent because he and Congress both would know that the public that will vote on their own campaigns just over a year later would punish anybody who had okayed the appointment of a political hack.

Mueller has been a wonderful director. Surely, though, he’s not the only person, among 300 million Americans, who can do the job.

To follow up on yesterday’s post, it now appears there is at least a reasonable chance that Republicans actually will muster the strength to block horrendous judicial nominee Goodwin Liu. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has been leading the charge, and he expressed optimism this morning. Here’s what Leader McConnell said to Jed Babbin a few mins ago on Laura Ingraham’s show: “This is a very bad nominee… I’m optimistic that we will be able to defeat the nomination.” In this morning’s Washington Post, “[ranking Judiciary Committe Republican Chuck] Grassley predicted that he had the votes lined up to block Liu from being confirmed.” Obviously it’s a bad idea to count chickens before they’ve hatched, but as McConnell said, there are reasons for optimism.

Meanwhile, even South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsey Graham, who has been annoyingly over-solicitous of Democrats for many years of judicial battles, sent a “Dear Republican Colleague” letter to all his fellow Senate Republicans. I’ll quote extensively from it:

“Only in the most extraordinary of circumstances, such as when a judicial nominee is ethically compromised or displays a fundamental disregard for the constitutional role of a judge, should the Senate prohibit them from office. Unfortunately, Goodwin Liu falls short of the minimum threshold for confirmation to the federal bench. I write today to urge a ‘no’ vote on the motion to invoke cloture on the nomination of Professor Goodwin Liu to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals…. The reasons for voting against cloture on Professor Liu’s nomination are undoubtedly ‘special and strong.’ Through his writings, Professor Liu has expressed preference for an extreme judicial philosophy that relies on a judge’s personal and subjective beliefs, not precedent and case law…. Unlike other nominees who have compiled lengthy records in the judiciary or government service, Professor Liu has spent the vast majority of his career in academia. That’s not disqualifying, of course, but his lack of broader experience fails to demonstrate an ability to uphold and respect the law in the face of personal disagreement.”

Graham then went on to provide a sample of Liu’s outrageous comments, and also blasted Liu for engaging in a “vicious personal attack on Justice Alito at the Judiciary Committee hearing considering his nomination to the Supreme Court.” Finally, Graham concluded: “Professor Liu has advocated for a staggeringly subjective and malleable judicial philosophy. Rather than deciding cases on the basis of law established by the political branches and past precedent, Professor Liu’s philosophy substitutes the role of the Judiciary for that of the Legislative and Executive branches of government. To Professor Liu, a federal judge may be less an impartial arbiter of justice than an advocate engaging in policymaking from the bench.”

Wow. That’s strong stuff. Coming from Graham, it may well convince wavering Republicans to stand strong against the nomination.

Curt Levey at the Committee for Justice has the story. Judicial nominee Goodwin Liu, radical and dishonest,  is due for a Senate vote tomorrow. Levey suggests that a filibuster might be in order.

I write here neither to advocate for, nor argue against, a permanent filibuster to kill this nomination. Others can decide whether Liu’s profound drawbacks amount to an “extraordinary circumstance” that allows a permanent filibuster under the terms of that sop to squishes, the Gang of Fourteen. Instead, I write merely to remind people that there is another option that isn’t all-or-nothing. I wrote about it back when Elena Kagan was being considered for the Supreme Court. The other possibility is that of a temporary, time-limited filibuster (or series of cloture votes — perhaps two or three) designed to draw public attention to the matter and actually encourage lengthy debate in that light.

What I wrote in terms of a Supreme Court nomination was this:

After demanding a full, fair hearing, they should in turn allow a full, fair vote. But the latter should depend upon the former, the public hearing and response before the full and oh-so-final vote…. Republicans showed in 2002 and 2004 that when judges become campaign issues, Republicans win. Despite GOP hand-wringing, evidence to the contrary is utterly nonexistent. Polls show that the public supports originalist approaches to judging rather than the “evolving Constitution” model. Polls show that the public, by outright majorities or solid pluralities, also approves of the usual policy results that happen to emerge from originalist procedures: against partial birth abortion, against government seizure of private property for other private use, against judicially imposed homosexual marriage, against handgun bans, against outright bans on all religious references in the public square, against race-based admissions and job promotions, against an ever-expansive federal government at the expense of the states, against bureaucratic overreach, and especially against coddling of criminals because of purely innocent procedural errors by police. These are issues Americans care about, and they are issues conservatives will always win on.

Judicial nominations are important.  One way or another, they merit significant public attention.

Yesterday I blogged about new developments in the Ecuadorian environmental case against California-based Chevron Corp., and said I would have a second part of the blog ready today. Well, here it is.

Earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has been giving fits to the plaintiffs’ lawyers who have so, uh, creatively pursued this case for years, refused plaintiffs’ demands that he recuse himself. What was particularly devastating in his answer was the fact that the Second Circuit Court of Appeals had praised to high heaven his handling of the case:

“[I]n light of the complexity of this case and the urgency of its adjudication, we wish to note the exemplary manner in which the able District Judge has discharged his duties,” the appellate court stated. “There is no question but that all concerned, not least this Court, are well served by the careful and comprehensive analysis which is evident repeatedly throughout the many memoranda and orders of the District Court, many of which were produced with rapidity in the context of the District Court’s daunting schedule in this and other important cases.”

That’s about as effusive an endorsement from a higher court as I’ve ever seen. It’s also, effectively, a total smack-down (in advance) of the plaintiffs’ recusal motion.

Also:

Kaplan also denied ever having “urged” Chevron to file racketeering suit.
     The Ecuadoreans contend that Kaplan made the suggestion by asking during a hearing: “Now, do the phrases Hobbs Act, extortion, RICO, have any bearing?”
     But Kaplan said he posed the question after Chevron made its accusations known.
     “Chevron had laid out its RICO, Hobbs Act and extortion claims well before the motion to quash was argued and well before the Court even posed its question,” Kaplan wrote. “In short, the chronology is flatly inconsistent with the LAP Representatives’ contention.”

What has gone unsaid in all this is the irony (or hypocrisy) in the plaintiffs’ whining about supposed “bias” against them in U.S. courts, where the alleged bias involved no allegations of financial wrongdoing by the judge and no other conflict of interest — in other words, no real ethical conflict, but merely a glorified difference of opinion — while the plaintiffs’ lawyers have utterly belittled and denounced the importance of manifold evidence of actual ethical conflicts in the Ecuadorean courts that have been raking Chevron over the coals.

(Sorry for such a long sentence.)

When one key judge was videotaped participating in what looked to all the world like a bribery scheme in favor of the plaintiffs, “The Washington D.C.-based Amazon Defense Coalition, which supports the plaintiffs, said in a statement on Tuesday that the video showed Nunez had resisted the attempts to bribe him.” Well, not exactly. Even the judicial system of Ecuador, panned internationally as being corrupt or unreliable, was forced to remove Judge Nunez from the case. Yes, internationally.  As in:

On Feb. 2, a German newspaper featured a lengthy report headlined “Ecuador emerges as hub for international crime.” This follows actions in recent years in which the U.S. State Department, the United Nations, the International Bar Association and six major American business organizations all have denounced Ecuador’s court system as unreliable or corrupt.on Feb. 2, a German newspaper featured a lengthy report headli major American business organizations all have denounced Ecuador’s court system as unreliable or corrupt.”

So we have an American judge with no direct conflict of interest and a record praised by the courts above him being blasted by the same outfits who are perfectly happy with a corrupt Ecuadorean system that they themselves have said is all about graft. Chevron has noted:

On film, Donziger declared, “the only language that I believe, this judge is gonna understand is one of pressure, intimidation and humiliation.  And that’s what we’re doin’ today.  We’re gonna let him know what time it is . . . .  We’re going to scare the judge, I think today.”  These tactics were employed because, according to Donziger, judges in Ecuador “make decisions based on who they fear the most, not based on what laws should dictate.”  When it was suggested to Donziger that no judge would rule against them because “[h]e’ll be killed,” Donziger replied that, though the judge might not actually be killed, “he thinks he will be…  Which is just as good.”

This is not, repeat not, just a question of one company fighting off a lawsuit. This is a question of American companies being badly abused by a foreign court system, at the urging of American lawyers about whom several judges have raised the specter that they have acted fraudulently. This should be a matter where the U.S. government, through the White House and State Department, should weigh in diplomatically to protect American interests. That they have not done so should be a mark of shame for the Obama administration.

For several years, California-based Chevron Corporation has been fighting against what has long appeared to be a rather bogus lawsuit on behalf of Ecuadorian plaintiffs (and the Ecuadorian government, driven by American trial lawyers, in the course of which the specter of potential fraud on the part of those attorneys has been brought up repeatedly by judges and others).

Now come two new-ish developments in the case, which has become an important test of whether American courts and/or the Obama administration will stand up for an American company under apparently groundless assault abroad.  I’ll blog here about the second of these developments tomorrow, but for now, the first one merits watching. About two weeks ago, The NY Times’ “Greenwire” featured this story about a problematic tie-in between the alleged skulduggery against Chevron and a company that is a major U.S. federal contractor on other eco-projects, including last year’s BP oil spill:

Boulder, Colo.-based Stratus Consulting, a long-term contractor with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies, is gathering and analyzing data concerning the Gulf of Mexico spill.

Stratus was named in February as a defendant in the federal racketeering suit filed by Chevron against Ecuadorean plaintiffs and their legal team who are seeking damages for environmental contamination relating to Texaco Petroleum Corp.’s operations there…. Chevron’s allegations concerning Stratus’ involvement in the conspiracy to extort the company center on the actions of an independent expert, Richard Cabrera, who was hired by the Ecuadorean court to conduct a study of the alleged environmental damage.

Chevron noted this:

Stratus’ own insurance company, Navigators Specialty Insurance Company, submitted a filing with a federal court in Colorado to argue that it had no duty to defend Stratus against allegations of fraud.  According to an article in Law360.com, “Navigators Specialty is now seeking to avoid covering Chevron’s suit on the grounds that the consultant knew when the professional liability policy began in October of an alleged act, mistake or omission that could have reasonably led to a lawsuit. A policy provision excluding coverage for intentional acts also bars indemnification and defense, as does an exclusion for undisclosed circumstances, according to the declaratory relief suit.”

Stratus, of course, denies culpability for any wrongdoing, and this blog post is intended to reach no ultimate judgment on that issue. The point here is to note that if Stratus is found culpable for major misdeeds, it darn well ought to affect its ability to garner federal contracts — a major source of revenue for the company, as this list of what (by my quick arithmetic) looks like nearly $40 million of work indicates.

It also is quite interesting how large a proportion of those contracts (by my VERY quick count, well over half) have come after Barack Obama took office. Stratus’ principles seem to be Democratic/Obama donors. Granted, the amounts aren’t very high, and further granted (indeed, I insist) that political donations are not in any way inherently corrupt or corrupting. But they can give evidence of political connections, of course, and when they coincide with federal contracts they should always be examined so the public itself can decide whether anything looks amiss. That said, for the record, Stratus principles have donated the following amounts in recent years: Douglas Beltman, $1,000 to Obama for America. David Chapman, $250 to the Democratic National Committee Services Corporation and $300 to Obama for America. And Robert Rowe, $250 to Obama for America. As Jerry Seinfeld would say, “not that there’s anything wrong with that.”  But it does show what looks like an apparent liberal bent by Stratus, and at the margins it puts a spotlight on the Obama administration’s failure to lift a finger in support of Chevron’s seemingly just cause.

For more on this, read the excellent round-up by Carter Wood at Shop Floor.  And, to give major credit where due, Bob McCarty beat everybody on this story by a mile.

Again, more on this tomorrow as well.

The Wall Street Journal today fired a tough shot across the bow of Mitch Romney, and in the process again gave fair warning about the dangers of Obamacare.

Romney will try to answer on Thursday.

Here are the bad stats that the WSJ cites:

A new survey released yesterday by the Massachusetts Medical Society reveals that fewer than half of the state’s primary care practices are accepting new patients, down from 70% in 2007, before former Governor Mitt Romney’s health-care plan came online. The average wait time for a routine checkup with an internist is 48 days. It takes 43 days to secure an appointment with a gastroenterologist for chronic heartburn, up from 36 last year, and 41 days to see an OB/GYN, up from 34 last year…..

Massachusetts health regulators also estimate that emergency room visits jumped 9% between 2004 and 2008, in part due to the lack of routine access to providers. … Another notable finding in the Medical Society survey is the provider flight from government health care. Merely 43% of internists and 56% of family physicians accept Commonwealth Care.

Romney’s answer supposedly will include these ideas:

Bullet points issued by the campaign suggest the four major planks of the speech will be: restoring state responsibility “to care for their poor, uninsured and chronically ill” – or, presumably, Medicaid; giving people who buy their own insurance tax deductions similar to the ones granted to businesses; streamlining federal regulations that apply to the health-care industry; and focusing on market-based reforms.

It will be quite interesting to see the details. Clearly, Mr. Romney is vulnerable on this issue. Cognoscenti say it is the biggest single black mark against his bid for the Republican presidential nomination.

None of this, though, helps Romney explain why he accepted an individual mandate to purchase health insurance as part of Romneycare. On principle alone, that should always have been a non-starter.

Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli seems destined to lose the next round of his lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Obamacare, and he can blame South Carolina Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for it.

At the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, Cuccinelli drew a horribly liberal three-judge panel to hear his case. Two of the judges are Obama appointees, and one is a Clinton appointee. The two Obama appointees should not even be on the court — but they are because of failures by, or the outright underhandedness, of Graham.  If Graham had worked harder to force approval of GW Bush judicial nominees for his own Fourth Circuit, the Circuit would remain among the most conservative in the nation, rather than now trending liberal.

Both of the Obama appointees came for seats that stood vacant during the entire eight years of the Bush presidency. Yes, eight whole years. Maryland’s Andre Davis filled a seat to which US Attorney Rod Rosenstein had been nominated by Bush. So solid were Rosenstein’s credentials that even the liberal Washington Post editorialized not just in his favor, but impassionedly in his favor, several times. Yet he never even received a vote.  North Carolina’s James Wynn came from a state that for two of those eight years enjoyed two Republican senators — thus, no “blue slip” problem — while Republicans held a strong 55-45 majority in the Senate. In short, there should have been no reason at all not to fill that seat.

Meanwhile, a South Carolina seat (Graham’s home state!) and a Virginia seat also went unfilled for years, with the Virginia seat also open during the two years of highest Republican ascendancy and with two GOP home-state senators.

Why is this in large part Graham’s fault? Several reasons.

First, he was a key player on the Judiciary Committee. Judiciary Committee members worth their salt will at least usually be able to push through the nominees from their own state, especially when both senators from the state approve. Graham in particular, if his own boasting were to be believed, should have been especially able to secure approval for nominee Steve Matthews — because his vaunted “outreach” to Democrats, via the “Gang of Fourteen” (about which more in a moment) and otherwise, should have given him even more sway with Demo committee members than an ordinary GOP committee member would have had. Instead, for all of his bipartisanship (or actual defections to the Dems), Graham was powerless to gain the approval for Matthews — if he even tried. It is highly possible that he didn’t really try, because he was trying to screw over the Bush administration for not nominating some lackey of his own. Either way, that South Carolina vacancy, later filled by Obama nominee Albert Diaz, can be laid at Graham’s door.

Then there is the Gang of Fourteen in general. The alternative to the Gang of Fourteen deal was to employ a parliamentary maneuver called the “constitutional option” that would have ruled a permanent filibuster out of order if used to kill a judicial nomination (and only if used against a judicial nomination). It was Graham, more than any other single member, who negotiated the Gang of Fourteen deal that killed the constitutional option. After the deal, all nominees were supposed to get final floor votes (without filibuster) unless they represented “extraordinary circumstances.” Gee, that didn’t work. After the Gang deal, fewer Bush nominees made it through the Senate during a time of GOP majority than the number of CLINTON nominees who made it through the Senate while the GOP held a majority. In other words, a Republican Senate was kinder to Clinton than it was to Bush. That’s hardly a triumph for Graham and his Gang.

Then there is the Virginia seat. Not one but three Bush nominees were serially blocked, two of them while Republicans held total sway. (Ironically, one of them, E. Duncan Getchell, is now the Virginia Solicitor General who will argue Cuccinelli’s case before the Fourth Circuit.) One of them was not just a failure of Graham to effectively support, but instead a victim of Graham’s deliberate sabotage. William J. Haynes was a superb nominee and was senior counsel at the Pentagon. Graham joined the Dems in effectively accusing Haynes of being responsible for “torture” of enemy detainees, even though the plain truth is that Haynes was instead responsible for reining in the amount and intensity of “enhanced interrogation” that was used. The real story was that Graham blocked Haynes because of a personal vendetta involving Air Force JAG rivalries against civilian Air Force attorneys. It was a petty vendetta, and one for which Haynes really was a mere stand-in for Graham’s ire, not even a real party to the dispute.

Publicly, for a long time, Graham refused to acknowledge responsibility for blocking Virginia’s Haynes (who originally also hailed from his home state of South Carolina, and who attended college in North Carolina, so he had ties to three of the four Fourth Circuit states), but then Graham bragged about it at a primarily liberal event (if my sources are accurate).

The reason all this is important is because a three-judge panel is chosen randomly by computer. But if there are more conservative judges to choose from, the odds of the computer assigning conservative judges to a particular case are obviously much higher. The leftist panel selected for the Cuccinelli case would almost assuredly not have been chosen (heck, two of them would not even have been on the court) if the Fourth Circuit remained a stalwart conservative bench — which it would have if Republicans, led by Graham, had fought harder and smarter to get Bush’s nominees approved.

Instead, the Fourth Circuit now leans left. Even if Cuccinelli appeals a bad three-judge panel decision to the whole circuit court en banc, the odds are at least slightly against him winning at that level. (Of course, he’ll still have a decent shot at winning at the U.S. Supreme Court, but that’s another story.)

And it really is Lindsey Graham’s fault.

Tim again hits a crucially important issue  in his column that ran yesterday. When fewer than half of the population pays income taxes, the balance tips in favor of freeloading. The Washington Times editorial Wednesday laments that half of the equation: Welfare, of various sorts, is out of control.

It’s no wonder that the latest Agriculture Department figures shows one out of every five households received food stamps in February. The assistance provided to 20.8 million homes – up 20 percent in the past year-and-a-half – came at an annual cost of $68 billion. Free lunches were handed out to another 18.4 million, leaving taxpayers with a bill for $12.8 billion…. Instead of punishing enterprise and subsidizing poverty, the country needs to restore the conditions that promote prosperity. America’s corporate tax rate – currently the second highest in the world – needs to be cut. We need to restrain federal spending by scaling back the freebies doled out to far too many people. That’s the best way to restart our economic engine.

Only policies that promote growth will put more people above the income line at which they pay income taxes. Taxes are not a good thing, but making enough money to pay taxes is. Unless people are paying at least a nominal rate of taxes, they will feel no compunction to support the sorts of policies that reduce the need for taxes in the first place. From what they can see in the immediate horizon, at least, they are not at all invested in the health of the private economy, but instead are invested in the idea of bigger government — because bigger government now costs them nothing, and probably subsidizes them directly.

Tim’s quote from Orrin Hatch was good:

“An increasingly smaller group of Americans is shouldering the burden for an increasingly larger group of Americans.”

This is a recipe for ultimate economic collapse.

Veronique de Rugy adds more at NRO. She notes massive empirical research that shows high levels of publicly held debt have the effedct of consistently lowering economic growth. She ends with a quote that itself contains a link to this paper. In that paper comes a line that restates my point: “What is fleeting in economics is politically popular, while what is enduring in economics is politically unpopular.” The author descrivbes this phenomenon as the “shortsightedness bias” inherent in politics. When a majority of the public freeloads, their short-sightedness bias will be in favor of more freeloading, more debt — and, against their long-term interest, less growth. That’s why tax rates should not be raised, but why the tax base must be widened.  Counterintuitively, the way to widen the base is to keep the rates low enough to promote the economic growth that lifts more people into income levels at which they pay taxes. And as more people pay taxes, deficits and debt start to decline. A government that encourages economic growth can therefore be a more stable government than one that tries to soak the rich. A broad tax base thus supports ordered liberty. High tax rates undermine it.

Sorry to coin an awful word such as “lossful,” but in this case it fits. I wish to associate myself with Tim’s excellent post below about the Obamites advancing what he calls a “toxic” rule to undermine private, usually for-profit colleges. In addition to Tim’s history of excellent reports on this subject (and Renee’s), Mark Hyman has done several on-target pieces on the same subject. It’s also worth noting that this is not a typical, right-vs-left battle. As The Washington Times noted in an editorial, Marc Morial of The Urban League has joined a number of other left-leaning outlets in denouncing the administration’s outrageous policies. Mr. Morial told me the rule “would have disastrous consequences for those who are at greatest risk of a life in poverty if they don’t obtain a college education.”

As Linda Chavez wrote, “Shouldn’t the Education Department devote its resources to expanding opportunities for Americans to receive schooling, not restricting them?”

At NRO today, Yuval Levin takes yet another liberal to task for conflating taxes with earnings, for confusing what belongs to government with what belongs to individuals. Indeed, one of the most disturbing trends among lefties these days is the assumption that virtually everything — money, property, civil rights — start with government and are the government’s to dole out or withhold as the government sees fit. The Washington Times did a good editorial on this last month:

When President Obama outlines his tax-increase plan on Wednesday, it’ll be based on the liberal assumption that all money belongs to the government, with Americans retaining only what bureaucrats allow. That’s the dangerous argument Supreme CourtJustice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, made last week in a case on education funding…. Justice Kagan, joined by three other liberal justices, dissented, arguing there is no functional difference between a tax credit and a government appropriation. Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority, shot this down. “[Justice Kagan‘s] position assumes that income should be treated as if it were government property even if it has not come into the tax collector’s hands,” he wrote. “That premise finds no basis in standing jurisprudence. Private bank accounts cannot be equated with the Arizona State Treasury.”

Now comes Levin to note almost the exact same sin by Slate’s Simon Lazarus:

In other words, Lazarus argues that a tax credit that could be used toward the purchase of health insurance (even a refundable credit that would provide money for health coverage for people who don’t pay taxes) is the same thing as a penalty for failing to purchase health insurance. This is an even more contorted argument than the one now being made in federal court in defense of the individual mandate (that the mandate is just a tax).

As the WashTimes noted, this attitude is pervasive on the left, especially in the lefty legal circles from which Justice Kagan (and Justice Sotomayor) came — and it extends to God-given rights, too:

Justice Kagan pushed similar fallacies for years. In a 1992 essay for the Supreme Court Review, she argued that a “nonsubsidy” by a government is legally indistinguishable from a “penalty.” In that article, she was discussing the funding of abortion referral services. “In choosing a stance from which to view government action,” Justice Kagan wrote, “we instinctively consider how the world looked prior to the action.” Thus, “If the starting point assumes funding for all family-planning services, including abortion referral, then the government decision is a penalty.”

Note where her “starting point” is. Justice Kagan always starts with government power and prerogatives. It was in that same 1992 paper that she described First Amendment free-speech rights as something “dol[ed] out” as “a favor” by government.

The WashTimes then offered this important corrective:

[C]ontrary to the worldview of Justice Kagan and her sponsor in the Oval Office, government is a creation of individual citizens and derives its powers from the people rather than doling out privileges to them.

Again and again, the Obama administration and its fellow travelers will argue not only that government knows best, but that it enjoys the power to impose the fruits of that “knowledge” on the rest of us. Obamites think government has the right to compel us to engage in a particular form of commerce (health insurance), whether we want to or not. It thinks the government can determine better than the voters themselves who qualifies as a community’s “candidates of choice” (hint: If it is a black community, only Democrats qualify, regardless of what the black citizens themselves say). Obamites likewise think government can compel senior citizens to accept Medicare benefits they don’t even want.

And so on.

This attitude, in all its forms, is anathema to ordered liberty. Simon Lazarus may have intended to be making a fairly technical (albeit highly politically charged) point about health-care proposals, but it is his underlying assumptions that are so execrable. Yuval Levin is right to call him out.

When I wrote last week on the coming stagflation, I didn’t know that by formerly used official US inflation measures, current inflation is running at 10%. Niall Ferguson says it is. His terrific column is here.

This Ferguson paragraph mirrors one of mine from last week:

To ordinary Americans, however, it’s not the online price of an iPad that matters; it’s prices of food on the shelf and gasoline at the pump. These, after all, are the costs they encounter most frequently. And with average gas prices hitting $3.88 a gallon last week, filling up is now twice as painful as when President Obama took office.

(From my column last week: “The Fed economists may discount food and gasoline prices as unstable indicators that aren’t part of “core” inflation, but for most Americans food and gas cost hikes are the very definition of inflation. These are the things they pay for every day; they are the items closest to their psyches. Those gas prices on the big billboards at every filling station have an outsized effect on American psychology.”)

Here’s the Ferguson bit about how the inflation measure has changed:

And the reason the CPI is losing credibility is that, as economist John Williams tirelessly points out, it’s a bogus index. The way inflation is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics has been “improved” 24 times since 1978. If the old methods were still used, the CPI would actually be 10 percent. Yes, folks, double-digit inflation is back. Pretty soon you’ll be able to figure out the real inflation rate just by moving the decimal point in the core CPI one place to the right.

Good stuff. Read the whole thing.

Abigail Thernstrom has a tremendously important column at NRO today.  She discusses the truly bizarre (in terms of logic) liberal teeth-gnashing over the “problem” that black population movement to the suburbs causes for the idea of black-majority legislative districts:

Blacks should know their place, the media seem to think. Increasingly, they are leaving their natural habitat — the inner city — and wandering into residential areas where lots of non-blacks live, the Washington Post and other media outlets report with obvious distress. … 

There goes the neighborhood — that is, the black ghetto. It isn’t yet gone, but it’s going. One might see that as excellent news. It’s not, the mainstream media tell us. Residential segregation has long been considered the most important sign of miles to go on the road to racial equality, but the escape of blacks to the suburbs will make the creation of majority-black legislative districts harder to achieve…. 

A possible Justice Department response to the new, worrisome demographic picture is to insist on even more imaginative racial gerrymandering to recapture black voters who have fled cities for greener pastures, but a majority on the Supreme Court has voiced dismay over tortured race-driven lines. The Court’s discomfort arises from constitutional concerns, but quite another question can also be asked: When black voters have been able to choose the traditional path of upward mobility and settle in a suburb, should the law be working to reunite those voters with the communities they made great efforts to escape?

It seems legitimate to assume (although I know of no survey data confirming the point) that minority families who leave central cities don’t necessarily identify with their former, less prosperous neighborhoods. Surely, they acquire new interests tied to schools, as well as other institutions and organizations in the area where they now live. And thus we may wonder why legislators drawing new maps insist on stereotyping blacks as fungible members of a cohesive group and, on the basis of that assumption, place them in bizarre districts that often resemble (as one federal judge has put it) “a microscopic view of a new strain of disease.”… 

Both in cities and in suburbs, America is thus becoming increasingly multi-ethnic — a picture we should surely celebrate. And yet, while residential segregation is widely viewed as evidence of continuing racial pathology, the deliberate drawing of electoral districts to segregate whites from minorities is, ironically, considered positively enlightened public policy.

It is not, in fact. Race-conscious districts, particularly in the South, were appropriate in the years in which few southern whites would vote for black candidates regardless of their qualifications. But they come with substantial costs that are bound to grow as America keeps maturing racially. By now, those costs outweigh any possible benefits.

Contortionate efforts to create “majority minority districts,” except in unique circumstances to remedy obvious past wrongs, have always been obnoxious. For the same reason that segregated lunch counters were morally wrong, so are segregated voting districts. The elder Bush’s administration in the early 1990s made a devil’s bargain with black political leaders: Ghettoize as many black voters as possible into black-majority districts, no matter how illogical the districts might otherwise look, and they could create more black elected officials in the short term — and also more Republicans, because by pushing black voters (who typically vote Democratic) out of the surrounding districts, they could increase the odds of Republican victories in those surrounding jurisdictions.

It was a cynical maneuver. It caused further divisions between blacks and whites who no longer had to even try to appeal to each other in order to win elections. It further exacerbated the trend of blacks being considered automatic vassals of the Democratic Party while Republicans developed a greater cluelessness (and sometimes an uncaring-ness) about the concerns of black citizens.

The national Democratic Party, pandering to the black elected officials, openly supported this racial gerrymandering, even though it should have been obvious that it was costing Democrats legislative victories in what otherwise would have been swing districts. As moderate Democrats lost the chance for election, the party moved ever more leftward — and the national political well was poisoned by further polarization and discord, and indeed by a growing failure of each side to even begin to understand, much less pay any heed to, the other side’s point of view.

Frankly, the left has taken its cynicism to far greater levels than Bush 41’s minions ever did. The nadir of ghettoization based on an assumption of racial group-think (not to mention the insulting assumptions of the general populace’s idiocy and possibly racism) came when the Obama Justice Department, via radical lefty attorney Loretta King, refused to allow the town of Kinston, N.C., to hold municipal elections in non-partisan fashion. Why? Because, she decided, the black majority in Kinston would not be able to elect its “candidate of choice” if Democrats were not identified on the ballot — with the assumption being that only Democrats could possibly be the “candidates of choice” for black voters. (For more on this case, read this and this and this.)

Thernstrom explains why this paternalistic attitude towards blacks is utterly counterproductive politically:

The majority-black districts to which the civil-rights community and its allies in the media and the academy are so committed also appear to act as a brake on black political participation. A number of first-rate scholars have found that safe black districts dampen electoral turnout; why bother to vote when the outcome will surely be the election of one black candidate or another — all likely to support the same policies once in office?

Worse than that, it is morally repugnant. It insists that even in the 21st Century, American government policy is to judge citizens’ political rights by the color of their skins. Jim Crow lives, and it is the political Left that is feeding him.

All along, the issue of Barack Obama’s birth certificate has been an embarrassing sideshow. All along, it has been clear he was born in Hawaii (not one but two newspaper announcements at the time attested to that), and all along, it hasn’t mattered anyway, because as the son of an American mother, Obama is a “natural born citizen” regardless.

But as I have long argued, the delay in releasing the birth certificate is indeed a symptom of a more important disease in the Obama administration, namely its terrible lack of transparency. Just eight months into his term, I complained about it:

The candidate whose most identifiable promise was to provide open and transparent government instead is leading an administration rife with secrecy, stonewalling and prevarication.The administration repeatedly has stiff-armed Congress, the media, outside organizations and even a prestigious independent government commission. It has raised “none of your business” from an adolescent rejoinder to a public policy – to keep the public in the dark.

Two months before I wrote that, Andrew McCarthy at National Review explained that the question isn’t where Obama was born, but how he lived his life as an adult:

The fact is that Obama’s account of his background is increasingly revealed as a fabrication, not his life as lived; his utterances reflect the expediencies of the moment, not the truth. What is supposed to save the country from fraudulence of this sort is the media. Here, though, the establishment press is deep in Obama’s tank — so much so that they can’t even accurately report his flub of a ceremonial opening pitch lest he come off as something less than Sandy Koufax. Astonishingly, reporters see their job not as reporting Obama news but as debunking Obama news, or flat-out suppressing it. How many Americans know, for example, that as a sitting U.S. senator in 2006, Obama interfered in a Kenyan election, publicly ripping the incumbent government (a U.S. ally) for corruption while he was its guest and barnstorming with his preferred candidate: a Marxist now known to have made a secret agreement with Islamists to convert Kenya to sharia law, and whose supporters, upon losing the election, committed murder and mayhem, displacing thousands of Kenyans and plunging their country into utter chaos?

Chief among the questions is how Obama managed to get from Hawaii to Occidental to Columbia to Harvard, with an odd stop in Chicago in between and again after Harvard. Were strings pulled in his behalf? By whom? That’s why, as I argued yesterday at The American Spectator, the otherwise objectionable Donald Trump is actually right (blind squirrel finds acorn) to pivot and ask about Obama’s college transcripts:

They are questions that ought to be answered. They are not, however, the sorts of questions that should be allowed to run out of control the way the birther questions did. The real reasons to vote against Obama have to do with his extreme leftist ideology, his horrendous record, and his insufferable arrogance that leads him to push the outer bounds (and probably exceed those bounds) of permissible executive authority. That record is enough to discredit him. If the transcripts discredit him further, so much the better. But if they are released and show him to have been a fine student, they should not be allowed to overshadow his other, dangerous deficiencies.

One of those deficiencies — a lesser one, perhaps, but still significant — is his administration’s propensity for stonewalling, which isn’t a private sin but a public one. It undermines our republican (small ‘r’) system. Every respectable study of Obama’s record in this regard has found it lacking. Even liberal sites are complaining. The summation from the Associated Press has the numbers:

Two years into its pledge to improve government transparency, the Obama administration took action on fewer requests for federal records from citizens, journalists, companies and others last year even as significantly more people asked for information.

Amazingly enough, the administration even blocked media requests about its transparency record itself:

The Obama administration censored 194 pages of internal e-mails about its Open Government Directive that the AP requested more than one year ago. The December 2009 directive requires every agency to take immediate, specific steps to open their operations up to the public. But the White House Office of Management and Budget blacked-out entire pages of some e-mails between federal employees discussing how to apply the new openness rules, and it blacked-out one e-mail discussing how to respond to AP’s request for information about the transparency directive.

This is an administration that hides one heck of a lot of information. That’s probably because this is a president with a lot to hide.

In my last post, I explained that Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) would cut far more Medicare services, without giving patients any real choice in the matter, than Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal would ever do — and that Ryan’s would give patients control, whereas IPAB would leave them at the mercy of bureaucrats far removed from the scene. Again, the issue is, who decides?

That’s the theme in areas other than IPAB, too. Indeed, it is the central question of Obamacare. Obama’s system and its corollaries leave all authority in the hands of central planners — disembodied persons, as far as the patient is concerned, for whom the patients are little more than statistics on a spread sheet.

Fox news contributor and former Reagan-Bush in-house thinker James Pinkerton is rightly banging the drum for more options for patients and providers alike. In what he calls a “Serious Medicine Strategy,” Pinkerton explains that the best way to keep costs down is to encourage the development of cures rather than of merely managed treatments. As Pinkerton says, healthy people are less expensive than sick people. Therefore, intellectual property rights for researchers should be protected better, or longer, than they are now. The FDA should be more lenient, or more rapid, in approving medicines — at least for trial use, with appropriate warnings, perhaps. And so on. The idea is to provide more chances for more cures, and more choices for everybody involved — mostly through the free market.

There is a lot more to say on this and related topics. Again, though, the central message is this: Where bureaucrats and central planners exert too much control, or interfere too much, the ultimate provision of services is likely to be either worse, or more expensive, or both. But if people are freed to pursue their own best interests. They will. More on this as the weeks go by.

Who decides? That is the most important question when it comes to Medicare savings. First, some background:

Conservatives suddenly are abuzz again with talk of an Obamacare “death panel,” and in substance they have a point: If the Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) works anything like its model in Oregon… and if government health-care programs effectively crowd out private options so that the bureaucratic decision-makers in the government program are, for all intents and purposes, the ultimate arbiters of who receives which treatments… then people have serious reason to worry that their lives could be foreshortened by government fiat. Employing the phrase “death panel” has its advantages and disadvantages (the biggest of the latter is that it keeps the establishment media from giving the complaint any credence, even though the problems with IPAB are both real and acute), but the board’s potential for harm is evident in the fact that 72 Democratic House members last year joined Republicans in asking for the panel to be removed from the bill.

Meanwhile, the anti-Obamacare lawsuit which takes on IPAB directly (among other things), led by the Goldwater Institue, seems to me absolutely on target in challenging how the board is set up to be a power unto itself with no congressional oversight of any relevance or weight. That suit merits far more attention, via full columns rather than quick blog mentions, and conservatives are foolish not to rally in support of it.

With all the anti-IPAB talk bubbling up right now, though, the talk has been strangely disconnected from the budget debate that has been front and center of the American political universe for weeks. Yet with President “Don’t Interrupt Me” Obama jetting all over the country to spread demagogic scare tactics against the Medicare portion of Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, those on the right really haven’t done much to parry the specifics of his attacks on the “voucherization” or “privatization” of Medicare. Yet the fact is that the president aims to save almost as much money from Medicare as Ryan does — except that he wants to use IPAB to do it.

That’s why conservatives should take up his challenge. We should answer that it is he, not we, who is (/are) for “cutting” Medicare. He does it by giving vast powers to unelected bureaucrats almost entirely unanswerable to Congress. We achieve savings, which may not involve actual cuts in care at all, by giving power to the patients themselves. Conservatives should do a very specific poll on Medicare Part D. If, as I suspect, it is still a highly successful program, then conservatives should say that all Ryan wants to do is to make all of Medicare work the same way that Part D does — except without the doughnut hole. The idea is to allow seniors themselves to achieve savings while finding the best care they can.

We save; Obama cuts. More importantly, we give the power to the patients; he gives it to bureaucrats with a mandate to chop costs by unaccountable orders.

So the question is, Who decides: The individual patient, or the government commissars?

When phrased like that, conservatives don’t even need to say the phrase “death panel.” For most listeners, the scary implications of Obama’s approach will be clear.

Following up on my column today on the execrable Obama response to last year’s Gulf oil spill, it’s worth reading pieces in the New Orleans Times-Picayune today so as to remind us of certain realities. First, as the caption accompanying this editorial notes (and as has been reported numerous times), this disaster hardly came out of nowhere. Instead, workers and mid-level supervisors had been reporting problems on this particular well for weeks.

Both widows including Courtney Kemp, of Jonesville, La. told committee members that their husbands, Shane Roshto and Wyatt Kemp, had told them in the weeks before the explosion about problems they had in controlling the well. “This well was different in the fact that they were having so many problems, and so many things were happening, and it was just kind of out of hand,” said Kemp.

Other reports confirm that these truths:

The AP recently obtained documents showing that a BP drilling engineer who worked closely on the blown-out well kept quiet about his misgivings in the weeks leading up to the accident.

In an email message to his wife on March 11, 2010, Brian Morel said his team aboard the rig was “out of control.”

“I can’t take it, so I am staying away from the issues today,” he wrote.

A few weeks earlier, the company had reprimanded Morel in a performance evaluation, cautioning him to pick his battles and “learn when to push and when to concede.”

In other words, this was eminently preventable. Warning signs were missed. Decision-making was terrible. And BP had a reputation, at least in some quarters, for cutting corners on safety.

What this means is that the risks of something like this happening again are very, very slim. If it hasn’t happened for many decades, and then when it does happen it turns out to have been preventable, and if everybody is now on the lookout for signs of trouble, and if new safety equipment and well-capping equipment has been developed and are ready at hand… well, then, it stands to reason that all other would-be drillers, and all the businesses and individuals who depend on the wells for their livelihoods, should not be punished by a “permitorium” on offshore drilling. Nor should American consumers nationwide, who are seeing energy prices (especially prices at the pump) rise to near-record levels.

Meanwhile, the T-P’s Bob Marshall (who was my boss nearly a quarter-century ago) updates us all on the continuing efforts to analyze the long-term ecological damages from the spill. This is crucial work. Conservatives rightly skeptical of EPA overreach on matters large and small, and property owners justly angry at the federal government’s assault on private property in the name of protecting “wetlands” that are no more than “prairie potholes,” sometimes forget that some ecological causes are indeed important. I have always argued that the most important of those are the health of the oceans and seas and the fisheries within them, which also means protecting the coastal eco-systems (actual wetlands/marshlands) that serve as the nurseries for those fisheries. Hunters and fishermen, innately conservative on so many levels, understand these things.

The trick to protecting these precious resources held in common is not to regulate people half to death, but to provide incentives for (or remove disincentives from) proper husbandry of the wetlands and seas. Government wetlands replenishment projects, to make up for the effects of government levee-building and canal-dredging, also are appropriate in some places — and they are less expensive than are disaster-relief costs to make up for damages caused by hurricanes whose effects would be far less fierce if healthy wetlands were still available to absorb some of the rising floodwaters and otherwise cushion the blow.

Nobody really needs a heavy hand from government; heavy hands too often come down with the force of a Rocky Marciano clenched fist. What is needed is a government that is responsive and smart, one which reacts quickly (Obama’s administration did not) but that does not overreact in ways that further punish the victims (which is what Obama did).

Future blowouts can be prevented without killing the regional or national economies. Again, the BP disaster was an anomaly. As my colleague Renee Giachino said on this site last week, the whole airline industry isn’t closed down when one plane crashes. Why should energy exploration be treated any differently?

Ashton this past weekend noted the latest failure of Eric Holder’s Justice Department. A spate of reports last week indicates that some of the Holder team’s other areas of inaction are even worse — and that its actions in still other areas are at least as bad as the areas of inaction.

In terms of inaction, there was the report from Pajamas Media, borderline frightening in its implications, that the Obama/Holder team is failing or, worse, refusing to prosecute instances of terror financing:

But from a political perspective there was absolutely no way that they could move forward. That’s why this decision came from the top down. These individuals who were going to be prosecuted are still the administration’s interfaith allies. Not only would these Muslim groups and their friends in the media be screaming “Islamophobia” at the top of their lungs and that this is a war against Islam, but the administration would look like absolute fools. It’s kind of hard to prosecute someone on material support for terrorism when you have pictures of them getting handed awards from DOJ and FBI leaders for their supposed counter-terror efforts.

Then there is the Holder team’s highly politicized hiring practices, which are actually worse — more slanted in one direction, and deliberately so — than anything the much-maligned Bush DoJ did. J. Christian Adams updated the story at the Washington Examiner, which both he and the Washington Times had earlier (at different times) brought to light. As the WashTimes noted last October:

Among the new hires are: Sharyn Tejani comes from the National Partnership for Women and Families, a hotbed of liberal activism, where she served as one of the lead attorneys filing a Supreme Court brief supporting an explicitly race-based refusal to promote white firemen in New Haven, Conn. Aaron Schuham comes directly from Americans United for Separation of Church and State – a group so leftist, it has argued the Obama administration isn’t liberal enough. Audrey Wiggins comes from another liberal bastion, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, which also filed a brief against the white firefighters. Bryan Sells comes from the American Civil Liberties Union, as does Meredith Bell-Platts.

As Adams concluded:

Attorneys in the Civil Rights Division should be legal technicians, not activists. The division is the only division of the Justice Department where cases are initiated and brought by low-level line attorneys.Every other division is reactive, not proactive. If adopting the agenda of outside activist groups constitutes “reinvigorating” the Civil Rights Division, the next Republican president needs to deinvigorate it soon after taking office.

Earlier in his column, he reported these bizarrities ignored by the establishment media:

Other bizarre cases have come out of the Holder Civil Rights Division. DOJ stopped the debut of the Amazon Kindle because it was not in Braille. It attacked South Carolina for providing special treatment to inmates infected with AIDS. It demanded that Dayton, Ohio, hire black police officers who failed the competency examination.

Then there’s this from former DoJ official Hans von Spakovsky, writing in the Washington Times, reminding us of two lawless, race-based actions by the Holder DoJ, both involving the jettisoning of neutral, fair entrance exams for police and firefighters. Von Spakovsky also has this over at his Heritage Foundation home, telling about DoJ’s abuse of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Finally (for now), while the news in the following case is more about bad judging than about any new DoJ shenanigans, the whole case on the Arizona immigration law stemmed from DoJ shenanigans in the first place. Again, von Spakovsky reports.

The Holder team is willfully abusive of the law as written and traditionally interpreted. It is a disgrace.