Freedom Line Blog

By confirming John Kerry as Secretary of State, the U.S. Senate (with three honorable exceptions: Cornyn, Cruz, Inhofe) just dishonored all Vietnam vets. After all, it was Kerry who randomly accused American soldiers in Vietnam of having “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.”

One imagines that he will be by far the worst U.S. Secretary of State since… the current one.

Actually, if anything, Hume was too nice to her. On the Fox News Sunday show yesterday, he said she qualifies as a “competent” Secretary of State, but in no means a “great” one. It’s a segment well worth watching, because Hume makes a solid argument. That said, I think she has been only a small step above a disaster. Even acknowledging that bad things happen all over the globe that no Secretary of State can really be blamed for, the sad reality is that in almost every region of the world, American interests are now in worse shape than they were four years ago. Much of the blame should be laid at the feet of Barack Obama: After all, it is ultimately his policies, not Clinton’s, that are being pursued. But there is no evidence at all that Clinton in any way deviated, even in private, from Obama’s bad policies, and in many respects it seems obvious that Obama basically followed her lead.

So, where do we stand? In the Middle Easat, almost certainly worse than before. Turkey has gone further down the road towards open and troublesome Islamism. Egypt is a disaster. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon, and not only has failed to moved closer to the West, but has crushed a real, potentially powerful “freedom movement” while the Obama-Clinton team lifted not a finger. Libya actually might be slightly better (more US-friendly and ultimately safer) than it was under the mercurial Ghadafi, but compared to about 2005, when Ghadafi was completely cooperating with us, Libya is more dangerous to us — more unstable, more unpredictable long term. (This is completely aside from the 9/11 assault there that killed four Americans.) And even the overthrow of Ghadafi was a mess, with the US administration doing the diplomatic and military hokey-pokey — one foot in, one foot out, a foot back in and shake it all about — rather than dealing cleanly with the situation. Finally, of course, Syria is a disaster area, with more than 60,000 dead.

Most importantly in the Middle East, our ally Israel feels more isolated than ever. This is terrible.

In Africa, meanwhile, al Qaeda is resurgent. Algeria and Mali are especially worrisome.

Then there is Russia. The “re-set” failed spectacularly. Russia is more recalcitrant, less US-friendly than it has been since about 1992.

Eastern Europe? Our would-be friends there rightly feel insulted, stabbed in the back, and abandoned.  Western Europe? Well, the US image or influence there is about the same as when Hillary first walked into Foggy Bottom, but the state of Western Europe’s affairs is horrendous, with 26% unemployment in Spain and economic difficulties throughout.

The Far East? No progress against North Korea. Continuing militarily provocative actions from China.

How about the Western Hemisphere? Nothing good. Ecuador has joined Venezuela as uber-leftist anti-US agitators. Brazil has moved leftward and more corrupt, even as Obama has sucked up to it repeatedly. Argentina is again making noises about owning the Falklands (!).

Everywhere we look, the United States interests are no better off, and often worse off, than when Clinton took the reins at the State Department. As Hume rightly said, there have been no triumphs — but there have been spectacular failures, such as the murder of four Americans in Libya and the ascension of Mr. Morsi in Egypt.

Combined with Clinton’s repeated evasions of real answers, and of real responsibility, for the Benghazi fiasco, this record is one of failure. It would be a good thing if Mrs. Clinton’s retirement from State would turn into a retirement from public service altogether.

The New Republic is out with a new interview with BHO, the man in the Oval Office. It pains me too much even just to copy and paste the worst parts of it… so I won’t. But please read it yourself. The whole thrust of it is that he — yes, Mr. Obama — is the one always going the extra mile for compromise; that he and Nancy Pelosi (!) and Harry Reid (!) again and again have taken the “tough” steps toward compromise that the country needs, but that the Republicans are just so darned intransigent and a lot of them don’t even really care about what’s good for the country.

The man is either delusional or despicable dishonest, or both. Either way, his attitude is as disastrous for the country as his performance has been. He’s so sanctimonious, so solipsistic, so self-aggrandizing that it’s sickening. What a godawful creature he is.

Tim is right that today’s DC Circuit Court ruling on the NLRB appointments is “a humiliating rebuke for [Barack] Obama.” It also reads well, with solid textual analysis supporting its interpretation of the “Recess Clause.” That said, its holdings are so sweeping — both as to what constitutes “the Recess” of the Senate and as to what it means that a vacancy can be filled by such appointment (only) if it “happen[s]” during the Recess — that while they certainly make sense in law and logic, they may go so far as to violate enough existing practice as to make the full circuit en banc or the Supreme Court to reject the full scope of the ruling. Being a realist, I can certainly see a final result that narrows the scope of this ruling (and of it definition of “Recess” and “happen”), but that still throws out Obama’s appointments and still upholds the main thrust of today’s ruling, which is that there are serious limits to the “Recess appointment” power.

But allow just a little further prediction. When the high court so rules, and Obama’s “humiliation” is confirmed, The One in the Oval Office will have a conniption fit. As it so happens, such a high court ruling will probably be just one in a series of about five or six key decisions in the next 18-24 months that will go directly against Obama administration arguments, actions, and abuses. Look, therefore, for Obama to resurrect his constitutionally dangerous, full-frontal assault against the Supreme Court and the courts in general, trying to undermine their very legitimacy. In fact, so unhinged may be Obama’s power lust that he might even try to openly defy an explicit Supreme Court ruling, maybe even citing Andrew Jackson’s infamous (perhaps apocryphal) statement from Worcester v. Georgia that the chief justice “has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

In short, I see in this and other developing cases the potential for serious constitutional crisis, brought on by Obama’s authoritarian impulses. I hope I’m wrong.

This really isn’t a big deal, but it still rankles. Today, Barack Obama included a line in his speech that was almost a direct quotation from Ronald Reagan, but he gave no attribution. When Reagan uttered it, it was an original and interesting turn of phrase.

Here:

“Whether we come from poverty or wealth; whether we are Afro-American or Irish-American; Christian or Jewish, from big cities or small towns, we are all equal in the eyes of God. But as Americans, that is not enough, we must be equal in the eyes of each other.”

Obama today: “We are true to our creed when a little girl born into the bleakest poverty knows that she has the same chance to succeed as anybody else, because she is an American, she is free, and she is equal, not just in the eyes of God but also in our own.“

I missed this when it came out, but the story, and the telling of it, are so moving that it gave me chills. Read here about a real American hero, the Rev. Emil Kapuan, who saved (physically) and ministered to (physically and spiritually) to hundreds of soldiers during the Korean War. What a wonderful, poignant, inspirational piece! The author is Lt. Col. William Latham, AS Army Ret., who now teaches at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College.

This is really, really, really worth the read.

The ever-thoughtful former U.S. Rep. Artur Davis, who is definitely of the center-right rather than the Tea Party right, nonetheless does a nice job defending the energy and many of the motivations of Tea Party activists in this essay at his web site.

The shortest distance in modern politics is the one between a Republican willing to denounce his party for extremism and the set of a cable or Sunday morning talk show. The gift of exposure is waiting for the cheap ticket of describing today’s Republicans as an intolerant set of know-nothings whom one no longer recognizes…. One modest proposal for Republican moderates: spend more time traveling the side roads to the buffet chains and libraries where, for example, local Tea Parties organize. The virtue of the trip, for a moderate, would be a discovery that a Tea Party conclave is as likely to include a civil engineer, or retired university professor as is the regular party committee, and far more likely to contain volunteers than are the luncheons of platinum level donors. Among other discoveries, to draw on personal experience, the presence of people like one Tea Party activist in Virginia, whose other major volunteer engagement is a network in Richmond for tutoring homeless young adults; or a Tea Party activist in Fairfax County who risked a lucrative career in business development over exposing a client’s wage scale that systematically discriminated against blacks.

Davis does not specifically refer to Colin Powell’s demagogically unfair remarks on Meet the Press yesterday, but his essay’s message (if not its direct intent, which surely had nothing to do with Powell) stands as a tacit rebuke to the Powells of the world who rush to denounce and smear good, decent Americans.

Again, though, that’s not the point of his essay. The point is that centrists and rightists should work to find common ground and build on that, rather than seek areas of disagreement and bash each other over those disagreements.  (As it so happens, I have an essay coming out in the February print edition of The American Spectator that makes a plea for a similar approach.) He’s correct, and his constructive advice is one that everybody right of center ought to take to heart.

I and others have rightly blasted some of Colin Powell’s cheap shots in his Meet the Press interview yesterday, but I missed one of them until just now. He accused Republicans of deliberately “making it hard for these minorities to vote, as they did in the last election.” He also said “the courts struck most of that down.” Both parts of that allegation are incorrect. As Hans von Spakovsky(among others)  has repeatedly noted, there is no evidence that any voter ID laws have disenfranchised legitimate voters, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. And courts have repeatedly found voter ID laws to be perfectly reasonable, legitimate, and constitutional, with the DC Circuit issuing yet another ruling just last week in favor of such laws and against the Obama administration. Of course, when the Supreme Court itself heard a challenge to voter-ID laws, it ruled 6-3 in favor of the law’s constitutionality.

Now, let’s move on to Powell being aghast at Sarah Palin’s use of the expression “shuck and jive.” Granted, as soon as I heard Palin use it, I realized she had made a big error. I do think the term can carry racial connotations. What’s key here is the context. If you use the expression to describe a black man currying favor with whites, that’s a rather insensitive remark, to say the least. But if Powell is so concerned about governors using the term, he really ought to make sure he denounces current New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo. And if he’s of the opinion that the statement of one governor (or former governor) is ipso facto evidence or even proof of a deep racial insensitivity on the part of the governor’s whole political party, then surely Powell today will clarify his remarks by blasting Cuomo’s Democratic Party as well. After all, Cuomo’s remarks were more directly descriptive of the sort of behavior that creates a racial/racist caricature than Palin’s ever were. “You can’t shuck and jive at a press conference,” he said, adding “all those moves you can make with the press don’t work when you are in someone’s living room.” As the original “shuck and jive” slander specifically referred to minstrel-show-like movements, Cuomo’s use of the term hit far closer to the racist home than Palin’s ever did.

And, as many others have noted, Obama’s own press secretary used the term “shuck and jive” as well. So why hasn’t Colin Powell denounced him?

(NOTE: One of those videos to which I linked had an extended piece on the controversy over Obama’s birth certificate. I do NOT, NOT, NOT, endorse anything having to do with those allegations. It was just the only link I could find in a QUICK search that included both parts of the interview that I address in this post.)

I explained why on WKRG-TV last night in Mobile, AL.

Hint: Look at the Dem seats up for re-election in the Senate in 2014.

Ashton, just to be clear (in response to your post), I do understand the procedures. Here’s the thing: There is plenty of time to gauge, from press statements and elsewhere, a rather good sense of how many senators support a nomination, and therefore whether or not it will be killed in an up or down vote. My contention is that a senator seeing the tea leaves going in favor of Hagel could consider a hold before the nomination technically reaches the floor. I do not necessarily advocate this, but I think it’s worth looking into.

Sure, a majority leader can disregard a hold, technically. But if he does so, members of one’s own party, looking to protect their own prerogatives, are then MORE likely to join the “holder” in a subsequent filibuster.

But the main thing I advocate is not a hold, but the willingness to filibuster this thing to death. Of course I know that Reid is threatening to kill the filibuster, but there is blowback on his side, too. The rules will be determined in just a few weeks; from what I have read, the most likely outcome is that he will kill the ability to filibuster the motion to proceed to debate in the first place, but will probably not change the rules to disallow a filibuster on the motion to “call the question” — in other words, to end debate and hold a straight up-or-down vote.

Because this motion comes already after at least some debate has been held, it is perfectly consistent with my agreement with Ashton’s advocacy of using open debate to try to kill the nomination. Indeed, I think enough Democrats are skittish about Hagel that the nomination can indeed by killed in a straight up or down vote — and that there will be enough clear statements of Democratic opposition that it will be safe to allow it to go to such a vote.

BUT… BUT… BUT! — if it looks like Obama has strong-armed enough Dems that Hagel will get through, or has a good chance of doing so, THEN I think a filibuster is in order to keep debate going (technically speaking) and, in short, to forever block the nomination. By that time, the rules will be set already. Reid of course could then still use the nuclear option, but it would be mighty risky of him to do that after having already agreed to rules for this Congress that do allow a filibuster before proceeding to a final vote.

So I am not “wrong” about procedures. You may disagree with my advocacy of certain procedures, but that’s different from not understanding them fully.

And, for the record, I am not a huge fan of killing ANYTHING with a permanent filibuster. I am an advocate of a different kind of filibuster reform, which I have written about elsewhere. But the rules and their use should be consistent from party to party. Unless a fair-minded, apolitical reform is introduced, and absent serious constitutional (letter OR spirit) concerns that apply in the case of judicial nominees but not executive branch nominees, I think that a precedent as recent as the filibuster against John Bolton is one that should apply the first time the shoe is on the other party’s foot, so to speak, in terms of a major executive branch nomination.

This is especially true when the concerns go, as they do with Hagel, not just to mere political differences, but to major policy misjudgments, major evidence of unseemly bias, and character concerns.

Just as no anti-black racist should ever be confirmed for a high post, so to should no anti-Semite be so confirmed. This is basic stuff, getting to the very heart of moral fitness for office. I think there is solid evidence that Hagel has anti-Semitic (not just anti-Israel’s foreign policy) tendencies, and that he is also dangerously unwilling to even acknowledge obvious proof of terrorism if the terrorism in question is mostly aimed at Israel. He cannot, must not, ever, be confirmed.

The indispensable U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, R-VA, has put out a wonderfully strongly worded press release blasting the government of Tunisia for releasing a prime suspect in the Benghazi terrorist assault and, more importantly for our purposes, blasting the terrorist-coddling (my words, not his) Obama administration for not only failing to exert enough pressure on Tunisia to do otherwise, but for refusing to comment on this outrage and for refusing to cut off aid to Tunisia.

To quote Wolf on what happened:

Ali Harzi, a key suspect in the September 11 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate and annex in Benghazi, was released by Tunisian authorities today.  I have every reason to believe that Harzi was involved in the attack, which took the lives of four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, and resulted in the destruction of two U.S. facilities.  For months following the attack, the Tunisian government blocked the FBI from interviewing Harzi.  Now Harzi walks the streets of Tunisia a free man – facing no consequence for his role in the Benghazi attack.

Furthermore:

Last month, I asked the Obama Administration to cut off aid to Tunisia.  I am very disappointed to learn that the State Department is once again ducking this issue and today refusing to comment on Harzi’s release.

“The release of this key suspect, nearly four months to the day following the attack, further underscores the need for a House Select Committee to fully investigate the attack and the U.S. response in the days, weeks and months following.

Wolf is absolutely right that a special “Select Committee” is called for. Its first witness should be Hillary Clinton; its second witness should be John Brennan; its third witness should be the usually honorable Leon Panetta. Wolf said that next week he will reintroduce his resolution to form such a select committee. Meanwhile, the establishment media should interrupt its Nina Burleigh act on Barack Obama long enough to demand to know why Tunisia is still getting use of American taxpayer dollars, in light of (and in contradiction to) Obama’s multi-repeated promise that his “biggest priority right now is bringing [the attackers] to justice.”

Not even Jimmy Carter was so feckless when it came to upholding American honor, and protecting its assets and people, abroad.

I respectfully but strongly disagree with Ashton’s post against the idea of a Republican filibuster of the Hagel nomination, or a hold on the same.

To be more specific, I do agree, wholeheartedly, with this:

In the confirmation hearings, during floor debate, and in an actual speaking filibuster if it comes to that, Senate Republicans will have many instances to make precisely the case Quin alludes to, and any other substantive policy criticisms about Hagel they think will defeat his confirmation.  But let’s have the argument in public, through the normal process of a presidential nomination.

U.S. Senators like to think they work within “the world’s greatest deliberative body.”  Let them prove it with a robust examination of Chuck Hagel’s fitness to be the next Secretary of Defense.

I do believe that such scrutiny is a good thing. I do believe they should use it to put the pressure on Democrats to oppose the nomination. But I disagree with Ashton’s implication that, in the end, a straight up or down vote should be Hagel’s right.

In this extreme case, a case of a man so fundamentally at odds with so many basic precepts of decent foreign policy (he does not worry about Iran getting nukes, he would not label Hezbollah a terrorist organization, he would not advocate getting tough with North Korea, he repeatedly made references to the “Jewish lobby” and similar remarks, he said “let the Jews pay for” the single most popular USO post for American servicement, to the detriment of our own troops, and he was the only one of 100 senators to refuse to condemn Russian anti-Semitism, among numerous other foreign policy sins), there is more at stake than the public record. Such a man has no business, none whatsoever, coming anywhere within Jew-baiting distance of the Pentagon’s top office. He would be a menace as Secretary of Defense.

If not enough Democrats will join Republicans in killing this dastardly nomination, then Republicans ought to filibuster the nomination to death. And if they won’t do that, then a single Republican should use every other power at his disposal to block it.

I oppose the use of a filibuster to permanently kill a judicial nomination, for numerous reasons I have explained elsewhere. I think it violates the spirit and perhaps letter (the latter is arguable) of the Constitution to hold a third branch of government hostage to a super-majority vote. But that is decidedly not the case with an executive-branch appointee. Congress is empowered to keep direct watch over executive overreach. It should do so.

Democrats in the Senate filibustered to death the nomination of John Bolton to be Ambassador to the United Nations. Republicans and reasonable Democrats ought to do the same to Hagel, if they cannot defeat him in an up-or-down vote.

This is a hill to die on.

Ashton seems to accept with some equanimity the idea the Chuck Hagel will be confirmed as Secretary of Defense. Hmmm…. At least one GOP senator ought to announce that Hagel will be confirmed only over his (the senator’s) dead body.

Even after all my years on and/or covering Capitol Hill, I don’t quite understand all the ins and outs of how a “hold” works. But surely, if Jesse Helms could put a permanent hold on William Weld’s nomination to be an ambassador, then why can’t/won’t another senator kill the Hagel nomination with such a hold?

If not, this is clearly a nomination that can be filibustered to death. As well it should be. The only man in the United States Senate to refuse to sign an open letter (signed by all 99 other senators) condemning Russian anti-Semitism has no business being confirmed to a job that might entail the provision of troops or weapons for defense of Israel.

The man appears, to many, to be an anti-Semite. Opponents make quite a case that he should never set foot in the top office at the Pentagon.

As only he can do — sounding polite and reasonable while building a devastatingly critical case — Fred Barnes lights into the establishment media for its lily-livered lapdog act while not just kissing or licking, but slobbering over, Barack Obama’s ring. He won’t say it, but the case he lays out makes it clear that the media vis-a-vis Obama approaches the position Nina Burleigh offered vis-a-vis Bill Clinton. (Google it.)

One sample Barnes paragraph (among many):

Compare Obama’s coverage with that of President George W. Bush. The difference is startling. There was no fear of affronting Bush. He faced relentless scrutiny of his tactics in the war on terror: wiretaps, renditions, Guantánamo, the Patriot Act. The media raised questions about his motives, the constitutionality of his policies, and his brainpower. White House press conferences became tense and hostile events when national security issues were broached.

Obama’s adoption of these same policies has drawn minimal attention, much less the kind of media wrath that Bush endured. Last week, for example, Obama signed a bill extending the use of warrentless wiretapping to gather intelligence on America’s enemies. Bush was harshly criticized by the media on this very issue. Obama got a pass.

It really has been a shameful performance by the media. One might even say (read Barnes’ treatment of this issue) that the media has deliberately been putting “party before country.” But that might not really be true. I think a lot of the establishment media don’t know the difference.

At the risk of being accused of celebrating a bad deal rather than merely arguing that it wasn’t as bad as some conservatives say(I am doing the latter, not the former), I hereby jump into the fray again to request a little logical consistency from fellow conservatives.

Imagine a scenario the direct converse of what just occurred this week.

Imagine that years ago Congress had passed a “temporary” tax hike to pay for a war and its aftermath. Imagine that the hike was scheduled to expire at 12:01 a.m. on a certain New Year’s Day. In other words, by law, taxes would drop on every American on Jan. 1 if Congress didn’t act.

Now, what if Congress suddenly decided it couldn’t “afford” to “lose” those revenues. So it began working to block the expiration of those higher rates.

Regardless of whether Congress acted on Dec. 30 (before the expiration of the higher rates) or on Jan. 1 or 2 (after the expiration), there is not a conservative on Earth who would argue that Congress was doing anything other than raising taxes if Congress indeed intervened. And if Congress had intervened to block the scheduled rate reduction for 99% of Americans, while allowing the lower rates to apply to 1%, there is not a conservative alive who would be celebrating the reprieve for the 1% rather than denouncing Congress for keeping the current rates for the 99%.

In that scenario, every conservative would treat the already-scheduled-by-law rate reduction as the baseline, and any change in that schedule as the intervention.

So why, if the situation is reversed, do conservatives yell that Congress “raised” taxes by acting to avert a scheduled tax hike for 99% of Americans? Why is it that the already-scheduled-by-law rate increase is treated as if it is the intervention, while the change in that schedule, in order to save lower rates for 99%, is treated as the baseline?

…….

The point is that consistency should be required. Deciding whether something is a tax “hike” or a tax “cut” should not be a changeable proposition depending on the political circumstances. Either the law as written is the baseline, or it isn’t. You can’t say that in one case the law as written is the baseline, while in another case the existing rate structure is the baseline no matter what the law says is supposed to happen to that baseline.

Conservatives have every reason to grumble that President Obama refused to act to protect the final 1% (or whatever the exact number is) of Americans from higher taxes. But it is just not fair to blame Republican leaders for failing to act when they indeed already had acted months ago but the Senate and president refused to go along. Yes, yes, there were all sorts of different strategies and tactics that might have achieved better results (from a conservative standpoint) than were actually achieved, but that doesn’t mean that congressional Republicans are guilty of hiking taxes when they strove so mightily (even if ineffectually) to avoid raising even a single dollar of taxes.

The law as written is a mighty powerful instrument. President Obama had the law as written on his side, combined with the media, combined with the polls, combined with the political momentum of a very large electoral victory. For Republican leaders to fail to overcome the law, the media, the polls, and the political momentum might represent a lack of skill, but it is hardly a betrayal of principle. All that is at issue are small degrees of difference as to what was achievable as the best, or least bad, outcome from a very difficult situation. When a party controls only one half of one of the two “political” branches of government, and when the party controlling one-and-a half out of two (including the most powerful one) also has existing law (requiring higher rates as of Jan. 1) on its side, then the first party does not have one heck of a lot of leverage.

Do I think anybody else could have achieved a better outcome than John Boehner achieved? Yes, slightly. But was the final outcome an utter catastrophe, compared to what would have happened if nobody acted at all? Not in the least, as I have explained in other blog posts and columns. And there is something to be said for Boehner’s dogged attempts to avert catastrophe, and certainly something to be said for a result that saved married couples from higher tax rates for another $200,000 in earnings while for the first time inflation-indexing a very large exemption from the death tax.

———————

By contrast, moving forward, the leverage is almost all in favor of conservative goals. Whereas in this week’s deal the alternative of failing to act would have meant a horrible outcome (tax-rate hikes for 100% of Americans), there now remains not a clause in current law that will force any more taxes to rise if Congress fails to act. But if Congress fails to act at all — if it does nothing — then conservative wishes for lower spending will indeed occur. On both taxes and spending, the leverage of doing nothing — and thus of allowing the law as written to proceed — is now in conservative hands.

What remains is for Republicans and conservatives to revamp their strategy, tactics and communications, so they come out better in political terms than they emerged from this fight. The first step needs to be to stop cannibalizing our own side and instead aim fire at the leftist president — and to start by focusing attention on the unpopular$1 trillion in taxes that just went into effect from the unpopular next phase of implementation of the unpopular ObamaCare law.

It’s time to stop bemoaning the past, and to start working to improve the next battles that will be upon us in very, very short order.

In addition to my column now out, I also wrote a blog post at The American Spectator to explain why this deal ticked from being unacceptable to being, well, something less than utterly disastrous. (Obviously, that is not much of a recommendation, but it is important perspective.)

Here’s part of it:

Well, the end result was indeed that the sequestration cuts were replaced with other cuts. Or at least they were offset with an equal amount of “savings.” Now, it is true that small portion of the offset comes from a change in Roth IRA accounting rather than from spending cuts. And it is true that the cuts aren’t “specified” as I had hoped. But the offsets do come in the form of law — in budget “caps” going forward that, while hardly foolproof, do actually provide several important hurdles in the way of those who would exceed them. Moreover, by keeping intact under law the exact same budget targets as under the original sequestration deal, and by keeping 5/6ths of those savings in the form of the very hard-to-evade bludgeon of sequestration (if Congress doesn’t act, sequestration is automatic; the GOP need not do any more bargaining to achieve those savings), fiscal conservatives are no worse off than they were a week ago. Tactically, in fact, they are better off, because they preserved sequestration, but without the threat of higher taxes that will kick in for everybody and automatically, if they don’t act.

In addition, I will have plenty to say in the next week or so about how Republicans/conservatives can “play their hand” better in coming months than they have done so far.

In a very lengthy post at The American Spectator, I explain why the castor oil produced last night might be more good than bad for conservative digestions — by just a tiny amount, to be sure, and even then only if conservatives start playing their cards better in the coming months, but still an amount worth considering.  Please do take the time to follow the link and read the whole thing, but for now, the main point is that this deal actually does retain the lower spending levels (on discretionary spending) that conservatives had wanted. This fact should not be lost in the din of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

For purposes of this post, let me add to that AmSpec mini-essay to focus on two aspects of this deal that conservatives should truly celebrate.

Both involve “permanent” (in legislative lingo) solutions to vexing tax issues that conservatives have long sought.

First, this bill would permanently establish a $5 million threshold before the death tax kicks in. This is a huge achievement, protecting the vast majority of small businesses and family farms from this horrible tax. Even better, it indexes the threshold to inflation — so the exemption from the death tax will only grow over time. This is terrific. It is good economics, good policy… in short, a very good win.

Second, this bill permanently protects tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of taxpayers, from the evil Alternative Minimum Tax. How? Again, by permanently indexing the current threshold for inflation. Rather than leaving this hidden time bomb ticking, forever threatening to explode, subject to repeated “fixes” at the last minute by harried congressmen, this now enshrines into law the protections that all current taxpayers still below the AMT level now enjoy.

These are not achievements to scoff at. Sometimes it makes sense to bank some gains and come back to fight another day for other things of importance.

This is the opening salvo, predictably enough from the New York Times. This is by a constitutional law professor who argues that some provisions of the Constitution are downright “evil.” He says we should just scrap the whole thing. I think this view is far more common on the Left, and in the White House and upper echelons of the Justice Department, than the liberals will yet publicly admit. But expect this meme to grow. This is dangerous. These people are dangerous. They must be argued down, with energy and right reason.

Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post has a very insightful post about why Republicans are in political position to refuse a bad deal on the “Fiscal Cliff.”

Of the 234 Republicans elected to the House on Nov. 6, just 15 (!) sit in congressional districts that Obama also won that day, according to calculations made by the Cook Political Report’s ace analyst David Wasserman. That’s an infinitesimally small number…. The Senate landscape paints the same picture — this time looking forward. Of the 13 states where the 14 Republican Senators will stand for reelection in 2014 (South Carolina has two, with Lindsey O. Graham and Tim Scott up in two years time), Obama won just one in 2012 — Maine…. [But] fully one-third of the 21 Senate Democrats who will stand for reelection in 2014 represent states that Romney won.

It is axiomatic on the right that Republicans have misplayed the already-weak hand they have been dealt in these “Cliff” negotiations. I myself think the misplays have been not quite as egregious as others think, although I do think the strategic, tactical, and communications skills of the GOP are in pretty bad shape overall. (I also think, as I wrote here a few weeks back, that the whole idea of these closed-door negotiations was misguided.) But even different degrees of “bad” are all still “bad,” which means conservatives are left in a poor position no matter what. But Cillizza’s long view shows that, politically speaking, Republicans probably have less downside than had been thought, if we “go over the cliff.” My biggest concern about the cliff is the gutting of defense spending. That can be fixed. It almost certainly will be, after the fact, regardless. But Republicans actually will have almost as much leverage (they can’t have much less, because they now already have so little) in coming months on taxes as they do now. And perhaps the extra time might give them a chance to find somebody who can actually communicate their message more effectively, thus changing the narrative and giving everybody right of center (and therefore, the whole country, because our principles are good for public policy) a better deal than we might get in these last 12 hours of the year.

Twitter now says GOP concedes it will get ZERO spending cuts in cliff deal. This would be worse than going over the cliff. It would be utterly unacceptable. Better to accept the taxes and defense cuts and bank the AUTOMATIC domestic spending cuts, then go back later to restore defense and cut taxes again. MUCH MUCH better to do it that way than to not achieve the already-automatic levels of spending savings.

To let spending start growing again while also saving the lower tax rates on those who create the least economic growth, but not on the “investor class,” would be the absolute worst of all worlds. The deficit and debt would rise, the economy wouldn’t be any better off (and might be worse), and the principle of fighting tax-rate hikes would be out the window.

If this really is the shape of the deal, it is utterly unacceptable. No deal is better than this.