Freedom Line Blog

For anyone looking for an excellent summary of the history, purpose, and use of the Senate’s budget reconciliation process, Newt Gingrich provides the best single source description I’ve read so far.  This analysis – supplemented with charts showing when the process has been used, by whom, and for what – will be very helpful when debating your liberal friends or trying to decipher the media’s confused coverage of the procedure.  It even discusses “the Byrd Rule” (named after its author, West Virginia Democratic Senator, Robert Byrd), and its role in stopping the Clinton White House from using reconciliation to pass HillaryCare.  With President Obama calling on congressional Democrats to use reconciliation to pass the Senate’s health care “reform” bill so they can bypass a Republican filibuster, now is the time to get your arguments down and call your members of Congress.

H/T: Human Events

Today’s Washington Times has a morosely humorous article discussing the current fetish for “jobs creation” bills in Congress.  From confiscating beachfront property to establishing a non-profit government entity to promote travel, nearly every bill in Congress is being fitted into a jobs frame that makes it difficult to oppose on its claims.  But not, of course, on the substance.

For that, we need look no farther than the end of the liberty-loving economics student’s book shelf for a copy of Henry Hazlitt’s “Economics in One Lesson.”  After explaining why full employment is only and always the means to achieving the proper goal of full production, Hazlitt takes aim at the predecessors of our latter day misguided politicos:

Yet our legislators do not present Full Production bills in Congress but Full Employment bills.   Even committees of businessmen recommend ‘a President’s Commission on Full Employment,’ not on Full Production, or even on Full Employment and Full Production.  Everywhere the means is erected into the end, and the end itself is forgotten.”

So too, is the credibility of any member of Congress who thinks that the answer to spurring economic growth comes from anything other than lower, simpler taxes.

Ordinarily, the term “bunker mentality” refers to an individual or group so cut off from outside opinion that they view any dissent as a threat to power.  The Obama White House is acting the part in its call for congressional Democrats to exercise the so-called “nuclear option” and pass health care “reform” through the Reconciliation process, public opinion polls be damned.  But if the president launches legislative nukes at his opponents and the American people (but I repeat myself), and then retreats back into his publicly financed bunker, how long will it be until he realizes he has to live with the fallout?  Better yet, will his agenda be so radioactive that only the most suicidal Democrats will follow him back out into the public square?

H/T: Jake Tapper at ABC News

As discussed previously by CFIF, Representative Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting some much deserved attention for his path breaking proposal, “A Roadmap for America’s Future.”  The Roadmap lays out a comprehensive vision for matching spending on federal entitlements like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security with tax receipts.  In other words, it offers specifics on the GOP’s long-stated aim to make government live within its means.

Of course, proposing an elegant, tough-minded legislative solution in an election year doesn’t win many co-sponsors.  In Ryan’s case, he’s got 9.  The folks at Newsweek noticed and are calling out Republicans for their lack of agreement on a substantive way forward.  Being a man of substance and conviction isn’t easy in Washington, D.C., especially for a member of Congress.  That Paul Ryan is willing to put his policies where his rhetoric is deserves not only a nod, but broad based conservative support as well.

Today is an important day in United States Supreme Court history, and in the ongoing battle to protect the individual freedoms enshrined in the Second Amendment.

Two years ago, the Court finally and explicitly confirmed that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms in District of Columbia v. Heller. Today, it hears oral argument in McDonald v. Chicago to determine whether that right protects citizens against state infringement as well as in federal jurisdictions such as Washington, D.C.

Everyday citizens unfamiliar with Court precedent and the legal contortions distinguishing which provisions of the Bill of Rights will or will not be protected will scratch their heads and wonder, “if the First Amendment applies to protect citizens against state infringement, why not the Second Amendment?”  The Court has also recognized Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendment protections against state violation.  The legal niceties, however, are less important than the overarching illogic that even attempts to render Second Amendment rights less important or worthy of protection.

The simple fact is that this case illustrates once again the way in which politicized judges decide which rights they consider important based upon their own personal political preferences.  Our Founding Fathers did not draft the Constitution as a byzantine code to be understood and applied only by conceited judges.  Rather, they intentionally began the Constitution with the words, “We the People” and created it to be understood, treasured and applied by everyday citizens.

Accordingly, the legal nuances are less important than the overall theme:  big government once again seeks to infringe upon citizens’ individual freedoms and Constitutional rights via court decree.  Fortunately, the Court appears likely to side with the Second Amendment over the city of Chicago.  But even if it abandons logic and principle by upholding Chicago’s prohibition, the battle will continue with citizens exercising their rights at the federal, state and local legislative and executive levels.  In which case gun “control” advocates may ultimately come to regret a fleeting Pyrrhic judicial triumph.

Hats off to the media for casting their glance to a deserving corner of Middle America. While we’re still about 10 months from the 2012 presidential sweepstakes starting in earnest, an amazing amount of journalistic attention has been directed towards Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels in recent days — this despite the fact that Daniels has probably been the most reticent of all potential GOP contenders.

Anyone who can generate plaudits from National Review’s Mona Charen, Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift, and the New York Times’ Ross Douthat in the course of a week deserves a serious look. It also helps if that same individual can make principled, fact-driven cases for market-based policies, come off as more decent than any other politician on the continent, and give the best political speech of the last decade.

Before Republicans begin their usual coronation of the next candidate in line, Mitch Daniels deserves consideration commensurate with his tremendous record as a public servant.

If there are any camels’ backs at the breaking point, here’s a public employee union-sponsored straw.   As if daring the mainstream media to challenge his meritless assertions of bipartisanship, President Obama named SEIU leader and fellow Saul Alinsky disciple, Andy Stern, to his “Bipartisan National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform.”

That’s right; the panel of experts tasked with finding ways to reduce the federal deficit will count among its ranks a man who agitates for expanding both the membership and compensation of government employees.  He also has tight connections with ACORN and organized intimidation campaigns against Tea Party activists.  Asking Stern to find ways to save taxpayer money is like putting a fox in charge of the bed check in a hen house: it makes sense if you don’t think about it.

Well, this isn’t too surprising.  When asked by a reporter to grade herself on the past year’s performance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi responded that she’d give herself “an ‘A’ for effort.” No doubt the mother of five is the kind of helicopter parent demanding trophies for participation, and praise for people who deign to show up.  But if you can get an ‘A’ just for trying, what grade will the Speaker bestow on herself when and if the Democrats in Congress actually pass the health care “reform” bill?

Below is one of the latest cartoons from Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.