Freedom Line Blog

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

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

Huzzah to the 241 members of the House of Representatives who, in a thinly bipartisan vote today (4 Democrats voted in favor), passed H.R. 10, better known as the Regulations from the Executive In Need of Scrutiny (REINS) Act.  As the acronym indicates, the bill wants to limit President Barack Obama’s ability to impose job-killing regulations on the economy.

How does the REINS Act purport to do its job?  If passed by the Senate and signed by the President then every new federal agency regulation inflicting at least $100 million in economic costs would be subject to an up-or-down vote by both houses of Congress.  ($100 million is the threshold for “major” regulations these days.)  When those bills fails – which they almost certainly will unless they are inextricably intertwined with a national security issue – the bureaucrats who dream up these obstacles to economic growth will have to go back to the drawing board and divine a less expensive way to grow the federal government.

Characteristically, the Democrats running the Senate and the one occupying the White House have promised to do nothing to help pass this bill.  (The President even threatened to veto it should enough Senate Dems have the temerity to save their states’ small business owners from the paperwork onslaught thanks to 219 new regulations poised to add thousands of dollars per worker in compliance costs.)

Today, fiscal conservatives can cheer passage of a real “job creation” bill thanks to the conservative plurality in the House of Representatives.  Next year, it will critically important to elect more of these to the Senate – and hopefully the presidency – so that America can get back to work.

I’m not sure whether my title line sounds more like a disreputable law firm or an unpublished fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. Anyway …

There are a lot of good points flying around these discussions. Let me hit on a couple of things in Ashton’s post from earlier today.

He’s certainly right that Santorum may get an unexpected star turn during the NewsMax debate moderated by Donald Trump later this month. Like Ashton, I find the whole affair unsavory (a point I’ve been making over at Ricochet, though I’ve been getting significant pushback there), but I find Santorum’s decision to participate much more reasonable than Newt’s. The former is in such dire need of a Hail Mary pass that he can’t let quibbles with the format keep him from one last shot at a broad swath of the electorate. Newt, whose surge is continuing unabated, doesn’t need the exposure — and his participation is at odds with his repeated insistence that he’s the Serious candidate in the race.

One final note regarding Huntsman, whom Ashton mentioned in passing. As the anti-Newt campaign has developed legs in recent weeks (particularly with the Republican establishment in Washington), there has been yet another search for a conservative alternative, which has led some pundits (including the esteemed George Will) to posit that Huntsman deserves another look. Their rationale? That the former Utah governor has been the most consistently conservative candidate in the field — both in rhetoric and in record — on taxes, guns, and abortion.

This is another example of the principle I keep coming back to as we discuss presidential candidates: having the right positions on paper is necessary, but not sufficient. Huntsman may be good on a handful of issues, but his campaign has been weighed down by the fact that he consistently picks fights with the conservative base, often over superfluous issues (did we really need another election year argument over evolution? Has there ever been a significant presidential decision that hinged on that debate?). He’s the guy who comes back from a stint as Ambassador to China to tell us how bad we look overseas. He’s the guy who tells the Republican Party how primitive it is. And the primary he’d most like to win is with the media.

Why hasn’t Huntsman taken off? Because the only time he communicates with conservatives is to tell them how ashamed of them he is.

While federal bureaucrats dither, the ever-evolving telecom market continues to move at warp speed.  As Holman Jenkins of The Wall Street Journal observed, “The half life of regulatory know-it-allism gets shorter and shorter.”

Under an agreement announced last week to rave reviews, Verizon will pay $3.6 billion for 20 MHz of  unutilized spectrum on which Comcast, Time Warner and Bright House Networks – collectively part of the SpectrumCo joint venture – were sitting.  As part of the agreement, Verizon will also offer cable television services for those entities while they can in turn resell Verizon’s wireless service.  But here’s the takeaway point of it all.  Spectrum is the critical conduit by which wireless technology operates, and this cooperative accord will more promptly make idle spectrum available for consumer use via such cutting-edge devices as tablets and smartphones.  By way of contrast, it would take years under even the rosiest scenarios before Congress and federal regulators got around to making desperately-needed spectrum available for consumer use.

With consumer demand continually placing greater demands upon finite capacity, this deal will increase wireless breathing room.  In so doing, it will thereby ensure better customer service and open more doors to foreseeable and unforeseeable innovations.  It’s a win for consumers, and it once again illustrates the possibilities that markets provide when we allow them to operate more freely and cooperatively.

Ashton makes great points about how the Trump debate could offer Rick Santorum one last chance to make a splash. He REALLY needs to carefully prepare some explosive sound bites. He actually has done very well in the debates at making overall, sustained points, in understandable fashion. But he hasn’t done so in ways that are memorable or galvanizing. I think sound-bite politics is a hugely unfortunate aspect of today’s campaigns. But it is an essential skill to master.  It’s actually not easy, because it needs to sound substantive enough to NOT sound gimmicky, but it needs to be a bit gimmicky in order to be memorable enough to do real good. It’s even harder when you need to do it against somebody who buries you in words the way Gingrich does.

In short, opportunity knocks, but it’s a heavy door to open…. or something like that.

Troy, your analysis of Santorum’s weaknesses as a debater is well taken.  You’re also correct to draw out the positive of having so many presidential debates: it allows second tier candidates to make a mark in the public’s consciousness with well-delivered messages whenever the moderator gives them 15 seconds to speak.  Unlike Gingrich and Cain (and arguably Huntsman), Santorum has not made the most of his limited opportunities at these forums.

But that might change with the growing boycott of Donald Trump’s Newsmax debate.  So far, only Gingrich and Santorum have confirmed their attendance at the debate on December 27^th in Des Moines, IA.  With Huntsman, Ron Paul, and as of yesterday Mitt Romney (rightly) calling the Trump-as-moderator idea a distracting publicity stunt – and Michele Bachmann leaning towards declining the invitation because she correctly points out that Trump is considering a third party bid – it means that Rick Perry is the only major candidate yet to decide.  If he bows out, then the debate in Des Moines will feature a Newt v. Santorum one-off exactly one week before the Iowa caucuses.

Despite all his miscues in the debates so far, Santorum would be face-to-face with the current GOP frontrunner seven days before Iowa Republicans –  a state party dominated by grassroots conservatives – goes to the polls.  If this unique opportunity comes to pass and Santorum still can’t master the sound bite, he should demand a Lincoln-Douglas style debate with Newt on who has the most compelling conservative vision for America.  That means Trump would effectively become a timekeeper while arguably the two biggest conservative reformers of the 1990’s go at it to prove their base bona fides.  (And if Trump can’t handle not being the star of the show, this gives Newsmax an excellent reason to let him bow out.  Besides, his participation has already cost them ratings with the refusals of several big name candidates.  As a parting gift, they could let The Donald hock his new book during commercial breaks.)

Newt would relish the opportunity.  He has already debated Herman Cain one-on-one, and is set for a Lincoln-Douglas face-off with Huntsman.  Moreover, he said he would challenge President Barack Obama to an L-and-D format where each participant gets an extended period of time to speak and respond.  How could he refuse to engage in the same kind of debate with Santorum?

Both Santorum and Newt have thought seriously about the issues confronting the country, and this format would give them each the opportunity to demonstrate their seriousness to a national audience.  And, with the slow news cycle during the Christmas break providing the perfect opening for sustained attention to the debate before and after, the uniqueness of the event would no doubt increase viewership and water cooler talk.

It’s true that Santorum seemingly needs a miracle where all of the major candidates take themselves off the stage and allow him a one-time shot to prove to conservatives that he is a better Mr. Right than Newt Gingrich.  That seems to be happening with every new debate decline.

Thoughts?

Sheer genius, about the perils of Gingrich. Mark Steyn is funny as can be, and right on target, explaining way back right after it happened that Gingrich lost his speakership because he was weirdo, ninny and Grinch all at the same time. Amazing reading.

Ashton and Quin posit some ideas below for why former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (a man I admire) hasn’t become a significant candidate in the Republican presidential field. Let me tackle a few of these suppositions and then explain why I think Santorum’s campaign is in the basement — and why it will stay there.

Ashton wonders if the media has an aversion to Santorum because of his stances on social issues. I doubt it. Mike Huckabee was the social conservative candidate du jour in 2008 and he got plenty of press coverage. The fact that the media mandarins are often unsympathetic to people of faith doesn’t keep them from covering religious candidates– it usually just means they’ll cover them with scorn. It’s been 25 years since Pat Robertson ran for president and the press is still taking their shots at him

Quin is correct to note that Santorum consistently shows a very strong grasp of the issues in debates. He’s also correct to note that the former senator gets very little camera time at these forums. That latter fact, however, doesn’t explain Santorum’s failure to catch on. The time a candidate gets in a debate is a lagging indicator of his relevancy, not a leading one. Herman Cain didn’t get much attention in early debates either, but he maximized what time he had and his performances led to his rise in the polls. The same was true of Newt Gingrich early on. Ditto Huckabee in 2008. If a second-tier candidate wants to get into the first tier, he has to know how to exploit the few openings that come his way. Santorum doesn’t.

Like Quin, I don’t put much stock in the argument about Santorum as a loser because of his performance in the 2006 Pennsylvania senate race. Those are calculations that are primarily made by beltway types for beltway types.

Of all the diagnoses, I think Quin’s point about Santorum’s failure to win style points in the debates is closest to the mark, though I would take it much farther. Santorum actively hurts himself in these forums. He has a seemingly unshakable tendency to come off petulant, complaining about how much time he gets and boasting about his congressional record in a manner so ostentatiously self-regarding as to be off-putting.

It’s also important to remember that “style points” matter (just ask Rick Perry). Style, particularly in the way you communicate, is one of the major levers of presidential power, though it’s not always sufficient (just ask Barack Obama). Santorum conveys no personal warmth, humor, or sense of personality whatsoever. He seems just as bland as Tim Pawlenty once did behind the podium.

That may seem like a superficial standard by which to judge a possible president, but it’s one of the standards we use (it’s a lot less operative at other levels, including the senate, which is why Santorum hasn’t had this problem before). Americans have an emotional attachment to the presidency and they’re always implicitly asking themselves “Is this the person I want in my living room for four years? Is this the person I want to rally behind in a time of crisis?” Unless and until Santorum can figure out how to convince voters to answer those questions in the affirmative, he’ll remain mired in the single digits.

I hope Troy, Tim, and whomever else will weigh in on this, too, and that Ashton will have more thoughts as well, about Ashton’s excellent questions about Santorum’s viability.

The deal is this: Santorum, first, has indeed been creeping up the polls in Iowa, and earning several key local endorsements. But he can’t get a big break or make a big move, it seems. All along he’s been doing the kind of painstaking grassroots work that sets the predicate for victory but that doesn’t itself achieve victory UNLESS a spark is lit. It’s like patiently gathering firewood, of all kinds, from tiny kindling to great big logs, and building a spectacular would-be fire — but not yet having a match, or even any flint, or even a magnifying glass to concentrate the sun’s rays to set the whole thing ablaze. The man has an incredibly well-constructed organization in Iowa, but it needs to be lit on fire.

Part of his problem is that he has received so little chance in the debates to make an impression. I’ve actually counted the number of times in several debates that each candidate was allowed to speak, and Santorum comes out on the bottom every time. The moderators have just given him short shrift.

Second, while he has been almost universally praised for his knowledge and his articulation of issues in the debates, he hasn’t been praised for style points. He has come across as the ace high school debater outpointing everybody on stage, but not out-charming everybody. He seems a striver endlesslessly trying to prove himself, rather than somebody who exudes a particularly executive authority of the sort of person who just expects his right to lead to be taken for granted.

Third, he has the tag of a loser. It’s crazy, but it’s there. He lost his last race by 18 points. Never mind that Gingrich oversaw the loss of House seats in what should have been a year for big GOP victories in 1998, nor that Gingrich poisoned the well so badly in 1996 that no GOP candidate for president was going to win. Never mind that if Romney had had the guts, as Santorum did, to run for re-election in 2006, he would have lost by about the same margin. Never mind that Santorum still outpolled the GOP candidate for governor in Pennsylvania that year, and most GOP candidates for the House in their respective districts, nor that he was running in the worst GOP year (other than Watergate) in 3/4 of a century, nor that his opponent was the namesake son of the most popular Pennsylvania governor in 70 years, nor that registered Dems outnumbered Repubs in PA by a cool million people. Never mind that Santorum won in a big upset in 1990, that he beat another incumbent in 1992 (dedistricted into the same space), that he won a big upset for the Senate in 1994, or that he won another upset for re-election to the Senate in 2000, holding his seat by five points as GW Bush lost the state by four points. Somehow, none of that matters: He’s a loser, dontcha know, because, well, he lost one race. Crazy.

But in all his winning races, Santorum closed fast right at the end. He’s trying to do the same thing here, without much campaign cash but with plenty of hard work. It may look like a long shot, but only a fool would completely write off his chances.

Though there are many positive things to say about Rick Santorum’s candidacy – battle-tested conservative on national security, welfare reform and foundational issues like family and marriage – he has yet to catch anything resembling a break while seemingly every other Republican running for president has (witness the regrettable Jon Huntsman ticking up in New Hampshire).

Unlike frontrunners Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum has no personal baggage, and has not flip-flopped on any principled issue since entering public life twenty years ago.  As we’ve discussed before, Santorum has great ideas on personal and corporate tax reform that would lead to real economic growth.  So, with the base refusing to support Mitt Romney and others skittish of Newt Gingrich’s past and future, why can’t Rick get a break?  Is it media bias over his stance on social issues?  Bad debate performances?  Does he lack contacts with big donors?

Byron York has written several pieces anticipating an Iowa surge for Santorum, but so far…nothing.

Thoughts?

Newt Gingrich thinks that Nancy Pelosi just gave him a great Christmas gift. She is so despised by conservatives, he thinks, that having her threaten to unleash dirt on him will make conservatives rally to his cause. But let’s think this out a little further: Nancy Pelosi knows the same thing. She WANTS it known that she wants to go after Gingrich, because she WANTS conservatives to rally to his cause, because she KNOWS he is so incredibly beatable — in part because of all the dirt that she and so many others have stored up about the guy.

So she’s playing smart politics by helping Gingrich now — because helping Gingrich now helps Obama later.

Meanwhile, there’s a problem with Gingrich’s complaint, here:

Gingrich said that Pelosi’s suggestion that she would reveal information from that investigation underscored that the ethics charges were politically motivated. “It tells you how capriciously political that committee was,” Gingrich said.

The problem is that Gingrich actually admitted having prevaricated to investigators for two solid years about the charges. Moreover, it wasn’t just Democrats who found him flagrantly guilty; it was his fellow Republicans, or at least three of the four of them, who joined the conclusion.

So how, pray tell, was it politically motivated?

All of which is just by way of acting as a fact checker….. Politically, of course, Gingrich is an effective salesman, in a way, of the Gingrich cause, which is the cause of Gingrich. World historical definers of and savers of civilization can’t be bothered with petty facts…..

Here’s my contribution to the debate on how to cut the federal deficit: Congress should cut the criminally mismanaged loan program administered by the Department of Energy.  Under Secretary Steven Chu’s watch, the department has doled out $535 million to the now-bankrupt Solyndra, with a separate $400 million sweetheart deal to Abound Solar.  Both firms are financially backed by top-dollar campaign bundlers for President Barack Obama’s presidential runs.

Had this program not been in place nearly $1 billion of taxpayer money would not have been parceled out to crony capitalists.  (Add the $548 million steered to Siga Technologies Inc. for a smallpox drug America doesn’t need, and you’re at nearly $1.5 billion to pay for products the private market doesn’t want.)  Is there a Democrat in Congress willing to defend this massive waste of taxpayer money, money that could have been spent to pay down the debt, shore-up Social Security, or extend the payroll tax holiday?

The best reason to get a Republican nominee quickly is so that the broader American electorate can be educated on the enormous amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse inflicted on the nation’s fisc by the Occupiers in the White House.

Earlier today Newsmax invited the main Republican candidates to a December 27^th debate in Des Moines, IA.  One catch: it will be moderated by Donald Trump.  Somehow a “moderate” Donald Trump doesn’t seem possible.

In a way it’s fitting that Trump, erstwhile Republican presidential candidate, will be preside over what may be the final GOP debate before the January 3, 2012 Iowa caucuses.  Trump started the anti-Romney conservative popularity surges that later carried Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Herman Cain and now Newt Gingrich to prominence.

But for all his popularity, the choice of Trump is a bit curious since he’s recently admitted to thinking about running for president again – this time on a third party ticket.  While the venue and media exposure may preclude candidates from staying away, I would be wary of taking questions from a guy who could use his moderator’s role to pin down potential rivals.

This week’s edition of the Liberty Update, CFIF’s weekly e-newsletter, is out. Below is a summary of its contents:

Senik:  Obama to the Working Class: Go Away
Lee:  New Round of “Climategate” Leaks Deal Another Blow to Global Warming Orthodoxy
Hillyer:  Why Supremes Will Nix ObamaCare
Ellis:  Maxine Waters Is Worse than Barney Frank
Hillyer:  Fight Abusive Police and Prosecutors

Freedom Minute Video:  Elena Kagan: Is the Fix in on ObamaCare?
Podcast:  The Supercommittee’s Failure and the 2012 GOP Primary Field
Jester’s Courtroom:  Occupy Courtroom

Editorial Cartoons:  Latest Cartoons of Michael Ramirez
Quiz:  Question of the Week
Notable Quotes:  Quotes of the Week

If you are not already signed up to receive CFIF’s Liberty Update by e-mail, sign up here.

When Barack Obama entered office and proposed his nearly $1 trillion spending “stimulus” bill, his administration promised that unemployment would peak at 8% in the fall of 2009 if we passed his plan.  They also predicted that unemployment would be down to approximately 6% by now.

Instead, following today’s latest report from the Department of Labor, unemployment has now exceeded Obama’s promised 8% ceiling for a record 34th consecutive month.  Although some will focus on the decline from 9.0% to 8.6%, most of that statistical decline is due to people giving up and dropping out of the labor force, rather than from sudden job creation.  That is illustrated by the fact that only 120,000 net jobs were added, less than the anticipated number.  That’s also fell far below the 200,000 new jobs needed each month to reduce the unemployment rate by just 1% over the span of a year. Additionally, the broader labor participation rate again declined and now stands at 64%.

In contrast to the destructive effects of Obama’s borrow-and-tax-and-spend agenda, Ronald Reagan’s tax-cutting agenda saw unemployment plummet from 10.4% to 7.1% over the same period of time.  As the old Latin saying goes, “res ipsa loquitur” – the fact speaks for itself.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to hear the lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of ObamaCare and raises questions about Justice Elena Kagan’s apparent bias in favor of the health care reform law. 

A piece in Politico today looks at the efforts by Mitt Romney’s campaign team to ward off the growing challenge from the Newt Gingrich boomlet. While the author, Reid J. Epstein, spends a fair amount of time examining the lines of attack that are being planned for both Romney and his surrogates, one aspect of their strategy is undersold in the piece. Epstein writes of the Romney campaign:

… They’re also ready to sit back and wait for the other candidates who are more dependent on strong showings in Iowa to do the dirty work.

Cue all-purpose gadfly Ron Paul. Paul is out with a devastating new anti-Gingrich ad that plays right into Romney’s hands. In fact, the ad — with its focus on questioning Newt’s conservative credentials — plays a lot better coming from the undiluted Paul than the notoriously squishy Romney. The reality, though, is that it probably does much more to help the latter than the former. See for yourself:

So federal bureaucrats at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), those known master micromanagers of the American economy, concluded in their wisdom to oppose the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile, two independent, free, private parties.  Along the way, the FCC went to the improper and unprecedented extreme of releasing a staff report gratuitously and inaccurately critiquing the justifications offered for the merger.  Again, we’re talking about a merger between two consenting, informed parties.  We’re also talking about a merger application that was voluntarily withdrawn by the parties.  Yet the FCC, for reasons still unexplained, broke with decades of administrative protocol and published the staff report.

Remember, this is the same supposedly omnipotent federal government that managed the housing market so well in recent decades through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, not to mention the splendid business acumen it displayed in the energy sector with such examples as Solyndra.  And it’s the same FCC that incompetently attempted to commandeer Internet service through so-called “Net Neutrality,” which earned it a unanimous rebuke from the D.C. Court of Appeals and Congress.

Turning its eye toward the telecommunications industry, the FCC decided in its considered expertise that the AT&T/T-Mobile merger was not in the best interests of the American people.  As one particularly curious example, the FCC staff report claims that the proposed merger would cause job losses.  One would think that federal regulators would be more circumspect in asserting job projections in light of the slow-motion “stimulus” disaster that was supposed to cap unemployment at 8% in October 2009.  Instead, unemployment stands at 9% and has exceeded 8% for a record number of months.  Moreover, if the merger was a likely job-killer, why would even the Communication Workers of America (CWA) labor union support it?  The FCC asks us to believe that the labor union most impacted by the proposed merger would somehow seek fewer dues-paying members?

Moreover, the FCC itself within the past month claimed that its own $4.5 billion fund to deploy wireline broadband to just 7 million Americans would create “500,000 jobs and $50 billion in economic growth.”  Yet it now contradicts itself by claiming the proposed AT&T/T-Mobile merger, which would deploy broadband service to the far greater number of 55 million Americans, would somehow destroy jobs?  In other words, the FCC seems to think that smaller amounts of government spending to bring broadband to a smaller number of people will create jobs, but much larger amounts of private investment to bring broadband to a much greater number of people will not.

Federal bureaucrats are unequipped to micromanage the telecom industry, just as they’re incompetent to tell Boeing (America’s top exporter) where it can and cannot operate manufacturing plants.  It’s yet another example that the FCC is out of control, and threatening American jobs by its malfeasance.

Troy Senik, former presidential speechwriter and Senior Fellow at CFIF, discusses the failure of the Supercommittee and how and why the Republican primary field has shifted.

Listen to the interview here.

I am so glad Ashton posted this latest outrage from the flagrantly corrupt, thuggish, Obama/Holder (In)Justice Department. If a Republican administration had done this, every editorial page in the United States — EVERY ONE — would have been yelling bloody murder about the trampling of the public’s right to know, etc.  Every major newscast would be lead with this story. Cue the dramatic music about the cover-up indicating that a crime MUST have been committed, and cue the race for someone to append the most clever “-Gate” ending as a name for the scandal.  But if Obama does it…. yawn.

This is serious. It appears criminal. And it must not stand. Go back and read Ashton’s post and the backup documentation. It’s an outrage.