Freedom Line Blog

Really, Mr. Veep? Really?!?

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.

Just when he thought it was safe to grab hold of the GOP presidential mantle, Mitt Romney gets the worst kind of endorsement – a thumbs-up from Jimmy Carter.

Said Carter: “I’d rather have a Democrat but I would be comfortable — I think Romney has shown in the past, in his previous years as a moderate or progressive… that he was fairly competent as a governor and also running the Olympics as you know. He’s a good solid family man and so forth, he’s gone to the extreme right wing positions on some very important issues in order to get the nomination. What he’ll do in the general election, what he’ll do as president I think is different.”

To be sure, Carter’s statement about being “comfortable” with Romney isn’t as bad as the former Democratic president’s labeling one-time Romney rival Jon Huntsman as an “attractive” candidate and “very attractive to me personally.”

However, Carter’s justification for being comfortable with Romney does reinforce the conventional wisdom that Romney’s conservatism is a veneer whereas his “moderate or progressive” past is the truer indicator of how he’ll govern as president.

To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, maybe we’ll have to elect Mitt to see how he’ll govern.

H/T: Political Wire

In recent days, Wal-Mart has been rocked by the New York Times‘ reporting on a bribery scandal in Mexico, where the firm reportedly paid over $24 million to government officials to fast-track the permitting process for stores built south of the border.

The left, of course, is all over this because Wal-Mart is their corporate bete noir of choice. Personally, however, I think the party that bears the most guilt is the Mexican government, which has created an atmosphere in which graft is the easiest way to do business. Absent those conditions, the need for bribes would have been minimal and the issue would’ve been moot. Regardless, however, there’s an important angle here that gets fleshed out by the American Enterprise Institute’s Nick Schulz, writing for Forbes:

… While we’re on the topic of companies having to pay the politically powerful for access to markets, can we stop for a moment to examine how things sometimes get done right here in the United States? It’s not uncommon for big box retailers to pony up cash and other unearned benefits in order to break new ground on stores.; what’s different here, however, is that members of our political class often force them to do it. And it’s all perfectly legal.

Consider a recent bill in Maryland, where I live, aimed at big box retailers. Firms like Wal-Mart, Costco, and others hoping to expand operations in wealthy Montgomery County, just outside Washington DC, would be forced to negotiate legally-binding “community benefits agreements” as a condition for building and operating new stores. These sorts of bills are not uncommon when big retailers want to expand or enter into new markets.

The upshot is that politically well-connected local stakeholders – unions, community organizers, and other interest groups – get cash, hiring promises, and other benefits from the retailer in exchange for dropping any opposition to a new store.

Among the possible benefits are “assistance to community organizations and programs.” These organizations can, in turn, use this “assistance” to support the political candidates who push this kind of legislation in the first place.

What Schulz is describing is no more representative of free-market capitalism than the bribery going on in Mexico. As long as business owners have to compensate others who have contributed absolutely nothing to their efforts as the predicate for setting up shop, political power over business is still excessive. At least the folks in Mexico have the decency to call this what it is.

Last month, we explained why overturning ObamaCare’s individual mandate would not amount to “judicial activism” as liberals hypocritically contend.  Quoting Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Number 78, we noted that, “The courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority.”   For the Supreme Court to refrain from overturning the individual mandate due to timidity or political calculation would effectively erase the interstate commerce clause and its limiting principle out of the text of the Constitution, an act of supreme judicial arrogance and activism.

Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, former Reagan and George H. W. Bush attorneys David Rivkin, Jr. and Lee Casey highlight another manner in which upholding, rather than overturning, ObamaCare’s individual mandate would constitute judicial activism.  Namely, because upholding it would eliminate any limiting commerce clause principle, courts would suddenly possess even greater future power to decide on an arbitrary case-by-case basis which federal laws satisfied their undefined discretion:

There is virtually no economically unrealistic regulation – that forces companies to produce goods nobody wants to buy, or sets artificial prices – that could not be salvaged at least in the short run by an offsetting purchase mandate of some kind…  Although the policy merits of various mandates could honestly be debated, there is simply no neutral, judicially enforceable basis on which courts can determine which prepayment mandates Congress can impose as a means of regulating future transactions and which it cannot.  In fact, if the courts were to scrutinize such mandates, as ObamaCare defenders suggest, striking down those they considered to be too onerous or preposterous (such as a “broccoli mandate”) the judges truly would be engaged in illegitimate judicial activism.”

Thus would Potter Stewart’s infamous “I know it when I see it” become the rule in every instance of potential Congressional overreach, and a tool for unrestricted future judicial activism.

Today’s Wall Street Journal highlights a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center showing a drastic change in Mexican immigration patterns into the United States over the last decade.

During America’s economic boom from the 1990’s until 2005, millions of illegal immigrants were attracted to border-states like Arizona for lucrative work in industries like construction.

Between 2005 and 2010, however, the numbers of Mexicans migrating back to Mexico roughly matched the numbers of those coming into America.  In 2011, evidence suggests that more Mexican immigrants returned to Mexico than came to America.

The WSJ author’s final paragraph gives a glimpse how the Pew report might be used by liberals to undermine Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law being argued before the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court begins a review of Arizona’s anti-illegal immigrant law. That law, and similar ones drafted in other states, has led some undocumented Mexicans to go home. Lawmakers should take the shift into account to ensure policies reflect current reality, said Roberto Suro, a professor of public policy at the University of Southern California.”We have turned the page in terms of migration,” he said. “We haven’t turned the page yet in terms of the policies.”

Justified laws that achieve their intended purpose should be applauded, not repealed.  In Arizona’s case, the state had unacceptably high levels of illegal immigration and it passed a law to help state law enforcement officers identify and deport illegals who had then committed a second crime (the first being illegal entry).

If the Pew findings are true and illegal immigrants took Arizona – speaking through its law – at the state’s word, then the present reality of less illegal immigration supports continuing the law’s enforcement.  To follow the logic of USC’s Professor Sura about success mandating repeal is foolish and denies the important role law plays in deterring bad behavior.

As has been chronicled at length here at CFIF, one of the hallmarks of Eric Holder’s Justice Department has been its insistence on injecting race into the public square as often as possible. And one of the areas where this has played out in department policy has been in the DOJ’s repeated threats to crack down on police and fire forces for what it claims are racially discriminatory employment practices.

In 2009, for example, the New Haven, Connecticut, Fire Department threw out the results of a standardized test aimed at measuring candidates’ suitability for promotion when the number of African-American candidates who passed was deemed insufficiently high. The department was motivated in part by fear of a Justice Department lawsuit — a fear that proved to be well-founded when the DOJ filed suit against the state of New Jersey the following year because white test-takers had a higher passage rate (89 percent) than black (73 percent) or Hispanic (77 percent) candidates in an exam for police promotions.

Neither of these cases featured allegations that the tests or the promotion processes were inherently racist. Rather, they simply rested on the DOJ’s notion that unequal outcomes are inherently unjust; that the fact of disparate results was sufficient, in and of itself, to reveal systemic injustice.

So far, the results of DOJ pressure have been mixed. The New Haven firefighters whose successful test results were thrown out took their case all the way to the Supreme Court, where the justices ruled in their favor, 5-4. In New Jersey, however, the DOJ’s bullying tactics won the day, with the state agreeing to revise the exam and issue back pay to minority officers (many of whom resented the feds’ “help”).

Yet that inconsistent track record isn’t keeping the department from going at it again. This time they’re taking the show to Jacksonville, Florida. Per a DOJ release from yesterday:

The Justice Department today filed a lawsuit against the city of Jacksonville, Fla., alleging that the city is engaged in a pattern or practice of employment discrimination against African-Americans in its fire and rescue department in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  The lawsuit challenges the fire department’s use of written examinations for the promotion of firefighters to four ranks – Lieutenant, Captain, and District Chief, all in the suppression line, and Engineer…

The United States’ complaint alleges that the examinations impact African-American candidates in two ways.  First, African-American candidates for promotion to the four positions pass the examinations at significantly lower rates than white candidates.  Second, even those African-Americans who pass the examinations are rarely promoted because the fire department selects candidates for promotion in descending rank-order based primarily upon each candidate’s written examination score and African-American candidates score significantly lower than whites.

Notice that there’s nothing in there that any fair observer could characterize as bias. Rather, the complaint is, in essence, that the Jacksonville Fire Department is too objective.

As the police officers in New Jersey noted in the piece linked above, even a successful outcome for the DOJ will not have the effect of helping out minority officers, whose qualifications will now be called into question on the basis of de facto affirmative action.

If the feds really wanted to help out, they would examine the underlying causes of why the tests exhibit racial disparities in the first place. Could it be that America’s public schools — rotting as the result of the influence of teachers unions — have disproportionately failed minority communities? Could it be that the social pathologies subsidized in perpetuity by the welfare state have thwarted upward mobility in poor neighborhoods?

Answering those questions, of course, would require some real soul-searching. And it might also require giving up the notion that good intent is sufficient to make Democrats the perpetual guardians of America’s minority communities, no matter what kind of havoc their policies wreak in reality. But that’s a level of introspection we shouldn’t expect from this Administration. In Eric Holder’s DOJ, it’s easier to just file a lawsuit and assume that the other guy’s a racist.

In a presidential election year like 2012, it’s easy for national issues to crowd out state and local concerns at the ballot box.  But thanks to Obamacare’s costly mandate on states to create health insurance exchanges, fiscal conservatives running for state offices can easily make opposition to more government a central plank in their campaign platform.

According to Cato Institute scholar Michael F. Cannon, outside of the U.S. Supreme Court’s potentially striking down Obamacare’s individual mandate, the most important health policy battle to be waged is state government opposition to creating Obamacare’s state-based health insurance exchanges.

As I’ve written previously these exchanges are a subtle way to coerce states into spending millions of dollars to set-up a government-controlled, taxpayer-subsidized “market” for health insurance.  Thereafter, when Obama’s bureaucrats at HHS decide the state version isn’t performing exactly the way they want, Obamacare grants HHS the power to take over any state’s exchange and run it from Washington, D.C.  Thus, the bait-and-switch is yet another way for Obamacare to hide its impact on the federal budget deficit by shoving some of its start-up costs onto the states.

Cato’s Cannon outlines a different strategy, with talking points that to me seem ready-made for a state campaigner’s website:

Jobs. Refusing to create an exchange will block Obamacare from imposing a tax on employers whose health benefits do not meet the federal government’s definition of “essential” coverage. That tax can run as high as $3,000 per employee. A state that refuses to create an exchange will spare its employers from that tax, and will therefore enable them to create more jobs.

Religious freedom. In blocking that employer tax, state officials would likewise block Obamacare’s effort to force religious employers to provide coverage for services they find immoral — like contraception, pharmaceutical abortions, and sterilization.

The federal debt. Refusing to create exchanges would also reduce the federal debt, because it would prevent the Obama administration from doling out billions of dollars in subsidies to private insurance companies.

The U.S. Constitution. The Obama administration has indicated that it might try to tax employers and hand out those subsidies anyway — even in states that don’t create an exchange, and even though neither Obamacare nor any other federal law gives it the power to do so. If that happens, the fact that a state has refused to create an exchange would give every large employer in the state — including the state government itself — the ability to go to court to block the administration’s attempt to usurp Congress’s legislative powers.

A lower state tax burden. States that opt to create an exchange can expect to pay anywhere from $10 million to $100 million per year to run it. But if states refuse, Obamacare says the federal government must pay to create one. Why should states pay for something that the federal government is giving away?

Bye-bye, Obamacare. That is, if the feds can create an exchange at all. The Obama administration has admitted it doesn’t have the money — and good luck getting any such funding through the GOP-controlled House. Moreover, without state-run exchanges, the feds can’t subsidize private insurance companies. That by itself could cause Obamacare to collapse.

There is no reason a state should agree to spend millions of dollars laying the groundwork for a federal takeover of health care.  Fiscal conservatives running for office this cycle should articulate this argument well and often.

Ramesh Ponnuru is right on target about Reagan’s legacy.

Republicans and conservatives, too, misrepresent his lessons:

Reagan believed that one reason his immediate predecessors were perceived as failures was that they conveyed a sense of being overwhelmed by the presidency. Only with time has it become clear how much “real discipline, hard work and focus” Reagan kept hidden.

This misimpression about Reagan, says Hayward, leads conservatives to underemphasize the importance of all this hard work — both in drafting policies and honing rhetoric — and to think that good gut instincts are a substitute for it.

When conservatives these days look for presidential and especially VP candidates, they are far too prone to go for the “gut instinct” test rather than the tests of experience, wisdom, proven record, etcetera. Food for thought.

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.

Reminder that you can follow me on Twitter at @QuinHillyer. Might have some fun things to say.

Free Market America, a new group operating in partnership with Americans for Limited Government, has a powerful new video out that makes an important point: if one was setting out to intentionally inflict harm on the American economy via energy policy, the resulting strategy would look a lot like what the Obama Administration is proposing.

The point here is not that Obama’s agenda is a covert plot to damage the nation — it’s not — but rather that its effects will be just as calamitous as if it was. Take a look for yourself:

Once upon a time, liberals scoffed at the idea that legislation needed to be constitutional in order to be lawful.  Remember then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s infamous response to the question of where in the Constitution did Congress have the power to pass Obamacare: “Are you serious?”

Well, after the U.S. Supreme Court scared the daylights out of the liberal commentariat with pointed questions about Obamacare’s constitutionality, it seems that opponents of Indiana’s recent right-to-work law are trying their hand at interpreting the text instead of the spirit of the document.

The Daily Caller summarizes the argument:

Indiana’s law prohibits employers from making union membership a condition of getting or keeping a job. The union’s February lawsuit claimed the law violated its members’ Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of “equal protection” under the law.

But an amended complaint filed on Wednesday added a Thirteenth Amendment claim as well. The new lawsuit suggests that when nonunion employees earn higher salaries and better benefits because of the union’s negotiation on behalf of its members, the union has been forced to work for those nonunion employees for free.

And being forced to work without compensation, the union suggested in its revised lawsuit, is slavery.

It’s the height of hypocrisy for union leaders who’ve spent decades coercing membership and dues from any worker falling under their legally-sanctioned monopoly to claim that economic enslavement only occurs when its members have to subsidize benefits other people don’t value.

In a sane world, the union’s lawsuit would be thrown out with prejudice as a waste of court time and resources.

But this is the Age of Obama.  How much longer can it be before the Department of Justice and the National Labor Relations Board weigh-in with briefs defending the indefensible?

Roll Call has a behind-the-scenes look at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s opposition research team, and the findings aren’t pretty.

As any number of elections have taught us, a candidate’s personal history is just as relevant to voting decisions as his or her policy stances.  What makes the profile of the DCCC outfit stomach-churning, however, is the glee staff members exude from discovering the lowest points of other people’s lives:

Diana Asti, a newly promoted research analyst, finished a 204-page book on a target following seven days on the ground, 30 Freedom of Information requests and finding every word from the candidate ever on record. That morning in the DCCC’s second-floor conference room, Asti finally had the opportunity to reveal one of her biggest discoveries about her target: his secret first marriage.

“My head just went in all different directions, like maybe they’ve divorced and he hasn’t paid alimony, or maybe he has a child and he hasn’t paid child support,” exclaimed the 23-year-old Asti afterward in an interview. “I went into a million different directions of what this could possibly be. It was a very exciting moment.”

In case you’re wondering, the reason so few politicians seem “real” is because they live in fear of people like Diana Asti.

And let’s not forget her colleague Jonathan Pullum, a man who confesses the following desire whenever he sees his Republican target:

Occasionally, Pullum still sees his quirky research subject around Capitol Hill. Johnson doesn’t know the 24-year-old from any other young staffer, but Pullum describes his reaction as giddy.

“I have this real desire to be like, ‘How’s it going, buddy? Let’s talk about your diet,’” Pullum said. “It’s all these bizarre things that you know.”

Bizarre, indeed.

Read all about it, and more, here at the site of our friends “Right on Crime.“

U.S. Treasury Secretary and Tax Cheat Tim Geithner and his minions at Treasury, trying to make the Bush-Obama TARP (and other financial-sector) bailouts look good, are cooking the books in a flagrant manner. That is the upshot of this superb bit of reporting and analysis from the incomparable Jonathan Weil of Bloomberg News. Well worth reading. A sample:

On top of that, there’s the current net cost of the government-sponsored housing financiers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which the Treasury pegged at $151 billion. …[T]he report included a White House budget projection showing the net cost of the Fannie and Freddie conservatorships would fall 81 percent to $28 billion by fiscal 2022. Put another way, the projection envisions record profits at the two companies for years to come….As for the declining Fannie and Freddie cost projections, the Treasury is relying on a forecast that in essence has the two companies generating $123 billion of earnings over the next 10 years. This would be nice, except there’s no basis for believing it will happen. The companies have reported losses every year since 2007. During the previous 10-year period from 1997 to 2006, which included the housing boom, their combined earnings were only $82 billion….

This isn’t fuzzy accounting; it’s deeply dishonest accounting. Weil should not be the only journalist reporting it.

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.

A delightful surprise in my inbox today from the Heritage Foundation:

From the preamble to the 27^th Amendment — The Heritage Guide to the Constitution Online is a completely searchable reference tool with leading expert analysis of the Constitution. The site features clause by clause analysis of our timeless reference book, links to essays, as well as a teaching companion.

ConstitutionOnline.com provides clear, concise analysis for users who are trying to further their understanding of the Constitution.

No document is more central to securing “the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity” than the United States Constitution, and no website is more thorough than ConstitutionOnline.com.

The links above are hosted by an internal email system, so in case you have trouble accessing the site, use this link ( http://www.heritage.org/constitution ).

When you visit the site check out the bevy of essays explaining “About This Guide,” “What the Constitution Means,” “How It Was Formed,” and “The Originalist Perspective.”

There’s also a link to a “Teacher’s Companion” that’s great for Tea Party meetings and reading groups, as well as formal classroom settings.

With the primary season effectively over, now is a great time to brush-up on the Constitution, its meaning, and history.  Goodness knows conservatives will need every argument we can muster come the general election if the Republic is to survive.

Before too much time goes by, I should give a shout-out to Eric Eversole, on the case on behalf of military voters stationed abroad. This is REALLY important reading. Basically, it boils down to this: The Obama/Holder Justice Department still isn’t protecting the interests of military personnel who want to vote. This is awful.