Freedom Line Blog

The fight between the Tea Party and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) is heating up again.  The Daily Caller says that the group quietly gave money to Senators Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Dick Lugar (R-IN), and Olympia Snowe (R-ME), among other incumbents.

Tea Party activists are claiming the NRSC is once again trying to influence GOP primaries that are likely to be contested between establishment types and newer blood fiscal conservatives.  But although Lugar has an official Tea Party opponent (Indiana Treasurer Richard Mourdock), no official challenger has filed paperwork against Hatch and Snowe.  (Though Rep. Jason Chaffetz is widely expected to compete against Hatch.)

The complaints of NRSC favoritism have more sway in Lugar’s case since Mourdock is actively campaigning against him.  If the Tea Party wants to make its point heard in the other cases, it better get challengers like Chaffetz to get off the fence and into the race.

The Heritage Foundation has a helpful list of the Obama Administration’s many anniversaries this month:

The Obama Administration has seen its fair share of milestones this month. Yesterday marked the first anniversary of the Dodd Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act, Obamacare is just over one year old, it has been more than 800 days since the Democrat-controlled Senate passed a budget, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau opened its doors on Thursday–the first new federal agency in nearly a decade. You’ll notice that no one is celebrating any of them.

Liberals are aghast that regulating the economic activity of millions of people is going so slow, while business owners and the unemployed are living in constant fear of growth-killing rules.

Happy Anniversaries, Mr. President!  Your laws are destroying America.

Roll Call reports that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards has been ordered by the Federal Election Commission to repay nearly $2.3 million in misused matching funds.

The FEC’s order follows a legally required audit of Edwards’ campaign after the candidate took taxpayer money in return for capping his expenditures.  It turns out Edwards exceeded the cap and violated the law.  (For those familiar with Edwards’ post-2008 history, it’s no surprise his fiscal excess rose to the level of his personal excess.)

What does this have to do with campaign finance law?  Plenty.

To supporters, one of the goals of campaign finance laws is to increase the amount of transparency in who funds a candidate.  That goal is much easier to achieve when the hook of federal auditing is swallowed along with matching funds.  Like most liberals, John Edwards is relentlessly supportive of increasing government oversight on just about everything.  Now, the very transparency and oversight he championed for others is unearthing all kinds of sordid details he would surely prefer stay out of view.

Maybe Edwards’ inner libertarian will awaken and he’ll become an advocate for less government and more privacy.  If nothing else, he would be well advised in the future to practice a lot more discretion.

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

Hillyer:  The Nation Could Use Santorum-omics
Ellis:  Operation Castaway, Another ATF Gun Scandal
Senik:  Obama to America: “The Check is in the Mail”
Ellis:  “Green Jobs” from Government Subsidies Wither on the Vine
Release:  CFIF Secures First Amendment Victory for Core Speech in West Virginia

Freedom Minute Video:  Obama by the Numbers: The President’s Debt Ceiling Lie
Podcast:  Former FL House Maj. Leader Discusses Federal Debt Limit, Energy Policy, More
Jester’s Courtroom:  Vegetarians Sue for Trip to Ganges River

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.

In an interview with CFIF, Adam Hasner, Former Majority Leader of the Florida House of Representatives and candidate for the U.S. Senate in 2012, discusses the current debt ceiling debate and the need for America to change its policies regarding off-shore drilling, among other issues.

Listen to the interview here.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino debunks President Obama’s claim that 80 percent of the American people agree with his plan to raise taxes as part of a debt ceiling deal.

The Daily Express reports from the U.K. today that the BBC is taking a new approach to climate change skeptics: ignoring them outright. Here’s how the paper has it:

THE BBC was criticised by climate change sceptics yesterday after it emerged that their views will get less coverage because they differ from mainline scientific opinion.

In a report by its governing body, the BBC Trust, the corporation was urged to focus less on opponents of the “majority consensus” in its programmes.

It said coverage should not be tailored to represent a “false balance” of opinion if one side came from a minority group.

… Although he found no evidence of bias in BBC output, he suggested where there is a “scientific consensus” it should not hunt out opponents purely to balance the story.

Needless to say, the BBC’s decision strikes at the heart of both scientific and journalistic integrity. These are two fields where it should be universally recognized that truth is not whatever the majority says it is. As long as the BBC is going to be playing this game, however, let’s make it a fair fight. 

Clearly, we should not expect to hear minority points of view on the following propositions, all of which are supported by the vast majority of economists: Free trade is beneficial, the minimum wage is a job-killer, and outsourcing is a positive good. Since the experts have weighed in, we’re confident that the BBC will now get to work suppressing dissenters as a matter of civic hygiene. We look forward to their objectivity.

Roll Call reports that Texas Republican Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst has entered the race to replace retiring Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson (R-TX).  The field is already crowded, with former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, an ardent conservative, angling to be the Lone Star version of Florida’s Marco Rubio.

Dewhurst’s substantial personal wealth and four statewide electoral victories (3 as Lt. Gov., 1 as land commissioner), are prompting some to say he’s now the frontrunner.  With Governor Rick Perry mulling a bid for president, this could signal a major shake-up of Texas GOP politics as two of the state’s highest profile jobs come open for the first time since 2002.

Troy’s earlier point about the media creating a false story about presidential candidate Michele Bachmann (R-MN) being a pill-popping migraine sufferer is borne out by reporting from Byron York.  Citing what amounts to a doctor’s note from the resident physician in the House of Representatives (released with Bachmann’s permission), York says:

The doctor says Bachmann has had “an extensive evaluation by both my office and by a board-certified consulting neurologist.”  That evaluation, he continues, “has entailed detailed labwork and brain scans, all of which were normal.”  Monahan says Bachmann’s migraines occur “infrequently,” and that when she does have a headache, she is “able to control it well with as-needed sumatriptan and odasentron.”  Monahan says Bachmann has not needed to take the medication daily.  The two drugs, he adds, are “commonly used therapies.”

With that behind us, let’s get news that really matters, like whether Joe Biden’s botox habit is compromising his ability to advise (or possible succeed!) the president.

Over at The American Spectator, I explain why conservatives should accept a scaled-down version of the Gang of Six plan on the budget. Let me make it even more clear. Herewith, the Hillyer Plan, which has legislative elements simple enough that they should be able, on a fast track, to be passed by Aug. 2 — and if not, by about mid-August (which means a delayed August “recess”), which would require a temporary extension of the debt limit which all sides should accept. But let’s be up front about this: Sometimes, Washington gets WAY too tied up with official accounting “scores” of budget proposals, when in truth almost all out-year projections are nonsense, with huge shifts in numbers dependent on unpredictable effects of economic growth, inflation, and other factors. The Hillyer Plan would specifically NOT be “scored” in advance, because the point isn’t to figure how many economic assumptions can dance on the bead of an abacus. Instead, the guiding principle should be good policy combined with overall debt reduction, without worrying about whether the reduction officially hits a specific numerical target. As Jack Kemp and the Gingrich Congress showed, economic growth can and will balance a budget that is reasonably restrained.

Okay, here’s the plan:

1) Permanent (non-sunseted), three-tiered rates for both individual and corporate income taxes, at 12%, 24%, and 30%.

2) Capital gains taxes at the same levels — except that the calculation of the base price would be indexed for inflation for the first time, and no individual capital gain under $5,000 would be taxed.

3) Complete elimination of taxes on ordinary stock dividends. Dividend taxes require far too much accounting for far too little bang for the buck.

4) A cap on the deduction for mortgage interest at $3,000 per month (adjusted upward for inflation every five years). Owners of McMansions will be getting a big enough break via cutting the top rate from 35% to 30% that this trade-off will be more than worth it. A cap, too, on the deduction for state and local income taxes, set at perhaps $10,000. (This would have the effect of at least subtly pressuring high-income-tax states to reduce their own tax rates, while of course gaining at least a little money for the feds.)

5) Complete and permanent elimination of the Alternative Minimum Tax.

6) Elimination of Barack Obama’s hated tax break for private jets.

7) Elimination of all tax breaks for corn ethanol, combined with elimination of the import tariffs on cellulosic ethanol.

8) From the Gang of Six plan: Shift to the chained-CPI (a more accurate measure of inflation) government-wide starting in 2012, along with the following specifications for Social Security: (1) exempt SSI from the shift for five years, and then phase in the shift over the next five years; and (2) provide a minimum benefit equal to 125% of the poverty line for five years. (According to CBO, the shift to chained-CPI would result in the annual adjustment growing, on average, about 0.25 percentage points per year slower than the current CPI.)

9) From the Gang of Six plan: Repeal the CLASS Act.

10) Allow the Dems to pick any business tax “loopholes” of their choice for elimination, of up to $150 billion over ten years, of which the GOP would be obliged to accept $100 billion of them. (Note: The selection of options, first by the Dems and then by the GOP, could easily be done within two weeks.)

11) Require the administration by law, within a year, to approve permits to open enough federal-government-owned lands to energy development to produce, via royalties and taxes, at least $100 billion in federal revenue over the next ten years. This idea stems from a column by Gary Palmer of the Alabama, not yet available online. Palmer explains: “According to the U.S. Department of the Interior and the Bureau  of Land Management, there are 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation. This is three times more than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. The Green River Formation covers about 11 million acres in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, with about 80 percent of the recoverable oil in a 1,225 sq. mile area of western Colorado. The federal government owns or manages 73 percent of the lands that contain significant oil shale deposits in the West and 80 percent of the recoverable oil in the Green River Formation.”

12) Immediately remove authority to spend at least $75 billion in whatever “unobligated” funds still remain (some were withdrawn a few months ago in the 2011 Continuing Resolution).
13) Pass a shell budget resolution that sets overall non-defense Appropriations limits for 2012 of $25 billion less than the combined budget authority approved for 2011 (in actual dollars, without an inflation adjustment).

14) Before final passage of this whole package, pass “Sense of the House” and “Sense of the Senate” resolutions (there’s no time for actual legislation before Aug. 2 to implement the specifics)  supporting the following items in the Gang of Six spending outline:

• Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions would find $70 billion.
• Homeland Security and Government Affairs would find $65 billion.
• Agriculture would find $11 billion while protecting the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.
• Commerce would find $11 billion.
• Energy would find $6 billion and may propose additional policies to generate savings that would be applied to the infrastructure deficit or to reduce the deficit.
• Judiciary would find an unspecified amount through medical malpractice reform.

• Impose spending caps and security/nonsecurity firewalls.
• Sequester accounts at the end of the year to recoup any excessive spending by Congress.
• Restrict the use of emergency designations that circumvent the spending caps.
• Prevent Congress from exceeding the caps by requiring a stand-alone resolution subject to a 67-vote threshold, in order to isolate that vote to increase the deficit from any other policy items.

• Achieve program integrity savings of $26 billion in entitlement programs to curb fraud, abuse, and other wasteful spending government-wide.
• Create a working group to provide updated budget concepts for CBO and OMB.

There. I hate to have a “14-point” plan because it has the cringe-inducing whiff of Woodrow Wilson, but that’s just how the numbering came out. Anyway, I believe every one of the first 13 points could actually be enacted in law by Aug. 2 or certainly by August 15, and while the resolutions in Point 14 obviously do not have the force of law until subsequent legislation enacts them, it would have enough moral force, with enough public attention, to effectively force compliance as soon as the complicated legislative wheels could operate.

At this time of “shared sacrifice”, the political class is fond of telling us that there are “no easy choices” to combat the nation’s crisis of overspending. Yet as private companies have cut back on their payrolls to cope with the Great Recession, Washington hasn’t even been firing on the merits, according to USA Today:

Death — rather than poor performance, misconduct or layoffs — is the primary threat to job security at the Environmental Protection Agency, the Small Business Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Management and Budget and a dozen other federal operations.

The federal government fired 0.55% of its workers in the budget year that ended Sept. 30 — 11,668 employees in its 2.1 million workforce. Research shows that the private sector fires about 3% of workers annually for poor performance, says John Palguta, former research chief at the federal Merit Systems Protection Board, which handles federal firing disputes.

The 1,800-employee Federal Communications Commission and the 1,200-employee Federal Trade Commission didn’t lay off or fire a single employee last year. The SBA had no layoffs, six firings and 17 deaths in its 4,000-employee workforce.

What to do when your industry is singled out by government regulators as a threat to public health?  If you’re in the soft drink industry, use the Freedom of Information Act against state and local governments to get documents that show how regulators use taxpayer dollars to attack legal commercial enterprises.

Earlier this month, the American Beverage Association sued New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, which has been at the forefront of education efforts in the fight against obesity. The ABA says the city improperly withheld documents it sought through the Freedom of Information Act.

ABA spokesman Chris Gindlesperger said his group made the same request as the New York Times, but that the newspaper received more information than the ABA.

“Public health departments are going out and aggressively misrepresenting our products in advertising and using taxpayer money to do that,” Gindlesperger said.

Big government advocates are complaining that the FOI requests are “an effort to overwhelm or smother government employees, who already have too much to do.”

Then again, maybe those same government employees could lighten their load a bit by stopping the PR campaign against an industry selling a legal product to satisfied consumers.

If you or a family member are weighing a decision about whether or how much college loan money to request from the government next fall, consider this nugget from Michael Barone’s column on the coming burst in the higher education bubble:

Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, is adept at spotting bubbles. He cashed out for $500 million in March 2000, at the peak of the tech bubble, when his partners wanted to hold out for more. He refused to buy a house until the housing bubble burst.

“A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he has said. “Education may still be the only thing people still believe in in the United States.”

Owning a college degree may certify completion of a program, but it does not guarantee that the holder has marketable skills to land a job, as this report on the ongoing talent shortage details.  Higher education – like all levels and kinds of education – is an investment only if the students, faculty and administrators involved focus on learning and teaching things that matter.  And with a 9.2 percent unemployment rate, that increasingly means basic comprehension of grammar, logic and rhetoric, with some grounding in finance thrown in for good measure.

So, if you know someone thinking about going back to school for a master’s in Religious or Women’s Studies – for the good of your fellow citizens and taxpayers, urge them to reconsider.  We can’t afford the experience.

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.

Two developments have intersected in recent weeks to put Minnesota Congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate Michele Bachmann squarely in the media’s crosshairs.

The first is the fact that Sarah Palin shows no signs of getting into the presidential race anytime soon, depriving the MSM of its pinata of choice. The second is that Bachmann’s clear conservative principles and energetic personality are translating into real results. Just today, a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows Bachmann rocketing into second place (behind Mitt Romney) for the Republican presidential nomination.

Bachmann, like Palin before her, lives a life remarkably free of Beltway trappings and seems to have committed a cardinal sin amongst the punditocracy: she actually believes in her conservative principles. That may be the reason that a story as desperate as this is dominating today’s political news:

Presidential contender Rep. Michele Bachmann confirmed Tuesday she suffers from migraine headaches, but stressed they would not get in the way of her seeking the position or serving as commander in chief.

“Like nearly 30 million other Americans, I experience migraines that are easily controlled with medication,” Bachmann, R-Minn., said in a statement. “Let me be abundantly clear — my ability to function effectively has never been impeded by migraines and will not affect my ability to serve as commander in chief.”

… Bachmann’s son, Lucas Bachmann, told The New York Times that the migraines were not incapacitating. “She is probably not going to run a mile, but in terms of being able to engage, she can comprehend and assess information — without a doubt,” said Lucas Bachmann, who is a medical resident in Connecticut specializing in psychiatry.

Good lord. A presidential candidate is revealed to have one of the most common chronic medical ailments in America and all of a sudden the media is worried that Kim Jong-Il will get the jump on her because she’ll be in a dark room with a damp washcloth on her face? John F. Kennedy spent most of his administration loopy on painkillers, steroids, and (on at least one occasion) anti-psychotics, and still manages to get royal treatment from the press to this day. There was one crucial difference, however: Kennedy and the press read from the same sheet of music.

For the anti-establishment Bachmann, this train of abuses will likely continue. At this rate, expect to see a hard-hitting expose on whether her proclivity for hangnails may prevent her from properly using the veto pen by later in the week.

The bipartisan “Gang of Six” has been in bad odor with conservatives for months now because it always has been seen as a sell-out and a way to force tax hikes into law with bipartisan cover. But the deal outlined today actually claims to represent a net tax cut of $1.5 trillion over ten years. It would actually lower marginal tax rates on both individuals —

* Simplify the tax code by reducing the number of tax expenditures and reducing individual tax rates, by establishing three tax brackets with rates of 8–12 percent, 14–22 percent, and 23–29 percent.

* Permanently repeal the $1.7 trillion Alternative Minimum Tax.

— and businesses:

Establish a single corporate tax rate between 23 percent and 29 percent, raise as much revenue as the current corporate tax system, and move to a competitive territorial tax system.

I haven’t had much time to study all the details, but it looks like this deal would achieve $500 in real savings in the short term and then set up about as good a budget “cap” system as I’ve ever seen, without triggering tax hikes. I reserve final judgment, but, frankly, I don’t see anything in here for conservatives to seriously object to.

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.

Michael Barone is one of those rare Washington pundits who thinks facts are more important than feelings. That means that when he makes sweeping claims, he’ll always have the data to back them up. And he’ll do so in the dispassionate fashion of a doctor reading an X-ray. That’s part of what makes his new column on the debt ceiling so chilling. In it, he writes:

The bedrock issue is whether we should have a larger and more expensive federal government. Over many years, federal spending has averaged about 20 percent of gross domestic product.

The Obama Democrats have raised that to 24 or 25 percent. And the president’s budget projects that that percentage will stay the same or increase far into the future.

In the process, the national debt as a percentage of gross domestic product has increased from a manageable 40 percent in 2008 to 62 percent this year and an estimated 72 percent in 2012. And it’s headed to the 90 percent level that economists Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart have identified as the danger point, when governments face fiscal collapse.

Barone’s words are a bracing reminder of the stakes in this fight. Virtually all Democrats — and even many Republicans — would have us believe that this is a moment defined by pure political philosophy; that it’s simply a question of whether you balance the books through tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination thereof. But it’s more than just principles that hang in the balance. It’s the fate of a nation.

Fred Barnes’ story at the Weekly Standard about our supercilious, self-important, rude, overbearing, blowhard of a president is absolute must reading. It explains why these budget talks have been unproductive: because Barack Hussein The One The Redeemer Obama has absolutely no regard for anybody else’s opinion, no patience with dissent of any kind — and no manners. In short, he’s a boor — a boor with authoritarian inclinations:

The president has been less genial away from the prying eyes of the press and the public. In the private talks, he’s dominated the discussion with the eight most senior members of Congress in an overbearing way not likely to lead to compromise. He’s been argumentative. He’s come across as President Blowhard.

After Sperling briefed the group on the deficit cap proposal, House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi addressed another subject. When a Republican participant criticized the deficit cap, Obama interrupted with a monologue. When the Republican tried to speak a second time, the president quickly cut him off and delivered another sermon on why the criticism was wrong.

I have argued all along that Obama doesn’t really even want a deal. He wants  a crisis. His behavior — pretending to be the adult and compromiser in public while actually torpedoing progress in private — is exactly that of somebody who is trying to foment a crisis from which he can benefit.

That’s why Charles Krauthammer makes sense:

[D]are the president to put the country in default on the basis of ‘I won’t accept anything short. I only want something that will serve me on Election Day.’

All of this talk about a Balanced Budget Amendment is fine and dandy, but it has NOTHING to do with the debt ceiling fight. It is literally impossible to get a BBA in time for the debt limit deadline. The best thing to do is to stop talking and actually pass spending cuts attached to a short-term lifting of the debt limit. Even better, doing a shorter-term debt limit hike also means the spending cuts, while substantial, are less likely to include things against which Obama can demagogue. In other words, the cuts, while not as big in total dollars, can be more carefully chosen for PR purposes — and they will accompany a more restrained debt-limit hike, which itself sends a message that conservatives refuse to give carte blanche to debt as high as Obama wants the new limit to be.

Yes, call Obama’s bluff. The way to do that is to pass a politically palatable bill with real savings — and leave extraneous things out of it.

The New York Times has an interesting biographical gap filler on Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry’s former life as a Democratic state representative.  The theme that stands out is Perry’s uncanny ability to run for office at a time perfectly suited for his personal ambitions.

Here’s an example from when he switched parties to become a Republican running for statewide office.

Rumors that Mr. Perry would defect to the Republican Party — and run against Jim Hightower, the populist Democratic agriculture commissioner — picked up steam by late 1989. On Sept. 29, Mr. Perry made it official at a Capitol news conference. At his side were Fred Meyer, chairman of the Texas Republican Party, and Senator Phil Gramm, a former Democrat, who was aggressively courting would-be converts.

Mr. Perry’s timing, now legendary, could not have been better. He was one of only two Republicans elected to nonjudicial statewide office in 1990. Eight years later, Republicans swept every one of them.

“Perry has been a risk taker,” said Mr. Hance, the party switcher who became the chancellor of Texas Tech University. “And if you look at Perry’s timing in every race, he’s been the golden guy.”

Could 2012 be another such moment for the Texas Tea Party governor?