Freedom Line Blog

Check out this new and powerful ad from our friends at Citizens Against Government Waste, which is “a chilling look at one potential future scenario” if the United States continues on its destructive fiscal path.

Learn more about this ad and CAGW’s inspiration for doing it here.

In today’s Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan lets loose with an unequivocal endorsement of the Tea Party’s contribution to revitalizing the GOP.  According to Noonan, Tea Party activists kick-started the Republican resurgence by decoupling it from former President George W. Bush’s ideological grip.

The tea party did something the Republican establishment was incapable of doing: It got the party out from under George W. Bush. The tea party rejected his administration’s spending, overreach and immigration proposals, among other items, and has become only too willing to say so. In doing this, the tea party allowed the Republican establishment itself to get out from under Mr. Bush: “We had to, boss, it was a political necessity!” They released the GOP establishment from its shame cringe.

Much like 1995, 2011 will feature a Republican congressional majority that is unabashed in its demand for fealty to first principles, the Constitution, and limited government.  Oh, the anticipation…

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

Release:  CFIF Launches TV Issue Ads  Urging End to Reckless Gov’t Spending, Rising National Debt and Job-Killing Agenda
Senik:  Where Do We Go From Here? An Immediate Agenda for a New Republican Congress
Lee:  Tea Partiers Actually Better-Educated, Less “Afraid” Than the General Public
Ellis:  Venezuela, Iran & Russia: A VIRUS to American Foreign Policy

Freedom Minute Video:  The American Public is the Real “Party of No”
Podcast:  Organization Calls on Women to Get Out the Vote
Jester’s Courtroom:  From No Restroom to the 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.

In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses a new Gallup poll on how the American people view the federal government.  Here’s a hint:  The three most common phrases used were “too big,” “confused” and “corrupt.”

Interview with Sonja Eddings Brown, President of The Kitchen Cabinet and a longtime grassroots organizer, on her organization’s planned “October Surprise” to drive conservative women to vote early and to vote absentee to send a message to Congress on the economy and spending in Washington. 

Listen to the interview here.

Barack Obama has consistently failed to gain political traction with unseemly attacks against everyone from former President Bush to Fox News to John Boehner’s tan.  So Obama redirected his aim using illogical and baseless attacks against business groups whom he accuses of attempting to “sway elections” through sinister election spending.”  David Axelrod, Obama’s top political guru, has labeled election spending a “threat to our democracy,” and when pressed to identify a shred of evidence supporting Obama’s allegation of illegal foreign campaign spending benefiting Republican candidates could only reply, “do you have any evidence that it’s not?”

So which group has actually spent the most to influence this year’s Congressional elections?  The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), a 1.6 million member union of public employees.  According to The Wall Street Journal, AFSCME has now spent $87.5 million, which outdistances the demonized Chamber of Commerce by a cool $12.5 million.  Of the top five spenders, in fact, three of them are big labor unions (the other two being the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and National Education Association (NEA)).

One would hope for more ethical behavior from a President who based his entire 2008 campaign on bringing “change” to our toxic political discourse.  What will be his campaign theme in 2012?  Instead of “hope and change,” he’s building a legacy of “hypocrisy and impropriety.”

The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Heninger explains why the New York State Comptroller race is the most important race no one has heard of:

The news just keeps getting worse for the primary resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  With his party facing historic defeat in the congressional midterms, President Barack Obama should also be worried about the coming crack-up among two vital parts of his base: teachers unions and wealthy liberal donors.  The first wants job protection; the latter better student outcomes.

Their collision course is expertly analyzed by Alvin Felzenberg.  A sample:

We have seen hints of rising tensions between these two elements of the president’s base for over a year. First, there came David Callahan’s “Traitors to their Class: The New Super Rich,” in the New Yorker, an account of how the information-based elites that rallied to Barack Obama break with their fellow Democrats on such matters as free trade, “card check,” and, yes, public sector monopolies over the delivery of education. There was the now infamous District of Columbia mayoral primary, which pit the reformist mayor Adrian Fenty against challenger Vincent Gray. No issue sparked greater controversy than the record of school superintendent Michelle Rhee, who Obama publicly hailed along with Fenty in a televised presidential debate. And no public official prior to Rhee has spent more time thinking of what D.C. children should be taught and evaluated since Thomas Jefferson. While Rhee proved Fenty’s greatest asset in his re-election campaign, the unions clearly did a better job in getting out the vote than did parents whose children benefitted from Rhee’s efforts.

Read the entire article here.

H/T: U.S. News & World Report

In an op-ed published today on Foxnews.com, CFIF’s Troy Senik makes the case for a Constitutional Amendment to force Congress to rein in excessive federal spending.  Such a Constitutional Amendment is being pushed as part of CFIF’s “One More Vote” project:

If, as expected, a new generation of economic conservatives join the ranks of the United States Congress in the wake of the upcoming midterm elections, they will face a momentous challenge: how to finally deliver on the promises of fiscal restraint that have so often eluded recent Republican majorities.

To do so, they will need to understand how past congressional failures have set us on the road to reckless spending and how dire the consequences will be if we don’t change paths soon.

In 1995, Congress came within inches of passing a Balanced Budget Amendment.

In that moment, we stood on the precipice of long-term fiscal responsibility. But the amendment failed — by one vote.

Fast-forward to the present and it becomes obvious that the fateful decision not to discipline our spending habits has saddled the nation with an unsustainable economic burden. Since the Balance Budget Amendment failed, our national debt has climbed to more than $13 trillion.

By 2020, the total gross federal debt, including liabilities for Social Security and Medicare,– is anticipated to reach 122 percent of GDP. Even without factoring in entitlement obligations, this will translate to a debt burden of more than $170,000 for every American family. …

Senik goes on to note:

If this trend continues unbroken, the United States will find itself poised for the same kind of decline that has beset nations like Greece and states like California. But there’s still a limited window left for us to stave off disaster.

Any serious approach to our economic travails will have to tackle three issues simultaneously: the need for balanced budgets, the danger of tax increases during a time of recession and the prevention of an expansion of the nation’s debt load. The current national consensus for common-sense budget reforms provides leaders in Washington the impetus and the opportunity to address all three.

What’s needed is a Constitutional Amendment requiring 60 percent of the Senate and House of Representatives to vote in the affirmative for any piece of legislation that increases the debt ceiling, raises current taxes or imposes new taxes. The Constitutional Amendment should also require Congress to pass a balanced federal budget annually.

By embracing balanced budgets, these common-sense reforms embrace the legacy of the original Balanced Budget Amendment campaign of the mid-1990s. But they also recognize that balancing the federal ledger is a necessary, but not sufficient, step to getting our fiscal house in order.

Read Senik’s entire piece here.

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.

How is the most powerful man in the world spending the week prior to the midterm elections, while the economy is in turmoil and the public is revolting over expansive government programs that his administration initiated? According to CNN, he’ll be chatting with Jon Stewart on the Daily Show.

It’s bad enough that Obama is a feckless president. But he’s an awful pedestrian one too.

We’re now exactly two weeks from the long-awaited 2010 Congressional midterm election and report card for President Obama.  By now, the question is simply how high the expletive decibel level will ascend on election night inside the White House.

On that front, a Gallup poll brings news every bit as chilly and cloudy for Democrats as today’s Washington, D.C. weather.  In fact, the poll shows a high for Republicans that even 1994 didn’t bring.  According to polling completed this past weekend, Republicans now possess a 5-point lead in voter preference, 48% to 43%.  And here’s the really bad news for Democrats:  that’s not among likely voters, but among registered voters.  (Among likely voters, the GOP lead expands to 11% or 17%, depending on whether the “high turnout” or “low turnout” polling model is applied.)

Let’s put that historic lead in perspective.  In 2002, the party holding the White House hadn’t added both House and Senate seats in its first mid-term since 1934, but the supposedly failed President Bush broke almost 70 years of precedent by adding 8 House and 2 Senate seats.  Even that year, however, Democrats held a 9-point polling lead in mid-October among registered voters.  And during the famous 1994 election season that rejected two years of Clintonian rule alongside a Democratic House and Senate, Republicans only held a 3-point lead on October 18-19, which switched back to a 3-point Democrat lead by October 22-25.  If this is any indication, Democrats aren’t going to need seat belts this year, they’re going to need airbags.

A parallel alliance between the world’s governing thugs continues to follow a James Bond movie scenario: buffoonish villains pursuing absurdly dramatic evil.  Other than a shared penchant for casual clothing and over-the-top rhetoric, however, there’s nothing funny about the increasingly close alliance between Venezuela, Iran and Russia.

This week, Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez is traveling to Russia and Iran to secure cooperation agreements on nuclear enrichment, oil production and other stick-in-the-eye measures to America and its allies.

At some point, Americans will wake up to a clutch of hostile nations that have nuclear weapons in volatile regions.  Hopefully, the Obama Administration is doing much more strategic planning than waiting for a Felix Leiter-type CIA operative to save the day.

In another fascinating article from Reason Magazine, three policy experts explain how governments in Canada, New Zealand and post-WWII America slashed government spending and spurred economic growth.  Each expert highlights the strategies used to achieve the respective financial miracles, but one from Canada deserves special mention:

In assembling these cuts, (Canadian Finance Minister) Paul Martin didn’t follow the usual pattern of consulting interest groups one by one. Instead, he held four televised regional consultations in which various lobbyists, experts, and ordinary citizens contended with one another. Martin also spoke directly to the public about what was needed to turn Canada’s budget around. In October 1994, his Department of Finance published a report, A New Framework for Economic Policy, showing that in order to keep the ratio of debt to GDP from rising, government had to run a substantial surplus on its program budget—that is, have revenues significantly exceeding state expenditures.

Public debates used to be a spectator sport in the civilized world.  (Remember reading about the Lincoln-Douglas debates?)  If Republicans win back control of at least one house of Congress, it would behoove their leadership to find ways to nationalize spending issues with public debates.  And, if members of Congress are too afraid to step forward and defend principles, they should consider sponsoring debates featuring lobbyists, policy wonks and activists.

We all know who votes for whom.  Let’s get them in the same room, on camera and hear their pitch.

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.

Last month, we profiled how federalism is alive and well in economic policy — as exemplified most explicitly in the sharp contrast between California and Texas (a topic we’ve been exploring for nearly a year).

As John Steele Gordon points out in the Contentions blog over at Commentary’s website:

It is often pointed out that the states make great laboratories for political-science experiments. And an experiment has been underway for quite a while testing the liberal model — high taxes, extensive regulation, many government-provided social services, union-friendly laws — against the conservative model — low taxes, limited regulation and social services, right-to-work laws. The results are increasingly in. As Rich Lowry reports in National Review Online, the differences between California and Texas are striking. Between August 2009 and August 2010, the nation created a net of 214,000 jobs. Texas created more than half of them, 119,000. California lost 112,000 jobs in that period.

California has always prided itself on being a leading indicator for the rest of the nation. We’ll see how well they like that designation when it turns out to mean being the canary in the coal mine.

“We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”  That was Nancy Pelosi last March, promoting that Pandora’s Box known as ObamaCare.  Well, it turns out that Pelosi and the bill’s proponents may be upset to find out what is not in it.  Namely, they failed to include a severability clause in their haste.

So what is a “severability clause,” and why might it matter?  A severability clause is a simple provision stating that if a court later declares one or more subsections of a bill void, the remainder of the bill remains valid and enforceable.  Without a severability clause, an entire bill can be jeopardized even if a very small part of it is stricken by the judicial branch.  Now, with separate lawsuits challenging ObamaCare quickly proceeding toward judicial reckoning, it is possible that the entire package may crumble if its individual mandate (forcing free citizens to engage in involuntary commerce by purchasing approved health insurance) or some other clause falls.

There is no guarantee in this regard, as the Supreme Court just this year curiously allowed the tangled Sarbanes-Oxley web to survive despite its own absence of a severability clause.  Nevertheless, the complete demise of ObamaCare due to the failure to add a simple severability provision could be one positive byproduct of ObamaCare’s sloppy birth.

You may remember Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s reaction to President Barack Obama’s scolding of he and other conservatives on national television last January.  According to Alito, he’s finished with the farce of sitting stone-faced while being harangued.

The 60-year-old justice, an appointee of President George W. Bush, acknowledged with a smile that his colleagues “who are more disciplined refrain from manifesting any emotion or opinion whatsoever.”

Alito, answering questions following a speech Wednesday at the conservative Manhattan Institute in New York, also said, “Presidents will fake you out.” The institute provided an online video link to Alito’s talk and question-and-answer session.

The president will begin a sentence with an invocation of the country’s greatness, Alito said. If justices don’t jump up and applaud, “you look very unpatriotic,” he said.

But, Alito continued, then the president may finish the thought by adding “because we’re conducting a surge in Iraq or because we’re enacting health care reform.” Justices aren’t supposed to react to statements about policy or politics.

The better course, Alito said, is to follow the example of more experienced justices like Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and the recently retired John Paul Stevens. None has attended in several years.

“So I doubt that I will be there in January,” Alito said.

H/T: The Associated Press

For anyone wondering how large organizations can put pieces of time-sensitive information into a coherent, real-time picture, author Steven Johnson provides an answer.  In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, Johnson explains ‘the adjacent possible;’ i.e. alternative paths.  In the short video below, Johnson discusses the missed opportunity pre-9/11 to match up the FBI’s ‘Phoenix Memo‘ with the arrest of a would-be terrorist who said during flight school that he didn’t need to know how to land.

If our nation’s intelligence community is ever going to function efficiently, it’s going to need a way to match information in a fast, coherent way.  Maybe Johnson’s book could help.

Slate’s Noreen Malone writes an incisive article detailing the secret behind the rise of conservative female activists: superior use of social networking.

This brand of social activism also happens to perfectly dovetail with the brand of conservative feminism that was being promoted at the (Smart Girl Summit): You can maintain your duties as a wife and mother but also become involved in the movement through making phone calls, handing out flyers, running for school board if national office seems too disruptive to your family. ( “Start small, build big” was another theme—school board leads to county leads to state, etc.) You can organize an entire conference and run a highly trafficked Web site but, since those activities are not professionalized, still call yourself a stay-at-home mom. And those “maternal” skills—organization, communication—are just as good, if not better than, a high-powered professional résumé in a movement that’s asking for foot soldiers. (But high-powered résumés are OK, too—cf Liz Cheney.)

Though Malcolm Gladwell makes some excellent points about the limitations of social networks as vehicles for social change, the increasing use and adaptability of social networking technology is allowing a whole new breed of conservative activists (homeschooling mothers) to dramatically impact the national political scene; at least when it comes to news coverage and GOP primaries.

Stay tuned…