Freedom Line Blog

Kudos to the Heritage Foundation for drawing attention to this analysis from the Brookings Institution about President Barack Obama’s unprecedented use of the waiver process to bypass Congress and rewrite education law:

It is one thing for an administration to grant waivers to states to respond to unrealistic conditions on the ground or to allow experimentation and innovation. Similar waiver authority has been used to advance welfare and Medicaid reform going back to the Reagan administration, and to allow a few districts and states to experiment at the margins of NCLB in the Bush administration. It is quite another thing to grant state waivers conditional on compliance with a particular reform agenda that is dramatically different from existing law. The NCLB waiver authority does not grant the secretary of education the right to impose any conditions he considers appropriate on states seeking waivers, nor is there any history of such a wholesale executive branch rewrite of federal law through use of the waiver authority.

Gallup is out with its new presidential polling numbers today. The results are dismal for President Obama. Only 16 states and the District of Columbia show the Commander-in-Chief with an approval rating over 50 percent.

Of course, we have to insert the normal caveats: we’re still more than a year away from the 2012 presidential election and it’s how Obama runs against his Republican opponent — not how he performs in a vacuum — that will determine his ultimate fate at the polls.

That being said, what’s most interesting about the new polls is their implications for next year’s electoral college. Crunching the numbers, RealClearPolitics’  Tom Bevan finds that the states giving Obama an approval rating of 51 % or higher have a total of 166 electoral votes between them; states at 49 % or lower have a total of 320 (270 are required to win a presidential election).

Digging deeper into the math only makes the picture more dismal for the White House. Bevan calculates that even adding states where Obama’s approval is at 49-50% (Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Rhode Island, Washington, and Wisconsin, respectively) only gets him to 218 electoral votes — 52 shy of the total needed for victory.

Does this make Obama’s defeat inevitable? Not by a long shot. But it means that the president is in for a very steep climb over the next 15 months. Let the games begin.

Dig

Byron York eviscerates the common liberal meme that former President George W. Bush was worse on spending and taxes than President Barack Obama.  After showing that Bush’s tax cuts increased federal revenues and shrank deficits while Obama has increased the national debt at twice Bush’s pace, York ends with a resounding rebuke of the common “eight years of Republican rule” canard.

None of this is to say that George W. Bush had a good record on spending. He didn’t, and he’s fair game for criticism. But is it honest to condemn reckless spending in “eight years of Republican rule” when Democrats controlled the Senate for four of those years and the House for two? Is it honest to talk about the “cost” of the Bush tax cuts when federal revenues increased significantly while they were in effect? And is it honest to refer to Bush’s ballooning deficits when deficits actually trended down for much of his presidency — at least before Democrats won control of Congress?

Of course Obama partisans would like to pin the president’s troubles on Bush. But they should get their facts straight first.

U.S. News & World Report summarizes a great one-page handout from the office of Senator John Barasso (R-WY):

At Tuesday’s GOP Senate caucus lunch, the lawmakers said that they will renew their efforts, supported by business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. In a memo Barasso handed out to the lawmakers, he claimed that the administration in July only has put in $9.5 billion in new regulatory costs by proposing 229 new rules and finalizing 379 rules. Among those he cited were EPA, healthcare reform, and financial regulatory reform rules.

If you’re a Tea Party activist, or someone looking for a compact fact sheet describing the growth in government, check out Senator Barasso’s handout. (pdf)

There are few things more annoying than trying to compete against someone who won’t play the game.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI) expresses the frustration of many conservatives who want a real debate about the purposes of government and our ability as a nation to fund them.  Ryan rightly chides President Obama for failing to engage in specifics about how to focus policymakers’ attention on the debt, not just its ceiling.

It is mystifying to me that the president continues to shut out Ryan’s “Path to Prosperity” proposal as a middle ground between bankrupting Medicare and Medicaid and eliminating them altogether.

One would think The One could see a Clintonian moment when presented.  But rather than see Ryan’s willingness to preserve the social safety net for what it is – a path to a long-term bipartisan solution – the president can’t see past his own partisan nose.

Yet instead of laying out his own vision, President Obama continues to offer speeches instead of specifics.  Lots of us want a debate about the ends of government, and how we structure our economy to pay for it.  If the leader of the Democratic Party won’t engage in a serious debate about it, maybe the Democrats should get someone who will.

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.

With the debt ceiling debate now officially behind us, most Americans will be tempted to simply exhale and move on from the psychological exhaustion of the past few weeks. Like many other conservative pundits (including our own Quin Hillyer), I have misgivings about the final agreement but generally agree that it was the best deal possible given the constraints (including Republican control of only one house of Congress).

Still, that doesn’t mean we should avoid learning the lessons of the recent dust-up, one of which is artfully put by the Atlantic’s Gregg Easterbrook (not exactly a doctrinaire conservative) writing today for Reuters:

The deal raises the federal borrowing ceiling by $2.4 trillion. This means Congress will immediately spend another $2.4 trillion. That basic point is being overlooked.

You’ve got a debt ceiling on your credit card. The ceiling is there for emergencies, and all responsible borrowers work to stay below their credit ceilings. Experience with the national debt ceiling, by contrast, shows that every dollar of available debt is always spent. Announced in doublespeak as a “savings” plan, this deal guarantees the national debt will rise another $2.4 trillion. The moment the deal becomes law, members of Congress from both parties will see an added $2.4 trillion in the cookie jar and begin raiding.

Easterbrook is right. One of the main points of contention in the recent debate was whether the President would have to come back to Congress for another debt ceiling increase within the next year or whether it would be extended into 2013 (the latter won out). But that fight misses the point. We won’t be seeing real reform until new increases in the debt ceiling become unnecessary. Until then, we’re stuck arguing over what speed to drive on the road to perdition.

George Soros, the leftwing hedge fund billionaire and part-time Hungarian Bond villain, announced last week he’s opting out of the regulatory straitjacket he demanded of his industry.  Taking advantage of a little-known loophole in the Dodd-Frank financial “reform” law, Soros is evading the kind of “transparency” he championed for others.

Per Michelle Malkin:

Under Title IV of Dodd-Frank, hedge funds were required to abide by new registration and reporting requirements in an attempt to better police systemic risk (not that the feckless Securities and Exchange Commission has ever been able to fulfill that mission). To evade the regulations, Soros and other firms have used a recently passed rule allowing so-called family offices to shield themselves from both registration and disclosure rules that would have subjected Soros Inc. to a new “Financial Stability Oversight Council.”

But what would Soros want to hide?  More Malkin:

Soros and his family shelled out $250,000 for Obama’s inauguration, $60,000 in direct campaign contributions and untold millions more to liberal activist groups pushing the White House agenda.

…

Over the past year, Soros provided coveted support for Obama and the Democrats’ Byzantine financial “reforms” under the sweeping Dodd-Frank law. He preached to financial publications around the world about the need for increased regulatory controls over his industry. And in November 2008, while paying obligatory lip service to concerns about going too far, he submitted a statement to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that recommended: “The entire regulatory framework needs to be reconsidered, and hedge funds need to be regulated within that framework.”

That is, unless you’ve got creative lawyers and a disingenuous president’s ear.

Last week, Ashton took a look at the Tea Party’s irritation with the National Republican Senatorial Committee. Just as in 2008, the Tea Party believes (with good reason) that the NRSC is trying to put its hand on the scales during Republican primaries and shut conservative challengers to establishment incumbents out of key races throughout the nation.

This may not be the biggest stage on which the Tea Party movement refuses to be broken in 2012, however. This will be the first presidential election since the movement has congealed, and Tea Party leaders are making known that they don’t intend to squander their leverage. Per a report on the Daily Caller today:

The country’s largest Tea Party organization is warning that the future GOP presidential nominee shouldn’t automatically count on having the support of its grassroots activists.

“There was some controversy that was created when another Tea Party group came out and said the Tea Party movement would line up behind whoever is the Republican nominee,” Mark Meckler, a national coordinator for the organization, said during a Christian Science Monitor breakfast briefing with reporters Wednesday. “I think that’s presuming an awful lot.”

“Tea Partiers are very independent folks by nature,” he said in response to questions from The Daily Caller, “they make their own decisions, there’s no organization, no leader to tell them what to do.”

Two things are striking about this development. First, the fact that members of the Tea Party — which is now into its third year on the American political scene — still have to explain that they are a leaderless movement unified around a set of loosely-defined core principles is remarkable, particularly when that explanation is directed at Republicans, who should be conversant in Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order“.

Second, the Tea Party — long predicted to be co-opted by the GOP — is still boldly staking out its independence. That means any Republican presidential candidate hoping to inherit the keys to the White House will have to satisfy the conservative Tea Party base, establishment Republicans, and a fair number of independents. If that sounds like a tough road to hoe, it is. But it comes with one great virtue — any candidate with such a broad appeal would be an electoral lock. And if he (or she) lived up to those principles once sworn in, it could create just the kind of political coalition needed to unwind the dangerous excesses of the Obama years.

For the past two and a half years, it’s been the exclusive provenance of the right to point out that President Obama often seems overmatched by his job. But after this weekend’s latest round of debt ceiling negotiations — where a newly irascible President Obama was nowhere to be seen amidst the congressional horse-trading — it’s becoming clear that Democrats on the hill are starting to think the same thing. The ugly details are fleshed out by Craig Crawford, writing in the Huffington Post:

While the GOP obviously would savor a solution to the debt-ceiling crisis that gives Obama no credit, why are Democratic leaders so willing to cut him out?

The answer might be found in growing concerns among veteran Capitol Hill Democrats that their president is a lousy negotiator.

Although they see him as a talented public communicator, his short time as a senator and painfully slow learning curve as president leads congressional Democrats to think it best to take over and provide cover for him once the deal is done.

“A talented public communicator” who can’t negotiate? The Democrats are essentially saying that the president is really good at talking about his job, just weak when it comes to actually doing it. This, my friends, is what the wag who coined the phrase “damning with faint praise” had in mind.

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.

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?

Charles Krauthammer suggests (more a command, really) calling President Barack Obama’s bluff about a “long-term deal or nothing” on a debt default deal: a short-term deal that extends the negotiating clock instead.

The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something larger.

Why not?  Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell’s plan to give the president authority to raise the debt ceiling on his own just stokes an already imperial presidency.  What’s more, McConnell’s reservation of oversight to Congress by a 2/3 vote to block the president from raising the debt ceiling is constitutionally suspect because it sounds suspiciously like an impermissible legislative veto.  Since the Supreme Court has said that Congress can’t overrule Executive decisions once Congress delegates its authority, don’t be surprised if McConnell’s clever power switch gives unilateral discretion to a big-spending liberal president without any means of checking him.

Far better to go with Krauthammer’s suggestion since it keeps the focus on spending and the economy and relieves the pressure of a debt default while the parties get serious about specifics.

Michael Barone says that thanks to a sputtering economy, a growing Mexican middle class, and measures like Arizona’s e-Verify system that puts the onus of enforcement on employers, President Barack Obama’s push for immigration reform is behind the curve.  It would be far better if the federal government reacted to facts on the ground.

That means we can shift our immigration quotas to more highly skilled immigrants, as recommended by a panel convened by the Brookings Institution and Duke University’s Kenan Institute for Ethics and as done currently by Canada and Australia.

Such a change would be in line with the new situation. Mexican immigrants have tended to be less educated and lower-skilled than immigrants from other Latin or Asian countries. Lower Mexican immigration means lower low-skill immigration. Employers of such immigrants may have to adjust their business models.

Probably they are already doing so. But government adjusts more slowly.

Tell us about it.

The incomparable Veronique de Rugy (Reason columnist and economist at the Mercatus Center) was recently a guest on Bloomberg TV, where she was tasked with rebutting the faulty economics behind the gigantic economic stimulus program that’s still holding back the American economy. As the video below shows, it was child’s play for this intellectually rigorous defender of free markets:

Writing for Big Government, AWR Hawkins asks the obvious question about the political hot potato being passed around by President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and interim ATF director Ken Melson – none of whom claim any “substantive” knowledge about a federal program to arm Mexican drug dealers.

In other news, on July 5^th Jack Tapper (ABC News) peppered Obama’s White House Press Secretary with questions about “Fast and Furious” in front of the rest of the press reporters, but the most substantive answer that Jay Carney gave was: “The president takes this very seriously.” (In all fairness to Carney, he’s clueless because Obama keeps him clueless.)

Look folks, this is ridiculous. Where is Chris Matthews? Where is that Keith guy who used to work for MSNBC? Where are all the freaks who wanted to hang George W. Bush in effigy for supposedly-lying about Iraq?

Why are they silent in the face of so great a cover-up?

Probably because the “Gunrunner” and “Fast and Furious” projects have too many inconsistencies to tolerate; better to just ignore them.  A liberal president presides over the intentional escalation of a narco-fueled civil war.  His celebrated AG fails yet again to faithfully execute his oversight responsibilities.  And the man charged with ensuring that alcohol, tobacco, firearms, and explosives don’t fall into the wrong hands is at the head of a bureaucracy actively peddling the most lethal one (guns) to obtain the others.

With Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry killed as a result of guns used in the ATF program, isn’t it about time to get an updated (and much more accurate) version of “Bush lied, people died”?

Annette Meeks, CEO of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, offers this damning editorial of Democratic Governor Mark Dayton’s decision to shut down the state’s government rather than sign a balanced budget without tax increases.

Among the bevy of withering arguments against Dayton’s action, Meeks points out that the budget passed by the legislature actually increased state spending by 6 percent while filling a $5 billion deficit.  The problem for Dayton: no soak-the-rich “millionaires’ tax.”

Like President Barack Obama with the nation’s debt ceiling, Governor Dayton is playing a dangerous game for the sake of fiscal discrimination.  Moreover, Dayton is unwilling to consider the state equivalent of a continuing budget resolution.

I’ll give Meeks the last word:

Last week, Republican legislative leaders, in a desperate move to stave off closing the government, proposed a “lights on” budget resolution that would have allowed services to continue while negotiations continued. In a crass, cynical move, Dayton rejected this good-natured offer.

We are here for one reason — Dayton. He insists upon inflicting as much pain as possible for state residents and government employees. And he is doing this so that the Legislature will bend to his will and raise income taxes, launching Minnesota into the stratosphere of high income taxes.

There are certain principles worth fighting for. Preserving a sound economic future for our state is one of those things.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of drifting off the highway, chances are you’ve been instantly reminded by the deep grooves on the other side of the white line.  When your car crosses over them a deep, sickening rattle shakes your vehicle.  It’s a warning that you’re about to leave the road and enter a crash zone.

Most people have to fight to urge to overcorrect.  Austan Goolsbee, President Barack Obama’s chief economist, would probably reclassify the loud death tones as just “bumps along the road” and keep driving.

That’s effectively what Goolsbee is doing by claiming that the nearly 80 percent drop in jobs created from April to May are just 200,000 or so “bumps” in the White House’s empirically indefensible road to recovery.

Like an absent-minded professor ignoring the warning signs of an impending car wreck, Goolsbee and Co. are driving the American economy off the road and into a ditch.  Unemployment is anchored at 9.1 percent.  The stock market is falling with every new round of bad economic news.  Rating agencies are downgrading America’s economic outlook because of its lack of fiscal responsibility.

There are two ways to stop bumping over the warning grades.  Either get back on the highway or leave the pavement entirely.  By sticking to his present course, President Obama is steering the nation’s economy into a serious wreck.

As I wrote earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is growing tired of President Obama’s refusal to involve the legislative branch in the policy-setting for the conflict in Libya. Today that irritation grew to a head on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Washington Times reports:

Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must give explain himself [sic] or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

The word “including” in the last sentence is a bit of an overstatement. Since the courts will almost certainly refuse to intervene in this matter under the political question doctrine, cutting off funds is virtually the only way for Congress to impose real consequences (it’s also something of a proxy for a vote on policy, given that many White Houses argue that approving funds is the same as approving a war).

It’s not clear that this would be a wise move, however. Regardless of the initial rationale for the Libyan expedition (which was not compelling in terms of American national security interests), the reality is that the strategic landscape has shifted since the West has intervened. Leaving now in a rush has the potential to be more destablizing than not intervening in the first place. It would be better instead to set a few hard and fast objectives (killing Gaddafi, securing rebel control of certain parts of the country, etc.), achieve them, and go home, hopefully leaving that nation no worse than we found it.

That prescription may be less dramatic than the Congress wants. But that’s what they get for not speaking up sooner.

This morning, the Labor Department announced that the U.S. unemployment rate climbed again to 9.1% this month, up from 9.0% in April.  Just as alarmingly, the net number of jobs created was only 54,000, down from 232,000 in April.  In addition to deteriorating from the previous month, both numbers fell well below the expectations of economists, who had anticipated a decline in the unemployment rate to 8.9%, and 160,000 net new jobs.  This also means that in the 27 months since Obama signed his unprecedented government spending “stimulus,” unemployment has only climbed from 8.2% to 9.1%, even though the Administration projected that he would have it down to 6.5% by now.  By way of comparison, in the same 27 months following the effective date of President Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983, unemployment plummeted from 10.4% to 7.3%.  The facts speak volumes.