In an interview with CFIF, Carrie Severino, Chief Counsel and Policy Director of the Judicial Crisis Network, discusses the Senate filibuster rules change and judicial nominations to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Listen to the interview here.
Newt Gingrich has had a rough time of it the past week or so. The press is all over him for his hard-line stance on the federal judiciary (including abolishing the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals), his poll numbers are slipping, and some of the brightest lights in the conservative commentariat (including Charles Krauthammer, Mark Steyn, and George Will) have been taking him out to the rhetorical woodshed.
Newt’s due a little holiday cheer then, and it comes in the form of Thomas Sowell’s new column, which essentially provides an endorsement from one of conservatism’s leading intellectuals. Sowell begins with the premise I expressed in an October column. I wrote at the time:
It represents a healthy political idealism for Republicans to search for the second coming of Ronald Reagan. But it’s a bit tiresome when they become inconsolable at his absence. Reagan was of a class alone, not only in his combination of political skills and ideological bearings, but also in the way that his abilities uniquely met his moment in history. Cursing the whole enterprise just because you can’t find his carbon copy is akin to writing off a Super Bowl win because you didn’t have a perfect season.
Sowell applies this principle to the Gingrich candidacy:
Do we wish we had another Ronald Reagan? We could certainly use one. But we have to play the hand we were dealt. And the Reagan card is not in the deck.
While the televised debates are what gave Newt Gingrich’s candidacy a big boost, concrete accomplishments when in office are the real test. Gingrich engineered the first Republican takeover of the House of Representatives in 40 years — followed by the first balanced budget in 40 years. The media called it “the Clinton surplus” but all spending bills start in the House of Representatives, and Gingrich was Speaker of the House.
Speaker Gingrich also produced some long overdue welfare reforms, despite howls from liberals that the poor would be devastated. But nobody makes that claim any more.
Did Gingrich ruffle some feathers when he was Speaker of the House? Yes, enough for it to cost him that position. But he also showed that he could produce results.
In a world where we can make our choices only among the alternatives actually available, the question is whether Newt Gingrich is better than Barack Obama — and better than Mitt Romney.
Sowell is certainly an outlier amongst the right-leaning intelligentsia. The question now is whether he’ll also be in the minority when it comes time to vote.
Rick Perry got some (admittedly earned) grief last week after a cringe-worthy moment at the CNBC Republican Presidential Debate in Michigan, when he couldn’t recall the third of three cabinet departments he wants to abolish (for the record, they were the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and — the one he blanked on — the Department of Energy).
The media fixation on the gaffe overshadowed a bigger point: Rick Perry is proposing some of the most dramatic reforms to the federal government of any presidential candidate in decades. At a speech in Iowa earlier today, the Texas governor laid out an agenda that makes clear that the cabinet proposals were far from an aberration. Check out this list of proposals from the remarks:
Perry may be faltering in the polls, but this list reminds us why he was a contender in the first place. At the very least, let’s hope that the eventual Republican nominee has the good sense to co-opt this agenda.
 CFIF Freedom Line Blog RSS Feed CFIF on Twitter CFIF on YouTube |
