Freedom Line Blog

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.

It’s easy to attribute Obama’s poor approval ratings to generic anti-government sentiment and/or ongoing economic difficulty, citing Congress’s low approval as supporting evidence.  But a recent Rasmussen poll shows something interesting.  Namely, that the most conservative portion of our federal government receives the highest approval ratings from the public.  In fact, the number of respondents stating that the Supreme Court is doing a “good” or “excellent” job (35%) is approximately double the number who rate its performance as poor (18%).

Indeed, by a 31% to 26% margin, respondents believe the Supreme Court is too liberal, not too conservative.  Interesting insight for elected officials, and especially candidates, to ponder.

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.

Please allow for a personal sentiment: I have no respect for Barack Hussein Obama. None.

Yes, I respect the office of the presidency. But I have no respect whatsoever for its current occupant.

There is a good reason why Mark Halperin used a nasty word to describe Obama after Obama’s press conference yesterday: because, if a not-so-nasty but otherwise entirely synonymous word had been used, Halperin would have been right on target. So was Sen. Marco Rubio.  This hugely egotistical man, Obama, has nothing to offer but demagoguery; has offered no leadership; has saddled us with debt; has no personal grace when challenged; has no dignity, but only petulance, when in the fray; has no respect for constitutional limits on his own power or those of his political appointees; has no real love for what this country is or has been but only for what he wants it to be after he “transforms” it; has little respect for the actual views of the American citizenry; has a dangerously radical belief in subjugating ethics for the sake of power; is fundamentally dishonest, not to mention horribly hypocritical on subjects ranging from the debt ceiling to the War Powers Act and plenty of other issues as well.

This is not a man who has ever achieved anything OTHER than self-advancement — indeed, he himself has admitted that he accomplished little as a community organizer; his legislative record is incredibly thin; and his presidency has been, in terms of results, disastrous.

In short, this is not a man to emulate either on the basis of character or significant attainments of any sort that are not self-aggrandizing.

There: ‘Nuff said.

In February, President Obama unveiled his irresponsible deficit-inflating 2012 proposed budget.  By April, Obama hastily said “never mind,” scrapped that proposal and offered a vague Budget 2.0 speech after Congressman Paul Ryan (R – Wisconsin) embarrassed him by unveiling his debt-cutting budget roadmap.

The problem is that the so-called leader of the Free World was too afraid to offer any specificity whatsoever, focusing on his reelection instead of the nation’s intensifying fiscal emergency.  At a House Budget Committee hearing last week, Rep. Ryan asked Congressional Budget Office (CBO) chief Douglas Elmendorf whether the CBO had yet been able to estimate Obama’s latest “budget.”  Elmendorf’s not-so-subtle reply:

We don’t estimate speeches.  We need much more specificity than was provided in that speech for us to do our analysis.”

Come to think of it, a lot of voters probably think back to the 2008 presidential campaign and say the same thing.

Blame Obama for high gas prices. Sorry for the cross-link, but the info is here.

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.

In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting yesterday, the Supreme Court obliterated the Obama administration’s ludicrous position (with apologies to the Chamber of Commerce, which lost its usually perspicacious way on this one) that a state may not withdraw a business license from employers who knowingly or intentionally hire illegal aliens. The whole controversy was nonsense.  The Chamber and Obama had argued that federal law prohibits states from sanctioning employers in that way, even though — get this — the law they cited explicitly allowed states to enforce rules against hiring illegals through “licensing and similar laws.”  In pursuit of its extremely pro-immigration ideological agenda — which will be put to an even bigger and more politically explosive test in another Arizona case next year — the administration argued that the exact words of a federal statute should be ignored in order to read that statute as preventing state action meant to dovetail with and complement, not undermine, those very same federal immigration laws. Writing for a 5-3 majority, Chief Justice Roberts concluded that no ambiguity exists at all: “the plain wording of the clause,” “on its face,” supported Arizona’s contention that it was operating entirely within the law.

As Ed Whelan noted at Bench Memos, Roberts got in a very sharp dig at the dissenting justices (and at the administration) by noting that two dissents read the clauses at issue in completely different ways. His footnote is worth quoting, with my bolded emphasis added:

JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR creates an entirely new statutory requirement: She would allow States to impose sanctions through“licensing and similar laws” only after a federal adjudication. Such a requirement is found nowhere in the text, and JUSTICE SOTOMAYOR does not even attempt to link it to a specific textual provision. It should not be surprising that the two dissents have sharply different views on how to read the statute. That is the sort of thing that can happen when statutory analysis is so untethered from the text.

As The Washington Times argued last December, a decision in favor of Arizona in this case means that in the more explosive case next year, “the administration’s argument… falls apart.” The Washington Times’ conclusion also stands: “States retain certain authority unless Congress expressly says otherwise. Arizona is right to insist that the Constitution is meant to limit federal power.”

Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation notes some solace for businesses worried that they could lose their licenses over a mere mistake in hiring, rather than willful or flagrant violation of immigration laws: “As the Chief Justice pointed out, there is no sanction against employers for merely hiring unauthorized workers. The state law’s sanctions are only triggered if an employer hires such a worker intentionally, knowing that they are not authorized to be employed. An employer acting in good faith need not have any fear of being sanctioned, especially since they enjoy a safe harbor from liability if they use the federal E-Verify system to check on prospective employees.”

In a different piece, this from the Washington Examiner, von Spakovsky gives evidence of the practical reasons that the states’ authority in this regard is so important: The administration is flat-out refusing to enforce immigration laws on its own.

One can be moderate on the overall subject of immigration, supporting streamlined processes for legal immigration, while insisting that the law actually be enforced against those who break it. Culturally, too, legal immigrants (it stands to reason) are more willing to acclimate to American society and to our language, more willing to become more fully Americans as earlier waves of immigrants did; illegals tend (by my observation) to be more separatist, less assimilated, and even resentful. Is it too much to ask for the federal government to allow states to take reasonable steps to guard against the worst abuses from waves of unassimilated aliens, if the feds themselves won’t do it?

Current commentary on the 2012 presidential race, including here at CFIF, centers primarily on the strength of the germinating Republican field.  The more Barack Obama weakens between now and November 2012, however, the easier the task for whoever emerges from the GOP race.  On that note, two new polls should have Team Obama sweating.  In the first, Rasmussen reports that Obama only leads “Generic Republican” by one point this week.  With most discussion of that generic Republican field focusing on its supposed weakness, that is significant.  In the second, CNN reports that 48% of respondents state Obama’s presidency has been a failure to date, while only 47% rate it successful.  The fact that CNN polled all adults, rather than registered voters or likely voters, is all the more reason for him to worry.

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.

This morning, the Labor Department announced that first-time unemployment claims rose again, from 414,000 last week to 424,000 this week.

As demonstrated by this Labor Department graph, weekly unemployment claims average approximately 300,000 during periods of economic normalcy.  One year ago, the number stood at 463,000 when the Obama Administration proclaimed the arrival of the “Recovery Summer,” yet it never dipped below 400,000 for the remainder of 2010.  We finally dipped into the high 300,000 range in February of this year – still an elevated level – but the number climbed back to 478,000 last month.

This is the Obama “stimulus,” over two years and $1 trillion of government spending later.

The more I think about it, the more it rankles me that President Obama wants to extend FBI Director Robert Mueller’s term by two years, and that the opposition to this proposal has been so muted. On principle, the extension is an awful idea (even apart from the bitterness of longtime agents, as reported in today’s WashPost), and principle should not take a back seat to admiration for the person of Mueller.

Here’s the deal: By almost all accounts, Mueller has done a superb job as FBI Director. Because of that record, Congress seems to be assessing Obama’s extension request in terms of whether Mueller should be kept on.  But that’s the wrong standard. The question should be not about Mueller, but about whether Mueller should be kept on. Or, better, whether an FBI Director — any FBI director — should be kept on beyond the statutory ten-year limit. So far, only Sen. Charles Grassley, Iowa Republican, has spoken up from the Hill to raise this point. Ever so hesitantly, Grassley said the re-appointment might set a “risky precedent.”

Might? Try “would.” There are excellent reasons why, by law, the FBI chief is limited to a single, ten-year term. Those reasons are laid out in this statement by the ACLU (yeah, I know, an oft-suspect organization). Take out the tendentious second paragraph (except the first sentence of it, which is fine) of the official statement, and I agree with every word of what remains. This is the key point:

It was for good reason that Congress chose to limit the tenure of future FBI directors. By setting a 10-year term, Congress sought to protect both the FBI director from undue political influence and our democratic institutions from allowing an unelected official to hold the power to examine the lives of Americans, including political leaders, for longer than is appropriate.

The rampant abuses under J. Edgar Hoover showed the dangers of letting one, unelected man gain such a major foothold in a position with great power, and with so much public acclaim, that elected officials are loathe to dismiss him. Yes, of course there is oversight authority to which the FBI Director answers in theory, but congressional oversight can be notoriously weak and executive oversight can be obviated by the very fact that the director serves the executive and can therefore use his own accumulated power to the executive’s political (or other) benefit.

It made perfect sense to create a term of up to ten years for the director, so he would be semi-immune to the politics that comes with Cabinet-level appointments by every incoming president.  It made even more sense to limit that term, by law, so that the separation from democratic accountability would not be impregnable.

The CNN story linked above ends with the statement that Mueller is “on the cusp of being officially irreplaceable.” That statement should give every Madisonian cringe. One of the understandings that underlie a republic is that no man is irreplaceable. It is not merely a cliché to say that we are a nation of laws and not of men. Any time any man, even a Mueller or a Petraeus or a MacArthur,  becomes seen as irreplaceable, the dam against over-accumulation of executive power is broken. (I myself don’t worry much about accumulation of legislative power, because by its very nature it is dispersed and because frequency of elections allows the public to weigh in.)

Conservatives who do not object to Obama’s request for a new law giving him this “one-time” term extension for Mueller are failing to remember their basic principles.

Finally, on a practical level, allowing a potentially re-elected Obama to appoint the new FBI director right after his re-election could shift a huge power to a president newly unmoored from electoral pressures Do we really want to give Obama such carte blanche? Forcing Obama to appoint a new director this year, as scheduled, would ensure that he appoint somebody moderate and competent because he and Congress both would know that the public that will vote on their own campaigns just over a year later would punish anybody who had okayed the appointment of a political hack.

Mueller has been a wonderful director. Surely, though, he’s not the only person, among 300 million Americans, who can do the job.

Fully nine weeks ago, President Obama assured members of Congress and the American public that U.S. involvement in Libyan “kinetic military action” would be a matter of “days, not weeks.” Notably, Obama also opined in 2007 that, “The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”  Well, according to the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the President must secure Congressional assent for military action or withdraw U.S. forces within 60 days.  Today marks that 60-day milestone.  Well played once again, Mr. President.

As the Senate debates proposed tax rules that would unfairly and discriminatorily target domestic oil and gas producers, the Center for Individual Freedom on behalf of its 300,000 supporters and activists across the United States today formally urged all Senators to vote “NO” on S. 940.   Addressing that counterproductive proposed legislation, Grant Aldonas (former Under Secretary of Commerce for International Trade) and Pamela Olson (former Assistant Treasury Secretary for Tax Policy) warned of its likely destructive consequences in a Washington Examiner opinion piece today.   Here is one particularly relevant excerpt from their commentary:

Rather than offering serious ideas about how to tackle entitlements, cut wasteful spending or reform the tax code, proponents of raising the oil companies’ taxes have seized on the notion that American energy producers benefit from billions of dollars in alleged tax subsidies.

[The] single most damaging thing the proposal does is mortgage our energy future to the state-owned energy giants that now dominate global energy markets. The U.S. economy runs on oil, but we produce only 40 percent of what we consume, meaning our economy and standard of living depend heavily on our access to foreign oil and gas resources.

Reid’s plan works just fine if you are comfortable having America’s energy future decided in Beijing, Moscow, or Tehran. Not so much if you think we should be deciding our own destiny.

Any proposal that would enhance the competitiveness of foreign government-owned oil giants at the U.S. companies’ expense and lead to greater volatility in oil markets and rising prices for U.S. consumers qualifies as a damaging unintended consequence.”  (Emphasis added.)

To read this excellent commentary in full, please click here.

CFIF also urges you to contact your Senators (contact information for your Senators available here) and urge them to vote “NO” on S. 940.

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.

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.

Tim again hits a crucially important issue  in his column that ran yesterday. When fewer than half of the population pays income taxes, the balance tips in favor of freeloading. The Washington Times editorial Wednesday laments that half of the equation: Welfare, of various sorts, is out of control.

It’s no wonder that the latest Agriculture Department figures shows one out of every five households received food stamps in February. The assistance provided to 20.8 million homes – up 20 percent in the past year-and-a-half – came at an annual cost of $68 billion. Free lunches were handed out to another 18.4 million, leaving taxpayers with a bill for $12.8 billion…. Instead of punishing enterprise and subsidizing poverty, the country needs to restore the conditions that promote prosperity. America’s corporate tax rate – currently the second highest in the world – needs to be cut. We need to restrain federal spending by scaling back the freebies doled out to far too many people. That’s the best way to restart our economic engine.

Only policies that promote growth will put more people above the income line at which they pay income taxes. Taxes are not a good thing, but making enough money to pay taxes is. Unless people are paying at least a nominal rate of taxes, they will feel no compunction to support the sorts of policies that reduce the need for taxes in the first place. From what they can see in the immediate horizon, at least, they are not at all invested in the health of the private economy, but instead are invested in the idea of bigger government — because bigger government now costs them nothing, and probably subsidizes them directly.

Tim’s quote from Orrin Hatch was good:

“An increasingly smaller group of Americans is shouldering the burden for an increasingly larger group of Americans.”

This is a recipe for ultimate economic collapse.

Veronique de Rugy adds more at NRO. She notes massive empirical research that shows high levels of publicly held debt have the effedct of consistently lowering economic growth. She ends with a quote that itself contains a link to this paper. In that paper comes a line that restates my point: “What is fleeting in economics is politically popular, while what is enduring in economics is politically unpopular.” The author descrivbes this phenomenon as the “shortsightedness bias” inherent in politics. When a majority of the public freeloads, their short-sightedness bias will be in favor of more freeloading, more debt — and, against their long-term interest, less growth. That’s why tax rates should not be raised, but why the tax base must be widened.  Counterintuitively, the way to widen the base is to keep the rates low enough to promote the economic growth that lifts more people into income levels at which they pay taxes. And as more people pay taxes, deficits and debt start to decline. A government that encourages economic growth can therefore be a more stable government than one that tries to soak the rich. A broad tax base thus supports ordered liberty. High tax rates undermine it.

There’s new political malfeasance from the Obama Administration.  Its Department of Education has sent the destructive so-called “Gainful Employment Rule,” which unfairly persecutes and effectively eliminates private college competition in higher education, over to the Office of Management and Budget for final review.

In addition to its harmful effects, the Rule is also riddled with corruption, from allegations of insider trading to defective Government Accountability Office reports.  The Education Department’s handling of this issue has been simply appalling.  Even more outrageous is the fact that the Department has not made the most recent version of the Rule – the one that was just sent to OMB for final review – available to the public.

In February, we applauded the House of Representatives when it passed a bipartisan amendment to H.R. 1 that stated that “no funds may be used to ‘implement, administer or enforce’ the U.S. Department of Education’s proposed Gainful Employment rule, nor may the Department ‘promulgate or enforce any new regulation or rule’ that would have the same effect as the Gainful Employment rule.  Unfortunately, however, that amendment was not included in the final budget.  But the battle to preserve student choice and market freedom in higher education is far from over.

At a time when our country has fallen behind in the rate of college graduates, we need competition in higher education now more than ever if we want to survive in an increasingly competitive world economy.  The Rule is clearly not close to being ready for final review, and the Department of Education must  reconsider its implications.  Most particularly, its harmful impact on less wealthy and working students who rely on career colleges and ultimately on our economy.

Here’s more encouraging news:  Americans are “getting it” on the issue of federal deficits and debt.  According to a new Gallup survey, an overwhelming 73% to 22% majority blames excess spending for the deficit, not insufficient taxation.  Barack Obama and his liberal apologists seek to blame “tax cuts for the rich” and insufficient revenues as the problem.  But as illustrated by the Heritage Foundation’s newly-released 2011 Budget Chart Book, our budget would still be approximately balanced if spending merely returned to early 2000s levels.  Does any serious person contend that government was too small in the first half of the 2000s, that government didn’t spend enough, that the poor and hungry were somehow cast out on the cold streets, that bureaucrats went unpaid?  Of course not.  The problem is explosive spending growth.  Obama oversaw an 84% increase in domestic discretionary spending, including his failed “stimulus,” in just his first two years.

Fortunately, Americans see through his attempt to demand even more taxpayer dollars to feed the insatiable leviathan he hopes to enlarge.

Although the campaign for America’s fiscal survival continues, it is important to recognize battle victories along the way.

CFIF has participated in the effort to stop the duplicative, unnecessary and wasteful second engine for the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter that refused to die.  Pratt & Whitney was awarded production of the F-35 engine, but forces in Congress perpetuated the wasteful General Electric/Rolls-Royce second engine.  The Pentagon doesn’t want it.  The Senate has voted it down.  The House has voted it down.  The Bush White House sought to stop it.  The Obama White House has sought to stop it.

Unfortunately, the second engine project rambled on at a cost to taxpayers of $1 million per day, because of Beltway pork-barrel political forces and the previous Congress’s failure to even pass a 2011 budget.

But at long last, the Defense Department this week instructed G.E. and Rolls Royce that the second engine contract has been terminated.  This is progress.