Freedom Line Blog

Carly Fiorina may not eventually win the GOP presidential nomination, but that shouldn’t necessarily be the end of her involvement in the 2016 election.

Fiorina, a former Hewlett-Packard CEO and one-time U.S. Senate candidate in California, is making the rounds ahead of a potential announcement that she is running for president.

Though she’s low in the polls, Fiorina is making a name for herself as Hillary Clinton’s best critic.

“The Democrats and Hillary Clinton have made gender an issue with their ridiculous ‘war on women,’” the New York Times quotes Fiorina as saying. “I think if Hillary Clinton faces a woman opponent, she will get a hitch in her swing.”

What better way to deflate the liberal meme that Republicans hate women than by nominating a conservative female to the party’s standard bearer? Fiorina is proudly pro-free market and pro-life, making her someone to watch as the GOP field takes shape.

By establishing her abilities as an able Clinton critic, Fiorina may be positioning herself to show the eventual nominee that she can go toe-to-toe with Hillary and effectively neutralize any war-on-women attacks.

Keep an eye on Fiorina. If Hillary is the Democrats’ nominee, we may see a lot more of Carly.

Don’t know much about American history?

Blame the federal government.

Back in 1968, Congress and President Lyndon Johnson agreed to move Veterans Day, Memorial Day and George Washington’s birthday to designated Mondays to ensure three-day weekends throughout the year. Since the change would mean that Washington’s birthday (February 22nd) would never be celebrated on the prescribed third Monday of February, the new holiday became known as Presidents Day.

The motivation was primarily economic.

“The three-day weekend was favored by federal workers, private sector labor unions, the National Association of Manufacturers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and an array of tourist-related industries and trade associations,” writes Carl Cannon. “It was even pro-family, its backers proclaimed. It was a win-win-win.”

The results were predictable. Today, many people don’t know that we celebrate the living on Veterans Day and the fallen on Memorial Day. Others don’t realize that some presidents – like George “Father of His Country” Washington and Abraham “Savior of His Country” Lincoln (born Feb. 12th) – deserve more attention and appreciation this time of year than their Oval Office brethren.

One way to overcome this misconception in the future is to acquaint one’s self with some of the best works on Washington and Lincoln. Ron Chernow and Richard Brookhiser have well regarded biographies on Washington. Harry Jaffa has two outstanding books on Lincoln.

Reading any of these ahead of next year’s edition of Presidents Day will go a long way toward reclaiming part of what makes America exceptional – Her exceptional leaders.

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) is using an interesting tactic to get House Republicans to pass his immigration reform bill – Scare them with threats of a lawless presidency.

“I believe this president will be tempted, if nothing happens in Congress, he will be tempted to issue an executive order as he did for the DREAM Act kids a year ago, where he basically legalizes 11 million people by the sign of a pen,” the presumptive 2016 presidential candidate told a Florida radio station last week.

In effect, Rubio is telling House Republicans – opponents of his pathway to citizenship plan for illegal immigrants – that unless they pass the Senate Gang of Eight’s bad bill President Barack Obama will enlarge his controversial Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Brought to life last year via executive order, Obama directed immigration agents to put illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children at the bottom of the deportation list. The policy also makes available temporary work visas to those covered.

But Rubio, a University of Miami law school graduate and former Speaker of the Florida House, has his eyes on the wrong target.

For one thing, not even the liberal academics that provided cover for the president’s unilateral and unprecedented action think Obama has the power to defer action on every illegal immigrant.

“The justifications for DACA made clear that this is not a situation where the president can reduce overall enforcement of immigration laws. He can just redirect it in certain ways,” former principal deputy attorney general and current University of Virginia law professor David A. Martin told the Washington Post.

And even if President Obama did decide not to enforce any immigration laws, why is his lawlessness an argument against Republicans? Wouldn’t the proper response to an expanded abuse of presidential power be to oppose the president?

Yet it seems like Rubio is giving Obama a pass while preemptively blaming House Republicans for future bad acts the president may commit.

Only in a place like Washington does that kind of logic make sense. If Rubio really believes that the President of the United States won’t be constrained by the separation of powers and the rule of law, then the object of his anger should be directed at the White House, not Republicans in the House of Representatives.

Jonathan Allen of Politico sums up the highly successful line of attack Republicans aimed at President Barack Obama during their nominating convention:

If Republicans landed a punch on Obama, it was the kind of strategic body blow that a skillful pugilist deploys to gain better position for the rest of the fight.

No roundhouse, no jaw-splitter, no knockout. It was the kind of shot aimed at subtly shifting momentum and softening up the opponent in a way that may not be evident to the casual observer.

Allen is right and Obama’s camp knows it.  That’s why they’ve been running a character assassination campaign against Mitt Romney – felon, murderer – instead of talking about any of the President’s accomplishments.

The simple fact is there aren’t any successes directly attributable to Obama worth talking about.  The more the Romney team can make this election a “good man, bad president” referendum on the incumbent, the more likely it is that Obama will be a one-term wonder.

Jay Cost of the Weekly Standard explains why the current 1970’s era primary system almost always impedes the Party of Reagan from nominating a Reaganite for president.

So, here’s the question of the day: why can’t the party of Reagan ever seem to nominate a Reaganite?

My answer: because conservative Republicans are not actually in control of their own party. Though they are its animating force – they give it policy ideas to implement, they turn out regularly to support the party in good times and bad, they advocate the party and its ideology to their friends, neighbors, and relatives – they are not in charge, and have not been since the 1970s (arguably the 1920s, but that’s another story altogether).

Later on, Cost describes how GOP moderates maneuver around the conservative base to secure presidential nominations.

Self-identified conservatives tend to be a majority of most primary electorates, so one would think that, even with the limits of primaries, you’d still get a quality conservative nominee. But that isn’t necessarily the case in a three-way race. That’s the final, huge problem with the primaries. They do not build consensus, which ultimately would require the assent of the conservative side of the GOP. Instead, they create a game similar to the show Survivor – “outwit, outplay, outlast.”

If you are a moderate Republican – e.g. Bob Dole or John McCain – you don’t need to win a majority of the conservative vote. You just need to do well enough among moderate Republicans so that you win more votes than your conservative opponents. Then, you simply wait for the media and the party establishment to pressure your conservative challengers into dropping out.

See if this sounds familiar:

The rules of the nomination game favor candidates who have the insider connections, can garner positive coverage from the media, can appeal to non-ideological and poorly informed voters, and who can win perhaps just a third of the vote in the early rounds. Such candidates are rarely the conservatives. Put another way: conservatives consistently lose because they are not actually in charge of their own party.

This is why, moving forward, conservatives need to spend serious time and effort thinking about how to fix this screwed up process. Yes, it is important to consider the big policy issues – tax reform, health care, industrial policy – but without good rules to produce good nominees who can implement those policies, then it is all for naught.

Food for thought.  You can read the entire article here.

See if you can make sense of the following two paragraphs:

Tens of thousands of gallons more oil gushed into the Gulf of Mexico on Wednesday after an undersea robot bumped a venting system, forcing BP to remove the cap that had been containing some of the crude.

The setback, yet another in the nine-week effort to stop the gusher, came as thick pools of oil washed up on Pensacola Beach in Florida and the Obama administration tried to figure out how to resurrect a six-month moratorium on deepwater drilling. (Emphasis mine)

Why on this great blue marble of ours is the Obama Administration trying to force the shut-down of nearly three dozen properly working oil rigs when there are now tens of thousands more gallons of oil gushing into the Gulf from a totally different site?

Maybe it’s debatable whether a moratorium should be sought.  But how can it be that this seems to be the only solution the White House is willing to fight for when it could be doing a lot more good getting the federal bureaucracy to start helping state and local governments clean up the mess right now?  Is the Office of the President of the United States really this impotent?