The House Stands for Law and Liberty

It's like Congress went poking into the sides of a sofa and found the Constitution that people once talked about. 2011 is America's Josiah moment (2 Chronicles 34), if I may put it that way.

George Will celebrates this in his column, "A Congress that Reasserts Its Power" (Washington Post, January 16, 2011).

The eclipse of Congress by the executive branch and other agencies is Congress's fault. It is the result of lazy legislating and lax oversight. Too many "laws" actually are little more than pious sentiments endorsing social goals - environmental, educational, etc. - the meanings of which are later defined by executive-branch rule-making. In creating faux laws, the national legislature often creates legislators in the executive branch, making a mockery of the separation of powers. And Congress makes a mockery of itself when the Federal Register, a compilation of the regulatory state's activities, is a more important guide to governance than the Congressional Record.

Unfortunately, courts long ago made clear that they will not seriously inhibit Congress's scandalous delegation of its lawmaking function to others. So Congress should stop whining about the actions of the EPA (emissions controls), the FCC ("net neutrality"), the Interior Department (reclassifications of public lands) and other agencies and should start rereading Shakespeare: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings." 

Barney Frank's view is that Congress should do whatever it darn well pleases, and if the courts have a problem with it, they'll say something. But Will sees the courts, those guardians of the tablets, as having failed in their duties.

Regarding the relevance of the Constitution, you must remember this: Rep. Nancy Pelosi, asked about the constitutionality of the health-care legislation - a subject now being seriously litigated - said, "Are you serious? Are you serious?" She was serious. She seriously cannot comprehend that anyone seriously thinks James Madison was serious when he wrote (Federalist 45), "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined." Unfortunately, for too long too many supine courts have flinched from enforcing the doctrine of enumerated powers, and too many Congresses have enjoyed emancipation from that doctrine. So restraint by the judiciary must be replaced by congressional self-restraint. 

This may sound strange, but it looks like it is Congress to the rescue for liberty. Interesting, isn't it, that it is never the Senate to the rescue. In 1994 and 2010, it was the lower house of the popular branch.

Wallis Won't Give Up

George Will has suggested that in time of national tragedies of the sort that happened in Tuscon we should have a moratorium on sociology. ("The Charlatans' Response to the Tuscon Tragedy," Washington Post, Jan. 11, 2011)

We have all come close to dying of a surfeit of sociology. The reasons for this bizarre behavior were obvious to some, even to our sociologist laureate, the Pima County Sherriff, Mr Dupnik.



So they quickly popped off on "the [Republican, conservative] rhetoric of violence and hate" as MoveOn.org put it, and, as Will documents it, "The Tucson shooter was (pick your verb) provoked, triggered, unhinged by today's (pick your noun) rhetoric, vitriol, extremism, "climate of hate.""

Jon Stewart rejects the pop sociology, too. People want to comfort themselves by drawing a straightline at times like this between the horrific event and a particular social cause. Change the cause (e.g., control or ban the rhetoric), and the bad thing will never hanppen again. But "you can't outsmart crazy."

Perhaps I'm sheltered in the quiet glen of conservative news and opinion sources, but I think that the rhetoric issue is settling down. (Has the president had a role in this. I haven't noticed the post-partisan uniter of the nation playing a significant role in it. But I hope that wasn't uncivil of me to notice.) People who rhetorically went over the top on rhetoric that goes over the top are being shamed into silence.


Of course, far be it from my brother in Christ Jim Wallis to be shamed into silence! Here he is with the Peace and Civility Pledge asking me to repent for my role in what Loughner did. Let’s not call anyone evil, he says. Reagan called the Soviets evil, and the left had a fit. How uncivil! But it is not uncivil to call evil by its name. But one should be careful in doing so, and provide strong arguments for one’s claim. That upholds reason as the basis for political discourse, and strips political evil of its rhetorical cover.

Purify Politics. Depoliticize the Economy

Democrats and John McCain like to crow about all the money in politics, and its corrupting influence. But is it really so much money? George Will's research staff puts it in perspective for us ("The Democratic Vision of Big Brother," Washington Post, Oct. 17, 2010).

Total spending, by all parties, campaigns and issue-advocacy groups, concerning every office from county clerks to U.S. senators, may reach a record $4.2 billion in this two-year cycle. That is about what Americans spend in one year on yogurt but less than they spend on candy in two Halloween seasons. Procter & Gamble spent $8.6 billion on advertising in its most recent fiscal year.

Those who are determined to reduce the quantity of political speech to what they consider the proper amount are the sort of people who know exactly how much water should come through our shower heads (no more than 2.5 gallons per minute, as stipulated by a 1992 law). Is it, however, really worrisome that Americans spend on political advocacy -- on determining who should make and administer the laws -- much less than they spend on potato chips ($7.1 billion a year)? 

But with government driving its tentacles every more deeply into the economy and the business of business, who can blame corporations and the Chamber of Commerce investing in the outcome of national elections? If you want to get money out of politics, get politics out of money!

The Progressive Project of Learned Feudalism

George Will gave this address to the Cato Institute on the occasion of receiving their Milton Friedman Prize for Advancing Liberty on May 13.

Fifty-one days ago the president signed into law health care reform, that great lunge to complete the New Deal project and the Great Society, that great lunge to make us more European. At exactly the moment that this is done the European Ponzi scheme of the social welfare state is being revealed for what it is.

There is a difference. We are not Europeans. We are not, in Orwell's phrase, a "state-broken people." We do not have a feudal background of subservience to the state. No, that is the project of the current administration - it can be boiled down to learned feudalism. It is a dependency agenda that I have been talking about ad nauseam.

Here is the podcast:




Read the print version of "Not a State-broken People."

Charles Murray spoke on this same subject to the American Enterprise Institute last year.

You might also read what David Brooks said at the same time.

Auto Bailouts and Sinking American Prospects

In the 1970s, my dad bought American cars on point of principle. He thought it was right to support the North American auto industry. Eventually, however, he found that American car manufacturers were doing him no favors in return. So since the late 1970s, he has bought Peugeot, Saab, Volvo, and Acura (which is Honda). I drive a Honda Odyssey.

As consumers, we direct our money to the companies we think will give us the best products. But recently, the so-called Big Three American automakers went to Washington asking for $15 billion of your money and mine to make up for the money we have not been spending on their cars. The trouble has been not only that many Americans have been preferring the products of other companies. But even when we have been buying GM, Ford and Chrysler, we have been paying only the market price, which is considerably less than what the companies need to make a profit. So having failed in the marketplace, they asked the government to take from us what we have freely chosen not to give them.

Congress refused. But on Friday, President Bush gave them, by executive decree, over $17 billion from the Congressionally established $700 billion slush fund (TARP, the Troubled Asset Relief Program) designated for stabilizing the financial markets.

George Will sees not just an unwise use of public funds, but a deterioration of our constitutional system of government.

The expansion of government entails an increasingly swollen executive branch and the steady enlargement of executive discretion. This inevitably means the eclipse of Congress and attenuation of the rule of law.

Mark Steyn tells us why these car companies are failing and will continue to fail.

General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a vast retirement home with a small loss-making auto subsidiary. The UAW is AARP in an Edsel: It has 3 times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan make a pre-tax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler and GM make a loss of between $500 and $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

Steyn actually takes you on a jolly ride through several aspects of America's present decline: "See the USA from your Chevrolet: An hereditary legislature, a media fawning its way into bankruptcy, its iconic coastal states driving out innovators and entrepreneurs, the arrival of the new messiah heralded only by the leaden dirge of "We Three Kings Of Ol' Detroit Are/Seeking checks we traverse afar," and Route 66 looking ever more like a one-way dead-end street to Bailoutistan."

But he ends upbeat, wishing us all "a very Hopey Changemas."

Whoever said the era of Great Canadians would die with William Shatner haven't been reading Mark Steyn.

Socialists Anonymous for the Right

Are conservatives in America serious about facing what we have become and about rethinking what we need to be if we are to help foster what is best in this free republic?

George Will throws a bucket of cold water on anyone who is still baffled and whining within the movement ("The Hyperbole of a Conservative").

Conservatism's current intellectual chaos reverberated in the Republican ticket's end-of-campaign crescendo of surreal warnings that big government -- verily, "socialism" -- would impend were Democrats elected. John McCain and Sarah Palin experienced this epiphany when Barack Obama told a Toledo plumber that he would "spread the wealth around."

America can't have that, exclaimed the Republican ticket while Republicans -- whose prescription drug entitlement is the largest expansion of the welfare state since President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society gave birth to Medicare in 1965; a majority of whom in Congress supported a lavish farm bill at a time of record profits for the less than 2 percent of the American people-cum-corporations who farm -- and their administration were partially nationalizing the banking system, putting Detroit on the dole and looking around to see if some bit of what is smilingly called "the private sector" has been inadvertently left off the ever-expanding list of entities eligible for a bailout from the $1 trillion or so that is to be "spread around."

The seepage of government into everywhere is, we are assured, to be temporary and nonpolitical. Well. ...

He goes on to cite "temporary" programs that started with the Depression and WWII, but which, alas, are still with us. It is the nature of most public officials that once they get their claws into a source of revenue or a sphere of control, they never let go. Why should the banks, the automakers, and the occasional trillion dollars of public "emergency" spending be exceptions to this natural law?

Will drives home his point here:

Hyperbole is not harmless; careless language bewitches the speaker's intelligence. ... In America, socialism is un-American. Instead, Americans merely do rent-seeking -- bending government for the benefit of private factions. The difference is in degree, including the degree of candor. The rehabilitation of conservatism cannot begin until conservatives are candid about their complicity in what government has become.

Conservatives need to face what they have become under George W. Bush, and then confess "Hi, my name's _______, and I'm a socialist," repent, re-study the Founding, the Constitution, the basic principles of political and economic liberty, and I would add the disgrace and dignity of man in the gospel of Christ, and then study how prudence would apply these lessons to the present shambles of which we are co-architects.

For background on W-conservatism, read Fred Barnes, "Big-Government Conservatism," The Weekly Standard, Aug. 18, 2003.

Clintonian Self-Defeat

It is somewhat sickening to have to spend so much time discussing the Clintons, but, as they have done now for many years, they make it a necessity. Is it possible that either Barack Obama or John McCain will deliver us from this?

Let me turn to George Will and Maureen Dowd for help today in bearing this aweful burden.

In "Howlers, Whoops and Miracles" (Washington Post, Feb. 14, 2008), Will draws attentions to the Clintons' extraordinary capacity for self-inflation and audacious lies.

With metronomic regularity -- the rhythm may arise from some strangely shared metabolic urge, which may explain the mystery of their marriage -- the Clintons say things that remind voters of the aesthetic reason for recoiling from them. Aesthetic considerations even cause many Republicans...to hope, against three decades of evidence, that Democrats can be sufficiently sensible to nominate Barack Obama, even though Hillary Clinton would be more vulnerable to John McCain.

Though, as we all know and all too well, Bill Clinton is "an overflowing caldron of narcissism and solipsism," Hillary continually reiterates, if only by implication, that she is offering us "two for the price of one" if she is elected president. In Virginia this past Sunday, in an apparent attempt to neutralize Obama's rhetorical appeal and minimize the importance of her own notorious deficiency in this, Hillary told an audience that, as Will puts it, "she is constantly being urged to unleash her inner Pericles." Are you ready for this?

People say to me all the time, 'You're so specific. . . . Why don't you just come and, you know, really just give us one of those great rhetorical flourishes and then, you know, get everybody all whooped up?'

When she is not flattering herself in ways that persuade only the most willfully gullible, she is belching forth political poison intended to bare knuckle her way back into the White House, but which may in the end be the petard on which she hoists herself. Maureen Dowd, a delightfully unsympathetic sister, says "her pitch is the color of pitch."

In "Darkness and Light" (NYT, February 6, 2008), Dowd says that Hillary's argument against Obama is that only she is tough enough to stand against the Republican hate machine and overcome in the November election. “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

Obama is himself being toughened in the course of this campaign by the unmatched toughening agent herself. What doesn't kill him will make him stronger. Teh big question for Obama, she says, is, "Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic? Will he have the muscle to take on the opposition, from Billary (which she later calls 'the Clinton attack machine...not invincible, but breathing fire') to the Republican hate machine to the terrorists overseas?"

American presidential campaigns are long and grueling, and this serves a useful public purpose. As Dowd intimates, Obama will need that battle honed toughness for dealing with the foreign enemies. Perhaps confronting the heavily bounded evil of his Clinton opponants will sensitize him to the far more unrestrained evil of national enemies lurking in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela whose savage breasts are unmoved by his "hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world" and whose evil he does not seem to take quite qeriously.