More about Elizabeth Warren's ancestry

This news, recently posted by Michael Patrick Leahy, about Elizabeth Warren, Democratic candidate to return Scott Brown's Senate seat to Democratic hands: Not only isn't she of American Indian origin, but one of her ancestors was involved in rounding up Indians and forcing them to move to Oklahoma:

For over a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Warren has described herself as a Native American. When recently asked to provide evidence of her ancestry, she pointed to an unsubstantiated claim on an 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage license application by her great-great grand uncle William J. Crawford that his mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee.

After researching her story, it is obvious that her "family lore" is just fiction.

As I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim. O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was listed as "white" in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note, the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)

But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren's explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery "the ultimate and cruelest irony" of the Warren Cherokee saga.

Jonathan Crawford, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford’s husband and apparently Ms. Warren's great-great-great grandfather, served in the East Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteer Militia commanded by Brigadier General R. G. Dunlap from late 1835 to late 1836. While under Dunlap’s command he was a member of Major William Lauderdale’s Battalion, and Captain Richard E. Waterhouse’s Company.

These were the troops responsible for removing Cherokee families from homes they had lived in for generations in the three states that the Cherokee Nations had considered their homelands for centuries: Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

While these involuntary home removals were not characterized by widespread violence, the newly displaced Cherokee mothers, fathers, and children found an oppressive and sometimes brutal welcome when they finally arrived at the hastily constructed containment areas. An estimated 4,000 Cherokees were warehoused in Ross’s Landing stockades for months awaiting supplies and additional armed guards the Federal Government believed necessary to relocate them on foot to Oklahoma.

Jonathan Crawford most likely did not join the regular Army troops who "escorted" these Cherokees along the Trail of Tears. He did, however, serve once more with Major William Lauderdale's re-formed Batallion of Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteer Militia. This group fought the Seminole Indians in Florida during the Second Seminole War. Crawford arrived in Florida in November, 1837, and served there for six months until his unit was disbanded in Baton Rouge, Louisiana the following May. (Note: It was not uncommon in those days for militia formed to serve for a limited period of time under specific commanders would reform later under the same commanders.)

Jonathan Crawford's service as a Private in Captain Richard E. Waterhouse's Company of Major William Lauderdale's Battalion of Mounted Infantry in Brigadier General R. G. Dunlap's East Tennessee Mounted Infantry Volunteers is confirmed by his appearance in the muster roll of the Brigade, taken around June of 1836. (Note that this transcription of the muster roll incorrectly lists the date as 1832.)

His service a year later (1837) in Major William Lauderdale's Tennessee Volunteer Mounted Infantry (Five companies of volunteers, one of which was led by Captain Richard E. Waterhouse) is confirmed by his widow O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford’s 1851 pension application before the Bledsoe County, Tennessee commissioners

Meanwhile, William J. Crawford (Elizabeth Warren's great-great grandfather who would, fifty-seven years later, falsely claim that his mother was Cherokee in that now-infamous 1894 Oklahoma Territory marriage license application) was born in Bledsoe County, Tennessee in 1837. This was just a few months after his father apparently helped remove thousands of Cherokees from their homes and a few months before his father went off to fight Seminole Indians in Florida.

His father, Jonathan Crawford, Elizabeth Warren's great-great-great grandfather, died in Jackson County, Tennessee in 1841. His mother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, died sometime between 1860 and 1870 - most likely in Bledsoe County, Tennessee.

Neither O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, Jonathan Crawford, nor any of their seven other children, apparently ever claimed that O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had Cherokee heritage.


As recently as two weeks ago, Ms. Warren publicly claimed to have Native American ancestry. In Dorchester, Massachusetts on April 27 at the Bricklayers and Allied Craftsmen Apprentice Training Center she stated, “I am very proud of my Native American heritage.” Yet, decades after she first made this same claim, it now appears that it is without any foundation.

It is time for Ms. Warren to publicly acknowledge the truth of her ancestry. It is time for her to admit that she has no Native American heritage that she can prove; and it is time for her to acknowledge instead, that she is likely a direct descendant of a Tennessee Militiaman who apparently rounded up the ancestors of those who truly have Cherokee heritage, the first step in their forced removal from the Southeastern United States to Oklahoma over the long and tragic Trail of Tears.

Come clean, Ms. Warren!

Can Barack Obama make the American people forget the economy?

Yesterday's editorial in the Washington Examiner began:

What issues are most important to voters this presidential election year? If you said the economy, jobs and the budget deficit, congratulations, you are like the rest of America. But if you said gay marriage, birth control and pranks Mitt Romney pulled in high school in 1965, then you either already are, or may have a future in the liberal media.

Very apropos. Obviously, President Obama does not want people to focus on the economic issues that point out how totally unsuccessful, even after three years of trying, the Obama administration is at fixing what is wrong with the economy. He and his media allies would rather direct people's attention to Mitt Romney's nearly half-century-ago harassment of a seemingly-gay classmate, or a vacation he took where he strapped his dog's shelter on top of his car (also decades ago). They figure that they have to make people dislike Romney so much that they will forget about people's being out of work, or being forced to take a health plan poorly suited to their needs, or all the other things that Obama's administration has foisted on the American people. Hopefully he will not succeed. We need to make clear that Obamanomics is the issue in 2012, not something Mitt Romney did to a fellow high-schooler almost 50 years ago.

Obama and gay marriage

President Barack Obama has now officially endorsed gay marriage. And I think this puts him on the right side of this issue, so I can hardly be opposed to him for that reason. But I hesitate to mark this as the world-shaking event that many in the media are proclaiming it. There are a number of reasons why I think it will have little consequense.

First of all, marriage is a state-level issue. Obama has already come out against defending DOMA, which is the one Federal law affecting marriage, so this is no change for him; otherwise, it carries as much weight as would a state Governor expressing himself on foreign policy.

Secondly, among people who oppose gay marriage and oppose Obama's re-election, it can only deepen an opposition that was already there; they were not going to vote for Obama this November anyway, and so this opposition will not change anything.

Third, among people who support gay marriage and support Obama's re-election, it can only get him more support from people who would have voted for him anyway; so again, nothing will be changed.

So what about people who are for gay marriage, but at present against Obama's re-election? Will any of them shift their support from Romney to Obama? Not very likely. Most of them, I imagine, are like me — gay marriage is a relatively minor issue, and my opposition to Obama (and I presume that of others in this category of prospective voter) is due to other actions that Obama has taken as President.

The remaining group of people conststs of people who are against gay marriage, but at present for Obama's re-election. Some people think Obama is being courageous in making this statement, because he might offend them. But who are they likely to be? If you look at the recent Maryland gay-marriage controversy, the only normally-liberal legislators who opposed gay marriage were African-Americans, mostly in Prince George's County. They were responding to African-American clergy who were religious conservatives, even if socially liberal. Bur the African-American community is so proud of Barack Obama that I would be surprised if his support decreased very much in that community because he came out for gay marriage. So this was hardly the risk some people seem to think it is.

Truth: a casualty of liberal thinking?

As I have mentioned more than once, I get a lot of material for my posts from columns I read in the Washington Examiner. Many of the columns do not really share my opinions, and I've agreed with some and disagreed with others. (In some, I have not really cited the column, such as one by Gene Healy on Gary Johnson, though it was because of that column that I wrote my most recent post, which was about Johnson.) And yesterday I saw another column I'd like to cite; this one by the Examiner columnist I tend most to agree with: Noemie Emery. Her column, in yesterday's paper, was entitled “The year of losing touch with reality”: among some of the things she says is

Somewhere in the recent past (say, about the time “Dreams From My Father” was published), liberals decided reality wasn't really their thing. It was too dull. It didn't give closure. Sometimes the endings weren't right. So it turns out that Obama's main squeeze in his young days was a “composite,” digitally enhanced for your reading experience.

Then, it turned out that even the blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts for his seat in the Senate, was hired by Harvard as an American Indian, though the proportion of Cherokee in her bloodline was just 1 in 32 parts. Just how pale-faced is Warren? A lot more than George Zimmerman, the brown-skinned son of a Peruvian mother who is accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. He was described by the New York Times as a “white Hispanic,” because if you're going to characterize a death as a lynching, the one who commits it had better be white.

I have to say that I enjoyed seeing those words in her column, and I felt I really needed to quote them. She also goes on to say, later in the same column,

What could be less real than that? Well, there is one thing — conjecture about what would have been in an alternative universe, in which much is asserted and nothing proved. These have become mainstays for President Obama, whose case for re-election is based not on what has happened, but what could, would or might have occurred under different conditions, which he is allowed to make up. One is his belief that his stimulus averted a second Depression. A second is to charge that a President Romney would not have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden and then to attack Romney for a “decision” he never had the opportunity to make. The supposed evidence for this claim came from a wide-ranging interview on general strategy that Romney had given five years earlier.

I recommend that you read the entire column, but these excerpts show how Noemie Emery tells it “like it is.” More power to her.

Spoiler alert?

This weekend, Gary Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Wexico, accepted the Libertarian Party nomination for the Presidency. And he made a statement that he “would rather die” than endorse either President Obama or Mitt Romney for president.

I am certain that part of this is rhetoric that is intended to ensure that Johnson is considered a serious candidate. And Johnson is, of course, a “more serious” candidate than most of the people the LP has put forth. An actual state governor in the past, he's actually better qualified for the Presidency than then-Sen. Barack Obama was four years ago. But let's face it. He has no chance whatever to be elected President. Nobody who was not a candidate of the two largest parties has even finished as high as second in a Presidential election since 1912 — and that was Theodore Roosevelt, a former President in his own right. Nobody else has finished as high as second since before the Civil War.

So Gary Johnson can only be considered a spoiler. If we had some system like approval voting in place, I might advise a vote for him to show support for the idea of libertarianism. But with our plurality system in place, a vote for Johnson simply takes a needed vote away from Mitt Romney, where it has some chance of ousting the current incumbent. And ousting the current incumbent is the first priority in this election.

In some ways, I probably am closer to Johnson's positions than to Romney's. (Not all: Johnson's libertarianism includes the very isolationism I condemned at the start of this month. And he embraces the Libertarians' desire to legalize illegal drugs.) But Johnson can't beat Obama. Romney can. And if there is any chance that Johnson draws enough votes away from Romney that Obama is re-elected, it will be a tragedy for this country. So I cannot look with favor on Gary Johnson's candidacy.

More on football

A few days ago I posted a note on here about football, how the game just seems too violent. While I got one comment which registered a dissent, a day or two ago I saw a news bulletin which, to me, pointed out just how bad it is. It seems that Troy Aikman, a former player in the National Football League, was quoted as saying that it was a bad idea to increase the NFL season to 18 games. Now think of it! An NFL season is all of sixteen games long! Major League Baseball teams play a season of 162 games — more than ten times that number. The major leagues in basketball and hockey have seasons only about half as long (in number of games) as MLB, but even so, that's about five times as many as the NFL. And here you have a former star in the NFL saying that this is enough. Obviously, football takes too much out of its players.

I looked up a bit more about Troy Aikman — not being a fan of the game, I don't know much about him. It seems he'd had 10 concussions before retiring from the “sport” — and he was quoted, not so recently, as saying: “Football Has Gotten So Dangerous I Wouldn't Even Let My Kid Play The Game.” Even then, over a year ago, he was condemning the plan to increase the season from 16 to 18 games, but the quote in question damns the “sport” even more — he was considered a “star” — the post in question uses that term to describe him — and he calls the “sport” so dangerous he wouldn't let his own son play it.

The 1/32 Cherokee Elizabeth Warren

It is interesting that Elizabeth Warren, the Democrat trying to win back Edward Kennedy's old senate seat from Sen. Scott Brown in Massachusetts, apparently got her Harvard Law School professorship because she was part-American Indian. (The politically correct term is “Native American,” but I will not use that term: anyone born in this country, including myself, is a native American, and so that's a misuse of the English language.) As Michael Barone puts it:

When she was hired, Harvard Law had just denied tenure to a woman teacher and was being criticized for not having enough minorities and females on its faculty.

Of course, Harvard and Warren say her claim to minority status had nothing to do with her being hired. And if it did, no one is going to say so. Nothing to see here; just move on.

And it is funny, up until her hiring, Warren had listed herself in various directories as minority, but more recently she has not. well, it's true that she has some claim of American Indian ancestry:

a researcher at the New England Historic Genealogical Society found that in a transcript of an 1894 marriage application, Warren's great-great-great-grandmother listed herself as Cherokee… That makes Warren one-thirty-second Native American.

Of course, is that enough to make someone a “minority”? More to the point, should that tenuous a claim to minority status convey a preference in hiring? Apparently, Rutgers Newark Law School, where Elizabeth Warren got her law degree, is considered such a low-status school that Harvard Law would normally not hire a person with Warren's background as a faculty member. (I don't mean to put down Rutgers in general: I taught there, though not at the Newark campus, in the 1970s. I'm talking specifically about its law school.) Would a male applicant without racial minority status have been hired by Harvard Law if he had Warren's educational background? I suspect not. Barone's comments are justified:

…the Warren story illustrates the rottenness of our system of racial quotas and preferences. Although the people in charge of administering them deny this, just about everyone with eyes to see knows that you're more likely to be hired and promoted if you have checked one of the non-Asian minority boxes: black, Hispanic, Native American, Pacific Islander.

[…]

People who classify themselves as approved minorities get into schools and get jobs that they wouldn't if they classified themselves as white. Not surprisingly, some people, perhaps including Warren, game this system.

The original justification was that this would overcome the disadvantages that American blacks endured during decades of slavery and segregation. That made sense to many people at the time. Those disadvantages were real, and most Americans wanted to be fair.

But the extension of minority status to other groups and the perpetuation of racial preferences for nearly half a century since the abolition of legal segregation mean that there is increasingly little correlation between membership in the favored categories and genuine disadvantage.

A note worth pondering.

Yes, it DOES depend on who he's running against!

Newt Gingrich has been criticized for the tepidness of his endorsement of Mitt Romney:

I’m asked sometimes, ‘Is Mitt Romney conservative enough?’ And my answer’s simple: Compared to Barack Obama? You know this is not a choice between Mitt Romney and Ronald Reagan. This is a choice between Mitt Romney and the most radical, leftist president in American history.

But Gingrich is justified. Certainly he has every right to believe that Mitt Romney is not his ideal candidate, but the choice is Romney or Obama, and he's making the choice between those two. I have my own misgivings about Mitt Romney — as you can tell if you read the things I posted about him back in 2007 and 2008. (Just one example) They happen to be the opposite of Gingrich's — I'm afraid he may be too conservative. So four years ago, with first Rudy Giuliani and later John McCain in the running, I had a relatively low opinion of Mitt Romney. This year, when his only rivals for the nomination were right-wing extremists like Rick Santorum (and Ron Paul, who isn't exactly a “right-wing extremist,” but rather such a caricature of a libertarian that even a relatively libertarian Republican like me could not support him!), it was much easier to support Romney. And in the general election campaign, where the alternative is Obama, there's no question. Mitt Romney, though as far from being my ideal candidate as he is from being Newt Gingrich's ideal candidate, deserves my 100% support this year.

What will the Obama administration do about Chen Guangcheng?

We have been reading about the blind Chinese political activist, Chen Guangcheng, who recently escaped from house arrest and sought asylum in the embassy in Beijing. The Obama administration is now on the spot. Will he somehow stay in China under US protection? (He'd have to stay in our embassy; otherwise he'd be under Chinese sovereignty and they could do whatever they wanted to him.) Or will he be taken to the U. S.? (He apparently repudiated the earlier quote that he wanted to stay in China, though the Obama administration still claims that it was genuine.)

The Obama administration will have to make up its mind, as to what matters more to it: good relationships with the Communist regime in Beijing, or the U. S.'s reputation as a place where the politically persecuted can get a safe haven. I await the outcome.

What a "sport"!?

The papers today write of a former player in the National Football League, Junior Seau, who apparently committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. At least one author of an article suspected he shot himself in the chest so his brain would be intact and could be studied to see the effects of concussions he had received over the years in his football career.

Another story making the rounds of the papers is the league's suspending various people (players and coaching staff) in the New Orleans franchise over their placing rewards on their team's seriously injuring opposing team players.

It's in the nature of football — a “sport” that seems to be nothing more than unbridled violence. Many people, a few decades ago, were calling for the abolition of boxing because of its violence — I think football is at least as bad, and I think perhaps that “sport” in more deserving of a ban.

I'm not a big sports fan — the only sport I care about is baseball. But I notice that when someone has a sports-only channel playing on a TV in my vicinity, if it's showing basketball, or soccer, or hockey, I'll mostly be just bored. But when it's football, I'm downright disgusted. I'll wince and close my eyes. I really can't understand why this “sport” is becoming the most popular sport in the U. S. A. Are our people really so bloodthirsty?

And I suppose this popularity is why we'll never see football banned. Which is the real pity.

Libertarianism and isolationism

Some people who care deeply about freedom, and would be, on that account, termed libertarians, also seem to be fervent isolationists. I don't see the connection — in fact, as I said in an earlier post, I cannot see why freedom is good, but exporting it is bad. But we all know how much of an isolationist Ron Paul is, and he's one of the most extreme libertarians around. Today I saw another example.

The Washington Examiner, as I have said in the past, is a conservative paper, not only in its own editorial policies, but in its choice of columnists. Almost all its columnists would be described as more conservative than I am. But two of the columnists, John Stossel and Gene Healy, are better described as libertarians than conservatives. (Healy is a vice-president at the Cato Institute, certainly a libertarian credential.) And today, Healy's column showed that, like Paul, he qualifies as an isolationist.

Today's Gene Healy column was entitled: “Is Rubio running for veep, or Globocop?” And in it he takes Sen. Marco Rubio to task for advocating what Healy terms a “neoconservative” foreign policy. (Read Healy's column: here.)

Perhaps I too am a “neoconservative.” (I'm not quite sure what that means!) But to me, helping people attain freedom, not just in the USA but all over the world, is a good thing. And there's where I part company with Gene Healy.

Is this 2004, or 1980, or something yet different?

I was looking at a post by Jonathan Chait in New York Magazine called “2012 Election Is Bush-Kerry in Reverse,” likening this election to the one eight years ago, in which, to quote Chait,

The parallels between this year’s presidential election and the one we had eight years ago are striking. Incumbent president with middling approval ratings faces rich guy from Massachusetts with a reputation for flip-flopping.

We all know how that campaign ended up, of course: the incumbent defeated the “rich guy from Massachusetts.” Presumably, Chait favors Obama and wants the same to happen this year.

Many of the people commenting on this post say, in effect, “no, it's more like the 1980 Reagan-Carter election,” and again, we all know how that one ended up too. I don't imagine any of the people making that comparison are Obama-supporting liberals! But in fact, every election has its own factors. Romney, unlike Kerry, didn't claim to be a war hero in a war he then strongly opposed, and he inherited his wealth (and then increased it by good businessmanship, the point he is raising to emphasize his qualifications to handle this economy) while Kerry married his, so the 2004 comparisons are pretty lame. While, compared with 1980, there are also major differences: Reagan had a history of connecting with the people, from his acting background, while Romney is not exactly the warm communicator that Reagan was.

So, yes, there are elements in common with 1980, and also with 2004, but this one looks to play out in a totally different way. And I hesitate to predict what will happen in November based on any of the presidential elections we've had in the past.

Another comment on our president's negatives

Yesterday, a columnist named Steve Huntley posted the following on the Chicago Sun-Times' site:

The no-holds-barred Democratic machine is laboring overtime to come up with reasons voters should re-elect President Barack Obama. He’s more likeable than Mitt Romney. The presumptive GOP nominee is a right-wing extremist. The cool, hip Obama has the women and youth vote locked up. In short, the White House strategy is to talk about anything but the economy.

Democrats gleefully cite polls showing Americans like Obama more than Romney. That harkens back to the 2004 race when President George W. Bush was seen as the guy you have a beer with rather than losing Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry.

But the economy was in good shape then, so it was easy to vote for the affable frat boy Bush over the dour Kerry. With unemployment above 8 percent for the longest time since the Depression and the economic recovery limping along at the most anemic pace in modern history, voters might reject the more popular guy in favor of the sober, get-the-job-done executive who has economic home runs like Staples and the Sports Authority on his resume.

To try to further paint Romney as less likeable, the Democratic propaganda apparatus intends to use the long, divisive GOP primary to label the former Massachusetts governor as a right-wing extremist. That ploy might run into trouble with all that videotape of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum condemning Romney as “a Massachusetts moderate.”

On another front, the administration tried to build on the Democrats’ favorable gender gap with women by dragging the Catholic Church into a controversy over insurance coverage for contraceptives. That blew up when a Democratic strategist and frequent White House visitor alienated stay-at-home moms by saying Anne Romney “never worked a day in her life.” Romney used that to talk about how women are attuned to economic reality through daily household buying.

Making matters worse for Democrats was an analysis of White House pay by the conservative Washington Free Beacon showing pay for women employees to be 18 percent below that for men. That recalled a former top female official saying that when she worked at the White House, “It actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women.’’

Obama then did a college tour touting his proposal to keep interest rates on student loans low. It turned out that Romney backs that too. Making matters worse for Democrats was an analysis by the Associated Press showing that the labor market in the Obama economy is so weak that half of 2012 college graduates were unemployed or working in jobs below their skill levels. Will young people vote for cool and hip, or for a better chance to get a job so they can pay off those loans?

The line of reasoning that voters might prefer competence to likability got a boost from, of all people, former White House chief-of-staff Bill Daley, though he obviously didn’t mean to. In a Chicago speech, Daley said, “The president has a very difficult time with the business community. Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican. That’s just a fact of life.”

Considering that fact of life, who would you rather have in the White House, a charisma-deprived guy from the party of success or the likeable guy from the party of, well, not success?

Some useful points to ponder.

How reliable are the polls?

Polls now seem to show that President Barack Obama leads Mitt Romney by a slim margin. There are a few recent polls with a lead for Romney, but more favor Obama. Should we put any trust in them, though, this long before the election? Probably not.

Let's look at the polling data from 2008, four years ago. Remember that this was an election that Obama won by 52.9% to 45.7%. What were the polls showing around April 26? Mostly a tie. In between, a lot happened. Among other things, John McCain built up a bit of a lead in September — though even at that time, the polls ranged from 54-44 McCain to 47-45 Obama. Then, the economy tanked. Obama went ahead, in one poll by as much as 53-38. But his eventual margin was a lot less.

The point is, we don't know what will happen between now and November. We could have another 9/11 — though it's not likely. If gasoline prices hit $5, it will hurt Obama (though I myself would hardly notice, since I don't own an automobile). The Supreme Court will announce its decisions on Obamacare, the Arizona law on illegal immigrants, and other matters in a couple of months and this will inflame tempers one way or the other. North Korea may do something, or the war between the Sudans might escalate to the point of affecting us. But nobody knows now what the news will be in the next few months.

So I look at the polls, but I think it is impossible to place a lot of trust in them, especially when it is only April.

The Catholic Church, Trayvon Martin, abortion, and the death penalty

A few days ago I wrote a post about the Trayvon Martin case. I received a comment by a reader, disagreeing with me, including strong support for the right of self-defense. And among other things, it included the words:

As long as a thug could come at you in your home or whatever, and threaten your physical person, you have a right to self-defense. As long as that threat exists (and it exists big time in Britain, where gun crimes have increased since they've been yanked out of the hands of law-abiding citizens), you have a natural right to defend yourself with equal force.

One thing that amazes me is that the above comment comes from a priest of the Catholic Church. (And no, I'm not revealing anything that the poster has not already stated in earlier comments here. He has said as much.) Now the Catholic Church has said that it is sinful to kill a little bit of tissue growing in a woman's uterus because this bit of tissue has the potential to become a human being — despite the fact that carrying this fetus to term could seriously impact the woman's health, possibly even endanger her life. And the same Catholic Church has come out against the death penalty, denying the right of a state to kill someone who is not merely a threat to someone's life, but has actually killed someone.

Now I do not know whether the priest who posted the words quoted above represents the teaching of the Catholic Church, for presumably he posted it without asking his bishop, but I do know that as a priest, he is certainly expected to embrace his church's teachings, as I stated them, on abortion and the death penalty. And it seems to me that there's a bit of an inconsistency there. You can't abort a fetus — even if it endangers the life of a pregnant woman. You can't execute a convicted murderer. But it's just fine to shoot (and kill) someone you perceive as a threat to your person. Even if all he's carrying is a box of Skittles and a can of Arizona iced tea.

Explain this to me again.

Voter identification laws

Let me begin this post by going back to something that happened to me in 1964 — yes, if you're younger than 48 years old (which I suspect the majority of readers are), before you were born! But I'm certain of the year because I was working at a job which I began in February, 1964, and left the following September. This job was located in Philadelphia, and it was my habit to spend the week there from Monday to Friday, and go back to New York City, my real home, Friday afternoon after work, returning Monday morning to Philadelphia. It was only an hour and a half — though if you added the subway trip from where I lived in Marble Hill (the northern tip of Manhattan) to Penn Station, that made it somewhat more than two hours, too long for a daily commute, but reasonable to do on this one-round-trip-a-week schedule. Now, I found myself leaving work on this particular Friday without enough money in my wallet for a round-trip train fare to New York, and in those days there were not ATMs at all the banks, as there are now. And it was Good Friday, which is in Pennsylvania a bank holiday (or at least was in 1964; I don't know if this is still the case), a fact I was not aware of because in New York it is not. The Penn Central ticket agent (this was before Amtrak) would not accept a check, so I went to the Greyhound station — and was told that only if I had a driver's license would Greyhound accept a check — shucks, if I had a driver's license, why would I be taking Greyhound?! (And this was before State-issued non-driver's IDs!) I was forced to buy a one-way ticket; the next day, since I had a bank account in New York City at a place that was open Saturdays (not all were, in those days!) I could go to that bank and get some money. (Again, those days were different — I had one account at a New York bank and one at a Philadelphia bank, because in those pre-ATM days that was the only way I could be sure of having some way to get money 6 days a week!)

Now fast-forward to 2011. I had a State-issued non-driver's ID card — with an expiration date of July 13, 2011. But I tried to use it to get into a Federal building on August 6, less than a month after it had expired — and was refused entry! One would think that a card which would have proved I was who I claimed to be, if I had presented it twenty-five days earlier, would still be acceptable on that date, but it was not.

The Greyhound Company would not let me cash a check for less than $10 without an ID in 1964. (Yes, fares were that low back then!) The Federal Government would not even let me enter a building with an ID 24 days after the expiration date last summer. Yet that same Federal Government is claiming it would be an undue burden for a State to require identification of a voter! There's some sort of a disconnect there. Certainly it is important enough to make certain that someone is a registered voter before allowing him to cast a vote that such a requirement is reasonable — and if the Federal Government thinks that even an ID that had been valid less than a month previously is not good enough to get into a building, how can they insist that no identification can be required to vote?

The last big controversial Supreme Court case of the year

This week, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on Arizona v. United States, dealing with the State of Arizona's law to deal with illegal immigrants in the State. The Obama administration says that Arizona had no right to pass such a law, because the Federal government has primary responsibility over immigration policy. Arizona, however, maintains that everything it has legislated is in conformity with Federal law, that it is an attempt to harmonize State law with Federal immigration law, and it is attempting to deal with Federal laxity in enforcing its own laws.

Once more, as with “Obamacare,” the Court will hear arguments and then leave us in the dark as the Justices make their decision, which will not be announced for months. It is a frustration that the Court's way of doing things is so slow, but I suppose this ensures that the process is deliberative rather than political. But I find it hard to wait.

The difficulty of transition

Right now there is a problem which really needs to be addressed, which lies behind the major difficulty we will have in settling the massive debt that our government has accumulated. And it is a problem that will occur especially if libertarian solutions are attempted to just about any of our strains on the relationship of government to populace. I will elucidate this problem by firsty describing my own personal history in the 1980s and 1990s.

In the late 1970s and 1980s, and even into the very early 1990s, I was, perhaps not rich, but financially comfortable. Not in the league of a Mitt Romney; not even in the league of your typical corporate executive; but doing well enough that I could travel to Europe, Australia, and Japan for nice vacations. I could still, too, save money for future needs, and I did. But when they invented the concept of the Individual Retirement Account, the IRAs you still hear banks and such institutions pushing, I did a calculation. You could not (still cannot today) withdraw money from such an account before age 59½ and that was, for me, a long way off in the 1970s and 1980s; I would not turn 59½ until 2002!

So during this period, I opted for the flexibility of investing my money in more normal investments — it meant I had to pay taxes, but I could take the money out without the early withdrawal penalties that IRAs involved. I figured that when I turned 50, more or less, would be the time to think about opening up an IRA.

But a funny thing happened on the way to age 50 — or really, just after I had my 50^th birthday — in 1992, Bill Clinton was elected President. You have to understand: the reason I was doing well financially in the 1970s, 1980s, and into the early 1990s was that I was working for companies that were contractors with Government — mostly space and defense-related contracts (not exclusively, but overwhelmingly more than anything else). And in particular, the job I had in 1992 was funded out of the Strategic Defense Initiative program (nicknamed “Star Wars”). It wasn't really military, but it was funded by the military on the premise that the scientific instruments we were supporting could be used to search for such threats as incoming missiles. Bill Clinton had campaigned on a promise to end the SDI program — and though he didn't immediately do so, by 1994 I was unemployed.

And I was still unemployed four years later, in 1998. And I could scarcely think of starting an IRA; I was drawing on all the money I'd invested before that, and when my mother died in 1996, on the inheritance as well. I am glad I had not put the money into a form where I could not take it out until 2002; I needed it then and there.

From 1998 to 2006, I managed to do some work, though some of the time I was unemployed, and even when I was employed, a lot of it was part-time work, that would not have paid for an apartment in this county. From 2000 to 2006, I was living in homeless shelters. In 2006, the job that I had then closed its office. Rather than look for work then, at age 64, I realized that I could make more money in Social Security retirement benefits than I was making on that job — actually, quite a lot more — so I retired. I was able to move out of the shelter only then.

Now, I depend on my Social Security benefits. Perhaps, if I had put the money that was withheld for Social Security into a different investment, I might be making more money from that investment. I don't know; I was not given that opportunity. But the point is that at any point in time, such as now, there are people who have paid money into Social Security, and don't have that money in any investment account. Any plan to phase out Social Security is going to hurt these people. And nobody has presented a plan that addresses this difficulty. Even when they say that everyone over age 55, say, will be guaranteed a Social Security benefit comparable to what the status quo provides, what about someone who is 54?

And it's not just Social Security. People have made economic decisions based on the Government providing certain benefits. They have not put aside their own money to provide for these contingencies, because it has been reasonable to plan that the Government will continue to provide what it has provided. And it's not being foolish to do this: nobody knows the future, but these people have been sold on the promise that these benefits will come to them. Now what?

I admit I have questions, but not answers. But what are the answers to these questions?

Romney-Christie?

A recent poll says that Republicans favor Chris Christie for VP on a Romney ticket. And, unlike such as Marco Rubio, Christie has not taken himself out of the running:

There is only one person in my party who gets to make that decision and that’s Gov. Romney. If Gov. Romney comes to me and wants to talk about it, I’ll always listen.

Not surprisingly, I think Christie is a good choice. I would have liked him for President; I'd certainly be happy to see him as VP. If you look at my earlier posts about Gov. Christie, they are almost all positive. So I think it should not be a surprise that I'd be happy with him on the ticket.

The vice-presidential guessing game

Now (although Mitt Romney and Barack Obama are concentrating on each other) many people are trying to guess who will be Romney's vice-presodential choice. Of course, nobody can read Romney's mind, so it's pure guesswork. Not many expected Sarah Palin to be John McCain's VP choice in 2008.

Many polls have been taken, though Romney is not likely to use the polls as a guide. Some of the results of the polls are interesting. Naturally, since I've said good things about them as presidential choices in the past, I'd be happy with such choices as Condoleezza Rice, Mitch Daniels, or Chris Christie for VP: I've seen all three in the poll results. Of course, all three specifically deny their interest, but one never knows whether such denials are for show or real. It is bad form to say you want the VP slot, and I imagine that anyone who actually said he/she wanted to be VP on a Romney ticket would immediately be stricken from the list!

There is a good chance we will not know for many months. The convention is a long time off, and Mitt Romney doesn't need to announce his choice till then. On the other hand, if he announces his VP choice soon, that person can start to campaign against the Obama-Biden ticket as presumptive nominee, which could be an advantage.

It's just as much a speculation trying to guess when Romney will announce his choice as to guess who his choice will be, however. I guess we simply have to wait and see, as we have to wait and see what the Supreme Court will do in the Obamacare case or any of the other things we are waiting to play out at this time.

When is a recess a recess?

Some time ago, President Obama made some recess appointments under the Constitutional provision (Art. II, Sec. 2, clause 3) that:

The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.

And at the time, I thought nothing could really be done about it, that even though it was a misuse of the recess appointment clause, there was no way to challenge it. Well, I've been surprised. Yesterday I read an article entitled “GOP senators sue Obama over sham labor board nominees.” And it seems that Noel Canning, a family-owned business in Washington State that bottles and distributes soft drinks, is challenging the National Labor Relations Board’s determination that it must enter into a collective bargaining agreement with a labor union on the basis that members of the NLRB were illegally appointed in that way. And this lawsuit has been joined by the Republican leadership of the Senate.

I had thought such a suit would founder because nobody might have standing to sue. But perhaps I was wrong. Let us see what the courts say here.

The conservatives' problem

The Washington Examiner, a paper that I read regularly, is a rather conservative newspaper; one in fact that makes me, by comparison, seem a liberal. And a lot of the columnists in the Examiner are, similarly, a lot too far right for me, and my criticisms of these columnists in this blog have been numerous. But I've noticed one of the Examiner's columnists with whom I usually agree: Noemie Emery — and readers of this blog will find my references to her columns pretty much uniformly favorable. And today's column is not an exception to this. I quote her column here:

Pity the conservatives — they certainly do pity themselves — in their perennial election-year plaint. Since time immemorial — 1988 — they have presented large fields in primary contests, and each time they have been forced to take squishes and Bushes, mavericks, Doles and McCains. They suspect plots, but the reasons are simple: The candidates they have backed have been pretty appalling. And the market for a genuine movement conservative may not be as big as they think.

Putting second things first, they fool themselves with statistics, noting that the number of self-described conservatives (something over 40 percent) is twice as large as that of self-described liberals. They assume they have a built-in and reliable base. But the word “self-described” is the problem. Mitt Romney would call himself a conservative, as would Rudy Giuliani, as would John McCain. People conservative on only some issues describe themselves as conservative. If the question were phrased to fit movement conservatives, the number might be cut in half.

Even among the Republican primary electorate, the largest plurality is “somewhat conservative,” and they are the ones who elect the McCains. In recent primaries, Rick Santorum won among evangelicals who self-described as “very conservative.” Evangelicals who weren't “very conservative” and the very conservative who weren't evangelicals voted for Romney. Very conservative strong evangelicals do not define the Republican Party. These leaders don't know their own base.

As to part A, let's go to Jim Geraghty's words: “I would argue that a conservative presidential candidate who aspires to be the actual president, not just the metaphorical president of the conservative movement or the president of a faction of the movement, has to clear a bar of credibility,” such as actual record at governing, the ability to form and maintain coalitions, and the ability to establish a level of trust. The sad fact is that while the establishment picks have been Senate leaders (Dole and McCain), effective state governors (Romney and Bush 43), and a vice president, CIA head and ambassador (Bush 41), the right-wing insurgents have largely been vanity candidates, activists somewhat far out on the fringes, and people who never held office at all.

In 1988, it was Dole and Bush 41 against Jack Kemp, Pete du Pont and Pat Robertson. In 1992 it was Bush 41 against Pat Buchanan. In 1996, it was Dole against Buchanan, Phil Gramm and Steve Forbes. And in 2000 it was Forbes, Orrin Hatch, Gary Bauer and Alan Keyes against Bush 43 and McCain.

(The outlier was 2008, when all the major candidates were the size of a president, and all were strong Reaganites on at least one set of issues — McCain and Giuliani had War on Terror credentials; Romney had business credentials; and Mike Huckabee had social conservatives' backing. All were suspected of moderate leanings elsewhere.)

The 2012 contest upped the ante on vanity candidates, with six or more cranks, losers and retreads against the lone figure of Mitt. In the last 24 years, of all the insurgents who have run to the right of eventual winner, only four — Hatch, Gramm, Rick Perry, and Kemp — had the right resumes to be running for president. The first three were nonstarters. Kemp's attempt to run as the true heir to Reagan was derailed by the claims of Reagan's loyal vice president, the elder George Bush.

Why was Reagan the last “real conservative” to win the nomination and the election that followed? He was the last and only with the experience and the political talent to reach beyond his own base. If conservatives want to win, they should try running a good politician. Who knows? It could work again.

As usual, Ms. Emery makes a lot of sense. Though, if the truth be told, I think that it's probably a good thing that “the right-wing insurgents have largely been vanity candidates, activists somewhat far out on the fringes, and people who never held office at all.” Because I certainly do not want an extreme right-winger. Some of the people she has mentioned as “establishment candidates” — people like Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, and Bob Dole — have been the kind of person I really wanted to see in the Presidency.

Obama and the Organization of American States

The Organization of American States recently met, and we see headlines like “Cuba issue deals blow to US stature at ‘Summit of the Americas’” on the news media. Yet, for once, I think President Obama did something right, and I want to commend him for it. The OAS was where a number of left-wing Latin American leaders pulled for Cuba to be allowed to rejoin the group. And President Obama said ‘no’ — not until they revert to democratic rule. This actually was a pleasant surprise — our President has been running such a left-wing administration that he would seem sympathetic to such a push. But here he did the right thing. And I will say as much, as I promised to do.

What is there to write about?

It's hard to write a blog post right now. Mitt Romney seems unchallenged in his quest for the Republican nomination, but it won't actually be given to him till late summer. The Supreme Court has heard all the arguments on “Obamacare,” and probably has even voted on how they will rule on the case, but their practice is to keep everything secret until June, when they adjourn for the summer, so nobody knows what the decision is. I've said about all that comes to mind on Trayvon Martin and on Hilary Rosen — though it seems that Bill Maher has raised the ante on Rosen's comment. So what do I write about?

Well, today I noted a Rassmussen poll that showed: “In a hypothetical Election 2012 matchup, presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney earns 48% of the vote, while President Obama attracts support from 44%.” That's close, too close to gloat over, but a sign that the trends are going the right way. Obviously, I want to see a Romney victory over Obama in November — I say “obviously” because anyone who reads this blog knows that I have a strong negative opinion of President Obama, and while I have some negative points to raise against former Gov. Romney, they are overwhelmingly dominated by the positive ones.

But there still seems little to write about. In addition to the poll I just cited, it's a good thing that the North Korean rocket launch failed — and even better that they publicly admitted it. But this and the Rasmussen poll hardly make material for a detailed blog posting.

The real perpetrator in the Trayvon Martin murder: Florida law

So George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Trayvon Martin (claiming “self-defense,” though Martin was carrying nothing more threatening than some candy and an iced tea!) will be tried for murder in Florida. It took this long to charge him, because they had to figure out how to deal with Florida's “stand your ground” law. Zimmerman should, I agree, be tried, and if the facts are as we have been told, convicted and sentenced (Florida law would not, it seems, give him the death penalty for this crime. Too bad). But just the fact that Florida law encouraged Zimmerman to “stand his ground” and permitted him (a known overreactor, who once called 911 because a neighbor left his garage door open!) to own and carry a gun, makes me feel that the true villain of the case is the State of Florida.

I still feel, even if this puts me at odds with every other person who generally shares my “conservative/libertarian” philosophy, that no person, other than the military and law-enforcement personnel, has a genuine need to carry a gun. If Zimmerman had no gun in his possession, Trayvon Martin would be alive today. And he is not the first person, regardless of the race of the shooter or the victim, to be shot by someone believing he was acting in “self-defense,” who in fact was not threatened. (And then, there are accidental shootings, where nobody was even trying to kill someone!)

But some will argue that we need to be able to defend ourselves from really threatening people carrying guns. My response is: if guns were only made in quantities necessary to supply the police and military, how would the bad guys get them? Right now, perhaps, an insignificant minority of the guns circulating around were lost by police or military warehouses. Most were manufactured for private sale, intended of course to be sold to people who can, under today's laws, own them legally. If nobody could buy a gun (except the police and military), these criminal-owned guns would never have been manufactured. So there simply would not be a need for “self-defense.”

Attacks on a Presidential candidate's spouse: "dumb" or fair game?

Hilary Rosen is a lobbyist and someone who has been described as a “Democratic strategist.” In 2008, she referred to attacks on Michelle Obama in the following words on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show:

You know essentially, you've taken on sort of the most sympathetic person in the candidate's realm, the wife, who is taking care of the children, supporting the husband, doing everything she can because she loves him. Michelle Obama is a pretty terrific woman I have to say, and I think that attacking her is a dumb strategy on the Republicans' part.

Interestingly, “the wife, who is taking care of the children, supporting the husband, doing everything she can because she loves him” is fair game to attack if that candidate is Mitt Romney, rather than Barack Obama, and that wife is Ann Romney, rather than Michelle Obama. That same Hilary Rosen was recently quoted as having said:

Ann Romney has actually never worked a day in her life.

Hilary Rosen may feel that being a full-time housewife is not work, and in fact she is even correct in saying that most women these days work at a “regular” job even while raising kids, but if being “the wife, who is taking care of the children, supporting the husband, doing everything she can because she loves him” makes Michelle Obama “the most sympathetic person in the candidate's realm,” why does it not apply equally to Ann Romney?

This is certainly another case of damning the rich because they are rich, a tactic which Mitt Romney's opponents feel impelled to employ this year. Mitt Romney brings in enough money that Ann does not have to work. In many cases, of course, the female half of a married couple chooses to work outside the home anyway, even when her financial contribution is not needed, but Ann Romney happened to believe that her best way to attain fulfillment was to devote all her energy to being a full-time housewife. This should be her decision to make. (Hilary Rosen, also, is a lesbian, so in her case, at least one of the members of the partnership has to be a working woman, and would have to be even if the other one could stay at home!) Of course, such attacks on the rich simply because they are rich don't work in the United States. Even the non-rich hope to be rich some day, and so most people feel that the solution to our problems is not taking down the rich but building up the non-rich so that they can become rich.

Ann Romney deserves to be given no more and no less deference than Michelle Obama. If one is fair game, so is the other; if one is off limits, so is the other.

Warren Buffett's taxes

President Obama thinks he has been given a boost by a remark that Warren Buffett made about the tax laws allowing him to get away with paying a smaller effective tax rate than his secretary. The President now speaks of the "Buffett Rule" which would make everyone whose income was over a certain threshold pay at least as much of a percentage of their income as Buffett's secretary.

Of course, let us analyze this. First of all, even if the Buffett Rule were to go into effect, the additional revenue would not be more than a drop in the bucket as compared to the Federal deficit. All it would do is certify President Obama as a modern-day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and since there are more poor people than rich ones, he figures he gains votes by this scheme. Second of all, it gives Warren Buffett a good reputation — here he is, volunteering to pay more taxes! But, of course, he could do that more quietly and anonymously — simply by refusing to take all the deductions rhat tax law allows — the tax laws permit him to take these deductions; they do not require him to do so. So Buffett is simply doing this to give himself the image of generosity. Truly generous people are willing to do it without the fanfare.

I would say to Mr. Buffett: If you want to be generous, be generous with your own money — leave the other millionaires alone. It would be better to find ways of reducing the Government's need for funds, so that Mr. Buffett's secretary's tax bill could be reduced. After all, every dollar that the government takes from a citizen is $1 less that the citizen can control what it is spent on.

The primary contest is over. Now for the general-election fight

Rick Santorum has suspended his campaign. It appears that the real cause is his daughter's serious illness; such a reason is not something I'd wish even on someone I dislike as much as Santorum, but regardless of the reason, it appears that this opens the way for Mitt Romney to go into general-election mode, and train all his big guns on the real target — President Barack Obama. It will still be a difficult task, not to make the conservatives feel he's abandoned them as he points to his centrist record. But fortunately, it seems Obama has the same problem — with extreme-left Democrats who feel Obama has sold them out.

But the extreme right will vote for Romney over Obama, and the extreme left will vote for Obama over Romney. So both are going to have to try to capture the political center. And I am wondering how well each will succeed.

Why is freedom good — but exporting freedom bad?

The question that forms the title of this post first entered my mind when I put up a post about Martin Luther King a couple of months ago, around the King birthday celebration. People honor King for working to free his people — Americans of African descent — while I look at his other attempts — to interfere with our trying to extend freedom to the people of Vietnam — and see King a lot less favorably.

But more recently this same question has occurred to me in the context of two other people, politically far removed from King: Ron Paul and Gary Johnson. Paul and Johnson are both considered libertarians: Paul was the Libertarian nominee for the Presidency in 1988, though before and after that year he has been involved in Republican Party politics; Gary Johnson is seeking to be the LP's candidate in 2012, though, similarly to Paul, he has been an officeholder under the Republican banner. And both seem to feel that taking part in foreign wars to attempt to gain freedom for other people is a bad thing.

Ron Paul: The war mentality was generated by the Iraq war in combination with the constant drumbeat of fear at home. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, who is now likely residing in Pakistan, our supposed ally, are ignored, as our troops fight and die in Iraq and are made easier targets for the terrorists in their backyard. While our leaders constantly use the mess we created to further justify the erosion of our constitutional rights here at home, we forget about our own borders and support the inexorable move toward global government, hardly a good plan for America.

Gary Johnson: I would completely withdraw our military presence [in Afghanistan].

The question with which I titled this post applies to all these people. Why is freedom good — but exporting freedom bad?

The big problem in the "health care" debate

One of the big problems — I think the biggest problem — in discussing the health care situation is that the “uninsured” are all considered in one category, while there are a lot of different reasons that people are uninsured.

There are those — mostly young and healthy — who are pretty certain that they are not in the near future going to need medical care, so it is economically a stupid thing to do for them to get health insurance. They are certainly right, by and large. Most of them make little use of the health care that is available, and making them buy insurance, against their will, as Obamacare does, is clearly and simply a confiscation of their money that is the worst feature of the law.

There are people who have been denied insurance because of pre-existing conditions, and it is this group that Obamacare tries to help. But surely, the argument that you can't help this second group without forcing the first group to pay is specious. There must be a way of supporting the insurance companies — perhaps by a fund supported by general tax revenues — enough to compensate them for the additional cost associated with covering these people, without specifically hitting the young and healthy with a burden targeted at them.

Neither of these two groups, however, is the most important. There are those who simply do not have the kind of job that carries health insurance benefits. And the reason this is a problem is that we have uniformly depended on employers to provide health insurance, as a result of World War II wage controls! Yes, back in World War II, it was decided that wages had to be controlled, but to allow employers to provide health care benefits instead of increasing wages was all right, and tax benefits were put in place to encourage employers to do that. This leads to three bad results: (1:) Except for Federal employees (who have a plethora of choices!), people who are employed are locked into a single plan (or occasionally a small number of plans), without the ability to comparison-shop to pick the one that best suits them, (2:) People who change jobs have to go into a new plan, often needing to change their doctors, and (3:) people who are unemployed have no coverage, or can only buy it at a price far beyond their ability to pay, because they do not get a tax-subsidized rate like an employer or a group-based rate. This at a time when their income is reduced or eliminated!

It seems clear that the only way to fix our health insurance system is to detach it from employment. And Obamacare does not begin to consider this.

Obama with egg on his face

As I said in an earlier post, President Obama (who, by the way, I have found out was not a professor of constitutional law, but merely a senior lecturer, a far less exalted academic title) made the remark that a Supreme Court overruling of “a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress” would be “an unprecedented, extraordinary step.” Now, considering that ever since 1803 the Supreme Court has been recognizing that the Constitution trumps “law[s] that [were] passed by… a democratically elected Congress” (and the majority that passed PPACA was hardly “strong” — it was 7 votes in a House of 435 members!), it would seem that Pres. Obama's knowledge of constitutional law is rather deficient. (It would be deficient, even for someone who did not teach it at a law school!)

And he was called on it. A judge of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, Judge Jerry Smith, ordered the Department of Justice to submit a three-page, single-spaced memo stating the administration's position on judicial authority to invalidate unconstitutional laws in response to the president's rather hostile comments. Attorney General Eric Holder filed that memo Thursday, which included the words: “The power of the courts to review the constitutionality of legislation is beyond dispute.”

Interestingly, while the Obama Administration conceded this point, some liberal lawyers (such as Laurence H. Tribe) think it was Judge Smith who overstepped the bounds. I guess Tribe could not see in Obama's words what most people did — a challenge to the Court's right to void the PPACA if they saw it as unconstitutional. I wonder what planet Tribe lives on!

Romney-Ryan?

With Mitt Romney at over 600 delegates, nobody but Rick Santorum seriously doubts that he will be the GOP nominee for President this year. And so, people have been discussing a vice-presidential candidate. Since Congressman Paul Ryan strongly backed Romney and campaigned with him in Wisconsin (probably helping him win that state's primary earlier this week), his name has come up a lot in the discussions recently.

There are certainly good reasons for this. Unlike Marco Rubio, Ryan has not been pointedly taking himself out of the running. And unlike Sarah Palin on 2008, Ryan has a lot of experience: seven terms in the Congress, recently becoming essentially the GOP leader on budget issues in the House of Representatives. And Ryan and Romney certainly seem to get along well with each other.

One thing that might by some be taken as a negative is President Obama's repeated wailing about the “Romney-Ryan budget.” But, in a sense, that is not a big problem. President Obama will blame Ryan's budget ideas for every economy-related evil that liberals regularly attribute to conservatives, whether he is Romney's VP candidate or not! So making him the official VP candidate does nothing to focus Obama's criticisms any more sharply on him than otherwise.

Actually, the only real negative point I would have against picking Ryan is that Ryan's strength is the economic area, and so is Romney's — you usually want the VP to be strong in areas where the President is weak (Dick Cheney on foreign/defense policy, where George W. Bush had little experience, for example).

Well, Mitt Romney has a long time to think it over. It will be interesting to see who is his pick.

1976, 1980, ... or 1964?

Rick Santorum has a pretty weird view of history. He looks back at the 1976 election, in which the GOP nominated Gerald R. Ford over the more extreme conservative Ronald Reagan, and seems to think that the reason the Republicans lost that year was Ford's moderation. He said recently:

“Let’s not make the mistake of 1976 again. Let’s bypass that era, and move straight to 1980, and let’s defeat a Democratic incumbent.”

In fact, after Richard M. Nixon was forced to resign and Ford pardoned him, the public disaffection for Nixon, more than anything else, was responsible for Ford's loss. And in any case, this is not 1976, and Santorum, in any case, is certainly no Ronald Reagan. Reagan was certainly a far more open man to the moderate wing of his party than Santorum has demonstrated himself to be. In 1976, Reagan had indicated that, if nominated, his vice-presidential candidate would be Richard Schweiker, about whom Santorum must have heard — he was a Senator from Pennsylvania, a post that Santorum himself has held. But Schweiker, unlike Santorum, was a moderate — and one well known as such. Reagan, in putting forth Schweiker's name, signaled that he wanted to include the moderate wing of the party in his vision of a Republican government. And in 1980, he did the same. Moderates in the party had favored George H. W. Bush, and Reagan named him as the vice-presidential candidate.

For that matter, Barack Obama is hardly a Jimmy Carter. Carter was, in 1976, a fairly obscure Governor of Georgia, whose record if anything was relatively conservative as Democrats go. Obama, by contrast, has pushed a hard left agenda for four years in the White House, with a clear record.

Ronald Reagan also embraced the ideas of libertarianism, which Santorum disdains. (Santorum was quoted as saying “I am not a libertarian, and I fight very strongly against libertarian influence within the Republican Party and the conservative movement.” You can't get more hostile to libertarianism than that! Reagan, on the other hand, said “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism” in 1975.)

The biggest analogy to a 2012 in which the GOP might nominate Santorum is 1964, in which Barry Goldwater read the moderates out of the party in his acceptance speech: “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!” (Though, in fact, unlike Santorum, Goldwater's conservatism was very close to libertarianism.)

And we know what happened in 1964.

Memo to Barack Obama: We have a Constitution in this country!

President Barack Obama seems to think that this is a country like Britain, where Parliament is all powerful, rather than a country with a Constitution that limits what Congress can do. He is quoted as having said, about the so-called “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act,” better known as “Obamacare”:

Ultimately, I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress. And I'd just remind conservative commentators that for years what we’ve heard is, the biggest problem on the bench was judicial activism or a lack of judicial restraint -- that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law. Well, this is a good example.

Why is this an “unprecedented, extraordinary step”? the Court has ruled lots of laws unconstitutional that were passed by “a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.” The first time was in 1803, for heaven's sake!

President Obama used to teach constitutional law. If he thinks that ruling Obamacare unconstitutional would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary step” because it was “passed by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress,” I wonder what he taught his students when he was a law professor. It would be interesting to know.

And now, some more waiting

This morning I went to the polls, as today was Maryland's primary day. Mitt Romney is expected to win big here today, and of course, he'll win even bigger in the District of Columbia, where Rick Santorum is not even on the ballot. So the real wait will be till late tonight when the results come in from Wisconsin, which is supposed to be closer.

Voting for Romney required me to make seven X's on the screen (we have touch-screen voting machines here); one vote for Romney himself, three for the three Romney delegates in my district, and three more for the three alternates pledged to Romney. It's not like the electoral college, where you vote the name of your preferred candidate, and it's automatically counted for all the electors pledged to that candidate. I did also vote for a candidate for Senate and one for the House of Representatives — I ignored the judgeship elections, which were uncontested, and the contests for the Board of Education, for reasons I've given before. So I voted nine times — seven of which votes were for Romney!

Romney already has more than half the delegates he needs for the nomination — more than twice as many as Santorum — but Santorum is still not convinced. Will he really have to get all the necessary delegates before Santorum concedes? That will be an even more frustratingly long wait.

The best case against Obama in 2012

Yesterday, in a posting on “The Daily Beast,” Michael Medved suggested that one of the reasons that Barack Obama may be vulnerable in this year's election is that he was elected on a “pledge to unify the nation and put aside petty, partisan differences.” Medved begins his post:

In the last 100 years, every U.S. president who lost his bid for a second term did so because he abandoned his principal promise to the American people. If Republicans can persuade the public that Barack Obama similarly shattered the pledge at the very core of his presidency, they will succeed in denying him the new lease on the White House he insists he deserves.

Four elected chief executives in the past century failed in their reelection campaigns—and each of them flopped by landslide margins. For William Howard Taft in 1912, Herbert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George H.W. Bush in 1992, broken promises doomed their chances for another four-year term.

He goes into some detail, which you can read on his post but which I am deleting for brevity, but the most important point he makes is:

If Republicans want to see history repeat itself in 2012, with a once-popular incumbent turned out of office by a deeply disillusioned electorate, they must persuade the public that Barack Obama has continued the big-loser pattern of broken promises. That means reminding voters of the most important theme associated with his rise to power: the pledge to unify the nation and put aside petty, partisan differences. Whatever happens with the unemployment rate or gas prices, the president’s failure to live up to these assurances remains both painful and apparent.

In the speech that made him a national figure overnight, Illinois Senator Barack Obama gave the keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. “Alongside our famous individualism, there’s another ingredient in the American saga. A belief that we are connected as one people,” he intoned. “The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states; red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them. We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

In his Inaugural Address four-and-a-half years later, the newly elected president sounded strikingly similar themes. “On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord. On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Can even the most devoted Obama admirer plausibly claim that this new day of harmony and cooperation actually dawned in Washington?

Low approval ratings for all federal officials suggest that Americans recognize that the “conflict and discord” have become more bitter than ever before and that the president, despite his soaring rhetoric, plays a prominent part in the squabbling. He may attempt to blame conservatives exclusively for the small-minded gamesmanship, but he’s compiled his own long record of below-the-belt, straw-man attacks, sliming his opponents as greedy and corrupt, claiming that they place plutocrats and corporate power above the public welfare.

Instead of the fresh era of “unity of purpose,” President Obama must acknowledge that his signature legislative achievement, health-care reform, passed both houses of Congress without a single Republican vote, and led elected officials in the majority of states to challenge its constitutionality before the Supreme Court.

And furthermore, Medved reminds us:

When challenging Barack Obama’s claim on a second term, the Republicans should remind the American people why we entrusted him with the presidency in the first place. Beyond any specific expectations about jobs, taxes, and health care, the public welcomed the prospect of an end to the bickering with a new politics of common-sense reform.

The GOP candidate can expose the president’s spoiled promise by renewing the same pledge more credibly, and demonstrating in the campaign itself the coalition-building, pragmatism, and bipartisanship the people expected from the incumbent. Reinvigorated hope for unity and cooperation provides the best chance to highlight this president’s most fatal failure and to add his name to the melancholy list of discredited one-termers who broke faith with the American people.

No better reason to turn Barack Obama out on his ear in 2012. And there is an obvious choice as to who should replace him. Mitt Romney was a productive Governor in a State where the legislature was overwhelmingly under the control of the opposite party. And they were not conservative Texas Democrats, such as served in the legislature that George W. Bush had to work with. (He thought he could be “a uniter, not a divider,” but he'd never had to deal with Democrats luike Nancy Pelosi as Texas Governor.) These were liberal Massachusetts Democrats. And yet he found a way to work with them. Mitt Romney can be the force for harmony that Barack Obama said he could be.

A fight next door

While the Democrats have a cut and dried choice for their Presidential nominee, there is a nasty, bitter fight in the congressional district next to the one I'm in that has led to my Democratic-enrolled wife (who does not live with me) receiving an amazing number of campaign leaflets.

First, some background. The westernmost district of Maryland (the Sixth) has long been represented by a Republican, Roscoe Bartlett. A couple of decades ago, then Governor Parris Glendening, horrified at the fact that Democratic-majority Maryland had a 4-4 division in its Congressional delegation, pushed through a gerrymander which would have made Elbridge Gerry proud. And it worked. Maryland's delegation has been either 6-2 or 7-1 in favor of the Democrats since then. (The one time it went 7-1 was after a bitter Republican intra-party fight in one district that left the incumbent Republican, defeated in the primary, endorsing the Democrat.) But the current Governor, Martin O'Malley, thought he could go Glendening one better. He took Roscoe Bartlett's district and remodeled it so it extends all the way into relatively urbanized Montgomery County, hoping to put in just enough Democrats to defeat Bartlett. The new Sixth District ranges from the very rural western end of the state to the dense Washington suburbs, stopping just a few blocks away from my home.

Some say the new district was drawn especially for State Senator Rob Garagiola, who has decided to move to the federal scene. Certainly, Garagiola figured so. But a serious challenger showed up: John Delaney, a businessman who has never held political office, but who seems, in the eyes of many people, to be a better choice. (The fact that he actually does not live in the Sixth District is no barrier. The Constitution only requires Congressmen to live in the same State that they represent, not the same district. In fact, it does not even require States to divide themselves into districts.) Delaney has the support of many powerful local politicians, including Douglas Duncan, who was the County Executive for years. And even former President Bill Clinton for some reason got into the act. You do not often hear of an ex-President endorsing a candidate in a local race in a State where they do not live, but he has officially endorsed John Delaney.

Each of the two (there are actually three other candidates in that primary, but nobody bothers to talk about any of the other three) has been slinging as much mud as you could imagine at the other. Garagiola brought up a six-year-old article in Forbes Magazine talking about how Delaney's business practices were heartless, and Delaney was termed a “loan shark” in Garagiola's campaign material. Delaney, in turn, points to Garagiola's work as a paid lobbyist for organizations ranging from banks to labor unions, something that Garagiola has tried to hide. Local newspapers have come out for Delaney. So, although the district may have been drawn up for Garagiola, Delaney seems to be the candidate of everyone who might be called “establishment,” or at least the “Democratic establishment.”

Obviously, I'm not going to favor either of one — first of all, I'm not in the district; second of all, I hope that whoever wins the primary loses to Bartlett in November — but Delaney seems the more honorable candidate (even if he's far too much of a liberal Democrat for me to like him, and even if he has the endorsement of Bill Clinton, whom I despise!) But it will be interesting to see who wins, and whether the supporters of the loser can back the winner, or whether the beneficiary of all this infighting will be Roscoe Bartlett.

A good sign

The Republican Party supports a lot of things that I do as well, and that is one reason I remain a Republican, even though there are some things that Republicans tend to favor that appall me. For example, the fact that Michele Bachmann was, and Rick Santorum still is, considered a serious candidate for the Republican nomination, testifies that enough bigoted homophobes inhabit the Republican Party that the kind of appeal to that kind of hostility can work in the party. Closer to home, gay District of Columbia Councilman David Catania, originally elected as a Republican, found the party so uncomfortable a political home that he became an independent a few years ago. That this sort of thing exists in the Republican Party saddens me, as I feel some grief that the party I consider my political home can be charged with such an intolerant stance. And therefore, I was happy to read a posting in The Daily Beast (under David Frum's name, but by Ryan Prior) entitled “A Strong Republican for Congress… Who Just Happens to be Gay.” (The posting was made 3 days ago, but I just saw it today.)

It seems that Richard Tisei, an openly gay Massachusetts state senator, is running for the GOP nomination for Congress in a district where the incumbent Democrat, Rep. John Tierney, just might lose because of his wife's possible involvement in a gambling scandal. And though Tisei has a primary to get through in September, he has the support of the most important Republicans in Massachusetts, especially popular Senator Scott Brown. While there have been two openly gay Republicans that have served in the House of Representatives, Steve Gunderson and Jim Kolbe, they were originally closeted and were involuntarily outed. If Tisei wins the nomination in the September primary and goes on to win the election in November, both of which seem likely, he becomes the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. And that may send a message to gay Americans that they don't have to choose between being gay and being Republicans. Which is a very good thing.

There is absolutely no reason why there is any incompatibility between supporting conservative economic ideas and being gay. But gay people have felt that the GOP is hostile to them, and have flocked to the Democratic Party for that reason. I think that the election of Richard Tisei would be a great thing, not just because it may be a Republican takeover of a Democratic seat, but because it would place in the Congress the kind of Republican that is sorely needed: someone who does not share the “social” agenda of the Bachmanns and Santorums, but still hews to Republican ideas on the things that matter. Let's hope he wins.

Of course, I wonder how Michele Bachmann will take it, sitting in the same caucus with him!