An important ruling by the Supreme Court - Knox v. SEIU

The Supreme Court seems to have decided that they will put off announcing their rulings on “Obamacare” and the Arizona law on illegal immigrants to the very end of the session — another week to go, therefore. But I was not aware that there was another case before them that was extremely important, and they ruled just yesterday on that one. When Scott Walker got through the recall election, it was a big victory over Big Labor, and this decision, in a case called Knox v. Service Employees Int’l Union, Local 1000, is equally significant.

To provide the background, the best thing I can do is to quote Ed Whelan's “bench memo” from National Review Online:

For decades now, the Supreme Court has “countenanced a significant impingement on First Amendment rights” of employees who choose not to join the union that represents the bargaining unit in which they’re employed. Specifically, the Court has ruled that the government may compel nonmembers of a union (under so-called “union shop,” “agency shop,” or other “union security” arrangements) to pay fees to the union to support the union’s activities related to collective bargaining, and that the government may place the burden on objecting nonmembers to affirmatively opt out of paying the costs of the union’s political and ideological activities.

The passage quoted in the first sentence of this post is, in fact, from a nearly unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1984 that stated that “[i]t has long been settled that such interference with First Amendment rights is justified by the governmental interest in industrial peace” (emphasis added)—and that leveraged that existing “interference with First Amendment rights” to justify additional interference with those rights.

Today’s ruling in Knox v. SEIU is significant less for its specific holding than for the Court’s long-overdue awakening to what it aptly calls “the critical First Amendment rights at stake.” Unions, which have benefited massively from coerced funding, will be screaming about what that reawakening may portend in future cases.

Here’s a quick summary of the legal and factual background to Knox: Under Supreme Court precedent, the government may authorize a union to charge nonmembers a fee that covers the costs both of collective-bargaining activities and of political and ideological activities, so long as nonmembers are informed of, and allowed to deduct from their payment (under an “opt out”), the portion of the costs estimated to be attributable to the union’s political and ideological activities. In June 2005, the SEIU local in California sent out its annual fee statement, which set monthly dues of 1% of gross salary, capped at $45, and estimated that some 56% of its costs would be attributable to collective-bargaining activities. Some two months later, the SEIU local, in order to generate funds to help oppose ballot propositions, raised the monthly dues for a limited period to 1.25% and removed the $45 cap. The union maintained that only those nonmembers who had objected to the annual fee statement could object to the special assessment. Further, despite the fact that the entire increase was intended for political activities, the union maintained that even those nonmembers whose objections it would recognize would have to pay 56% of the increase.

Justice Alito’s excellent majority opinion in Knox (joined by the Chief Justice and Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas) holds that the First Amendment does not allow the government to authorize a public-sector union to require objecting nonmembers to pay a special fee for the purpose of financing the union’s political activities. Here is a summary of his reasoning:

1. “[W]e do not revisit today whether the Court’s former cases have given adequate recognition to the critical First Amendment rights at stake.” The free-rider arguments that those cases have relied on (i.e., preventing nonmembers from free-riding on the union’s collective-bargaining activities) “are generally insufficient to overcome First Amendment objections” and are “something of an anomaly.” “Similarly, requiring objecting nonmembers to opt out of paying the nonchargeable portion of union dues—as opposed to exempting them from making such payments unless they opt in—represents a remarkable boon for unions.” It’s difficult to see the justification for an opt-out rule. Indeed, the Court seems to have accepted the opt-out approach “more as a historical accident than through the careful application of First Amendment principles.”

“By authorizing a union to collect fees from nonmembers and permitting the use of an opt-out system for the collection of fees levied to cover nonchargeable expenses, our prior decisions approach, if they do not cross, the limit of what the First Amendment can tolerate.” (Slip op. at 14.)

2. The SEIU “asks us to go farther.” It seeks approval of a procedure under which (a) a special assessment billed for use in electoral campaigns failed to provide a new opportunity for nonmembers to object, and (b) those nonmembers who had previously opted out were nonetheless required to pay more than half of the amount of the special increase, even though the purpose of the increase was to mount a political campaign. This procedure is “indefensible.”

(a) A nonmember can’t make an informed choice about a special assessment that is unknown when the annual notice is sent. It would have been an easy matter for the union to give the nonmember a choice. A refund the following year would not have been fully compensatory, nor would it undo the violation of First Amendment rights.

(b) The special assessment was slated for political purposes, so nonmembers should have been able to avoid paying the entire amount of the increase. The SEIU’s claim that objecting nonmembers ended up with a windfall rests on dubious statistics. Further, the risk that objecting nonmembers might pay too much or too little should be borne by “the side whose constitutional rights are not at stake”—the union. The union “has no constitutional right to receive any payment from these employees.”

While the Court’s previous rulings have substantially impinged upon the First Amendment rights of nonmembers, “we see no justification for any further impingement. The general rule—individuals should not be compelled to subsidize private groups or private speech—should prevail” in the context of this special assessment.

Now that is a powerful statement. And not only was it the opinion of a majority (five members) of the Court, but two more, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, agreed with the judgment but Justice Sotomayor wrote a concurring opinion (joined by Justice Ginsburg). So the decision was 7-2 on the main issue. Where Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg differed from the other five was that the majority would require that nonmembers would only be assessed these charges if they opted in, the two more liberal Justices were willing to keep the current “opt-out” system.

A quote from Fox News' post on the case is relevant:

The court ruled for Dianne Knox and other nonmembers of the Service Employees International Union's Local 1000, who wanted to object and opt out of a $12 million special assessment the union required from its California public sector members for political campaigning. Knox and others said the union did not give them a legally required notice that the increase was coming.

The union, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, said the annual notice that the union gives was sufficient. The high court disagreed in a 7-2 judgment written by Justice Samuel Alito.

The difference between opting in and opting out was stated in more detail by Trevor Burrus on the Cato Institute's site:

The narrowest question in Knox was whether the notice given by the SEIU Local 100 complied with the Supreme Court’s requirements. There was a broader question, however, pushed by Cato in our brief (joining the Pacific Legal Foundation, the Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation), on whether only having the ability to “opt-out” of political spending (rather than to “opt-in”) violates the First Amendment (Tim Sandefur of PLF offers his thoughts here). Opting-out presumes that the non-members want to engage in the union’s political advocacy, and this seems to place the burden on free speech on the wrong party.

In a decision that rings with a chastising tone directed at the union, Justice Samuel Alito affirmed that opting-out can be a First Amendment violation. In his words: “Our cases have tolerated a substantial impingement on First Amendment rights by allowing unions to impose an opt-out requirement at all.” Justice Alito also adopts our argument that balancing the rights of individuals with the “rights” of unions is the wrong way to look at the issue. Unions have long argued that complying with administrative requirements to give notice to non-union members impinges on their ability to be effective political advocates. Moreover, the unions argue, sometimes it is not possible to accurately determine what percentage of their funds will be used for political advocacy and “there is at least a risk that, at the end of the year, unconsenting nonmembers will have paid either too much or too little.” “Which side should bear the risk?” asks Justice Alito. “The answer is obvious: the side whose constitutional rights are not at stake.”

In this case, the First Amendment violation was particularly troubling because the union exacted money from nonmembers in order to defeat a California proposition that would have bolstered nonmembers rights. “If Proposition 75 had passed,” writes Alito, “nonmembers would have been exempt from paying for SEIU’s extensive political projects unless they affirmatively consented. Thus the effect of the SEIU’s procedure was to force many nonmembers to subsidize a political effort designed to restrict their own rights.”

Although the decision does not go so far as to require that unions must always use an opt-in procedure when extracting political war-chest money from nonmembers, it takes a very strong step in that direction, as Justice Stephen Breyer argues in dissent. Opting-in will only be required for such “special assessments” as in this case or for a general “dues increase.”

Finally, one of the most interesting posts I saw was by Noah Kristula-Green, who posts on the Daily Beast, because it shows that this may presage a ruling on “Obamacare.” After quoting part of Ed Whelan's posting earlier mentioned, he writes:

The mandate in Obamacare is all about the free rider problem. Further, opting out of the market for insurance sure sounds like this. We will know soon but the language in this union dues case does not bode well for Obamacare.

I think that Knox v. SEIU is one of the most important cases decided this year by the Court. And the SEIU must be particularly unhappy for one reason. As Becket Adams said in a post on The Blaze:

... although the SEIU was able to convince California’s left-leaning Ninth Circuit that because the original notices said assessments were “subject to change” that they were in the clear, the Supreme Court disagrees.

Justices Sotomayor and Ginsburg agreed with the judgment, written by Justice Alito, and ruled in favor of Knox. The final ruling was 7-2; Breyer dissented, joined by Kagan, according to SCOTUS blog.

Wait – Justices Sotomayor and Ginsberg ruled against the SEIU?

Whoa.

“All that money spent electing Obama, and his first SCOTUS pick rules against #SEIU,” the Washington Examiner’s David Freddoso tweeted when news of the decision broke.

The SEIU was all for Justice Sotomayor, when President Barack Obama proposed her. But even she realized the union was overstepping!

Obama's assault on the rule of law

As I said in a recent post, President Obama's unilateral decreeing of a substantial portion of the DREAM act brings the issue of constitutionality to the fore. I would like to add some words to this, taken from a posting by Andrew C. McCarthy on PJ Media:

In continuing the dramatic shift from American constitutional democracy to rule by executive fiat that has marked his tenure, President Barack Obama now claims that the illegal aliens, to whom he purports to grant what effectively is amnesty, are “Americans … in every single way but one — on paper.” That is false. They are not Americans under the only thing that matters, the thing the Obama administration has chanted like a mantra — while riding roughshod over – since its very first day in power: the rule of law.

The Constitution and congressional statutes are written on parchment. That is the only relevance of “paper” in this equation — as the “hard copy” of our social contract and of the laws enacted pursuant to it. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, is endowed with such a power: “To establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization.” Congress exercises this power by passing laws. Under the Constitution, which Obama took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend, and under the laws it is his duty to execute faithfully, illegal aliens — no matter how sympathetic their plight, no matter how blameless they may be for the illegality of their status — are not citizens of the United States. They are not Americans. Period. It is not “paper” that separates them from our body politic, it is the law, of which Obama is supposed to be servant, not master — as I argued in this September 2011 essay for The New Criterion: “The Ruler of Law — On ‘Justice’ in the Age of Obama.”

Nevertheless, immigration is only the context of the president’s latest usurpation. It is a critically important issue, yes, but the real gravity of what Obama has done lies not in the subject matter of his edict but in the authoritarian assumptions of its issuance. They transcend mere arrogance: the president proposes to eviscerate our constitutional system. He claims nothing less than the dictatorial power to pronounce what the law is. This usurpation, moreover, complements the dictatorial powers he has already claimed to enforce only the laws of his choosing and to use the police powers of his office to deprive the sovereign states and the people of their constitutional prerogatives and rights.

To be sure, a president has not only the authority but the duty to refrain from enforcing congressional statutes that violate the Constitution. Presidents are no less duty-bound in this regard than the federal courts, which are obliged to hold that such enactments are null and void when the question arises in litigation. That, however, is not what Obama is doing.

As John Yoo observes, there is no conceivable argument that the federal immigration laws are constitutionally suspect. Obama simply rejects them as a matter of policy preference. That itself is a blatant violation of his constitutional oath.

Lest we forget, the president of the United States is the only federal official required by the Constitution to swear, as a condition precedent to assuming the vast powers of his office, that he will “faithfully execute the office of president of the United States, and … to the best of my ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Nor ought we forget that every nominee to the Supreme Court and the office of attorney general is grilled by the Senate regarding his or her willingness to abide by and enforce those laws and precedents with which he or she, on policy grounds, disagrees. It is a bedrock principle that once the people’s representatives enact a law to which there is no plausible constitutional objection, government officials must honor that law — regardless of their personal views about it — unless and until it is repealed or amended through the process prescribed by the Constitution.

Nor can prosecutorial discretion remotely justify Obama’s gambit. Resources are finite. Practicality demands — and the law acknowledges — that good-faith judgments must be made by the Justice Department and other Executive Branch agencies regarding which violations of law are a priority to address and which may go unaddressed. President Obama, however, is not saying the Executive Branch lacks the resources to enforce the immigration laws. He is proclaiming that he chooses not to enforce them.

Moreover, he is not simply refraining from law enforcement. He is affirmatively obstructing the states from enforcing their sovereign right to police their territories. He furthermore proposes to confer positive benefits on a class of illegal aliens in order to legitimize their status, something it is in the power only of Congress to do and something which Congress — having considered the matter carefully, and having heard the objections of the American people — has specifically declined to do.

This is another instance of Obama’s brazen lack of regard for the system he is duty-bound to honor: He claims he cannot sit back and wait for Congress to act; but as he well knows, lawmakers have acted: They said “no.”

Obama is not merely failing to enforce the immigration laws. He is destroying the system on which our liberty depends, a system he swore to safeguard. This oath was a solemn one, of far greater consequence than, say, a pitcher’s oath to testify truthfully to Congress about steroid use — an incident over which the federal government has spent millions of taxpayer dollars in an effort to convict Roger Clemens of a felony, notwithstanding the utter absence of any federal interest in the integrity of professional baseball.

We are entitled to conclude Obama defrauded the American people in taking his oath of office. He prefaced the oath by unabashedly declaring his intention to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He followed the oath with a series of usurpations designed to do just that. This highlights another mendacious aspect of Obama’s pandering to the hard Left on illegal immigration and, symmetrically, on election fraud (the policing against which he similarly obstructs).

The president says the young illegal aliens he has in mind are “Americans” except on paper. But who is Obama to say what an American is? By his own self-heralding, he is here to transform the United States. His mantra is “change.” He has stacked his Justice Department and the rest of the Executive Branch sprawl with progressive operatives whose obsession is to transmogrify America culturally, economically, and politically — to alter our very nature. When Obama talks about someone being “an American” or something being one of “our values,” he is not talking about the America that is; he is invoking the authoritarian, collectivist, redistributionist, post-sovereign, transnational America of his design.

It ought not matter whether we agree or disagree with Obama’s policy objectives on immigration — or the glut of areas from the use of force to labor relations to state sovereignty to socialized medicine to debt to diet, etc., on which he presumes to dictate rather than honor the law. Our social compact as a body politic demands that policy objectives be pursued within a system of divided powers in which the prerogatives of the president and of the federal government are strictly limited. Obama rejects this bedrock principle. Therefore, we must reject him.

If he is not removed from office — and if, while he retains office, politically accountable actors at the federal and state level continue their feckless failure to use their constitutional muscle to block him and rein him in — this will no longer be America. Not even on paper.

So much of what McCarthy has said agrees with my own thoughts that I repost the page in full. But the key sentences of this post deserve emphasis: “Our social compact as a body politic demands that policy objectives be pursued within a system of divided powers in which the prerogatives of the president and of the federal government are strictly limited. Obama rejects this bedrock principle. Therefore, we must reject him.” That is the big issue to be settled in 2012.

Michael Bloomberg's unfortunate decision

Although Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City has not formally decided it yet, it is clear that he has decided to remain neutral in 2012, as he did in 2008. According to Michael Barbaro of The New York Times,

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York has remained coy about whether he plans to endorse a presidential candidate this year, even as Mitt Romney and President Obama aggressively court the billionaire media mogul.

The most that the mayor and his aides have said is that Mr. Bloomberg, who did not endorse in 2008, is carefully weighing his options this time around.

But during casual conversations at charity event a few days ago, Mr. Bloomberg was far chattier — and candid — about the subject, according to three people who overheard him.

Mr. Bloomberg said that he believed Mr. Romney would probably be better at running the country than Mr. Obama, according to two guests.

But Mr. Bloomberg said he could not support Mr. Romney because he disagreed with him on so many social issues, these two people said. The mayor mentioned two such issues: abortion rights and gun control.

As a result, Mr. Bloomberg said, he intended to remain neutral, said one guest.

(There is more to the post, but this is the important point. Read the whole post if you wish.) Now I happen to agree with Mayor Bloomberg in what he said about such social issues as abortion and gun control. But so did the previous mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani. And, like Mayor Giuliani, I feel that President Obama's stance on important issues like the economy overshadows such things as those social issues. Mayor Giuliani endorsed Gov. Romney way back in April. It is unfortunate that Mayor Bloomberg will not do so.

Changing the issue

Because of President Obama's decreeing a substantial part of the DREAM act unilaterally, without authorization by Congressional action, he has changed the issue. It is no longer a question of whether the DREAM act is desirable. It now has become a question of separation of powers under the Constitution.

Even someone who wants to see the DREAM act become law can oppose this act by the President, because the Constitution (Art. II, Sect. 3) states that the President “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

When Pres. Obama decided that he would not support the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” in the courts, he had a constitutional basis for doing so — he believed (and I believe rightly) that the DOMA was unconstitutional, and that he was supporting the higher law (the Constitution) against the lower law (DOMA). In this action, I supported him. But the President has not claimed that our immigration laws were unconstitutional. Therefore he has an obligation under Art. II, Sect. 3 to “take Care that [this law] be faithfully executed.”

As I earlier said, this should be cause for impeachment, but will not, because the political facts of life will prevent it — none of the Democrats in the Senate will vote to convict, and they constitute a majority, not just the ¹/₃ that can kill an impeachment.

At least one Congressman says he will sue. This is a worthwhile effort, but the way our court procedures work, it will take years for this suit to get through the court system. The much faster procedure is to retire Barack Obama this November.

This is NOT Chicago!

In this country, there are city charters that give the mayors a lot of power and others which have relatively weak mayors. I understand (though I've not read the charter in any detail) that Chicago has a charter that, on its face, provides for a relatively weak mayor. But in fact, not only two generations of Richard Daleys, but even earlier mayors of Chicago, found it possible to exercise far more powers than Chicago's charter allowed them. Chicago has a “weak-mayor” charter, but it has had very strong mayors in fact.

Why is this important to us, outside the city of Chicago? Because we currently have a President, Barack Obama, who may have been born in Honolulu (despite “birther” claims), but whose political life has all been spent in Chicago. And he seems to think that the national government is to be run like Chicago's — with an executive who is not bound by a Constitution's limited allocation of powers. First he simply construed the Constitution in ways it had never been construed before, like making “recess appointments” when the Senate was not really in recess but simply off for a weekend. Now he's actually creating new legislation, which Congress has never approved (and in fact voted down) — as in his recent unilaterally-implemented DREAM Act. But this is not Chicago. We believe in our Constitution. And hopefully the American people will tell Barack Obama this, in the only way that will get it across to him, by electing someone else this November. And the obvious choice for “someone else,” of course, is Mitt Romney, who will restore this country to Constitutional government.

Obama's decreeing the DREAM Act

Fred Bauer yesterday posted the following on his blog, A Certain Enthusiasm:

Today, the White House offered a de facto amnesty of an unknown number of illegal immigrants. The AP has some details:

The policy change, announced Friday by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants [though it could be far more---FB] who have lived in fear of deportation. It also bypasses Congress and partially achieves the goals of the so-called DREAM Act, a long-sought but never enacted plan to establish a path toward citizenship for young people who came to the United States illegally but who have attended college or served in the military....

Under the administration plan, illegal immigrants will be immune from deportation if they were brought to the United States before they turned 16 and are younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, have no criminal history, graduated from a U.S. high school or earned a GED, or served in the military. They also can apply for a work permit that will be good for two years with no limits on how many times it can be renewed.

The policy will not lead toward citizenship but will remove the threat of deportation and grant the ability to work legally, leaving eligible immigrants able to remain in the United States for extended periods.

A key point raised by Daniel Horowitz: no law by Congress has been passed enabling this immunity from deportation or the granting of work permits. Whether one agrees with the result of a selective amnesty that creates a class of permanent non-citizen workers or not (especially in a time of high unemployment), we should pay attention to the implications of process here.

If the president can claim the ability not only to selectively halt the prosecution of various laws but also to create new legislative mechanisms for work permits for immigrants, what limits are there to the president's power? Could the president just choose to stop enforcing civil rights laws and create new standards for voting instead? Could the president choose to avoid collecting taxes at the legally specified rate and instead create new tax rates? Could the president set separate new rates for Republicans or Democrats or women or men? (After all, the administration's new immigration rule treats one age group differently from another.)

President Obama's move could have radical implications for executive power. It could also have implications for the pending Supreme Court case about Arizona's recent immigration law. The federal government's brief there suggests that the executive branch has a broad latitude in deciding what laws to enforce and how to enforce them. In this move, the Obama administration has taken that principle to a new level, not only choosing not to enforce certain laws but also creating new measures. If the Supreme Court endorses the administration's position for Arizona outright, some on the court may feel that they are giving the administration a green light to extend its executive reach even further.

It seems that President Obama feels he is beyond the Constitution: he can create a law that Congress has not passed. There will not be a 2/3 vote in the Senate to remove him, so impeachment is not going to happen, but this is really one more reason that President Obama must be retired. Our processes have to wait until an election in November and an inauguration in January, but this would be faster than going through the courts. And who would have standing to sue?

Will the court rule Monday?

I have seen some articles in the paper suggesting that the Supreme Court may rule as soon as Monday on “Obamacare.” It has been hard waiting these past few months. It is to be firmly hoped that the act will be completely thrown out, so that we can start again from scratch. While there are good features, everything is so intricately interlocked that we can't just pick and choose which clauses of the act will be thrown out — and as Judge Roger Vinson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida determined (though he alone has so ruled) the absence of a severability clause implies that the entire law must go on the basis of his determination that the mandate is unconstitutional. But we cannot get into the heads of the nine Justices. Some may feel that there are parts of the act worth saving, and be reluctant to throw the whole bill out. After all, except for Judge Vinson, other judges who did rule the individual mandate unconstitutional still would retain the rest of the bill.

Really, this wait is killing me.

Obama's economy

At a fundraiser, President Barack Obama accused Gov. Mitt Romney of running a campaign with no message, doing nothing but casting blame on the president for the economy:

“The challenge is because folks are still hurting right now, the other side feels that it’s enough for them to just sit back and say, ‘Things aren’t as good as they should be and it’s Obama’s fault,’” the president said at a fundraiser at a private residence in Maryland. “And you can pretty much put their campaign on, on a tweet and have some characters to spare.”

Well, Mr. President, that is a message. The point is that you have been President for three years and some months, and you had a Democratic Congress for the first two years of that period, and the economy is not so great. What you keep trying to do is divert the American public from the terrible economic situation because you know that if (to quote a campaign strategist for the Democrats in 1992) “it's the economy, stupid,” you cannot win this election. The reason Mitt Romney and the Republicans are saying “Things aren’t as good as they should be and it’s Obama’s fault,” is that things aren’t as good as they should be and it is Obama’s fault.

Once more, the District government acts stupid

The headlines in the Washington Examiner say “D.C. approves 4 to be medical marijuana dispensaries.” As if marijuana had a legitimate medical use. Among the organizations opposing marijuana, there is the American Society of Addiction Medicine, for example, which issued a report last March (follow the link).

Let's face it. “Medical marijuana” is simply a way for people looking to get high to justify it by claiming it's for “medical” use. it's a dangerous drug, with no reason to legalize it, and once more, DC is stupid.

Another guest post

Yesterday I saw another post that was just too good for me not to repeat here. It was written by Howie Carr of the Boston Herald:

It’s no fun being a moonbat anymore.

You didn’t get invited to Barney Frank’s wedding in Newton. That “Elizabeth Warren for Massachusetts” bumper sticker on your Prius has become a magnet for roadway ridicule.

But worst of all is what’s happened to your hero, Barack Hussein Obama. The emperor has no clothes. Mighty Casey has struck out.

Everything was so much simpler when George Bush was president.

Was it a mere four years ago when Barack modestly predicted that just his nomination alone would be the moment “when the rise of the oceans began to slow?” On Friday — exactly four years and four days after the seas started receding — the modern Moses conceded that housing in the U.S. is “underwater,” and that he hasn’t done squat about it.

But hasn’t he brought down the gas prices to $3.50 a gallon? Only $1.61 more to go and they’ll be back to where they were on Bush’s last day in office.

How can Barack be trailing the vulture capitalist Mitt Romney in Michigan? Don’t these bitter clingers read The New York Times [NYT]?

Even Chris Matthews’ leg has stopped tingling.

In 2008, everything was, you’ll pardon the expression, black and white. Predator-drone attacks under Bush — unconstitutional genocidal terrorism. Five times as many Predator-drone attacks under Barack — brilliant strategy by our wartime president.

Whatever happened to anti-war candlelight vigils? You see them on TV about as often as you watch military coffins being unloaded at Dover AFB.

Which is to say, never.

Campaign spending was never an issue in 2008 when Barack was grinding McCain’s moneymen into the dust. Then money was the mother’s milk of politics. Now, this George, er Mitt Romney, is lowering the boom on His Wonderfulness.

A national scandal is what these super-PAC’s are. Somebody call George Soros.

As a loyal moonbat, you’d love to respond to Jim Messina’s endless email money grovels. But the trust funds Pater and Mumsy set up for you just aren’t getting nearly the returns they did in the bad old days when Dick Cheney was unleashing hurricanes to ravage New Orleans.

The economy is “unexpectedly” sliding yet again, as the network anchors always say, but it’s not Barack’s fault. It can’t be. He went to Harvard. It’s all caused by those “headwinds” from Europe, that’s what Jim Cramer blamed it on this week. And before that it was the warm winter, or the Japanese tsunami, and don’t forget the early Easter, or was it the late Easter and, and … George Bush!

Doesn’t anyone remember Bush’s jobless recovery — when unemployment was 4.5 percent? Now 3 million citizens have vanished from the workforce and unemployment is 8.2 percent. It’s the new normal.

Whatever happened to “9/11 — An Inside Job?” Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan have vanished into the Witness Protection Program. Nancy Pelosi is babbling about ghosts in the White House. Guys in white coats are chasing the vice president with a net as he raves about “crops that don’t depend on soil, water or fertilizer.”

What a drag it is, being a moonbat.

I must say, I wish I could write as well. But let my echoing his column substitute.

Even "progressives" are spotting Obama's fraudulence

Thanks to Tom Bowler's “Libertarian Leanings” blog, I saw a blog post by a “progressive” named Taylor Marsh:

… What is Pres. Obama fighting for besides himself, the only cause that makes him rise up to do anything?

The guy can’t even find a slogan, stuck with We’re Not Done Yet.

God help us all.

Barack Obama didn’t find the cause of unions important to fight for or the need to make the election results, even in a loss, an important reason for people to rise up and protect the place where the middle class was born. A living wage came about through unions, with Scott Walker continuing the gutting of them begun by Ronald Reagan, on behalf of corporations, the place behind which Barack Obama stands as well. If you’re not standing with the unions manning the barricades you’re no good to them, which Obama proved conclusively through Wisconsin.

The line “What is Pres. Obama fighting for besides himself…?” evinces that Ms. Marsh finally gets it: Pres. Obama has no cause except more power for himself. He will embrace “progressive” causes if he thinks they will advance the chances of his re-election, and eschew them if they would not. And thus, she says, a bit further down in her blog post:

I remain fascinated that anyone pretending to have Democratic, progressive, let alone liberal, political views cares whether Pres. Obama wins or loses. What it’s going to take for people to understand he’s not fighting any of your battles, but only waging his own for himself, is unknown at this point, but maybe when he shoots for legacy on the “grand bargain” fence of history people will tune in and, perhaps, wake up. Then it will be too late, though it already is and was a long time ago.

And Ms. Marsh is pro-union — that whole blog post just drips with comments about how great unions are. She and I may agree on very little, but she's found out what I saw years ago — President Obama is “only waging his own [battle] for himself.”

Back to Tom Bowler. You really should read that post of his. Because he makes it clear that the same applies to that “progressive” icon who is Taylor Marsh's heroine — Elizabeth Warren. Bowler says:

Warren is a working class hero who railed against the bank foreclosures, but who also made hefty profits flipping foreclosed homes in Oklahoma. I suppose that's pretty typical of today's heroes of the proletariat.

(Elizabeth Warren purchased this Oklahoma City home at 200 NW 16th Street for $30,000 in August 1993, then sold it for $145,000 five months later.)

I don't always agree with Tom Bowler's posts — but this time it's a home run for him.

Yet more about Wisconsin

One thing that needs to be pointed out about the fuss over Gov. Scott Walker's reforms in Wisconsin: Prior to the reforms, people had union dues withheld from their pay whether they wanted to be members of the union or not. So, as of early 2011, the membership of the Wisconsin chapter of AFSCME (the main public-employee union) was over 60,000. When the compulsion to contribute to the union via withheld dues was ended, the numbers fell — and by February of this year was less than 30,000. (For the exact numbers, see this page.) This means that the majority, at least of those public employees who were under AFSCME, left when they got a chance. They were certainly not voluntarily contributing their dues. Was such coercion fair? I would say no! (The union representing the teachers, according to data from the same source, didn't quite lose as much of a share of its membership, but from a starting membership of 17,000 lost about 6,000 — more than a third.)

Clearly, in many states, the union membership that there is gains numbers from coercion — union-shop contracts, legal in most of the states, which make people join a union, whether they want to or not, in order to keep their job. We really ought to have a national right-to-work law, which would outlaw such contracts, though that will never happen as long as the unions own the Democratic Party; and the Senate, at least, cannot act unless over 60% can be mustered on one side of a question.

And even many people who belong to unions see Scott Walker's role as positive. He actually got 38% of the votes cast by union members in the recall election! That means that almost 2 out of every 5 union members agreed that reforms such as Gov. Walker's were a good thing. That's just looking at union members, who would appear to be a sample biased against any action that weakens organized labor.

These are amazing facts. It certainly means that organized labor is losing the support of the workers it claims to represent. And that is a good thing.

Setting a few things straight

I have been praising Gov. Scott Walker rather effusively in recent posts, because he has done some good things for the State of Wisconsin. But I do want to make things clear. There is a lot about Scott Walker that I do not like.

For one thing, he is opposed to mass transit improvements. He's been very negative in those matters when they have come up in Wisconsin, and I don't like that. He is also one of the strongest anti-abortion politicians I've run across. So I don't consider Scott Walker to be exactly the kind of Republican I'd really want to see in power.

But if you have read enough of my posts, you will be aware that one thing that gets me very much worked up is the behavior of organized labor, and Gov. Walker has been more willing to take them on than most executives in this nation. And for this, he gets my strong support.

The comments on Wisconsin's recall election

Not too surprisingly, the Left is shocked at Scott Walker's winning the recall election, and trying to minimize its significance by calling it a “narrow” victory (it isn't; a Republican win by 7 points in a Democratic-leaning state is pretty major in our political system!) and pointing out that a lot more money was spent by Walker than his opponents ignoring a lot of union money that was wasted on Kathleen Falk's primary campaign and other issues that were not, technically, referring to recalling Walker but certainly implied it). The Right is happy (and though I'm only slightly right of center, I include myself in this group) but still concerned that many of those people who supported Walker for reasons of fairness will still cast their votes for Obama in November. But today I saw a post, dated yesterday, entitled “Get Serious About Governing, Democrats” by Matt Welch (someone I'd put in the rightist camp, of course), Editor in Chief of Reason magazine, that does a good job of summarizing the arguments, so I'll repeat it here.

When politicians and activists warn that this or that election is a stark, Manichean choice between the champions of good and the malefactors of evil, many of us on the sidelines of political tribalism tend to wearily roll our eyes. But what independents tend to underappreciate is that the artificially raised stakes are a main part of the consumer attraction in the first place. It makes politics more meaningful, even fun, when you imagine that you are up against a pure form of rapacious evil.

Wisconsin has been the front line of America's Democrat vs. Republican, blue vs. red rhetorical war for 16 months now, ever since newly elected Republican governor Scott Walker pushed through a budget repair bill that withdrew government from the union dues-collecting business for public employees and removed the collective bargaining power of most government unions, an act that triggered historic public protests. So on the morning after Walker survived a labor-led recall election by a higher margin than he originally won office in 2010, there were plenty on the left grumbling darkly about the Dark Lord rising over our once-free country.

At The American Prospect, Harold Meyerson compared Walker's actions to a “jihad” and suggested (paradoxically) that a post-union labor movement might just resort to rioting. Walker “wins one for the plutocrats,” Joan Walsh lamented at Salon, without really explaining how the monocle-wearers could win 38 percent of the union vote.

Such demonization was of a piece with leftish commentary in the run-up to the recall. Esquire's Charles P. Pierce described Walker as a “goggle-eyed homunculus hired by Koch Industries to manage its midwest subsidiary formerly known as the state of Wisconsin,” which would now be subject to “the habits of oligarchy.” Even more grossly, The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel wrote in The Washington Post that Walker's policies were intended to “cleanse the electorate of people who don’t look, earn or think like him.”

It's almost comforting, in such a florid, menacing universe, to wallow in righteous defeat. But I would suggest that if progressives want to change minds and political outcomes, they might try a different strategy: Instead of merely rallying opposition to irredeemable bogeymen, how about providing a concrete, numbers-rich alternative to the brutal budgetary math Walker's union-tweaking policies were designed to address?

It is a fact that the majority of state budgets are in the red, that overall state spending increased by 81 percent from 2002-2007, and that rare-in-the-private-sector defined benefit pensions for government workers (along with post-retirement medical benefits) are a large and growing portion of state and local budgets, even while being chronically underfunded. The situation is terrible now, and will be much worse in the near future. So, progressives: Tell us concretely what you plan to do about this.

The state of California's public-sector pension contributions have increased 304 percent in a decade, up to $2.2 billion of a $91 billion budget, and growing faster by the minute. Pension contributions account for 20 percent and 27 percent, respectively, of the city budgets of San Diego and San Jose, whose citizens have responded by passing initiatives asking government workers to contribute more to their own pension and health care. Cities from California to Rhode Island have initiated bankruptcy over pension costs.

So, progressives: What is the right percentage of a government budget to be spent on public sector pensions? If this requires that cities and states simply need to come up with bigger budgets (through increased taxes) precisely how much bigger would be appropriate? If you don't want to increase overall budgets, what other government services are you willing to cut?

If the past four years of public debate are any indicator, we won't soon see concrete answers to any questions like these. Progressives almost never tell us how big they think the government should be. It is easier to make grand and vague gestures on behalf of working Americans than it is to justify the math of public sector unions negotiating with union-backed politicians to spend the money of non-union taxpayers, which may help explain why Americans are solidly in favor of public employees paying more of their own freight. And in all the hot air spewed about the Wisconsin recall, where were the positive arguments for all the citizen benefits received in the prior run-ups in Badger State spending?

As long as Democrats keep dodging these questions, no amount of plutocrat-baiting will reverse their political fortunes. Governments at all levels are out of money. Progressives are going to have to come up with a better response to that than saying “we were robbed.”

This is a very nice summary, and I think it describes the situation very well.

And the numbers are (almost all) in

When I posted my last one last night, only a quarter of the precincts were in. Scott Walker had a better than 60-40 lead. Now, with 99.9% in, the margin is down to 53-47. Still big enough that one can say that the people have spoken and defeated Big Labor, but nowhere near as big a margin as what it first seemed.

It is great to see that in a “progressive” State like Wisconsin, the unions got their come-uppance. And it was even better than that: Tom Barrett, who was the candidate that had to carry their water, was not even their original choice. The unions' favorite candidate didn't even make it through the Democratic primary. She had vowed, if elected Governor, to veto any budget that did not restore the unions all the rights that Walker had taken away; Barrett was somewhat more moderate. So even in the Democratic primary, the Wisconsin public refused to vote the unions' way.

Unfortunately, there was one note that was not so good — many of the Wisconsinites who voted for Scott Walker did so simply because they felt that a recall was going too far and should be reserved for official misconduct, so they are still Democratic-aligned as far as November is concerned, and Obama remains a big favorite in Wisconsin. But Wisconsin is, as I said earlier, a “progressive” State. Mitt Romney does not have to win Wisconsin, and if he wins the presidency, it will probably still be while losing Wisconsin. So those results are not too disturbing. For now, let us just rejoice that — as I said earlier — even in a “progressive” State like Wisconsin, the unions got their come-uppance.

The Wisconsin results

As I write these words, only about ¼ of the vote in Wisconsin has been counted, but Scott Walker's lead seems quite impressive -- over a 60-40 margin. Even if a lot of the vote that comes in later is more Democratic, it does appear that Big Labor's attempt to bring down Gov. Walker has failed. Three Governors have been subjected to recall elections in United States history; the first two were actually removed. But Scott Walker, the third, will serve out his term. It looks as if sanity has prevailed in Wisconsin. And Big Labor has been shown the door. Let us hope that the rest of the year will be as good for the people as this has been.

The volatility of the polls

I don't think I've ever seen the polls as volatile as they are now. Real Clear Politics shows a CNN Poll taken May 29-31, showing Obama leading by 3 points, and a Rasmussen poll taken May 30-June 1, showing Romney leading by 4. That's a difference of seven points, and the polls are supposedly only a day apart with a 2 day out of 3 overlap. Either one of them is selecting poorly (or both are!) or the public cannot be trusted to give their true intentions.

But if the numbers are this volatile, can we put any credence in the polling results? I think that about all we can say is that, as of now, it's close. And a lot will happen anyway between now and November. I'm sure that Tuesday, when Scott Walker either wins the recall election, as most polls say, or loses it to Tom Barrett, there will be some movement in other polling numbers: if Walker wins, people will realize that you can fight Big Labor, for example, while some weak Obama supporters may reconsider their choice. Then the Supreme Court will be heard on Obamacare and the Arizona illegal immigration law. If the Obama administration loses on either or both, will it energize the Left (who might want to redo the Supreme Court majority by giving Obama time to appoint new Justices)? Or will it energize the Right, who will point to Obama's assault on the Constitution and make them even surer they want to get rid of him? And, of course, if the Court goes the opposite way, we would see possible reactions that are mirror images of these.

There is a good chance that, by July 1, the polls will look a lot different from the figures we see today. And certainly by November, a lot of people will change their mind.

What is his problem with Romney?

Rick Bayan is a fellow who runs a blog called The New Moderate, with which I agree on some points and disagree on others. His concept of “moderation” has some ideas that look close to those I hold myself and others I look at aghast. And Thursday I saw a post which is one of those I cannot accept. It was entitled, “Romney Bags the Nomination While a Better Man Drops Out.”

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I've been, in this election cycle, a strong supporter of Mitt Romney. So clearly, you can see why Bayan's title alone distressed me. But I wondered who the “better man” was that Bayan was praising, so I read it and found that he was talking about Charles Elson “Buddy” Roemer III, a former governor of Louisiana who had first sought the Republican nomination, and later, when it was clear that nobody considered his candidacy as a serious one, tried for the nomination of Americans Elect, a quixotic “moderate” group that wouldn't even call itself a party, and foundered when it found that its nomination process didn't work. The timing of Roemer's withdrawal is clear. While he refused to support Mitt Romney, the fact that he gave up his candidacy only two days after the day that Mitt Romney clinched the GOP nomination is clearly a confession that for Roemer to continue can only help President Barack Obama, by siphoning off votes from Romney. (I wish that Gary Johnson, another erstwhile Republican nomination seeker who got about the same amount of attention as Roemer, had come to the same conclusion.)

But Bayan's title for his post says it all: Rick Bayan just can't accept Romney as a voice of moderation. [Among other things he says in the post is “...was Romney the best candidate the GOP could have produced? No again. He wasn’t even the best Mormon candidate. (That honor belongs to Jon Huntsman, who apparently was too sensible and articulate to make a dent among Republican voters.)” Also, “Romney is the kind of moderate who gives moderates a bad name.”] He would have preferred — he actually says this in the post — Roemer.

While Bayan might think that Huntsman or Roemer would have been a better GOP candidate than Romney, it is important to recognize that no politician can accomplish a thing unless he can get elected. Neither Buddy Roemer nor John Huntsman, estimable though they might be in Bayan's eyes, was able to convince any number of Republicans that he had a serious chance of getting the White House back from Barack Obama in 2012. Mitt Romney did. Obviously, though Bayan didn't see in Mitt Romney a credible voice for the American political center, millions of others did.

Certainly, while I like much of what Rick Bayan says, this post of his is not included. And I will continue to support Mitt Romney enthusiastically in the hope of showing Barack Obama the exit from the White House.

One more nail in the coffin of DOMA

A three-judge panel of the First Circuit Court has ruled the so-called “Defense of Marriage Act” unconstitutional. Unfortunately, it is unlikely that this will be the end of it; one of the few things I strongly dislike about the current Republican leadership in the House of Representatives is that it has taken up the cause of the homophobic bigots of this country, and has retained legal counsel that will probably appeal this verdict, even though the Obama administration will not. But given that this ruling was unanimous, it gives hope that the Supreme Court will let this decision stand.

I really cannot see any justification for DOMA. Marriage law has historically been a matter for the states, and the only case where the Supreme Court has invalidated a State law has been to keep a State from restricting marriage. (See Loving v. Virginia.)

So far, this is only one more nail in the coffin of DOMA, but there is only one more step available. If it is appealed to the Supreme Court, we will have to await a final decision.

One thing I find somewhat ironical is the stand of a lot of “conservative” columnists, who might in other cases cheer a Court's setting aside of a Federal law attempting to interfere with State prerogatives, but who take the other side here — even taking Pres. Obama to task for refusing to defend DOMA! But Pres. Obama is sworn to uphold the Constitution, and if he believes DOMA to be unconstitutional, he is doing exactly the right thing! (Suppose a “conservative” was in the White House, and a law under attack on constitutional grounds was one that conservatives thought to be unconstitutional. Should the President defend that kind of law too?)

An important month

Tomorrow is the first of June. A June that will be one of the most important months, outside of election-year Novembers, in U. S. political history.

Next Tuesday, of course, will be an election, though only in the State of Wisconsin. But this election will show whether ordinary people can take politics away from Big Labor. Governor Scott Walker has tried to get his state's finances in order, and his method has been to take some of the power that public employee unions have exercised in the State away. This has gotten him the unions' deep enmity, of course, so he is forced to fight a recall election — an extreme rarity in this country. Only two Governors have actually been removed by recall in the history of the United States. (A third was put up for recall, but impeached and removed by that process before a recall election could be held.) But it looks as though he will win. Polls show a majority of Wisconsinites will vote to keep Gov. Walker. They are not going to be puppets of Big Labor.

The other extremely important occurrences that will happen this month will be Supreme Court rulings. Both the Arizona illegal immigration law and “Obamacare” are expected to be the subjects of Court rulings this coming month. Both can have a serious impact on what the powers of the Federal government are considered to be. There is a good chance that both rulings will go against Pres. Obama, which will be important reins on the unfettered Federal domination of power that he seeks. A Mayor of Chicago can override the will of his city's people, and Pres. Obama has tried to do the same on a national level. But he will, hopefully, be shown that there are constitutional limits on his power.

Two referenda

It appears that there will be two referenda on the Maryland ballot this November on legislation that has been pushed by Governor Martin O'Malley. And while O'Malley has gotten behind both of them, and similar groups are forcing referenda on both, I'm of quite different minds on the two. And I expect to vote one way on one, and the other way on the other.

The first is the “gay marriage” question. I will certainly vote to keep the law as it was passed by the Maryland General Assembly (State legislature) and signed by Gov. O'Malley. What reason the opposition has for wanting to reverse this law I do not understand. I have not seen a single point made in opposition to gay marriage that holds up to scrutiny, and it is clear and simple a bigoted attempt to make things difficult for homosexual Marylanders.

On the other hand, Gov. O'Malley is also pushing a State version of the so-called DREAM Act. It would make illegal aliens living in Maryland — without the legal right to do so! — eligible for in-State tuition reductions at Maryland's public higher education institutions. I cannot see why Marylanders' state taxes should go to help these people get an education in Maryland, while, say, a United States citizen who has his primary residence in one of the other 49 States does not get this break. If Gov. O'Malley wished to eliminate the in-State/out-of-State differential, it might be justified. But to put illegals ahead of, for example, residents of Delaware or Virginia makes no sense to me. They have no business even being in the state, for goodness' sake!

Is it justified to describe Obama as a socialist?

Yesterday on the Forbes magazine Website, Paul Roderick Gregory wrote a piece entitled “Is It Within Bounds To Ask: Is Obama A Socialist?” I thought this title interesting, because I've basically considered President Obama to be a socialist, without any hesitation. But I wanted to read Gregory's column, and I think it is so well put that I want to repeat it verbatim:

As campaign rhetoric heats up, pundits and talking-point guys and gals debate what is on or off limits. Can or should the Democrats talk about 16-year-old “bully” Romney or about his “weirdness” (a veiled reference I guess to his Mormon faith)? Can or should the Republicans revive Reverend Wright’s black liberation rants, the Bill Ayers connection, or the President’s youthful drug use, which apparently was prolific.

One such pundit on the democrat side (who and where I forget) referred to “crazies” who call Obama a “socialist.” Such statements are beyond the pale, he declared in disgust. They are on a par with the “birther” claims.

Despite such dismissals, there is strong and legitimate interest in whether President Obama is a socialist. My Forbes piece Is President Obama Truly a Socialist continues to attract many readers three months after it was posted. It showed the remarkable overlap between Obama’s electoral platform and the Party of European Socialists, which represents leftist and socialist parties in the European parliament. My French Socialists Test Drive Obama’s Electoral Platform showed that French socialist Francois Hollande’s and Obama’s platforms are virtual carbon copies, and Hollande is quite open about and proud of being a socialist.

Democrat strategists know that the American electorate reacts strongly negative to “socialism” and are doing their best to discredit any and all who call Obama a socialist. There can be no doubt that Obama is a socialist in the European reform-Marxism tradition. In France, Obama would be the candidate of the French socialist party. In Spain, he would be at home in the Socialist Worker’s Party. In Germany, Obama would be torn between the Social Democrats and Die Linke. In “Old Europe,” the welfare state is well entrenched. Elections are about tinkering at the margin. The United States has still to decide whether it wants the European welfare state or not. Obama does. Romney does not.

Democrat strategists discredit Obama-is-a-socialist claims by equating them with the ludicrous charge that Obama is a card-carrying communist of the cold war tradition. That is not what is being said. European socialists are proud of their rich tradition and heritage that date back to the split with revolutionary Marxism at the turn of the last century. In the United States, however, candidates must conceal rather than openly proclaim their socialist beliefs.

The upcoming November election offers American voters a choice that is starker than they understand. Obama brings to the table a deep distrust of free enterprise and a belief in government as the solution to most problems. Romney offers a vision of faith in private enterprise and a distrust of government intervention. Obama will disguise his views with “fair share” slogans and weak protestations of faith in private enterprise.

Both sides might as well come clean. Obama should make his health care reform a centerpiece of his campaign rather than pretend it does not exist. Romney should explain the insights into American capitalism he gained at Bain Capital and why that qualifies him for the Presidency. Both should state their positions clearly and let the electorate decide. The winner will have a mandate for action.

That’s the way democracy should work. It rarely does. Let this election be an exception.

I cannot disagree with anything Gregory wrote there, except that there are places where he wrote “democrat” with a small “d” and I think should have written “Democrat” with a capital “D”, so I'll repeat it with full credit to him.

The evolution of Memorial Day

When I was growing up, Memorial Day was quite different from the way it is now. First of all, some people called it “Decoration Day,” though both names were common. (See the note on the name on Wikipedia.) And it was before they moved all the holidays to Mondays in 1968, so it was on May 30 every year, regardless of what day of the week it was.

But the biggest change involves what the holiday was all about. At that time, it was still considered to honor the dead of the Civil War, even though at that time three wars had been fought since, and a fourth, in Korea, was going on (although, by the time I was 11, it had ended). It was so much associated with the Civil War that several Southern states did not celebrate it, but had their own “Confederate Memorial Day” holidays (which were not on the same days in all states). (There is a site, at usmemorialday.org, that claims that Memorial Day was converted into a general day for honoring all the war dead of the nation after World War I. My memory says different. Since it only became an official Federal holiday in 1971, I suppose what it meant varied among different people, though.)

Anyway, it certainly has evolved during my lifetime, though it actually goes back to the 1860s.

Gov. Christie's sports gambling plan

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey has proposed to legalize sports gambling in that State. Currently, however, there is a Federal law that would prevent it. In 1991, Congress passed a law that permitted it in four states: Nevada, Delaware, Oregon, and Montana, which had permitted it by a deadline specified in that act. New Jersey, which had been given the opportunity to do so in 1991, did not. So, on what basis is Gov. Christie challenging the law?

There are two Constitutional provisions that call for uniformity in Federal laws across the States: Art. I, Sect. 8, clause 1 states that “...all Duties, Imposts, and Excises shall be uniform throughout the United States,” and Art. I, Sect. 9, clause 6 says that “No Preference shall be given by any Regulation of Commerce or Revenue to the Ports of one State over those of another: nor shall Vessels bound to, or from, one State, be obliged to enter, clear, or pay Duties in another.” But there is neither a tax involved, nor an import duty or other port regulation. So all I can imagine is that Gov. Christie is using the text of Art. I, Sect. 8, clause 1 and Art. I, Sect. 9, clause 6 to imply that the Constitution requires uniformity.

Actually, I hope Gov. Christie wins. I'd much rather see governments get their revenue from the voluntary expenditure of gamblers — and there will always be people who want to gamble — than by raising taxes. And I think that Federal laws should be uniform across the States; the differences in State laws is another matter. But I really wonder how the Supreme Court will rule if the case gets to them. Why should New Jersey not be able to do what Nevada is doing? Common sense is in agreement with Gov. Christie. But it's hard to make a case that the Constitution is.

Romney's VP choices

In yesterday's Washington Examiner was a short story from the Associated Press that stated:

Mitt Romney's vice presidential search has entered a new phase: auditions.

As his campaign evaluates potential running mates, Republicans with a possible shot at the No. 2 spot on the presidential ticket are starting to engage in unofficial public tryouts for the traditional vice presidential role of attack dog.

Democratic President Barack Obama is “the most ill-prepared person to assume the presidency in my lifetime,” New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie declared in a speech in Kentucky this week. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio told South Carolina Republicans that there hasn't been such a “divisive figure in modern American history” as Obama.

Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, speaking Tuesday at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library — it's a favorite venue for Republicans seeking more attention — said Obama “wants to take us further in the wrong direction.” In an Alabama appearance this month, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal called Obama “the most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter.”

Not that any of them — or any of the others who may have landed a spot on Romney's list — are talking about becoming vice president. Nor are any of them acknowledging that they're trying out for the role or saying the Romney campaign has asked them to do so. Top Romney aides are sworn to secrecy, as are potential running mates and their staffs — an example of the Romney campaign's closely controlled, no-leaks culture.

Well, it's quite possible that they are auditioning for Romney's VP choice. But it could be that they are simply giving opinions they hold. (Jindal's comment that Obama was “the most incompetent president since Jimmy Carter” is about what I said a few days ago, and I certainly don't expect Mitt Romney to tap me for VP!) But any one of those four could be a good choice, if he is thinking of one of these for VP. So I'm certainly glad to hear their comments.

Barack Obama and LBJ

On March 12, 1968, Lyndon B. Johnson got 49% of the vote in the New Hampshire Democratic primary. Eugene McCarthy got 42%. Such a comparative performance is believed by many to be the reason that Johnson decided not to run for re-election that year.

Fast forward to 2012. Just a few days ago, approximately 40% of the Kentucky Democratic primary voters voted "uncommitted" against President Obama. A similar proportion in Arkansas voted for a Tennessee lawyer that, I am sure, most Arkansans knew nothing about. And a few weeks earlier, in the West Virginia Democratic primary, 41% of the vote went to a prisoner in Texas. Just like 1968, we're talking about Democratic primaries, with a sitting Democratic President defending his record. And at least, in 1968, Eugene McCarthy was a well-known figure. Obama's opposition in those three states was not. (In Kentucky, there was nobody -- just “uncommitted”!)

Perhaps Barack Obama should realize that, even in his own party, voters are dissatisfied with his Presidency. He ought to emulate Lyndon Johnson and retire. But, of course, he won't. He enjoys power too much. (But didn't LBJ, also?) So it is up to the American people to retire him in November.

On Bain Capital and GST Steel

President Obama has been attacking Mitt Romney with the claim that Romney's company, Bain Capital, sucked the blood out of a steel company, GST Steel. Of course, as I posted earlier, Romney had left Bain Capital two years before GST Steel went bankrupt. But I now find out exactly why GST Steel went bankrupt: its unions.This article by Kimberley A. Strassel appeared on the Wall Street Journal's site on May 17:

This week the Obama campaign debuted its attack on Bain Capital, the private-equity firm Mitt Romney founded. Its two-minute ad purports to tell the story of GS Technologies, a Kansas City-based Bain investment that went bankrupt in 2001.

To hear the Obama campaign, this is a tale of greed: GST was a healthy, happy, quality steelmaker until Bain plundered its worth and stripped its 750 workers of their due. "It was like a vampire," laments one former employee in the ad. "They came in and sucked the life out of us."

GST is a tragic tale, though in a different way. The real story of GST is that of a private-equity firm trying to spark some life into a uncompetitive, over-unionized industry. Bain's crime here—if that's what you call it—was giving a dying steel plant an unexpected eight-year lease on life.

When Bain bought the Kansas City mill in 1993, steel was a scene of carnage. Global players were pouring out cheap products, and America's high-cost steel plants couldn't compete. The industry had lost 200,000 jobs in preceding years. In 1992 alone, the six largest U.S. steel mills had lost a combined $3 billion. Armco, the company Bain would buy the plant from, would lose $641 million in 1993.

The Kansas City plant was itself dying. At its 1970 height it employed 4,500; by the late 1980s it was down to 1,000. A year before acquisition, Armco had laid off another 75. Its equipment was old; it faced fierce competition at home and abroad.

B.C. Huselton, a vice president of the business at the time, tells me that in 1990 the Armco CEO held a meeting. "He told us, 'Look, we either try to sell it, or we've got to shut it down.'" Armco had shut down another Kansas City facility, Union Wire Rope, only a few years before.

The Kansas City plant had two product lines—high-carbon rods and grinding media (used in mining)—that it felt could give it a competitive edge. But it needed investment, and Armco was tapped out. Bain nonetheless saw some potential and in 1993 joined other investors to acquire it for $80 million. Management renamed it GS Technologies (which would become part of a larger GS Industries) and poured an additional $100 million into modernization.

The strategy worked for a time. The market firmed up and GSI became a U.S. leader in steel rods. In 1994 it felt confident enough to distribute a dividend to investors. In both 1996 and 1997, GSI would realize $1 billion in revenue.

And then came the tsunami. The late 1990s saw a new outpouring of cheap steel from elsewhere around the globe. The Asian financial crisis walloped the mining industry, cutting demand for GST products. The price of GST's electricity and natural gas skyrocketed. The union dug in, refusing to make concessions. By April 1997, it was on strike, shooting bottle rockets at guards. Labor costs spiked, and by 1999 GSI was reporting $53 million in net losses.

In 2001 it would become one of 31 steel companies that went bankrupt from 1993 to 2003. (Mr. Romney left Bain in 1999.) The steel crash was the economic drama du jour, with Congress railing about "dumping."

At the time, GST's union blamed the company's bankruptcy on the political class, for failing to hamstring imports. "We can't compete against the steel imports that are being sold under cost," said the president of GST's union in 2001. "Our pleas fell on deaf ears in the political arena." The Bush administration would ultimately slap on giant tariffs.

The bankruptcies were led by unionized companies that, like airlines and textiles and Detroit, had negotiated pay and benefits that helped drive their employers under. GST's pension benefits would get passed on to the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp., which in 2002 received $7.5 billion in claims from the steel industry alone. The PBGC covered GST's basic pension payouts.

The Obama ad doesn't note that the broader company, GS Industries, employed 3,500 and that the Kansas City plant (with 750 workers) was the only one shuttered. Other plants were bought and operate today. Nor does it mention Bain's other steel investment in the early 1990s, in an Indiana start-up called Steel Dynamics. The firm touts innovative technology and a nonunion workforce. It today reports $6.3 billion in revenue—25 times what it claimed in its 1996 IPO—and employs 6,000.

A private-equity firm looking to quickly strip value from a company—to "suck" the life out of it—does not do so by investing $100 million in modernization and holding on for eight years, through bankruptcy. Bain has surely made its share of mistakes, and one may well have been trying to resuscitate a traditional steel firm in the grip of industry upheaval. The irony, says Mr. Huselton, is that this plant "wouldn't even be in today's news, if it hadn't been the opportunity that came with Bain. Those jobs would have been gone in 1993."

That's a more revealing story—of the pressures of a global market, the dangers of an inflexible workforce, and the opportunities that come with private equity and risk-taking. It's just not one Team Obama wants to tell.

I've said a lot about greedy labor unions. And I could say more. But Obama, bankrolled by the SEIU and its like, doesn't want to put the blame where it belongs. Don't blame Mitt Romney. Blame the union.

The fraudulence of Obama

Yesterday, Peter Wehner wrote a post entitled, “The Fraudulence of Obama” with a damaging critique of our incumbent President. He wrote:

To understand the fundamental fraudulence of Barack Obama, consider just one issue: his relationship with lobbyists.

In arguably the most important speech of the campaign, the Jefferson-Jackson dinner in Iowa in 2007, Obama said, “[Lobbyists] have not funded my campaign, they will not work in my White House.” Upon taking office, Obama made quite a show of announcing new ethics rules barring lobbyists from working in the administration on issues that fell under their lobbying bailiwick. Yet Obama immediately allowed waivers for lobbyists working on issues that fell under their lobbying bailiwick.

But that’s not all. During the 2008 campaign, Obama said this:

I intend to tell the corporate lobbyists that their days of setting the agenda in Washington are over, that they had not funded my campaigns, and from my first day as president, I will launch the most sweeping ethics reform in U.S. history. We will make government more open, more accountable and more responsive to the problems of the American people.

When speaking about the destructive power of lobbyists in a town hall meeting in Bristol, Virginia, Obama was emphatic: “We are going to change how Washington works. They will not run our party. They will not run our White House. They will not drown out the views of the American people.” And in August, 2008, Obama said this: ““I suffer from the same original sin of all politicians, which is we’’ve got to raise money. But my argument has been and will continue to be that the disproportionate influence of lobbyists and special interest is a problem in Washington and in state capitals.”

Now let’s judge Obama’s words against his actions, with the help of a Washington Post story.

Here’s how the story begins:

Before 9 a.m., a group of lobbyists began showing up at the White House security gates with the chief executives of their companies, all of whom serve on President Obama’s jobs council, to be checked in for a roundtable with the president. At 1 p.m., a dozen representatives from the meat industry arrived for a briefing in the New Executive Office Building. At 3 p.m., a handful of lobbyists were lining up for a ceremony honoring the 2011 World Series champions, the St. Louis Cardinals. And at 4 p.m., a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs arrived in the Old Executive Office Building for a meeting with Alan B. Krueger, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.

It was an unremarkable January day, with a steady stream of lobbyists among the thousands of daily visitors to the White House and the surrounding executive office buildings, according to a Washington Post analysis of visitor logs released by the administration The visitor logs for Jan. 17 – one of the most recent days available – show that the lobbying industry Obama has vowed to constrain is a regular presence at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The records also suggest that lobbyists with personal connections to the White House enjoy the easiest access.

Now hypocrisy is not an unknown quality in a politician. But what sets Obama apart from almost everyone else is the lengths Obama goes to in order to portray himself as morally superior to the rest of the political class even as he acts in ways that completely shatter his claims. He reminds me of the minister who cannot help from condemning the very sin to which he is beholden. And so as recently as last month Obama was saying, “A lot of folks see the amounts of money that are being spent and the special interests that dominate and the lobbyists that always have access, and they say to themselves, maybe I don’t count.”

What’s impossible to know is the degree to which Obama is alarmingly cynical or the degree to which he is alarmingly self-deluded. Whatever the case, he is a man whose words mean nothing. Nothing at all.

This is not very surprising. After all, this is the same president who promised that if you were happy with your present health care plan, you could keep it. This is the president who said “There is not a liberal America and a conservative America, there is the United States of America.” (And again: “The pundits like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states - red states for Republicans, and blue states for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states. ... We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”) I could go on. But Wehner has said enough to make the point.

A follow-up to the endorsement of Bongino for Senate

I was just looking at Dan Bongino's website. Interestingly, I can't even tell from it his positions on the “social issues.” But actually, that's the way it should be.

Dan Bongino is running on the right issues. The things that need to be fixed in this country. No need to reconsider — I'm supporting him for the Senate. Read his stands at this site.

Dan Bongino for Senator

In this area, a lot of areas have these events (usually called “Taste of …” and the name of the area in question) where you can sample food from a lot of nearby restaurants. Yesterday was “Taste of Wheaton,” and I went there. Besides the food tables, there were a couple of rows of other tables, put up by various organizations: nonprofits, County agencies, commercial establishments, and both major parties. In fact, they put the Republicans' table right across the way from the Democrats' — whether on purpose or not. (Most people thought this was deliberate!) I went over to the Republicans' table, and by the table was Dan Bongino, the candidate in this year's election for Senator from Maryland. I hadn't supported Bongino in the primary, and I knew very little about him (except that I was likely to support any Republican against our incumbent, Ben Cardin), so I began the conversation asking why I should support him. I did not say anything about my own political beliefs, because I did not want him to know which issues he needed to emphasize to get my support. (I don't, as you who read this blog regularly would know, like the “social conservative” positions taken by many Rrpublican candidates these days, though I would vote for someone who self-identified as a social conservative against a Ben Cardin if social conservatism was not his chief issue.) Bongino's response, however, kept me quite satisfied. He began talking about reducing Government's impact on our lives — the kind of libertarian appeal with which I strongly agree. He then mentioned economic matters and the ineffectiveness of Ben Cardin (who has almost no legislation that he has sponsored among the laws). He never mentioned any of the social issues, and the campaign literature he handed me was similarly oriented toward economic matters and Bongino's qualifications. I certainly feel comfortable, on the basis of my conversation with him and his campaign literature, supporting Dan Bongino for Senator from Maryland.

Another voice on the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman story

Mansfield Frazier wrote a post on the Daily Beast site this morning. The main title talks about the need to try George Zimmerman, but it is another point he makes that I want to emphasize:

At heart, this case is really about the type of society some want to have versus the one the National Rifle Association wants to foist on an unsuspecting public. Just imagine for a minute that Trayvon Martin was an adult instead of a juvenile; further, that he was licensed to carry a concealed weapon; and still further, that he had a gun on his person when Zimmerman approached him. Under “Stand Your Ground” laws Martin could have just as easily shot and killed Zimmerman instead, and (if not for the fact he was black, and that laws—when race enters into the picture—have been applied unequally in this country for centuries) he then could have made the same self-defense claim. Under this type of Wild West mentality fistfights can (and will) escalate into murders.


Nonetheless, more laws are being proposed in some states to allow concealed weapons to be carried into bars, schools, and public buildings, all in the name of creating a safer society.


According to a study published in the prestigious American Journal of Epidemiology, however, “Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns in the home of dying from a homicide in the home …”


Writing on the website for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Violence, Dennis Henigan said, “The NRA has a wonderfully simple story to tell. In the NRA’s world, people are neatly divided into two readily identifiable groups: good guys and bad guys. In this imaginary world, we know that legal carriers of guns must be good guys and that good guys use their guns only in legitimate self-defense—that’s what makes them good guys in the first place. The Trayvon Martin tragedy reveals the real world to be far more complicated.” Indeed it is.


In the streets there’s a phenomenon called “pistol courage” which poses the question, would Zimmerman—if he wasn’t armed—have approached Martin in the aggressive manner in which he did? Put another way, are cowards, when they’re empowered with the advantage of firepower, willing to take more risks, and even provoke situations that could have been handled in another manner if they were not armed?


Many gun nuts brag about how they could blow someone away and sleep like babies, and for some of them that’s the gospel truth. But for others (even case-hardened soldiers and police officers) once they’ve taken the life of another human being they’re forever changed—and not for the better. And there’s really no way to know in advance how a person will be affected.


In the Martin/Zimmerman case, issues such as who was crying out for help and what Trayvon was saying to his girlfriend in the seconds before the confrontation cannot be dismissed, and can only be thoroughly examined in a court of law. But the real upside of a trial is that a much-needed spotlight will be placed on “Stand Your Ground” laws. Even if Zimmerman is found not guilty, if those dangerous laws are changed, society will have won a victory.

I'm glad to see this post. As I said earlier, it's really these gun laws that need to be blamed for the Trayvon Martin death. But I was perplexed that others didn't see it that way. Mansfield Frazier clearly gets it.

What have the two in common?

In Virginia, judges are elected by the legislative branch, unlike most of our states (Only Virginia and South Carolina do it this way). And the General Assembly, as it is called there, just got through a process where a judicial candidate, Tracy Thorne-Begland, was denied election because he is gay and living with a partner. One particular Republican delegate, Robert G. Marshall, led the opposition to Thorne-Begland, and 31 Republicans altogether opposed him, which was enough to kill the nomination.

This kind of bigotry saddens me, and makes me ashamed to be a member of the same party. However, the other party stands for all sorts of other things I cannot abide, so you will not see me joining the Democrats. I am a Republican because I oppose the Democrats' economic policies, whether it's fealty to organized labor or socialistic approaches to business, and because I oppose most Democrats' foreign policy positions. What the connection is between Republican economic and foreign-policy positions, which I favor, and this sort of homophobic bigotry I cannot fathom. And in fact there are conservative Republicans, from Dick Cheney to Michael Barone (columnist in the National Review and Washington Examiner), who support gay marriage, so it is still possible to detach these issues from each other. But how can the party shed this anti-gay image? Somehow it must. The Republican party is, on other issues, the party of individual freedom. It cannot be the party of coercion in this instance.

An[other] infuriating column by Cal Thomas

Yesterday I read a column in the Washington Examiner written by Cal Thomas, and as usual, Mr. Thomas' positions I find infuriating. Now in this column, he is actually advocating a position I share — that Obama should be opposed — but I think for all the wrong reasons. Thomas begins his column (named “The Gospel According to Obama”) with the paragraph:

It is one thing to talk about “fairness” when it comes to allowing gays and lesbians to marry; it is quite another to claim biblical authority for such relationships.

President Obama cited the Golden Rule about treating others as you would like to be treated. In doing so, he ignored the totality of Scripture and the notion that the Lord alone sets the rules for human behavior.

Now, Mr. Thomas seems to think that he alone is an expert on Scripture; or, more likely (since, if I recall correctly, he is a Roman Catholic) that all of the world is bound by what the Pope has said, and Mr. Thomas' deference to Papal infallibility should be shared by all. Now, whatever I may think about President Obama, I believe that he, as much as Cal Thomas, has an equal right to interpret the Scriptural meaning — and, in fact, I claim this right for myself as well. And in particular, since there are churches that are willing to solemnize gay marriages (even if his own is not), Mr. Thomas is in addition imposing a religious test contrary to both the spirit and the letter of Article VI, paragraph 3 of the United States Constitution:

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

So Mr. Thomas is way off base. And later in the same column, he says:

I recently wrote that it is becoming increasingly difficult for people who believe the Bible is God's Word to impose their beliefs on those who disagree with them. But it is something altogether different for those who disagree with them to claim the Bible doesn't say what it actually says. Obama apparently hopes there are sufficient numbers of biblical illiterates — and he could be right about this — who either don't notice his sleight of hand, or don't care.

Again, Cal Thomas knows “what [the Bible] actually says,” while Barack Obama does not. But then he slips into a different argument:

Thousands of years of human history have sustained marriage between one man and one woman.

In other words, “this is how it's always been.” But of course, until the 1860s, “how it's always been” included slavery; and one can name all sorts of things that once upon a time could be described as “how it's always been.” That does not mean they were right. But then, Thomas goes back to the Bible, and fires off a number of biblical quotations, but fails to note that the Bible also says he should not eat pork, that a widow should marry her late husband's brother, etc., etc. So why do these quotes carry more weight? After these quotations, Mr. Thomas goes on:

Liberal theologians have tried to modify, or even change, what is contained in the Bible, and there are those in our time who are following their example with the issue of same-sex marriage. People are free to accept or reject what Scripture says, but not to claim it says something it does not. In modern times, that's called spin. In an earlier time, it was called heresy.

What “liberal theologians” say deserves as much credibility as Mr. Thomas, who is offering only one interpretation of what Scripture says, an interpretation which he certainly has a right to hold to, but not to bind anyone else to. Now, Mr. Thomas does say one thing which I actually find to make some sense:

As he seeks to justify his position on same-sex marriage and other issues with at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture, President Obama might be said to be preaching another gospel. This could possibly lead to a fissure in his solid support among African-Americans, costing the president votes in November. It will also likely galvanize the culture warriors. Minorities mostly vote for Democrats, but they don't like their faith denied. That could cause some of them to stay home on Election Day, or even vote for Mitt Romney.

While I might challenge Mr. Thomas' characterization of President Obama's position as “at best a questionable use of and at worst a denial of Scripture,” I can certainly agree that there are African-Americans who might weaken their support for him, or possibly even vote for Mitt Romney, as a result of this; not many, because they seem so proud of having one of their number. But in the same issue of the Examiner, for example, columnist Gregory Kane, an African-American conservative who never did support Obama, mentions that his mother's support for Obama has been lost as a result of this stance.

In a sense, I should not gloat over someone casting a vote for Romney for a reason which I think should not govern a voter's decision. I shudder to think of the fact that I have people like Cal Thomas on “my team.” But I reason this way: Obama may lose some votes for the wrong reason. But if he does, I can't really shed any tears. Any reason that someone votes for Mitt Romney against Barack Obama helps remedy the terrible wrong that resulted from the 2008 election.

Obama: the worst of all Presidents? Perhaps not, but it's close!

Barack Obama has been one of our very worst Presidents. But I got to thinking: Is he the worst ever? Well, I can't really say; I've heard of some pretty bad Presidents, such as James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding, but not having lived through their Presidencies, I find it pretty hard to evaluate them vis-à-vis Obama. So I finally decided that I could only evaluate him as compared to the Presidents who served during my lifetime. And for the rest of this post, I will stick to that field.

When I was born, Franklin D. Roosevelt was President. But he died before my third birthday, so I really have no memories of him as President. And anyway, though my opinion of him is a whole lot lower than that of my FDR-loving parents, he would be out of the running for worst, so whether or not he should be counted among “the Presidents who served during my lifetime” doesn't really matter.

Thinking through the list of Presidents from Truman to Obama, I find that, while I am strongly negative about at least one, namely Bill Clinton, and I really think he should have been removed by the impeachment process for his lying under oath, there is really only one President who might contend with Pres. Obama for the title of “worst in my lifetime”: Jimmy Carter.

Jimmy Carter took two carefully crafted foreign policy deals and ruined them: first: we had found a way to have Communist China represented in Washington by the equivalent of an embassy, while not giving up our insistence that the true legal government of China was the Nationalist government in Taipei, and second: we had negotiated a settlement of the Vietnam War. Carter gave in to the Communist Chinese demand that we throw out the embassy of Nationalist China and give them the status as the legitimate government of China, and he essentially surrendered South Vietnam to the North. In general, Carter was hopelessly naïve about Communists; he expressed “shock” that Leonid Brezhnev would lie to him!

Domestically, Carter was pretty bad too: he appointed a doctor who had been found guilty of prescription drug law violations as his drug program manager! In general, knowing Jimmy Carter from Georgia was more important than competence in qualifying for an appointment in the Carter Administration,

Now, Barack Obama came into office because the economy had taken a serious dive. So you'd think he would use the powers of the Presidency to work on the economy. But his only economic proposal was really a “stimulus” that did not stimulate. Most of his efforts were spent trying to put through a “cap and trade” proposal that would, if anything, bring our economy down further (which never went through, in the end!) and, even more, actually forcing through an unconstitutional (well, ok, it has not yet been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, so it's only my opinion that it is unconstitutional!) law on health care, over the wishes of the American people. (Even in Massachusetts, they elected Scott Brown to Ted Kennedy's seat when Kennedy died, mainly because of his stance on that health care bill!)

So was Obama worse than Carter? It's a close call. Probably Carter deserves the “worst of the Presidents who served during my lifetime” title, and Obama is only #2. But it's hard to understand why anyone really contemplates voting to re-elect him this year.