Liberal Versus Conservative Reaction and Constitutional Drift!

Skidaway Island Republican Club

John Fund is the SIRC President's Day speaker, Feb., 18, 2013 John Fund is currently a National Affairs Columnist for National Review magazine and a contributor to the  Fox News Channel. He is considered a notable expert on American politics and the nexus between politics and economics.  John previously served as a columnist and editorial board member for The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of several books, including Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books, 2012) and The Dangers of Regulation Through Litigation (ATRA Press, 2008). He worked as a research analyst for the California Legislature in Sacramento before beginning his journalism career  as a reporter for the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.  Roll Call, the newspaper of Capitol Hill, called John  "the Tom Paine of the modern Congressional reform movement." He has won awards from the Institute for Justice, The School Choice Alliance and the Warren Brooks award for journalistic excellence from the American Legislative Exchange Council. John will be speaking at The Plantation Club, Feb 18th. Cocktails at 6: followed by dinner at 6:30. Cost is $100/person. His Topic: "Visitor's Guide to an Alien Planet: Washington, D.C."   That should intrigue some people.In many of my own memos I always refer to D.C. as Disney East! ---- Barry Rubin discusses the rationale for Obama's recent nominations and what effect they will have on our nation's foreign policy.   (See 1 below.) --- Jeff Foxworthy discusses the different reaction and paths a liberal and conservative take when they are confronted by something they find no to their liking.  He hits the nail on the head.  (See 2 below.) --- Victor Hanson on deficits.  (See 3 below.) ---  There is an increasing chorus of those who believe our Constitution no longer serves a useful purpose and we should abandon its dictates. The problem is that far too many have abandoned our constitutional dictates and this is why, as we move away from its intellectual anchorage, we have gone adrift. The authors argue Congress has far too much freedom in fiscal matters and do pretty much as they wish. (See 4 below.) --- --- Dick

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1) Noxious Nominations: 
The Four Horsemen of the American Foreign Policy Apocalypse

By Barry Rubin

I did a lot of soul-searching before writing my latest article, “After the Fall: What Do You Do When You Conclude America is (Temporarily or Permanently) Kaput?” Of course, I believed every word of it and have done so for a while. But would it depress readers too much? Would it just be too grim?

Maybe U.S. policy will just muddle through the next four years and beyond without any disasters. Perhaps the world will be spared big crises. Possibly the fact that there isn't some single big superpower enemy seeking world domination will keep things contained.

Perhaps that is true. Yet within hours after its publication I concluded that I hadn't been too pessimistic. The cause of that reaction is the breaking story that not only will Senator John Kerry be the new secretary of state; that not only will the equally reprehensible former Senator Chuck Hagel be secretary of defense, but that John Brennan, the president’s counterterrorism advisor, will become CIA chief.

About two years ago I joked that if Kerry would become secretary of state it was time to think about heading for that fallout shelter in New Zealand. This trio in power—which along with Obama himself could be called the four horseman of the Apocalypse for U.S. foreign policy—might require an inter-stellar journey.

Let me stress that this is not really about Israel. At the end of Obama's second term, U.S.-Israel relations will probably be roughly where they are now. Palestinian strategy--both by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas--has left the United States no diplomatic or "peace process" option on that front. The problem is one of U.S. interests, especially the American position in the Middle East but also in other parts of the world.

You can read elsewhere details about these three guys. Here I will merely summarize the two basic problems:

--Their ideas and views are horrible. This is especially so on Middle Eastern issues but how good are they on anything else? True, they are all hostile to Israel but this isn’t the first time people who think that way held high office. Far worse is that they are pro-Islamist as well as being dim-witted about U.S. interests in a way no foreign policy team has been in the century since America walked onto the world stage.

Brennan is no less than the father of the pro-Islamist policy. What Obama is saying is this: My policy of backing Islamists has worked so well, including in Egypt, that we need to do even more! All those analogies to 1930s’ appeasement are an understatement. Nobody in the British leadership said, “I have a great idea. Let’s help fascist regimes take power and then they’ll be our friends and become more moderate! That’s the equivalent of what Brennan does.

--They are all stupid people. Some friends said I shouldn’t write this because it is a subjective judgment and sounds mean-spirited. But honest, it’s true. Nobody would ever say that their predecessors—Hillary Clinton, Robert Gates, and David Petraeus—were not intelligent and accomplished. But these guys are simply not in that category. Smart people can make bad judgments; regular people with common sense often make bad judgments less often. But stupid, arrogant people with terrible ideas are a disaster.

Brennan’s only life accomplishment has been to propose backing radical Islamists. As a reward he isn't just being made head of intelligence for the Middle East but for the whole world! Has Brennan any proven administrative skill? Any knowledge of other parts of the world? No. All he has is a proximity to Obama and a very bad policy concept. What's especially ironic here is that by now the Islamist policy has clearly failed and a lot of people are having second thoughts.

With Brennan running the CIA, though, do you think there will be critical intelligence evaluations of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, or even Hamas? Is the CIA going to warn U.S. leaders about the repression against women, Christians, and moderates? Will there be warnings that Islamists are taking over Syria or reports on Islamist involvement in killing Americans in Benghazi?  Can we have confidence about U.S. policy toward Iran?

To get some insight into his thinking, consider the incident in which a left-wing reporter, forgetting there were people listening, reminded Brennan that in an earlier private conversation he admitted favoring engagement not only with the Lebanese terrorist group Hizballah but also the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. Ask yourself this question: when an American intelligence chief told Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood was a moderate, secular group who approved that line of argument?

Kerry, of course, was the most energetic backer of sponsoring Syrian dictator Bashir al-Assad before the revolt began. Now he will be the most energetic backer of putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Syria. Here is a man who once generalized about American soldiers in Vietnam as being baby-killers and torturers. Such things certainly happened but Kerry made the blame collective, except for himself of course.

As for Hagel, suffice it to say that the embarrassing quotes and actions from him in the past--including his opposition to sanctions against Iran--fueled a response to his proposed nomination so strong that the administration had to back down for a while.

What would have happened if President Harry Truman turned over American defense, diplomacy, and intelligence in 1946 to those who said that Stalin wanted peace and that Communist rule in Central Europe was a good thing?  

Obama has been president of the United States for four years. Yet in foreign policy, having some decent and competent people in high positions mitigated the damage. Well, the reins are now loosed; the muzzle is off.

I apologize for being so pessimistic but look at the cast of characters? When it comes to Obama Administration foreign policy’s damage on the world and on U.S. interests one can only say, like the great singer Al Jolson, folks, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

To get a sense of his thinking, check out Brennan’s article, “The Conundrum of Iran: Strengthening Moderates without Acquiescing to Belligerence,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 618, Terrorism: What the Next President Will Face (Jul., 2008), pp. 168-179. Here’s the conclusion:

“If the United States actually demonstrates that it will work to help advance rather than thwart Iranian interests, the course of Iranian politics as well as the future of U.S.-Iranian relations could be forever altered.”

The Obama Administration followed this advice during its first two years with the result being total failure. The theme of the 2008 article carries over to his view of the Muslim Brotherhood. If the United States shows it is friendly, helpful, and does not oppose their taking power then revolutionary Islamists will become moderate.

For example, he also proposes a U.S. policy, “to tolerate, and even to encourage, greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system….” This step, he suggests, will reduce “the influence of violent extremists in the organization.”

Of course, Hizballah does not need to stage terrorist attacks if it holds state power! Terrorism is only a tactic to seize control of countries. If you give revolutionaries their goal then why do they need to continue using such a tactic? Yet putting them in power does not increase stability, improve the lives of people, or benefit U.S. interests. If al-Qaeda, for example, overthrew the Iraqi or Saudi government you would see a sharp decline in terrorist attacks! If the Muslim Brotherhood rules Egypt, Tunisia, or Syria it doesn’t need to send suicide bombers into the marketplaces.

The same by the way would apply to anywhere else in the world. If Communist rebels took power in Latin American or Asian countries you wouldn’t find them hanging out in the jungles raiding isolated villages.

In Brennan’s terms, that means the problem would be solved. Instead, the correct response is parallel to Winston Churchill's point in his 1946 Fulton, Missouri, speech: "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines."

This is what Brennan—and the Obama Administration—fails to understand regarding this point. The danger is not terrorism but a dangerous revolutionary movement that becomes even more dangerous if it controls entire states, their resources, and their military forces. 

 Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal.
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2)

                    THEY OUGHT A OUTL A W THIS E-
MAIL STUFF!   

THE FENCE TEST, THINK A BOUT THIS, IT IS TRUE. You can't get any more accurate than this! This is straight forward country thinking...by Jeff Foxworthy  Which side of the fence? If you ever wondered which side of the fence you sit on, this is a great test! If a Republican doesn't like guns, he doesn't buy one. If a Democrat doesn't like guns, he wants all guns outlawed. If a Republican is a vegetarian, he doesn't eat meat. If a Democrat is a vegetarian, he wants all meat products banned for everyone. If a Republican is homosexual, he quietly leads his life. If a Democrat is homosexual, he demands legislated respect. If a Republican is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better his situation.  A Democrat wonders who is going to take care of him. If a Republican doesn't like a talk show host, he switches channels. Democrats demand that those they don't like be shut down. If a Republican is a non-believer, he doesn't go to church. A Democrat non-believer wants any mention of God and religion silenced. If a Republican decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job that provides it. A Democrat demands that the rest of us pay for his. If a Republican reads this, he'll forward it so his friends can have a good laugh.  ADemocrat will delete it because he's "offended". ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 3)When big deficits became good By Victor Davis Hanson As a senator and presidential candidate, Barack Obama said that he detested budget deficits. In 2006, when the aggregate national debt was almost $8 trillion less than today, he blasted George W. Bush's chronic borrowing and refused to vote for upping the debt ceiling: "Increasing America's debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that 'the buck stops here.'" In 2008, Obama further blasted Bush's continued Keynesian borrowing: "The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children ... so that we now have over $9 trillion of debt that we are going to have to pay back -- $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That's irresponsible. It's unpatriotic." Strong words. But so worried was Obama about the debt that just two weeks after he took office, he promised still more: "And that's why today I'm pledging to cut the deficit we inherited by half by the end of my first term in office. ... I refuse to leave our children with a debt that they cannot repay." In his first term, Obama has added more than $5 trillion to the national debt, borrowing more in four years than the "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" Bush did in eight. In fact, Obama is on schedule to add more total debt by the end of his two terms than all prior presidents combined. What happened to worries about leaving our children with a "debt they cannot repay"? And where did all borrowed money go, given that the war in Iraq has been over for more than a year, and we are winding down in Afghanistan? The recession that ended in 2009 cut revenues, and the population continues to get older and draw more on federal entitlements. But all that said, we have spent record trillions of dollars during the last four years expanding the size of government. A vast 2009 stimulus plan; new Obamacare; new federal employees; vast new expansions in food stamps, disability and unemployment insurance; and spiraling Medicare,Medicaid and Social Security payments all increased government spending in each year of the Obama presidency to a higher percentage of the gross domestic product than at any time since 1946. Obama, for all his overblown rhetoric in 2006, was once right about the deficits. But the antidote for the profligacy of the Bush administration was not to increase the borrowing even more. What, then, explains the vast gulf between the prior Obama rhetoric and his current record on deficits? Either one of two things occurred. The first possibility is that Obama and his advisors really believed that record deficit spending, near-zero interest rates and expansions in federal entitlements would jump-start the economy into prosperity. In fact, the opposite occurred. Economic growth continued to hover around or below 2 percent of GDP. Unemployment has never dipped below 7.8 percent during Obama's entire presidency. The massive borrowing made things worse, not better. A second explanation for Obama's "irresponsible" and "unpatriotic" behavior is that, at some point, he began to see political advantages to massive borrowing when combined with near-zero interest rates. The growth of entitlements is popular with many voters, especially given that 47 percent pay no federal income taxes. Politically, it proved wiser to provide free birth control pills than to be demagogued as wanting to throw granny over a cliff. Who wants to run on giving fewer things to voters and making everyone pay more for what they receive? Perhaps the Reagan-era notion of lower taxation could only be ended through a sense of impending calamity. As formerWhite House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel once put it, "You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before." Reagan once advocated a "starve the beast" philosophy -- lower taxes resulted in less money for out-of-control government. Obama flipped that sequence to a "gorge the beast" paradigm of an out-of-control government demanding far more in taxes. Higher taxes, weighted heavily toward the affluent, spread the wealth and correct the inequities of market-based compensation. They punish the culpable 1 percent. And they remind some that they did not build their businesses on their own. Deficits force income redistribution through changes in the tax code that in any other political climate would have proven impossible. But beware of what you wish for. Obama has already gotten his dream of a vastly increased government, federalized health care, near-zero interest rates and record debt to force higher taxes. The problem now is that there are not enough millionaires and billionaires to make up for the shortfall. And if interest rates rise just a bit, the debt will bury us all -- fat cats and thin cats alike. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4)Our Obsolete Constitution? by Richard A. Epstein (Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow and member of the Property Rights, Freedom, and Prosperity Task Force) James Madison would have supported the flat tax. By common consent, our constitutional system of government is broken in some deep way that resists any short-term fixes. Anyone who has witnessed the fiscal cliff saga must fear that the brinksmanship so evident between the Republicans and Democrats is rapidly becoming par for the political course. Now that the negotiations have been completed and the debt limit battle looms nigh, it is clear that our nation’s political problems have gone from bad to worse. Our modern constitutional system seems to be weighed down by non-stop political crises, from entitlement reform to labor relations. With each new crisis comes a short-term fix. Over time, these fixes will only exacerbate the nation’s long-term problem of living beyond its means—for now, short-term interest rates remain low enough to fund the nation’s tidal wave of debt. What, if anything, should be done about our political crises? On this question, a recent New York Times op-ed by Georgetown Law Center professor Louis Michael Seidman gives precisely the wrong answer. In his piece, “Let’s Give Up on the Constitution,” Seidman attributes the current “fiscal chaos” to an antiquated Constitution to which we should owe scant respect. In this vein, he dismisses the founding fathers as “a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves.” Why therefore should anyone care about what James Madison thought when he wrote the Federalist papers nearly 225 years ago? The problem with the original constitutional design, he goes on to argue, is that it requires all revenue measures to begin in the House of Representatives. But the framers had a point in having revenue measures originate in the more populous house; it is an indirect way of restraining the propertied elites in the Senate. Beyond that, this limitation is easily evaded by a variety of procedural maneuvers and has not limited some of our more grotesque revenue bills from being passed into law, including the noted exemplar spawned by the recent fiscal cliff negotiations. Unfortunately, Seidman has the causation reversed. The reason why the situation today is so perilous is that Congress is not strictly bound by the Constitution, just as Seidman advocates. There are currently no constitutional constraints limiting the discretion of Congress to decide what tax burden will be placed on what groups for what reasons. In fact, the only restraint on taxation is a broken-down system of public deliberation, which results in a fruitless question to find, as Seidman puts it, “a common vocabulary to express aspirations that, at the broadest level, everyone can embrace.” Otherwise, Congress is free to dispense tax favors and impose tax burdens as though there were no tomorrow. Yet there is no such common vocabulary because there are a set of irreconcilable political ambitions from which neither side will retreat. The progressives think in terms of income and wealth redistribution; they believe that the problems of economic growth and jobs will take care of themselves, notwithstanding four years of high unemployment rates and an ever more progressive system of taxation. The fiscal conservatives think that low taxes on a broad economic base, coupled with the deregulation of labor, real estate, and financial markets, will produce the high growth rates that will, in the end, do more to help the other 99 percent than the policy agenda of the current progressives. James Madison's Wisdom For Today On these issues we can learn far more from James Madison than his modern critics. In Federalist Number 10, he addressed the problem of factions, writing: “By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” The chief mission of government, he asserts, is to develop permanent institutional restraints to guard against factions. One of those was originally found in Article I, section 8, clause 1, of the Constitution, which stated that “Congress shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” Madison took a very narrow view of that Clause in Federalist Number 41, noting that the Clause had been lifted from a parallel provision in the Articles of Confederation that in no way sought to confer unlimited powers on the federal government. In his view, the proper way to think about this clause of the Constitution was to link the objects on which Congress could spend money to those that it could regulate under its enumerated powers, all of which were given far narrower readings in 1787 than they are today. If anything, an even narrower version of the clause seems defensible given that all three objects of permissible expenditure of public revenues are public goods of the sort that must be supplied to all individuals if they are to be supplied to any. Paying off state debts and providing for the common defense are classic public goods. The last power that deals with the “general Welfare of the United States” is not some open sesame clause that renders irrelevant the limitations of paying off debt and providing for the common defense. The key words here are “of the United States,” which refers to the nation as a whole, not—here the link to Federalist 10 becomes explicit—to this or that particular faction. To see why, it is useful to compare the collective expenditures made for the general welfare of the United States and corporate expenditures that are made for the general welfare of corporations. Limitations are always put into corporate charters to ensure that cash or property is not transferred from one unfortunate group of shareholders to another with more power, like the company’s officers or directors. The key challenge in the formation of a union among jealous states is to give them confidence that their taxes will similarly be spent on collective goods, and not on transfer payments that subject one faction to expropriation by another. To be sure, there are always some difficult cases, but these are not sufficient to upend the overall system. No one should doubt that the creation of an interstate highway system falls within the conception of general welfare even if the network of local roads does not. The Flat Tax Solution The limitations from the spending clause are one component of a constitutional system dedicated to the control of factions. But it is also necessary to insist, as a constitutional matter, that all taxes be flat, as yet another protection against the risks of redistribution through faction. This can be done through a consistent application of the Takings Clause. Many people might be either aghast or amazed at so strong a claim. But in its short form, the argument runs as follows. There is, in principle, no watertight distinction between taxes and takings. With the latter, the government occupies property, for which it must pay compensation. With the former, it threatens to seize property, via a tax lien, if taxes are not paid. In both cases, the government is allowed to take so long as it supplies compensation. With specific parcels of land, that is done through cash payments from the public treasury. With taxes, the benefits come in the form of (non-divisible) public goods. To be sure, it is impossible to supply exact equivalents between property taxed and benefit supplied. But without question, the flat tax gives the best first estimate, while limiting the power of Congress to use an explicit program of redistribution that can rip a nation apart. The efforts of all branches of government to keep that understanding alive were more or less successful until the early part of the twentieth century, when progressive forces began to overwhelm the more pristine conception of Congressional powers. The Sixteenth Amendment, ratified in 1913, removed the requirement that income taxes be apportioned among the several states, and was widely understood to authorize the imposition of progressive taxation as well. The Maternity Act of 1921 relaxed matters on the spending side to allow for federal funding for maternity and child care. The Supreme Court brushed aside the constitutional challenge to the law in the 1923 cases of Massachusetts v. Mellonand Frothingham v. Mellon on the ground that neither individual citizens nor the states had standing to challenge the law. So the law went without any judicial review of whether this expansion of the federal spending power met constitutional muster. By this time, the original understanding of federal powers to tax and spend were in tatters, and it took only some deft words by Justice Benjamin Nathan Cardozo in the 1937 case of Helvering v. Davis to make it crystal clear that the power of Congress faced little or no oversight from the Court. That understanding was carried forward by all sides in last year’s health-care case, NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), which upheld the individual mandate, making clear that Congress was subject to no check in its exercise of the taxing power so long as there was some rational basis to forge a connection between the ends chosen and the means selected to reach those ends. The older conception of public goods has been entirely rejected by all justices on the Supreme Court regardless of their political persuasion, so we have a current legal regime that is just the one Professor Seidman craves. On taxing and spending, we have a constitutional structure that is not informed by a single action or statement of James Madison or any other founder. Instead, our structure allows Congress to debate the many vexing problems of current times unhindered by constitutional principle, passing statutes whose “wisdom or fairness” is beyond the power and the competence of the courts to judge. It is precisely because this New Deal constitutional structure is in place that we face fiscal cliffs and political chaos. Congress has so many degrees of freedom that it is all too possible for a winning coalition to target its enemies in order to help its friends. Thus it is now in the interest of President Obama to demonize the “millionaires and billionaires” who do not pay their “fair share” of taxes under a tax scheme that looks more progressive than any this country has faced since 1979. In effect, popular groups can isolate and outvote persons of property in ways that will only give Congress more resources to spend money on special programs whose costs are high and benefits are dubious. Though we may have escaped a worse fate by resolving the fiscal cliff negotiations, next time we may not be so lucky. Richard A. Epstein, the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of Law, New York University Law School, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. His areas of expertise include constitutional law, intellectual property, and property rights. His most recent books are Design for Liberty: Private Property, Public Administration, and the Rule of Law (2011), The Case against the Employee Free Choice Act (Hoover Press, 2009) and Supreme Neglect: How to Revive the Constitutional Protection for Private Property (Oxford Press, 2008).