For those who have never been to Tybee, it is a very laid back little beach town that is a mixture of beautiful private homes and as you move to the back river there are a lot of smaller cottage type homes. No high rises!
There is not much by way of shopping because the season lasts about 6 months. There are some good restaurants, Sundae Cafe is probably one of the best in the Savannah area and as you drive to Tybee from Savannah, about 15 miles, Elle is one of the most beautiful restaurants I have ever eaten at and the Thai food is superb.
Tybee is an old fashion beach town and is a great place for families.
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;
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I have a question that perplexes me and maybe you have an answer.
Obama says the greatest threat to America and to our military is climate change yet he has enacted an agreement that allows a rogue and fanatic leader to pollute the air with nuclear particles. Maybe I am missing something. Please help me to understand both the wisdom and logic of his actions.
Thanks in advance for any help!
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Jonathan Pollard should never have been given the harsh sentence and releasing him now is a side show . His release and a lousy agreement have nothing to do with each other except it is ploy on Obama's part to try and make nice and throw Israel a bone. The bone is Pollard's skinny skeleton of his former self.. (See 1 below.)
Obama wants to take everyone's eye off the ball of a questionable and dangerous deal and Pollard's release is just another ploy. Also what about the four Americans abandoned by Obama and Kerrystill in Iran? (See 1a below.)
===
This should make sense to anyone with their head screwed on 'correctly' - wanted to say right but chose not to for obvious reasons. (See 2 below.)
Peter Berkowitz, no relationship that I know about, has written a thoughtful piece about contemporary conservatism, how and why it came to be and how and why it needs to move forward.
Obama has been effective in changing America partly because he controlled Congress in his first term, then was able to continue in his ways because a feckless Republican Congress was afraid to challenge him because he was black and they lacked the leadership that could meld them into a cohesive force.
Much of what Obama has done has not been good for our nation but conservatives must prioritize, knowing they cannot reverse everything Obama has imposed. They must offer solid solutions to the many problems that have been festering long before Obama became president and do so in bite sizes. Four solutions are far better than 10 failed attempts.
Trump highlights the frustrations many feel but in a manner that is not acceptable, in my opinion. He deserves credit for touching several of the third rails and bringing them forward and now, as the debates begin and the nomination process moves forward Trump and all the others must offer solutions that will be embraced by the middle.
Will they be able to do so? Stay tuned, we are about to find out. (See 2a below.)
===
Dick
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1)
U.S. Preparing to Release Convicted Israeli Spy Jonathan Pollard, Officials Say
Some administration officials hope freeing spy may smooth relations with Israel after Iran nuclear deal
Israeli protesters march on behalf of Jonathan Pollard in honor of his 49th birthday in this photo from August 2003. PHOTO: GALI TIBBON/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
The Obama administration is preparing to release convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollardfrom prison, according to U.S. officials, some of whom hope the move will smooth relations with Israel in the wake of the Iran nuclear deal.
Such a decision would end a decadeslong fight over Mr. Pollard, who was arrested on charges of spying for Israel in 1985 and later sentenced to life in prison. The case has long been a source of tension between the U.S. and Israel, which has argued that a life sentence for spying on behalf of a close U.S. partner is too harsh. Israel has for years sought Mr. Pollard’s early release, only to be rejected by the U.S.
Now, some U.S. officials are pushing for Mr. Pollard’s release in a matter of weeks. Others expect it could take months, possibly until his parole consideration date in November.
A parole hearing for Mr. Pollard was held in early July. Mr. Pollard’s lawyer, Eliot Lauer, said he hasn’t heard from the parole commission “and I would expect that either I or my client would be the ones who would be notified.’’ That hearing would have been the moment for the U.S. to object to Mr. Pollard’s pending release. Mr. Lauer wouldn’t say if the government raised objections.
Some U.S. officials strongly denied Friday there was any link between the Iran deal and Mr. Pollard’s prospective release, saying that any decision would be made by the U.S. Parole Commission.
A White House spokesman referred questions to the Justice Department, where a spokesman declined to comment on a matter which may be before the Parole Commission.
Mark Regev, spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, declined to comment.
Mr. Pollard, 60 years old, was a civilian analyst with the U.S. Navy when he was arrested for passing secret documents to Israel. He eventually pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life.
Anne Henderson Pollard and Jonathan Pollard at their wedding Aug. 9, 1985, in Italy. PHOTO:GETTY IMAGES
Under sentencing laws at the time he was convicted, Mr. Pollard has to be considered for parole after 30 years, though that doesn’t mean he has to be granted parole. The Bureau of Prisons website currently lists his possible release date as Nov. 21, which is the date the federal parole commission is slated to consider whether to end his sentence.
Last year, President Barack Obama told an Israeli interviewer: “I have no plans for releasing Jonathan Pollard immediately, but what I am going to be doing is to make sure that he, like every other American who’s been sentenced, is accorded the same kinds of review and the same examination of the equities that any other individual would provide.’’
To get out before November would require unusual intervention. In the federal prison system, often the easiest way to free an inmate early is to cite deteriorating health. Mr. Pollard’s supporters say he is suffering from a host of medical ailments that should qualify him for mercy.
The U.S. has considered releasing him before but always backed away from such a move, largely because of opposition from senior leaders at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Justice Department. When he was sentenced, then-Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger said it was hard to imagine “a greater harm to national security than that caused by” Mr. Pollard.
It is possible that such opposition could again scuttle any release, but it appears his chances of winning freedom are better now than they have ever been, U.S. officials said. Some U.S. officials said they expect he will be a free man before the year is over.
Mr. Netanyahu has personally pressed for years to get the U.S. to release Mr. Pollard, who is currently serving time in a federal prison in Butner, N.C.
Discord between Israel and the U.S., over the recent failed Middle East peace initiative and how to handle Iran, has taken the relationship between the two allies to new lows. Mr. Netanyahu has been a leading opponent of the deal struck between Tehran and six world powers to curb Iran’s nuclear program.
When U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter visited Israel earlier this week, after the nuclear deal was concluded, the two governments disagreed over how the two should deliver public remarks. Secretary of State John Kerry has announced a trip early next month to the region, but so far hasn’t included Israel as one of his stops.
The fate of Mr. Pollard is close to a national obsession in Israel, where he has become a cause célèbre.
“I can only say that like all of Israel I will be very happy if he is released,” said Noam Shalit, father of former Hamas hostage Gilad Shalit, and a public supporter of Mr. Pollard. “I can’t speak to international relations…But on the human level, I’d say it’s about time.”
Michael Oren, a member of the Knesset for the center-right Kulanu party, and Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2009 to 2013, said he had been hopeful Mr. Pollard would be paroled. Mr. Oren, however, drew a distinction between the Pollard news and the tensions created by the Iran deal.
“While we are delighted that Jonathan Pollard will be a free man again, this will not change in any way our position on the nuclear deal,” he said. “The Pollard case is about justice and clemency and the nuclear deal about security and survival.”
The prospect of Mr. Pollard’s freedom still grates on many U.S. intelligence officials, in part because his release likely wouldn’t come as part of a like-for-like swap, as espionage cases are often resolved. Other officials counter that 30 years is a fair punishment and that keeping Mr. Pollard in prison until he dies would serve little purpose.
Mr. Pollard has explained his espionage activity by citing a great affinity for Israel, though counterintelligence officials say he was paid tens of thousands of dollars for his work.
From June 1984 through November 1985, Mr. Pollard removed large amounts of highly classified U.S. intelligence from his office, made copies and delivered it to Israeli operatives.
About a year after his spying began, federal agents stopped Mr. Pollard as he was leaving work and questioned him about the possible unauthorized removal of classified information.
During that conversation, he twice took breaks to call his wife, using a prearranged code word “cactus,” signaling that she should remove a suitcase full of classified information from their apartment. She also pleaded guilty and served three years in prison and later moved to Israel.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Mr. Pollard’s release “would be nothing more than a pathetic attempt by a weak administration to curry favor with our Israeli allies who across the board reject this dangerous deal with Iran.’’
A spokesman for another GOP presidential candidate, Rick Santorum said even though he supports the release of Mr. Pollard, “this does not compensate for the tremendous damage the Obama administration has done to Israeli-American relations and the damage the Iran deal poses.’’
—Noga Tarnopolsky contributed to this article.
1a)
The Iran Deal and the ‘Problem of Conjecture’
Obama is hoping that the nuclear pact will lead to equilibrium in the Middle East. All the evidence points the other way.
Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani on March 8 in the Salahuddin province of Iraq, where he is leading Shiite militias against Islamic State; President Obama at a White House news conference, July 15; Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in Tehran, June 4. PHOTO:REUTERS/ASSOCIATED PRESS/GETTY IMAGES
In making the case for his nuclear-arms-control deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran, President Obama has confronted Congress with a stark choice. “There really are only two alternatives here,” he declared at last week’s press conference. “Either the issue of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon is resolved diplomatically through a negotiation or it’s resolved through force, through war.”
This binary argument is so central to his administration’s case that the president provided a second formulation: Without the deal, he said, “we risk even more war in the Middle East, and other countries in the region would feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear programs, threatening a nuclear arms race in the most volatile region in the world.”
Listening to all this, I am reminded of what Henry Kissinger once called the “problem of conjecture.” Writing in 1963, before anyone had devised a way to slow down a Soviet nuclear-arms program vastly bigger than any Iran will ever have, Mr. Kissinger summed up the dilemma that faces any strategic decision maker: “the choice between making the assessment which requires the least effort or making an assessment which requires more effort.” The problem of conjecture is that if a statesman “acts on the basis of a guess, he will never be able to prove that his effort was necessary, but he may save himself a great deal of grief later on. . . . If he waits, he may be lucky or he may be unlucky.”The president insists that the Iran deal is tightly focused on “making sure” that the Iranians “don’t have a bomb.” It is not, he says, “contingent on Iran changing its behavior” in any other respect—notably the funding of proxy armies and terrorist organizations throughout the Middle East. “The incremental additional money that they’ve got to try to destabilize the region,” according to Mr. Obama, is not “more important than preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.”
The key point of the problem of conjecture is that the payoffs are asymmetrical. A successful pre-emptive action is never rewarded in proportion to its benefits because “posterity forgets how easily things might have been otherwise.” Indeed, the statesman who acts pre-emptively is more likely to be condemned for the upfront costs of pre-emption than to be praised for its benefits in the form of averted calamities. By contrast, playing for time is not absolutely certain to lead to disaster. Something may turn up.
To illustrate his point, Mr. Kissinger cited the classic example of the policy of appeasement, which was designed to slow down, not to halt or reverse, the rearmament and expansion of Nazi Germany. If the democracies had moved earlier to contain Germany, Mr. Kissinger argued, “we wouldn’t know today whether Hitler was a misunderstood nationalist, whether he had only limited objectives, or whether he was in fact a maniac. The democracies learned that he was in fact a maniac. They had certainty but they had to pay for that with a few million lives.”
The analogy with 1930s Europe is as overused as it is rarely applicable. But in one respect it is relevant here. Like President Obama today, Britain’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was playing for time in 1938, reasoning that a conflict at that point would be worse than a conflict in the future. The conjecture, then as now, was that buying time would improve the relative strategic position.
Whatever Mr. Obama may say, the point of this nuclear deal isn’t just to postpone the Iranian acquisition of nuclear weapons by 10 years. For it to be more than a mere deferral, it also must improve the relative strategic position of the U.S. and its allies so that by 2025 they will be in a stronger position to stop Iran from entering the club of nuclear-armed powers. How might the U.S. achieve this?
As the president put it, his “hope is that building on this deal, we can continue to have conversations with Iran that incentivize them to behave differently in the region, to be less aggressive, less hostile, more cooperative . . . in resolving issues like Syria or what’s happening in Iraq, to stop encouraging Houthis in Yemen.” His goal by the time he “turn[s] over the keys to . . . the next president, is that we are on track to defeat ISIL . . . that we have jumpstarted a process to resolve the civil war in Syria, [and] that in Iraq . . . we’ve also created an environment in which Sunni, Shia and Kurd are starting to operate and function more effectively together.”
This echoes Mr. Obama’s illuminating account of his strategy for the Middle East to the New Yorker magazine in January 2014. “It would be profoundly in the interest of citizens throughout the [Middle East] if Sunnis and Shias weren’t intent on killing each other,” he mused. And “if we were able to get Iran to operate in a responsible fashion—not funding terrorist organizations, not trying to stir up sectarian discontent in other countries, and not developing a nuclear weapon—you could see an equilibrium developing between Sunni, or predominantly Sunni, Gulf states and Iran.”
In short, for all the high-flown rhetoric of the president’s speeches, his goal is the classic realist objective of a balance of power in the region. The technicalities of the Iran deal—the number of centrifuges, the size of the enriched-uranium stockpile, the rigor of the inspections regime—need not detain us here. The key question is whether or not slowing down Iran’s nuclear program will increase regional stability. Critics of the deal should acknowledge that it might, for in the realm of conjecture there are no certainties. But the president and his advisers should admit that the probability is very, very low.
“The really important question,” Mr. Obama told the Atlantic magazine in May, is “how do we find effective partners—not just in Iraq, but in Syria, and in Yemen, and in Libya—that we can work with, and how do we create the international coalition and atmosphere in which people across sectarian lines are willing to compromise and are willing to work together in order to provide the next generation a fighting chance for a better future?” The answer: Not this way.
Why should Iran suddenly mend its ways? In return for merely slowing down its pursuit of nuclear weapons, it is being handed up to $150 billion in previously frozen assets, a commercial bonanza as sanctions are lifted, and the prospect of an end to conventional arms and ballistic-missile embargoes after, respectively, five and eight years. All Iran has to do is keep the International Atomic Energy Agency happy that it is sticking to its nuclear commitments. There will be no “snap back” of sanctions if Tehran opts to use its new resources to double or quadruple its support for Hezbollah and Hamas, the Assad regime in Syria, and the Houthi rebellion in Yemen.
Now ask yourself: How are Iran’s rivals likely to respond to this timeline of Iranian rearmament: increased support for proxies this year, upgraded conventional weapons in 2020, ballistic missiles in 2023, and nukes in 2025? The president’s conjecture is that by buying time he also gets closer to a regional balance. The alternative and much more likely scenario is that he gets an arms race and escalating conflict.
Historical analogies must be used with care. Last week the president boldly likened his deal with Iran to Richard Nixon’s opening to China and Ronald Reagan’s strategic-arms-reduction treaty with the Soviet Union. These analogies are misleading. Mao Zedong andMikhail Gorbachev did their deals with the U.S. from positions of weakness. In the early 1970s, the Chinese Communists were threatened externally by the Soviets and internally by their own crazy Cultural Revolution. In the 1980s the Soviets were losing the Cold War not only economically but ideologically. By contrast, though under intense economic pressure because of the U.S.-led sanctions campaign, the Iran regime has been gaining strategically since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and domestically since the crushing of the Green Revolution in 2009.
In the Cold War, communism posed a twofold challenge: the Leninist and the Maoist. The U.S. had some success containing the Soviet version in Europe and the Middle East, but struggled to contain the Maoist version in Korea, risked Armageddon to keep Soviet missiles out of Cuba, and failed miserably to save South Vietnam. The Kissingerian solution was to be closer to the two Communist powers than they were to each other.
The U.S. used a mix of détente and containment on the Soviets, and engagement with the Chinese. But Washington also built very strong alliances in Europe and Asia. And the U.S. overtly resisted the ideological challenge posed by both brands of Marxism.
What, by contrast, is the strategy today? Faced with two forms of Islamic extremism, Shiite and Sunni, we are tilting toward Iran, the principal sponsor of the former. We are alienating our allies, moderate Sunnis as well as Israelis. In doing so, I fear, we are stoking the flames of sectarian conflict at all levels, from the local to the national to the regional. And all the while President Obama repeats the hollow mantra that “Islam is a religion of peace.”
To repeat: No one can say for sure what will come of the president’s strategy. It may magically produce equilibrium in the Middle East, as he hopes. But all the evidence points the other way: toward a continuing escalation of violence in the region, and indeed throughout the Islamic world.
According to the International Institute of Strategic Studies’ Armed Conflict Database, total fatalities due to armed conflict increased world-wide by a factor of roughly four between 2010 and 2014. The Middle East and North Africa accounted for more than 70% of the increase.
According to the statistics on terrorism gathered by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, the number of terrorist incidents world-wide quadrupled between 2006 and 2013, while the number of fatalities rose by 130%. In that period, the percentage of fatalities attributable to Muslim groups rose to 92% from 75%.
President Obama’s conjecture is that his nuclear-arms deal with Iran will somehow break these trends. My conjecture is that the effect will be exactly the opposite. Even before he hands over the White House keys to his successor, we shall see that there was no simple, binary choice between peace and war. We bought time. We postponed Iran’s nuclear breakout. But we also stoked the flames of a conflict that doesn’t need nukes to get a lot more lethal than it already is.
Mr. Ferguson’s first volume of a biography of Henry Kissinger will be published by Penguin Press in September.
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2)When you vote for an incumbent you
are perpetuating our government as it is
now. Nothing will change.
now. Nothing will change.
These three, short sentences tell you a
lot about the direction of our current
government and cultural environment:
lot about the direction of our current
government and cultural environment:
1.) We are advised NOT
to judge ALL Muslims by the actions of a few
lunatics, but we are encouraged to judge ALL
gun owners by the actions of a few
lunatics.
Funny how that works. And here's another
one worth considering.
one worth considering.
2.) Seems we
constantly hear about how Social Security is
going to run out of money.
How come we never hear about welfare or
food stamps running out of money? What's
interesting is the first group "worked for"
their money, but the second didn't.
food stamps running out of money? What's
interesting is the first group "worked for"
their money, but the second didn't.
Think about it..... Last but not least:
3.) Why are we cutting
benefits for our veterans, no pay raises for
our military and cutting our army to a level
lower than before WWII, but we are not
stopping payments to illegal aliens such as
monthly payments for each child, money for
housing, food stamps, free education
including college and also the right to
vote?
Am I the only
one missing something?
one missing something?
2a)
The Right Way Forward for Conservatism
Despite the rise of Donald Trump and big Supreme Court rulings on gay marriage and Obamacare, Republicans can get out of their funk if they unite around what’s best in the conservative tradition
Sen. Barry Goldwater was the modern conservative movement’s first national standard-bearer. Here, as Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, gold coins rained down on convention delegates.. PHOTO: JOHN DOMINIS/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
On Aug. 6, the top 10 Republican contenders for their party’s presidential nomination—as measured by the average of five national polls—will take the stage in Cleveland for the first of a scheduled 11 primary debates over the next eight months. The candidates will take turns attacking the Affordable Care Act, denouncing President Barack Obama’s Iran deal and insisting on the need to promote economic growth by cutting taxes, curbing regulation and reducing spending.
In a rambling announcement of his candidacy in mid-June, Donald Trump declared that Mexico is “sending” criminals, including “rapists,” to the U.S. Former Gov. Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio criticized his inflammatory opinions, but Mr. Trump only doubled down on his immigration stance.But as inviting a target as the president and his policies present, the GOP hopefuls may well save their sharpest attacks for one another. Recent weeks have highlighted both prominent fissures among conservatives and the challenges posed to their movement by the country’s changing social and political terrain.
A week later, Republican Gov. Nikki Haley of South Carolina—responding to the racially motivated massacre of nine African-Americans at a Charleston church—called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from the State House grounds. Sens. Lindsey Graham and Tim Scott, also Republicans, stood by her side. Ms. Haley, a two-term governor and rising GOP star, offended traditionalists throughout the South and raised the hackles of many conservatives elsewhere who balk at even the appearance of kowtowing to political correctness. But within two weeks, South Carolina’s Republican-dominated House and Senate voted overwhelmingly to remove the Confederate flag from the State House grounds. It came down July 10.
Three days after Ms. Haley’s statement, in a 6-3 majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court upheld the Internal Revenue Service’s interpretation of an obscure but crucial provision of the Affordable Care Act. To the consternation of conservatives—not least Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote a scorching dissent, and Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, who joined it—this was the second time in three years that Justice Roberts had provided a justification for rejecting a legal challenge that could well have doomed President Obama’s signature domestic legislation
The next day, in a 5-4 majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court discovered in the due-process and equal-protection clauses of the 14th Amendment a fundamental right to same-sex marriage. Justices Roberts, Scalia, Thomas and Alito each penned strongly worded dissents, contending that the majority’s holding had no basis in law, arrogated power to the judiciary and encouraged the pernicious notion that opposition to same-sex marriage could only arise from—and express—ignorance or bigotry.
It has been, in short, a rough month for conservatives. But it’s nothing that conservatives who draw on the best in their own tradition can’t handle.
The conservative movement in the U.S. arose in the years after World War II, in response to the New Deal’s enormous enlargement of the welfare state and the Cold War-era threat of expansionist totalitarian communism. Since those days, conservatives have successfully managed a range of setbacks and challenges, and they can do so again today.
They should forthrightly reaffirm their commitment to the Constitution’s principles of individual freedom, equality under law, and limited government—all of which presuppose and protect religious faith and traditional morality. They should distinguish among what they can alter, what they must accept and what they should embrace. And they should design principled reforms that can win majority support in a country where diversity ensures that any conceivable national majority will include a significant spectrum of opinion.
The movement’s first national standard-bearer was Sen. Barry Goldwater. In 1964, the Arizonan lost to President Lyndon Johnson in a landslide: Johnson carried 44 states and the District of Columbia, won 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52 and took 61% of the popular vote. Conservatism seemed thoroughly repudiated.Conservatives should also recall their shifting fortunes over the relatively short history of their movement, a history that underscores how much their political prospects depend on the capacity, favored by our constitutional system, to harmonize principle with the claims of democratic sentiment.
Republicans prevailed in five of the next six presidential elections. In 1984, former Goldwater supporter Ronald Reagan won re-election in a landslide of his own, taking 525 electoral votes to Walter Mondale’s 13, carrying 49 states (leaving Mr. Mondale only his home state of Minnesota and the District of Columbia) and winning 59% of the popular vote.
The synthesis of individual liberty, limited government and respect for tradition and faith that Reagan embodied eroded in the 1990s under the brash leadership of House Speaker Newt Gingrich. It deteriorated further during the presidency of George W. Bush.
The Bush administration’s war on terror, invasion of Iraq and big domestic spending so divided conservatives that, as Mr. Bush left office in 2009, the two main camps in contemporary conservatism—social conservatives and limited-government or libertarian conservatives—wanted nothing more to do with each other.
It fell to Mr. Obama to reunite conservatives. He managed to do this within months of his inauguration—with a pork-laden $800 billion stimulus package and a determined push, despite a historic economic crisis, to enact comprehensive health-care reform. With these sweeping measures, Mr. Obama convinced quarreling conservatives that their shared opposition to his agenda outweighed their philosophical differences.
Energized by the tea-party movement—which includes many social conservatives committed to restoring limits on the federal government—conservatives came storming back in the 2010 midterm elections. By winning control of the House of Representatives, they created a major roadblock to the president’s ambitions.
Although Mr. Obama managed to secure a second term in 2012, Republicans enjoyed dramatic gains in the 2014 midterm elections: They extended their margin in the House, took the Senate and scored historic victories in state races, resulting in GOP control of 31 governorships and more than two-thirds of all state legislative chambers.
When viewed against the backdrop of conservatism’s vicissitudes over the last 65 years, this summer’s controversies seem considerably less than catastrophic.
To be sure, Mr. Trump’s demagoguery on immigration is a recipe for alienating the center right and independents, whose votes are indispensable to Republican hopes for winning the White House—to say nothing of the country’s fast-growing bloc of Latino voters, many of them clustered in highly contested states. But conservatives should acknowledge that Mr. Trump has tapped into widely shared anxieties.
To regain their footing on these issues, conservatives should support lawful immigration. This will require serious candidates to set out proposals to secure the nation’s borders, reform the immigration system, welcome properly admitted newcomers from around the world and deal humanely with the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been encouraged—by means of lax law enforcement and economic inducements—to enter the country illegally and remain here without documentation.
The removal of the Confederate battle flag from the South Carolina State House grounds also exposed tensions within conservatism, but it was no setback for conservatives. To the contrary, it was a sign of maturity. As Ms. Haley argued, though the flag may represent pride in their history and heritage for many Americans, for many of their fellow citizens, the flag is, quite understandably, “a deeply offensive symbol of a brutally oppressive past.”
It was entirely fitting for a conservative—and for South Carolina’s first female and first Indian-American governor—to lead in eliminating government endorsement of a symbol inextricably bound up with the Confederacy, a regime devoted to the preservation and extension of slavery and the dissolution of the union.
It was also entirely in keeping with conservatives’ devotion to free expression for Ms. Haley to emphasize that “those who wish to show their respect for the flag on their private property” remain free to do so. She resisted the noxious doctrine now flourishing on university campuses that any utterance or idea that offends any member of any protected or favored group must be silenced.
Beyond the flag controversy, the response of Charleston’s citizens to the hate-filled attack was itself a vindication of conservative confidence in American principles and virtues. The heroic coming together of the city’s leaders—black, white, Christian and Jewish—in the immediate aftermath of the mass murder attested to the wellsprings of community, compassion and moral courage in America. And the awe-inspiring expressions of forgiveness by family members of the victims demonstrated the power of religious faith to elevate our humanity.
As with the call to take down the Confederate flag, the Supreme Court’s June rejection of a challenge to the Affordable Care Act didn’t represent a fundamental threat to conservatism. Justice Roberts for the majority and Justice Scalia in dissent agree that the court must exercise restraint to perform its essentially nonpolitical role of adjudicating cases and controversies in accord with the law. They just disagreed in this instance about what that required. Justice Roberts suggested that restraint obliges the court to search assiduously for a reading of the text that leaves the resolution of big social and economic issues to the political branches, whereas Justice Scalia insisted on the imperative to hew to the original understanding of legal texts.
More to the point as a practical matter, the court’s ruling in King v. Burwell doesn’t mean that the Affordable Care Act is here to stay. The act continues to lack majority support in opinion polls. Though there has long been a consensus that the federal government has a vital role to play in providing affordable health care for all, a vital role isn’t necessarily a dominant role.
The coming debates provide Republican presidential candidates an opportunity to introduce thoughtful reforms—including the repeal and replacement of Obamacare—that provide maximum room for market forces to discipline the price and quality of health insurance and expand its availability.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the same-sex marriage case, which united the four most conservative justices, presents challenges of a different sort. Gay marriage was a fringe concern 25 years ago, but it has acquired majority support. Many young conservatives are comfortable with it, and the trend shows no signs of abating.
Even if the court hadn’t precipitously intervened, same-sex marriage probably would have continued steadily gaining acceptance throughout the country. Because of the moral, political and even conservative grounds in its favor, it is futile for conservatives to attempt to overturn the ruling on legal grounds, however much the court overreached in finding a fundamental right where none had been known to exist.
Among the most unfortunate consequences of Obergefell v. Hodges for conservatives—and for democratic debate—is that it encourages the view that opposition to changing the meaning of marriage to include same-sex couples is tantamount to the rejection of gay rights and reflects rank prejudice. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion lends legitimacy to the pernicious tendency to denounce those who think differently as deniers, haters and extremists.
So those arguing that the traditional family is the best institution for raising children must not only reaffirm limited government in light of Obergefell’s expansion of federal power; they must also champion freedom of thought and discussion. They must remind their fellow citizens of the indispensability of dissent and divergent opinions. In so doing, they will uphold not only their own moral convictions but also major principles of the American tradition.
Conservatives must also prepare for battles that will pit the new, implicit constitutional right to same-sex marriage against the old, explicit constitutional right to the free exercise of religion. On July 2, less than a week after the court’s same-sex marriage decision, Oregon Labor Commissioner Brad Avakian ordered Aaron and Melissa Klein, the owners of a bakery called Sweet Cakes by Melissa, to pay $135,000 in damages to a lesbian couple for refusing, on religious grounds, to bake a cake for their same-sex wedding. He also ordered the Kleins “to cease and desist” from making statements that they would discriminate against anyone “on account of sexual orientation.”
The challenges facing conservatives are real. In recent decades, even as the GOP has racked up impressive gains in Congress, well-credentialed Republicans— George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney—have lost bids for the White House, and George W. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000.
To preserve a conservative majority in Congress and to reassemble one that can win the presidency, conservatives must recover their appreciation of how social conservatism and limited-government conservatism fit together—and not just because neither alone can now muster a national majority. The two camps confront genuine tensions, but they form a coherent movement: Limited government protects the practice of traditional morality, and traditional morality educates individuals to take responsibility for their families and communities.
Some Republican presidential candidates seem to understand this imperative. It isn’t easy to say whether Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Scott Walker are social conservatives or limited-government conservatives. That’s good: Conserving the Constitution’s principles of liberty depends on blending and balancing the demands of both schools.
The candidates who take the stage in Cleveland in a few weeks shouldn’t speak as if today’s challenges to the conservative movement represent something entirely new. Nor should they underestimate the tasks ahead. Circumstances once again compel conservatives to apply their principles prudently to the world as it really is.
Mr. Berkowitz is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His books include “Constitutional Conservatism” and “Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism.”
