After meeting with members of Rhode Islanders for Judge Alito and the Rhode Island Judicial Confirmation Network on Friday afternoon, Senator Lincoln Chafee stated that still he has not taken a public position on how he would vote on the nomination of Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court, but that he has 99% of the information he needs, and will announce his position before the vote is taken, possibly by the middle of next week. Senator Chafee believes that it is unlikely that the nomination will be held up by a filibuster.
Eugene Bernardo of Rhode Islanders for Judge Alito praised Senator Chafee for taking his responsibilties seriously, looking at the nomination with a fair and open mind, and conducting a dignified process.
Joseph White, also of Rhode Islanders for Judge Alito, described the meeting with Senator Chafee as a “brainstorming session” with particular emphasis on the areas of constitutional law of importance to the Senator; the 1st amendment (interpretation of the the establishment clause), the 14th amendement, the commerce clause (finding an appropriate balance between what is and what is not regulated), and Roe v. Wade.
When asked about the particulars of the Judiciary Committee’s confirmation process, Senator Chafee responded that issues like the Concerned Alumni of Princeton “could have been dismissed more quickly” and more important issues, particularly constitutional issues, could have been discussed. (Senator Chafee produced a copy of the constitution from his jacket pocket at this point). Senator Chafee noted that some of his fellow Senators had done a good job, but a few had “gone off on filibusters, talking too much”.
Mr. White added that it was obvious Samuel Alito was very similar to John Roberts, who was confirmed by the Senate to the Supreme Court earlier this year, and that President Bush had done a great service for the American people by finding two great Supreme Court nominees.
Dan Yorke interviewed Senator Chafee for the first time in 4-5 years on his radio show yesterday afternoon. Yorke has not been easy on Sen. Chafee over the last few years–it was he who dubbed him “the Senator from Virginia”–and I thought it worth the time to listen and pass along a summary of the conversation. For those of you who don’t want to read the extended summary, here are the major points I took away from the interview:
1) Senator Chafee doesn’t regret voting for former President George H.W. Bush instead of his son, President George W. Bush, who was actually running for office in 2004. He also seemed to imply that he showed more party loyalty by doing this than did Zell Miller, who crossed the line to vote for a Republican. And isn’t it neat that the current President is still supporting Senator Chafee? My quick take: Sen. Chafee held party loyalty higher than personal ideals during the 2004 election. He has been rewarded with support from the national GOP.
2) He’s opposed to the policy in Iraq. WMD was a false premise. The WMD used by Saddam on the Kurds was WWI technology and wasn’t “real” WMD. There’s was no link between Al Queda and Saddam. (Though maybe there was…) Thinks we’re in “another Vietnam” and that Iraq is a quagmire. My quick take: Sen. Chafee holds personal ideals higher than loyalty to a President of his own party on this point. Nonetheless, he still has the support from the National GOP.
3) Still unwilling to announce whether he is going to vote for Judge Alito’s confirmation or not. My quick take: Finger is in the wind.
4) Thinks Mayor Laffey showed disrespect by not telling him personally that he was going to run against him for Senate. Hinted that the Mayor was also ungrateful given the help Sen. Chafee gave him when he first came to RI. Also still thinks that Mayor Laffey should have run for some other office to help the RI GOP. Finally, thinks that Mayor Laffey has shown a retributive character and gave the example of the Jackvony pixelization episode. My quick take: Senator Chafee thinks Mayor Laffey has shown no party loyalty by not following the advice of the RI GOP leadership and he has also not shown Sen. Chafee proper respect. Sen. Chafee won’t be mean in the campaign except when he says that Mayor Laffey is mean.
Now, here’s the extended summary–and please remember that this is a summary, not a transcript. (I’ve quoted some lines when confident I got it right). I’ve put the topical headings in bold. I’ll leave the rest of the opining to the commenters:
Here’s how to understand the meaning of the term “unitary executive” being bandied about at Samuel Alito’s confirmation hearing.
Suppose Congress decides that their campaign-finance laws aren’t being enforced aggressively enough. To step up enforcement, they create a national police force to investigate campaign finance cases, granting it powers equivalent to those of the FBI. The chief of the Campaign Finance Police Force will be hired by and serve at the pleasure of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The Senate also creates an office of special prosecutors, outside of the US Attorney system, to take cases investigated by the new Campaign Finance Police to court.
Does Congress have the power to create this special police force, or to create its own police force to patrol the US border with Mexico, or to create its own agency to close down schools not conforming to the No-Child-Left-Behind Act? The answer is no. The American system of government is based on the idea that powers to make, enforce, and interpret the law must be divided amongst different groups of people.
Article II, section I of the Constitution states that…
The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.The power to enforce the law is the integral component of executive power. The unitary executive means that Congress or the courts cannot grant themselves chunks of the executive’s enforcement authority. They cannot act contrary to Article II’s requirement that enforcement of the law be carried out through the branch of government headed by the President. This in no way implies that the President is above the law.
Lest you think that a unitary executive somehow automatically implies increasing the power of the government, please note that my argument from a year ago as to why WJAR-TV reporter Jim Taricani should not have been sentenced to home-confinement for refusing to disclose a source to a judge was, in part, a unitary executive argument. Taricani’s case was prosecuted by a court-appointed special prosecutor. A special prosecutor beholden only to the judiciary, and not to any executive branch of government, should not have the power to enforce laws by threatening people with jail time. [Open full post]
It was one thing to do nothing more active than sit in my office, blog, and write columns when I actually managed to make time to write. Lately that hasn’t been possible. So, with the thought that “getting to work” in a metaphorical, political, and Anchor-Rising-al sense may now require me to actually leave the house (so as not to slip into working), I’ve decided to take a morning off and attend this Saturday’s East Bay GOP Breakfast.
Whether you’re from one of the ten technically included towns or otherwise, I encourage you to attend. Perhaps we can argue about Mayor Laffey’s candidacy in the presence of the man himself.
ADDENDUM:
So as to provide me somebody behind whom to hide should things get testy, Andrew will be attending the breakfast, as well.
Edward Achorn offers we sighted Rhode Islanders, today, our periodic fix of motivational disheartenment at the state of our state. None of it’s surprising, including the feeling — at least in this overworked blogger — of desperation to do something to make Rhode Island a better place to live and a more fruitful participant in the United States of America.
The new thought that Achorn’s piece brings to mind comes in the form of a question: Why is Steve Laffey, given his persona as a scrapper intent on righting difficult wrongs, campaigning to vault right over the tangled local brambles into the federal government? The way to begin improving Rhode Island’s contribution as a member of the U.S.A. is by improving its actual health, the example that it sets, and the culture to which it contributes — not by shifting its column on a handful of Congressional vote tallies.
Secretary of State candidate Guillaume de Ramel helps advance a point I began making at the end of last week (h/t RI Future)…
I write today to strongly support legislation (2006 H 6718) that will incrementally increase the minimum wage in Rhode Island from $6.75 to $7.40 by January 1, 2007.I submit that this response was entirely predictable. Whenever any fiscally reasonable politician (like Governor Carcieri) discusses some aspect of fiscal and economic policy as a standalone issue, he loses, unless there is a major crisis looming. No matter how much is proposed, Dems argue that even more on the one issue — be it more regulation, higher taxes, or greater redistribution of wealth — is necessary to fix the problems that are there. Or, to paraphrase Mr. de Ramel, “You want to raise the minimum wage? Well, you should want to raise it more!”
Your committee members and House and Senate leaders showed real leadership when you passed legislation last year that would have increased the minimum wage, affording hardworking Rhode Islanders the opportunity to earn more critically-needed dollars in each paycheck. Unfortunately, as we are both aware, Governor Carcieri turned his back on Rhode Island’s workers and vetoed that measure. Now he is offering the General Assembly and these same hardworking Rhode Islanders a half-hearted compromise of increasing the minimum wage to $7.10 an hour.
Governor Carcieri’s hollow election year compromise is not enough. All working Rhode Islanders should be able to afford life’s basic necessities without compromise — especially in this time of extraordinary home heating and utility costs. A $7.40 minimum wage is critical to that goal.
The result, as this case illustrates, is that the Governor gets limited political benefit from something like a minimum wage increase presented in isolation from the rest of his economic policies. His opponents join together to say the increase was not enough, that it would have been more had they been in office, and who cares about what other effects it might have.
The way for the Governor to overcome this dynamic is to clearly link taxation and regulation in his policymaking. Had Governor Carcieri established the connection between business taxation and the minimum wage as soon as the proposed wage increase was announced, he would have had a response ready for his detractors…
We can raise the minimum wage as high as you want, as long as additional costs being imposed on small and medium size businesses can be offset with a set of appropriate tax-cuts. Aren’t you willing to cut back the money that the state takes in to help give more money to the people — in terms of both an increased minimum wage and a smaller tax burden?[Open full post]
Walter Williams, once again, cuts through all the political posturing about the rationale for lobbying reforms in his latest editorial:
…Whatever actions Congress might take in the matter of lobbying are going to be just as disappointing in ending influence-peddling as their Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, known as the McCain-Feingold bill. Before we allow ourselves to be bamboozled by our political leaders, we might do our own analysis to determine whether the problem is money in politics or something more fundamental.
Let’s start this analysis with a question. Why do corporations, unions and other interest groups fork over millions of dollars to the campaign coffers of politicians? Is it because these groups are extraordinarily civic-minded Americans who have a deep interest in congressmen doing their jobs of upholding and defending the U.S. Constitution?…Anyone answering in the affirmative…probably also believes that storks deliver babies and there really is an Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.
A much better explanation for the millions going to the campaign coffers of Washington politicians lies in the awesome growth of government control over business, property, employment and other areas of our lives. Having such power, Washington politicians are in the position to grant favors. The greater their power to grant favors, the greater the value of being able to influence Congress, and there’s no better influence than money.
The generic favor sought is to get Congress, under one ruse or another, to grant a privilege or right to one group of Americans that will be denied another group of Americans. A variant of this privilege is to get Congress to do something that would be criminal if done privately.
Here’s just one among possibly thousands of examples. If Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) used goons and violence to stop people from buying sugar from Caribbean producers so that sugar prices would rise, making it easier for ADM to sell more of its corn syrup sweetener, they’d wind up in jail. If they line the coffers of congressmen, they can buy the same result without risking imprisonment. Congress simply does the dirty work for them by enacting sugar import quotas and tariffs…
…A tweak here and a tweak there in the tax code can mean millions of dollars.
…Campaign finance and lobby reform will only change the method of influence-peddling. If Congress did only what’s specifically enumerated in our Constitution, influence-peddling would be a non-issue simply because the Constitution contains no authority for Congress to grant favors and special privileges. Nearly two decades ago, during dinner with the late Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek, I asked him if he had the power to write one law that would get government out of our lives, what would that law be? Professor Hayek replied he’d write a law that read: Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans. He elaborated: If Congress makes payments to one American for not raising pigs, every American not raising pigs should also receive payments. Obviously, were there to be such a law, there would be reduced capacity for privilege-granting by Congress and less influence-peddling.
Whatever Congress does for one American it must do for all Americans: A simple, but powerful, policy spoken by one of the greatest economists. Now ponder how that would change Washington’s game of pork.
[Open full post]Possibilites for tax-reform in this session of the Rhode Island legislature appear strangely muddled. On the one hand, Speaker of the House William Murphy named tax-reform as one of the three highest priorities for the 2006 legislative session…
Let it be our New Year’s resolution; let it be our sense of duty to every Rhode Islander struggling to make ends meet that puts Responsible Tax Reform, A Comprehensive Energy Strategy, and A Fair Minimum Wage and to protect identities of individuals and other things that come to the floor front. Let?s resolve to make those some of our legislative priorities this year (emphasis in original).(Sidebar: Does anybody understand what the phrase “to protect identities of individuals” means in this context?)
Despite the fact that the Speaker of the House — generally regarded as the most powerful individual in Rhode Island politics — is amenable to tax-reform, Governor Donald Carcieri was recently quoted in an Andrea L. Stape article in the Projo as saying that he doesn’t believe tax-reform is possible this year…
Consequently, he is considering a legislative proposal that would phase in a reduction of the historic-preservation tax credit and follow that with a phased-in income tax cut. Overall, he said that structural change would bring the state’s tax burden more in line with neighboring New England states and make it more attractive to companies.I see two possibilities for the disconnect between Governor Carcieri and Speaker Murphy. The first is that the governor wants to proceed with extreme caution due to the budget shortfall. The most recent estimate says that Rhode Island needs to close a gap of about $77,000,000 for the current fiscal year. It could be that the Governor doesn’t want to advocate tax-cuts while the budget still needs to be reconciled and program cuts may be necessary.
The governor said the proposal is interesting now, since it would work to reduce the state’s tax burden in future years without significantly affecting the 2007 fiscal budget.
“This year is probably not the year to get tax [reform] done,” he said.
However, there may also be a political element at work here. The Governor’s political strategists could be telling him that he and Republican legislative candidates would lose an issue to run on if a major tax-reform package were to pass this session. The idea that the Governor is thinking politics also explains why he has embraced the minimum-wage increase this (election) year that he vetoed last year.
Either way, I fear the Governor is being a tad shortsighted. Governor Carcieri needs to seize this opportunity to shape the debate about Rhode Island’s economic and fiscal future. By talking about the minimum wage increase and tax-reform at the same time, explaining how employers and employees are all part of the same community, and how taxes and regulations are all part of the same system, the Governor could effectively counter the Democrat’s message of class warfare in a way that cannot be done when fiscal and economic issues are discussed in an isolated, unconnected manner. [Open full post]
