Mac has recently published a couple of columns in the New York Post and National Review on media coverage and criticism of the war in Iraq. At The Corner, he has also posted a response from someone who is, in the words of Glenn Reynolds, not anti-war, but just on the other side.
[Open full post]In an editorial entitled Judging While Catholic: Do journalists understand that the Constitution prohibits religious tests for officeholders?, Manual Miranda provides all of us with a tutorial on religious tests and the U.S. Constitution:
John Roberts will be the fourth Roman Catholic on the current Supreme Court, but only the 10th Catholic among the 109 justices who’ve served in the high court’s 215-year history. A few senators and a good many journalists have made much of it.
Earlier this week, in a span of minutes, three journalists asked me to respond to liberals, like Sen. Richard Durbin (D., Ill.), raising Judge Roberts’s religion as a confirmation issue…Minutes before penning this column, a fourth prominent political reporter startled me further by asking: “What religion test clause? Where does that appear?”
Well, here, everyone jot this down. “The line” appears in Article VI of the U.S. Constitution: “No religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.”
Much bigger than the obvious problem of overreaching Democratic senators (because it is obvious) is that Americans are depending on journalists to catalyze the most important public debate outside an election: the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice…The preface to one [Pew Research Center] 2004 report notes:Journalists at national and local news organizations are notably different from the general public in their ideology and attitudes toward political and social issues…news people, especially national journalists are more liberal, and far less conservative, than the general public.
Most Americans know this by now. Some may know the result of another Pew survey that found most journalists were overwhelmingly irreligious. What we do not know is how many journalists read, much less understand the Constitution…Here are two sightings from this week alone.
In Monday’s Boston Globe, columnist Cathy Young, also a contributing editor of the libertarian Reason magazine, concludes: “A candidate’s or nominee’s ideology should be fair game whether it’s religious or secular in nature, whether it’s rooted in conservative Catholicism or liberal feminism.”
More interesting is how Ms. Young gets to this conclusion. While applauding John F. Kennedy’s milestone election as the first Catholic president, Ms. Young recites Article VI, but she conflates the religious test clause with the provision that officeholders “shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution.” She interprets this to mean that “an officeholder could not be required to take an oath or perform a religious ritual affirming his allegiance to a particular religion or denomination, or even a general belief in God.”
Ms. Young thinks it’s about cookie-cutter discrimination, and not about protecting actual religious beliefs. In fact, the two clauses are quite separate in their intent. Their distinct origin is itself telling. At the Constitutional Convention most proponents of the Oath Clause sought to ensure the public servants were “sincere friends to religion,” but greater forces than that had been lobbying to ensure that there would be no “religious test” for public office…
Requiring an oath or affirmation in taking public office was the Framers’ nod to God, the requirement that no particular set of religious beliefs be required of office holders was their nod to their painful experience with the religious intolerance of England.
In Wednesday’s Washington Post (“Why It’s Right to Ask About Roberts’s Faith”), columnist E.J. Dionne asks: “Is it wrong to question Judge John Roberts on how his Catholic faith might affect his decisions as a Supreme Court justice? Or is it wrong not to? . . . Why is it wrong to ask him to share his reflections with the public?” It would be helpful, Mr. Dionne concludes, “if Roberts gave an account of how (and whether) his religious convictions would affect his decisions as a justice.”
Mr. Dionne’s error is found is his own words: “Yes, any inquiry related to a nominee’s religion risks being seen as a form of bigotry, and of course there should be no ‘religious tests.’ ” Indeed. And that is the problem, again.
Journalists believe that the religious test clause guards against simple discrimination against Catholics or Jews or any other particular denominations. It does not. It prohibits a probe of what the potential officeholder believes derived of his religious convictions. It is not about what he lists on a questionnaire under religion, as if it were like race or sex. That is why the liberal press has mocked the concern raised by conservatives that the abortion litmus test and other lines of inquiry are a constitutionally prohibited religious test.
When England passed its two Test Acts, they did not prohibit Catholics from holding public office. Rather, the “test” sought to exclude anyone from holding public office who believed that the bread and wine in the ritual of the Eucharist turned into the body and blood of Jesus Christ, a fundamental tenet of Catholic belief.
Fortunately, Mr. Durbin and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) have shied away from that line of inquiry, since their clients haven’t figured out how to profit from it…
The U.S. Constitution is quite clear that there shall be no religious test. Of course, since left-wing Senators Schumer and Durbin don’t believe in being guided by the original intent underlying the U.S. Constitution, none of us should find it surprising that they are willing to twist the religious test issue to meet their political objectives.
Several of the other postings listed below elaborate further on Senator Schumer’s crass methods, methods driven by raw power objectives instead of principles that have any connection to the Founders’ beliefs embodied in our Constitution.
For my column — which will now be appearing every other Wednesday — I pondered the formation of London’s homegrown Muslim terrorists: “Exploding Across Arm’s-Length Tolerance.” The bottom line is that the common thread that runs through the astute explanations — the root cause, if you will — is disengagement. And pushing religion, and the religious, away from politics and government will only exacerbate the problem.
[Open full post]An editorial entitled Meet the New Special-Interest U.S. Congress by George Melloan continues an ongoing discussion about the perverse incentives that drive public sector behaviors:
…Taxpayers can rest easier now that the denizens of Capitol Hill have gone home for their August holiday. But those worthies have left behind a trail littered with the favors they’ve done for their special friends at the expense of the taxpaying masses…
The McCain-Feingold act, the current embodiment of years of campaign finance “reforms,” was peddled as a law that would “take money out of politics.” Oh, sure. Campaign spending set a record last fall, much of it provided indirectly from shadowy sources rather than up front and in public. Americans in some distant past had a largely unrestricted right to support candidates with their contributions, but a Congress uncomfortable with free choice chose to limit that power.
A case can be made that we are seeing the result of this limitation in the performance of the current Congress, which seems to have less regard than its predecessors for the broad public interest…
This near fiasco [the Cafta vote] for U.S. trade policy raises a question: How did lobbyists for a few business interests with little overall economic importance [See Corporate Welfare Queens: Destructive Parasites Which Deserve to Die] almost overwhelm the broad interests of the U.S. and its trading partners? One possible answer is that narrow interests can wield such power because…campaign-finance restrictions have so narrowed the financial support base for lawmakers that they have become more beholden to lobbies with the cash and know-how to defeat anyone who doesn’t toe the line…
Before recess, the House also rushed to approve two big spending bills covering who knows what. In both the highway [see previous posting here] and energy bills the main concern was not the price tag or whether the money would be spent efficiently. It was to ensure that every member got a fair share for his state or district…
Apologists for all this profligacy argue that at least it “creates jobs.” But none of those jobs comes with any cost-benefit test of the type that a private venture would have to pass to get funding. Thus there is no measure of whether the money spent adds or subtracts from human well-being.
There is very little concern for anything other than dividing up the tax-and-borrowing revenues so that every member, along with his coterie of supporters, gets a share…
Congress knows it has a spending problem, just as alcoholics are aware that they have a drinking problem. The late Democratic Senator Pat Moynihan once said to Journal editors, “It doesn’t do any good for you to yell at us — we just can’t help it.”
He may have been right. Congress has made various stabs at setting up a “congressional budget process” that would reconcile the various spending bills and keep them within some agreed-upon total. But somehow the machinery just never seems to work. It keeps getting overwhelmed by the pressures of political logrolling…
A broader argument is that money holds the republic together. By sharing it out, the federal government buys the loyalty of a broad variety of constituencies, thereby insuring national unity. In politics, “fairness” is a very big word, even if it is only applied to those who receive federal largesse and seldom to those taxpayers who cough it up.
If “fairness” is the guiding principle, perhaps it should apply to the equal treatment under the law of everyone who wants to express his constitutional right to free expression by supporting, financially, the candidate of his choice. The result might be that members of Congress would become less beholden to special interests and more concerned with the common good…
It is worth repeating a paragraph from an earlier posting:
A more complete discussion of the perverse incentives that exist within the public sector are discussed in the posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, where numerous links provide the opportunity to dive more deeply into both the root causes and the symptoms of an irresponsible, out-of-control public sector.
Walter Williams latest editorial entitled Human rights vs. property rights offers an insightful look into the twisted views of some Leftists:
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent 5-4 ruling in Kelo v. New London, statements have been made about property rights that are demonstrative of the paucity of understanding among some within the legal profession. Carolyn Lochhead’s July 1st San Francisco Chronicle article, “Foes Unite in Defense of Property,” reports on the coalition building in Congress to deny federal funds to cities that use laws of eminent domain to take private property for the benefit of another private party.
But it’s the article’s report on a statement made by a representative of People for the American Way…that I’d like to address. According to Ms. Lochhead’s article, “Elliot Mincberg, the group’s legal director, said the case [Kelo v. New London] had been brought by the Institute for Justice as part of an effort by conservatives to elevate property rights to the same level of civil rights such as freedom of speech and religion, in effect taking the nation back to the pre-New Deal days when the courts ruled child labor laws unconstitutional.” To posit a distinction between civil or human rights on the one hand and property rights on the other reflects little understanding…
My computer is my property. Does it have any rights — like the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Are there any constitutional guarantees held by my computer?…to think of property as possessing rights is unadulterated nonsense.
…Property rights are human rights to use economic goods and services. Private property rights contain your right to use, transfer, trade and exclude others from use of property deemed yours. The supposition that there’s a conflict or difference between human rights to use property and civil rights is bogus and misguided…
That it’s bogus to make a distinction between human, civil and property rights can be seen in another way. In a free society, each person is his own private property; I own myself and you own yourself. That’s why it’s immoral to rape or murder. It violates a person’s property rights. The fact of self-ownership also helps explain why theft is immoral. In order for self-ownership to be meaningful, a person must have ownership rights to what he produces or earns…if someone steals my computer, he’s violated my ownership rights to my computer, which I earned through my labor, and therefore my human or civil rights to keep what I produce.
Creating false distinctions between human rights and property rights plays into the hands of Democrat and Republican party socialists who seek to control our lives. If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.
As President John Adams (1797-1801) put it, “Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.” Adding, “The moment the idea is admitted into society that property is not as sacred as the laws of God, and that there is not a force of law and public justice to protect it, anarchy and tyranny commence.”
An indepth look at the Kelo decision can be found in a posting entitled The Kelo Decision: When Private Property Rights are Eroded, Our Freedom is Diminished.
[Open full post]An article entitled Highway Bill Full of Special Projects tells another government spending horror story:
When President Eisenhower proposed the first national highway bill, there were two projects singled out for funding. The latest version has, by one estimate, 6,371 of these special projects, a record that some say politicians should be ashamed of.
The projects in the six-year, $286.4 billion highway and mass transit bill passed by Congress last week range from $200,000 for a deer avoidance system in Weedsport, N.Y., to $330 million for a highway in Bakersfield, Calif.
For the beneficiaries — almost every member of Congress — they bring jobs and better quality lives to their communities and states. To critics, they are pork barrel spending at its worst.
“Egregious and remarkable,” exclaimed Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., about the estimated $24 billion in the bill set aside for highways, bus stops, parking lots and bike trails requested by lawmakers.
McCain, one of only four senators to oppose the bill, listed several dozen “interesting” projects, including $480,000 to rehabilitate a historic warehouse on the Erie Canal and $3 million for dust control mitigation on Arkansas rural roads.
His favorite, he said, was $2.3 million for landscaping on the Ronald Reagan Freeway in California. “I wonder what Ronald Reagan would say.”
Reagan, in fact, vetoed a highway bill over what he said were spending excesses, only to be overridden by Congress. Meanwhile, according to a Cato Institute analysis, special projects or “earmarks” numbered 10 in 1982, 152 in 1987, 538 in 1991 and 1,850 in 1998. The 1998 highway act set aside some $9 billion for earmarks, well under half the newest plan.
“This bill will be known as the most earmarked transportation bill in the history of our nation,” said Keith Ashdown, vice president of policy for Taxpayers for Common Sense, which tracks such projects in congressional legislation…
…few lawmakers are willing to turn down a new road or bridge in their district…
Lawmakers were sending out press releases bragging of their accomplishments even before the bill was passed, said Tom Schatz, president of Citizens Against Government Waste. “It’s a symbol of why everything else is out of control, not just highways.”
The biggest beneficiaries tend to be the lawmakers with the biggest clout…
The highway bill is one area where the minority Democrats aren’t forgotten…
Not every lawmaker came seeking gifts. Two conservative Republicans from Arizona, Jeff Flake and John Shadegg, wrote Young asking that the $14 million the committee was allotting to each House member for earmarks be sent instead to the state transportation department.
Flake’s office said that in the end he didn’t take any projects, and Flake and Shadegg were two of only eight House members to vote against the bill.
An earlier posting first highlighted the ridiculous actions contained in the highway bill.
It is all part of a game where politicians of both parties spend a portion of our hard-earned monies as if those funds were nothing but Monopoly play money.
Why does this happen? Because Misguided Incentives Drive Public Sector Taxation.
A more complete discussion of the perverse incentives that exist within the public sector are discussed in the posting entitled A Call to Action: Responding to Government Being Neither Well-Meaning Nor Focused on the Public Interest, where numerous links provide the opportunity to dive more deeply into both the root causes and the symptoms of an irresponsible, out-of-control public sector.
I noted with interest the national splintering of the AFL-CIO and wondered what effect it would have on this, one of the most “labor-friendly” states in the union. According to this report on this subject in today’s ProJo, RI ranks 1st in New England and 9th nationally in percent of union employees in the workforce. Let’s consider these figures (from the ProJo story)
About 17 percent of Rhode Island’s work force of 494,000 was under union contracts in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The national average is 12.5 percent. . .
. . . almost all public employees in the state are covered by union contracts; state and municipal employees now make up about half the state’s unionized members. There is little room for union growth among public employees. [Unless, of course, you unionize a new group, like say home day care workers, say? –MAC]
Doing the math, that means 8-9% (or around 40,000 people) of our state work force is composed of unionized government employees. As we all know, this is a substantial political bloc.
Apparently, labor leaders, such as the AFL-CIO’s Rhode Island leader George Nee, are all a bit in the dark, though there is a desire to maintain strong ties. That’s understandable. This very unity of various organized labor groups has been one of the key factors in making them the strongest single political player in our state.
A major goal, said Nee, is keeping together WorkingRI, a labor-financed lobbying coalition that includes some unions not currently in the AFL-CIO. The coalition lobbies at the State House on issues that affect both union and nonunion workers.
Among the topics WorkingRI advances are organizing state daycare workers, increasing the state minimum wage, and pushing for better workplace safety.
Rhode Island unions helped build the state Democratic Party, and union leaders are still influential in the party; Frank Montanaro, AFL-CIO state president, is also Rhode Island’s Democratic national committeeman.
Democratic party leaders are confident that the division on the national level will not spill over into a weakening of labor support for local Democrats running for office, said William Lynch, the state Democratic chairman.
So, while
The leaders of the dissident unions say that the AFL-CIO, under president John Sweeney, spent too much money on trying to elect Democrats to Congress and the presidency, and not enough on organizing campaigns to sign up more workers.
Nonetheless, it would appear that Sweeney’s tactic is what works here in Rhode Island and nothing is going to change any time soon.
[Open full post]It’s saddening to admit that I finished reading Minette Marrin’s “Confronted with our own decadence,” in the London Times, with a mordant smirk. I recall, just about four years ago, having the very thought with which she ends:
Despite all this, I do, now for the first time, feel a faint glimmer of optimism. One of the responses to the bombings might be a new awareness of what matters most, and how best to defend it. If that means a new sense of purpose and a new sense of conviction, then perhaps some good will have come out of this evil.
Perhaps the intervening years have in actuality been marked by the death-throes frenzy of the faction whose demise would represent the “some good” of my own bittersweet optimism. But even if that proves to be the case, I’m increasingly disheartened to conclude that we may have no respite before evil finds ways to reassert itself, having been thwarted by the collision of its current manifestations in decadence and tyrannical extremism.
[Open full post]Manuel Miranda’s discusses the Federalist Society in an editorial entitled The ‘Evil Cabal’ Of Conservative Lawyers:
Three years ago Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) stood on the floor of the Senate and said: “Mr. President, I take the opportunity today to right a wrong. Over the past two years, members of the Federalist Society have been much maligned by some of my Democrat colleagues, no doubt because they see political advantage in doing so. The Federalist Society has even been presented as an ‘evil cabal’ of conservative lawyers. Its members have been subjected to questions that remind one of the McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s. Detractors have painted a picture which is surreal, twisted and untrue.”
Here we go again.
Before I proceed, let me join the view…that the left looks pretty silly in making a big deal of Judge Roberts’s association–whatever it is–with the Federalist Society. It is more than amusing; it is sophomoric. (See the three-page talking points issued yesterday by Howard Dean’s Democratic National Committee on the Roberts-Federalist cover-up.)
Judge Roberts’s ties with the Federalist Society are not the story. If Judge Roberts is not a member, he’s not a member. But the White House should not be in the business of appearing to disassociate itself from its friends. By running to correct media reports last week that Judge Roberts was a member of the Federalist Society, the White House created an issue where none existed. It should have left it to the press or Democrats to unveil this great mystery. To add injury to insult, the move now has the appearance of having been bungled with the Washington Post’s discovery of Judge Roberts’s name on a Federalist Society list from 1997-98…
There is no Federalist Society handshake and there is no Federalist Society group think. Some years ago the Washington Monthly published an article titled “The Conservative Cabal That’s Transforming American Law.” It cited a 1999 decision by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals as the “network’s most far-reaching victory in recent years.” The decision overturned some of the EPA’s clean-air standards on the grounds that it was unconstitutional for Congress to delegate legislative authority to the executive branch.
Oh, really? In this case two prominent individuals closely associated with the Federalist Society were of differing opinions. C. Boyden Gray, former White House Counsel for the first President Bush and a member of the Federalist Society’s Board of Visitors, filed an amicus brief making the winning argument. Yet the case was overturned by the Supreme Court in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, a frequent participant in the society’s activities.
The Washington Monthly also attacked Mr. Gray as a water carrier for the Federalist Society in advancing Microsoft’s effort against antitrust enforcement. Yet Robert Bork, who also served on the Federalist Society’s Advisory Board, was Microsoft’s chief intellectual adversary.
Rather than assist the left in creating a conservative bogeyman, here is a user-friendly defense of the Federalist Society: Again, the words are Orrin Hatch’s. The Federalist Society stands for three propositions, he said: “that government’s essential purpose is the preservation of freedom; that our Constitution embraces and requires separation of governmental powers; and that judges should interpret the law, not write it. For the vast majority of Americans, these are not controversial issues.”
As Orrin Hatch concluded in his speech three years ago: The Federalist Society is “not quite the vast right-wing conspiracy hobgoblin some [Democrats] would have the American people believe.”…
Here is the link to the Federalist Society website.
They define their purpose here:
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.
The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities. This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, and law professors.
In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community.
You can read more about them here, including these points:
Q. Does the Federalist Society take positions on legal or policy issues or engage in other forms of political advocacy?
A. No. The Society is about ideas. We do not lobby for legislation, take policy positions, or sponsor or endorse nominees and candidates for public service. While overall the Society believes in limited government, its members are diverse and often hold conflicting views on a broad range of issues such as tort reform, privacy rights, and criminal justice.
Q. Who joins the Federalist Society?
A. …Membership is open to anyone who wishes to join the Society, and the organization often attracts people who share a desire for public service.
Q. Who can attend Federalist Society meetings?
A. Everyone is welcome to the programs of our 180 law school chapters, 60 metropolitan lawyers chapters, and 15 nationwide practice groups. The several hundred events sponsored each year by the Federalist Society are publicly advertised and are open to the press and the general public. A number of our events are on television or are webcast.
Q. Who are some of the Federalist Society’s participants and speakers?
A. The Society has a strong reputation for hosting speakers on all sides of the ideological spectrum. A number of the Society’s most frequent and prominent speakers – from the Left as well as the Right – attest to the fact that the Society has contributed a great deal to free speech, free debate, and the public understanding of the Constitution…
Sounds like a threatening group, doesn’t it?
[Open full post]In an editorial entitled “The Inquisitor: Charles Schumer, leader of the anti-Bush crusade,” John Miller writes these important words:
[Open full post]…[Schumer] has embarked on a careful strategy of blurring the fundamental distinction between judging and politicking. In 2001, he chaired Judiciary Committee hearings on whether ideology should play a more open role in confirmations. Previously, senators have focused on the professional qualifications of court nominees rather than their political beliefs, which is why a known liberal such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to secure a spot on the Supreme Court with only three Republicans voting against her. With Bush in the White House, however, Schumer decided to try changing the ground rules. One of his mentors has been University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, author of the forthcoming book Radical in Robes: Why Extreme Right-Wing Courts are Wrong for America.
If Democrats want to evaluate nominees on their legal views, Republicans shouldn’t object. What Schumer proposes doing, however, is evaluating nominees on their political preferences. This is something else entirely, and it is a natural outgrowth of legal realism, an academic movement that claims laws aren’t neutral rules so much as tools of power. By the time Schumer sat in Harvard’s lecture halls, variants of this idea were firmly entrenched there – and it is the chief intellectual doctrine behind the judicial activism that liberals applaud and conservatives abhor. It essentially says that judges are no less political than politicians. Therefore, confirmation hearings should not be dispassionate episodes of advice and consent, but raucous quasi-elections that engage the interests and urges of the public…
Schumer cloaks these views about ideology by saying he simply wants to avoid extremes. “People on the far left [and the] far right want to make law,” he said on Meet the Press in July. “Neither of them should be on the bench.” The presumption, of course, is that senators possess the impartiality to determine what’s mainstream and what’s not. “If he thinks that he can set aside his liberal ideology and make these choices,” asks Republican senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, “then why can’t judges do the same when they’re ruling on the law?”…
