WELL, THIS SEEMS TO HAVE BEEN OBAMA’S AGENDA: Jacob Heilbrunn: Is It Time To Abolish Congress? Technocrats have never liked Congress, of course, because its members represent their constituents.
Archive for 2013
October 1, 2013
ROGER SIMON: Should The Republicans Mount A “Charm” Offensive?
ON JOHN GIBSON’S RADIO SHOW IN A MINUTE, talking about my USA Today column.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: Government Overreach Threatens Lives.
IN THE MAIL: From Harry Stein, Will Tripp: Pissed Off Attorney at Law.
NICK GILLESPIE: Let Us Be Clear: Obama Deserves Chief Responsibility for Gov’t Shutdown. “Boehner and the GOP may well be ‘anarchists’ and Reid and the Dems may be useless. But it’s the president who runs the show.” Obama wanted a shutdown, and Obama got a shutdown. He likes chaos, division and fingerpointing.
UPDATE: You can’t blame the House GOP for this: Despite Three-and-a-Half Years To Prep Obamacare, A Fiasco Takes Shape. “A responsible steward of taxpayer dollars would never have considered opening the exchanges in their current state of disarray. . . . The press has certainly known about the bureaucracy’s failure to execute for well over a year. Yet, with very rare exceptions, one will search in vain for coverage of the missed deadlines, internal control weaknesses, and emptied slush funds from the Associated Press, the New York Times, or the broadcast networks.”
INSTAVISION: I talk with Michael Barone about his new book, Shaping Our Nation: How Surges of Migration Transformed America and Its Politics, and what it means for today’s immigration debate.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 145.
ILYA SOMIN: “Terrorism,” “Hostage-Taking,” and the Government Shutdown.
Terrorists and hostage-takers are evil because they threaten lives and property that do not belong to them. “Your money or your life” is a terroristic threat, because the person making the threat has no right to dispose of either your money or your life. But there isn’t any terrorism or hostage-taking if you say you won’t give me any of your money unless I do something you want me to do.
In the case of the government shutdown, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has no constitutional or other obligation to pass a funding bill that includes funding for Obamacare or any other particular government program. Part of the reason why the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse is so they can decide which government programs are worthy of funding, and which are not. It is also worth noting that the Republicans are not the only side in this dispute who are willing to shut down the government if they don’t get what they want on health care policy. President Obama and the Democratic-controlled Senate could just as easily avoid a shutdown by accepting the House bill. In its latest version, it doesn’t even defund Obamacare completely, but merely delays implementation by a year and repeals the medical device tax, which is currently part of the law. This is not to say that Obama and the Senate Democrats are acting as “terrorists” or “hostage-takers” either. The Senate is not obliged to pass the House bill. If they do, Obama has every right to veto that bill if it gets to his desk. But there is considerable symmetry between the two sides’ positions.
But not, however, in the press coverage they receive. Because the press is deeply suspicious of anyone who stands in the way of the orderly and efficient expansion of the state.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Fighting Inequality With Marriage.
Marriage is increasingly the big sociological divide in American life. Getting and staying married makes you part of a privileged elite.
As Charles Murray documents in his 2012 book “Coming Apart,” that divide tracks the income divide, with low-income whites much less likely to be married than their high-income counterparts. (I criticized a different aspect of Murray’s book in this column.) The causality is debatable. Maybe poorer people have a harder time getting married. Maybe being married makes it easier to earn more. Maybe some third factor causes both phenomena. But what is clear is that you’re most likely to have a better life if you’re married — even if, it turns out, you get cancer.
Friends are nice, but they are rarely equivalent to a spouse. The level of on-call commitment and intimacy is simply different. Your spouse knows you in a 24/7 way that few if any others do, especially in a society organized around the nuclear family rather than the extended one. (A spouse also multiplies your extended family by two.) As my economist husband likes to put it, being married also creates a “joint utility function.” Your happiness becomes entwined with your spouse’s, giving you strong incentives to make an extra effort.
And yet government policies seem almost intentionally designed to undermine marriage. And to make it less appealing.
DESPITE ALL THE SHUTDOWN STUFF, THEY HAVEN’T GIVEN UP: House Republicans Work Immigration Behind Scenes.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Atlantic: America’s Wasteful Higher Education Spending, In a Chart. “We spend more of our economy on higher education than almost any other developed country, and achieve some of the worst results.”
AT AMAZON, deals in Home Audio & Home Theater.
Plus, today’s deals in Cellphones & Accessories.
Also, today only: The X-Files, plus the movies, $89.99 (73% off).
UPDATE: From a reader: “I’ve been watching the X-Files lately. I never got into it when it was on the air, seemed too paranoid, now it seems like reality TV.”
DAMAGED BRAND: Anger with the federal government is now the highest since at least 1997, Pew says. “The Pew Research Center, which conducted the survey, says this is the highest level of anger they have reported, or at least since they started asking the question in 1997.” Pitchforks are warranted.
UPDATE: Surprise! Obamacare health insurance exchange websites don’t work; HealthCare.gov a total mess.
USA TODAY: Five Reasons Ted Cruz Deserves Our Respect.
SHIKHA DALMIA: Convert ObamaCare Into A Free Market System. “Individuals shopping for their own coverage with their own dollars will unleash robust competition that’ll do more to bend the cost curve than the price controls and rationing that Obamacare will inevitably bring. What’s more, if individuals are getting generous credits to purchase coverage, it’ll render the employer mandate moot and the individual mandate a whole lot weaker.” I don’t expect much cooperation from the Democrats.
DOUBLING DOWN: President To Trumpet Launch Of ObamaCare Exchanges.
JAMES TARANTO: Law Of The Land: What ObamaCare And The Debt Limit Have In Common.
Consider the debt limit. Like ObamaCare, it is a statute enacted by Congress–or rather a series of statutes, each authorizing the issuance of additional debt as it becomes necessary. The Congressional Research Service reports that the 111th Congress–the same one that enacted ObamaCare–raised the debt limit three times: by $789 billion to $12.104 trillion in February 2009, by $290 billion to $12.394 trillion in December 2009, and by $1.9 trillion to $14.294 trillion in February 2010.
Obama and the Democrats, who then controlled Congress, could have avoided the current difficulty by enacting legislation in 2009 or 2010 raising the limit to, say, $20 trillion–or abolishing it altogether, or suspending it until 2017. (A suspension of fixed duration, 3½ months, was in fact enacted this past February.)
It’s not hard to think of reasons why instead they followed the custom of enacting only stopgap increases instead of what would have amounted to a blank check. For one, it would have been politically disadvantageous, if not disastrous, for Democrats to announce their intention to put the country that deeply into debt. For another, Obama had not yet been re-elected, so that a blank check from congressional Democrats might have been cashed by a Republican president.
Democrats in Congress are no more eager than Republicans to give up the leverage that comes with the need for periodic legislation raising the debt limit. As we noted Friday, Democrats attempted unsuccessfully to use that leverage 40 years ago to enact laws restricting political speech. And in 2006 a young Democratic senator voted against raising the limit to a comparatively paltry $8.965 trillion.
Yeah, you know who it was.
INDEED: Beware Of The Police’s Increasing Militarization.
The Dallas County Sheriff’s Office gets an MRAP tactical military vehicle, used for counterinsurgency fighting in Iraq, as law enforcement becomes a collection of SWAT teams pursuing not-always-guilty Americans.
In early August, a SWAT team broke through the gates of a 3.5-acre farm in Arlington, Texas, that promotes a sustainable lifestyle and did a 10-hour search of the property. Residents were handcuffed and held at gunpoint as police looked for nonexistent marijuana plants and various city code violations.
As the owners watched, 10 tons of their private property was hauled off in trucks — dangerous items such as blackberry bushes, okra, tomatillo plants, native grasses and sunflowers that provided food and bedding for animals, everything from furniture to compost.
The city said the code citations were issued to the farm after complaints by neighbors “concerned that the conditions” at the farm “interfere with the useful enjoyment of their properties and are detrimental to property values and community appearance.”
The SWAT raid came after “the Arlington Police Department received a number of complaints that the same property owner was cultivating marijuana plants on the premises,” the city’s statement said. So why not just knock on the door with a search warrant?
Because then you don’t get to play soldier. Emphasis on the word play.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama waives ban on aiding regimes that use child soldiers.
Obama first waived the provision in 2010. Samantha Power, then the National Security Council senior director for multilateral affairs and human rights, promised “at the time that the waivers would not become a recurring event,” as The Cable recalled.
“Our judgment was: Brand them, name them, shame them, and then try to leverage assistance in a fashion to make this work,” Power said. “Our judgment is we’ll work from inside the tent.”
The country’s world is in the very best of hands.
INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: Shutdown Preparations Prove Most Government Is Waste.
When the government shuts down, the president will do without three-fourths of his White House staff — 1,265 taxpayer-salaried federal workers. That’s a fraction of the government’s total waste.
House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, who didn’t show up to vote on the budget last week, recently claimed, “the cupboard is bare. There’s no more cuts to make” in a government that spends almost $4 trillion each year.
But it’s funny how when the massive state apparatus is starved of its cash flow, lots of things magically appear in that bare cupboard.
A Sept. 26 letter from the assistant to the president for management and administration to the director of the Office of Management and Budget (couldn’t those jobs be merged?) comically outlines the shutdown plan.
“Approximately 436 employees will be designated as excepted or exempt to perform excepted functions,” the manager of the White House budget tells the manager of the executive branch budget. “The remaining 1,265 will be placed in furlough status once they have concluded activities necessary to shut down their offices.”
Activities like what? Turning off the lights?
The Executive Office of the President “has carefully reviewed its personnel needs … to ensure that the mission … is carried out without significant interruption.”
But the letter says during the shutdown it’ll take 12 taxpayer-paid employees “to support the vice president in the discharge of his constitutional duties.” Call them the dirty dozen, since they take care of what Vice President John Nance Garner called “a bucket of warm spit.”
What do these 12 absolutely essential non-Secret Service vice-presidential staff do, guarantee that Joe Biden doesn’t make a gaffe during the shutdown?
He also gets one staffer for the vice president’s residence. Can’t “average Joe,” who as a senator famously rode the commuter train with the riffraff from Delaware to Washington every day, make his own meals for a few days? Or put up with Dr. Jill’s cooking?
Why are 61 U.S. Trade Representative employees required during the shutdown “for developing, coordinating, and advising the president on U.S. trade policy”?
And how many of the more than 20 members of the first lady’s staff, at least four of whom are paid six figures by the taxpayers, will be deemed non-essential?
The White House is just a microcosm of the out-of-control growth in federal government personnel.
Five percent across the board, year-over-year, each year until the budget is balanced. Then freeze for five years.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: A CEO who resisted NSA spying is out of prison. And he feels ‘vindicated’ by Snowden leaks.
Just one major telecommunications company refused to participate in a legally dubious NSA surveillance program in 2001. A few years later, its CEO was indicted by federal prosecutors. He was convicted, served four and a half years of his sentence and was released this month.
Prosecutors claim Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio was guilty of insider trading, and that his prosecution had nothing to do with his refusal to allow spying on his customers without the permission of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. But to this day, Nacchio insists that his prosecution was retaliation for refusing to break the law on the NSA’s behalf.
There was a time I would have doubted that sort of claim, but not so much now.