Wednesday, February 27, 2013

A Ruling on Racial Progress

By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
 
I can only hope that the scourge of racism is finally purged from Stewartstown and Pinkham's Grant. These are two of 10 New Hampshire towns covered by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which requires local officials to get permission, or "preclearance," on any changes to their election laws.
 
Stewartstown has just over a thousand souls in it and is 99 percent white. In 1970, when it was put under the authority of Section 5, the census listed two blacks out of its 1,008 residents. Pinkham's Grant boasts nine residents, and it must also beg Washington for permission to make any changes to how it votes.
 
In 1970, New Hampshire required all of its citizens to pass a literacy test to register to vote. But Pinkham's Grant, Stewartstown and the other eight towns also had low voter-participation rates. These two factors -- a test of any kind for voting and participation rates under 50 percent -- met the criteria for oversight under Section 5.
 
But after years of onerous preparation, the state filed for a "bailout" from the oversight provisions of Section 5 in November. And although the Justice Department hasn't taken a whole state off its watch list since the early 1980s (back when that hotbed of Jim Crow, Maine, was taken off the list), New Hampshire will probably be let off the hook.
 
In 2009, the Supreme Court signaled to the Justice Department that the Voting Rights Act was sorely in need of updating. In 1965, the legislation was a radical but necessary response to entrenched, institutionalized racism. Today, blacks vote at a higher rate than whites in many Section 5 jurisdictions, and in others the shortfall is hardly due to anything like Jim Crow. Latino rates are on the rise too.
 
Nine whole states are still covered; seven of them are from the old Confederacy (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia) plus Arizona and Alaska. But there are jurisdictions in parts of Florida, California and the Confederate bastions of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York City that must seek preclearance from Uncle Sam as well.
 
"The evil that Section 5 is meant to address may no longer be concentrated in the jurisdictions singled out for preclearance," the high court said in Northwest Austin Municipal Utility District No. 1 vs. Holder.
 
Justice Clarence Thomas complained that the prospect of getting a bailout -- i.e. getting out from under Section 5 -- is essentially a "mirage." The Justice Department is eager to prove it's not, because the court is hearing a new case this week, Shelby County vs. Holder, which the court could use to throw out the whole regime.
 
Liberals are horrified by any talk of getting the feds out of the election business, somewhat understandably. The passage of the Voting Rights Act is a treasured chapter in American political history. It's also not surprising that much of the argument for keeping it unreformed rests on the emotional resonance of the civil rights movement half a century ago and the alleged popularity of the law.
 
Nostalgia is a weak argument for any law, or so liberals usually tell me. As Justice John Roberts wrote in 2009: "Past success alone ... is not adequate justification to retain the preclearance requirements." And, popularity shouldn't be an issue at all. The popularity of slavery was one reason the court could hand down an opinion such as Dred Scott.
 
President Obama (who is black and twice carried Virginia) disagrees. If the preclearance requirement were stripped, he said, it "would be hard for us to catch those things up front to make sure that elections are done in an equitable way." That's true. But that logic basically amounts to turning the Civil Rights Division into a permanent department of pre-crime.
 
It's true Congress keeps renewing the law (the last vote extends Section 5 until 2031), but one reason for that is that liberal politicians, journalists and activists are quick to demagogue anyone in favor of retiring Section 5 as being "anti-civil rights," in much the same way any criticism of the Violence Against Women Act is instantly spun as support for wife-beating. You may not have noticed, but the Democratic Party has a vested interest in -- or at least a nasty habit of -- cynically using race as cudgel against its opponents. It's no wonder Republicans have little desire to take up the issue.
 
Whether the Supreme Court ends up throwing it all out or simply goading the Justice Department to do the right thing, the court is playing a useful role by forcing our system to acknowledge the fact of racial progress.

Why Does Anyone Need to Read About Celebrities?

By Ann Coulter
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
 
Having given up on trying to persuade Americans that taking guns away from law-abiding citizens will reduce the murder rate, Democrats have turned to their usual prohibitionary argument: "Why does anyone need (an assault weapon, a 30-round magazine, a semiautomatic, etc., etc.)?"
 
Phony conservative Joe Manchin, who won his U.S. Senate seat in West Virginia with an ad showing him shooting a gun, said, "I don't know anyone (who) needs 30 rounds in a clip."
 
CNN's Don Lemon, who does not fit the usual profile of the avid hunter and outdoorsman, demanded, "Who needs an assault rifle to go hunting?"
 
Fantasist Dan Rather said, "There is no need to have these high-powered assault weapons."
 
And prissy Brit Piers Morgan thought he'd hit on a real showstopper with, "I don't know why anyone needs an assault rifle." Of course, where he comes from, policemen carry wooden sticks.
 
Since when do Americans have to give the government an explanation for why they "need" something? If that's the test, I can think of a whole list of things I don't know why anyone needs.
 
I don't know why anyone needs to burn an American flag at a protest. The point could be made just as well verbally.
 
I don't know why anyone needs to read about the private lives of celebrities. Why can't we shut down the gossip rags?
 
I don't know why anyone needs to vote. One vote has never made a difference in any federal election.
 
I don't know why anyone needs to bicycle in a city.
 
I don't know why anyone needs to have anal sex at a bathhouse. I won't stop them, but I don't know why anyone needs to do that.
 
I don't know why anyone needs to go hiking in national parks, where they're constantly falling off cliffs, being buried in avalanches and getting lost -- all requiring taxpayer-funded rescue missions.
 
I don't know why Karen Finley needs to smear herself with chocolate while reading poems about "love." But not only do Democrats allow that, they made us pay for it through the National Endowment for the Arts.
 
In fact, I don't know why anyone needs to do any of the things that offend lots of people, especially when I have to pay for it. I don't mind paying for national monuments and the ballet, but if "need" is a legitimate argument, there's no end to the activities that can be banned, forget "not subsidized by Ann."
 
Democrats are willing to make gigantic exceptions to the "need" rule for things they happen to personally like. Their position is: "I don't know why anyone needs to hunt; on the other hand, I do see why your tax dollars should be used to subsidize partial-birth abortion, bicycle lanes and the ballet."
 
They'll say that no one died in my examples (except abortion) (and bicycling) (and bathhouses) (and national parks), but the victims of mass shootings weren't killed by gun owners. They were killed by crazy people.
 
How about keeping guns out of the hands of crazy people?
 
Liberals won't let us do that -- and yet they won't tell us why anyone needs to live on sidewalk grates, harass pedestrians and crap in his pants. Those are precious constitutional rights, straight from the pen of James Madison, and please stop asking questions.
 
"I don't see why anyone needs ..." is code for: "I don't do it, so let's ban it." The corollary is: "I enjoy this, so you have to subsidize it."
 
Environmentalists say: "I don't know why anyone needs to shower once a day -- my French friends and I take two showers per month. We think we smell fine."
 
That's the difference between a totalitarian and a normal person. Liberals are obsessed with controlling what other people do.
 
As Sen. Dianne Feinstein said this week, so-called "assault weapons" are a "personal pleasure" and "mothers and women" have to decide whether this personal pleasure "is more important than the general welfare."
 
The "general welfare" is every tyrant's excuse, going back to Robespierre and the guillotine. Free people are not in the habit of providing reasons why they "need" something simply because the government wants to ban it. That's true of anything -- but especially something the government is constitutionally prohibited from banning, like guns.
 
The question isn't whether we "need" guns. It's whether the government should have a monopoly on force.
 
In liberals' ideal world, no one will even know you don't have to wait 22 minutes for the police when someone breaks into your home, there are toilets that can get the job done on one flush, food tastes better with salt, and you can drive over 55 mph and get there faster.
 
Meanwhile, we're all required to subsidize their hobbies -- recycling, abortion, the "arts," bicycling, illegal alien workers, etc.
 
Liberals ought to think about acquiring a new hobby: leaving people alone.

Teacher Tells Students to Call 9-11 Hijackers “Freedom Fighters”

By Todd Starnes
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
 
An Advanced Placement World Geography teacher at a Texas high school who encouraged students to dress in Islamic clothing also instructed them to refer to the 9-11 hijackers not as terrorists – but as “freedom fighters,” according to students who were in the class.
 
Students at Lumberton High School were also told to stop referring to the Holocaust as Genocide – instead they were told to use the term “ethnic cleansing.”
 
John Valastro, the superintendent of the Lumberton Independent School District, tells me that the teacher did absolutely nothing wrong.
 
“What is more dangerous – fear and ignorance or education and understanding,” he asked. “From our standpoint, we are here to educate the kids.
 
Valastro said the teacher involved is a 32-year veteran who was simply following state teaching guidelines.
 
“I don’t think my freshman-level teacher was trying to politicize radical Islam or anything like that,” he said. “I don’t think our teacher has...to my knowledge ever converted a single student to Islam.”
 
The Islamic lessons in the small public high school generated national attention after a photograph of four female students wearing burqas surfaced on Facebook.
 
April LeBlanc’s 15-year-old daughter was one of the students in the photograph. She told me that many parents in the district feel betrayed by school officials.
 
“My biggest thing is not the burqa,” she said. “That was the key to opening up the rest. It’s scary how far they dove into the Islamic faith. It’s scary what they taught my daughter. Who’s in charge of this? How did our superintendent let this slip through the cracks?”
 
LeBlanc said the students were told that they could no longer use the terms suicide bomber or terrorist. Instead, they were instructed to use the words “freedom fighters.”
 
“This teacher taught her that a freedom fighter is when they give their life for the Holy War – and that they’re going to go to heaven,” she said. “They were saturating these kids in Islam and my daughter is an American Christian child.”
 
Madelyn LeBlanc told me that it was clear her teacher was very uncomfortable lecturing the students.
 
“I do have a lot of sympathy for her,” the 15-year-old said. “At the very beginning she said she didn’t want to teach it but it was in the curriculum.”
 
Her mother added that it was her impression that the teacher did not agree with the quote about calling the terrorists freedom fighters and laced her lecture with sarcasm.
 
During a lesson on Judaism, LeBlanc said the teacher told the class, “Students, I’m supposed to be politically correct and tell you that the Holocaust was not Genocide. It was an ethnic cleansing.”
 
LeBlanc said her daughter kept detailed notes of every classroom lecture and as she read the transcripts she became disturbed.
 
“Really,” she asked. “They can’t call the Holocaust Genocide? I was more upset with that than the lessons on Islam. It made me sick.”
 
And then came the comparison between the 9-11 hijackers and the freedom fighters.
 
Madelyn said a young man sitting beside her was stunned.
 
“He was shocked that we had to call them that,” she told Fox News. “He laughed and asked the teacher, ‘Is that a joke? Are you serious? Why do we have to call them that? That makes it sound okay (what they did) And it’s not.’”
 
Madelyn said the teacher didn’t know how to respond.
 
“She said it was something we have to learn for the end of the year testing,” she said. “I’m sure it was very difficult for her to do.”
 
Madelyn said the lesson about freedom fighters made her feel “terrible.”
 
“That made it sound like what they were doing was okay,” she said.
 
The superintendent also defended the lesson on freedom fighters.
 
“The whole idea behind this particular lesson – do you call yourself a freedom fighter or Islamic jihadist – or whatever it is you want to be called – you’ve got to put things in perspective,” the superintendent said. “We’re trying to teach the kids to discern for themselves that one thing can be called many different things.”
 
Valastro said it’s important for students to understand context.
 
“We might see it as terrorism, but from the Islamic side they might call it jihadist or freedom fighter,” he said.
 
The superintendent said he was not aware of the specific comments made about the 9-11 hijackers – but conceded there was only one side to the attack.
 
“I do agree it was a terrorist attack,” he said. “But in several classes across this country, you’re going to have a make-up of students from all over the world in your class. We teach it as an act of terrorism – whereas they are teaching it to their kids as a revolutionary event.”
 
LeBlanc said she was especially bothered by the lack of emphasis on other religions. She said there were hardly any lessons on Judaism and none on Christianity.
 
“I wondered how it was okay for them to go so in-depth into a religion from the other side of the world but it was not okay for them to be like that with Christianity,” she said.
 
“I try to stay open-minded,” she said. “I don’t want my daughter to be ignorant about the world. My kids watch the news with us. We make them aware. I don’t even mind the high school teaching these things.”
 
But, she added, there was no balance.
 
“They can talk about how important Mecca is – but why aren’t they talking about how important Christianity was to the founding of the nation,” she asked.
 
LeBlanc and other parents said they feel betrayed.
 
“We trusted these people,” she said of the school system. “It scares me. I feel like our school is being infiltrated. How can this not be a sign? We’re talking about Lumberton, Texas. We’re talking about a small town with Christian churches on every street corner. Right in our small school this is going on.”

Obama’s Fear of Spending Cuts

By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
 
According to President Obama, the $62 billion in new taxes this year imposed as part of the fiscal-cliff deal will have no effect on economic growth. In fact, the president believes that he can safely impose another $58 billion in tax increases to replace spending cuts from the upcoming sequester. And, of course, Obamacare’s almost $42 billion in new taxes (and regulations) in 2013 don’t have any impact on hiring or investment. But, the president says, the $44 billion in cuts this year resulting from the sequester will throw the U.S. economy back into recession.
 
The president seems to labor under the impression that nearly all government spending adds to the economy and that wealth in private hands does not. Certainly, though one can debate the relative efficiency of programs funded by the government, a case can be made that some government spending can add to economic growth when such spending truly represents an investment (to use the president’s favorite buzzword) in, for example, scientific research, infrastructure, or education. In reality, however, most government spending has little to do with investing. Even under a fairly broad definition of “investment,” such spending represents less than 13 percent of this year’s budget. By far, most of the rest consists simply of transfer payments — that is, taking money from one person and giving it to another. Transfer payments add to GDP only in a technical sense, but they do not create any new wealth or increase productivity.
 
On the other side of the equation, it is important to remember that every dollar that the federal government spends must first be extracted from the private sector, through either taxes or borrowing. That means that those resources are not available for the private sector to invest in ways that grow the economy.
 
President Obama may think that the rich sit around like Scrooge McDuck, watching piles of money in their vaults, but in reality individuals, even rich ones, either spend their money or they save and invest it. If they spend it, it helps provide jobs for the people who make and sell whatever it is they buy. If instead the money is saved or invested, it provides capital to start businesses and hire workers. And so, even in those few cases where government spending can be termed an investment, it displaces a certain amount of private investment, thereby reducing the net return on the government’s action.
 
That would suggest that cutting government spending, even through an admittedly flawed process such as the sequester, might ultimately be better for the economy than preserving government spending at the cost of higher debt or taxes.
 
But, as the president and his supporters (Paul Krugman in every other column, for example) might respond, hasn’t Europe shown us that cuts in government spending can devastate an economy? Great Britain is held up in particular as an example of how a country cannot cut its way to prosperity. Britain has embraced austerity and its economy has slipped back into recession.
 
But Britain actually shows just the opposite. The British government has made few real spending cuts. In real terms, total government spending did decrease marginally from 2011 to 2012 by £11 billion, or 1.6 percent of total spending, but it still remains £55 billion above 2008 levels after adjusting for inflation. On the other hand, there have been plenty of tax hikes, including increases in the Value Added Tax (VAT), income taxes for high earners, capital-gains taxes, payroll taxes, and taxes on home sales. Sound familiar?
 
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center has pointed out that in Europe generally, countries have raised taxes far more than they have cut spending. To blame slow European growth on spending cuts, then, would be quite a stretch.
 
In the U.S., the cuts under the sequester amount to roughly 0.3 percent of GDP. No doubt they will impose a certain amount of pain on individuals directly affected and on communities that depend heavily on federal payments. But they are unlikely to tank the U.S. economy. On the other hand, continuing to raise taxes or to run massive deficits will almost certainly continue to slow economic growth.
 
Higher taxes, more spending, more debt — that, not the sequester, is something we should really be afraid of.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Environmentalism and Human Sacrifice

By Dennis Prager
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
 
Last week, Bjorn Lomborg, the widely published Danish professor and director of one of the world's leading environmental think tanks, the Copenhagen Consensus Center, published an article about the Philippines' decision, after 12 years, to allow genetically modified (GM) rice -- "golden rice" -- to be grown and consumed in that country.
 
The reason for the delay was environmentalist opposition to GM rice; and the reason for the change in Philippine policy was that 4.4 million Filipino children suffer from vitamin A deficiency. That deficiency, Lomborg writes, "according to the World Health Organization, causes 250,000 to 500,000 children to go blind each year. Of these, half die within a year."
 
During the 12-year delay, Lomborg continues, "About eight million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency."
 
"Golden rice" contains vitamin A, making it by far the most effective and cheapest way to get vitamin A into Third World children.
 
So who would oppose something that could save millions of children's lives and millions of other children from blindness?
 
The answer is people who are more devoted to nature than to human life.
 
And who might such people be?
 
They are called environmentalists.
 
These are the people who coerced nations worldwide into banning DDT. It is generally estimated this ban has led to the deaths of about 50 million human beings, overwhelmingly African children, from malaria. DDT kills the mosquito that spreads malaria to human beings.
 
US News and World Report writer Carrie Lukas reported in 2010, "Fortunately, in September 2006, the World Health Organization announced a change in policy: It now recommends DDT for indoor use to fight malaria. The organization's Dr. Anarfi Asamoa-Baah explained, 'The scientific and programmatic evidence clearly supports this reassessment. Indoor residual spraying (IRS) is useful to quickly reduce the number of infections caused by malaria-carrying mosquitoes. IRS has proven to be just as cost effective as other malaria prevention measures and DDT presents no health risk when used properly.'"
 
Though Lukas blames environmentalists for tens of millions of deaths, she nevertheless describes environmentalists as "undoubtedly well-intentioned."
 
I offer two assessments of this judgment.
 
First, in life it is almost always irrelevant whether or not an individual or a movement is well intentioned. It is difficult to name a movement that has committed great evil whose members woke up each day asking, "What evil can I commit today?" Nearly all of them think they're well intentioned. Good intentions don't mean a thing.
 
Second, while environmentalists believe they have good intentions, I do not believe their intentions are good.
 
Concern for the natural environment is certainly laudable and every normal person shares it. But the organized environmentalist movement -- Lomborg specifically cites Greenpeace, Naomi Klein and the New York Times -- is led by fanatics. The movement's value system is morally askew. It places a pristine natural world above the well-being of human beings.
 
The environmentalist movement's responsibility for the deaths of tens of millions of poor children in the Third World is the most egregious example. But there are less egregious examples of the movement's lack of concern for people.
 
Take the Keystone XL pipeline, the pipeline the Canadian government wants built in the US in order to send Canadian crude to American refineries. It would be a 1,179-mile, 36-inch-diameter crude oil pipeline, beginning in Alberta, and ending in Nebraska. The pipeline will be able to transport about 830,000 barrels of oil per day to Gulf Coast and Midwest refineries, reducing American dependence on oil from Venezuela -- Iran's base in the Western Hemisphere -- and the Middle East by up to 40 percent. It will also provide Americans with many thousands of well-paying jobs.
 
Approving this pipeline is a moral and economic necessity.
 
The American economy needs the pipeline -- even big labor wants it; it vastly reduces American dependency on countries that wish to hurt us; it helps our ally and biggest trading partner, Canada; and if America doesn't use that oil, China will.
 
But the Obama administration may (again) veto the Keystone XL pipeline -- for one reason: environmentalist fanaticism.
 
The employment of thousands of Americans, the well-being of the American economy and American national security -- all of these concerns are secondary to the environmentalist movement's view of nature uber alles.
 
There are many fine people who are concerned with the environment. Indeed, we should all be. But the movement known as environmentalism is not only a false religion, it is one that allows human sacrifice.

Hollywood and PC History

By Fred Thompson
Monday, February 25, 2013
 
Last week I received a call from a Hollywood reporter asking me if I thought that the political criticism that the movie Zero Dark Thirty had received would hurt its chances at the Oscars. Not having a lot of experience with Academy Awards, I replied that I had no idea. However, I couldn’t help but offer something, so I added that I wouldn’t be surprised if it did, since liberal criticism of movies often seems to resonate more than criticism from the right, which is usually ignored. (“Moo,” right? Master of the obvious.)
 
The reporter was referring to the “word” going around Hollywood that ZDT had fallen out of favor after (mostly) liberal politicians in Washington criticized the movie for showing enhanced-interrogation techniques as an important and effective tool in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. Three senators called for an investigation into what information the CIA had offered the filmmakers, and asked the studio to state that torture was not an effective technique. Specifically, the movie suggested that enhanced interrogation had produced some information that, along with other intelligence, revealed Osama bin Laden’s courier, which in turn led to bin Laden himself. Liberals on both coasts were outraged. Never mind that this is precisely what several people involved in the pursuit, including Obama’s former CIA director Leon Panetta, said happened. How dare a Hollywood movie throw a bone to a George W. Bush policy!
 
Perhaps my reporter friend was on to something. Last night, Zero Dark Thirty didn’t fare too well at the Oscars, despite having received more critical praise than the other nominees and garnering the most pre-Academy awards. Kathryn Bigelow, the highly acclaimed director of the movie, didn’t even get nominated for best director. The Carter-era Iranian-rescue movie Argo (with the phony final runway-chase scene) won Best Picture, which was announced by Michelle Obama.
 
I’m not saying it’s all about politics — not Washington politics, anyway. It’s more about hypocrisy and political correctness. The criticism of Zero is based, wrongly, in my opinion, on its supposed historical inaccuracy. Meanwhile Lincoln is receiving almost universal adulation, although the most important dramatic premise of that movie is not historically accurate.
 
The tense and exciting fight against the clock as Lincoln tried to get the 13th Amendment passed was made up. The South was not going to be allowed to hold it up, particularly with General Sherman’s successful military campaign far below the Mason-Dixon Line.  Further, Lincoln had made it clear that he’d call a special session of Congress in March 1865 if needed, at which time he would be assured of having enough Republican votes for passage of the amendment.  Lincoln’s greatness needs no embellishment, but that didn’t stop the writer of the screenplay from embellishing. Abe Lincoln was an extraordinary politician but a politician nonetheless — he opposed slavery vehemently but, as late as 1862, had no intention of eradicating it if the Union could be preserved without doing so. He didn’t even support the 13th Amendment when the idea was first introduced. None of this is extremely important in the broad scope of history, but moviemakers would have gone a little lighter on Lincoln as saint if they had prized historical accuracy.
 
Frost-Nixon was an award-winning Broadway play and movie based on a real-life TV interview of the former president by David Frost. The final scene shows Frost aggressively going after Nixon and finally wearing him down, getting him to admit that he was in on the cover-up of Watergate. But the confession never happened in the real interview. In the mainstream media, only writer Elizabeth Drew pointed this out and chided those responsible for the misrepresentation.
 
You’ve probably never read the transcript of the Scopes monkey trial, on which the movie Inherit the Wind is based. If you did, however, you would not find the befuddled, confused, and embarrassed William Jennings Bryan who is depicted in the movie, where he defends a literal interpretation of the Bible. Regardless of one’s view on the matter,  the historical record shows Bryan more than held his own under cross-examination by Clarence Darrow and that the unfair portrayal just might have had something to do with Hollywood’s opinion on the issue.
 
Altering history or making up “facts” in a movie or play is not that big of a deal. Every historical drama ever written has contained heavy doses of fiction, either for dramatic effect or to make a point. Just ask Richard II. What is of concern is that fictionalized accounts that are factually wrong but politically correct tend to become accepted history. Others that are less convenient, such as Zero Dark Thirty, get a congressional investigation.

Against Gun Registration

By Charles C. W. Cooke
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
 
If, as is frequently claimed, conservative fears of a federal gun registry are paranoid and spurious, then the stand that Oklahoma senator Tom Coburn is taking in the Senate will presumably be welcomed by all sides. On this week’s Fox News Sunday, Coburn bluntly affirmed that any background-check bill emanating from the Senate “absolutely will not” contain any provision for “record-keeping of legitimate, law-abiding gun owners.” The inclusion of such a scheme, he declared, would “kill this bill” — and any others to boot. As well it should: As things stand, the Firearm Owners Protection Act mandates the federal government to destroy within 24 hours any information that it gathers during background checks; all who are jealous of their liberty must ensure that this remains law.
 
Contrary to the claims of some on the right, President Obama has not advocated any form of gun registration. But, despite how it sometimes appears, President Obama is not the entire U.S. government, and while he may have kept quiet on the matter, others have not been so wise. Illinois representative Bobby Rush has thrice introduced the “Blair Holt’s Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act” — first in 2007, again in 2009, and, most recently, as soon as the 113th Congress convened in January of this year. Rush’s bill would require all gun owners to possess a federal firearm license and allow the attorney general to create and oversee a national gun registry.
 
Another bill, introduced in January of this year by Representative Rush Holt, would “provide for the mandatory licensing and registration of handguns.” And Senator Dianne Feinstein, who authored the 1994 “assault weapons” ban, included registration of grandfathered weapons in her recent “assault weapons” bill and has a history of proposing national gun registration. A host of other bills include provisions, both large and small, by which the federal government might keep tabs on Americans’ gun ownership.
 
An American gun registry has been an aim of gun-control advocacy groups for almost 40 years — and not always as a stand-alone measure. Reinforcing the worst “slippery slope” fears held by Second Amendment advocates, the chairman of the Brady Campaign explained the role of gun registries in 1976:
 
 The first problem is to slow down the increasing number of handguns being produced and sold in this country. The second problem is to get handguns registered. And the final problem is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition — except for the military, policemen, licensed security guards, licensed sporting clubs, and licensed gun collectors — totally illegal.
 
The threat to liberty inherent in gun registries should be painfully self-evident, especially when combined with the horrifying history of such programs elsewhere. The sheer fruitlessness of such systems, however, is not so apparent, and the uninitiated could be forgiven for wondering, “What’s the fuss?” Luckily, a few other countries — countries regarded by the gun-control lobby as being more enlightened than the United States and happily lacking in the pernicious influence of the National Rifle Association — have tried and abandoned gun registries.
 
Canada’s experiment with a long-gun registry, ostensibly contrived to prevent “violence against women” — it’s always for “women” or “the children,” isn’t it? — achieved little more than to demonstrate what the less naïve among us already knew: that criminals do not abide by the law. As Mauser has noted, data from Statistics Canada show not just that only 4 percent of long guns used in Canadian homicides were registered, but also that the claim that such registration will help the police to “monitor potentially dangerous gun owners” is upside down. Instead, statistics reveal that Canadians who own legally registered guns are less dangerous to their fellow citizens than those who either do not own guns at all or own unregistered guns. Unsurprisingly, while the long-gun registry was in force, in not a single case did the police employ it in order to identify a murderer.
 
When, as the culmination of a piecemeal process that began in 1995, the registry was created in 2003, Canada’s parliament promised that its cost would not exceed $2 million. By 2012, the registry had cost taxpayers $2.7 billion — a 134,900 percent increase on projections. (In the U.S., a registry costing the same amount per person would run $67 billion over the same time.) For this considerable outlay, the government reaped a homicide rate that dropped more slowly than that of the United States, a country in which gun laws have been slowly liberalized; a collection of disillusioned police forces, whose budgets were being eaten up by the growing costs of gun registration; and an angry citizenry whose indignation, Gary Mauser observes, was serious enough to create a peculiar coalition of the Reform, Progressive, Conservative, and New Democratic parties and to wipe out the Liberal party in the West. The registry was abolished in 2012.
 
New Zealand’s long-gun-registry experiment ended in failure, too. By the early 1980s, New Zealand’s National Police pleaded with that country’s parliament to abandon the system, having watched ballooning budgets lead only to a lot of wasted time and to the expansion of a system that, frankly, didn’t do anything useful. In 1983, parliament, conceding that criminals are unlikely to leave registered guns at the scenes of their crimes, complied.
 
Very little thought is necessary to render as a sick joke the oft-repeated claim that police benefit from knowing who has guns and who hasn’t. A registry tells authorities which law-abiding citizens have weapons and which don’t — which at best is useless information, and at worst is yet another case of government’s failing to do anything about the criminal and so going after the law-abiding instead. The reductio ad absurdum of this tendency has been well documented by the historian Clayton Cramer. “The U.S. Supreme Court,” Cramer writes,
 
 ruled in Haynes vs. U.S. (1968) that convicted felons have a Constitutional right to not register a gun, because to register a gun would be self-incrimination. Only people that aren’t criminals can be punished for not registering. If the criminals aren’t required to register, but you and I are, why bother?
 
As Cramer noted, the Supreme Court thus ruled that on Fifth Amendment grounds “a person illegally possessing a firearm, under either federal or state law, [can] not be punished for failing to register it.” I have no great objection to this principle, but it does highlight the absurdity of an approach that would see constitutionally protected individual liberties being strictly guarded in the case of criminals but restricted when it comes to the law-abiding. Practically speaking, the Haynes decision legally exempts from any future registry the very people whose behavior is used to justify its necessity. Surely, if we are going to become so strict about the Constitution, then the Second and Fourth Amendments should share in the bounty?
 
If good sense prevails, this principle will never need to be tested. As John Lott argued in 2012, “in parts of the United States where registration is required, the results have been no different” from what they were in Canada. “Neither Hawaii, D.C., nor Chicago can point to any crimes that have been solved using registration records,” he adds. Both philosophically and practically, Senator Coburn is right to insist that the federal government stay out of the registry game. Only in Washington, D.C., could a handful of politicians look at the failure of registry programs at home and abroad and propose that they be copied and expanded. Those who have charged that opponents of a federal gun registry are fighting a straw man will, I can only presume, line up in support of Coburn; for if there’s truly no enthusiasm for record-keeping in D.C., then no one has anything to fear from the senator’s innocuous stand.

Republicans & Immigration

By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, February 26, 2013
 
Republicans are terribly confused over illegal immigration. They still can’t quite figure out its role in the last election.
 
Did the issue lose them the Latino vote? Maybe — but why did they also forfeit the Asian vote, and by nearly the same margin? Why did the caricature of Republicans as old white nativists resonate with Asians as well? If support for closing the border and refusing amnesty lost Republicans the election, why do a majority of Americans continue to poll in opposition to any sort of collective amnesty?
 
And why, in some polls, did Latinos seem more concerned about continuing big-government readiness to help the poor and tax the wealthy than about immigration reform? Alan Simpson and Ronald Reagan, who helped to give us the 1986 amnesty, are not heroes to the Latino community. Is there statistical support for the often-repeated axiom that Latinos, as a group, are more likely than members of the so-called majority culture to embrace traditional family values — lower divorce rates, lower rates of illegitimacy, lower crime rates, higher graduation rates?
 
Of course, kinder, gentler talk — unlike the buffoonery that was heard in some of last year’s sloppy Republican primary debates — would have helped. Yet in 2008 circumspection and prudence did not aid all that much the moderate John McCain, who in the past had championed a sort of amnesty lite. And all the silly and often gratuitous braggadocio about upping the height of the border wall or electrifying it was more than trumped by the crass pandering of Barack Obama, who called on Latinos to “punish our enemies”; joined with a foreign nation, Mexico, to sue one of his own states, Arizona; and claimed his opponents wanted to arrest children on their way to ice-cream parlors. Note there is no national commentary deploring the fact that the president of the United States engaged in just the sort of crass ethnic showmanship that characterized the Republican debates. Apparently, because his pandering worked and the Republicans’ did not, under the laws of politics only the latter was pandering.
 
Confused by questions like these, Republicans don’t quite know what to do about the 11 to 15 million illegal aliens in our midst, with more to come in future years. And in lieu of wisdom, principles, and consistency, Republican are mostly experimenting, trying to square the circle and win the Latino vote with clichés about conservative values and a vaguely familiar message of amnesty for those already here predicated on no additional illegal immigration. But the problem can be only reduced, not solved, by kinder, gentler language and outreach to Latino groups, for in the end it is an existential issue well beyond trimming.
 
In truth, illegal immigration is illiberal to the core, based on reducing the legal applicant to a formalistic naïf, making a mockery of the law, undermining the American poor, enabling the worst policies of the Mexican government, and aiding the American well-off. True, it was mostly conservative employers and mostly liberal partisans, hand in glove, who have created the problem in the last 30 years — the one wanting cheap non-union labor, the latter wanting future dependents and constituents. But that said, there are now forces in play that ensure that the status quo is antithetical to everything the Republican party claims it stands for.
 
Republicans profess that they favor a meritocracy and a nation that looks at the content of our character rather than the color of our skin. But contemporary illegal immigration is not a theoretical issue about federal law. Rather, in terms of particular immigrant groups, it is largely of concern to Latin Americans, who want more Latin Americans to enter the United States, preferably legally but, if not, then illegally. This is largely for reasons of ethnic solidarity, never mind that it interferes with integration and assimilation. If it is a question of keeping the present system of massive influxes of illegal aliens, periodically remedied by amnesties of the 1986 sort, versus an entirely legal system that privileges education and skill sets, and therefore might well result in true diversity, with tens of thousands of Asians, Africans, and Europeans entering legally, rather than mostly a monolithic influx of Latin Americans entering illegally, then I fear most activists would prefer the present non-system.
 
In other words, if the southern border were closed, and only legal immigration were permitted, predicated on criteria other than ethnic profile, proximity, pseudo-historical claims on the American Southwest, and family ties, then Republicans would still lose the Latino vote, at least for the short term.
 
The situation is probably even worse than that for Republican immigration idealists. As they are learning in their disastrous cobra dance with the administration, Barack Obama and his activist supporters define “comprehensive immigration reform” quite differently from the way most Republicans would. If the latter are willing to concede de facto green-card status, with the much ballyhooed “pathway to citizenship,” to foreign nationals who have long resided here, are not on public assistance, and do not have criminal records — in exchange for closing the border, crafting a meritocratic legal-immigration system, and imposing fines on employers who hire illegals — the Democrats most probably would not be on board.
 
In a word, too many illegal aliens are recent arrivals and would not benefit from this scheme. Too many thousands are on public assistance. And too many thousands have criminal records. That these latter groups are, of course, a minority amid a much larger hard-working majority matters little to liberals. It is not so much that they are for amnesty for most, as that they are against deportation for some — a group that in aggregate could be in the hundreds of thousands. Watch the eroding negotiations, as Obama casts his alluring bait, hooks his Republican fish, and then yanks them around on requisite border enforcement, prior arrests and convictions, and the unemployed on public assistance. For demagogic purposes, there is only a Dream Act, not a non-Dream Act; all are eligible for citizenship, almost none for deportation; only future brain surgeons crossed the border illegally, not those who sometimes commit felonies or drive while intoxicated.
 
For the political liberal, the children of illegal aliens vote solidly Democratic and will be expected to do so in bloc fashion for the future. For the cultural liberal, everything from Chicano Studies Departments and La Raza to affirmative action, setasides, and cultural chauvinism are predicated on massive influxes of foreign nationals that take two or even three generations to assimilate fully and so skew statistical surveys of the status of the resident Latino community. The old melting pot is derided in elite ethnic circles as much as the bankrupt model of the salad bowl is praised.
 
Without illegal immigration, Latinos eventually would become something akin, for example, to the mostly middle-class Italian-American community (does it have a lobbying group known as La Razza?) — politically balanced, without tribal appendages in the media and academia, with a young person named Lopez no different from one named Pirelli, ethnicity becoming merely incidental rather than essential to his persona.
 
What then should be the Republican position?
 
First, in the short term, insist on civil speech, and refer to illegally residing foreign nationals with respect and dignity — and yet also without the fawning and transparent obsequiousness that earn contempt rather than respect. Make the argument that the present state of entitlements is unsustainable and that conservative approaches to the economy and the popular culture are more in tune with immigrants’ longer-term aspirations. And then hope for charismatic, high-profile national leaders like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, who, for largely emotional reasons, might be able to help peel off maybe 40 percent of the so-called Latino vote.
 
All that said, Latinos will not break for Republicans, or even split 50/50, until ethnicity becomes a secondary issue. That evolution will take more than civility, courtesy, and sympathetic Latino spokesmen. It will demand years of melting-pot principles instead of tribal pandering. Some of these principles are:
 
1. There must be a closed and enforceable border that eliminates all illegal entry. That reality must precede, not follow or be simultaneous with, pathways granted to citizenship.
 
2. Green-card residence could be offered to those who initially broke our immigration law — but only with carefully crafted prerequisites, including substantial residency in the U.S., a clean criminal record, and proof of employment and independence from public assistance. For those who qualify, the green card should be forthcoming; for those who do not, the road should lead back to one’s country of origin.
 
3. An eventual pathway to citizenship for the qualified green-card holder should hinge on acquisition of proficiency in English and other traditional citizenship tests, presumably satisfied as the resident applicant waits behind those legal applicants whom he cut in front of in illegal fashion when he first came here.
 
4. We should insist on an ethnically blind legal-immigration system focusing on granting citizenship on the basis on education and skills — and not prejudiced on the basis of national origin.
 
Sticking to these principles would probably mean that the Republicans would at best capture no more than 40 percent of the Latino vote in the next few elections. But the reform offers the best hope that Latinos, like most other ethnic groups, would eventually become indifferent to immigration policy, politically ambiguous, and more likely to vote for the candidate on the basis of his positions and his character, and not the nature of his ethnic agenda.
 
For those very reasons, expect the president and his immigration supporters to praise these principles in the abstract and oppose them bitterly in the concrete. Their purpose is not to institute comprehensive immigration reform, but to demand amnesty, to renege on its prerequisites, to blame Republicans for the failure of compromise, to demagogue the issue in the next election, and to rest content with the continuance of the present non-system that has so greatly benefited both professional ethnics and Democratic operatives.

Monday, February 25, 2013

Defense Is Not Optional

By Jim Talent
Monday, February 25, 2013
 
Recently, Neal Freeman wrote an article for NRO on Bill Buckley’s famous maxim that, in election campaigns, conservatives should support the “rightwardmost viable” candidate. Mr. Freeman focused on the meaning of the word “viable” in that formulation. That was a useful exercise, but it’s also helpful to consider what Mr. Buckley understood by the term “rightwardmost,” especially as it relates to the national defense.
 
We can assume that Mr. Buckley used “rightwardmost” as a synonym for “most conservative.” In a Townhall interview near the end of his life, he described conservatism this way: “Conservatism aims to maintain in working order the loyalties of the community to perceived truths and also to those truths which in their judgment have earned universal recognition.”
 
One of those truths is the essential weakness of human nature. Conservatives believe that human beings — while capable of great things if sufficiently steeped in the values of an enlightened society — are by their nature weak and corruptible. That’s the reason conservatives are suspicious of government; government represents the harnessing of state power to the weaknesses of human nature.
 
For the equal but opposite reason, conservatives also believe that government is necessary as a restraint on the worst tendencies of human beings. Government must therefore exercise a police power, properly checked and balanced to prevent abuse. It must also provide for the national defense by maintaining military forces that are effective but also systematically constrained so that they do not become an agent of oppression.
 
The idea that government should be limited in its role and constrained in the exercise of power, but vigorous in its proper functions, is at the heart of conservatism, and of the Constitution as well. In Federalist #51, James Madison wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
 
The Constitution, of which Madison was the primary author, assigns the function of national defense to the central government. In fact, the text of the Constitution makes clear that national defense is the primary, exclusive, and mandatory function of the federal government.
 
• Of the 17 enumerated powers granted Congress in Article I, more than a third relate to defense. Congress is granted the full range of authority necessary to organize the defense of the United States as it was then understood.
 
• Article II establishes the presidency and sets forth the general executive powers of his office, such as the appointment power. The only substantive functions of government specifically assigned to the president relate to national security and foreign policy, and the first such responsibility granted him is his authority as “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
 
•Under the Constitution, national defense is exclusively the function of the federal government. Article I, Section 10, specifically prohibits the states, except with the consent of Congress, from keeping troops or warships in time of peace, and from engaging in war, the only exception being that a state may act on its own if actually invaded.
 
• National defense is the only mandatory function of the federal government. Most of the powers granted to Congress are permissive in nature. But the Constitution requires the federal government to protect the nation. Article IV, Section 4, states that the “United States shall guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government and shall protect each of them against invasion.” (Emphasis added.) In other words, even if the federal government chose to exercise no other power, it must, under the Constitution, provide for the common defense.
 
One of the ironies of modern times is that the bigger the federal government has become, the less effectively it has exercised its primary responsibility. Over the last two decades, the government has systematically cut the size of the military and failed to recapitalize its inventory, while increasing its missions. In 2011, with no consideration whatsoever of the impact on national security, the government cut defense spending by almost $500 billion and followed that with another $500 billion sequester of funding. All this was done in defiance of the recommendations of Secretary of Defense Bob Gates (who was no profligate when it came to defense budgets; he ruthlessly cut a number of modernization programs in 2009–10) and the bipartisan Perry-Hadley Commission on defense, which specifically warned in 2011 that the U.S. military was facing a “train wreck” unless the size of the Navy was increased and all four of the services were recapitalized.
 
As a result, the military is becoming a hollow force. The Navy has fewer ships than at any time since before World War I; the Air Force is smaller, and its aircraft older, than at any time since the inception of the service in 1947; the Army and Marines are stressed, badly in need of new vehicles and helicopters, and — even if the sequester does not occur — scheduled for a substantial reduction in their end strength. The Pentagon is so broke that it recently had to delay deployment of a carrier to the Persian Gulf.
 
There is currently an undercurrent of disagreement among conservatives about the defense sequester and, more broadly, the importance of funding the armed forces at a time of mounting federal debt. That disagreement was reflected in the speeches given by Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Rand Paul in response to the State of the Union address. Senator Rubio condemned the defense sequester as “devastating” and assigned primary responsibility for it to the president. He was right on both counts. The sequester is devastating — the chairman of the Joint Chiefs compared it to “shooting ourselves in the head” — and the president, as commander-in-chief, is primarily responsible for it, whether he sponsored it or, as he claims, simply agreed to it.
 
Senator Paul did not condemn the defense sequester in his speech. His sole comment regarding the defense budget was that “Republicans [should] realize that military spending is not immune to waste and fraud.” He’s right in the narrow sense. The Pentagon, like all agencies of government, wastes money. But focusing on that now, given what is happening to America’s armed forces, is like sending a letter to George Washington at Valley Forge telling him to save money on pencils.
 
Moreover, talking about the budget crisis in terms of defense funding simply helps the president avoid confronting the main challenge to the government’s solvency. Anyone who looks at the federal budget can see that the problem is the structural gap between the revenue collected for entitlement programs and the cost of those programs. That gap is growing and is crowding out everything in the discretionary budget, including funding for the military. Cutting the defense budget is not the answer to the fiscal crisis facing our nation; it is a symptom of it.
 
Conservatives in Congress are admittedly in a difficult position regarding the defense sequester. They have to work to reform the federal budget; they can’t do that unless the president actually presents a comprehensive plan; and tolerating the sequester in the short term may be the only way of inducing him to do that. But that doesn’t make the damage to American security any less real, and it will increase the importance — if and when a budget agreement is reached — of repealing not only the sequester but also the cuts that preceded it, and returning at least to the level of military funding that Secretary Gates recommended before he left office in 2011.
 
In that same Townhall interview, Bill Buckley freely acknowledged that, like many conservatives, he had a strong libertarian streak. The interviewer, Bill Steigerwald, followed up by asking why he had feuded so often with libertarians. Here is his response:
 
I suppose the most important argument is the dogmatic character of libertarian conservatism.
 
I once wrote an essay on the subject in which I said that if I were at sea on my boat and saw a light flashing I would not worry deeply whether the financing of that light had been done by the private or public sector. This became a kind of playful debate with the [University of] Chicago [economists]. By and large it has to do with the tenacity with which some libertarians tend to hold on to their basic [principles].
 
To turn Buckley’s illustration into a metaphor, the United States is now sailing in a sea of growing danger and seems to have lost sight of the light on the shore. China is flexing its muscles in support of its national ambitions. Iran and North Korea are advancing their nuclear and missile programs. Al-Qaeda and its allies are expanding their bases of operation. And in an age of nuclear and cyber and biological weapons, the oceans no longer protect the United States.
 
The answer to these challenges is not to plan on sending American troops into combat around the world. Senator Paul makes that point often, and he’s right. The surest (and cheapest) way of protecting America is to deter these threats before they ripen into war. That requires, first and foremost, a robust military. Conservatives may disagree about a lot of things, but they should agree on that. In fact, liberals should agree, as well. President Kennedy was able to prevent the Soviets from putting missiles into Cuba, without a shooting war, because the United States had a strong Navy. And as Ronald Reagan used to say, “Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because America was too strong.”