Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Republicans Should Stop Nominating Mushy Moderates to the Supreme Court



By Thomas Sowell
Tuesday, June 30, 2015

Many people are looking at the recent Supreme Court decisions about Obamacare and same-sex marriage in terms of whether they think these are good or bad policies. That is certainly a legitimate concern, for both those who favor those policies and those who oppose them.

But there is a deeper and more long-lasting impact of these decisions that raises the question of whether we are still living in America, where “we the people” are supposed to decide what kind of society we want, not have our betters impose their notions on us.

The Constitution of the United States says that the federal government has only those powers specifically granted to it by the Constitution — and that all other powers belong either to the states or to the people themselves. That is the foundation of our freedom, and that is what is being dismantled by both this year’s Obamacare decision and last year’s Obamacare decision, as well as by the Supreme Court’s decision imposing a redefinition of marriage.

Last year’s Supreme Court decision declaring Obamacare constitutional says that the federal government can order individual citizens to buy the kind of insurance the government wants them to buy, regardless of what the citizens themselves prefer.

The Constitution gave the federal government no such power, but the Supreme Court did. It did so by citing the government’s power to tax, even though the Obamacare law did not claim to be taxing.

This year’s Obamacare decision likewise ignored the actual words of the law and decided that the decisions of 34 states not to participate in Obamacare exchanges, even to get federal subsidies, would not prevent those federal subsidies to be paid anyway, to exchanges up by the federal government itself.

When any branch of government can exercise powers not authorized by either statutes or the Constitution, “we the people” are no longer free citizens but subjects, and our “public servants” are really our public masters. And America is no longer America. The freedom for which whole generations of Americans have fought and died is gradually but increasingly being taken away from us with smooth and slippery words.

This decision makes next year’s choice of the next President of the United States more crucial than ever, because with that office goes the power to nominate justices of the Supreme Court. Democrats have consistently nominated people who shared their social vision and imposed their policy preferences, too often in disregard of the Constitution.

Republicans have complained about it, but when the power of judicial appointment was in the hands of Republican presidents, they have too often appointed justices who participated in the dismantling of the Constitution — and usually for the kinds of social policies preferred by Democrats.

Chief Justices appointed by Republican presidents have made landmark decisions for which there was neither Constitutional authority nor either evidence or logic. The first was Earl Warren. When Chief Justice Warren said that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” he was within walking distance of an all-black public high school that sent a higher percentage of its graduates on to college than any white public high school in Washington. As far back as 1899, that school’s students scored higher on tests than two of the city’s three white academic public high schools. Nevertheless, Chief Justice Warren’s unsubstantiated assumption led to years of school busing across the country that was as racially divisive as it was educationally futile.

Chief Justice Warren Burger, also appointed by a Republican president, gave us the “disparate impact” notion that statistical disparities imply discrimination. That notion has created a whole statistical shakedown racket, practiced by government itself and by private race hustlers alike.

And now Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by George W. Bush, gives the federal government the power to order us to buy whatever insurance they want us to buy. With that entering wedge, is there anything they cannot force us to do, regardless of the Constitution?

Can the Republicans — or the country — afford to put another mushy moderate in the White House, who can appoint more mushy moderates to the Supreme Court?

Progressive Mass Hysteria



By Victor Davis Hanson
Tuesday, June 30, 2015

One of the most harrowing incidents in the Athenian historian Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War is the democratic debate over the rebellious subject state of Mytilene on the distant island of Lesbos. Thucydides uses his riveting account of the Athenian argument over the islanders’ fate to warn his readers of the fickle nature of democracy.

Outraged by the revolt of the Mytileneans, the frenzied Athenians suddenly assemble and vote to condemn all the adult males on the island, regardless of the role any of them may have played in the revolt. They are to be executed en masse for rebellion, on grounds of collective guilt. The next day, however, cooler heads in Athens narrowly prevail. The radical demos just as abruptly takes a second vote and withdraws its blanket death sentence of the day before, voting instead to execute only 1,000 of the ringleaders of the rebellion.

But what about the messenger ship that was dispatched hours earlier to deliver the mass death sentence?

A second trireme is now sent off by the contrite democracy with orders to the crew to row as fast as they can, in hopes of delivering the reprieve in time. The relief vessel and its exhausted crew arrive at Lesbos at the very moment that all the adult male islanders have been lined up and are about to have their throats slit.

Thucydides uses the frightening story to warn of the wild — and often dangerous — swings in public opinion innate to democratic culture. The historian seems at times obsessed with these explosions of Athenian popular passions, offering an even longer and more hair-raising account of popular mood swings over invading Sicily. We forget sometimes that the Athenian democracy that gave us Sophocles and Pericles also, in a fit of unhinged outrage, executed Socrates by a majority vote of one of its popular courts.

American democracy has become increasingly Athenian, as it periodically whips itself up into outbursts of frantic indignation. While the government in theory still operates according to the checks and balances of the Constitution, in reality, in the hyped Internet world of modern pop culture, fevered passions can seize the majority of the population in a matter of hours.

The idea of gay marriage in 2008 earned unapologetic disapproval from Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The liberal voters of California twice rejected the idea in statewide plebiscites. But after years of constant harangues in the media, boycotts, public ostracisms, and ad hominem attacks on the integrity of skeptics, the liberal political establishment — many of whose members are recipients of large amounts of cash from wealthy gay donors — suddenly flipped.

A sort of collective hysteria took over from there. In 2008 there was common assent on the part of the Democratic party’s leadership that the three-millennia-old belief that marriage involved different sexes would prevail, while a separate rubric, “civil union,” would be invented for homosexual couples. But by 2012 that notion was not merely outdated, but taboo. Almost overnight, supporting the erstwhile Obama position of permitting civil unions but rejecting gay marriage became tantamount to career suicide.

Ditto on illegal immigration. Barack Obama likewise swore between 2008 and 2012 that he was no despot who by executive fiat could legalize violations of immigration laws that had been passed by Congress. Yet by 2015 anyone who would agree with Obama’s past vows is now rendered little more than a nativist and xenophobe — so powerful is the Orwellian engine of groupthink.

Take the Confederate-flag debate. What started out just days ago as a reasonable move by the state of South Carolina, in the aftermath of the Charleston mass shootings, to remove the Confederate battle flag from public display on state property, within hours had descended into something like the mob’s frenzy over Mytilene. We have now gone well beyond removing state sanction from a flag that represented an apartheid society. Indeed, Americans of the new electronic mob are witch-hunting the past with a vengeance, as private, profit-driven companies seek to trump one another’s piety by banning the merchandising of Confederate insignia. Meanwhile, our versions of the ancient sophists and demagogues are hoping that the mob can stay agitated long enough to go on to new targets, such as banning public airings of Gone with the Wind or ending respect for public monuments of prominent Confederate war dead.

At some point, the throng will exhaust itself, and realize that while removing Confederate flags from state property was a reasonable and overdue gesture, most of what followed was Mytilenean to the core. Think of the contradictions that have already arisen from the mob frenzy.

One cannot today buy Confederate flags online, but one can easily purchase Nazi insignia of the sort that flew over Auschwitz or the hammer-and-sickle Communist banner that represented the Great Famine, forced collectivization, and various cultural revolutions that led to 100 million slaughtered or starved to death in the 20th century.

One can argue that the slave-owner Robert E. Lee fought to perpetuate human bondage, but Lee never took delight in personally executing without trial his ideological enemies, in the manner of the psychopathic, pistol-toting Che Guevara, whose hip portraiture adorns all too many campus dorm rooms.

Present politics mostly define the degree of past sin and the appropriate punishments, as the revolutionary mob decides in an instant which particular historical figure deserves the most immediate ostracism and should be Trotskyized from our collective memory. Should we now remove the racist Andrew Jackson from the $20 bill? Even in my small town in central California there are schools named Jackson and Wilson. Apparently our Depression-era educators thought that the one Democratic president was a populist reformer, the other an idealistic internationalist. Yet both were abject racists, at least as we understand the charge today. In fact, no president of the 20th century disliked blacks in general and integration in particular as much as the Southern segregationist Woodrow Wilson, although he adroitly cloaked his racial hatred with a thin veneer of liberal academic respectability as president of Princeton University and author of several progressive tracts.

The writings and speeches of Margaret Sanger, founder of what evolved into Planned Parenthood, trumped the biases of Wilson. Her progressive version of eugenics fueled much of her family-planning agenda. She saw reproductive rights as inseparable from discouraging the supposedly less gifted (in her view, mostly non-whites) from having lots of children.

Should Al Gore give one of his trademark teary public confessions and, in vein-bulging angst, apologize to blacks for misrepresenting his senator father’s racist votes against civil-rights legislation? Should Bill Clinton join Gore on the podium to feel our pain and say he is sorry that regional Clinton–Gore campaign affiliates often plastered “Clinton–Gore ’92” on the Confederate battle flag in an effort to get out the supposed redneck vote? Will Hillary Clinton join in too and apologize for her 2008 declaration — delivered during her heated, racialized primary struggle with Barack Obama — that the polls showed “how Sen. Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states [Indiana and North Carolina, where primaries had just been held] who had not completed college were supporting me.”

Planned Parenthood is as likely to disown its progenitor as Princeton University is to change the name of the Wilson School of Public and International Affairs — and as the Clintons are to publicly repent for their past appeals to blue-collar whites. Apparently, on the one hand, we must understand that there are inveterate haters and symbols of unrepentant racism that should be excised from the body politic, and, on the other hand, there remain well-meaning progressives of the past, who were unfortunately captives of their times and said or wrote things (often spoken in the heat of passion, or taken out of context today) that they did not quite mean. The record of the latter group, according to modern liberal tastes, is unfortunate — but is fortunately overshadowed by their greater liberal accomplishments. Consequently, the mass hysteria against anything that reeks of past racism will be carefully steered clear of monuments honoring the pro-segregationist J. William Fulbright or former Klan leader Robert Byrd, or other liberal heroes like the racist states’-righter but Watergate icon Senator Sam Ervin, who, 20 years before Watergate, authored “The Southern Manifesto,” which encouraged opposition to the desegregation of schools.

There will be no liberal watchdog or enlightened corporation that goes after the federally funded National Council of La Raza for its racist nomenclature, which can be traced back to Franco and Mussolini. We cannot properly damn the liberal Earl Warren or the progressive McClatchy newspapers for their 1941 racial rah-rahing that helped convince the progressive Roosevelt administration to implement the Japanese internment.

The damnation of past segregation by race does not extend to censure of present segregation by race in campus dorms and meeting places. No one cares much that the liberal racism that prompted Woodrow Wilson to discourage blacks from attending his beloved Princeton logically continues with the modern Ivy League university adjusting SAT scores and GPAs to ensure that Asian-Americans are not “overrepresented” in Princeton’s incoming class: In both cases, utopian racialism by enlightened social engineers cannot be judged by calcified notions of color-blind fairness.

These outbursts of public frenzy at supposed enemies may reflect grassroots furor, but they are also orchestrated by progressive grandees who are inconsistent in their targeting of history’s villains — offering context and exemption for liberal fascist and racist thought, speech, and iconography, while connecting their present-day political rivals to the supposed sins of the country’s collective past. Manipulating the past, in other words, becomes a useful tool by which one can change the present.

In another analysis, Thucydides reminds us, in regard to the stasis at Corcyra, that in frenzied efforts to reconstruct both the past and present to fit ideological agendas, “Words had to change their ordinary meaning and to take that which was now given them.” So they do today, as the mob makes the necessary adjustments in going from one obsession to the next.

Grexit signs: Drachma, how we’ve missed you!



By John Lloyd
Sunday, June 28, 2015

There is no excuse for Greece. Since it joined the European Union in 1981, successive governments of left and right have treated the EU like a witless sugar daddy. They trusted their fellow members to be hopelessly infatuated with this sun-drenched cradle of democracy that the wallet would always open, the numerous peccadilloes always winked at and the answer always yes. The civil service was packed with political clients, newspapers with tiny circulations were kept going through state advertising — as long as they supported the government in power — and workers in the public sector could retire at 50 on reasonably good pensions, sometimes even earlier.

It is no more than justice that harder-faced politicians from northern Europe are now telling Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras that the show cannot go on. Other profligate states — Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain — have taken the medicine and are emerging from the worst of the austerity fever wards. Citizens of the former communist states to the east — who have not all attained the median living standards of Greece even now — are against more gifts to Greeks.

Such is the mood facing Tsipras and his comrades in Syriza, the main governing party. His one card,  that the EU will do anything to keep Greece in, now threatens to be trumped by a euro zone bloc that says, “You want what we won’t give: so go (and have a nice sun-drenched day).”

The Greek government now gives every sign of desperation. It’s plan to delay repayment of 1.6 billion euros until a July 5 referendum on the terms shifts the responsibility back to the Greek public — who elected Syriza to get a better deal. The EU finance ministers on Saturday rejected giving a stay of execution, and the European Central Bank will now find it very difficult to continue financing the insolvent Greek banks whose resources are being drained by frightened clients. The ECB’s rules prohibit throwing good money after bad.

And there is a hard limit on how much the EU can give. Give Greece too much and those in the south who have swallowed the medicine of austerity, and those in the east who are struggling to reshape their economies to make them ready for the euro, will revolt. That would be a far larger problem than Greece. Either Tsipras sells to his party and country conditions which he has described for months as intolerable, or it’s forward to the past currency. Drachma, how we’ve missed you!

But there’s another current running, with which Tsipras is more in tune. As another last last meeting failed in Brussels this weekend, so very rich people convened a quite separate meeting  in London to discuss how capitalism can be made responsible. The attendees include representatives from banks and other institutions which control around $28 trillion, one third of the world’s investable assets. The idea was conceived by Alan Mendoza of the UK’s Henry Jackson Society, picked up by Lynn de Rothschild, wife of Sir Evelyn de Rothschild and CEO of the holding company  E L Rothschild. The co-chair of the Inclusive Capitalism task force, McKinsey managing director Dominic Barton, explained that “there is growing concern that if the fundamental issues revealed in the crisis remain unaddressed and the system fails again, the social contract between the capitalist system and the citizenry may truly rupture, with unpredictable but severely damaging results.”

In the United States, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who isn’t seeking the Democratic nomination and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who is, are drawing huge crowds and getting much air time to denounce, as Sanders put it, the “greed of the billionaire class.” At 73, he’s got six years on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton: but he stormed across New Hampshire last weekend with his populist message, and he’s only a few points behind Clinton in polls asking who’s best for the nomination.

In the most successful capitalist states, the disquiet with capitalism is growing even as the effects of the 2008 crash are moderating and growth returning. Both a reviving far left, and a revived far right, are pointing at high unemployment figures especially among the young; low wages; and above all, gross inequalities. The social contract of which McKinsey’s Dominic Barton speaks is, for these groups and their followers, already ruptured: they are encouraged by the far left/right parties in the view that they are capitalism’s forgotten people, a growing army of workless, wealth-less, insecure and with no other choice but to protest.

At Europe’s borders, the very, very poor, utterly insecure and truly forgotten (till now) migrants do anything — brave arrest, beatings and drowning — to get into Europe. The EU, which has liked to present itself as a caring and sharing institution, is now impelled by a pitiless public to find ways to keep them out. Fences, border checks and mass arrests are everywhere. Kindly non-governmental organizations that offer help to the thousands of migrants in Italy and Greece are cursed by citizens who see them as encouraging the inward flood. There are more than 20 million refugees in the world. Some 43,000 left their homes every day last year, and the wars, persecutions and hunger for a better life that made them do so haven’t abated. The EU leaders have agreed on a deal to take some 60,000 of the migrants: but it’s voluntary, there are no quotas for each nation, and time and political calculation may whittle that number down.

The quaking noises from Western capitalism and the gathering force of the parties on the extremes shine a different light on Greece’s government. For Syriza, the determination not to cut pensions, not to provoke more job losses and to increase taxes on companies and the wealthier citizens are measures designed to cut against the prevailing  consensus that higher taxes can only deter companies from investing and creating more jobs, and that “over generous” welfare and pension payments must be reined in. For Tsipras and his party and supporters, the defiance of the EU and the International Monetary Fund is a blow against a capitalism which has already failed.

The socialism in which Syriza believes and seeks to foster, and the support it still has in Greece, has collided against an EU which stands or falls by the health of the capitalist system. That neither Syriza, nor anyone else, has thought of a way to make real socialism work is, for the moment, beside the point for increasing numbers of Europeans. The concerned capitalists in London this weekend had better come up with measures which really are inclusive: otherwise their concern could turn to fear, and the specter of socialism again stalk Europe.

Yes, Churches that Oppose Gay Marriage Should Still Get Tax Breaks


By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, June 29, 2015

By what must be a rather extraordinary coincidence, the question that “nobody was asking” just a few short years ago has in the last couple of days burst dramatically onto the scene: Should churches that refuse to marry same-sex couples be stripped of their nonprofit status? At Fusion, Felix Salmon makes the case that they should. “Now that the US government formally recognizes marriage equality as a fundamental right,” Salmon recommends, “it really shouldn’t skew the tax code so as to give millions of dollars in tax breaks to groups which remain steadfastly bigoted on the subject.”

Underscoring his central implication — that this is a settled matter and that it is time to bayonet the dissenters — Salmon submits bluntly that “if your organization does not support the right of gay men and women to marry, then the government should be very clear that you’re in the wrong” and “should certainly not bend over backwards to give you the privilege of tax exemption.” Certainly “any religious organization is entirely free to espouse whatever crazy views it likes,” he concedes magnanimously. “But when those views are fanatical and hurtful . . . it makes perfect sense for our elected representatives to register their disapproval by abolishing the tax exemption for organizations who cling to narrow-minded and anachronistic views.” Thus was another question raised: “Can you disagree with the state and remain an approved nonprofit?”

To Salmon’s credit, he is at least intellectually consistent. Ideally, he writes, he would “abolish tax exemption for all religious organizations, whether they support gay marriage or not.” In fact, he confirms on Twitter, if he had a magic wand he’d “abolish ALL tax exemptions and deductions” and thereby “force all subsidies to be explicit.”

Nevertheless, because most people are unlikely to get on board with this “drastic” position, Salmon concludes that it is “at the very least”

    entirely right and proper for the state to say to a church that if you want to thumb your nose at a fundamental right which is held by all Americans, then we are not going to privilege you with tax-free status. We’ll let you practice your bigotry, at least within the confines of your own church. But we’re not about to reward you for doing so.

That’s quite the “very least.”

There are a good number of obvious problems with this idea, not the least of which is that it is an open invitation to unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination. If we are to have such a thing as a “nonprofit” group, the federal government surely cannot decide who is eligible and who is not on the basis of whether they happen to agree with the present constitutional order. Not only would such an arrangement be hideously unstable — the Court does change its mind from time to time, after all — but it would merely alter, rather than abolish, the alleged problem, which is that certain institutions are being “rewarded” for their politics. “You don’t have to pay taxes if you agree with the status quo” is not a good look.

The practical questions abound. Which organizations would be favored? Which rights would be deemed too precious to invite criticism? And how would we decide? I accept that Felix Salmon’s proposal is a holistic one. But not everybody’s is. Actions are one thing. But how, one wonders, would we determine which views are beyond the pale? If our standard should “at least” be that institutional opposition to a “fundamental right which is held by all Americans” should deprive an organization of its tax-exempt status, we will need to do away with almost all politically minded nonprofits. That would be a radical step indeed. It is an indisputable fact that many nonprofit outfits are dead set against the infamous Citizens United decision, and hope to see it overturned. Other groups, such as the tax-exempt Violence Policy Center, are vehemently opposed to the rulings in D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, and would not only like to see them reversed, but aspires to help usher in a nationwide handgun ban afterwards — in other words, to overturn a right that has obtained in one form or another in America since the late 17th century, and which is explicitly enumerated within the nation’s founding charter.

It is not just single-issue outfits. Within the non-profit archipelago there sits a whole host of magazines, opinion generators, and religious charities — almost all of which take strong positions on what the Constitution means and how the Court should interpret it, and almost all of which could be accused of conspiring to “cling to narrow-minded and anachronistic views” and to “espouse whatever crazy” or “fanatical” or “hurtful” views they like. If, as Salmon argues, it is flatly wrong to “reward” churches for opposing basic constitutional rights or for saying things that our thoroughly modern arbiters of taste find retrograde, surely it is wrong to “reward” non-religious organizations for doing the same? Mother Jones, the product of a 501(c)(3), not only wants to overturn part of the First Amendment, but has published a “DIY Guide” to doing so. Should it be stripped of its status? On the other side of the aisle, the Heritage Foundation, also a non-profit, opposes the decision in Roe v. Wade, which, until such time as it is altered or rendered moot, protects abortion as a “fundamental right which is held by all Americans.” Should it be removed from the rolls because its governing board considers that Justice Blackmun erred in 1973?

Perhaps we might leave Pandora with an intact box for five minutes? At the very least.