The Roberts Opinion: It's Not All Bad

By Kate Hicks
Thursday, June 28, 2012

John Roberts is not a “traitor to his philosophy.” He is not a liberal. He is, above all else, a very strict originalist, and the Chief Justice of a Court that is acutely aware – and wary – of its role in politics. Understand that his opinion, though certainly not ideal for the Right, contains more good news for conservatives in its pages than it does on its face.

So let’s take a look at his surprising opinion – the controlling opinion, as it’s called, which sets precedent and “say[s] what the law is,” as Marshall said so long ago.

The Good News

First: let’s give credit where it’s due. Roberts made it abundantly clear that he’s not a fan of the actual policy. Moreover, he shifted responsibility for this policy back to the American people, and revealed his respect for the separation of powers:

“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

Unhappy with the ruling though you may be, the wisdom contained in that paragraph alone ought to cheer you. And I promise, there’s more!

Now then. What hath he wrought?

“Commerce Clause” is everywhere in the news today, and if you’ll recall, that was considered the basis for both upholding and striking down the mandate. Roberts threw out the government’s argument that it could regulate inactivity because of the “substantial effect” abstention from the market would have on the market as a whole. This, he said, was way too much power:

“Allowing Congress to justify federal regulation by pointing to the effect of inaction on commerce would bring countless decisions an individual could potentially make within the scope of federal regulation, and—under the Government’s theory—empower Congress to make those decisions for him. […] Construing the Commerce Clause to permit Congress to regulate individuals precisely because they are doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority.”

Moreover, he created a new precedent in Commerce Clause jurisprudence that limits its scope significantly, by accepting the distinction between activity and inactivity. In so doing, he created a concrete definition of Federal power that will influence the way Congress makes law in the future, and the way the Court interprets future Commerce Clause cases. Here’s the key passage to that effect:

“People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures—joined with the similar failures of others—can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act. […] The Government’s theory would erode those limits [on the Commerce Clause], permitting Congress to reach beyond the natural extent of its authority, ‘everywhere extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.’ The Federalist No. 48, at 309 9 (J. Madison). Congress already enjoys vast power to regulate much of what we do. Accepting the Government’s theory would give Congress the same license to regulate what we do not do, fundamentally changing the relation between the citizen and the Federal Government.”

It’s hard to see at first glance why we should celebrate this ruling, especially because it was evidently not enough for Roberts to overturn the mandate. But what Roberts did here was establish a defining limit on the Commerce Clause, which had heretofore not really existed. Congress is now restricted in its ability to use this very broad power, in that it cannot compel individuals to participate in the market. Consider, also, the wide array of tools at Congress’ disposal under the Commerce Clause to ensure compliance. Roberts has ruled that Congress can’t criminalize not buying something because of the effect abstention will have on the market. Indeed, that was at issue in this case; the fact that it’s unconstitutional is a win for liberty.

Furthermore, Roberts narrowed the definition of “substantially effects” to encompass activity that is already occurring, and curtailed Congress’ power to presuppose, and then regulate, activity.

“The proposition that congress may dictate the conduct of an individual today because of prophesied future activity finds no support in our precedent. We have said that Congress can anticipate the effects on commerce of an economic activity. […] But we have never permitted Congress to anticipate that activity itself in order to regulate individuals not currently engaged in commerce.”

Now, think back to the time when constitutional challenges to the mandate first began to surface: every legal scholar worth his salt, conservative or liberal, believed the Court would kill the activity/inactivity distinction. Yet that was the major victory the conservatives won in this case, and it’s now legal precedent. The mandate itself lives on, but Congress may never apply the full force of the U.S. government to compel anyone to make a purchase. This, the fight for the Commerce Clause, was the real war. And the right won it. Perhaps the fruit isn’t ripe yet, but it will prove juicy in time.

So now, to turn to the legal reasoning for why the mandate remains law. In other words…

The Bad News

Here’s Roberts: “And it is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so.”

You may keep your law, he says. But let me redefine it for you.

In the opinion, Roberts applies a test from an earlier case, Drexel Furniture, to determine whether the “penalty” meets all the requirements of a tax. It’s another long excerpt, but worth reading, as he’s very clear:

“The same analysis here suggests that the shared responsibility payment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax, not a penalty: First, for most Americans the amount due will be far less than the price of insurance, and, by statute, it can never be more. It may often be a reasonable financial decision to make the payment rather than purchase insurance… Second, the individual mandate contains no scienter requirement [i.e. it’s not punitive for breaking the law]. Third, the payment is collected solely by the IRS through the normal means of taxation—except that the Service is not allowed to use those means most suggestive of a punitive sanction, such as criminal prosecution.”

So here’s how it’s going to work from now on: the mandate is now just the “tax on not having healthcare,” which I’m sure will get a snappier name in the coming days, something akin to the “gas tax,” or the “income tax,” which most of us pay. Roberts says as much:

“[A]ccording to the Government…the mandate can be regarded as establishing a condition—not owning health insurance—that triggers a tax—the required payment to the IRS. Under that theory, the mandate is not a legal command to buy insurance. Rather, it makes going without insurance just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or earning income. And if the mandate is in effect just a tax hike on certain taxpayers who do not have health insurance, it may be within Congress’s constitutional power to tax.”

So after he invalidated the Commerce Clause justification, he determined that really, the “penalty” doesn’t force participation in the market; hence, why he didn’t throw out the mandate with the Commerce logic. It’s not really forcing people into the market; after all, it didn’t criminalize not owning insurance. It just puts a tax on it, and Roberts notes that taxes are often used to induce certain behavior:

“But taxes that seek to influence conduct are nothing new. […] Today, federal and state taxes can compose more than half the retail price of cigarettes, not just to raise money, but to encourage people to quit smoking. […] That Sec5000A seeks to shape decisions about whether to buy health insurance does not mean that it cannot be a valid exercise of the taxing power.”

Frankly, this doesn’t look like an expansion of the taxing power. Perhaps he’s articulating more clearly the intent behind so-called “sin taxes,” and other behaviorally-motivated taxes, but he’s not handing Congress more power. He’s just explaining a power they already had, and use.

Remember—he never said it was good policy, and in fact made it clear that he feels otherwise. What he did was invalidate an unconstitutional argument in defense of the policy, thereby banning it from future use, and then uphold a bad, but not unconstitutional statute, because it adhered to a permissible exercise of power. Congress passed a tax, he says, and it’s a bad one, and he doesn’t like it, but that doesn’t make it impermissible.

So, is this what the right really wanted to hear? Heck no! We like the dissent, where the whole thing goes. But Roberts is dumb like a fox, and it’s worth looking at the effects this ruling will have on the future, both near and far.

The Upshot

Over, and over, and over, President Obama assured us that this was not a tax. He was not raising taxes on the middle class (that’s what the Republicans were doing, remember?). Nope, says the CJ: ya raised our taxes. Politically, that’s going to prove troublesome for Obama this fall, and in a much more substantial way than having his “signature legislative accomplishment” overturned altogether.

For one, Roberts took away Obama’s ability to campaign against the Court. They upheld his law; he can’t do as he did after Citizens United and construe the ACA ruling as a massively political attack on the little guy and his uninsured plight. He has nothing to blame on the Justices. All they did was recharacterize the “penalty” as constitutional under the taxing power. Roberts robbed Obama of a scapegoat, and stuck Obama with an unpopular law in an election year. Ouch.

Second, Roberts has literally forced Obama to acknowledged that he broke a promise, and raised taxes. And tax increases don’t resonate well with the voters. Now, it’s doubtful Obama will assume responsibility for raising taxes – note that in his speech today, he didn’t acknowledge the Court’s reasoning for the ruling, only that they ruled in his favor. But the GOP has just added a major weapon to its arsenal: want to lower taxes? Then don’t reelect Obama.

This third observation is one that isn’t immediately eminent, but nonetheless just as important as those prior two, if not more so. Roberts has made it substantially easier to repeal Obamacare, and substantially harder to pass anything like it in the future. As noted above, Americans don’t like taxes. And thanks to the fact that many will opt to pay the tax rather than buy insurance (as that will cost less), the insurance problem in this country hasn’t been solved. The fact that we’ve settled the question of the mandate’s constitutionality means we can turn to the rest of the law, and address the flaws contained therein, and perhaps find a real solution to the healthcare crisis. As for future laws, Democrats lost the ability to hide behind “penalty” language. Roberts saw that the mandate waddled and quacked, and gave it the appropriate name. (He also forbade Congress from actually “mandating” anything, so that name isn’t even correct anymore.) The ACA barely passed the first time; future iterations of this theory are destined to fail, because Congress will have to stand up and say, “We propose to enact a new tax so as to influence your behavior.” If that isn’t the proverbial lead balloon, I don’t know what is.

So there you have it: it’s really not all bad. It’s not what we wanted, but then – as I suspect Obama will learn in the coming months – we must remember to be careful what we wish for.

Why Roberts Did It

By Charles Krauthammer
Thursday, June 28, 2012

It’s the judiciary’s Nixon-to-China: Chief Justice John Roberts joins the liberal wing of the Supreme Court and upholds the constitutionality of Obamacare. How? By pulling off one of the great constitutional finesses of all time. He managed to uphold the central conservative argument against Obamacare, while at the same time finding a narrow definitional dodge to uphold the law — and thus prevented the Court from being seen as having overturned, presumably on political grounds, the signature legislation of this administration.

Why did he do it? Because he carries two identities. Jurisprudentially, he is a constitutional conservative. Institutionally, he is chief justice and sees himself as uniquely entrusted with the custodianship of the Court’s legitimacy, reputation, and stature.

As a conservative, he is as appalled as his conservative colleagues by the administration’s central argument that Obamacare’s individual mandate is a proper exercise of its authority to regulate commerce.
That makes congressional power effectively unlimited. Mr. Jones is not a purchaser of health insurance. Mr. Jones has therefore manifestly not entered into any commerce. Yet Congress tells him he must buy health insurance — on the grounds that it is regulating commerce. If government can do that under the Commerce Clause, what can it not do?

“The Framers . . .  gave Congress the power to regulate commerce, not to compel it,” writes Roberts. Otherwise you “undermine the principle that the Federal Government is a government of limited and enumerated powers.”

That’s Roberts, philosophical conservative. But he lives in uneasy coexistence with Roberts, custodian of the Court, acutely aware that the judiciary’s arrogation of power has eroded the esteem in which it was once held. Most of this arrogation occurred under the liberal Warren and Burger Courts, most egregiously with Roe v. Wade, which willfully struck down the duly passed abortion laws of 46 states. The result has been four decades of popular protest and resistance to an act of judicial arrogance that, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg once said, “deferred stable settlement of the issue” by the normal electoral/legislative process.

More recently, however, few decisions have occasioned more bitterness and rancor than Bush v. Gore, a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines. It was seen by many (principally, of course, on the left) as a political act disguised as jurisprudence and designed to alter the course of the single most consequential political act of a democracy — the election of a president.

Whatever one thinks of the substance of Bush v. Gore, it did affect the reputation of the Court. Roberts seems determined that there be no recurrence with Obamacare. Hence his straining in his Obamacare ruling to avoid a similar result — a 5–4 decision split along ideological lines that might be perceived as partisan and political.

National health care has been a liberal dream for a hundred years. It is clearly the most significant piece of social legislation in decades. Roberts’s concern was that the Court do everything it could to avoid being seen, rightly or wrongly, as high-handedly overturning sweeping legislation passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the president.

How to reconcile the two imperatives — one philosophical and the other institutional? Assign yourself the task of writing the majority opinion. Find the ultimate finesse that manages to uphold the law, but only on the most narrow of grounds — interpreting the individual mandate as merely a tax, something generally within the power of Congress.

Result? The law stands, thus obviating any charge that a partisan Court overturned duly passed legislation. And yet at the same time the Commerce Clause is reined in. By denying that it could justify the imposition of an individual mandate, Roberts draws the line against the inexorable decades-old expansion of congressional power under the Commerce Clause fig leaf.

Law upheld, Supreme Court’s reputation for neutrality maintained. Commerce Clause contained, constitutional principle of enumerated powers reaffirmed.

That’s not how I would have ruled. I think the “mandate is merely a tax” argument is a dodge, and a flimsy one at that. (The “tax” is obviously punitive, regulatory, and intended to compel.) Perhaps that’s not how Roberts would have ruled had he been just an associate justice, and not the chief. But that’s how he did rule.

Obamacare is now essentially upheld. There’s only one way it can be overturned. The same way it was passed — elect a new president and a new Congress. That’s undoubtedly what Roberts is saying: Your job, not mine. I won’t make it easy for you.

Roberts' Ruling Took Guts

By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, June 29, 2012

Why not just cut open a goat and be done with it?

In ancient Rome, a special kind of priest called a haruspex would "read" the entrails of sheep to divine the will of the gods, the health of the growing season, or whatever else was weighing on the minds of men. Because animal guts don't, in fact, impart that much information about, say, next year's wheat harvest, the haruspices (called "auspices" in Latin -- from which we get the English word) could pretty much make it up as they went along. The same went for the auguries (priests who studied the flight of birds). Ultimately, the auspices and auguries made their decisions based upon the whims, vicissitudes and demands of politics in one form or another. If the rulers were happy with the result, they didn't much care what the guts actually said.

Fast-forward to chief haruspex John Roberts.

In the majority opinion written by Roberts, the Supreme Court held that the mandate to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (aka ObamaCare) is unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause. But Roberts also found that it's constitutional under Congress's power to tax. It is on these grounds that Roberts upheld the constitutionality of ObamaCare, siding with the four liberal justices of the bench.

The upshot is that Congress cannot use the Commerce Clause to force you to eat broccoli, but it can tax you into doing so. Huzzah for liberty!

To reach this decision, Roberts had to embrace a position denied by the White House, Congress and vast swaths of the legal punditocracy: that the mandate is a tax for the purposes of constitutional consideration but not a tax according to the Anti-Injunction Act (which bars lawsuits against taxes until after they're levied). Roberts' effort, wrote Justice Antonin Scalia in dissent, "carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists."

Let the record show that the sophists were valued defenders of entrail-reading.

Of course, there are substantive arguments in favor of Roberts' reasoning. But as far as I can tell, no one is confident, never mind certain, that Roberts actually believes his own position. And among supporters of ObamaCare, from the White House on down, no one cares whether he does.

President Obama -- self-praised constitutional scholar -- mocked those who called the fees and penalties under ObamaCare a tax. Now he celebrates a decision that mocks him back. Democratic National Committee Executive Director (and former White House aide) Patrick Gaspard seemed to summarize the depth of concern on his side of the aisle when he responded to the ruling on Twitter: "it's constitutional. B----es."

More sober-eyed liberal legal experts took similar positions. Roberts' opinion was "statesmanlike," they claimed, and, more bizarrely, "apolitical." Some, such as constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen, speaking on National Public Radio, even celebrated Roberts' brilliance at finding a way to save the reputation of the court by deploying what Thomas Jefferson called "twistifications."

Indeed, before and after the ruling, much of the journalistic and legal establishment argued that a 5-4 ruling to overturn ObamaCare would be "political" because the majority would be comprised entirely of Republican appointees. But a 5-4 ruling to uphold ObamaCare would be apolitical because, well, it just would be.

In other words, if five conservative justices rule according to their well-known convictions, it's illegitimate. But if Roberts twists himself like an illustration in the Kama Sutra to find a way to uphold the law, then that amounts to "leadership."

Now, I don't know what's in Roberts' heart, but no court watcher I've heard from puts much weight on the idea that Roberts did anything other than reason backward from the result he wanted in order to buy respect from the court's critics at the expense of his own beliefs.

At least that's one thing both fans and critics of this ruling can largely agree on.

Some of Roberts' defenders claim he's outmaneuvered everyone. By upholding ObamaCare, he's made future conservative decisions unassailable. He's poisoned the well of the commerce clause for liberals. He's removed the court as an election-year issue. He's gift-wrapped for Mitt Romney the attack that Obama has raised taxes massively, violating a host of promises and assurances. And, again, he's saved the legitimacy of the court.

That's all very interesting, but it leaves aside the real issue: None of those concerns are what was asked of the court. That so few people seem to care augurs poorly for the rule of law and the auspices of our republic.

Obama, Story-Teller

By Victor Davis Hanson
Wednesday, June 27, 2012

A sign of an undisciplined mind is serial lapses into self-contradiction, or blurting out a thought only to refute it entirely on a later occasion. For a president to do that is to erode public confidence and eventually render all his public statements irrelevant. That is now unfortunately the case with Barack Obama, who has established a muddled record of confused and contradictory declarations.

Last week, the president invoked executive privilege to prevent the release of administration documents related to the Fast and Furious operation. All presidents on occasion use that tactic, but rarely after they have put themselves on record, as did Senator Obama just five years ago, damning the practice as a de facto admission of wrongdoing. Does President Obama remember his earlier denunciation — or why he thought a special prosecutor was necessary to look into the Scooter Libby case, but not the far greater mess surrounding Eric Holder?

About the same time, President Obama offered de facto amnesty for an estimated 800,000 to 1 million illegal aliens. Aside from his circumvention of Congress and his casual attitude toward his own constitutional duty to enforce the laws as they are written, Obama had on two earlier occasions stated that he not only would not grant such blanket exemptions from the law, but also legally could not. That was then, this is now — the middle of a reelection campaign?

Candidate Obama derided George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for borrowing $4 trillion over eight years; what term might President Obama use to characterize his own record of borrowing $5 trillion in less than four years? “Extremely unpatriotic”? In his first year in office, Obama announced that he would deserve just a single term if the economy had not improved after his agenda was reified. What then is he to say to that earlier Obama when 8 percent unemployment is now in its 41st consecutive month, GDP growth is flat, and we continue to borrow $1 trillion per year?

As a candidate, Obama promised to play by the rules of public campaign financing, only to renounce that pledge when he was well on his way to raising $1 billion. Obama did not just promise to shut down Guantanamo and cease renditions, preventive detention, and military tribunals; he also denounced them in such venomous terms that his later embrace — or indeed expansion — of all these protocols was not so much hypocritical as surreal.

President Obama does not like filibustering in the Senate; Senator Obama apparently felt differently when he was in the minority and tried to stop a vote on the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. The list of the Obama about-faces and obfuscations grows weekly — the revolving door, lobbyists in the White House, the new transparency, opposition to super PACs, attitudes toward Israel, huge savings from Obamacare. And we are at a point now where no one can verify anything from the president’s past, given that his own memoir was largely mythographic — details about his family, friends, and girlfriends made up to enhance his preferred narrative of racial oppression. If a writer will fudge on the very details of his own dying mother’s seeking to obtain health care, then he will fudge on almost anything. And if the Birthers were unhinged for suggesting that Obama was born in Kenya, what are we to make of Obama himself allowing just that untruth to appear on his literary agent’s biography of him for over a decade?

What explains these weird disconnects? There are many contributory factors. First, Obama is a quintessential postmodernist, who believes that there is no abstract “truth,” only floating narratives that gain credibility by their aims — false if for ignoble reasons, true if spoken for egalitarian purposes. Obama would argue that his literary fictions were not actually fictions given that they served the cause of exposing racial bias — it is the intent that matters, not the details. The larger truth is that Barack Obama suffered angst because of his biracial identity; how, when, and where all that happened is immaterial.

Obama once really did lament that he could not legally offer amnesty, only to do just that; similarly, the use of executive privilege for a President Bush is not the same thing as for a President Obama. A statement can be judged true or false only by its ultimate objective — and in Obama’s case all his untruths must be true because they were intended to serve a progressive end.

Second, Obama understands that he is a symbolic as much as a real president. Name a controversy — Fast and Furious, the Secret Service scandal, the GSA mess, the serial leaking of key national-security secrets — and he assumes that critics will eventually be tarred with the brush of racial bias for daring to bring that scandal up and thereby help derail the nation’s first African-American president. Similarly, the fact that Obama is part African, has adopted the patois of the inner-city black community, and has allied himself with the identity-driven grievance industry is felt to offer exemption from charges of hypocrisy. So one can both damn fat-cats and endlessly play golf with them. The 1 percenters are culpable, but not so culpable that one would stay away from Martha’s Vineyard or Vail. In Obama’s mind, his minority status and left-wing politics trump any appearance of disingenuousness; he can slur the wealthy in the abstract while courting them and living like them in the concrete. And in our topsy-turvy world, to cite such hypocrisy is racist, whereas using race to seek exemption is not. We see how identity politics collides with truth all the time in America. In the Tawana Brawley case, the Duke lacrosse scandal, and the details surrounding the Trayvon Martin shooting, the point was not necessarily distinguishing fact from fiction, but being careful not to lose sight of the larger quest for racial justice.

Third, Barack Obama was as senator and remains as president a casual ad hoc thinker, an activist rather than a learned and informed leader. He assumes that how he speaks matters rather than what he says, as if months later when critics look at his contradictory transcripts they will remember only how he enthused the crowd by dropping his g’s or inserting a melodic “hope and change” or “make no mistake about it” fillip. At any given moment Obama can declare that he will cut the deficit by half by the end of his first term, that the private sector is doing fine, or that his administration has been a proponent of more gas and oil drilling. Emotion and enthusiasm are for him; detail, consistency, and accuracy are for others.

The media play an unfortunate role as well. Obama has never developed the normal politician’s fear of journalists, who customarily try to dry-gulch a politician by quoting back statements at odds with his record. Instead, Obama assumes that in a press conference or an interview, no one will remind him that he once criticized the use of executive privilege, opposed gay marriage, ruled out de facto amnesty by fiat, or denounced the revolving door. Obama rightly sensed that the more he damned Guantanamo as a candidate, the more his base would rally to his cause — and even more would they keep mum when as president he chose to keep the detention center open. Journalists simply empowered his habit of speaking off the top of his head by a conspiracy of silence. Deep down, Obama supposes that if he says something entirely opposite from what he once said, or something so preposterous that it cannot possibly be true, or calls the Falkland Islands the Maldives, no journalist would dare to press him on the disconnect — given the possible harm to the liberal agenda of our first African-American president.

But after nearly four years, the game is about up. If the president lectures the Europeans with another “make no mistake about it,” they will assume there are lots of mistakes about it. If he says “in point of fact” to Vladimir Putin, then Putin can be sure there are no facts at all. If Obama addresses the American people with “let me be perfectly clear,” then they assume he most certainly will be anything but transparent and concise. And if Obama compares a current event to one in his own past, then we can be sure that the earlier event never took place.

Obama’s critics may not be judicious or even quite accurate in calling him a liar, since he does not consciously and by deliberation craft mistruth. Rather, he simply is a story-teller, a novelist, a fabulist who says nice, interesting things for his own benefit, and on occasion thunders out promises in mellifluous cadences, without any worry whether they are true or false, or whether they confirm or reject what he said a bit earlier. What Barack Obama wants to be true, he says to be true; and we lesser folk can sweat the details when it is usually not.

Is ‘Illegal Immigrant’ a Racial Slur?

By Ian Tuttle
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Charles Garcia — the CEO of Garcia Trujillo, a strategy firm that works with Hispanic-owned companies — does not like the term illegal immigrant. He prefers economic refugee.

He is not alone. Media Matters for America, the liberal website “dedicated to . . . correcting conservative misinformation,” claimed that Fox News used President Obama’s June 15 immigration announcement as an “opportunity to dehumanize undocumented immigrants.” MMFA reported that Fox News used the term illegals 17 times during its June 15 broadcast, illegal aliens twice, and aliens once, not including uses of these terms in on-screen text. These “racial slurs” are further proof, the site contended, of Fox’s “long, documented history of anti-immigrant bias.”

Efforts to change the parlance of the immigration debate are not new. In 2010 the Diversity Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists called on journalists nationwide to replace illegal immigrant and illegal alien with undocumented worker or undocumented immigrant, arguing that the usual terms are “offensive” to Latinos.

That same year, the Applied Research Center, a self-described “racial justice think tank,” launched its Drop the I-Word (DTIW) campaign, calling on media outlets and elected officials to “uphold reason, due process, and responsible speech by dropping the i-word.” Illegals, the think tank contends, “is a racially charged slur used to dehumanize and discriminate against immigrants and people of color regardless of migratory status.”

But while DTIW maintains that “the i-word” is racist, dehumanizing, and often inaccurate, is it actually any of the three?

“The discriminatory message is not explicit, but hidden, or racially coded,” DTIW’s website reports, and it “fuel[s] violence.” Mónica Novoa, who came to the U.S. in the 1980s as a refugee from wartorn El Salvador, is the coordinator of the DTIW campaign. She cites as an example of anti-immigrant violence the case of Marcelo Lucero, a 37-year-old Ecuadorian immigrant who was stabbed to death on Long Island in 2008. Angel Loja, a friend of Lucero’s who was with him at the time, testified that the gang that assaulted them called them “Mexicans” and “illegals.” Novoa also mentions bullying against immigrants in Charlotte, N.C., where the language used indicates, she says, the “anti-immigrant animus . . . obvious in the comments section of any daily around the country whenever someone reports on immigration.”

These attacks should be condemned in the strongest terms, but they do not suggest that the majority — or even a significant minority — of the Americans who use the word “illegal” use it as racist code. Moreover, the claim that “illegal” is a racist slur fits a broader pattern: “Pro-immigration” organizations are quick to label as racist any attempt to enforce federal immigration law, while the DTIW campaign regularly conflates “anti-Latino” with “anti-immigrant” under the guise of promoting “racial justice.”

One of DTIW’s taglines, taken from Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, is “No Human Being Is Illegal.” The vocabulary of the current immigration conversation, says Novoa, “demoniz[es] an entire population of people.” Take alien, for example: “Alien has the connotation of someone being subhuman.”

Shahid Haque-Hausrath of the Montana-based Border Crossing Law Firm, PC, wrote on the firm’s website that illegal alien “implies that a person’s existence is criminal . . . [It] has been used to dehumanize immigrants and divorce ourselves from thinking of them as human beings.”

“A person cannot be illegal,” says Novoa. The language confuses the “actions and the people who are committing those actions.” But in fact, for Novoa, there is no place at all for illegal: She refuses to use the word in any context. And she is stumped, during our phone conversation, when I ask how it differs from calling someone a criminal or a felon.

Novoa says that it is “easy to confuse this term for legal language.” U.S. law does not define illegal alien, nor does it use the term illegal immigrant. But it does define alien: “any person not a citizen or national of the United States” (8 USC § 1101). This has been standard government usage for centuries, most famously in the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services continues to use the term in official publications. As for illegal, the term indicates a violation of the law; there is therefore no reason for the law itself to define it.

In part, Haque-Hausrath rests his argument against illegal alien on the fact that overstaying a visa, as many immigrants have done, “is a civil offense, not a criminal offense” — which is true: It is a federal criminal misdemeanor to enter the U.S. other than through an established point of entry, while it is a civil infraction to overstay a visa. But to call only the former “illegal” is misleading. Many things are illegal but not criminal — exceeding the speed limit, for example. Overstaying one’s visa falls into this category.

Another argument against illegal immigrant is that it presumes the guilt of those it denotes. NumbersUSA estimates that, of the approximately 10.8 million “unauthorized immigrants” currently residing in the U.S., about 60 percent crossed the border illegally and about 40 percent overstayed their visas. But to call all 10.8 million of those immigrants illegal, according to DTIW’s website, “finds many people guilty before they are tried.” Haque-Hausrath concurs:

When white collar criminals are arrested, we are careful to label them as “accused” and state that the government’s accusations are merely “alleged.” But when newspapers refer to immigration raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the headlines often repeat ICE’s figures on the number of “illegal aliens” who were arrested. These individuals are effectively convicted in the media before trial ever begins.

That is reasonable ground for precision in terminology, but it is no argument against using the term for people who in fact are here illegally. Discussing the problems — economic, social, cultural, moral — of a massive population residing in this country in violation of American law requires a general term, and illegal immigrants is a perfectly reasonable label for that group.

When journalists say that there are 10.8 million “illegal immigrants” inside American borders, Novoa says, they fail to put “people first.” Indeed, the intrinsic dignity of every person should be respected, and it is true that many immigrants have suffered immense hardship in their home nations. But empathy should not be an excuse to overlook the fact that people who broke our laws to come here have no right to remain here. The authorities and the media should not leap to the conclusion that any particular individual belongs in this group, but if he is found to have no legal documentation, he should be treated accordingly.

But DTIW goes farther than merely to dissemble on the question of illegality. The campaign uses inaccurate language of its own. DTIW condemns the “anti-immigration strategy” that, through the mainstream media, has normalized the use of illegal and similar terms. But with the exception of a few fringe groups, most do not oppose immigration as such. They oppose illegal immigration, and many argue for restoring the sorts of restrictions on immigration that existed until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. Above all, they insist on the importance of repealing that act’s family-reunification provision, which has let in hundreds of thousands of low-skilled immigrants. DTIW’s conflation of nativist groups with people who want strong action against illegal immigration and a sensible revision of the terms of legal immigration is, in DTIW’s own words, a practice that “halt[s] and derail[s] reasoned, informed debate.”

However, for all the misleading arguments and examples, Novoa’s final advice is sound: “For the purposes of reporting and for the purposes of the law, what we can ask is for people to be as precise as possible.” In the end, a judgment must be made about the subject of any conversation about immigration, and the goal of that judgment should be to label the persons involved as accurately as possible.

And that responsibility belongs to both sides.

Why the Obamacare Ruling Matters

By Michael Tanner
Wednesday, June 27, 2012

As we eagerly await the Supreme Court’s decision on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, a.k.a. Obamacare, expected shortly after 10 a.m. Thursday morning, much of the political Left remains mystified by the health-care law’s continued unpopularity.

According to an Associated Press/GfK poll released last week, 47 percent of Americans oppose the health-care law, while just 33 percent support it. Similarly, a Rasmussen presidential-election poll released just this week found that 54 percent of likely voters want the law repealed. And even more devastating, a New York Times/CBS News poll, which traditionally skews Democratic, found that fully two-thirds of Americans wanted either the individual mandate or the entire law to be found unconstitutional.

In the face of this ongoing opposition, the media has trotted out the usual excuses. First, the public doesn’t understand all the good things the health-care bill will supposedly do for them. As Chris Cillizza said on MSNBC, “People don’t know what they want.” They point to surveys showing that Americans express confusion about what the law would or would not do. Other surveys show that some benefits of the law, such as allowing children to stay on their parents’ policy until age 26 or guaranteeing coverage for individuals with preexisting conditions, are quite popular, even if the overall bill is not.

Thus, the Left continues to cling to the idea that the health-care law will eventually become popular once the public figures it all out. True, they originally thought that the bill would “become more popular after passage than it was before passage,” as Ezra Klein suggested. Then, they thought that it would become popular once some of the reforms took effect. “I think that health care, over time, is going to become more popular,” David Axelrod told us. Now, bizarrely, Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne claims that the bill will actually become more popular if the Court strikes it down.

Or maybe the public isn’t stupid; rather, they’ve just been brainwashed by a barrage of anti-Obamacare ads. Last week, the New York Times rolled out a front-page story highlighting a study that, in purchases of television advertising, opponents of the health-care law had outspent supporters three-to-one, $235 million to $70 million. That gap has shrunk in the last year, though: Since July 1, 2011, opponents spent roughly $27 million on television ads, compared with $12 million by supporters. Moreover, the study only included spending up to March of this year, and therefore does not include a new $20 million contract that HHS signed with a public-relations firm in May.

Of course, focusing on just television advertising ignores the many other avenues that supporters have used to sell their message, such as HHS mailings to seniors. There is also the virtually unending stream of pro-Obamacare stories in the mainstream media. And, there was the president himself, who has given at least 144 speeches, talks, or press conferences devoted to the bill.

This is roughly the same argument that liberals fell back on after they failed to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker. Their message didn’t lose on the merits; it was defeated unfairly by evil corporate interests who pulled the wool over voters’ eyes. (Ignore the fact that big corporate interests such as the pharmaceutical industry were recruited by the Obama administration to support the health-care bill.) If the Court tosses out all or part of the health-care law, expect to hear the same litany of villains: Citizens United, the Koch brothers, Karl Rove . . .

But the American people aren’t really dumb. And they haven’t been deluded by 30-second television ads.

Of course, Americans respond positively to parts of the law that appear to give them more benefits or that help the disadvantaged, especially when those provisions are presented to them as nearly cost-free. But Americans are also aware of the bill’s many failings: It increases federal spending, taxes, and debt. It adds new burdens to struggling businesses, making it harder for them to grow and hire new workers. It drives up the cost of health insurance, especially for the young and healthy, while putting in place structures that will almost inevitably lead to the rationing of care.

The average American adds up the costs and benefits and decides that, on the whole, they don’t want the law. It’s not bad marketing; it’s bad law.

But there is a much deeper reason why so many Americans reject Obamacare. They see it as an enormous expansion of federal power, contrary to the Constitution, American historical tradition, and their own innate dislike of big government. There is a reason why the individual mandate is the most unpopular aspect of the law.

If the Court upholds the government’s power to force you to buy health insurance, is there any limit to this power? Is there anything the government can’t require you to do? That is why the analogy of a “broccoli mandate,” while pooh-poohed by liberal legal experts, struck such a chord. It’s not that the public expects the broccoli police to appear on their doorstep anytime soon, but they understand that unrestrained and unlimited government power is a thing to be feared. Indeed, Gallup has found that nearly two-thirds of Americans believe that big government is the biggest threat to the future of this country, far more than either big business (26 percent) or big labor (8 percent).

That’s a dimension of the American character missed by those on the left who see government as nothing more than a benevolent force that goes about dispensing goodies and righting wrongs. The essence of the Obama administration is about the accumulation of government power, first by the federal government itself, and secondarily by the president himself. This desire for power explains not only the president’s policies but also his distaste for the democratic process, particularly when it stands in the way of his doing what he thinks must be done.

In a way, the health-care bill is typical of the entire Obama presidency. It asserts the power of government over individuals, and the power of the federal government over the states.

That is why Thursday’s Supreme Court decision is about far more than just one bad health-care law. If the bill — or at least the individual mandate — is struck down, the Court will have said that the power of government over our lives is not unlimited. There are some lines that government cannot cross, even when well-intentioned.

That would be a decision that the American people will cheer.

In Praise of Discrimination

By John Stossel
Wednesday, June 27, 2012

I'm scared.

I fear that even if the Supreme Court overrules most of Obamacare (or did already, by the time you read this), Republicans will join Democrats in restoring "good" parts of the law, like the requirement that insurance companies cover kids up to age 26 and every American with a pre-existing condition.

Those parts of Obamacare are popular. People like getting what they think is free stuff. But requiring coverage to age 26 makes policies cost more.

Even Bill O'Reilly lectures me that government should ban discrimination against those with pre-existing conditions. Most Americans agree with him. Who likes discrimination? Racial discrimination was one of the ugliest parts of American history. None of us wants to be discriminated against. But discrimination is part of freedom. We discriminate when we choose our friends or our spouse, or when we choose what we do with our time.

Above all, discrimination is what makes insurance work. An insurance regime where everyone pays the same amount is called "community rating." That sounds fair. No more cruel discrimination against the obese or people with cancer. But community rating is as destructive as ordering flood insurance companies to charge me nothing extra to insure my very vulnerable beach house, or ordering car insurance companies to charge Lindsay Lohan no more than they charge you. Such one-size-fits-all rules take away insurance companies' best tool: risk-based pricing. Risk-based pricing encourages us to take better care of ourselves.

Car insurance works because companies reward good drivers and charge the Lindsay Lohans more. If the state forces insurance companies to stop discriminating, that kills the business model.

No-discrimination insurance isn't insurance. It's welfare. If the politicians' plan was to create another government welfare program, they ought to own up to that instead of hiding the cost.

Obama -- and the Clintons before him -- expressed outrage that insurance companies charged people different rates based on their risk profiles. They want everyone covered for the same "fair" price.

The health insurance industry was happy to play along. They even offered to give up on gender differences. Women go to the doctor more often than men and spend more on medicines. Their lifetime medical costs are much higher, and so it makes all the sense in the world to charge women higher premiums. But Sen. John Kerry pandered, saying, "The disparity between women and men in the individual insurance market is just plain wrong, and it has to change!" The industry caved. The president of its trade group, Karen M. Ignagni, said that disparities "should be eliminated."

Caving was safer than fighting the president and Congress, and caving seemed to provide the industry with benefits. Insurance companies wouldn't have to work as hard. They wouldn't have to carefully analyze risk. They'd be partners with government -- fat and lazy, another sleepy bureaucracy feeding off the welfare state. Alcoholics, drug addicts and the obese won't have to pay any more than the rest of us.

But this just kills off a useful part of insurance: encouraging healthy behavior. Charging heavy drinkers more for insurance gives them one more incentive to quit. "No-discrimination" pricing makes health care costs rise even faster. Is it too much to expect our rulers to understand this?

Of course, the average citizen doesn't understand either. When I argue that medical insurance makes people indifferent to costs, I get online comments like: "I guess the 47 million people who don't have health care should just die, right, John?"

The truth is, almost all people do get health care, even if they don't have health insurance. Hospitals rarely turn people away; Medicaid and charities pay for care; some individuals pay cash; some doctors forgive bills. I wish people would stop conflating the terms "health care," "health insurance" and "Obamacare." Reporters ask guests things like: "Should Congress repeal health care?" I sure don't want anyone's health care repealed.

Reporters also routinely called Obamacare health "reform." But the definition of reform is: making something better. More government control won't do that. We should call politicians' insurance demands "big intrusive complex government micromanagement."

Let the private sector work. Let it discriminate.

The NHS: A Guide for Americans Under Obamacare

By Cal Thomas
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

BELFAST, Northern Ireland -- Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules on the "Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act" (this was written before the decision), the Obama administration has indicated it will move forward with those parts of the unpopular law it can impose on the country.

Guidebooks are helpful when going on vacation. The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is the best guidebook for Americans concerned where a nationalized health system might take us.

For years throughout the U.K. there have been horror stories about declining health-care services. Last week, NHS doctors threatened a strike over a plan to raise their retirement age and pension contributions. A majority of doctors decided at the last minute not to strike after negative public reaction.

Rationing has arrived, with more than 90 percent of English health trusts restricting "non-urgent" surgeries, which include hip and knee replacements and cataract surgery. It took a freedom of information request by the media to pry this fact from the NHS.

Long waiting periods for routine surgeries are increasingly the norm here. People are amazed when an American tells them we still have fast access to our primary care physicians. In the U.K., one must often wait weeks for an appointment and then additional weeks and sometimes months for treatment, depending on the procedure.

Cost-cutting, not improving the quality of care, now seems to be the major concern of the NHS. The London Daily Telegraph last week carried a story about a 71-year-old man who had been removed from treatment for pneumonia and epilepsy because he was deemed to be too old and too sick. Professor Patrick Pullicino, a senior consultant at East Kent Hospitals, told the Royal Society of Medicine of his personal intervention to save the man. He said he encountered "significant resistance" from hospital staff. When Pullicino persuaded them to resume treatment, the man recovered and was discharged.

The story contained this scary sentence: "NHS hospitals are using end-of-life care to help elderly patients die because they are difficult to look after and take up valuable beds." First the elderly, and then who? When cost becomes primary, what's next? Suddenly "death panels" don't seem so far-fetched.

NHS "looks like a supertanker heading for an iceberg," said Mike Farrar, chief executive of the confederation that represents organizations providing NHS services. Farrar told the Telegraph, "Despite huge efforts to maintain standards of patient care in the current financial year, health-care leaders are deeply concerned about the storm clouds that are gathering around the NHS."

For many, the storm has already struck like the torrential rain that has flooded much of the U.K. in recent days.

Here's another recent Telegraph headline: "Lives put at risk by shortage of drugs." The story says, "Four in five NHS trusts in England and Wales say patients are suffering 'unacceptable' delays for drugs to treat life-threatening conditions including cancer, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia and organ failure." Drug companies are getting better prices elsewhere in Europe and so are "rationing" them here.

In the U.K., the question is not whether everyone can access "free" health care; it is the type of health care they will be able to access, and will it be high quality, or something less? If government health care isn't working well here, why have faith it will work better in the much larger U.S.?

The United States doesn't need the NHS as a guidebook. We have our own. It's called Medicare and Medicaid. They are going broke and cannot be sustained without more borrowed money or sharply reduced services. When human life is regarded as disposable -- as with unborn babies -- and cost control replaces treatment as the main objective, then anything that enables government to reduce costs is possible. It then is only a matter of conditioning the public to accept lower-quality care and rationing.

Instead of keeping Obamacare, which heads in the direction of Britain's socialized medicine and the resulting problems of reduced care and accessibility, the U.S. should enact market-based reforms in the current system (proposed by Republicans) that would expand availability and affordability while not harming the quality of great care we now have in this country.

Arizona’s Victory

By Rich Lowry
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Upon its passage, Arizona’s immigration law was considered so outlandish that Attorney General Eric Holder famously rushed to condemn it without reading it.

Now the Supreme Court has read the law and rejected Holder’s case against its central element, the so-called “show me your papers” provision stipulating that police officers should check on the immigration status of people suspected of being in the country illegally.

If it were possible for a statute to be tarred, feathered, and run out of town on a rail, such would have been the fate of Arizona’s law. President Barack Obama inveighed against it. The state was boycotted. Otherwise reasonable people lost their heads. Former Bush speechwriter Mike Gerson thundered that the statute was un-American. Whether the law was deemed racist, fascist, or merely ill-advised, it was an article of faith that it was very, very unconstitutional.

When it got to the Court, though, it wasn’t even a close call. All eight justices ruling in the case — Justice Elena Kagan recused herself — turned aside the Justice Department’s preemptive challenge to the provision’s constitutionality. Given all the commentary recently from the left about how partisan the Court is and how 5–4 decisions undermine its legitimacy, the Court’s unanimous agreement that one of the most controversial laws in the land can go into effect should comfort those liberals professing to be worried about the highest court’s future.

The decision is a win for Arizona, although a limited and ambiguous one. The Court left open the possibility for future challenges based on how the law is enforced and, in a divided decision, struck down three other provisions on grounds that they interfere with the federal immigration system. If Arizona can’t claim total victory, it can claim vindication vis-à-vis all its hysterical critics. On the most important question, Governor Jan Brewer had a better grasp of the Constitution than the president of the United States.

What the Arizona-haters always ignored is that there are “show me your papers” provisions in the federal law. As Justice Anthony Kennedy recounts in his opinion for the majority, the federal government requires that aliens carry proof of registration. An extensive apparatus exists to facilitate state and local enforcement of the immigration laws. Congress has said that no special training or formal agreement is necessary for state officers to “communicate with the [federal government] regarding the immigration status of any individual, including reporting knowledge that a particular alien is not lawfully present in the United States.” The federal government runs a Law Enforcement Support Center available 24 hours a day to provide “immigration status, identity information and real-time assistance to local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.”

If the feds didn’t want to get any inquiries from police officers in Arizona, they should have written that loophole into the law. Certainly, Arizona’s statute is more in keeping with the spirit of federal immigration laws than the Obama administration’s selective enforcement with an eye to doing just enough to cover itself politically. It is bizarre that, with millions of people in the country in defiance of federal laws, the man charged with faithfully executing them is worried that Arizona police will do too much to assist the federal government by turning up illegal immigrants in the course of their work.

In his scorching dissent from the decision overturning portions of the Arizona statute, Justice Antonin Scalia emphasizes federal nonenforcement of the immigration laws. The Obama administration’s real beef with Arizona isn’t that it contradicts federal law so much as that it contradicts its own choice to ignore federal law as much as practical. Arizona, Scalia notes, has been particularly hard hit by the federal government’s decision to enforce at the border primarily in California and Texas: “Must Arizona’s ability to protect its borders yield to the reality that Congress has provided inadequate funding for federal enforcement — or, even worse, to the Executive’s unwise targeting of that funding?”

Arizona had the temerity to answer “no.”

Dodging Another UN Bullet

By Paul Driessen
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Note: This column is co-authored by Duggan Flanakin.

The Future We Want outlined a “common vision” for planetary “sustainable development,” as proclaimed by the “Organizing Partners of the Major Group of NGOs,” to guide the taxpayer-funded Rio+20 summit that ended last week in disarray and acrimony.

The activist organizations that cobbled the document together filled it with hundreds of platitudes and pseudo-solutions to global warming cataclysms, newly reconstituted as threats to resource depletion and biodiversity – and presented as standards and mandates for countries, communities and corporations.

The terms “sustainable development,” “sustainable” and “sustainability” appeared in the original text an astounding 390 times. Like “abracadabra,” these nebulous concepts were supposed to transform the world into a Garden of Eden global community, under United Nations auspices, that will use less, pollute less, and save species and planet from their worst enemy: humans.

To glean the document essence, however, readers only needed to understand two concepts: control and money – to impose the future the activists wanted.

The NGOs and UN called for “donations” from formerly rich European Union and Annex II (Kyoto Protocol) countries, at 0.7% of their gross national product per year. With the combined GNP of the contributing nations totaling about $45 trillion in 2010, the transfers would total $315 billion per year, or $3.2 trillion per decade.

President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton had previously committed the United States to provide $105 billion annually, based on our $15 trillion GNP (and strained line of credit). With US per capita GNP pegged at $47,340 – each American family of four would pay $1,325 a year. That may seem like chump change compared to TARP, Obamacare or the Obama Stimulus. But over a decade US citizens would involuntarily shell out well over a trillion dollars to UN sustainability schemes.

The UN claims it has already received more than $500 billion in pledges from governments and companies, to reduce fossil fuel use, increase renewable energy generation in poor countries, promote bicycle use in Holland, teach sustainability in universities, conserve water – and somehow still reduce global poverty. Time will tell how many are worth the paper they were printed on

To oversee this unprecedented wealth transfer to UN bureaucrats and NGO activists, The Future We Want architects sought to establish “an intergovernmental process” to assess financial needs, consider the effectiveness, consistency and “synergies” of existing instruments and frameworks, evaluate additional initiatives, and prepare reports on financing strategies. This grand scheme would be implemented by an intergovernmental committee of 30 “experts,” who will be accountable to – no one, actually, except perhaps the Secretary General of the esteemed United Nations.

The document reassured readers that “aid architecture has significantly changed in the current decade,” and “fighting corruption and illicit financial flows [has become] a priority.” Diogenes would search in vain for evidence of this.

Indeed, the very idea of still more aid must be questioned. “Has more than US$1 trillion in development assistance over the last several decades made African people better off?” Zambia-born economist Dambisa Moyo asks in her book, Dead Aid. “No,” she answers emphatically. What’s needed are investment, development, less regulatory red tape, and an unleashing of entrepreneurial instincts.

Nevertheless, the UN is determined to plow ahead, claiming that somehow, this time, they will get it right. Surely, the prospect of promoting sustainability and saving the planet and its species will convert scurrilous dictators, Western politicians and their cronies into honest leaders who would never divert eco-funding to political friends, Swiss bank accounts or crony-capitalist wind and solar projects.

With Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue bathed in green light (to symbolize ecology – or was it money?) and the National Religious Partnership for the Environment proselytizing throughout the event, surely miscreants would sin no more.

Meanwhile, Statement 61 (of 283!) helpfully pronounced that “urgent action on unsustainable patterns of production and consumption ... remains fundamental in addressing environmental sustainability” ... and each country should “consider the implementation of green economy policies in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication.”

In essence, the Rio+20 message was, “You got a problem? The UN team has an app for that!”

From poverty eradication to food security, nutrition and “sustainable agriculture,” to water and sanitation, to energy, sustainable tourism and transport, and sustainable cities and “human settlements,” the Future We Want “framework for action and follow-up” had it covered! Of course, there were caveats.

Everyone has a right to safe, sufficient, nutritious food – but biotechnology, chemical fertilizers, insecticides and modern mechanized farming are unsustainable. Electricity is vital, but the 1.4 billion now without lights or refrigeration must be content with “green energy.” Health “is a precondition for, an outcome of, and an indicator of, all three dimensions of sustainable development,” but no DDT allowed.

The authors also promised “full and productive employment, decent work for all, and social protections” for workers, to clean up the oceans, stop illegal mining and fishing, and ensure that only “sustainable forest management” prevails (the cut-no-trees kind that produces uncontrollable wildfires).

The Future We Want also lauded women, the scientific and technological community, indigenous peoples, young people, workers, trade unions, small-scale farmers, NGOs and “civil society” – while placing new burdens on the corporations that will be expected to generate trillions to prop up these efforts.

The document also included multiple proposals for technology transfers – but deleted all references to protecting patents and intellectual property rights. It also excised language “respecting the right to freedom of association and assembly, in accordance with our obligations under international law.”

Thankfully – despite attendance by 45,000 delegates from 180 nations – the Rio+20 summit became just another gabfest, the mandates became even more ill-defined “goals” and “recommendations,” and the world dodged another Kyoto-style bullet.

The activists and bureaucrats will doubtless be back, in a couple more years, in an exotic new locale, with new plans for saving the planet from scary new catastrophes.

However, poor countries are slowly catching on that these UN events are little more than neo-colonialist, eco-imperialist schemes to control and restrict economic development – and poor families are beginning to realize they won’t get a dime from these sustainability pledges or derive any tangible benefits from the green schemes.

Arizona Can't Do It; Washington Won't

By Debra J. Saunders
Tuesday, June 26, 2012

President Barack Obama hailed the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision Monday that struck down most of Arizona's 2010 immigration law. In a statement released by the White House, however, the president said that he remains "concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally."

All eight voting members of the Supreme Court upheld this provision, which requires that Arizona cops try to determine the immigration status of individuals who have been stopped for reasons not involving immigration.

Even though federal law requires legal immigrants to carry identification papers with them, open-border types have dubbed the Arizona provision "show me your papers." Even though the Arizona law requires that race not be a factor in any police actions conducted under the law, MSNBC's Chris Matthews calls that section of the law "the requirement that cops stop people because they look a certain way." Quoth the president, "No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like." No matter how much Arizonans improve the law, the left will maintain that it is about race and race alone.

The irony is that Obama has been a strong booster of the Secure Communities program, introduced by President George W. Bush, operated under U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and expanded under this administration. The program forwards fingerprints taken by local law enforcement to ICE, where officials check to see whether arrestees are in the United States legally. Obama is happy to have local law enforcement check on the immigration status of people it arrests, as long as only his feds make the decision over what to do -- or not do -- about it.

"A patchwork of state laws is not a solution to our broken immigration system," Obama intoned in his statement. That's Phony, Part 2.

"The White House hasn't sued San Francisco," a self-proclaimed sanctuary city, noted Jon Feere, legal policy analyst for the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, "but it's going after states that are trying to uphold the law."

I asked the Department of Justice to explain the administration's scruples on Arizona-versus-sanctuary-cities to me in 2010. A spokeswoman replied: "There's a difference between a state or locality saying they are not going to use their resources to enforce a federal law, as so-called sanctuary cities have done, and a state passing its own immigration policy that actively interferes with federal law. That's what Arizona did in this case, and we believe it is an unconstitutional interference with the federal government's prerogative to set and enforce immigration policy."

Or, in this case, not enforce immigration policy. Clearly, the president objects only when states seek to bolster immigration law, not flout it.

As dissenting justice Antonin Scalia reasoned, "the sale of illegal drugs, for example, ordinarily violates state law as well as federal law, and no one thinks that the state penalties cannot exceed the federal."

Now, there is a case to be made for the argument that letting states enforce federal law can, as Justice Anthony M. Kennedy wrote for the majority, "undermine federal law." But it's a case best made by those able to ignore the administration's selective umbrage. What Obama is really saying: "Move over, Arizona. Only I have the right to undermine federal law."

Obama Backers Use Race as Alibi for Ebbing Support

By Michael Barone
Monday, June 25, 2012

As Barack Obama's lead over Mitt Romney in the polls narrows, and his presumed fundraising advantage seems about to become a disadvantage, it's alibi time for some of his backers.

His problem, they say, is that some voters don't like him because he's black. Or they don't like his policies because they don't like having a black president.

So, you see, if you don't like Obamacare, it's not because it threatens to take away your health insurance, or to deny coverage for some treatments. It's because you don't like black people.

This sort of thing seems to be getting more frequent, or at least more open. As White House Dossier writer Keith Koffler notes, HBO host Bill Maher accused Internet tyro Matt Drudge of being animated by racism because he highlights anti-Obama stories.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews asked former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown if House Chairman Darrell Issa's treatment of Attorney General Eric Holder was "ethnic." Brown agreed, and Matthews said some Republicans "talk down to the president and his friends."

There's an obvious problem with the racism alibi. Barack Obama has run for president before, and he won. Voters in 2008 knew he was black. Most of them voted for him. He carried 28 states and won 365 electoral votes.

Nationwide, he won 53 percent of the popular vote. That may not sound like a landslide, but it's a higher percentage than any Democratic nominee except Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson.

Democratic national conventions have selected nominees 45 times since 1832. In seven cases, they won more than 53 percent of the vote. In 37 cases, they won less.

That means President Obama won a larger percentage of the vote than Martin Van Buren, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and (though you probably don't want to bring this up in conversation with him) Bill Clinton.

Now it is true that you can go out in America and find people who would just never vote for a black person. But it's a lot harder than it was a generation or two ago, when most voters admitted to pollsters they would never vote for a black president.

And you can probably find some people who usually vote for Democrats but would not vote for a black Democrat. But not very many of them, and they're likely to be pretty advanced in age, and so there are likely fewer of them around than there were four years ago.

My own view is that such voters were more than counterbalanced by voters who felt that, as an abstract proposition in the light of our history, it would be a good thing for Americans to elect a black president.

In 2008, Obama, who came to national attention by decrying the polarization of Red-state and Blue-state America, had obvious appeal to voters. I think there is a similar, and similarly unquantifiable, factor working for Obama this year: Many voters feel, as an abstract proposition, that it would be a bad thing for American voters to reject the first black president.

Some conservatives complain that there is a double standard, that whites who vote against Obama are accused of racial motives, while blacks, 95 percent of whom voted for him, are not.

I think that's unfair. Members of an identifiable group that has been in some way excluded from full recognition as citizens will naturally tend to support a candidate who could be the first president from that group. In 1960, Gallup reported that 78 percent of American Catholics voted for John Kennedy.

American blacks have suffered exclusion and discrimination more than any other group. And very large percentages of them regularly vote for candidates who share Obama's views on issues.

What's remarkable about our politics in 2008 and today is that most voters seem to be making their decisions based on their assessment of the issues and the character of the candidates.

The fact that some have, at least for the moment, moved away from supporting Obama to opposing him, or remain unsure, reflects not an increasing racism, but the fact that we simply have more information than we had four years ago.

Most of us are disappointed when our candidates don't win. But that's no excuse for phony alibis.

MSM: The Unreality Journalists

By Morgan Brittany
Monday, June 25, 2012

Alright, we on the right have been saying for years that the media is in the tank for the left and Democrats.  We have been screaming it at the top of our lungs.  Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O’Reilly spew monologue after monologue, citing examples over and over. 

Bernie Goldberg and Brent Bozell wrote books about it for pete’s sake!  (Bias:  A CBS Insider Exposes How the Media Distorts the News-Goldberg) and (Weapons of Mass Distortion:  The Coming Meltdown of the Liberal Media-Bozell).  Still, the media kept their eye on the path of liberal bias.  At first they were more cautious and discreet in their reporting.  Subliminal messages would creep into their commentary or they would completely ignore stories that were favorable to Republicans. 

If a Democrat was suspected, charged or guilty of wrongdoing, they would give it a passing glance and try to sweep it under the carpet as insignificant.  Always though, they would blame the other side and charge racism or playing politics.  There was always that subtle little dig that skewed the story. 

Well, that was then.  Now, it is right out there in the open.  There is no hiding their bias anymore.  Media producers are blatantly doctoring tapes and feeding it to salivating anchors who report the stories with glee and laughter.  Take for instance, the Andrea Mitchell piece on MSNBC last week. 

Their whole purpose was to make Mitt Romney look like he was out of touch with mainstream America when he talked about a supermarket scanner.  They laughed and joked about him as though he were a fool.   A few months earlier, they doctored the George Zimmerman tape trying to paint him as a racist.  I get it, the MSNBC audience wants to hear this, they want red meat from this network, but come on, this is becoming ridiculous.  It is embarrassing to the serious journalists out there and the whole profession in general.  I kind of relate it to the state of entertainment television today. 

You have great shows that are serious and well-thought out, well written and well acted like the CSI franchise, NCIS and others, and then you have the inane, stupid, degrading reality shows that expose the lowest common denominator in our society.  Granted, some of the scripted shows like Glee and Smash push the liberal agenda in their storylines, but we see that for what it is and it isn’t being passed off as anything except someone’s opinion.  It is aggravating sometimes to have that inserted into a great show, but then I can always choose not to watch it.  The news however, is a different situation. 

Journalists are supposed to be objective, fair, and report the information they receive accurately without any underlying motive.  If they purposely misinform people, how different are we from fascist countries that only tell you what they want you to know?

We have known for awhile that the lamestream media is blurring the lines between fantasy and reality with shows like “Real Time with Bill Maher” and “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart”.  These are supposed to be “fake news” programs even though some people accept them as fact.  The lines between reality and fantasy are becoming increasingly distorted.  These shows take on the appearance of being “real”, but whenever people start to believe them as hard facts, they hide behind the fact that they are just satire or comedy.  That doesn’t erase the fact that hundreds of thousands of viewers take their words as gospel.

Now, maybe the tide is beginning to turn.  It seems like even former NBC producers like Greg Kandra who worked for Katie Couric has come around and can’t defend the bias anymore.  Jake Tapper admitted that the media tilted the scales for Obama in the 2008 election.

Is it guilt making them admit it or what?

When you really look at the big picture going on here, you get a sort of disquieting feeling.  Are these people so blinded by their ideology that they will do anything to make sure the outcome favors their agenda?  It is the feeling that “the end justifies the means”?  Have we reached a point in this country where you can lie, steal, cheat or worse and it’s acceptable as long as you get the outcome you want?  I want honest journalism, honest reporting.  I want my country’s media to tell me the truth as it is, not as they see it.

The American people are not as dumb as the lamestream media thinks.  In a recent poll, 67% of respondents said that the media was biased.  That should cause them to maybe look in the mirror and see the truth. I don’t know what the answer is.  There seems to be less and less that one can depend on these days.  We look with a skeptical eye on almost everything that comes at us every day.  We doubt our political leaders, we don’t trust our financial institutions, and we wake up to the reality of broken promises for our future.  I only wish we could have some honest reporting of the facts.  Come on liberal journalists and anchors, respect your profession, bite the bullet and man up.  Be straight with us.  After all, we are grown-ups. Give us the truth, even if you don’t like it.