The GOP Won’t “Overplay its Hand” on the Obama IRS scandal...Because it Can't

It’s only been a couple weeks since news broke that the IRS unconstitutionally targeted conservative groups/organizations for additional scrutiny and harassment in the run-up to the 2012 election, and already, President Obama’s most ardent apologists are acknowledging the severity of this problem, calling the White House out on its arrogant mendacity and joining Republicans in their efforts to uncover the truth and bring all culpable parties to justice.

 

Yeah, right.

 

Actually, many on the Left have been trying to shift the focus from what is clearly a serious scandal involving unconstitutional acts by the government to...the GOP. But how? Republicans, whose role in this sordid affair (if any) is limited to that of victims, are rightly incensed by what in all likelihood was a calculated political efforts to boost the electoral prospects of the president and other Democrats by hamstringing conservative groups and individuals.

 

Well, as gifted as the Left is at creating alternate realities, even they can’t inculpate the GOP in this mess, it’s pushing a different narrative: Republicans are eagerly ginning up controversy and trying to capitalize on these so-called "scandals", but they're so blinded by their utter contempt and disdain for the president that they're already overreaching and blowing these things way out of proportion, oblivious to the pitfalls of ganging up on a president who's still a lot more popular than they are.

 

Charlie Cook, an idiot, has been pushing this narrative with the utmost vigor in National Journal. Last week, he wrote that “Republicans Should Go Easy on Obama.” (I tried to find where Cook had written the same or something similar about Democrats and President Bush, but I could find no such case.) On Tuesday, he claimed that Republicans are so blinded by their “hatred of Obama” that “they can’t see how little impact the 'scandals' have had on public opinion.” (Yes, he actually put "scandals" in quotation marks.) 

 

“The simple fact is that although the Republican sharks are circling,” Cook wrote, “there isn’t a trace of blood in the water.” He based this on an out-of-context quote from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the results of two polls (one of which was an outlier that pegged Obama’s job-approval rating at 53%, five percentage points higher than the current RCP average, and the other being Gallup, which as we know nailed President Romney’s margin of victory in the 2012 election).

 

Cook recites these polls in his latest article, in which he likens the bipartisan investigation into to the impeachment of Pres. Bill Clinton that proved to hurt Republicans more than the president: “The current situation is reminding many folks of the impeachment controversy in 1998” he says, raising the question of how many “folks” Cook talks to who don’t think exactly like him. “Blinded by their hatred for President Clinton, Republicans made irrational decisions then, and they are making the same mistakes today.”

 

Another National Journal contributor, Ron Fournier (who is not an idiot but is pretty obtuse) yesterday accused RNC Chairman Reince Priebus of “demonizing, politicizing and overreaching just enough to jeopardize his cause.” This is the same Ron Fournier who earlier this week expressly stated that the White House “has demonstrated an inability and/or unwillingness to tell the full truth about the IRS scandal and a spate of other controversies.” Either Fournier is suffering from some kind of bipolar disorder or he believes that the Obama White House’s serial dishonesty is just as consistent with innocence as culpability. 
 

Stuart Rothenberg, who is usually more astute, couldn’t resist the same faulty comparison Cook made. In a blog post entitled, “Will Republicans Screw Up Again? Some Are Already Overreaching,” Rothenberg mused:  

Republicans failed to capitalize on President Bill Clinton’s inappropriate conduct by over-playing their hand and pushing impeachment. Not only did they fail to drive him from office, the GOP ended up losing a handful of House seats in the 1998 midterms instead of adding seats as initially expected.

Republicans allowed themselves to look as if they were primarily interested in scoring political points and overturning the results of the 1996 election, even if it meant paralyzing the government.

That same danger exists once again for the GOP.

With fundraising playing such a huge part in our politics, some conservative groups will be tempted to use the trifecta of controversies to play to their bases to boost anger and fundraising.

This, in turn, will make the issues appear more and more partisan, giving the president the same opportunity that Clinton used when he sought to rise above “politics” and called for members of both parties to address public policy challenges.

He then undermined his own argument by describing some of the differences between 1998 and 2013 that make any comparisons of the two situations sound ridiculous.

 

I’ll spare you excerpts from the ramblings of ditsy hacks like Joan Walsh, Greg Sargent and Michael Tomasky; let it suffice to say that they've been even more defensive in their commentary on these affairs.

 

The logical rebuttal to these warnings of Republican “overreach” is simple. Republicans won’t overreach on—and won’t overblow—these scandals, esp. the IRS scandal, because they can’t. Yes, you could conceivably say something that exaggerates the magnitude of any one particular scandal (though I’ve yet to hear any such thing from a Republican to date), but the cumulation of these things—from the abject incompetence of the ill-conceived (and even more poorly executed) "Fast & Furious" operation to administration’s repeated prevarication about Benghazi to the possible unconstitutionality of the Justice Dept. preying on reporters and the definite unconstitutionality of the IRS’s treatment of conservatives—is far greater than any scandal or combination of scandals involving a U.S. president and his administration.

 

Sure, other presidents have done terrible and inexcusable things. Andrew Jackson forced thousands of Cherokee (including my great-great-great-great grandparents) to take leave of their homes in the southeastern U.S. and trudge miles westward in a journey that killed thousands of them and injured countless others. L.B.J. and his administration repeatedly misled Americans about the Vietnam war and continued to send American soldiers, many of whom were drafted, to die and/or suffer serious bodily harm in the jungles of southeast Asia after it became clear they were fighting a losing battle. Richard Nixon...well, we know what he did. And, don’t get me started on F.D.R.

 

Whether or not these or other nefarious deeds by part presidents fit the definition of “scandal” is a discussion for another time. I’m not saying the pain and suffering caused by the Obama Administration’s actions is worse than the Trail of Tears, but unlike Obama, Jackson had the legal authority to do what he did.

 

In addition to the unconstitutionality of the IRS’s actions, there’s another compelling reason why the gravity of that particular scandal can’t be overstated. As I explained in a YouTube video yesterday, the effects of the IRS’s misdeeds were, among other things, to unfairly hamstring conservative efforts in the 2012 campaign. Libertarian/Republican candidates and causes were deprived of much-needed capital during a critical election cycle. Who knows how many races would have turned out differently had the playing field been level?

 

I don’t mean to invite people to reconsider what has already come to pass, and I certainly don’t want to dwell on what might have been. This much is undeniable, however: as long as even one politician elected in a close race in 2012, the outcome of which might have been different had the IRS not engaged in these unconstitutional practices, is still in office, we are still living with the consequences of what the IRS did, and that means this scandal still has legs. In that sense, nobody is “overreaching” just by pulling out all the stops to make sure that the truth will come out and all complicit parties will be exposed and brought to justice.

The Obama-Nixon Comparison Is Indeed Appropriate

Steve Chapman, the Chicago Tribune columnist and editorial writer whose semiweekly musings range from the sentient to the delusional, has convinced me that the comparison of Obama to the late President Nixon is not only justified but apt. How? Well, take a look at this from his latest column:  

In recent days, those people have triumphantly likened Barack Obama to Richard Nixon, particularly on the misuse of the Internal Revenue Service for political advantage. In 1974, the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach Nixon because, among other reasons, he tried to cause "income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."

This, of course, is exactly what the IRS now admits doing when it singled out conservative groups for special scrutiny. The Treasury Department's Inspector General found, "The IRS used inappropriate criteria that identified for review Tea Party and other organizations applying for tax-exempt status based upon their names or policy positions."

The misconduct happened under the current president. Therefore, Obama = Nixon.

Makes sense to me, except for that "Obama = Nixon” part. The two presidents may be guilty of similar acts, but they’re not the same man. (I recently tweeted my displeasure at the profligate comparisons of Obama to Nixon; people shouldn’t speak so ill of the dead.)

 

Chapman then explains that he was just setting up a straw man. Equating the two “is like concluding that babies are like poisonous snakes because some of them have rattles." Nice one, Steve, and were that hackneyed quip the worst part of your column, I wouldn’t have been moved to write this post, but then you say, "Maybe information will someday emerge to confirm the conservative suspicion that Obama thuggishly subverted the IRS to win re-election, but so far, it falls in the realm of make-believe."

 

I’d say it falls in the category of “undiscovered evidence,” the kind that warrants a dedicated, persistent and earnest congressional investigation and the appointment of an independent counsel. Chapman did at least review the history of how Nixon used tax agents as political operatives, but then he went way out on a limb with his assertion that, in "the case of Obama, there is no evidence that he or his Treasury Secretary was aware of the mistreatment of conservative groups -- much less that either of them requested it."

 

Well, here's what we do know: According to The Associated Press: 

Many conservative groups complained during the 2012 election that they were being harassed by the IRS. They accused the agency of frustrating their attempts to become tax exempt by sending them lengthy, intrusive questionnaires.
 
The forms, which the groups have made available, sought information about group members' political activities, including details of their postings on social networking websites and about family members.
 
In some cases, the IRS acknowledged, agents inappropriately asked for lists of donors.
 
There has been a surge of politically active groups claiming tax-exempt status in recent elections -- conservative and liberal. Among the highest profile are Republican Karl Rove's group Crossroads GPS and the liberal Moveon.org.
 
These groups claim tax-exempt status under section 501 (c) (4) of the federal tax code, which is for social welfare groups. Unlike other charitable groups, these organizations are allowed to participate in political activities, but their primary activity must be social welfare.
 
That determination is up to the IRS.
 
The number of groups filing for this tax-exempt status more than doubled from 2010 to 2012, to more than 3,400. To handle the influx, the IRS centralized its review of these applications in an office in Cincinnati.

The IRS agents in Cincinnati reportedly came up with a list of things to look for in an application, including the words "tea party" and "patriot." Donors to conservative groups and Republican candidates were harassed, audited and elderly. (Their age is not the IRS's fault, but it is a common trait I've noticed among the conservative/Republican victims of the Obama Administration's witch hunt.) 

Lois Lerner, who runs the IRS division that oversees tax-exempt organizations, knew about the targeting of Tea Party groups as early as June 29, 2011, according to the Inspector General's draft report released last week. On Aug. 4, 2011, staffers in the IRS's Rulings & Agreements office "held a meeting with chief counsel so that everyone would have the latest information on the issue." This raises the question of whether then-IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman perjured himself at a hearing before the House Ways and Means Subcommittee on Oversight on March 22, 2012, when he testified, "There's absolutely no targeting." (This was in response to Rep. Charles Boustany's question, "Can you give us assurances that the IRS is not targeting particular groups based on political leanings?") Yesterday, Shulman testified before the Senate Finance Committee that he learned “sometime in the spring of 2012″ that “there was a list that was being used” to identify political groups for further review and that the term “tea party” was on the list. That may have also been a lie, but assuming for the moment it was true, Shulman did not immediately (or even shortly thereafter) notify the subcommittee of this. Rather, he left a false impression with Congress and the public until this month, when he finally corrected the record. However, if "everyone" means "everyone," then it means that Shulman was clued into the targeting well before he testified to the contrary. Not surprisingly, Lerner invoked her Fifth Amendment right not to incriminate herself today in a hearing before the House Committee on Oversight. 

   

As for whether the president and his Treasury Secretary personally knew about this misconduct, here's some "evidence" for Steve Chapman. The White House coordinated with the Treasury Department over "how the IRS would disclose its targeting of conservative groups." And, the White House was caught in another lie on Monday, when Jay Carney acknowledged that, contrary to what he had previously told the press corps, Senior legal Counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was told on April 24 about the IRS audit that showed tax officials unfairly targeted Tea Party groups and that she then told White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough "and other senior officials" about the investigation.

So, Steve is wrong about there being "no evidence" that the Secretary of the Treasury knew about the mistreatment of conservative groups, but the rest of that sentence is correct--if by "evidence" he actually means direct evidence that has come out. Circumstantial evidence of the president's culpability in this affair is mounting every day. Let's not forget that it took a considerable while after the Watergate burglary in June 1972 for evidence of Nixon's personal involvement in the cover-up to surface. The fallout from this particular scandal is still in its larval stage. If there's any talk on this subject that falls "in the realm of make-believe," then it's coming from those who are scoffing at and deriding the notion that President Obama's hands are clean in all this. Stay tuned.

Farewell, Iron Lady





The cortege passes along Fleet Street towards St. Paul's Cathedral for the funeral of former
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (inset). (Composite Photo)

Earlier today, thousands of Margaret Thatcher's relatives, friends and countrymen(and women) gathered at St. Paul's Cathedral in London for the former prime minister's funeral. While much of the media coverage and commentary has focused on ancillary matters--yes, her nineteen-year-old granddaughter was beautiful and eloquent, and yes, President Obama did not attend, nor did he send Vice-President Biden (thank God) or another cabinet-level member of his administration--I thought it would be appropriate to pay tribute to the woman herself. As much has been said about the Iron Lady, one can't overdo honoring the life and legacy of a figure as great as the Rt Hon. Baroness Thatcher.

First, a brief primer: Margaret Thatcher was born Margaret Hilda Roberts on 13 October 1925 in Lincolnshire. She was elected to Parliament in 1959 and became leader of the Conservative Party in 1975 and Prime Minister in 1979. Now for the interesting stuff. 

 

Thatcher's route to Parliament was not only unusual but extraordinary. She earned a degree in chemistry from Oxford and worked as a research scientist--you may have heard about her role in the creation of soft-serve ice cream--before marrying, studying law and eventually becoming a barrister. She made three unsuccessful runs for Parliament before being elected from Finchley (a now-abolished constituency in what was then the County of Middlesex), which she represented until her retirement in 1992.

 

Years ago I was pleased to make the acquaintance of Jill Knight, Baroness of Collingtree, who served with Thatcher in the House of Commons for 30 years. She recalled how, during the '70s, there was a great schism between Mrs. Thatcher and Ted Heath, whom she succeeded as leader of the Conservative Party. While Heath was Prime Minister, from 1970 to '74, Thatcher served as Secretary of State for Education & Science. The two did not see eye-to-eye on many issues, and a rift soon developed between them (not unlike the erstwhile division across the pond between the Goldwater conservatives and Rockefeller Republicans in the GOP). After being swept out of power in the 1974 elections, the Conservatives replaced Heath with the younger, more libertarian-minded Thatcher.

 

To understand the significance of Thatcher becoming leader of the Conservative Party, you need to be familiar with British postwar political history. (No, don't stop reading!) While World War II invigorated a depressed American economy and arguably left the United States as the world's lone superpower, it devastated Great Britain.  This loss of capital was compounded by a sharp decline in the birth rate caused by the deaths of many British men during World War I. Out of this emerged a "collectivist consensus" that transcended political parties: a generous, broad-based welfare state was needed to alleviate the widespread hardship caused by the War and support those who (suuposedly) had no other means of support. Often referred to as "Butskellism" (after Lord Butler, a Conservative who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1951 to 1955, and MP Hugh Gaitskell, Leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963), this consensus gave rise to policies that effectively transformed the U.K. into a social democracy and that were perpetuated by seven prime ministers, including Heath, until by the late 1970s the stagnant British economy was plagued by excessive taxation, routine strikes, high inflation, mounting deficits and a government that seemed both hyperactive and incompetent.

 

So when the Conservatives replaced Sir Edward with a true conservative who appropriately denounced many of these policies as socialism akin to the policies imposed on many eastern European peoples. After regaining power in 1979, the Conservatives, led by Thatcher, set about scaling back the welfare state, reducing taxes, deregulating key industries, privatizing government entities and limiting the power of trade unions. Though much of the rabble who had become accustomed to suckling at the government teat pitched many a fit, a majority of the electorate supported Thatcher's agenda and kept her in power for nearly twelve consecutive years, the longest uninterrupted prime ministry since the Earl of Liverpool.

 

All good things must come to an end, though, and in 1990, facing a growing rebellion from within her own party, the Iron Lady resigned. Of all the explanations floated for her sudden decline in popularity and eventual downfall, one particular policy deserves special attention. Thatcher had long advocated replacing the rates system (under which local government services were funded by ad valorem taxes) with a poll tax. In 1987, she got her wish, and the rates were replaced with the Community Charge, which assessed a single flat-rate per-capita tax on every adult. The policy was very unpopular, particularly with large families, and Thatcher's successor, John Major, made good on his promise to abolish it shortly after taking office as prime minister.

 

Thankfully for the U.K., much of her legacy was more durable, and the country has remained an economic power on the world stage to this day. Not all Britons are grateful for the many ways in which she saved them from another devastating (and likely irreversible) collapse. For all the talk about the stereotypical "ugly American", our brothers and sisters in Mother England have shown over the past week that Respect for the recently departed is not a custom they wish to observe. Labour MP John Healey, the Henry Waxman of South Yorkshire, actually called Thatcher's legacy "too bitter to warrant this claim to national mourning."

 

"Churchill . . . unified the country, while Margaret Thatcher divided it," he told the Guardian.

 

One of Healey's colleagues, Respect MP George Galloway, similarly praised one of the country's most revered leaders while maligning Thatcher.

 

"We'd be conducting this conversation in German if it was not for Mr. Churchill," he spewed on BBC2's Daily Politics. "He saved the very existence of this country, while Mrs. Thatcher did her best to destroy what was good about this country and did destroy more than a third of our manufacturing capacity, reducing us to the state we're in now." 

Of course, the Baroness Thatcher was one of those leaders so confident in her principles that she was never phased or deterred by the petulant (and, in Mr. Galloway's case, historically inaccurate) jeers of her detractors. In fact, she relished confronting them; just watch some old clips of her taking questions (a term that apparently has quite a broad definition when it comes to the British Parliamentary tradition of the Prime Minister's "Question Time") from the opposition during her tenure as Prime Minister.

 

She confronted challenges, both at home and from abroad, with a courage and boldness unlike any British PM since Churchill. To be sure, Tony Blair displayed a confidence in his own policy agenda and was steadfast in his support for the War on Terror, including Operation Iraqi Freedom, amid vocal opposition from the British people, but his affable demeanor and disarming mien didn't convey quite the same resolve (or instill fear in his enemies) like the Iron Lady's steely disposition and forthright rhetoric. ("You turn if you want to. The lady's not for turning.") While a lot of us had high hopes for David Cameron, he has yet to emulate the qualities that made Margaret Thatcher such an effective and successful leader.

Not all hope is lost, though, and as the United Kingdom--and the party of Disraeli and Churchill--bids farewell to another of its finest leaders, let us not just remember her many achievements but also take note of her philosophy and contemplate how it might be applied to solve our present-day problems.

Republicans and Democrats Working Together...To Screw Over Taxpayers

It's no secret that the U.S. Postal Service is having problems. It's run a deficit every year since FY2007, largely because of the extremely generous pensions and other benefits it's obligated to pay former employees. Last month, the USPS announced that, beginning in August, Saturday delivery service would be discontinued as a cost-cutting measure...sort of. The USPS will still deliver packages, mail-order medicines, Priority Mail and Express Mail six days a week, and all forms of mail will continue to be delivered to Post Office boxes on Saturdays. Still, this is supposed to save the Post Office $2 billion a year.

Except now it won't. On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate approved a bill that included a provision that prevents the USPS from reducing delivery service. The House of Representatives followed suit on Thursday. Both measures passed with bipartisan support.

If President Obama signs the legislation into law, then it will be back to the drawing board for whoever is tasked with trying to make the USPS financially sound. In the meantime, I suggest they adopt a new logo:

 

(It has nothing to do with the Republican Party. If that's what you thought, then look up "white elephant".) 

Richard Nixon at 100

(AP Photo)

 

My apologies to our readers for not posting anything in a while. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been spending between 90 and 95% of my waking hours either studying for the bar exam or searching for a full-time job in the Obama economy. sportsfan is recovering from watching his beloved Fighting Irish get their asses handed to them in the BCS Championship, and the rest of our contributors have various excuses (some very compelling) for not wasting their time on blogging.

 

Still, I couldn't let such a significant occasion pass without acknowledging the man who would have been 100 years old today.

 

Perhaps no U.S. president has had a more mixed record than Richard Milhous Nixon. His achievements included re-opening relations with China, France and Egypt, ending U.S. involvement in Vietnam (and the draft), and lowering the federal voting age to 18. But then there were the scandals. Oh, the scandals.

 

Nixon fit the classic definition of a Greek tragic hero: a great man with a tragic character flaw that brought about his downfall. In his case, it was paranoia. That paranoia drove him to plant listening devices around the White House during his presidency and five members of his re-election campaign to break into the DNC headquarters at the Watergate complex on an apparently ham-handed investigatory mission. What the White House originally dismissed as a "third-rate burglary" ultimately led to an unprecedented (and, to date, unrepeated) event: our president's term cut short, not by death, but by his own resignation.

The Watergate scandal alone would have been enough to indelibly tarnish Nixon's legacy, but his administration also suffered the taint of corruption from the activities of his vice president, Spiro Agnew, who turned out to have been on the take since his days as Baltimore County Executive. in October of 1973, less than a year prior to Nixon's departure, Agnew pled nolo contendere (no contest) to a charge of federal income tax evasion and resigned his office.

Even as scandal brought down his second-in-command and other scandals threatened to prematurely end his presidency, Nixon never let up in his efforts to further American interests abroad. After making good on his promise to withdraw all U.S. troops from Vietnam, he met repeatedly with then-Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev, their last meeting taking place while former White House counsel and unabashed weasel John Dean was spinning tales as fast as he could to the Watergate Committee in a desperate attempt to save his own skin. Negotiations between the two leaders (known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, or SALT) led to the signing of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972.

Per Nixon's directive, the U.S. provided vital support to Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. He visited Cairo in June of 1974 and agreed to provide Egypt with nuclear technology. Not long after that, the House Judiciary Committee approved three articles of impeachment related to the Watergate cover-up. Before the House of Representatives could vote to impeach him, Nixon released transcripts of tape recordings that implicated him in the cover-up and announced his resignation.

Even after leaving office, he remained an authoritative voice on international affairs. President Clinton even reportedly sought his advice, and the New York Times (which seemed to never have a kind word for Nixon when he was alive) acknowledged, "The former President was always strongest writing about foreign policy." He continued to visit foreign countries and meet with world leaders, and he wrote prolifically. (His memoir RN was okay, but if you really want to get a handle on the man's world view and/or mental processes, then Six Crises and The Real War are both worth a read, and I've read good things about Beyond Peace.)

I can remember learning of his death in 1994. I was in first grade; as I left school, I stood under the flagpole gazing at Old Glory. It's my earliest memory of seeing a flag flown at half-mast.

One day not long after that, while rooting through my parents’ closet looking for a box of monies (you know, like every kid does at one point or another), I found a shoebox full of political memorabilia. My father and grandmother had collected it over the years. There were buttons from every presidential campaign from 1900 to 1972, many of them bearing Nixon’s name. It turns out the '68 campaign was the first one my father had been involved in. He told me how he and his best friend David would stand out in front of my grandmother’s house, near the road, with a big NIXON sign, and passing motorists would honk or smile or shout at them (Every once in a while, someone would stick his head out the window and shout, “Vote for George!”—i.e., George Wallace, the Alabama governor and defender of segregation who ran for president in '68 on a states’ rights platform.) Nixon, of course, won the 1968 election but narrowly lost Texas. We still have the issue of the Star-Telegram from the morning after Election Day with the headline “NIXON IS ELECTED PRESIDENT.”

Dad wasn't the only active Nixon supporter in my lineage. Years before my folks ever met, my other grandmother served as precinct chair for Nixon's re-election campaign in 1972. Like many Nixon supporters, she was bemused by the scandals that unfolded so soon after an incredible victory she and thousands of others had worked fervently to ensure.

"All I got out of it was a red face and a letter from John Wayne," she later told me. (The Duke had supported Nixon in all three of his presidential bids and apparently sent letters to those who worked on the campaign, thanking them for their work.)

As a child, I idolized Nixon. Not because of my family, but because of what I learned about the man through my own research. Certainly, Nixon did a lot of things to warrant admiration, even by those who never knew him personally. His ascendancy to the vice-presidency was one of the fastest in U.S. history; after returning home from World War II, during which he had served in the Navy, Nixon was elected to Congress in 1946. While his role in the Alger Hiss investigation arguably stood out as the most salient highlight of his time in the House of Representatives, he also helped write the Taft-Hartley Act (a.k.a. The Labor Management Relations Act of 1947), which passed over President Truman's veto. During his second term in the House, he was elected to the U.S. Senate. His support for civil rights and opposition to price controls, illegal immigration and public power, along with his erudite speeches warning of the threat of "global Communism" endeared him to many conservatives, and in 1952, the Republican National Convention nominated the 39-year-old freshman senator to run for vice president on the ticket with Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eisenhower and Nixon won in a landslide--twice--even carrying several states in the "solid South" (including Texas, Tennessee, Florida and Virginia). 

 

As vice president, Nixon honed his already keen foreign policy credentials, touring dozens of countries and chairing National Security Council meetings in the president's absence. On a trip to Moscow in 1959, he challenged Khrushchev during their infamous "kitchen debate," bluntly telling the Communist leader, "You don't know everything." 

 

Nixon held the distinction of losing the closest presidential election in U.S. history and winning a presidential election by the biggest landslide in U.S. history. His successful 1968 campaign, waged eight years after a devastatingly close loss to JFK and six years after losing his bid for governor of California, remains one of the great political comebacks of all time. He's the only person to be twice elected vice president and twice elected president of the United States.

My appreciation of his work wasn't ideological, either. Domestically, Nixon could not be called a conservative, not in any sense of the word. He expanded the size of the federal government, signing into law legislation that created, inter alia, the EPA, EEOC, OSHA, CBO and FHLMC (better known as "Freddie Mac"). As part of his "New Federalism" agenda, he proposed a new welfare program that would have guaranteed a minimum payment to all needy American households, regardless of work ethic. He also put in place wage and price controls and took the U.S. off the gold standard. He cut some taxes but raised others, including the capital-gains rate. His administration commenced affirmative action, though arguably at a time when institutional racism was far more widespread in the U.S. than it is today. The federal revenue-sharing program, under which the federal government shares its tax revnues with local governments, also began under Nixon, so every time you see/hear some worthless politician wailing about how spending cuts will mean fewer teachers/police officers/firemen, they're probably lying, but their mendacity is facilitated by one of President Nixon's policies.

His policy mistakes aside, Nixon was a brilliant and hardworking man who made some bad choices. Nothing he is known to have done, however, is/was bad enough to justify ignoring all of his good deeds in damnatio memoriae. Count me as a fan who believes his accomplishments were far greater than his transgressions.

To some, Nixon will always be a villain, but he was certainly a hell of a lot better president than the one we have now.

Hang in there, Tony.

Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, during a Supreme Court
group portrait in Washington on October 8, 2010. (Associated Press)

Of all the concerns about what four more years of President Obama will mean for the United States, perhaps the single most disturbing prospect is an opportunity to shift the balance of the Supreme Court.

Despite this president's consternation, the judiciary is a coequal branch of government, and it has long provided a crucial check on overreach by the other two branches, especially the current executive. Among the current Court's unanimous rebukes of the Obama administration's positions are its decisions in:

• United States v. Jones, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that the attachment of a GPS (Global–Positioning–System) tracking device to a suspected drug dealter's vehicle, and the use of that device to monitor the vehicle's movements on public streets, was a "search" within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment;
• Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church & School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses of the First Amendment barred employment discrimination suits brought on behalf of ministers against their churches; and 
• Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, where it held, contrary to the administration's argument, that government-induced flooding that is temporary in duration gains no automatic exemption from Takings Clause inspection. 

The administration has enjoyed some victories before the high court, to be sure, most notably in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, where a five-justice majority upheld the constitutionality of the president's signature health care reform law, with one exception: seven of the nine justices agreed that the federal government couldn't threaten States with the loss of theirexisting Medicaid funding if they decline to comply with the law's Medicaid expansion. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who many expected to be the "swing" vote that would decide the case, instead sided with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito in a scathing dissent from the core ruling.

The cases in which Justice Kennedy finds himself in the minority are becoming more and more infrequent. Last term, he voted in the majority 93% of the time, more often than any other justice. Of the 42 cases in which the justices split, Kennedy voted with the majority in all but five--again, more often than any other justice.

Because of his pivotal role in so many decisions, the thought of a Democratic president--especially one as hyper-partisan as Obama--appointing Kennedy's succesor is troubling to say the least. Judicial appointments are arguably one of the president's most significant powers; he can stock another branch of government with whomever he wants, restrained only by the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate. President Obama has already made two Supreme Court appointments, but Justices Sotomayor and Kagan replaced like-minded liberals, so there was no significant change in the ideological composition of the Court. In this respect, their appointments weren't a loss for conservatives so much as a missed opportunity. The same could be said if Obama gets to appoint a successor to Justice Ginsburg or Justice Breyer.

If one of the Court's more conservative members should die or retire, however, then this president will have an opportunity to shift the ideological balance of the high court, possibly for decades to come. There's little danger of Chief Justice Roberts or Justices Alito and Thomas stepping down anytime soon, and Antonin Scalia is unlikely to leave with a Democrat in the White House. That leaves Justice Anthony Kennedy, notorious for playing his cards close to the vest.

Although appointed by President Reagan, Kennedy has not been a reliably conservative vote on the Supreme Court. He disappointed the Right on cases involving eminent domain, states' rights, the death penalty and the right of enemy combatants to petition for a writ of habeas corpus. His voting record more closely aligns him with William H. Rehnquist than any of his other erstwhile colleagues. His opinions reflect a comprehensive approach to interpreting the Constitution, going so far as to draw on international law and recent changes in American law and traditions. 

Ideologically, Kennedy is probably best described as a moderate conservative. Some have slapped him with the "libertarian" label. Here's something by David Boaz, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute:

Justice Kennedy seems to be very concerned with liberty. He often sides with conservatives on economic issues (which are actually never mentioned by Time) and campaign speech, and with liberals on civil liberties, gay rights, and school prayer. Pretty inconsistent, huh?

Or then again, maybe Justice Kennedy has a basically libertarian view of the world and the Constitution. The word “libertarian” never appears in the article. Perhaps it should.

And it’s not like the idea of Justice Kennedy’s libertarianism is a deep, dark secret. The writers might have consulted Helen Knowles’s book The Tie Goes to Freedom: Justice Anthony M. Kennedy on Liberty. Or Frank Colucci’s book Justice Kennedy’s Jurisprudence: The Full and Necessary Meaning of Liberty. Or Randy Barnett’s Cato Supreme Court Review article on the Texas case, “Justice Kennedy’s Libertarian Revolution.”

I’m not saying that Justice Kennedy is a down-the-line, Nozick-reading, Cato Institute libertarian. He did join the Court’s statist majority in the medical marijuana case Raich v. Gonzales. And he infuriated libertarians by joining the majority in striking down state term limits and upholding state eminent domain. But the books and article cited above, and the Institute for Justice’s 1997 rating of Supreme Court justices, do point to a strong libertarian streak in Kennedy’s jurisprudence.

Kennedy's background certainly doesn't contradict this assessment. As a lawyer in California, he worked closely with then-Governor Ronald Reagan, including on Proposition 1, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that would have limited state taxing and spending powers. (Voters rejected it in 1973.) It was Reagan who recommended to then-President Ford that he appoint Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. 

However he might be categorized, Kennedy has provided critical votes in decisions that struck down government overreach. Had someone in the mold of Sonia Sotomayor or Elena Kagan been on the Court in his stead, dozens of cases likely would have been decided differently. Our jurisprudence on many constitutional issues, involving everything from civil liberties to the commerce clause to substantive due process, would be very different.

It's possible that Kennedy adamantly wants a Republican president to choose his successor and has no desire to give up his seat while Obama is president. It's also possible that he might do the Rehnquist thing and stay on until he's ten toes up. Whatever the case, here’s hoping he sticks it out for at least four more years.

Another Policy Debate We Should Be Having

It's being reported that Adam Lanza, the gunman who killed his mother Friday morning at her Connecticut home before driving to an elementary school and gunning down another 26 people, including twenty children, ended his rampage by taking his own life.

Thank God.

Suicide is an ugly thing, but it was a fitting end to this incomprehensible monster. First, because it is, by its nature, a very cowardly act. Second, because no one else had to be the one to end Lanza's life.

Taking a life, even when it’s totally justified and necessary to save others, can be a nerve-racking experience, so I’m glad that no one was put in the position of having to take Lanza out. For all we know, he wanted to be brought down in a hail of gunfire. 

Even if Lanza had not died by his own hand, it's good that the survivors and the families and friends of the people he murdered will not have to endure his continued existence, as the surviving victims of other mass shootings (e.g., those perpetrated by James Holmes in Aurora and Maj. Nidal Hasan at Fort Hood) must.

Think about what it would have been like for the bereaved families of those Lanza killed, knowing that the man who visited this unimaginable horror upon them still walked the earth, living, breathing, while they laid their dead to rest.

Had Lanza lived to be prosecuted, he would not have faced the death penalty. Connecticut abolished capital punishment earlier this year. (Oddly enough, the law, passed by a Democrat-controlled state legislature and signed into law by Gov. Dannel Malloy (D), did not apply to the sentences of the eleven inmates currently on death row in the state.)

I'm not one of those death-penalty proponents who believe that deterrence is the only justification for capital punishment. There are some criminals so dangerous that life imprisonment alone is inadequate to eliminate the threat they pose to society. (One good example is the case of Gary Tison, an Arizona man who was sentenced to life in prison for killing a guard but managed to escape with the help of his family and later murdered six others before dying of exposure in the Arizona desert.)

Suppose Lanza were still alive. Suppose he was tried for and convicted of murdering everyone he had killed. Even if he spent the rest of his life in prison, the length of his incarceration wouldn't come close to the sum total of all the years he took off the lives of his victims. (The same, of course, could be said if he were sentenced to death and executed, but at least then he would have been subject to something comparable to the heinous acts he committed--having his life ended prematurely, against his will.)

The Sandy Hook massacre has, predictably, evoked calls for government action to prevent future mass shootings or at least reconsider our gun laws. But Connecticut already has some of the strictest gun-control laws of the U.S., and they didn't do a damn thing to prevent the most deadly shooting at a grade school in our country's history. What's more, the firearms Lanza used apparently belonged to his mother Nancy, who by all accounts was a responsible gun owner. Should we forbid the purchase or ownership of deadly weapons by anyone with a potentially dangerous relative? 

The efficacy of gun-control laws is debatable, as are the deterrent effects of the death penalty. I for one am willing to discuss both. Never mind the issue of whether it’s appropriate to make earnest policy arguments in the wake of such an atrocity; the debate has already begun. Those who abstain from policy discussions so as not to be seen as politicizing a tragedy risk not having their voices heard.

The late Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in his concurring opinion in the 1927 case of Whitney v. California, "If there be time to expose through discussion the falsehood and fallacies, to avert the evil by the processes of education, [then] the remedy to be applied is more speech, not enforced silence." If you see or hear someone making a false or fallacious statement in furtherance of what you regard as bad policy, then don't silence yourself out of some obsolete sense of decency. As another right-wing genius once said, "Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, and moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."

Politifact F---s Up, Again

This pretty much says it all:

Pretty much. I would only add that PolitiFact has a history of faux journalism, characterized by sloppy work, specious analysis and selective fact-checking. Only once since the site first named its "lie of the year" has the label been bestowed on an actual lie (last year, when they appropriately dubbed the Democrats' talking point that congressional Republicans voted to "end Medicare" the lie of the year).

In 2009, "death panels" received the non-honor, but of course, that was not a statement, and therefore cannot technically be a lie. The following year, PolitiFact claimed that calling Obamacare a "government takeover of health care" was not only a lie but deserved the 2010 "Lie of the Year" aphorism. Their explanation relied heavily on a very narrow logical framework:  

 

"'Government takeover' conjures a European approach where the government owns the hospitals and the doctors are public employees," Politifact creator/editor Bill Adair and deputy editor Angie Drobnic Holan wrote. "But the law Congress passed, parts of which have already gone into effect, relies largely on the free market."

So, according to PolitiFact, because Obama and the Democrats weren't technically nationalizing the American health-care industry, calling Obamacare "a government takeover" was 100% false. (Throughout the year, the web site gave different versions of the claim a "Pants on Fire" rating, which means that the assertion is not only false but "ridiculous".)

Now, once again, PolitiFact has failed to help "find the truth in politics," its stated mission. Perhaps most disgraceful is that the statement it dubbed the 2012 "Lie of the Year" wasn't made, at least not the way PolitiFact analyzed it.

As Gutfeld mentioned, this year's dubious distinction went to Mitt Romney's statement that Barack Obama "sold Chrysler to Italians who are going to build Jeeps in China" at the cost of American jobs. Back in October, Politifact posted about the claim and ruled it a "Pants on Fire!" falsehood. The problem? The ad in which the claim was uttered didn't say that the Italian manufacturers who bought Chrysler were going to build Jeeps in China "at the cost of American jobs;" it didn't even imply as much. PolitiFact added that last part. Without it, the statement is not only accurate but true. As Bloomberg News reported, "Fiat SpA (F), majority owner of Chrysler Group LLC, plans to return Jeep output to China and may eventually make all of its models in that country, according to the head of both automakers’ operations in the region." (emphasis added)

So it sounds like, even if the Romney campaign had claimed that American jobs would be lost as a result of the production of Jeeps in China, it would have had some justification for doing so. Not according to PolitiFact, who called the ad "brazenly false."

Maybe they just don't know the meaning of the word "false". Or "brazenly". Or "fact". Somebody should get Angie Drobnic Holan a dictionary for Christmas

Tragedy, Unadulterated

 

(REUTERS/Adrees Latif) 

Let's start by acknowledging a painful reality: There's no way to make sense of what happened this morning in Newtown, Connecticut. It was a senseless act of violence that killed over two dozen people, most of them children, right before Christmas. Even if we’re able to ascertain the shooter’s motive, there’s no justification for his actions.

I tried to find the right words to appropriately address this mass shooting, but then I realized that it really doesn’t matter. Anything that is said about this could do no more than incrementally alleviate or compound the pain it’s caused.

I was reminded of another horrifying calamity at a schoolhouse. One that occurred close to home, but far back in time.

On March 18, 1937, the London School in New London, Texas exploded. 311 people were killed, mostly children. Never before and not since has a single occurrence at a U.S. school taken so many lives. 

Like Newtown, New London was (and still is) a quiet community nestled in rural arcadia. One could hardly have blamed its denizens from feeling insulated from the worst of the world. The London School Explosion, of course, was caused by a gas leak, not an act of human malice, but I don't suppose that made it any easier for the hundreds of bereft to take. 

If you crave something therapeutic, some words that might soothe or comfort your soul in the wake of this awful news, then I'm afraid I won't be of much use to you, but here’s a sentiment from one of my old college chums, via Facebook:

My heart is broken to hear about the horrible tragedy in Connecticut. How sad it is to think that even the most innocent children are not safe from the horrors of the world. As we pray for all those involved, please take a moment to cherish your own loved ones.

Do not feel guilty if your appreciation of getting to spend time with your loved ones this holiday season is in any way enhanced by what happened at Sandy Hook Elementary this morning. Any good that can come of this tragedy will be in affront to the unmitigated evil that perpetrated it.

Something to Think About on Taxes

After I started this post, I read Stephen F. Hayward's piece in the December 3 issue of National Review, in which he offered House Republicans an idea on how to deal with Taxmageddon: 

The House GOP should call the Obama-Krugman bluff--of letting us go over the fiscal cliff on January 1--by passing a sweeping, pro-growth tax reform package right now, and sending it to the Senate, coupled with an announcement that it is not going along with tax increases for anyone unless taxes increase for everyone. The House GOP could even just pass Simpson-Bowles, and rightly say they are passing the plan President Obama's own commission recommended.

I was about to suggest much the same thing, albeit in my customarily garrulous style. Since taxes still seem to be the focal point of the negotiations between President Obama and Speaker Boehner, the House Republican Conference might as well accept that they're not going to convince the president and enough Senate Democrats to agree to a reasonable substitute for what will happen under current law before year's end and pass something like the Tax Reform Act of 1986. Unless they already have something drafted, however, that might not be feasible, so they could just use the Simpson-Bowles plan, but tax filers who itemize should still be allowed to take the full deduction for charitable contributions.

The other part of Hayward's/my idea--that the House GOP should announce that it is not going along with tax increases for anyone unless taxes increase for everyone--may sound like a move wrought with peril. At first blush, it sounds like it would play into the Democratic meme that Republicans are holding middle-class tax cuts "hostage" to protect "the rich," but the GOP has a ready retort, courtesy of the same Democrats who are levelling that charge: "shared sacrifice".

The argument is simple: If President Obama and congressional Democrats are serious about everyone needing to "share" in the "sacrifices" that must be made to get our fiscal house in order, then any deal we reach to reduce the deficit ought to send the message that "we're in this together," and therefore it's only fair that either all wage earners pay higher income taxes, or nobody pays higher income taxes.

Clever Democrats (yes, there are a few) might counter that the "sacrifices" that middle- and lower-income households will have to make should not come in the form of taxes but rather in cuts to entitlements and social welfare programs, but if they made that argument, then Republicans could simply challenge them to name specific programs and services they're willing to cut and at least offer an estimate of how much less they're willing to spend. (I have long believed that Senate Democrats will not be able to provide enough votes for the kind of spending cuts and entitlement reforms that would entice a sufficient number of Republicans to agree to the kind of massive tax hike for which the White House is calling.) 

In this vein, Republicans can also usurp the "fairness" issue, which Democrats always seem eager to inject into any debate over tax policy. Obama has demanded that the top individual income tax rates go from 33% and 35% to 36% and 39.6%, respectively, and that all other tax rates should stay the same. Prior to EGTRRA (the first Bush tax cut), the top rate was 39.6% and the lowest income tax rate was 15%. That's an 8:3 ratio between the highest and lowest income tax rates. Since 2003, individual income has been subject to a six-bracket (one more than under Clinton) schedule with a top rate of 35% and a bottom rate of 10%, a 7:2 (or 3.5 to 1) ratio. In other words, the current federal income tax is actually more progressive than it was under Clinton. Obama wants a six-bracket schedule with a top rate of 39.6% and a bottom rate of 10%, the most sharply graduated rate schedule in a generation. Not only should this be troubling to anyone who understands bracket creep, ubt I think most middle- and lower-income Americans would agree that it's not "fair" to lump a household making $300,000 or $400,000 a year into the same tax bracket as Donald Trump and Bill Gates (unless it's a flat tax, which Democrats have long eschewed). 

There's another dynamic at work here: The debate over the best way to effect a tax increase--whether to do it by raising tax rates or by limiting/eliminating tax credits and deductions--is fueled in part by the prospective impact of any such change in current tax law on future efforts to reform the tax code. Arch-conservative Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) recently said that he "would rather see the rates go up than do it the other way because it gives us a greater chance to reform the tax code and broaden the base in the future."

Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform who I think has some pledge or something maybe I don't know, had previously explained why he didn't like the concept of "raising revenues" through "closing loopholes," as House Republicans offered to do in their initial proposal to avert the "fiscal cliff". As he told Neil Cavuto:  

"They’re not talking about a few deductions and credits. They’re talking about a trillion dollars’ worth of deductions and credits; that’s what -- that's what the other team wants. If you do that [then] you’ve just killed tax reform for a generation. Why? How do you ever get the rates down if you don’t have the deductions and credits? What Obama’s hoping to do is raise taxes, spend the money, kill tax reform for individuals dead all at the same time."

It's something every Republican--in fact, every member of Congress who cares about the future of this country--ought to consider before voting, or even pledging to vote, for any bill designed to raise taxes, whatever the method. "Tax reform," as I and I think most other fiscally-astute Americans think of it, means cleaning up the tax code by lowering income tax rates and reducing and/or eliminating credits and deductions. If there aren't enough credits or deductions to reduce/eliminate, then this endeavor simply becomes a tax cut.

With this in mind, Taxmageddon is starting to look like an awfully appealing option. If they haven't already, then congressional Republicans ought to start hammering out an income tax reform bill along the lines of what Messrs. Simpson and Bowles called for. Post-Taxmaggedon, they'll be able to sell it as a middle-class tax cut that extracts more revenue from wealthy Americans. If the Democrats don't have a comparable counter-offer ready, then they'll be boxed in: oppose the GOP bill and keep taxes high on middle- and lower-income Americans, or sign on to it and effectively concede defeat on the tax policy argument.

What a great way to start Obama's second term.