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29
Dec 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Matt Welch attended Vaclav Havel’s state funeral and provides a fascinating look in his recent post:

Such was Václav Havel’s genre-straddling life and thoroughgoing conception of freedom that it seemed as natural as tartar sauce on fried cheese to bookend a portentous, Dvo?ák-haunted National Requiem Mass in Central Europe’s oldest Gothic cathedral with a loose-limbed, hash-scented rock and roll celebration at the Czech Republic’s most storied music venue, all while the non-VIPs on the streets of Prague (and their counterparts outside the capital) lent the most dignity of all to the three-day National Mourning by creating ad-hoc candlelit shrines in whatever patches of cobblestone reminded them of the man who made them most proud to be Czechs.

It was a remarkable memorial, one that–like Havel himself–could not have happened in any other city or country. Yet the celebration offered enough bread crumbs for non-Czechs to stumble upon the promise of forgotten political alchemies lurking just outside our daily view. I was there to pay my respects; here are some observations and pictures.

You could not go anywhere in Prague last week without hearing Havel’s hippiesh Velvet Revolution epigram, “Truth and love must prevail over lies and hatred.” Most foreigners tend to focus on the “truth” part of that equation, since Havel wrote and spoke so memorably about how the simple act of “living in truth“–i.e., calling things by their proper names, refusing to go along with the rituals of coercion, staying true to your authentic sense of self–inevitably expands the zone of freedom and puts authoritarians on the defensive.

Read the whole piece here.

In the January 2012 Vanity Fair, Todd Purdum has an interesting look at America’s development into a national-security state:

The private papers of the late George F. Kennan, Cold War architect and diplomat extraordinaire, reveal his anguish over the way his famous 1947 warning about Soviet expansionism helped transform the America he loved into one he no longer recognized: a national-security state. A half-century after a similarly historic warning—President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speech about the dangers of a powerful “military-industrial complex”—Todd S. Purdum shows how completely Kennan’s and Eisenhower’s worst fears have been realized, warping almost every aspect of society, deflecting attention from urgent problems, and splitting the country into two classes.

The full article (which is fairly long) is worth a read. A PubliusNM reader provided this article along with an interesting speech by John Quincy Adams on U.S. Foreign Policy:

 

And now, friends and countrymen, if the wise and learned philosophers of the elder world, the first observers of nutation and aberration, the discoverers of maddening ether and invisible planets, the inventors of Congreve rockets and Shrapnel shells, should find their hearts disposed to enquire what has America done for the benefit of mankind?

 

Let our answer be this: America, with the same voice which spoke herself into existence as a nation, proclaimed to mankind the inextinguishable rights of human nature, and the only lawful foundations of government. America, in the assembly of nations, since her admission among them, has invariably, though often fruitlessly, held forth to them the hand of honest friendship, of equal freedom, of generous reciprocity.

 

She has uniformly spoken among them, though often to heedless and often to disdainful ears, the language of equal liberty, of equal justice, and of equal rights.

 

She has, in the lapse of nearly half a century, without a single exception, respected the independence of other nations while asserting and maintaining her own.

 

She has abstained from interference in the concerns of others, even when conflict has been for principles to which she clings, as to the last vital drop that visits the heart.

 

She has seen that probably for centuries to come, all the contests of that Aceldama the European world, will be contests of inveterate power, and emerging right.

 

Wherever the standard of freedom and Independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her heart, her benedictions and her prayers be.

 

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.

 

She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.

 

She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.

 

She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example.

 

She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

 

The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force….

 

She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit….

 

[America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace. This has been her Declaration: this has been, as far as her necessary intercourse with the rest of mankind would permit, her practice.

 

When John Quincy Adams served as U. S. Secretary of State, he delivered this speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on July 4, 1821, in celebration of American Independence Day.

Which brings us to current national politics. The big news this week in the 2012 presidential race is Gary Johnson’s switch to the Libertarian Party:

Former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson said on Wednesday he is dropping out of the Republican presidential race and is seeking the Libertarian Party nomination for president.

“We are getting fed up with the two-party system,” Johnson said at a news conference at the state capitol in Santa Fe, where he was joined by some 50 supporters and by Libertarian Party chairman Mark Hinkle.

Democrats, Johnson said, have backed off on social issues such as gay rights and Republicans “are no longer stewards of the pocketbook.”

Johnson said that he’d been “snubbed by the Republican Party” and ignored by the national media.

As a long-shot candidate for president, Johnson had proposed cutting government spending, reducing taxes and legalizing marijuana.

As governor of New Mexico from 1995 to 2003, Johnson vetoed so many bills — some 750 — that he was later nicknamed “Governor Veto.”

Hinkle did not endorse Johnson, but the Libertarian Party released a statement welcoming Johnson to the party and commending him for “stopping the expansion of Big Government” when he was governor.

Full article here, and Reason has the text of Gary’s announcement email here. In other campaign news, CNN has a new poll out with some interesting results:

A new survey of people likely to attend Iowa’s Republican caucuses indicates that the former House speaker’s support in the Hawkeye State is plunging. And according to a CNN/Time/ORC International Poll, one-time long shot candidate Rick Santorum has more than tripled his support since the beginning of the month.

Twenty-five percent of people questioned say if the caucuses were held today, they’d most likely back Mitt Romney, with 22% saying they’d support Rep. Ron Paul of Texas. Romney’s three point margin is within the poll’s sampling error.

The poll’s Wednesday release comes six days before Iowa’s January 3 caucuses, which kickoff the presidential primary and caucus calendar. The Iowa caucuses are followed one week later by the New Hampshire primary.

A new CNN/Time/ORC poll of likely primary voters in New Hampshire indicates that Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, remains the front-runner, far ahead of his rivals for the GOP nomination.

More here, and more on recent polling from Reason here. Reason’s morning links have some additional campaign updates:

  • Onetime Michele Bachmann campaign leader Kent Sorenson is now supportingRon Paul.
  • Mitt Romney still ”uneasy with off-the-cuff remarks, unnatural at chitchat, and spare with his emotions.”
  • Rick Santorum is surging in Iowa; Newt Gingrich is plummeting.

The daily video here at PubliusNM has often been courtesy of ReasonTV and the folks there have now created a few playlists including one of their top five most popular videos of 2011 and the top five best interviews of 2011. Visit the ReasonTV YouTube Playlist page for more top five lists, and for today we’ll provide the second most popular video of 2011, a look at Peter Schiff’s trip to Occupy Wall Street representing the 1% (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

Heath Haussamen has a list of NM’s top 10 political stories of 2011, starting with Bingaman’s retirement announcement and including looks at Roundhouse dynamics, judicial scandal, and the Richardson investigation, among others. Read the full list here.

For additional NM updates, check out various recent posts on Errors of Enchantment.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, Gary Johnson, NM Politics
19
Dec 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Two deaths yesterday are generating some interesting news. First, Vaclav Havel, heroic anti-communist dissident in Czechoslovakia. The Economist has an “in memoriam” column that is a good read:

Havel practised what he preached. He himself was denied higher education, as the scion of a famous bourgeois family. Others might have curried favour by writing plays praising the regime. But he worked as a stage-hand, and studied drama in his spare time. As Czechoslovak communist rule eased in the 1960s, his plays were performed, and gained public acclaim. By 1968, he was a well-known and successful playwright.

For him and the rest of the country’s cultural elite, the Soviet-led invasion posed a sharp problem: emigrate, collaborate, or face the consequences. Philosophers became stokers, and poets street-sweepers. Havel took a job in a brewery (which he wrote about in his play “Audience“). In the mid 1970s he moved into active opposition to the regime, defending the underground rock group Plastic People of the Universe and, in 1977, signing the dissident declaration “Charter 77″.

The late 1970s were tough years for the captive nations of the Soviet empire. Havel was jailed from 1979 to 1984, during which he wrote the letters to his wife, Olga, that later became part of perhaps his best-known book. He also spent many days under arrest and interrogation. Out of jail, his every move, visitor, letter, phone call and utterance were subject to scrutiny by the StB, the secret-police servants of Czechoslovakia’s communist masters.

* * *

Havel was the de-facto leader of the Czechoslovak dissident movement, but it was not a role he enjoyed. He hated the intrusive phone calls from newspapers and radio stations, often retreating to his country cottage for some peace and quiet. He kept his appointments list on a small scrap of folded paper, sometimes entrusted to his beloved friend Zden?k Urbánek, whose stately good manners and quavering English could deter even the pushiest television crews (many would turn up unannounced, determined to interview the “opposition leader” on the spot, regardless of convenience or even agreement). His habitual and even plaintive refrain was that he was a playwright, not a politician. His only desire was for a political system in which he could do the only job that he felt truly qualified to do.

The second death came late yesterday of Kim Jong-Il, dictator in North Korea. Reason’s Matt Welch has a good related post, complete with disturbing video out of Korea:

One of modern history’s greatest monsters, the grand crab of the Hermit Kingdom, is dead of heart failure at 69 after a 17-year reign of terror.

As in most totalitarian monarchies, the death leaves a potential succession crisis in its wake. Son Kim Jong Un, the foreign-educated, maybe-in-his-late-20s annointed successor and known Michael Jordan fan, is said to lack a certain gravitas, and, more importantly, the full confidence of the military. Whatever happens next to the pulverized North Korean populace, it could hardly be worse.

Reason on Kim Jong-Il here. Of special note is John Gorenfeld’sgreat 2005 look into the dictator’s work as a drama critic and librettist, one of many bizarre cult-of-personality traits that made Jong-Il the unlikely breakout star of Team America World Police. As Nick Gillespie wrote in 2004, “North Korea remains a site of cosmically black humor, too real to be funny, a human nightmare incapable of being fully processed.”

Ilya Somin’s posts on Havel and Kim are worth reading as well.

In GOP primary news, Ron Paul has officially taken the lead in polls in Iowa:

A survey by left-leaning Public Policy Polling (PPP) finds the Texas congressman now leading for the GOP nomination in Iowa, where voters cast the first ballots of the 2012 presidential contest on Jan. 3.

Paul today also announced on his website that he raised more than $4 million since Friday in his latest “money bomb,” aimed at helping him in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — which all hold early caucuses or primaries.

Paul’s rise comes as Newt Gingrich fades. The former House speaker has dropped nine percentage points nationally since the beginning of the month, according to the Gallup daily tracking poll.

Note that the Public Policy Polling survey is just one poll, and polls are a snapshot in time.

In Iowa, Gingrich is leading Paul by an average of one point, according to several recent surveys compiled by RealClearPolitics. Mitt Romney is third in the Hawkeye State, according to the RCP data.

Read the full article here. Speaking of poll numbers, Obama continues to decline in popularity:

A majority of adults say President Barack Obama does not deserve a second term but are evenly divided on whether he will win re-election next year, says a new Associated Press-GfK poll that highlights some of the campaign obstacles he faces.

Although the public would prefer Obama be voted out of office, he fares relatively well in potential matchups with Republicans Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich. Another bit of good news for the Democrat: For the first time since spring, more adults said the economy got better in the past month than said it got worse.

The president’s approval rating on unemployment shifted upward – from 40 percent in October to 45 percent in the latest poll – as the jobless rate fell to 8.6 percent last month, its lowest level since March 2009.

But Obama’s approval rating on his handling of the economy overall remains stagnant: 39 percent approve and 60 percent disapprove.

Heading into the 2012 campaign, the poll shows the challenges facing Obama as he tries to win a second term among a public that does not support his steering of the economy, the most dominant issue for Americans, or his reforms to health care, one of his signature accomplishments. Yet voters appear to be grappling with whether to replace him with Romney or Gingrich.

For the first time, the poll found that a majority of adults, 52 percent, said Obama should be voted out of office while 43 percent said he deserves a second term. The numbers represent a clear reversal since last May, when 53 percent said Obama should be re-elected while 43 percent said he didn’t deserve four more years.

Full article here. On a related note, the Republican Policy Committee explained last week just exactly how Obama is making it worse:

 

George Will again writes about economic liberty this week, as only he can:

In 1927, seven years before the board game was created, Washington state decided to play monopoly. It gave a private interest the exclusive right to operate a ferry on 55-mile-long Lake Chelan in the northern Cascade Mountains. It apparently will defend this folly until Judgment Day, when state officials will get an earful from the Creator who — we have Jefferson’s word for this — endowed everyone, including Jim and Cliff Courtney, with the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Courtney brothers’ happiness would be enlarged if they could operate a competing ferry. But 84 years ago Washington state asserted a principle much favored by all of America’s governments:It may parcel out certain economic liberties sparingly and only to those who can prove to government that their exercise of their liberty will satisfy some government-concocted criteria.

That principle lacks constitutional warrant and repudiates the nation’s foundational philosophy. Hence the national importance of the Courtney brothers’ litigation, which asks courts to correct judicial mistakes of 1873 and 1938.

Read the full column here and read about the Courtneys’ lawsuit here.

Today’s video is a tribute to Vaclav Havel, a look at the fall of communism and the Velvet Revolution in 1989 (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

New Mexico Watchdog has the story of the altercation between Reps. Stapleton and Espinoza:

During a break in Wednesday’s Legislative Education Study Committee, Rep. Sheryl Williams Stapleton (D-Albuquerque) angrily confronted Rep. Nora Espinoza (R-Roswell), shouting “Don’t mess with me” and accusing Espinoza of “carrying the Mexican’s water on the fourth floor,” referring to Gov. Susana Martinez.

Back on Oct. 28, KRQE-TV aired an investigative piece from Larry Barker that said Stapleton did not take leave from her job as an administrator at the Albuquerque Public Schools system and received pay while attending legislative sessions. (You can click here to see that story.)

I’m pissed,” Stapleton said as she confronted Espinoza during a lunch break at the committee meeting, “I’ve been waiting for you.” Espinoza got a few words in before Stapleton said, “You said I’m corrupt. Prove it!”

“I’ve been falsely and biasly accused,” Stapleton told reporters a few minutes later. “It was a biased story and my colleague added to it by saying I committed corruption.”

Stapleton said she believes Espinoza was set up by people in the governor’s office to criticize Stapleton because she has resisted many of the governor’s educational reform bills. “From what I’ve heard from the blogs across the state,” Stapleton said, “the fourth floor [where the governor's office is located] is behind it.”

When asked about the comment, “carrying the Mexican’s water,” and how some people could consider that offensive, Stapleton said, “If it is, I didn’t mean it to be inflammatory,” adding that she is part Spanish.

* * *

Update: Just got done talking to Espinoza, who said she was startled by Stapleton’s outburst.

“It caught me by surprise,” Espinoza told Capitol Report New Mexico. “I was shocked when she came and attacked me. She doesn’t feel that she did but … everyone there could see it, the loudness of her voice … That’s an ethics violation, first of all, being a legislator. That is wrong, that is totally wrong.”

Stapleton is part of the Democratic House leadership, holding the position of Majority Whip.

Espinoza said she was surprised because, “I never mentioned her [Stapleton] in my criticisms. My comments were aimed at Winston Brooks,” who is the APS superintendent who told Barker in his Channel 13 report that he was changing the school district’s policy about granting leave with pay to APS employees and administrators.

Full story here. Heath Haussamen has the latest on the Richardson federal grand jury investigation:

Two high-profile politicos with ties to Bill Richardsonapparently testified Tuesday before a federal grand jury investigating the former governor.

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

“A former deputy campaign manager with former Gov. Bill Richardson’s presidential campaign and an Albuquerque restaurateur and developer appeared before a federal grand jury looking into possible wrongdoing by the state’s former chief executive.

“But neither Amanda Cooper nor Jimmy Daskalos had anything to say as they entered and left the Pete V. Domenici federal courthouse Tuesday in Albuquerque.

“Cooper is the stepdaughter of U.S. Sen. Tom Udall, D-N.M., and worked as Richardson’s deputy campaign manager during his presidential run. Cooper also worked on Richardson’s 2006 re-election campaign for governor.

“Daskalos, who has owned Yanni’s, a prominent Albuquerque restaurant, with Richardson insider Nick Kapnison, was a fundraiser for the former governor.”

The Albuquerque Journal added that neither Cooper nor Daskalos would comment on the situation. Grand jury proceedings are secret.

Full article here.

For those who wonder about 2012 in NM, it is looking “safe” for Obama according to Heath Haussamen:

After surveying New Mexico voters recently, a left-leaning polling company says President Barack Obama’s re-election chances in the state look good.

Of course, we’re talking about the group Public Policy Polling, and I’ve already written about the controversy surrounding their work and this specific poll.

At any rate, PPP’s survey found the Democrat Obama leading all Republican candidates by wide margins. In two-person races, Ron Paul came the closest to challenging Obama, with 51 percent saying they would vote for Obama, 38 percent saying they would vote for Paul, and 12 percent being undecided.

However, add former N.M. Gov. Gary Johnson into the mix as a libertarian – Johnson is consideringabandoning his GOP bid for president to do just that – and things get even worse for Republicans. With the three candidates being Obama, Johnson, and Republican Newt Gingrich, for example, Obama won with 45 percent to Gingrich’s 28 percent and Johnson’s 20 percent. In a three-person race that included Republican Mitt Romney instead of Gingrich, Obama won with 44 percent to Romney’s 27 percent and Johnson’s 23 percent.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, NM Politics
12
Dec 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Event Alert: this one is online. Tomorrow, December 13, at 1 p.m. PST the Reagan Foundation is hosting a Lecture with Peter Hannaford to discuss his latest book, Reagan’s Roots. Go here to view the webcast live.

Atlas Shrugged Alert: rumor has it that some Red Box locations are now renting copies of Atlas Shrugged Part 1. Check here to see if you can reserve a copy at a location near you.

Big news from SCOTUS this morning as the Court announced it will review Arizona’s controversial immigration reform law, SB1070. We’ve previously covered that law here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. SCOTUSblog hosted an online symposium in July on SB1070 with input from numerous scholars. From SCOTUSblog:

Adding further to the historic rank of the Supreme Court’s current Term, the Justices on Monday took on the searing constitutional — and political — controversy over state power to strictly limit the way undocumented immigrants live their lives in the U.S.   Along with the politics-saturated but deeply consequential constitutional disputes over the new federal health care law and the role of federal courts in drawing up new election districts to protect minority voters’ rights, the Term that will run through late June is assured of being one of the Court’s most significant single years ever.  The federal government is involved in all three disputes, and its main adversary in each is the same: prominent Washington lawyer and former U.S. Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who is also battling the government in lower courts over same-sex marriage.  The marriage issue, though, has only the slimmest of chances of getting to the Court this Term in any form.

* * *

The Arizona case puts before eight of the Justices — former U.S. Solicitor General and now Justice Elena Kagan will not take part — that state’s highly controversial bill, known popularly as “S.B. 1070.”  That measure set a pattern among a number of states that have been growing increasingly impatient with what they consider to be the federal government’s lax enforcement of immigration controls, and the resulting harm that they believe illegal immigrants are doing to the quality of life for their citizens and legal residents.  The Arizona measure, and one in Alabama that goes even further, were passed by state legislatures with the specific intent of making life so difficult for undocumented aliens that they would choose to leave the state.  Other states are also passing similar measures.

Arizona’s governor, Janice Brewer, in taking the fate of S.B. 1070 on to the Supreme Court, is portraying the case as a major test of the sovereignty of the states to make their own social policies under traditional “police power” principles.  The federal government, which tried unsuccessfully to persuade the Court not to get involved in the case at this point, is treating the case as a test of whether states may adopt their own immigration policies that frustrate specific goals of federal policy.

With Justice Kagan not taking part, presumably because she had something to do with the issue in her former role in the Obama Administration Justice Department, there is the possibility that the eight participating Justices will wind up split 4-4 in the case.   That would have the effect of simply upholding a Ninth Circuit Court decision, but without opinion and without setting a nationwide precedent.  The practical effect of that would be that Arizona could not enforce four key provisions of S.B. 1070, blocked by both the Ninth Circuit and, earlier, by a federal District judge in Arizona.

Big news indeed. Speaking of the administration, last week we noted Eric Holder’s testimony on the Fast and Furious operation debacle, and WSJ’s Law Blog has a good roundup of coverage from that testimony here.

Also, Steve Chapman notes that Obama is no friend of religious freedom in a thought-provoking column:

But look far enough in this pile of chaff and you find some wheat. On two major issues cited by Perry, Obama has broken with precedent to curtail religious freedom in a way that should alarm staunch secularists (like myself) as well as the devout.

The first instance arose after passage of his health care overhaul, when the Department of Health and Human Services ordered that all insurance plans cover contraceptives and sterilization for women, with no co-payment. The mandate means many Americans would have to be complicit in something their faith forbids.

* * *

Even more extreme is its position on a dispute involving an evangelical Lutheran church and school in Michigan. The school had dismissed a teacher who taught both religious and non-religious classes, and she went to court alleging illegal discrimination.

Federal courts have generally barred such lawsuits, leery of getting tangled up in church doctrine and discipline. But an appeals court ruled in favor of the teacher, and Obama’s Justice Department took her side.

Not only that, it said churches and their schools should be treated no differently from other employers. Taken to its logical conclusion, that would mean the Catholic Church could be forced to admit women to the priesthood.

When the case was argued before the Supreme Court, conservative Justice Antonin Scalia marveled at the administration’s claim: “There, black on white in the text of the Constitution, are special protections for religion. And you say it makes no difference?” Exclaimed liberal Justice Elena Kagan, whom Obama appointed, “I too find that amazing.”

more

From the 2012 primary updates:

WSJ Law blog describes how Rick Perry stumbles, again: “[W]e bring you Perry’s latest, a couple of missteps made during a sit-down with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register. In one, he blanked on the name of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. In the other, he referred to the Supreme Court as consisting of ‘eight unelected and frankly unaccountable judges.’”

Reason presents a Ron Paul roundup with some interesting tidbits and videos.

George Will explains how a third-party Ron Paul run leads to a second term for Obama:

When recently asked if he might mount an independent candidacy, he said: “I’m not thinking about it because, look, I’m not doing badly right now. … So we concentrate only on one thing: Keep moving up in the polls, and see how things come out in a month or two.”

He is in the top tier in Iowa, and would alienate Republican voters if he indicated an interest in bolting the party next autumn. Nationally, his ceiling is low, but his floor is solid: His supporters are inclined to accept no substitutes because no other candidate espouses anything like his high octane blend of libertarianism and isolationism.

Furthermore, he is now nationally known (he campaigned for the 2008 Republican nomination, and was the Libertarian Party’s 1988 presidential candidate), has a large base of small donors, and his intense supporters probably could get his name on most states’ ballots. He is not seeking re-election to his House seat, so what has he got to lose?

Well, his candidacy might guarantee Barack Obama’s re-election, and this might hurt the career of his son Rand, the freshman senator from Kentucky. Other than that, however, Ron Paul may think what his ideology implies – that Obama is only marginally more mistaken than Paul’s Republican rivals, who do not wake up each day angry about the 1913 Federal Reserve Act.

Video of the Day

Today’s video comes from PA Congressman Mike Kelly and his recent House Floor rant, definitely worth five minutes of your time (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

Check out Steve Terrell’s column in Saturday’s online Santa Fe New Mexican, in which he asks whether the Tea Party activists and the Occupy activists have received unequal treatment by the Santa Fe government:

Santa Fe Republicans indisputably are in the minority. This often leads to grumbling about their treatment by the Democratic majority. Like all political beefs, from any side, sometimes the concerns are overblown. Sometimes not.

Last week a couple of local GOP activists raised a valid question about basic fairness. Jim and Sheryl Bohlander emailed that they don’t think it’s fair that they had to pay hundreds of dollars to use the Santa Fe Plaza for tea-party events while members of the Occupy Santa Fe movement camp out at the city’s Railyard Park for free.

“As two of the principal organizers of the 2009 and 2010 tea-party rallies on the Plaza, we can confirm that we had to secure a permit to use the Plaza, $400 for each event, plus we had to secure at liability insurance policy for both events, well over $300 each time,” the Bohlanders said in their email. “The permit fee for 2011 was $455. Additionally, we had to state specifically the time frame of the events.”

I realize some readers will be thinking, “What the heck? They’re Republicans. They can afford it.”

But setting political prejudices aside — if that’s ever possible — one can ask if it’s fair to make one group of citizens pay to use a city park for a political gathering while another group gets to use a park for free?

Read the whole column here and let us know what you think in the comments.

While we wait for the full results of the grand jury investigations into former Gov. Richardson’s conduct, the state’s most prominent current embarrassment is busy amassing additional assets, this time in Cape Cod, Mass.:

The couple secured a $675,000 mortgage from the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank and purchased the 2,278-square-foot house from Gerald and Stephanie Coughlan of Wellesley. The Coughlans paid $1.6 million for the property on Nickerson Neck in 2004.

Most of the property’s value — $1.5 million — is in the 36,200-square-foot pond-front lot, according to Chatham assessing records. The assessed value of the three-bedroom house with 4.5 bathrooms was $297,900.

“Gov. and Mrs. Richardson will use this home as a vacation home,” Richardson spokesman Caitlin Wakefield emailed Friday. “Their primary residence will continue to be Santa Fe, N.M. Mrs. Richardson has longstanding ties in the Cape Cod area.”

More here. Continuing the New Mexicans in the national news theme, Murphygate has now made its way into the Los Angeles Times:

It wasn’t a good day for New Mexico’s judiciary when a district judge in Las Cruces, the state’s second-largest city, was indicted last spring on bribery charges for allegedly soliciting campaign contributions in return for political favors.

Then things went from bad to worse. The special prosecutor handling the case demanded that the chief justice of the state Supreme Court recuse himself for allegedly having made prejudicial comments and rulings.

And then came the release of a secretly recorded audiotape in which the indicted judge, Michael Murphy, could be heard casually spouting barnyard profanities, racial epithets and homosexual slurs.

The scandal has reverberated statewide, with some seeing it as evidence of rampant judicial corruption. Murphy’s allies portray it as little more than an indiscretion by someone caught talking out of school, and view the criminal charges as a broad interpretation of the bribery statute.

Full article here.

 

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Categories: 2012 Election, Constitutional Rights, Economy, Gary Johnson, Health Care, NM Politics
07
Dec 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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Cartoon courtesy of Reason’s Friday Funnies.

National

As we head into voting season, interesting news out of New York:

It wasn’t voter fraud that caused 60,000 ballots to be tossed from the 2010 election in New York – it was poorly designed voting machines.

According to a study from the New York University’s Brennan School for Justice, the new optical voting system confused voters so much that they ended up casting their votes for two candidates, or “overvoting.”

The study indicates that most of the problems “occurred far more frequently in areas with higher populations of low-income residents, people of color and immigrants.”

More here. Speaking of voting, another prominent conservative comes out against Newt:

Before Republicans put Newt Gingrich at the top of their party, they should consider what happened the last time he led it.

In the mid-1990s, Gingrich was the de facto head of the Republican Party. He helped lead it to victory in the congressional elections of 1994, which brought about real accomplishments such as welfare reform. But once he attained power, both his popularity and that of his party started to plummet. In the aftermath of his leadership, a Republican was able to take the presidency only by pointedly distancing himself from Gingrich.

Conservatives who dislike George W. Bush’s compassionate conservatism have Gingrich to thank for it. After Gingrich lost the budget battles with President Bill Clinton, it took 15 years for any politician to take up the cause of limited-government conservatism that he had discredited.

Although Gingrich isn’t solely responsible for the Republican policy defeats of those years, his erratic behavior, lack of discipline and self-absorption had a lot to do with them. He explained that one reason the federal government shut down in 1995 was that he was angry that Clinton had snubbed him during an international flight. The Clinton White House then released pictures of the two men gabbing on the plane. Later negotiations didn’t go well, with Gingrich saying, “I melt when I’m around him.”

Read Ramesh Ponnuru’s full indictment of Gingrich here. And what of the presumed Democratic nominee? David Harsani’s latest column is, as usual, great:

In Teddy Roosevelt’s era, President Barack Obama explained to the nation this week, “some people thought massive inequality and exploitation was just the price of progress….But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you want from whoever you can.”

And he’s right. Even today there are people who believe they should have free license to take whatever they want from whomever they can. They’re called Democrats.

Yet the president, uniter of a fractured nation, the mighty slayer of infinite straw men, claims that some Americans “rightly” suppose that the economy is rigged against their best interests in a nation awash in breathtaking greed, massive inequality and exploitation. Or I should say, he’s trying to convince us that it’s the case.

The middle-class struggle to find a decent life is the “defining issue of our time,” the president went on. And nothing says middle-class triumph like more regulation, unionism, cronyism and endless spending. Hey, Dwight Eisenhower (a Republican!) built the interstate highway system, for goodness’ sake. Ergo, we must support a bailout package for public-sector unions—you know, for the middle class.

Read the full column here. More on Obama’s most recent nonsense from Peter Suderman:

During yesterday’s big-hug-to-Teddy-Roosevelt speech on the economy, President Obama declared that “Some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent—1 percent. That is the height of unfairness.” Billionaires who pay just a single percent of their ginormous incomes in taxes? Can you believe it?!?!

Better question: Should you?

Glenn Kessler, who writes The Washington Post‘s Fact Checker column,decided to look into the source of the data point about billionaire tax rates. Turns out there isn’t one. Here’s Kessler:

This is a striking statistic. But the only evidence that the White House could offer for it was a TV clip of a conversation on Bloomberg TV, in which correspondent Gigi Stone made this assertion during a discussion about the tax strategies that the very wealthy use to avoid paying taxes.  The TV clip was promoted by the left-leaning website Think Progress.

Stone quoted from a Bloomberg News article last month that reported on such tax strategies, which mostly involve complicated ways to defer paying capital gains taxes. But the article never made the one-percent claim. It also noted that the IRS had gotten more hostile to such transactions in recent years.

An administration official conceded the White House had no actual data to back up the president’s assertion, but argued that other reports showed that some of the wealthy pay little in taxes. [bold added]

To put it in terms Obama might use: There are some who say that that billionaires pay tax rates as low as 1 percent, but they are just making shit up don’t have have any evidence for the claim.

Today’s Political Diary also looked at Obama’s love for TR:

So the White House has decided that President Obama’s re-election model is Teddy Roosevelt, Bull Moose version, circa 1910. In his opening salvo yesterday, Mr. Obama blew into Osawatomie, Kan., where TR delivered his famous anti-bank “New Nationalism” speech, and gave it a 2012 gloss. This Progressive Era retread has liberal pundits doing cartwheels, but the speech was remarkable for its lack of substance to match the severe tone.

According to Mr. Obama’s larger economic narrative, “the basic bargain that made this country great has eroded,” in particular “an America where hard work paid off, and responsibility was rewarded, and anyone could make it if they tried.” The speech leaned heavily on growing income inequality, stagnant middle-class wages and the supposed GOP philosophy of “a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can.” He didn’t precisely date when this decline began but repeatedly mentioned that it had been building “over the last few decades.” Mr. Obama said that one root of the problem is that the economy has grown more efficient and productive. Two culprits he mentioned were “ATMs and the Internet.”

Given these structural and irreversible changes, and that the other political party only supports “a prosperity that’s enjoyed by fewer and fewer of our citizens,” Mr. Obama might have mentioned solutions commensurate to the moment. Instead he offered this: Making education “a national mission”; more federal “investments” in infrastructure, scientific research and high-tech manufacturing; “pushing” Wall Street to delay home foreclosures; and raising top marginal tax rates so “the wealthiest Americans go to the same tax rate they were paying when Bill Clinton was president.” Mr. Obama concluded, “That’s what will transform our economy.”

In other words, the Osawatomie address was just another reworking of Mr. Obama’s familiar plea to preserve the government we have, without any major reforms. Federal and state spending on public schools remains at historic highs, while budgets for core government responsibilities like roads and bridges are being crowded out by the rapid growth of transfers and entitlements. What the government calls “payments to individuals” have climbed to 66% of the fisc, up from 28% in 1965. And how does returning to the Clinton tax rates fix the inequality that in Mr. Obama’s own telling has been building for decades?

Mr. Obama’s closing peroration saluted a company called Marvin Windows and Doors in Warroad, Minn., that has declined to lay off workers or close plants while its competitors did. This may be laudable, and it might be a good business strategy, or not, but is Marvin Windows and Doors a useful or realistic economic case study in the 21st century? Mr. Obama thinks it is. “That’s how America was built. That’s why we’re the greatest nation on earth.”

Jacob Sullum has a related column chronicling Obama’s reliance on the straw man, check it out here.

Political Diary also noted Obama’s most recent difficulties in getting judges confirmed:

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for the Obama administration on judicial nominations. First they faced off with the American Bar Association over the unusually high number of nominees that were judged unqualified even by the liberal-leaning group. And yesterday, the president’s D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals nominee, Caitlin Halligan, failed to get cloture in the Senate, 54-45.

The event drew an indignant response from President Obama, who said the nomination “fell victim to the Republican pattern of obstruction” and that the vote “dramatically lowers the bar” used to justify a filibuster, which had required “extraordinary circumstances.”

That’s a bit rich coming from Mr. Obama, who, as Ethics and Public Policy Center’s Ed Whelan noted, voted against cloture for Bush Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as well as appellate court nominees Janice Rogers Brown, William Pryor and Priscilla Owen. In 2007, Sen. Obama was one of 35 Democrats who voted against the nomination of Leslie Southwick, and when Judge Southwick was confirmed he pledged to “fight any other Bush nominations that threaten the very basis of our freedom and democracy.”

Starting with Miguel Estrada in 2003, Senate Democrats made sport of filibustering President Bush’s judicial nominees, a tactic that had never been used as a first-line tool against a president.

The seat to which Ms. Halligan is nominated was previously benchmarked for Peter Keisler, the impeccably credentialed Bush nominee whose nomination stalled in committee for three years and never got a vote. In his statement yesterday, President Obama said Republicans were blocking nominees for seats deemed “judicial emergencies.” Except, oh yeah, the D.C. Circuit isn’t one of them. In 2006, Sen. Pat Leahy, who was the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, was sanguine. “Republicans used to argue that its workload did not justify an 11th or 12th judge,” he said. “Well, its workload is lower than it was and Mr. Keisler is nominated to fill the 11th seat.”

Republicans take issue with Ms. Halligan’s views on abortion, affirmative action and gun rights, as well as her position on the detention of enemy combatants. A 2004 report by Association of the Bar of the City of New York’s Committee on Federal Courts that was signed by Ms. Halligan and other members challenged the Bush administration’s position on the detention of enemy combatants and argued for their trial in civilian courts. Ms. Halligan distanced herself from the report during her confirmation hearing.

Ms. Halligan is only the second Obama nominee to get shot down, following Goodwin Liu’s 52-43 no-cloture defeat in May. We’re no great fans of filibusters around here, but what did Democrats expect?

For those who don’t know, today is the anniversary of the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, which leads to today’s video. From the description of the video, an interview with author Craig Shirley:

The bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese on December 7, 1941 killed over 2,400 Americans and led directly to the entry of the United States into World War II.

In his powerful, thickly researched new book, December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World, Craig Shirley chronicles the day-by-day shifts in American culture, politics, and national identity through that horrible month. Before December, Shirley tells Reason’s Nick Gillespie, a solid majority opposed entry into World War II and the “eminently respectable” America First movement was poised to help select the next president of the United States. Non-interventionism was so universal that Franklin Roosevelt himself had campaigned for his third term as president on a promise to keep “American boys” out of European wars.

By the start of 1942, says Shirley, the long tradition of isolationism was over, never to be seen again. The nation that had rejected the League of Nations after World War I helped create the United Nations and America quickly became not simply a global economic, political, and military power but the dominant player on the globe.

(click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

If you haven’t yet, check out Francisco d’Anconia’s latest post noting Gary King’s Latest Embarrassment.

For those who think questioning the methods used in the war on drugs is inappropriate, take a look at this local story:

Norman Davis was sitting on the couch in his Taos County home, feeling a bit under the weather, on a summer day five years ago when he “heard this helicopter overhead.”

“It was loud. Very loud,” Davis, 76, said in a recent interview. “And I looked out the window and I see these guys hovering over me.”

It was a drug raid by New Mexico State Police, with the assistance of the National Guard.

At least six armed officers, some with semiautomatic weapons, took part in the bust. Five or more vehicles from different law enforcement agencies converged on Davis’ property as the chopper hovered overhead.

A judge refused to throw out evidence in the drug possession case but did find “merit to the claim that police swooped in as if they were in a state of war, searching for weapons or terrorist activity,” according to a recent New Mexico Court of Appeals opinion.

And what did the raid yield?

“I had 14 marijuana plants,” Davis said. “For personal use. It just seems like an enormous waste of resources for a plant that poses no harm or threat.”

Davis was 72 at the time. He said he smokes marijuana to help him with ailments that include osteoarthritis and is in the process of applying for entry into the state’s Medical Cannabis Program.

Davis grudgingly gave his consent for officers to search his property during the 2006 raid, figuring he didn’t have a choice, he said. After the plants were found inside his greenhouse, Davis was charged with possession.

But Davis now appears to have the law on his side.

The Court of Appeals recently overturned a District Court ruling that denied Davis’ motion to throw out evidence police found that day, agreeing that his consent to the search was “the product of duress and coercion or acquiescence.”

When police asked permission to search his place, Davis “was surrounded by numerous uniformed, armed law enforcement officers and several law enforcement vehicles while a helicopter hovered overhead,” the appellate court stated in its October opinion.

District Judge John Paternoster of Taos had found the search “just barely permissible,” according to the Court of Appeals.

The state Attorney General’s Office has taken the case to state Supreme Court, which has agreed to hear it.

That’s OK with Davis.

“I think it’s a good thing,” he said. “My lawyer thought this was an important constitutional question of what police can and can’t do.”

Hunt for ‘plantations’

State Police were conducting “an operation to identify marijuana ‘plantations’ in Taos County.” The operation included two National Guard choppers and two ground teams of officers.

Davis, in his interview with the Journal, said such high-profile searches are nothing new around Carson, the small community where he lives. “They’ve been making a habit out of doing it for 20 years,” he said. “It’s been random.”

A spotter in one of the helicopters observed ” ‘vegetation’ in the greenhouse and ‘plants at the back of (Davis’) house,’ ” according to the appeals court narrative. Armed officers then formed a perimeter around the property.

One approached Davis and told him “the helicopter (was) looking for marijuana plants and they believe they’ve located some at your residence.”

The officer asked for permission to search. According to a police recording, when Davis asked what would happen if he said no, the officer replied, ” ‘Well, then we’ll secure the residence. That’s up to you.’ ” Davis gave permission.

He subsequently said he wasn’t thrilled with the idea and said, “I don’t know if I should do this; I don’t know if it is in my best interest.”

Davis again asked the officer what would happen if he refused and the officer said the police “would go forth and try to execute a warrant through the District Attorney’s Office.” Davis “ultimately signed the consent form.”

‘Swarmed’ by police

Davis’ public defender lawyers argued “that the helicopter surveillance of his property violated federal and state constitutions and that his consent was not voluntarily given.”

The appeals court noted the “obtrusive” presence of officers, vehicles and a helicopter and that the officers were “heavily armed, carrying both their service handguns as well as AR-15 semiautomatic weapons.”

The appeals court ruling said that when the officer told Davis it would take only about 30 minutes to get a search warrant, Davis had reason to believe that “his refusal to consent was futile.”

The Attorney General’s Office said it won’t comment on a pending case, and State Police Chief Robert Shilling said in an email, “I’d rather not comment on operational issues and the justification of resources on any given case.”

“The case centers on the issue of consent and Fourth Amendment issue(s),” Shilling said.

But Davis believes the case also is about where police chose to focus their efforts.

“It’s like a big, stupid, mistake,” he said. “Hundreds and billions of dollars are being spent to put people in jail for growing a harmless weed.”

Asked whether he still grows pot, Davis said, “I don’t know if I should answer that.”

[— This article appeared on page A1 of the Albuquerque Journal]

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Categories: 2012 Election, Drug War, Economy, NM Politics
23
Nov 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Interesting development from the notoriously liberal (see first item) ABA:

The American Bar Association has secretly declared a significant number of President Obama’s potential judicial nominees “not qualified,” slowing White House efforts to fill vacant judgeships — and nearly all of the prospects given poor ratings were women or members of a minority group, according to interviews.

The White House has chosen not to nominate any person the bar association deemed unqualified, so their identities and negative ratings have not been made public. But the association’s judicial vetting committee has opposed 14 of the roughly 185 potential nominees the administration asked it to evaluate, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The number of Obama prospects deemed “not qualified” already exceeds the total number opposed by the group during the eight-year administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush; the rejection rate is more than three and a half times as high as it was under either of the previous two presidencies, documents and interviews show.

Full story from the New York Times here, and related story from WSJ Law Blog here.

On the campaign front, Newt now heads up the GOP pack according to Quinnipiac:

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich more than doubles his share of the Republican presidential vote to lead the presidential pack with 26 percent and in a head-to-head matchup tops former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney 49 – 39 percent, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll released today. But Romney is tied with President Barack Obama.

Former pizza magnate Herman Cain drops from the top spot with 30 percent in a November 2 national survey by the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University to third place with 14 percent today. Romney goes from 23 percent November 2 to 22 percent.

Gingrich, who topped out at 10 percent 20 days ago, zooms to the top as he convinces 48 percent of GOP voters that among all GOP contenders he has the knowledge and experience necessary to be president, compared to Romney’s 22 percent. Gingrich leads Romney 34 – 24 percent when GOP voters are asked who is a strong leader, a key quality Americans historically seek in a president. On foreign policy, he is seen as better by GOP voters 46 – 16 percent. But Gingrich trails Romney 32 – 9 percent when voters are asked who has “a strong moral character.”

More here. If you haven’t yet, maybe now is the time to take Reason’s matchmaker quiz to find your perfect GOP presidential candidate.

David Harsanyi takes on the supercommittee today:

Our government has the time to worry about school lunch menus in Boise, Idaho, but the Senate hasn’t found the time to pass a budget in Washington, D.C., in nearly three years. H.L. Mencken famously wrote that every decent man is ashamed of his government. This one gives you little choice.

Gridlock is ordinarily the most constructive and moral form of government, but with entitlement programs on autopilot self-destruct, we’re in trouble. So Americans turned their weary eyes toward a dream team, a supercommittee, a 12-member panel of our brightest lights, charged with identifying a measly $1.2 trillion in deficit savings over 10 years. Save us.

Alas, for Democrats, it boiled down to the most important issue facing the nation—maybe ever: “revenue enhancement.”

Politico reported that during the supercommittee hearing, both sides agreed to produce “wish lists” to offer some notion of where negotiations might go. Republicans—believe them or not—claimed to want to save $700 billion by block granting Medicaid, another $400 billion in spending cuts, $1.4 trillion in cuts to some mandatory health care programs, and about $150 billion in cuts to the federal workforce.

Democrats, on the other hand, reportedly wanted to pass a new $447 billion spending bill (perhaps forgetting that this was a wish list for a deficit reduction committee) and $1 trillion in tax hikes on those 1-percenters. Since Washington spent $1 trillion more than it took in just last year, this would provide nearly no purpose over 10 years—well, other than a political one.

Read the full column here.

Judge Andrew Napolitano is a great tv host and fascinating speaker. Today’s video is his interview with Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

A couple of good stories up at NMPolitics.net. First, NM ranks low yet again:

In 2010, Attorney General Gary King’s office recovered 53 cents for every $1 it spent to fight Medicaid fraud, the Albuquerque Journal is reporting.

Only Alaska had a worse record than New Mexico, according to the newspaper. Leading the pack was Missouri, which recovered more than $31 for each $1 spent. The national average was a recovery of $10 for every $1 spent.

Full story here. In other news, apparently 19 folks who have voted in NM may be foreign nationals:

A report the secretary of state sent to lawmakers Thursday claims that her office has found 105 registered voters who may not be U.S. citizens, and 19 of them have cast ballots in New Mexico elections.

That is on top of the two foreign nationals who recently came into Duran’s office to self-report that they were illegally registered to vote.

That’s fewer than the 117 potential non-citizen registrants – including 37 voters – that Secretary of State Dianna Duran claimed during a legislative hearing in March to have identified. Duran’s office is referring information about the 105 registrants who may be foreign nationals to the attorney general.

You can read the secretary of state’s report here.

Full story here.

As always, don’t forget to check out Errors of Enchantment regularly for some good updates.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, National Politics, NM Politics
17
Nov 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Steve Chapman today makes The Case Against Newt Gingrich:

Republican voters’ esteem for Newt Gingrich has been rising fast. At this rate it might someday equal, though not surpass, his regard for himself. Gingrich is not a person with an ego. He’s an ego with a person.

Just listen to his explanation of why it took him a while to catch on with voters: “Because I am much like Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, I’m such an unconventional political figure that you really need to design a unique campaign that fits the way I operate and what I’m trying to do.”

Other GOP candidates sound like they are merely campaigning for office. Gingrich, however, hurls verbal thunderbolts like Zeus, as the lights flicker and the earth shakes. Hopelessly in love with the sound of his own voice, he exhibits a stern, overbearing self-assurance that gives his pronouncements weight even when he is uttering nonsense.

See also Shikha Dalmia’s op-ed: Keep Newt undercover. Meanwhile, Ann Coulter makes the case FOR Mitt Romney:

There may be better ways to stop Obamacare than Romney, but, unfortunately, they’re not available right now. (And, by the way, where were you conservative purists when Republicans were nominating Waterboarding-Is-Torture-Jerry-Falwell-Is-an-Agent-of-Intolerance-My-Good-Friend-Teddy-Kennedy-Amnesty-for-Illegals John McCain-Feingold for president?)

Among Romney’s positives is the fact that he has a demonstrated ability to trick liberals into voting for him. He was elected governor of Massachusetts — one of the most liberal states in the union — by appealing to Democrats, independents and suburban women.

* * *

Instead of sitting on our thumbs, wishing Ronald Reagan were around, or chasing the latest mechanical rabbit flashed by the media, conservatives ought to start rallying around Romney as the only Republican who has a shot at beating Obama. We’ll attack him when he’s president.

It’s fun to be a purist, but let’s put that on hold until Obama and his abominable health care plan are gone, please.

Read her full column here.

Former Supreme Court Justice weighed in on “conservative” Judge Sutton’s decision upholding the constitutionality of ObamaCare:

When Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals became the first Republican-appointed judge to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens took note. The opinion, Justice Stevens says, may be good on the law, but not so good for Judge Sutton’s own career.

* * *

[T]oday, with every Republican presidential candidate opposed to the health law, Judge Sutton’s June opinion may have killed his chances of elevation to the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens said. The irony, he added, is that Judge Sutton probably believes the health law is bad policy, even if it isn’t unconstitutional.

More here.

So, in case you were still wondering, the Congressional Budget Office director made it clear in testimony earlier this week that the so-called stimulus spending is indeed bad for long term growth:

Testifying before the Senate Budget Committee today, Congressional Budget Office director Douglas Elmendorf reiterated his initial assessment of President Obama’s $800 billion “stimulus” package — that while it may boost the country’s GDP in the short-term, in the long-term, the effect of such spending is a net negative on GDP growth.

Needless to say, Elmendorf’s assessment would also apply to the president’s most recent jobsstimulus package, which would spend $450 billion over the next year, making it larger — in annual terms — than the first stimulus package, which spent $800 billion over two years.

Go here for the video of testimony. Speaking of economics, John Mackey had a great op-ed yesterday about economic freedom:

Is the United States exceptional? Of course we are! Two hundred years ago we were one of the poorest countries in the world. We accounted for less than 1% of the world’s total GDP. Today our GDP is 23% of the world’s total and more than twice as large as the No. 2 country’s, China.

America became the wealthiest country because for most of our history we have followed the basic principles of economic freedom: property rights, freedom to trade internationally, minimal governmental regulation of business, sound money, relatively low taxes, the rule of law, entrepreneurship, freedom to fail, and voluntary exchange.

The success of economic freedom in increasing human prosperity, extending our life spans and improving the quality of our lives in countless ways is the most extraordinary global story of the past 200 years. Gross domestic product per capita has increased by a factor of 1,000% across the world and almost 2,000% in the U.S. during these last two centuries. In 1800, 85% of everyone alive lived on less than $1 per day (in 2000 dollars). Today only 17% do. If current long-term trend lines of economic growth continue, we will see abject poverty almost completely eradicated in the 21st century. Business is not a zero-sum game struggling over a fixed pie. Instead it grows and makes the total pie larger, creating value for all of its major stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, investors and communities.

So why is our economy barely growing and unemployment stuck at over 9%? I believe the answer is very simple: Economic freedom is declining in the U.S.

Check out Mackey’s interview with Reason on health care here. Which leads to our video of the day, involving Mackey’s long interview with Reason (click here to view the long version at Reason and here for the excerpt at YouTube):

New Mexico

If you haven’t yet, go check out Francisco d’Anconia’s latest post on Heinrich and Udall. Speaking of NM politicians that are a disgrace, check out the latest on Bill Richardson:

A federal grand jury is investigating potential “financial irregularities” related to former Gov. Bill Richardson’sunsuccessful 2008 presidential campaign, the Albuquerque Journal is reporting.

From today’s Journal article:

“The grand jury has been hearing testimony in secret since at least September, and a number of witnesses have been granted immunity, according to defense attorneys familiar with the general outlines of the investigation.

“… the Journal has learned that one area under scrutiny is whether money from campaign supporters was used to settle a threatened lawsuit against Richardson in the fall of 2007 by a woman who formerly worked in state government.

“Several people familiar with some aspects of the investigation have mentioned similarities to pending criminal charges against former presidential candidate John Edwards on allegations that his campaign supporters paid to shield the candidate from a public scandal.

“The legal issue is whether the money constituted a de facto campaign contribution made in furtherance of the candidate’s bid for federal office.”

According to the Journal, the investigation “involves several other matters tied together by potential election law violations, including possible coordination between so-called ‘soft money’ from political action committees and the campaign.”

More from Heath Haussamen here.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, Health Care, NM Politics
14
Nov 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Big news of the day: ObamaCare is now officially headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. From WSJ Law Blog:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday did what it had long been expected to do, and agreed to hear arguably the most high-profile challenge to the law. Click here for Brent Kendall’s article in the WSJ; here for coverage from Scotusblog.

In a short written order, the high court agreed to hear a challenge that originated in Florida, brought by a group of Republican governors and attorneys general from 26 states, the National Federation of Independent Business and two individual plaintiffs.

The case raises several issues, but chief among them is this: Did Congress exceed its constitutional powers when it required most individuals to carry health insurance or pay a penalty?

The court is expected to hear oral arguments in March, with a decision expected by the end of June. That timeline means the court will rule on President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement during the thick of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The SCOTUSBlog link above is also worth checking out by those interested in more details of the anticipated argument schedule given the unprecedented (in modern times) setting for 5 1/2 hours of argument. Tim Cavanaugh has an interesting related post up looking at Obama’s 2008 stance against a health care mandate:

Here’s something President Obama might have forgotten: In 2008, when then-Sen. Obama was fighting then-Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination, he got the inside track by opposing a federal mandate requiring you and every other American to purchase health insurance.

The individual mandate, which is so totalitarian and unconstitutional that even the thoroughly unlibertarian voters of Ohio rejected it last week, went on to become the unpopular centerpiece of Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the putative reform of the health care system widely known as “Obamacare.”

Definitely check out the full piece.

National Public Radio has an interesting three-part series on influential individual that started today with a look at Ayn Rand, as noted by David Boaz of Cato Institute:

They looked at Ayn Rand this morning, and there are reports that they will cover F. A. Hayek tomorrow and John Maynard Keynes Wednesday. The segment quotes Rand from a televised interview with Mike Wallace (which you can view at the link) and then comments on the prevalence of her ideas today:

“Both parties today are for socialism, in effect — for controls. And there is no party, there are no voices, to offer an actual pro-capitalist, laissez-faire, economic freedom and individualism,” she said. “That is what this country needs today.”

If Rand were alive today, she might be pleased to see that, more and more, Americans do have that choice. And her ideas are alive and well-represented in the U.S. Capitol.

If by “well-represented,” you mean “often heard in protest as Congress passes Wall Street bailouts, corporate takeovers, health care takeovers, and trillion-dollar spending bills,” then yes.

NPR’s commenters weren’t very happy to hear Ayn Rand discussed. I especially appreciated this one:

The “objectivity” of ruthless plunderers from a displaced Russian bourgoise who refused to acknowledge the punishment of her class was brought on by its crimes against the people. Objective thinking people accept responsibility for their actions and the consequences that follow.

Marxism may be dead in Russia, but not in the NPR listener community! No doubt this commenter is knitting the names of American bourgeoisie who will one day be sent to gulags.

For anyone interested in Nixon’s post-Presidency 1975 grand jury testimony about Watergate, good news:

A heads up to our legal history buffs: The government’s Nixon Presidential Library just  published online – as in five minutes ago – his 1975 grand jury testimony about Watergate.

“This is Nixon unplugged,” historian Stanley Kutler, a principal figure in the lawsuit that pried open the records,told the Associated Press.

Still, he said, “I have no illusions. Richard Nixon knew how to dodge questions with the best of them. I am sure that he danced, skipped, around a number of things.”

The interview took place near Nixon’s California home over two days. It was the first time an ex-president had testified before a grand jury.

A very interesting infographic is now available online, allowing us to “visualize[] the words used in the 2011-2012 Republican Primary debates.” Here’s one example screen shot:

Which brings us to the video of the day. While he’s not a presidential candidate, Senator Marco Rubio is one of those frequently mentioned as a potential Vice President to bolster the GOP ticket. He spoke last week at the annual Federalist Society National Lawyers Convention (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

Interesting column last week by Michael Swickard calling for an end to Daylight Savings Time:

It is time we change the way time is changed twice a year in most of the country. Specifically, it is time to throw out Daylight Savings Time (DST) and throw it out for good. I wonder if we can get someone to sponsor a congressional bill to make this change. Most Americans would get along fine with year-round regular time.

While government does not give up power over the people willingly, we can make a case that we should change what government is doing now. The government nannies and minders say they have our best interests in mind with DST. They say that during the summer months there is more time in the evening to recreate with DST, so we should use that time rather than lose it. Still, when DST starts it is mid March, and it is November when the time changes back. There is a lot of time that is not summer.

Read the entire piece here. Also interesting is Heath Haussamen’s column calling for lawmakers to receive paychecks:

I authored a commentary in September arguing that we need to pay our state legislators; newspaper articles published this weekend may indicate that such an idea is gaining momentum.

Steven Robert Allen, executive director of Common Cause New Mexico, and State Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas, D-Albuquerque, were quoted as saying they support paying lawmakers in an article published by the Las Cruces Sun-News.

In addition, the Albuquerque Journal published an editorial saying voters should “be given the opportunity to decide if they want a professional, paid Legislature.”

In my September commentary, I argued that our unpaid legislators “can’t keep up with the governor or the pace of life in the 21st Century no matter how hard they work.”

Suggesting that our lawmakers are currently “unpaid” is pretty disengenuous, but it is true that they do not actually receive a salary (just massive per diem allotments that are often abused and a pension system that should not be ignored).

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Categories: 2012 Election, Constitutional Rights, Economy, Health Care, NM Politics
28
Oct 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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National

Charges against John Edwards for campaign finance law violations have survived motions to dismiss:

There have been doubts about the strength of the government’s case against former presidential candidate John Edwards.

But as an initial matter, the charges withstood five motions to dismiss filed by Edwards’ attorneys. The AP has the storyhere.

U.S. District Court Judge Catherine C. Eagles in Greensboro denied the motions Thursday, paving the way for Edwards to stand trial in January for allegedly using campaign funds to cover up an affair he had during his unsuccessful bid for the White House and then submitting false campaign-finance reports to cover his tracks. He has pleaded not guilty.

An interesting case, and we’ll continue to keep an eye on it. Some good information in Political Diary today and yesterday:

Barack Obama may have dreamed of being the liberal Ronald Reagan, a transformative president who could build a consensus for larger government just as Reagan did for smaller government. And after enacting ObamaCare and driving deficit spending to levels not seen since World War II, Mr. Obama might seem to be well on his way. But the president’s western campaign swing this week demonstrated the enduring influence of the politics of Reagan.

Speaking to students at the University of Colorado’s Denver campus, Mr. Obama claimed that “the reason I’ve been hitting the road so much is because the folks I’m talking to in cities and small towns and communities all across America, they’re — let’s face it, they’re making a little more sense than the folks back in Washington.” It’s unclear how many of the youngsters in the audience grasped the absurdity of this statement, coming from an incumbent president who has pursued the most aggressive agenda in half a century to shift power to the “folks back in Washington” and away from the folks in other cities and towns. Adding to the farcical nature of the event, Mr. Obama was there to announce yet another expansion of a federal program — an increase in taxpayer subsidies of student loans.

Why does a politician who clearly doesn’t believe in a more limited role for Washington feel the need to sound as if he does? Because Ronald Reagan persuaded Americans that government is most often the cause of America’s problems, not the solution, and that the nonsense of bureaucratic Washington can’t compete with the common sense of free people operating in free markets. Mr. Obama’s remarks suggest that despite the leftist policy triumphs of his first two years in office, the Reagan political consensus endures.

* * *

Republican presidential hopeful Rick Perry must be onto something with his flat tax. Liberals wasted no time on Tuesday shooting arrows at the Texas governor’s proposal, labeling it a giant-sized tax cut for millionaires and billionaires that’s paid for with higher taxes on the middle class.

Obama administration spokesman Ben LaBolt said the flat tax “would shift a greater share of taxes away from large corporations and the wealthiest onto the backs of the middle class.” Mr. Obama’s team just can’t get away from the class warfare theme.

The Democratic National Committee was also on the warpath. It sent out an email claiming to “fact check” the Perry flat tax, which would offer taxpayers the choice of filing under the current system or paying a 20% rate. The DNC cites former Obama administration economist Jared Bernstein, who says “not only would [the plan] shift the tax burden from the rich to middle-class and poorer taxpayers, but it would also shift the burden of tax preparation away from the rich.” Apparently, tax fairness means everyone has to share equally in the burden of tax complexity. Now, there’s an argument that only a tax accountant could love.

The Perry campaign has spent much of the past few days swatting down these “fairness” attacks. A Perry spokesman tells me that “nearly every income category comes out ahead financially under the flat tax. We were very careful to construct this in a way that protects the middle class from higher taxes.” Because the system is optional, no American has to pay a higher tax if they don’t want to. And like Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan, Mr. Perry’s proposal eliminates the corporate welfare in the code that allows companies like GE to pay no tax.

Now the pressure is on Mr. Romney to devise a bold tax plan of his own. He’s put out a detailed economic proposal with 57 planks and has called for tax rate cuts and other reforms, but he hasn’t put forward a comprehensive plan to overhaul a tax system that now extracts more than $300 billion a year in compliance and enforcement costs. Conservatives are challenging Mr. Romney to adopt a sweeping tax rewrite. He may have to do that if he wants to win the nomination, because right now the Republicans are a flat tax party.

Former Reagan Economist William Niskanen passed away earlier this week:

All of us at the Cato Institute are saddened to announce that William A. Niskanen, distinguished senior economist and chairman emeritus of the Cato Institute, passed away today in Washington at 78.

Niskanen served 23 years as chairman of Cato’s board of directors, stepping down in 2008. Prior to joining Cato, he served as a member and acting chairman of President Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers.

“Bill Niskanen was a world-renowned economist and a passionate leader of the growing classical liberal movement around the globe,” said Cato founder and president Edward H. Crane. “More importantly, he was a man of unshakeable integrity. His influence on and importance to the Cato Institute cannot be overstated. His passing is a terrible loss to the Institute and to the nation.”

Niskanen had a long and prominent career as an economist, including tenures as director of economics at the Ford Motor Company, professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley and Los Angeles, assistant director of the federal Office of Management and Budget, a defense analyst at the Rand Corporation, the director of special studies in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and the director of the Program Analysis division at the Institute of Defense Analysis.

Born March 13, 1933 in Bend, Ore., Niskanen graduated from Bend High School,and received his B.A. and Ph.D in economics from Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively.

Many of Niskanen’s articles and essays are collected in two books, Policy Analysis and Public Choice and Reflections of a Political Economist: Selected Articles on Government Policies and Political Processes.

More from Cato here and here, from Reason here.

According to the Atlantic Wire, The Super Committee Is Doomed:

With less than a month to go before the deadline to produce a debt deal, it appears that the Congressional deficit-reduction committee is nowhere close to a deal. Even worse, neither side can even get their rank-and-file members to back the current proposals.

Both Democrats and Republican leaked details of their current proposals and nobody seems very happy. Speaker of the House John Boehner called the Democrats plan a “non-starter” because it hinges on tax increases, which he still refuses to accept. The GOP plan promises $600 million in new tax revenue, that it assumes will come from awesomely obvious economic growth, an idea the Dems scoff at.

Democrats aren’t thrilled with their party’s offer either. Rep. Bill Pascrell of New Jersey says it has “absolutely no chance of being the law of the land” and he sees no path to a deal before the November 23 deadline.

Politico also outlines the procedural hurdles that must be overcome before then. The House only has eight work days scheduled in November, plus the Congressional Budget Office would have to score any final bargain before it can be voted on and signed by the President. That’s a lot of work to do before Thanksgiving.

The only remaining hope is that the automatic triggers — $1.2 trillion in cuts, mostly to defense, that kick in immediately if no deal is reached — are still so distasteful that both sides will bite their tongues and agree to something. Boehner says it’s “time to get serious” and swears he’s committed to a deal, but we’ve heard all that before. A near total unwillingness to compromise (and a certain indifference to artificial deadlines) is the reason we got the super committee in the first place.

Meanwhile in campaign-land, Timothy Carney notes that Obama’s supposed ban on contributions from lobbyists isn’t so much in effect:

President Obama doesn’t take campaign contributions from lobbyists — unless you count the owners and CEOs of lobbying firms, corporate vice presidents for government relations, or managing directors for public policy.

“We don’t accept any money from special-interest groups or Washington lobbyists,” the Obama campaign bragged in a recent email touting the $70 million raised last quarter by the campaign and the Democratic National Committee. But if you comb through the actual filings with the Federal Elections Commission, you see how misleading this claim is.

Wealthy revolving-door banker Peter Orszag epitomizes everything Obama ran against. Orszag was Obama’s budget director until the 2010 elections at which point he cashed out to bailed-out megabank Citigroup. A Citi executive touted Orszag’s “key … government experience” and “his expertise in economic policy.” In other words, Orzag has monetized his public service and sold it to Citi, which, like all big banks, counts on favorable government policy for its profits.

Apparently feeling fairly plush after nine months at a Wall Street salary, Orszag cut a $35,800 checklast month to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that divides its funds between the official Obama campaign and the Democratic National Committee. To sum up: Orszag gained inside knowledge and connections on the taxpayer dime, put them to work for a big bank, then used his salary from this bailed-out bank to give the maximum contribution to the man who hired him in the White House.

Read the full column here.

Today’s video is a bit long, but quite entertaining. Peter Schiff, a member of the 1%, sought a conversation recently with the Occupy Wall Street folks (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

You should definitely check out Dan Foley’s latest contribution to NMPolitics.net arguing that The Occupy Wall Street Folks Need to Focus:

Let me start out by saying I agree with the Occupy Wall Street folks if they are against government bailouts. I also believe it is not the government’s role to pick winners and losers in businesses, so once again we are on common ground. But as I drive by the folks on the streets in Albuquerque and look at the signs the people are holding up around the country I am shocked to see their anger is pointed only at Wall Street and the business folks.

Why is it they are not equally as angry at the folks in Washington who got us to this point? Why aren’t they asking President Barack Obama to give back the money he received from the very industry that led us to this point? Why aren’t they angry that entities like Fannie and Freddie where giving big dollars to Democrats who were fighting the tough regulations being championed by President Bush and other Republicans?

How come they are not angry at people like Representative Barney Frank, who, while involved in a relationship with a high-ranking Fannie Mae executive, was fighting any increase in regulation of a GSE (government-sponsored enterprise)? The simple fact that President Bush tried, at least 17 times, to get Congress to strengthen the regulations governing these entities was answered by party-line votes from Democrats in Washington, but this seems to go unnoticed.

I will say the Republicans got this wrong as well. These entities didn’t need tougher regulations, they needed to be shut down, and the government should have left the mortgage business totally. The fact is the government was in the very business it would not allow the private sector to enter into. The bank regulators would never have allowed banks to loan money for the very types of loans the government felt the need to guarantee.

Also worth checking out Haussamen’s latest update on Judge Murphy, including an apology.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, National Politics, NM Politics
26
Oct 2011

Publius Daily Digest

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Local Event Alerts:

Nov. 8, 11am-1:30pm at UNM, “Conservatism and the U.S. Constitution: Antidote to Tyranny” more info here.

Nov. 10, 1pm, Presentation by Robert Bradley, Jr., on his book Edison to Enron more info here.

National

Walter Williams’ latest column is a great look at the Occupy Wall Street movement:

The Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are demanding “people before profits” — as if profit motivation were the source of mankind’s troubles — when it’s often the absence of profit motivation that’s the true villain.

First, let’s get both the definition and magnitude of profits out of the way. Profits represent the residual claim earned by entrepreneurs. They’re what are left after other production costs — such as wages, rent and interest — have been paid. Profits are the payment for risk taking, innovation and decision-making. As such, they are a cost of business just as are wages, rent and interest. If those payments are not made, labor, land and capital will not offer their services. Similarly, if profit is not paid, entrepreneurs won’t offer theirs. Historically, corporate profits range between 5 and 8 cents of each dollar, and wages range between 50 and 60 cents of each dollar.

Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is the role played by profits, namely that of forcing producers to cater to the wants and desires of the common man. When’s the last time we’ve heard widespread complaints about our clothing stores, supermarkets, computer stores or appliance stores? We are far likelier to hear people complaining about services they receive from the post office, motor vehicle and police departments, boards of education and other government agencies. The fundamental difference between the areas of general satisfaction and dissatisfaction is the pursuit of profits is present in one and not the other.

The pursuit of profits forces producers to be attentive to the will of their customers, simply because the customer of, say, a supermarket can fire it on the spot by taking his business elsewhere. If a state motor vehicle department or post office provides unsatisfactory services, it’s not so easy for dissatisfied customers to take action against it. If a private business had as many dissatisfied customers as our government schools have, it would have long ago been out of business.

Read the full column here. The Week has a great compilation of the Occupy Wall Street demographics, summarized here by Reason:

  • 64 percent of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement who are under the age of 35, according to a survey of 1,619 people that visited OccupyWallSt.org. The survey was conducted by Baruch College professor Hector R. Cordero-Guzman and business analyst Harrison Schultz.
  • 20 percent over the age of 45, according to the same survey
  • 26.7 percent who are enrolled in school
  • More than $75,000 annual salary that 13 percent of the survey-takers take home, according to Cordero-Guzman and Schultz.
  • More than $150,000 annual salary reported by nearly 2 percent of the survey-takers ($343,927 adjusted gross income needed to be in the “extolled and excoriated 1 percent of richest Americans”)
  • 15 percent of the demonstrators who are unemployed, according to a different survey, this one conducted by veteran pollster Douglas Schoen via in-person interviews with 198 people at Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park
  • 18 percent of demonstrators who call themselves “part-time employed/underemployed.”
  • 53 percent of demonstrators who say they have previously participated in a political movement, according to Schoen’s survey
  • 98 percent who say they would support civil disobedience to achieve their aims
  • 31 percent who say they would support violence
  • 8 percent who say they are unsure of what they would like to see the movement accomplish
  • 44 percent who say they want to “influence the Democratic Party the way the Tea Party has influenced the GOP”
  • 32 percent who consider themselves Democrats; nearly the same amount (33 percent) say they don’t affiliate themselves with any political party.
  • 56 percent of demonstrators who say they voted in 2008
  • 74 percent of those who voted that say they cast a ballot for Obama in 2008
  • 51 percent of demonstrators who now say they now disapprove of Obama
  • At least 25 percent who says they will not vote in 2012

More details here by the Week.

Yesterday’s Political Diary notes the current administration’s big legal gamble (or the latest one, anyway) related to ObamaCare:

Cert petitions asking the Supreme Court to hear the various constitutional challenges to the Affordable Care Act could be distributed to chambers for consideration as early as this week. If they are, we’ll know by mid-November if and when the justices will rule on the individual mandate. In the meantime, though, let’s note the extremely big bet that the Justice Department — and presumably, the White House — is making.

At issue is the legal principle known as severability: Laws usually contain clauses holding that if one provision is invalidated on constitutional grounds, the rest stands. But ObamaCare doesn’t contain such a provision, either because it was forgotten in the rush to pass the bill or perhaps in the liberal overconfidence that the constitutional critics were cranks.

For this reason, when a Florida court rejected the individual mandate in February, it also struck down the entire statute. Other courts have found legal arguments for invalidating the mandate while preserving the rest (while of course others have found the whole thing constitutional).

In a brief filed late last week, Justice argues that the individual mandate is not severable from the Affordable Care Act’s core insurance regulation and subsidy scheme. In other words, the mandate is so important that the rest of the law may need to be erased if it goes overboard.

The safer legal strategy would have been to hedge on severability in the event the court overturns the mandate, since ObamaCare could never pass again in anything like its current form. But Justice’s all-in gambit may be to raise the stakes — daring the court not merely to overturn one unpopular provision but to quash President Obama’s major policy achievement and open itself to politicalblowback a la Citizens United. The Justice Department may think that will encourage the justices to be more careful, but such a risk may turn out to be a huge legal error in retrospect.

Good read at the WSJ today in The Flat-Tax Sweepstakes:

Rick Perry joined the GOP’s tax reform sweepstakes on Tuesday, proposing an optional flat income tax of 20%, among other fiscal and economic reforms. We’ll get to the details, but the larger story is how the drive for a flatter, simpler, more pro-growth tax code is taking center stage in the Republican Presidential contest.

Mr. Perry joins Newt Gingrich, who has proposed a 15% optional flat tax; Jon Huntsman, whose reform proposal would cut the top individual rate to 23%; and Herman Cain and his now famous 9-9-9 plan. House Republicans included a reform with a 25% top rate in their budget earlier this year. All of this ferment shows that whatever one thinks of the candidates as potential Presidents, most of them are trying to meet the political moment with reforms to address our major economic challenges.

Speaking of candidates, Jacob Sullum notes the “reckless disregard” candidates Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich have for the importance of judicial review:

Although Gingrich’s plan for confronting the judiciary is especially aggressive, it reflects familiar conservative complaints about “activist judges who tell us what is right and wrong and deny us the right to live as we see fit,” as Texas Gov. Rick Perry, another Republican presidential contender, puts it in his 2010 book Fed Up! Critics like Gingrich and Perry recklessly disregard the importance of court-enforced constitutional limits, seeking to undermine judicial review in ways they themselves would come to regret.

Gingrich and Perry surely are right that judges can be wrong. It is difficult, for example, to reconcile the original understanding of the Constitution with the Supreme Court’s decisions concerning abortion and the separation of church and state.

* * *

ingrich and Perry, like many conservatives, expect the federal courts to enforce constitutional restrictions on legislative power. But how well can they do that job if, as Gingrich recommends, Congress responds by defunding them or simply by declaring its legislative acts unreviewable? How strong a bulwark of liberty will the judicial branch be if, as Perry suggests, a two-thirds majority of Congress can override the Supreme Court’s decisions?

Despite all the dire warnings about judicial activism, the Court’s recent record suggests it does not have much strength to spare. According to an Institute for Justice report released last month, the Court struck down just 0.65 percent of federal laws and just 0.045 percent of state laws enacted between 1954 and 2002. “We suffer not from rampant judicial activism,” authors Clark Neily and Dick M. Carpenter conclude, “but rather from too little judicial engagement.”

Which leads into today’s video, a lengthy one you should check out over lunch. Institute for Justice attorney and founder of the Center for Judicial Engagement Clark Neily recently debated Ed Whelan, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and National Review Online contributor, on the issue of judicial engagement versus judicial activism. This is a must-watch for anyone who has an interest in the role of the judiciary (hint: that should be ALL PubliusNM readers) (click here to view in YouTube):

New Mexico

Paul Gessing at Errors of Enchantment notes an opportunity to bring “Sick and Sicker” the movie to New Mexico:

ObamaCare continues to be a dead weight holding the economy back. Worse, if it is not overturned, it will cause major, negative changes for America’s health care system. Rather than merely predicting how Americans will be hurt by increased government involvement in their health care, film maker Logan Darrow Clements went to Canada to see how their health care system works (or fails to work) for himself. The result was the film “Sick and Sicker.”

The Rio Grande Foundation is working to bring this informative movie to Albuquerque (and eventually other parts of the state). If you want to help us out, go to this page and pledge to purchase a few DVD’s. If we hit $700, we’ll show the movie in Albuquerque this fall. If we don’t hit $700, you won’t pay a dime. Thank you in advance for your support!

Apparently the Las Cruces Mayoral race is a hot one with a fair amount of coverage at NMPolitics.net for those interested.

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Categories: 2012 Election, Economy, Health Care, National Politics, NM Politics
25
Oct 2011

Eat the Rich

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Categories: Economy
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