Columnist.
Standing at the intersection of three foreign policy crises and a perennial constitutional tension, Bob Corker, R-Tenn., incoming chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, may be the senator who matters most in 2015. Without an authorization for use of military force (AUMF) tailored to novel circumstances, America is waging war against an entity without precedent (the Islamic State). Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons during negotiations that should involve congressional duties. And Russia is revising European borders by force and, like Iran, is the object of a U.S. experiment testing the power of economic sanctions to modify a dictator's behavior. As Congress weighs its foreign policy role regarding these three matters, Corker treads the contested terrain between deference to presidential primacy in foreign policy and the need for collective wisdom and shared responsibility.
Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, so last year's most encouraging development in governance might have occurred in February in a U.S. District Court in Frankfort, Ky. There, a judge did something no federal judge has done since 1932. By striking down a "certificate of necessity" (CON) regulation, he struck a blow for liberty and against crony capitalism. Although Raleigh Bruner's Wildcat Moving company in Lexington is named in celebration of the local religion -- University of Kentucky basketball -- this did not immunize him from the opposition of companies with which he wished to compete. In 2012, he formed the company, hoping to operate statewide. Kentucky, however, like some other states, requires movers to obtain a CON. Kentucky's statute says such certificates shall be issued if the applicant is "fit, willing and able properly to perform" moving services -- and if he can demonstrate that existing moving services are "inadequate," and that the proposed service "is or will be required by the present or future public convenience and necessity."
In 1968, a singularly traumatic year -- assassinations, urban riots, 16,899 Americans killed in Vietnam -- Vice President Hubert Humphrey, the ebullient Minnesotan, said his presidential campaign was about "the politics of joy." This was considered infelicitous. He was, however, right to insist that, whatever America's vicissitudes, the nation's premises explain its trajectory and validate cheerfulness. Similarly, after a 40-year-old Arizonan decided to try politics as a candidate for the Phoenix city council in 1949, he said: "It ain't for life and it might be fun." Barry Goldwater was right: Politics is supposed to be fun, and done right it is.
Barack Obama has made a geopolitical irrelevancy suddenly relevant to American presidential politics. For decades, Cuba has been instructive as a museum of two stark failures: socialism and the U.S. embargo. Now, Cuba has become useful as a clarifier of different Republican flavors of foreign-policy thinking. The permanent embargo was imposed in 1962 in the hope of achieving, among other things, regime change. Well. Fidel Castro, 88, has not been seen in public since January and may be even more mentally diminished than anyone -- including his 83-year old brother -- who still adheres to Marxism. Whatever Fidel's condition, however, Cuba has been governed by the Castros during 11 U.S. presidencies, and for more years than the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. Regime change -- even significant regime modification -- has not happened in Havana.
Scott Pruitt enjoyed owning a AAA baseball team here, but he is having as much fun as Oklahoma's attorney general, and one of the Obama administration's most tenacious tormentors. The second existential challenge to the Affordable Care Act began here. In the first, decided in June 2012, the Supreme Court saved the ACA by reading it imaginatively. The court held that although Congress could not, in the name of regulating commerce, penalize people for not engaging in commerce (buying insurance), the penalty linked to the individual mandate actually could be considered -- although Congress did not so consider it -- an exercise of Congress' enumerated power to tax.
The Battle of Palmito Ranch near Brownsville, Texas, on May 13, 1865, is called the last battle of the Civil War, but the Texas Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) might consider that judgment premature, given its conflict with the state's Department of Transportation and Department of Motor Vehicles. This skirmish is of national interest because it implicates a burgeoning new entitlement -- the right to pass through life without encountering any disagreeable thought. Under Texas' specialty license plate system, plates can be created by the Legislature by specific enactments, or can, for a fee, be designed by individuals, nonprofits or businesses. In the private instances, Texas is selling space for advertising. The specialty plates exhort ("Be a Blood Donor"), emote ("I'd Rather Be Golfing"), celebrate (NASCAR, many universities) and commemorate ("Buffalo Soldiers," "Korea Veteran").
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery." --Mr. Micawber in "David Copperfield" If America's long-term economic growth were 3.5 percent, the result would be the restoration of cheerfulness. If long-term growth is closer to 2 percent, the result will be continuing social disappointment and political crankiness. Rep. Dave Camp, R-Mich., as chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, did his considerable best to deliver the indispensable igniter of sustained growth -- tax reform. As he leaves Congress after 12 terms, passing the gavel to an equally able reformer, Paul Ryan, Camp remains confident that it can be done. Such serenity is strange in today's Washington, where even events that cause cheerfulness are for that reason depressing.
By history's frequently brutal dialectic, the good that we call progress often comes spasmodically, in lurches propelled by tragedies caused by callousness, folly or ignorance. With the grand jury's as yet inexplicable and probably inexcusable refusal to find criminal culpability in Eric Garner's death on a Staten Island sidewalk, the nation might have experienced sufficient affronts to its sense of decency. It might at long last be ready to stare into the abyss of its criminal justice system. It will stare back, balefully. Furthermore, the radiating ripples from the nation's overdue reconsideration of present practices may reach beyond matters of crime and punishment, to basic truths about governance.
Intellectually undemanding progressives, excited by the likes of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. -- advocate of the downtrodden and the Export-Import Bank -- have at last noticed something obvious: Big government, which has become gargantuan in response to progressives' promptings, serves the strong. It is responsive to factions sufficiently sophisticated and moneyed to understand and manipulate its complexity. Hence Democrats, the principal creators of this complexity, receive more than 70 percent of lawyers' political contributions. Yet progressives, refusing to see this defect -- big government captured by big interests -- as systemic, want to make government an ever-more muscular engine of regulation and redistribution. Were progressives serious about what used to preoccupy America's left -- entrenched elites, crony capitalism and other impediments to upward mobility -- they would study "The New Class Conflict," by Joel Kotkin, a lifelong Democrat.
In 2010, Plymouth, Conn., was awarded $430,000 for widening sidewalks and related matters near two schools. This money was a portion of the $612 million Congress authorized for five years of the federal Safe Routes to School program intended to fight childhood obesity by encouraging children to burn calories by walking or biking to school. Really. Fortunately, Plymouth is near Sharon, Conn., home of the Buckley family, whose members, when their gimlet eyes notice nonsense, become elegantly polemical. So, Congress' Safe Routes silliness inadvertently did something excellent. It helped to provoke James Buckley to write a slender book that, if heeded, would substantially improve American governance.
America's Newtonian Constitution might again function according to Madisonian expectations if a provoked Congress regains its spine and self-respect, thereby returning our constitutional architecture to equipoise. But this is more to be hoped for than expected. Even without this, however, the institutional vandalism of Barack Obama's executive unilateralism still might be a net national benefit. It will be if the Republicans' 2016 presidential nominee responds to Obama's serial provocations by promising a return to democratic etiquette grounded in presidential self-restraint. Not since the off-year elections of 1938, when voters rebuked Franklin Roosevelt for his attempt to pack the Supreme Court by enlarging it, has the electorate made constitutional equilibrium a central concern. James Madison, however, hoped institutional balance could be self-maintaining: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place."
Before the tryptophan in the turkey induces somnolence, give thanks for living in such an entertaining country. This year, for example, we learned that California's Legislature includes 93 persons who seem never to have had sex. They enacted the "affirmative consent" law directing college administrators to tell students that sexual consent cannot be silence but must be "affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement" and "ongoing throughout a sexual activity." Claremont McKenna College requires "all" -- not "both," which would discriminate against groups -- participants in a sexual engagement to understand that withdrawal of consent can be any behavior conveying "that an individual is hesitant, confused, uncertain."
Seen through the prism of subsequent national experience, Nelson Rockefeller resembles a swollen post-war automobile -- a land yacht with tail fins, a period piece, bemusing and embarrassing. He remains, however, instructive. Richard Norton Smith, a biographer as talented as he is industrious, could not have known, when he began his labors 14 years ago, that publication of his "On His Own Terms: A Life of Nelson Rockefeller" would coincide with the curtain rising on a presidential campaign to which Rockefeller's story is pertinent. It illuminates today's two-party dynamic.
It is as remarkable as it is repulsive, the ingenuity with which the Obama administration uses the regulatory state's intricacies to advance progressivism's project of breaking nongovernmental institutions to government's saddle. Eager to sacrifice low-income children to please teachers unions, the Department of Justice wants to destroy Wisconsin's school choice program. Feigning concern about access for handicapped children, DOJ's aim is to handicap all disadvantaged children by denying their parents access to school choices of the sort enjoyed by affluent DOJ lawyers.
Western reflection about human nature and the politics of the human condition began with the sunburst of ancient Greece 2,500 years ago, but lurched into a new phase 70 years ago with the liberation of the Nazi extermination camps. The Holocaust is the dark sun into which humanity should stare, lest troubling lessons be lost through an intellectual shrug about "the unfathomable." Now comes an English translation of a 2011 German book that refutes a 1963 book and rebukes those who refuse to see the Holocaust as proof of the power of the most dangerous things -- ideas that denigrate reason. The German philosopher Bettina Stangneth's "Eichmann Before Jerusalem: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer" responds to Hannah Arendt's extraordinarily and perversely influential "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil."
Barack Obama's coming request for Congress to "right-size and update" the Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against terrorism will be constitutionally fastidious and will catalyze a debate that will illuminate Republican fissures. They, however, are signs of a healthy development -- the reappearance of foreign policy heterodoxy in Republican ranks. Many events (U.S. military misadventures since 2001, the Syrian civil war, the rise of the Islamic State, the spinning centrifuges of Iran's nuclear weapons program) and one senator (Rand Paul) have reopened a Republican debate that essentially closed when Dwight Eisenhower won the 1952 Republican presidential nomination. One reason he sought it was to block Ohio's Sen. Robert Taft.
Now that two of the last three Democratic presidencies have been emphatically judged to have been failures, the world's oldest political party -- the primary architect of this nation's administrative state -- has some thinking to do. The accumulating evidence that the Democratic Party is an exhausted volcano includes its fixation with stale ideas, such as the supreme importance of a 23rd increase in the minimum wage. Can this party be so blinkered by the modest success of its third recent presidency, Bill Clinton's, that it will sleepwalk into the next election behind Hillary Clinton?
Unlike the dog that chased the car until, to its consternation, he caught it, Republicans know what do with what they have caught. Having completed their capture of control of the legislative branch, they should start with the following six measures concerning practical governance and constitutional equilibrium: -- Abolish the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. This creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank law violates John Locke's dictum: "The legislative cannot transfer the power of making laws to any other hands. ... The power of the legislative ... [is] only to make laws, and not to make legislators." The CFPB is empowered to "declare," with no legislative guidance or institutional inhibitions, that certain business practices are "abusive." It also embodies progressivism's authoritarianism by being, unlike any entity Congress has created since 1789, untethered from all oversight mechanisms: Its funding, "determined by the director," comes from the Federal Reserve.
Mix a pitcher of martinis Tuesday evening to fortify yourself against the torrent of election returns painting a pointillist portrait of the nation's mind. Before you become too mellow to care, consider some indexes of our civic tendencies. Voting began, and "persuasion campaigning" receded, weeks ago. Mobilization measures became more important than ads. Saturation spending on ads makes for a steep decline in the utility of the last dollars spent on them. In the 2012 presidential race, $46 million was spent on 56,837 ads in Las Vegas; $30 million was spent on 39,259 in Columbus, Ohio. Ads become audible wallpaper, there but not really noticed.
In a sun-dappled square decorated with scores of entrants in the community's Halloween scarecrow contest, a balky sound system enables, if barely, the Republican U.S. Senate candidate to exhort a few hundred people, mostly supporters, to urge neighbors to vote to reduce Sen. Harry Reid to minority leader. The exhorter is David Perdue, a glutton for punishment who has been campaigning incessantly for 15 months and may be doing so for two more. A Jan. 6 vote would end his second runoff, which will be necessary if, because the libertarian candidate gets perhaps 5 percent of the vote, neither Perdue nor his Democratic opponent, Michelle Nunn, wins 50 percent of the vote next Tuesday. Perdue's first runoff, a nine-week slog ending in July, resulted when none of the seven Republican primary candidates reached 50 percent.
