Columnist.
The early morning paramilitary-style raids on citizens' homes were conducted by law enforcement officers, sometimes wearing bulletproof vests and lugging battering rams, pounding on doors and issuing threats. Spouses were separated as the police seized computers, including those of children still in pajamas. Clothes drawers, including the children's, were ransacked, cellphones were confiscated and the citizens were told it would be a crime to tell anyone of the raids. Some raids were precursors of, others were parts of, the nastiest episode of this unlovely political season, an episode that has occurred in an unlikely place. This attempted criminalization of politics in order to silence persons occupying just one portion of the political spectrum has happened in Wisconsin, which often has conducted robust political arguments with Midwestern civility.
Barack Obama lost Kentucky in 2012 by 23 points, yet the state remains closely divided about re-electing the man whose parliamentary skills uniquely qualify him to restrain Obama's executive overreach. So, Kentucky's Senate contest is a constitutional moment that will determine whether the separation of powers will be reasserted by a Congress revitalized by restoration of the Senate's dignity. Even counting Justice Louis Brandeis as a Kentuckian -- at 18 he defected to Harvard and New England -- Mitch McConnell, 72, is second only to Henry Clay as the state's most consequential public servant. McConnell's skills have been honed through five terms. He is, however -- let us say the worst -- not cuddly. National Review has said he has "an owlish, tight-lipped public demeanor reminiscent of George Will." Harsh. But true.
One of the wonders of this political moment is feminist contentment about the infantilization of women in the name of progressive politics. Government, encouraging academic administrations to micromanage campus sexual interactions, now assumes that, absent a script, women cannot cope. And the Democrats' trope about the Republicans' "war on women" clearly assumes that women are civic illiterates. Access to contraception has been a *constitutional* right for 49 years (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965). The judiciary has controlled abortion policy for 41 years (Roe v. Wade, 1973). Yet the Democratic Party thinks women can be panicked into voting about mythical menaces to these things.
Wretched excess by government can be beneficial if it startles people into wholesome disgust and deepened distrust, and prompts judicial rebukes that enlarge freedom. So let's hope the Federal Communications Commission embraces the formal petition inciting it to deny licenses to broadcasters who use the word "Redskins" when reporting on the Washington Redskins. Using the FCC to break another private institution to the state's saddle for the satisfaction of a clamorous faction illustrates how the government's many tentacles give it many means of intimidating people who offend it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, empowered to ban trademarks that "may" disparage persons, has already limited trademark protection of the Redskins' name.
Come Tuesday, the national pastime will be the subject of oral arguments in a portentous Supreme Court case. This pastime is not baseball but rent seeking -- the unseemly yet uninhibited scramble of private interests to bend government power for their benefit. If the court directs a judicial scowl at North Carolina's State Board of Dental Examiners, the court will thereby advance a basic liberty -- the right of Americans to earn a living without unreasonable government interference. The board, whose members are elected by licensed dentists and dental hygienists, regulates the practice of dentistry in North Carolina. To the surprise of no one acquainted with human nature, the board wields its power for the benefit of fellow members of the cartel of licensed dental practitioners.
Gov. Chris Christie could be forgiven if he had chips on both shoulders as big as those shoulders. This year, the first of his second term, has been overshadowed by often partisan investigations, more protracted than productive, of the involvement of several of his former aides -- he fired them -- in the closing of some access lanes to the George Washington Bridge. Nevertheless, Christie today radiates serenity. His critics, including many Hillary Clinton enthusiasts, hoped the last 12 months would be for him a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. He has, however, thrived.
Every 36 years, it seems Jeff Bell disturbs New Jersey's political order. In 1978, as a 34-year-old apostle of supply-side economics and a harbinger of the Reagan Revolution, he stunned the keepers of the conventional wisdom by defeating a four-term senator, Clifford Case, in the Republican primary. Bell, a Columbia University graduate who fought in Vietnam, lost to Bill Bradley in the 1978 general election, but in 1982 he went to Washington to help implement President Reagan's economic policies that produced five quarters of above 7 percent growth and six years averaging 4.6 percent. Bell, now 70, is back. He won the Republican nomination to run against Sen. Cory Booker, 45, the Democratic former mayor of Newark who last October won a special election to serve the last year of the late Sen. Frank Lautenberg's term.
"The legislative department is everywhere ... drawing all power into its impetuous vortex." -- James Madison, Federalist 48 Unfortunately, Congress' vortex now spins the other way, throwing off powers that the executive scoops up. Hence this autumn's spectacle: Feverish House and Senate candidates waging ferocious campaigns to win or retain offices that are of rapidly diminishing significance. It is official: America "is at war." We know this because the president's press secretary says so. Congress has not said so, but many members say that the Islamic State must be countered and that they may have more to say about this in a few months.
The Machine Shed restaurant, where the waitresses wear bib overalls and suggest a cinnamon roll the size of a loaf of bread as a breakfast appetizer, sells a root beer called Dang!, bandages made to look like bacon strips, and signs that proclaim "I love you more than bacon." For Joni Ernst, however, the apposite sign reads "No one ever injured their eyesight by looking on the bright side." She, nourished by a cinnamon roll, is preparing for a bus tour taking her Senate candidacy to all of Iowa's 99 counties, and she seems to love campaigning even more than bacon, not that any proper Iowa farm girl -- her description of herself -- would publicly rank bacon second to anything. Ernst, a 44-year-old state senator, or Bruce Braley, a 56-year-old four-term Democratic congressman, will replace Sen. Tom Harkin, who is retiring after five terms. Of the five Senate contests in purple states -- Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Colorado -- this is currently the closest: The Real Clear Politics average of polls shows a tie (Ernst ahead by 0.2 percentage points).
Tacked to the wall of Greg Orman's campaign office is a print of a John Steuart Curry painting, "Tragic Prelude," that hangs in the capitol in Topeka. It depicts John Brown of Osawatomie, 39 miles south of here, as what he was, a deranged product of "bleeding Kansas," the Civil War's overture. Today, Orman, who is as calm as Brown was crazed, is emblematic of fascinating Kansas. Orman wants to deny Pat Roberts a fourth Senate term, thereby ending a congressional career that began in 1981 with 16 years in the House. Orman, who favors term limits and pledges to serve only two terms, is running as an independent. The Democrats' nominee has dropped out of the race, so Orman, 45, or Roberts, 78, will be a senator come January. Sensible Kansans have a problematic choice to ponder: Electing Orman would deepen the Senate's pool of talent, but it might thwart Republican efforts to control the Senate.
The pursuit of perfection is usually foredoomed, but the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, which has a latitudinarian understanding of ethical behavior, has a perfectly awful idea. It is urging the City Council to consider ways of paying -- starchier ethicists might call it bribing -- people to vote. Some ideas are so loopy that they could only be conceived by governments, which are insulated from marketplace competition that is a constant reminder of reality. And governments are generally confident that their constituents need to be improved by spending the constituents' money. The supposed problem for which the "pay the voters" idea purports to be a solution is this: Few Los Angeles residents are voting.
The United States last declared war many wars ago, on June 5, 1942, when, to clarify legal ambiguities during a world conflagration, it declared war on Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. Today's issue is not whether to declare war but only whether the president should even seek congressional authorization for the protracted use of force against the Islamic State. Promising to "destroy" this group with the help of "a broad coalition" of "partners," Barack Obama said last week, "I welcome congressional support for this effort." He obviously thinks such support is optional, partly because this "effort," conducted by U.S. combat aircraft, is something other than war. There he goes again.
Tucking into a dish of Scottish haggis is not a task for the fainthearted. There are various haggis recipes, but basically it is sheep's pluck -- the heart, lungs and liver -- cooked together, then mixed with suet and oatmeal and boiled in a sheep's stomach, then served, sometimes drenched with Scotch. People who pour whisky on oatmeal are not shrinking violets. Remember this on Thursday when Scotland votes on independence from the United Kingdom. There are economic reasons for and (mostly) against Scotland disassociating from the queen's realm. This issue, however, touches chords of memory more interesting than money. In "The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century," Cambridge University historian David Reynolds notes that World War I, a breaker of empires and maker of nations, quickened interest in nationalism and the nature of nationhood, especially the distinction between a *civic* nation and an *ethnic* nation: The former is "a community of laws, institutions, and citizenship," whereas an ethnic nation is "a community of shared descent, rooted in language, ethnicity, and culture." France embodied civic nationalism, forged by its revolution; Germany, "steeped in Romantic conceptions of the *Volk*," exemplified ethnic nationalism.
Since Barry Goldwater, accepting the Republicans' 1964 presidential nomination, said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice," Democrats have been decrying Republican "extremism." Actually, although there is abundant foolishness and unseemliness in American politics, real extremism -- measures or movements that menace the Constitution's architecture of ordered liberty -- is rare. This week, however, extremism stained the Senate. Forty-eight members of the Democratic caucus attempted to do something never previously done -- amend the Bill of Rights. They tried to radically shrink First Amendment protection of political speech. They evidently think extremism in defense of the political class's convenience is no vice.
Speaking on Aug. 29 -- at a fundraiser, of course -- Barack Obama applied to a platitude the varnish of smartphone sociology, producing this intellectual sunburst: "The truth of the matter is, is that the world has always been messy. In part, we're just noticing now because of social media and our capacity to see in intimate detail the hardships that people are going through." So, if 14th- century Europeans had had Facebook and Twitter, they would have noticed how *really* disagreeable the Hundred Years' War was. Obama did have a piece of a point: Graphic journalism, now augmented by billions of people with cameras in their pockets, can give an inflammatory immediacy to events.
The Islamic State is a nasty problem that can be remedied if its neighbors, assisted by the United States, decide to do so. Vladimir Putin's fascist revival is a crisis that tests the West's capacity to decide. Putin's serial amputations of portions of Ukraine, which began with his fait accompli in Crimea, will proceed, and succeed, until his appetite is satiated. Then the real danger will begin. Suppose Ukraine is merely his overture for the destruction of NATO, the nemesis of his Soviet memory. Then what might be his version of the Gleiwitz radio station episode 75 years ago?
To take the measure of this uncommonly interesting public man, begin with two related facts about him. Paul Ryan has at least 67 cousins in his Wisconsin hometown of Janesville, where there are six Ryan households within eight blocks of his home. And in his new book, "The Way Forward: Renewing the American Idea," he says something few politicians say, which is why so many are neither trusted nor respected. Ryan says he was wrong. At a Wisconsin 4-H fair in 2012, Ryan encountered a Democrat who objected to what then was one of Ryan's signature rhetorical tropes -- his distinction between "makers" and "takers," the latter being persons who receive more in government spending than they pay in taxes. He had been struck by a report that 60 percent of Americans were already -- this was before Obamacare -- "net receivers." But his encounter at the fair reminded him that, for a while, he and many people he cared about had been takers, too.
Russia's ongoing dismemberment of Ukraine and the Islamic State's erasing of Middle Eastern borders have distracted attention from the harassment of U.S. Navy aircraft by Chinese fighter jets over the South China Sea. Beijing calls this sea, and the Yellow and East China seas, the "near seas," meaning China's seas. The episodes involving aircraft are relevant to one of Adm. Jonathan Greenert's multiplying preoccupations -- CUES, meaning Code for Unplanned Encounters at Sea. This is designed to prevent incendiary accidents, a topic of special interest during this month's centennial commemorations of the beginning of a war that, ignited by miscalculations, ruined the 20th century. Greenert, chief of naval operations, has carrier-based aircraft flying from the Persian Gulf to targets in Iraq. He is, however, always thinking about the far side of the largest ocean.
What is called "the" 1964 Civil Rights Act is justly celebrated for outlawing racial and other discrimination in employment, "public accommodations" and elsewhere. But that year's second civil rights act, the Criminal Justice Act, which is 50 years old this month, is, some say, largely a failure because of unanticipated changes in the legal and social context. Is it? In 1961, Clarence Gideon allegedly broke into a Florida pool hall and its vending machines. Gideon, who was indigent, requested a defense attorney, was refused and was convicted. In 1963, a unanimous Supreme Court overturned his conviction, holding that the Constitution's Sixth Amendment ("In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right ... to have the assistance of counsel for his defense") entitles indigent defendants facing serious criminal charges to a government-provided defense attorney.
In physics, a unified field theory is an attempt to explain with a single hypothesis the behavior of several fields. Its political corollary is the Cupcake Postulate, which explains *everything*, from Missouri to Iraq, concerning Americans' comprehensive withdrawal of confidence from government at all levels and all areas of activity. Washington's response to the menace of school bake sales illustrates progressivism's ratchet: The federal government subsidizes school lunches, so it *must* control the lunches' contents, which *validates* regulation of what it calls "competitive foods," such as vending machine snacks. Hence the need to close the bake sale loophole, through which sugary cupcakes might sneak: Foods sold at fundraising bake sales must, with some exceptions, conform to federal standards.
