Columnist.
All modern presidents of both parties have been too much with us. Talking incessantly, they have put politics unhealthily at the center of America's consciousness. Promising promiscuously, they have exaggerated government's proper scope and actual competence, making the public perpetually disappointed and surly. Inflating executive power, they have severed it from constitutional constraints. So, sensible voters might embrace someone who announced his 2016 candidacy this way: "I am ambling -- running suggests unseemly ardor -- for president. It is axiomatic that anyone who nowadays will do what is necessary in order to become president thereby reveals character traits, including delusions of adequacy and obsessive compulsive disorder, that should disqualify him or her from proximity to powers concentrated in the executive branch. Therefore, my campaign will initially consist of driving around the Obnoxiously Entitled Four -- Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada -- trying to interest their 3.8 percent of America's population in a minimalist president.
Minnesota says it has 10,000 lakes. The state also has, according to Anthony Sanders, "10,000 campaign finance laws." He exaggerates, but understandably. As an attorney for Minnesota's chapter of the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, Sanders represents several Minnesotans whose First Amendment rights of free speech and association are burdened by an obviously arbitrary, notably complex and certainly unconstitutional restriction. Linda Runbeck is a Republican state legislator who is allowed to spend in her campaign -- most spending finances dissemination of speech -- only $62,600. She is not challenging this speech limit, although it is so low it prevents her from advertising on this city's television stations, whose broadcasts reach many of the state's voters. Rather, she is challenging the "special sources" provision that makes even more onerous the $1,000 limit on what any person can give her.
Standing on his presidential limousine, Lyndon Johnson, campaigning in Providence, R.I., in September 1964, bellowed through a bullhorn: "We're in favor of a lot of things and we're against mighty few." This was a synopsis of what he had said four months earlier. Fifty years ago this Thursday, at the University of Michigan, Johnson had proposed legislating into existence a Great Society. It would end poverty and racial injustice, "but that is just the beginning." It would "rebuild the entire urban United States" while fending off "boredom and restlessness," slaking "the hunger for community" and enhancing "the meaning of our lives" -- all by assembling "the best thought and the broadest knowledge."
Democracy can be cruel because elections deprive the demos of the delight of alibis and the comfort of complaining. Illinois voters have used many elections to make theirs the worst-governed state, with about $100 billion in unfunded public pension promises, and $6.7 billion in unpaid bills. The state is a stark illustration of prolonged one-party rule conducted by politicians subservient to government employees unions. A new Gallup poll shows that Illinois has the highest percentage -- 50 percent -- of residents who want to leave their state. If Illinois voters re-elect Gov. Pat Quinn, 65, they will reject Bruce Rauner, 58, who vows to change the state's fundamental affliction -- its political culture.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph T. Randa, revolted by the police-state arrogance of some elected prosecutors, has stopped a partisan abuse of law enforcement that was masquerading as political hygiene. Last Tuesday, Randa halted the corruption being committed by persons pretending to administer campaign regulations -- regulations ostensibly enacted to prevent corruption or the appearance thereof. The prosecutors' cynical manipulation of Wisconsin's campaign laws is more than the mere appearance of corruption. Eric O'Keefe's refusal to be intimidated by lawless law enforcement officials produced Randa's remarkably emphatic ruling against an especially egregious example of Democrats using government power to suppress conservatives' political speech.
After the marshal on Monday spoke the traditional "God save the United States and this honorable court," the Supreme Court ruled that the upstate New York town of Greece does not violate the First Amendment's prohibition of "establishment of religion" by opening its board of supervisors' meetings with a prayer. This ruling would not scandalize James Madison and other members of the First Congress, which drafted and sent to the states for ratification the First Amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights. The Congress did this *after* hiring a chaplain. Three decades have passed since the court last ruled on the matter of prayers during government meetings. In 1983, the court held: "The opening of sessions of legislative and other deliberative public bodies with prayer is deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country. From colonial times through the founding of the Republic and ever since, the practice of legislative prayer has coexisted with the principles of disestablishment and religious freedom."
If the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation's second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet another constitutional provision that evidently has escaped his notice. It is the Origination Clause, which says: "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills." The ACA passed the Senate on a party-line vote, and without a Democratic vote to spare, after a series of unsavory transactions that purchased the assent of several shrewdly extortionate Democrats. What will be argued on Thursday is that what was voted on -- the ACA -- was indisputably a revenue measure and unquestionably did not originate in the House, which later passed the ACA on another party-line vote.
Earnest moralists lament Americans' distrust of government. What really is regrettable is that government does much to earn distrust, as Terry Dehko, 70, and his daughter Sandy Thomas, 41, understand. Terry, who came to Michigan from Iraq in 1970, soon did what immigrants often do: He went into business, buying Schott's Supermarket in Fraser, Mich., where he still works six days a week. The IRS, a tentacle of a government that spent $3.5 trillion in 2013, tried to steal more than $35,000 from Terry and Sandy that year. Sandy, a mother of four, has a master's degree in urban planning but has worked in the store off and on since she was 12. She remembers, "They just walked into the store" and announced that they had emptied the store's bank account. The IRS agents believed, or pretended to believe, that Terry and Sandy were or conceivably could be -- which is sufficient for the IRS -- conducting a criminal enterprise when not selling groceries.
Anodyne euphemisms often indicate an uneasy conscience or a political anxiety. Or both, as when the 1976 Democratic platform chose "compensatory opportunity" as a way of blurring the fact that the party favored racial discrimination in the form of preferences and quotas for certain government-favored minorities in such matters as government hiring, contracting and college admissions. Since then, "affirmative action" has become the ubiquitous semantic evasion. Last Tuesday, however, in her 58-page dissent that she summarized from the bench to emphasize her strenuous disapproval of the court's ruling in a case from Michigan, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, entered the euphemism sweepstakes. She suggested adopting the phrase "race-sensitive admissions policies." Not that Michiganders are apt to be mollified by such semantic ether designed to tranquilize them regarding practices they correctly consider discordant with American values.
Recently, Barack Obama -- a Demosthenes determined to elevate our politics from coarseness to elegance; a Pericles sent to ameliorate our rhetorical impoverishment -- spoke at the University of Michigan. He came to that very friendly venue -- in 2012, he received 67 percent of the vote in Ann Arbor's county -- after visiting a local sandwich shop, where a muse must have whispered in the presidential ear. Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., had recently released his budget, so Obama expressed his disapproval by calling it, for the benefit of his academic audience, a "meanwich" and a "stink burger."
Occasionally, the Supreme Court considers questions that are answered merely by asking them. On Tuesday, the court will hear arguments about this: Should a government agency, whose members are chosen by elected officials, be empowered to fine or imprison any candidate or other participant in the political process who during a campaign makes what the agency considers "false statements" about a member of the political class or a ballot initiative? An Ohio statute, which resembles laws in at least 15 other states, says, among many other stern things, that: "No person, during the course of any campaign ... shall ... make a false statement concerning the voting record of a candidate or public official." Former Rep. Steve Driehaus, a Cincinnati Democrat who considers himself pro-life, says he lost his 2010 re-election bid because the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List violated Ohio's law with ads saying that when he voted for the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he voted for taxpayer funding of abortion.
In a 2006 interview, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer said the Constitution is "basically about" one word -- "democracy" -- that appears in neither that document nor the Declaration of Independence. Democracy is America's way of allocating political power. The Constitution, however, was adopted to confine that power in order to "secure the blessings of" that which simultaneously justifies and limits democratic government -- natural liberty. The fundamental division in American politics is between those who take their bearings from the individual's right to a capacious, indeed indefinite, realm of freedom, and those whose fundamental value is the right of the majority to have its way in making rules about which specified liberties shall be respected.
Robert Griffin, now 90, who rose to be second in the Republican U.S. Senate leadership, was defeated in 1978. Since then, only one Michigan Republican, Spencer Abraham in 1994, has been elected to the Senate and for only one term. Evidence that former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land might end this GOP drought is that Democrats are attacking her for opposing "preventive health care." This is a phrase Democrats use to include abortion as they try to reprise their 2012 alarms about Republicans' "war on women," which began with the martyrdom of Sandra Fluke. She was the Georgetown University law student aggrieved because the Catholic university she chose to attend was not paying for her contraception. The median starting annual salary of Georgetown law graduates entering the private sector is $160,000. Wal-Mart sells a month's worth of birth control pills for $9.
From the Goldwater Institute, the fertile frontal lobe of the conservative movement's brain, comes an innovative idea that is gaining traction in Alaska, Arizona and Georgia, and its advocates may bring it to at least 35 other states' legislatures. It would use the Constitution's Article V to move the nation back toward the limited government the Constitution's Framers thought their document guaranteed. The Compact for America is the innovation of the Goldwater Institute's Nick Dranias, who proposes a constitutional convention carefully called under Article V to enact a balanced-budget amendment written precisely enough to preclude evasion by the political class. This class has powerful and permanent incentives for deficit spending, which delivers immediate benefits to constituents while deferring a significant portion of the benefits' costs.
The Sisyphean task of tax reform should be tried only by someone who will not flinch from igniting some highly flammable people -- those who believe that whatever wrinkle in the tax code benefits them is an eternal entitlement. Tax reform's Senate champion is Ron Wyden, the affable, cerebral and tall Oregon Democrat who once wanted to be the NBA's greatest Jewish power forward since ... never mind. Anyway, a serious Republican reform plan has been produced by Rep. Dave Camp, who is retiring from Congress but will probably be succeeded as chairman of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee by Paul Ryan, who has a wholesome monomania about promoting economic growth. Conservatives should rejoice that the Senate's most important chairmanship, that of the Finance Committee, has come to Wyden, whose progressive credentials are impeccable but who says: "We like expanding the winners' circle." And who believes that economic growth of 4 percent is not only feasible but urgent.
The human kindling that makes up the flammable Republican base may soon burst into flames, again. Portions of that excitable cohort are looking -- some with fawn-like eyes filled with hurt, others with sparks shooting from eyes narrowed like gun slits -- askance at other Republicans urging Jeb Bush to seek the 2016 presidential nomination. A candidacy by Florida's former governor would be desirable. But if Republicans want to avoid intra-party carnage, they should be very careful about doing what The Washington Post recently reported: "Many of the Republican Party's most powerful insiders and financiers have begun a behind-the-scenes campaign to draft former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush into the 2016 presidential race."
"Andre Dawson," Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully once said, "has a bruised knee and is listed as day-to-day. Aren't we all?" Yes, so use some of your remaining time constructively by identifying the player or players who...
Igor Stravinsky, the Russian composer, said of Poland, perilously positioned between Russia and Germany: "If you pitch your tent in the middle of Fifth Avenue, it is quite likely you will be run over by a bus." Poland has been run over hard and often; indeed, between 1795 and 1918 it disappeared from the map of Europe. Geography need not be destiny, but it matters, as Ukraine is being reminded. During its hazardous path to the present, all or bits of it have been parts of Poland, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire, the Russian empire, the Soviet Union and now another Russian empire. Czarist Russia, which Lenin called "the prison of the peoples," is re-emerging and has in Vladimir Putin an ambitious warden.
Critics of Rep. Paul Ryan's remarks about cultural factors in the persistence of poverty are simultaneously shrill and boring. Their predictable minuet of synthetic indignation demonstrates how little liberals have learned about poverty or changed their rhetorical repertoire in the last 49 years. Ryan spoke of a "tailspin of culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working or learning the value and the culture of work," adding: "There's a real culture problem here." This brought down upon Ryan the usual acid rain of accusations -- racism, blaming the victims, etc. He had sauntered into the minefield that a more experienced Daniel Patrick Moynihan -- a liberal scholar who knew the taboos of his tribe -- had tiptoed into five years before Ryan was born.
While Vladimir Putin, Stalin's spawn, ponders what to do with what remains of Ukraine, remember: Nine years before the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which the Nazis embarked on industrialized genocide, Stalin deliberately inflicted genocidal starvation on Ukraine. To fathom the tangled forces, including powerful ones of memory, at work in that singularly tormented place, begin with Snyder's stunning book. Secretary of State John Kerry has called Russia's invasion of Ukraine "a 19th-century act in the 21st century." Snyder reminds us that "Europeans deliberately starved Europeans in horrific numbers in the middle of the 20th century."
