Columnist.
Two years from today, Iowa -- dark, brooding, enigmatic Iowa -- will be enjoying its quadrennial moment as the epicenter of the universe. And in 10 months, voters will vent their spleens -- if they still are as splenetic as they now claim to be -- in congressional elections. Some numbers define the political landscape. In an October poll, 60 percent favored voting out of office every congressional incumbent. The poll was taken just 11 months after voters re-elected 90 percent of House and 91 percent of Senate incumbents. Democrats are more likely to lose control of the Senate than gain control of the House. Ninety-three percent of Republican House members represent districts Mitt Romney carried, 96 percent of Democratic members represent districts Barack Obama carried. Since the mid-19th-century emergence of the current two-party competition, no party holding the presidency has ever won control of the House in any midterm election.
It was naughty of Winston Churchill to say, if he really did, that "the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." Nevertheless, many voters' paucity of information about politics and government, although arguably rational, raises awkward questions about concepts central to democratic theory, including consent, representation, public opinion, electoral mandates and officials' accountability. In "Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter" (Stanford University Press), Ilya Somin of George Mason University Law School argues that an individual's ignorance of public affairs is rational because the likelihood of his or her vote being decisive in an election is vanishingly small. The small incentives to become informed include reducing one's susceptibility to deceptions, misinformation and propaganda. And if remaining ignorant is rational individual behavior, it has likely destructive collective outcomes.
This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an *annus mirabilis* for conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time and effort. Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism's most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society.
Federal Judge John Gleeson of the Eastern District of New York says documents called "statements of reasons" are an optional way for a judge to express "views that might be of interest." The one he issued two months ago is still reverberating. It expresses his dismay that although his vocation is the administration of justice, his function frequently is the infliction of injustice. The policy of mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses has empowered the government to effectively nullify the constitutional right to a trial. As Lulzim Kupa learned.
In a scientific complex on 88 bucolic acres near here, some astonishingly talented people are advancing a decades-long project to create a sun on Earth. When -- not if; when -- decades hence they and collaborators around the world succeed, their achievement will be more transformative of human life than any prior scientific achievement. The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory's (PPPL) focus -- magnetic fusion research -- began at the university in 1951. It was grounded in the earlier work of a European scientist then living in Princeton. Einstein's theory that mass could be converted into energy had been demonstrated six years earlier near Alamogordo, N.M., by fission -- the splitting of atoms, which released the energy that held the atoms together. By the 1950s, however, attention was turning to an unimaginably more promising method of releasing energy from transforming matter -- the way the sun does, by fusion.
Congressional Republicans' long-simmering dismay about Barack Obama's offenses against the separation of powers became acute when events compelled him to agree with them that the Affordable Care Act could not be implemented as written. But even before he decreed alterations of key ACA provisions -- delaying enforcement of certain requirements for health insurance and enforcement of employers' coverage obligations -- he had effectively altered congressionally mandated policy by altering work requirements of the 1996 welfare reform; and compliance requirements of the No Child Left Behind education law; and some enforcement concerning marijuana possession; and the prosecution of drug crimes entailing mandatory minimum sentences; and the enforcement of immigration laws pertaining to some young people.
Liberals' love of recycling extends to their ideas, one of which illustrates the miniaturization of Barack Obama's presidency. He fervently favors a minor measure that would have mostly small, mostly injurious effects on a small number of people. Nevertheless, raising the minimum hourly wage for the 23rd time since 1938, from today's $7.25 to $10.10, is a nifty idea, if...
The education of Barack Obama is a protracted process as he repeatedly alights upon the obvious with a sense of original discovery. In a recent MSNBC interview, he restocked his pantry of excuses for his disappointing results, announcing that "we have these big agencies, some of which are outdated, some of which are not designed properly": "We've got, for example, 16 different agencies that have some responsibility to help businesses, large and small, in all kinds of ways, whether it's helping to finance them, helping them to export. ... So, we've proposed, let's consolidate a bunch of that stuff. The challenge we've got is that that requires a law to pass. And, frankly, there are a lot of members of Congress who are chairmen of a particular committee. And they don't want necessarily consolidations where they would lose jurisdiction over certain aspects of certain policies." The dawn is coming up like thunder as Obama notices the sociology of government. He shows no sign, however, of drawing appropriate lessons from it.
In his disproportionate praise of the six-month agreement with Iran, Barack Obama said: "For the first time in nearly a decade, we have halted the progress of the Iranian nuclear program." But if the program, now several decades old, had really been "halted" shortly after U.S. forces invaded neighboring Iraq, we would not be desperately pursuing agreements to stop it now, as about 10,000 centrifuges spin to enrich uranium. If Denmark wanted to develop nuclear weapons, we would consider that nation daft but not dangerous. Iran's nuclear program is alarming because Iran's regime is opaque in its decision-making, frightening in its motives (measured by its rhetoric) and barbaric in its behavior.
Critics of the agreement with Iran concerning its nuclear program are right about most things but wrong about the most important things. They understand the agreement's manifest and manifold defects and its probable futility. Crucial components of Iran's nuclear infrastructure remain. U.S. concessions intended to cultivate the Iranian regime's "moderates" are another version of the fatal conceit that U.S. policy can manipulate other societies. As is the hope that easing economic sanctions will create an Iranian constituency demanding nuclear retreat in exchange for yet more economic relief. Critics are, however, wrong in thinking that any agreement could control Iran's nuclear aspirations. And what critics consider the agreement's three worst consequences are actually benefits.
In 2011, tens of thousands of government employees and others, enraged by Gov. Scott Walker's determination to break the ruinously expensive and paralyzing grip that government workers' unions had on Wisconsin, took over the capitol building in Madison. With chanting, screaming and singing supplemented by bullhorns, bagpipes and drum circles, their cacophony shook the building that the squalor of their occupation made malodorous. They spat on Republican legislators and urinated on Walker's office door. They shouted, "This is what democracy looks like!"
We are tomorrow's past, so this Thanksgiving give thanks for 2013, a year the future might study more for amusement than for edification. HealthCare.gov performed the public service of defeating Barack Obama's ascription of every disagreeable effect to one of two causes -- George W. Bush or global warming. Concerning the latter, a CNN anchor wondered if an asteroid that passed by Earth on Feb. 15 was "an effect of, perhaps, global warming." The Los Angeles Times announced that it had stopped publishing letters questioning global warming caused by human activity.
For concision and precision in describing Barack Obama's suddenly ambivalent relationship with his singular -- actually, his single -- achievement, the laurels go to Rep. Steve Scalise, R-La. After Obama's semi-demi-apology for millions of canceled insurance policies -- an intended and predictable consequence of his crusade to liberate Americans from their childish choices of "substandard" policies sold by "bad apple" insurers -- Scalise said: Obama is like someone who burns down your house. Then shows up with an empty water bucket. Then lectures you about how defective the house was.
He has become fodder for an interpretation industry toiling to make his life malleable enough to soothe the sensitivities and serve the agendas of the interpreters. The quantity of writing about him is inversely proportional to the brevity of his presidency. He did not have history-shaping effects comparable to those of his immediate predecessor or successor. Dwight Eisenhower was one of three Americans (with George Washington and Ulysses Grant) who were world-historic figures before becoming president, and Lyndon Johnson was second only to Franklin Roosevelt as a maker of the modern welfare state and second to none in using law to ameliorate America's racial dilemma.
The New Republic magazine was, appropriately, the stimulant that last week gave the Democratic base a frisson of anticipation about a possible Elizabeth Warren presidential candidacy in 2016. Now in her 11th month as a Massachusetts senator, she is suited to carry the progressive torch that was fueled 99 years ago this month by The New Republic's founding.
One reason Washington makes so much bad history is that so many people here know so little history. This helps explain why "comprehensive" immigration reform is foundering: Too few of today's legislators know what happened 163 years ago. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell does know. The most important Kentuckian since Henry Clay, McConnell knows how his hero Clay, who was called "the great compromiser," failed to engineer Senate passage of a comprehensive compromise in 1850. McConnell, who wrote his senior thesis at the University of Louisville on the Compromise of 1850, knows that this was achieved by the canniness of Stephen A. Douglas. His is a name not much mentioned on Capitol Hill since he died in 1861 at age 48.
She who is about to become the most consequential woman in the history of American government will find it easier to be confirmed than it was to be nominated as the next chair of the Federal Reserve Board. Janet Yellen probably was the president's second choice, but Senate Democrats demonstrated their intention and ability to reject Larry Summers. Yellen, whose confirmation hearings are expected to begin Thursday, is suited to be the most important nomination of Barack Obama's second term (unless there is another Supreme Court vacancy). She is experienced and accomplished, and she represents a broad swath of academic thinking about the power of monetary policy and the Fed's proper role in wielding that power.
Barack Obama's presidency has become a feast of failures whose proliferation protects their author from close scrutiny of any one of them. Now, however, we can revisit one of the first and see it as a harbinger of progressivism's downward stumble to HealthCare.gov. "Cash for Clunkers" was born with Obama's administration as a component of his stimulus. Its fate is a window into why the recovery has been extraordinarily weak, and into what happens when progressives' clever plans collide with recalcitrant reality.
This term the Supreme Court will rule on important subjects from racial preferences to restrictions on political speech, but its most momentous case, to be argued Tuesday, concerns the prosecution of a Pennsylvania woman who caused a chemical burn on a romantic rival's thumb. The issue is: Can Congress' powers, which supposedly are limited because they are enumerated, be indefinitely enlarged into a sweeping police power by the process of implementing a treaty?
Brick by brick, judges are dismantling the wall of separation that legislators have built between political activity and the First Amendment's protections of free speech and association. The latest examples, from Mississippi and Arizona, reflect the judiciary's proper engagement in defending citizens from the regulation of political speech, aka "campaign finance reform."
