Columnist.
BETHESDA, Md. -- The pedigree of human beings, Thomas wrote, probably traces to a single cell fertilized by a lightning bolt as the Earth was cooling. Fortunately, genetic "mistakes" -- mutations -- eventually made us. But they also have made illnesses. Almost all diseases arise from some combination of environmental exposures and genetic blunders in the working of DNA. Breast cancer is a family of genetic mutations. The great secret of doctors, wrote Thomas -- who was a physician, philosopher and head of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center -- "is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning." But many things require intelligent interventions -- cures. So, to see the federal government at its best, and sequester-driven spending cuts at their worst, visit the 322 acres where 25,000 people work for the National Institutes of Health.
WASHINGTON -- Barack Obama's increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and redlines is floundering. And at last week's news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
WASHINGTON -- "Colleagues," said the June 27 letter to 98 U.S. senators, "now it is your turn." The letter's authors are Max Baucus, D-Mont., and Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the chairman and ranking Republican on the tax-writing Finance Committee, respectively. From their combined 71 years on Capitol Hill they know that their colleagues will tiptoe gingerly, if at all, onto the hazardous terrain of tax reform. Together with Chairman Dave Camp, R-Mich., of the House Ways and Means Committee, Baucus and Hatch propose a "blank slate" approach, erasing all deductions and credits -- currently worth more than $1 trillion a year -- and requiring legislators to justify reviving them. Hence the Baucus-Hatch letter, in response to which almost 70 senators sent more than 1,000 pages of suggestions. Although some often were short on specificity, the submissions were given encrypted identification numbers and locked in a safe, as befits dangerous documents.
DETROIT -- This city is the broken tooth in Michigan's smile. Nevertheless, the preternaturally optimistic governor, from whom never is heard a discouraging word, cheerfully describes his recent foray with a crew cleaning up a park in a particularly, well, *challenging* neighborhood: The weeds, says Gov. Rick Snyder, were so tall you could not see the sidewalks, or even the playground equipment. Concealed in the underbrush were some old tires. And a boat. And, he notes with an accountant's punctiliousness about presenting a complete record, they also found "a body." Never mind. Now another block of an almost cadaverous city has been reclaimed.
Gazing from the 14th floor toward the city center and the fragile sprouts of urban development along the river, Detroit's Caesar says laconically: "One hundred and thirty-one to go." Kevyn Orr, Detroit's emergency manager appointed by Gov. Rick Snyder, means that housing in this vibrant enclave is 97 percent leased. The enclave is, however, only eight square miles of this city's 139 square miles.
WASHINGTON -- When Houston was competing with a Brazilian city to be the site of a Japanese-owned plant, Houston could provide the Japanese with pertinent information about the educational attainments and other qualities of its workforce and the number of Japanese speakers in the area. The plant is in Texas partly because Houston had superior statistics, thanks to an inexpensive federal program currently under attack from some conservatives. They may not know that its pedigree traces to the Constitution's Framers. These Enlightenment figures -- rational, empirical, inquisitive -- believed in the possibility of evidence-based improvements. And they mandated the "enumeration" of the population every 10 years. James Madison soon proposed expanding the census beyond mere enumeration to recording Americans' occupations. And compliance with the survey was compulsory.
Former Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi knows neither Thomas Jefferson's advice that "great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities" nor the description of Martin Van Buren as a politician who "rowed to his object with muffled oars." Having won just 52 percent of the vote, Morsi pursued his objective -- putting Egypt irrevocably on a path away from secular politics and social modernity -- noisily and imprudently. It is difficult to welcome a military overthrow of democratic results. It is, however, more difficult to regret a prophylactic coup against the exploitation of democratic success to adopt measures inimical to the development of a democratic culture.
WASHINGTON -- At this intermission in the immigration debate, with House Republicans preparing to look askance at the Senate's handiwork, the argument is becoming ever stranger. It has reached a boil, especially concerning border security, at a moment when illegal entries are at a 40-year low and net immigration from Mexico has recently been approximately zero, largely because enforcement efficiency has already been substantially improved and because America's economic growth is inferior to Mexico's. Yet some Senate Republicans support spending $46 billion over 10 years to, among other things, double the number of border agents.
WASHINGTON -- In the 1780s, the son of a farmer in south-central Pennsylvania purchased from his father 116 acres where two roads intersected. He laid out 210 lots for a town he named for himself. He was James Gettys. What happened when two armies collided there 150 years ago was, some might argue, not the most important battle in American history or even in the Civil War. The 1777 defeat of the British at Saratoga won French support for the American Revolution. The Battle of Antietam (Sept. 17, 1862) enabled Abraham Lincoln to redefine the war by issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. The Battle of Midway sealed Japan's fate.
WASHINGTON -- Progressives resent progress when it renders anachronistic once-valid reasons for enlarging the federal government's supervisory and coercive powers. Hence they regret Tuesday's Supreme Court ruling that progress has rendered Section 4 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act unconstitutional. This section stipulates the formula by which nine states and some jurisdictions in others are brought under Section 5, which requires them to get federal permission -- "preclearance" -- for even the most minor changes in voting procedures. The 15th Amendment empowers Congress to enforce with "appropriate legislation" the right to vote. Sections 4 and 5 were appropriate 48 years ago, when the preclearance provisions were enacted for five years. They have been extended four times, most recently in 2006 for 25 years.
WASHINGTON -- Blackmun was concurring in the Bakke decision, which created the higher education "diversity" exception to the equal protection principle: Racial preferences in admissions to a public university do not violate the principle of equal protection of the law if they serve the supposedly compelling interest of achieving the educational benefits of a diverse student body. Twenty-five years later, in a 2003 case upholding the constitutionality of racial preferences in admissions to a state law school, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor declared -- citing no data or other reasons -- that in 25 more years preferences would be unnecessary. What Blackmun did not anticipate, and O'Connor did not appreciate, is that the diversity rationale for racial preferences appeals to the diversity industry in academia precisely because it makes no reference to compensation for prior injustices. Therefore it does not aim to "get beyond" race.
WASHINGTON -- The question of whether Barack Obama's second term will be a failure was answered in the affirmative before his Berlin debacle, which has recast the question, which now is: Will this term be silly, even scary in its detachment from reality? Before Berlin, Obama set his steep downward trajectory by squandering the most precious post-election months on gun-control futilities, and by a subsequent storm of scandals that have made his unvarying project -- ever bigger, more expansive, more intrusive and more coercive government -- more repulsive. Then came Wednesday's pratfall in Berlin.
WASHINGTON -- A quarter of a millennium later, that couplet from a colonial American almanac defines an urgent challenge. Modern society increases how, and the predictability of how much, people differ in the sequel. If America is to be equitable, with careers open to all talents and competent citizens capable of making their way in an increasingly demanding world, Americans must heed the warnings implicit in observations from two heroes of modern conservatism. In "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960), Friedrich Hayek noted that families are the primary transmitters of human capital -- habits, mores, education. Hence families, much more than other social institutions or programs, are determinative of academic and vocational success. In "The Unheavenly City" (1970), Edward C. Banfield wrote: "*All* education favors the middle- and upper-class child, because to be middle or upper class is to have qualities that make one particularly educable."
WASHINGTON -- In May 1918, with America embroiled in the First World War, Iowa's Gov. William Lloyd Harding dealt a blow against Germany. His Babel Proclamation -- that was its title; you cannot make this stuff up -- decreed: "Conversation in public places, on trains and over the telephone should be in the English language." The proscription included church services, funerals and pretty much everything else. Iowa's immigrant communities that spoke Danish, Dutch, Norwegian and French objected to this censorship of languages of America's wartime allies. Harding, however, said speaking any foreign language was an "opportunity [for] the enemy to scatter propaganda." Conversations on street corners and over telephone party lines -- Iowa telephone operators did the metadata-gathering that today's National Security Agency does -- resulted in arrests. Harding was ridiculed but Germany lost the war, so there.
WASHINGTON -- As soon as the Constitution permitted him to run for Congress, Al Salvi did. In 1986, just 26 and fresh from the University of Illinois law school, he sank $1,000 of his own money, which was most of his money, into his campaign to unseat an incumbent Democratic congressman. Salvi studied for the bar exam during meals at campaign dinners. He lost his campaign. Today, however, he should be invited to Congress to testify about what happened 10 years later when he was a prosperous lawyer and won the Republican Senate nomination to run against a Democratic congressman named Dick Durbin.
The steamboat conveying Andrew Jackson up the Ohio River toward his tumultuous 1829 inauguration had brooms lashed to its bow, symbolizing Old Hickory's vow to clean up Washington. But sweeping out Washington's Augean stables, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, is steady work, so steady it never ends. Neither do the policies that cosset sugar producers.
WASHINGTON -- Libertarians believe government should have a compelling reason before it restricts an individual's liberty. Today's liberals believe almost any reason will do, because liberty is less important than equality, fraternity, fighting obesity, and many other aspirations. Now, however, one of the most senior and liberal U.S. senators and one of the most junior and libertarian have a proposal that could slow and even repair some of the fraying of society. Seven-term Democrat Pat Leahy's 38 Senate years have made him Judiciary Committee chairman. Republican Rand Paul is in his third Senate year. They hope to reduce the cruelty, irrationality and cost of the current regime of mandatory minimum sentences for federal crimes.
Texting while driving is dangerous, especially if you are driving a train. A commuter train engineer was texting on Sept. 12, 2008, near Los Angeles, when he missed a stop signal and crashed into a freight train. Twenty-five people died. Congress supposedly is incapable of acting quickly, and we are supposed to regret this. In 2008, however, Congress acted with dispatch. We should regret that it did. Herewith another lesson about the costs of the regulatory state, especially when it is excited, eager to make a gesture, and propelled by an uninformed consensus.
WASHINGTON -- Lord Byron was, according to one of his legion of lovers, "mad, bad and dangerous to know," but he also loved dogs, which explains his cameo appearance in a recent Texas Supreme Court opinion. It answered an interesting question in a way that shows how courts can avoid creating opportunities for trial lawyers. The eyes of Texas were upon the state's high court when it reaffirmed an 1891 ruling that because pets are personal property, a bereaved owner of a negligently killed dog can seek only economic damages, not emotional damages. A lower court had sided with the Medlen family, letting them sue for "loss of companionship" after their dog Avery escaped from their backyard, was captured by animal control officers and was mistakenly euthanized.
