Columnist.
WASHINGTON -- Wonder why you have already broken all your New Year's resolutions? Do not blame yourself -- heaven forbid. Enlist modern sophistication and blame your brain's frontal cortex, affluence, the Internet (the "collapse of delay between impulse and action") and "the democratization of temptation." Those phrases are from Daniel Akst, a novelist and essayist whose book "We Have Met the Enemy: Self-Control in an Age of Excess" notes that the problems of freedom and affluence -- of "managing desire in a landscape rich with temptation" -- are desirable problems. But they are problems and have fascinating philosophic entanglements.
WASHINGTON -- New Republican legislators should come down Capitol Hill to the National Museum of American History, which displays a device that in 1849 was granted U.S. patent 6469. It enabled a boat's "draught of water to be readily lessened" so it could "pass over bars, or through shallow water." The patentee was from Sangamon County, Ill. Across Constitution Avenue, over the Commerce Department's north entrance, are some words of the patentee, Abraham Lincoln: THE PATENT SYSTEM ADDED THE FUEL OF INTEREST TO THE FIRE OF GENIUS Stoking that fire is, more than ever, a proper federal function, so the legislators should be given some reading matter. One is William Rosen's book "The Most Powerful Idea in the World," a study of the culture of invention. Another is the National Academy of Sciences report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm, Revisited," an addendum to a 2005 report on declining support for science and engineering research.
WASHINGTON -- Cowlitz County in Washington state is across the Columbia River from Portland, Ore., which promotes mass transit and urban density and is a green reproach to the rest of us. Recently, Cowlitz did something that might make Portland wonder whether shrinking its carbon footprint matters. Cowlitz approved construction of a coal export terminal from which millions of tons of U.S. coal could be shipped to Asia annually. Both Oregon and Washington are curtailing the coal-fired generation of electricity, but the future looks to greens as black as coal. The future looks a lot like the past.
WASHINGTON -- The nation's menu of crises caused by governmental malpractice may soon include states coming to Congress as mendicants, seeking relief from the consequences of their choices. Congress should forestall this by passing a bill with a bland title but explosive potential. Principal author of the Public Employee Pension Transparency Act is Rep. Devin Nunes, a Republican from California, where about 80 cents of every government dollar goes for government employees' pay and benefits. His bill would define the scale of the problem of underfunded state and local government pensions, and would notify states not to approach Congress like Oliver Twists, holding out porridge bowls and asking for more.
WASHINGTON -- Many parents have heard FICA Screams. Indignant children, holding in trembling hands their first paychecks, demand to know what FICA is and why it is feasting on their pay. FICA (the Federal Insurance Contributions Act tax) is government compassion, expressed numerically: It is the welfare state; it funds Social Security and Medicare. Sometimes it makes young people into conservatives.
WASHINGTON -- As the new political group No Labels convened in Manhattan, a judge was issuing a decision that illustrated why the group's premise is preposterous and its pretense is cloying. The premise, obscured by gaseous rhetoric, is that political heat is inherently disproportionate. The complacent pretense is that it is virtuous to transcend the vice of partisanship. No Labels purports to represent a supposedly disaffected middle of the ideological spectrum. Some No Labels enthusiasts speak of eliminating "political retribution," presumably meaning voters defeating candidates with whose positions they disagree. No Labels promises to police the political speech of the intemperate.
The difference between planning and accomplishing in war is on many minds as the Obama administration reviews progress, such as it has been, in Afghanistan in the 54 weeks since the president simultaneously announced the surge and a July 2011 beginning of "the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan." Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan from 2003 to 2005, was recently asked (on ABC's "This Week") to assess progress there. He responded with minimalist optimism: There has been "localized improvement" in "certain areas."
WASHINGTON -- The passions that swirled around Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that ended 10 years ago Sunday, dissipated quickly. And remarkably little damage was done by the institutional collisions that resulted when control of the nation's supreme political office turned on 537 votes out of 5,963,110 cast in Florida.
WASHINGTON -- On a midweek afternoon in February 2009, a month into the Obama presidency, Republican Rep. Mike Pence arrived at Columbus in his east-central Indiana district for a town hall meeting, the sort of event that usually attracted a few dozen constituents. Surprised to see the hallway outside the room crowded with people, "their arms folded and brows furrowed," Pence shouted down the hall to an aide, asking him to get a janitor to open the room. The aide shouted back that the room was open -- and overflowing. Congress had just passed the stimulus (Pence voted no) and Hoosiers were stimulated to anger. Soon the tea party would be simmering.
WASHINGTON -- Debates about judicial review concern the propriety and scope of judicial supervision of democracy, and involve the countermajoritarian dilemma: How to square the principle of popular sovereignty with the practice of allowing appointed judges, accountable to no contemporary constituency, to overturn laws enacted by elected legislators? A case destined for the Supreme Court concerns the health care law. The Constitution establishes a government of limited and enumerated powers. Which one empowers Congress to force individuals to purchase health insurance and to punish those who do not?
WASHINGTON -- The Framers of the Constitution, a nuisance regretted by most modern presidents, gave the legislative branch -- another indignity inflicted on presidents, as they see it -- an important role in making foreign policy. The Framers did so by, among other provisions, requiring the Senate's two-thirds (today, 67 votes) consent to treaties. The Framers' wisdom is confirmed by Barack Obama's impatience with senators reluctant to ratify, during Congress' lame-duck session, the New START treaty pertaining to Russia's nuclear weapons.
WASHINGTON -- An eminent Harvard law professor, James Thayer (1831-1902), argued that although the judicial function is "merely that of fixing the outside border of reasonable legislative action," this still gives courts "a great and stately jurisdiction." While patrolling that jurisdiction today, Supreme Court justices may be playing the video game "Postal 2," whose rich menu of simulated mayhem provoked California's Legislature to pass a problematic law. During the oral argument about whether the law restricting children's access to violent video games violates First Amendment guarantees of free expression, the lawyer representing game manufacturers urged the court to remember America's history of moral panics, which he said included one in the early 1950s about comic books. Really? Yes, and the episode remains instructive.
WASHINGTON -- Winning California's state lottery with the first ticket he bought put Kevin McCarthy, then 20, on a path to becoming, in January, the third-ranking Republican leader of a House majority pledged to make government less bountiful. With the $5,000 he won in 1985, McCarthy opened a sandwich shop in a nook in a small mall in Bakersfield, and hung a sign calling attention to it. When a government vehicle arrived, he thought city hall might have come "to give me the key to the city" as thanks for generating some jobs and sales tax revenues. But Bakersfield's bureaucracy wanted to complain about his sign, which somehow fell short of sign orthodoxy.
WASHINGTON -- Fifty years ago William F. Buckley wrote a memorable complaint about the fact that Americans do not complain enough. His point, like most of the points he made during his well-lived life, is, unfortunately, more pertinent than ever. Were he still with us he would favor awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which he received in 1991, to John Tyner, who, when attempting to board a plane in San Diego, was provoked by some Transportation Security Administration personnel.
WASHINGTON -- This lame-duck Congress -- its mandate exhausted, many of its members repudiated -- should merely fund the government for a few months at current spending levels with a "continuing resolution," then apologize for almost everything else it has done, and depart. If, however, the 111th Congress wants to make amends, it should repeal something the 95th did. The Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act of 1978 gave the Federal Reserve a "dual mandate." Although the central bank is a creature of Congress, it is, in trying to fulfill this mandate, becoming a fourth branch of government.
WASHINGTON -- General Motors, an appendage of the government, which owns 61 percent of it, is spending some of your money, dear reader, on full-page newspaper ads praising a government brainstorm -- the Volt, Chevrolet's highly anticipated and prematurely celebrated (sort of) electric car. Although the situation is murky -- GM and its government masters probably prefer it that way -- it is unclear in what sense GM has any money that is truly its own. And the Volt is not quite an electric car, or not the sort GM deliberately misled Americans into expecting.
WASHINGTON -- As he promised it would be, Barack Obama's presidency has been transformative, but not as he intended. Whether it lasts two or six more years, it is an exhausted volcano because its biggest consequence may already have happened: It has resuscitated the right, making 2010 conservatism's best year in 30 years -- since the election of Ronald Reagan.
Some Democrats read the election returns as symptoms of health because things could have been worse: "Happily, we have leprosy, not cholera." But embracing the fallacy of false alternatives is not a step toward recuperation. Neither is continuing the attitude Democrats adopted when passing Obamacare and that foretold their unhappy election: "No compromise with the voters!"
WASHINGTON -- Unwilling to delay until tomorrow mistakes that could be made immediately, Democrats used 2010 to begin losing 2012. Trying to pre-emptively drain the election of its dangerous (to Democrats) meaning, all autumn Democrats described the electorate as suffering a brain cramp, an apoplexy of fear, rage, paranoia, cupidity -- something. Any explanation would suffice as long as it cast what voters were about to say as perhaps contemptible and certainly too trivial to be taken seriously by the serious.
WASHINGTON -- During the Tuesday evening deluge, pay particular attention to these stories...
