Columnist.
The U.S. Supreme Court handed down two decisions this week that cry out for Congressional action. In upholding the constitutionality of most aspects of President Obama's health care reform legislation and in reaffirming the federal government's role in immigration policy, the Court's decisions should be a call to action for Congress to pass new legislation on these two vital issues. It's important to recognize that the decisions were narrowly tailored to deal only with constitutionality of the two laws at issue: the federal Affordable Care Act and Arizona's S.B. 1070. Neither decision spoke to the wisdom of existing policy in either area. In fact, both health care and immigration laws are in desperate need of major revisions. The health care decision, announced Thursday, affirmed the constitutionality of the major provisions of the law. While striking down one provision having to do with Medicaid, the Court upheld the most controversial part of the law, which mandates that individuals buy health insurance or pay a penalty to the federal government.
Can the federal government adequately predict exactly how many mathematicians, engineers, biochemists, and inventors the United States will need twenty years in the future? I doubt many of us would answer yes. Yet, federal immigration policy does exactly that in allotting work visas for highly skilled employees. Most of the debate over immigration has centered on low-skilled workers, especially the large population of illegal immigrants who have entered the country over the last two decades. But our legal immigration system is dysfunctional as well. The system primarily focuses on re-uniting foreign-born relatives with family members who are already here, paying little attention to what's good for our economy and what will benefit Americans by creating more jobs and wealth for all of us.
Gov. Scott Walker's victory in the Wisconsin recall election this week was no surprise to anyone but Big Labor. Unions were furious when Walker and the Republican-controlled legislature cut back their right to bargain on anything beyond wages. Democratic legislators fled the state for several weeks in 2011 in order to try to prevent a final vote from taking place. Demonstrators took over the state capitol, and when that didn't work, unions and left-leaning groups gathered signatures to force a recall vote. The national Democratic Party initially saw what was happening in Wisconsin as a popular revolt against Republican excesses and a key to preventing Republicans from building on their success in the 2010 congressional and gubernatorial elections. But as time for the recall neared, even party hacks were nervous. Still, organized labor pressed on, sure that they could count on Democrats, young people, minorities, and -- especially -- union households to turn out in greater numbers and vote to kick out Walker.
While much of the world's attention is focused on the Assad regime's appalling assaults against Syrian citizens, with more than a hundred dead in this week's massacre in Houla alone, another human rights atrocity occurring on a much larger scale garners far less attention. North Korea's new leader, Kim Jong-Eun, has done what few expected when he assumed power after his father's death last December. Instead of loosening control in the most totalitarian nation in the world, Kim Jong-Eun has actually expanded the number of North Koreans subject to forced labor, torture, starvation and death in the totalitarian nation's prison camps.
The Wisconsin recall election of Republican Gov. Scott Walker is not going quite like the unions and the Democratic Party expected. Back in 2011, many pundits thought that the governor had overreached when he took on public employee unions, restricting -- though not eliminating -- collective bargaining rights. But he did so because he inherited a state in dire financial shape with a deficit of $3.6 billion and public employee pensions and benefits that threatened to bankrupt the state.
Like many Americans, genealogy has been a keen interest of mine. I've had a good sense of where my family came from -- Spain on my father's side and the British Isles on my mother's. But what I knew was only part of the story. And this Sunday, May 20th, what I subsequently learned will be aired on the PBS series "Finding Your Roots."
The U.S. dodged another terrorist bullet when a would-be "underwear bomber" turned out to be a double agent. The news became public this week after rumors had circulated in April that Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a Yemini-based group that is now the chief terrorist threat against the U.S., had been planning a spectacular attack to coincide with the one-year anniversary of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden last May 2.
The Obama administration's record on human rights, never strong, just got a whole lot worse. This week's dramatic saga of Chinese dissident Chen Guangcheng's escape from house arrest in Shandong province to safety inside the U.S. Embassy to the embassy's role in handing him over to Chinese authorities is a disgraceful tale. Once again, the Obama administration has chosen to put human rights violations on the back burner, as it has nearly every time it has been asked for help, whether from Iranian protesters in 2009 or Syrian freedom fighters today.
Marco Rubio has thrown the GOP a lifeline; let's see whether his fellow party members are willing to grab it. The freshman U.S. senator from Florida has been a hard-line foe to illegal immigrants, both in his home state and since his election to Congress, but now he is considering drafting a new "DREAM Act," which would offer legal status to illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children. Similar efforts have failed in recent years, almost entirely because of Republican opposition. But according to the polls, most Americans favor such a measure. And passing it would be not only smart politics but also, more importantly, the right thing to do.
If Mitt Romney is to have any chance of beating President Barack Obama in November, he must win a larger share of the Hispanic vote than current polls suggest he will. And he won't unless he solves his immigration problem. It's a problem of his own making. He decided that beating up on illegal immigrants would boost his popularity among those suspicious that he was really a moderate Republican. In doing so, he injected an issue into the campaign that had largely fizzled -- and for good reason. Illegal immigration is down to historical lows -- primarily because the U.S. economy continues to be sluggish, so fewer people want to come here.
Not since Hillary Clinton's infamous remark during the 1992 presidential campaign -- "I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas" -- has a prominent Democratic woman so insulted full-time homemakers. Speaking on CNN Wednesday, Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen said that Ann Romney has "never worked a day in her life" and, therefore, can't understand the struggles of most women. Rather than apologize for sticking her thumb in the eyes of millions of American homemakers, Rosen doubled down when critics responded. "This isn't about whether Ann Romney or I or other women of some means can afford to make a choice to stay home and raise kids," she said. Talk about a "war on women"; this sounds like a war on work-at-home moms. In Rosen's view, they're either lazy or privileged.
A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center says a lot about the assimilation of the nation's largest minority group -- both good and bad. Hispanics -- those 50 million people who trace their ancestry to a Spanish-speaking country -- have become both more numerous and more diverse in the past 40 years. In 1970, Hispanics were primarily U.S.-born Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans -- who are U.S. citizens, whether born in Puerto Rico or on the mainland. But the adult population of Hispanics today is almost equally divided between those who were born in the U.S., 48 percent, and those who are foreign-born, 52 percent.
It may be months before we know what actually happened the night Trayvon Martin was shot in Sanford, Fla. on February 26. But many seem to have already decided that this was a brutal case of racial profiling and vigilante justice, emblematic of lingering racism in America. Martin's parents, who understandably want justice for their son, have been joined by a plethora of activists, politicians, commentators and celebrities in demanding that the shooter, George Zimmerman, be arrested and tried for murder. The Justice Department has gotten in on the act as well, investigating whether the shooting constituted a hate crime based on a an inaudible comment by Zimmerman on his 911 call that some have alleged was a racial slur. But turning this tragic incident into a symbol of racism is wrong and reeks of opportunism on the part of racial showmen like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson.
Much of the attention in the Middle East over the past few months has been focused on the suffering of the people of Syria. But the Assad regime in Syria, which is slaughtering its own people by the thousands, does so with help from its only ally, Iran. And it is not only in Syria that Iran wreaks havoc; Iran is the chief state sponsor of terrorism throughout the world.
Is Mitt Romney in favor of increasing the number of illegal immigrants in the United States? You might not think so, given his tough anti-illegal immigration rhetoric, but his leading immigration adviser wants to do just that. What's more, the proposal this adviser is pushing would impose a new tax -- from $1,200 to $1,600 -- on every American family for the birth of each child. These are the conclusions of a new study put out by the conservative think tank the National Foundation for American Policy. The whole study calls into question the motives behind the radical anti-immigration groups that have been trying to make illegal immigration a central issue in the campaign.
When it comes to the Nanny State, count me a critic. But I make a distinction between the government improperly sticking its nose where it doesn't belong and government acting as a good steward of my tax dollars. The difference explains why I support a proposal by a conservative state legislator that lets government tell food stamp recipients what they can and cannot buy with government funds. But there are limits to this intrusion.
Have we become so hypersensitive that a phrase in use for half a millennia must now be banished from the English lexicon? I'm speaking, of course, of the furor created last week when ESPN's mobile site ran a story headlined "A Chink in the Armor." The idiom is commonly used to describe the vulnerability in an otherwise impenetrable defense. Its etymology goes back to the Middle Ages, when knights in battle wore suits of armor that covered their bodies head to foot. Opponents looked for small openings -- chinks -- through which they might thrust their swords or other weapons.
Extending the payroll tax cut -- as the GOP leadership has now agreed with Democrats to do -- may be good politics, but it is lousy policy. For the average household with earnings of $49,445 a year (about the median), keeping individual payroll taxes at 4.2 percent as opposed to 6.2 percent will mean about a thousand dollars more in their wallets this year. And generally speaking, letting people keep more of their own money to spend and invest as they choose is a good thing, both for individuals and the economy as a whole.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the current refusal of the GOP base to accept Mitt Romney as the de facto presidential nominee will doom the party to failure in the fall. The thought is that too many debates, too much sniping among the candidates, and an overall enthusiasm deficit will leave the nominee -- and the odds still favor Romney -- mortally wounded. But this election was never going to be decided so much by voters affirmatively choosing the Republican candidate as by whether they were going to reject Barack Obama. Second-term elections are always a referendum on the incumbent, not the challenger. And when Americans have chosen to turn out a sitting president, it has rarely been because the challenger was so much more appealing. The qualities of the challenger aren't irrelevant; they're just not as decisive as the perceived success or failure of the incumbent.
Horror of horrors! Lego has introduced a new line of gender-specific toys aimed at girls. I might not even have become aware of the controversy had it not been a topic of discussion on the all-female PBS talk show "To the Contrary," on which I frequently appear. That we are still debating the pros and cons of allowing boys and girls to prefer different play choices says a great deal about the failure of the feminist movement. Lego, which markets plastic building blocks for everything from "Star Wars" fighting vehicles to Egyptian pyramids, has now introduced a line aimed at young girls. The new toys include Butterfly Beauty Shop, Stephanie's Outdoor Bakery, and Olivia's House, all featuring recognizable girl figures with long hair and feminine outlines, unlike the squat, sexless figures that characterize many of the company's other building sets. More importantly, these toys depict girls engaging in traditionally female activities and roles: getting their hair done, baking, caring for children.
