Columnist.
Seldom in American history has the Supreme Court unanimously rejected positions advocated by presidents' administrations. But in this respect at least, President Obama has produced the fundamental transformation he promised in his 2008 campaign. Over the last three years, the Court has rejected Obama administration positions repeatedly in unanimous 9-0 decisions. A review of these cases reveals much about the governing philosophy of the Obama administration.
Government just doesn't work very well. That's the persuasive thesis of three important books published this year. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's "The Fourth Revolution" takes a historical and international (and British) perspective. They argue that the welfare state, a creation of early 20th-century Brits, has become clunky in comparison to recent reforms in Scandinavia and the Asian model most highly developed in Lee Kuan Yew's Singapore. Peter Schuck's "Why Government Fails So Often" looks at a multitude of federal programs and concludes that most, though not all, have "deep structures" which make "policy failure and mismanagement" inevitable.
I'm old enough to remember when American liberals cherished the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment. They celebrated especially the freedom accorded those with unpopular beliefs and protested attempts to squelch the expression of differing opinions. Today things are different. American liberals are not challenging the Supreme Court rulings extending First Amendment protection to nude dancers, flag burners and students wearing antiwar armbands. They are content to leave these as forms of protected free speech. But political speech is a whole other thing. Currently 43 Democratic senators are so-sponsoring the constitutional amendment introduced by New Mexico's Sen. Tom Udall to amend the First Amendment so that it no longer protects political speech.
What should Republican lawmakers do about immigration? That's been a simmering source of controversy ever since George W. Bush's push for so-called comprehensive immigration legislation, with legalization and enforcement provisions, in 2006. Most liberals and many economic conservatives argued that support for such legislation was a political imperative for Republicans. Otherwise, they would continue to lose Hispanic voters, an inevitably increasing segment of the electorate, by 2-1 margins. That argument was bolstered by the 2004 exit poll, which showed comprehensive immigration supporter George W. Bush getting 44 percent of the Hispanic vote. That percentage may have been inflated, but if Bush had received the percentages of John McCain (31) or Mitt Romney (27), he would probably not have been re-elected.
America's two political parties seem to be coming apart. That's in contrast to the relatively stable competition of the last 20 years, when Democrats have won four of six presidential elections and Republicans won House majorities in eight of 10 congressional contests, always by less than landslide margins. The parties' stands on issues have remained familiar from one cycle to the next. That pattern seems likely to hold this year, with Republicans favored to hold their House majority, and with a better than 50 percent chance of gaining the Senate majority that eluded them in 2010 and 2012.
Polls show that most Americans wanted the United States to withdraw from Iraq. Barack Obama did indeed withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq, not troubling to negotiate a readily negotiable status of forces agreement that would have left a contingent of American soldiers there. Polls show that most Americans want the United States to withdraw from Afghanistan. Barack Obama has announced that the bulk of U.S. forces will withdraw from Afghanistan during his term in office, with only small numbers -- less than military leaders recommended -- remaining, provided the new Afghan government approves. The most recent Pew Research Center poll conducted for the Council on Foreign Relations shows that 52 percent of Americans -- the highest percentage in the last 40 years -- think the U.S. should mind its own business internationally and let other countries get along as best they can on their own. Evidently they don't want to see America being, in the old phrase, the policeman of the world.
President Obama evidently was caught by surprise by the scandal at the Department of Veterans Affairs. So, apparently, was VA Secretary Eric Shinseki, who evidently took at face value the corrupt VA statistics -- and who, after a distinguished military career, resigned last week. One who was probably not taken by surprise is longtime Yale Law Professor Peter Schuck, who identified the problems at the VA before the scandal broke in his recently published book, "Why Government Fails So Often and How It Can Do Better." Schuck is no libertarian who wants to do away with government altogether. He says he has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate but one since 1964.
Last week I set out a 2016 nightmare scenario for Republicans -- not one that seems likely, but one that can be extrapolated from current polling. In that spirit, let me set out a 2016 nightmare scenario for Democrats -- again, not likely but a plausible extrapolation. It assumes, first of all, that Hillary Clinton is not the Democratic nominee, or that her poll numbers have gone sharply down (they've declined somewhat over the last year, and could conceivably fall more). And it assumes that voters' attitude toward the Obama administration remains roughly where it is today, with 44 percent job approval for the president.
The opinion pages, economic journals and liberal websites are atwitter (a-Twitter?) these days over French economist Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century." Left-wingers cite Piketty's statistics showing growing wealth inequality -- though some have been challenged by the Financial Times -- in support of Piketty's policy response, huge taxes on high incomes and accumulated wealth. One suspects that many of his fans have another agenda in mind. They'd like to gull a majority of the 99 percent to vote for parties that would put their friends in control of an engorged state apparatus. There they could stamp out fossil fuels in favor of renewables -- and get all those overweight suburbanites out of their vulgar SUVs and into subways, and out of their ticky-tack subdivisions and into gleaming mid-20th century modern high-rises. (Actually, there is a great city like that: Moscow.)
The 2016 presidential election is shaping up as another close race, like the last four. From 2000 to 2012, both major parties' nominees received between 45 and 53 percent of the vote. Historically, that's a narrow range, not seen since 1880-1892. It suggests something close to parity between two highly competitive parties. Polls for the 2016 race, however, suggest strikingly different results. One would be a nightmare for Republicans. The other would be a nightmare for Democrats.
Gummit don't work good. That conclusion, often that inelegantly expressed, seems to be more and more common, not only in the United States but around the world. It is certainly the verdict of John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in their new book "The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State," although expressed, as you might expect from the editor and business editor of the Economist, in far more urbane language. Their thesis is that the state has been reinvented three times in the last 400 years, and needs reinvention once more. The first revolution they name after Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century philosopher who called for a powerful dictatorial state to protect people from the horrors of all-out war.
British politics has a familiar look to Americans, with a center-right Conservative Party and a center-left Labour Party resembling America's Republicans and Democrats. Britain's parliamentary system, however, presents a contrast with the U.S. Constitution on the surface. A prime minister whose party has a majority in the House of Commons can pass any law he or she likes, since members of Parliament almost always vote on party lines. The House of Lords can delay or amend legislation, but can be overridden by a Commons majority. The monarch theoretically has a veto, but it has not been exercised for hundreds of years and is unthinkable today.
In recent times, British and American politics have often flowed in parallel currents. Margaret Thatcher's election as prime minister in 1979 was followed by Ronald Reagan's election as president in 1980. As Charles Moore notes in his biography of Thatcher, the two worked together, albeit with some friction, reversing the tide of statism at home and ending the Soviet empire abroad. They seemed to establish British Conservatives and American Republicans as their nation's natural ruling parties. In time, Democrats and Labour responded. Bill Clinton's "New Democrat" politics prevailed in 1992, and Tony Blair's New Labourites, adapting Clinton's strategy, won the first of three big national landslides in 1997.
Demography is destiny, we are often told, and rightly -- up to a point. The American electorate is made up of multiple identifiable segments, defined in various ways, by race and ethnicity, by age cohort, by region and religiosity (or lack thereof), by economic status and interest. Over time, some segments become larger and some smaller. Some prove to be politically crucial, given the political alignments of the time. Others become irrelevant as they lose cohesion and identity. From the results of the 2008 presidential election, many pundits prophesied a bleak future for the Republican Party, and not implausibly.
Results of Tuesday's primaries, particularly the victory of state House Speaker Thom Tillis in North Carolina's Republican Senate primary, are being hailed -- or decried -- as a victory for the Republican establishment over the Tea Party movement. There's something to that. Tillis benefited from support from Karl Rove's American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and endorsements by Mitt Romney and Jeb Bush. In contrast, Sen. Rand Paul flew in on the day before the election to campaign for second-place finisher and fellow physician Greg Bannon, who was also endorsed by Tea Party Patriots and FreedomWorks. Mike Huckabee campaigned for the third-place candidate, minister Mark Harris.
Second-term presidencies are an opportunity for bipartisan compromise. The institutional stars are in alignment to address long-range problems not amenable in other circumstances. The president is barred from running for a third term and thus does not have to worry about his next campaign. In Congress, members of the president's party, with some reason to fear losses in the off-year election, may be willing to compromise before their bargaining leverage weakens. Members of the opposition party may be more willing also, since their hopes of getting a new president of their own party have been at least temporarily dashed.
For a president who hasn't enjoyed many foreign policy successes lately, Barack Obama did pretty well on his just completed trip to Asia. In Japan, he reiterated in no uncertain terms the American defense commitment, including on the Senkaku islands in the East China Sea, which China also claims and calls the Diaoyus. "Historically, they have been administered by Japan, and we do not believe they should be subject to change unilaterally," Obama said. "What is a consistent part of the alliance is that the treaty covers all territories administered by Japan."
French economist Thomas Piketty's book "Capitalism in the Twenty-First Century" has been inspiring a lot of comment and controversy. The English translation published last month zipped to No. 1 on amazon.com. It has given a lift to economists on the Left who have cheered on Barack Obama's flagging attempts to make income inequality a voting issue. They have hailed it as "truly superb" and "extraordinarily important." Others, not all on the Right, have taken a jaundiced view. "All wrong" was the verdict of one. "The main argument is based on two (false) claims," concluded another.
Schuette v. BAMN shouldn't have been a hard case. The Fourteenth Amendment outlaws racial discrimination. Racial quotas and preferences are, by definition, racial discrimination. Fifty-eight percent of Michigan voters in 2006 voted to prohibit racial quotas and preferences in admission to state colleges and universities. As Justice Antonin Scalia asked in his concurring opinion in Schuette v. BAMN, announced April 22, "Does the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment forbid what it expressly requires?" He went on, "Needless to say (except that this case obliges us to say it), the question answers itself."
Have the Republicans become the white man's party? Are the depth and bitterness of Republicans' opposition to Barack Obama and his administration the product of racism? Those are questions you hear in the clash of political argument, and you will hear plenty of answers in the affirmative if you click onto MSNBC or salon.com with any regularity. You can find a more nuanced and thoughtful analysis in Jonathan Chait's recent New York magazine article, "The Color of His Presidency." Chait, a liberal, starts off by noting that the post-racial America that Obama seemed to promise in his 2004 national convention speech and his 2008 campaign has not come into being.
