Columnist.
"[T]he Department of Education is not just wasting the billions it controls. It does substantial damage."
The Department of Education was created under President Carter in 1979 under the same misguided pretense that has driven much of the growth of our massively bloated federal government — that if there is something we really care about, we should give more money and power to Washington bureaucrats. It would be good news if the Department of Education just wasted the money it gets from our hard-earned taxes. But it uses the money to do real damage.
The push back against Donald Trump is about far more than Republican "elites" at war with Republican voters, which is what some claim. They say that Trump captured the strong anti-establishment sentiments of voters and that an entrenched Washington establishment won't accept this new reality.
The exchange between Senator Ted Cruz and Chuck Todd on "Meet the Press" last Sunday was possibly the most powerful and revealing of this whole presidential campaign. Cruz asked the crucial and telling question: "Why was there no Republican debate in Indiana?" Todd had no response other than defend his bosses at NBC. After the long slog of this campaign, after 12 debates, we arrived to a critical and potentially decisive moment in Indiana, with perhaps the highest stakes yet. And where is the media? Out to lunch.
I periodically get mail from folks who find it annoying that anyone pays attention to racial and ethnic differences. Aren't we all Americans? Isn't it un-American to refer to citizens as "African-Americans," "Hispanic-Americans," "Asian-Americans," and so on? My answer is, certainly not. In fact, the opposite is true. America is about "e pluribus unum." Out of many one. Although the origin of the idea "e pluribus unum" was about unity of the different states under one federal government, it is also relevant in terms of the integration of citizens from many different racial and ethnic backgrounds into one national fabric of common values and truths.
In 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, and former chairman of the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, to replace Thurgood Marshall on the U.S. Supreme Court. The rest, as they say, is history.
Georgia Republican Governor Nathan Deal recently vetoed H.B. 757, the Georgia Religious Liberty Bill. The governor warned that he would veto any legislation that "allows discrimination in our state in order to protect people of faith." He went on to tell fellow Republicans, who shepherded the bill that they should "recognize that the world is changing around us." Governor Deal wasn't alone in issuing warnings about the bill. Large corporations with a presence in the state threatened to pull operations out of Georgia if the bill passed. Perhaps this was more on Governor Deal's mind than our changing world.
After the 2012 election, when Americans re-elected Barack Obama, Republican Party leadership rightly did some soul searching. Republicans were in shock that Americans could re-elect a man they saw as clearly bad for the country, weakening us at home and fueling instability abroad. Polls showed that Obama's signature law, the Affordable Health Care Act — Obamacare — was not popular. It was clear that economic recovery was moving far too slowly, and that the economy was of top concern to Americans.
Although the current colorful, for want of a better word, presidential campaign is attracting attention from voters, indicators are that this attention reflects voters being turned off to the whole process. According to new polling data from Gallup, in the first three months of 2016 the percentage of Americans who say they have given "a lot of thought" to the election increased from 63 percent to 71 percent. However, over the same period, the percentage saying they are "extremely or very enthusiastic" about voting dropped from 48 percent to 43 percent.
The passage of the Affordable Care Act — aka Obamacare — in 2010 launched the tea party movement and planted seeds of resentment toward the Washington establishment that rages across the nation today. And there's no better of example of why this movement of outrage has grown and accelerated than the case — Zubik v. Burwell — now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Zubik v. Burwell, more popularly known as Obamacare v. Little Sisters of the Poor, is about the Obamacare mandate requiring employers and private insurance plans to provide cost-free coverage for contraceptives, sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs.
I was recently made very proud, and also very humbled, by receiving the Ronald Reagan Award, given at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference by the American Conservative Union. Regarding the award, ACU says: "The winners of this award, our highest honor, are not household names, but the men and women working in the trenches, who sacrifice and, in so doing, set an example for others." I write about this at the risk of coming off as the opposite of humble. After all, Star, really — announcing your award to the world? I'm writing about it because of the chaotic time we are in now, and because, no, it is not about Star Parker. It is about America and working to save our country.
The Supreme Court heard arguments last week in the Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt case, where the constitutionality of HB 2, the Texas omnibus abortion law that Gov. Rick Perry signed in 2013, is being challenged. At issue are the new regulations that the law placed on abortion providers in Texas. One: Facilities performing abortions must meet all standards of an "ambulatory surgical center." Two: Any physician performing an abortion must have "admitting privileges" at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic.
Hillary Clinton is now setting a campaign theme that should provide a golden opportunity for Republicans, if Republicans play their cards right. "We don't need to make America great. America has never stopped being great," says Clinton. But this doesn't reflect how most Americans now feel. The percentage saying they are satisfied with how things are going in the country has averaged less than 30 percent since 2007, according to Gallup.
Down in South Carolina, in the days before the Republican primary, I was shocked by the number of South Carolinians who told me they were trying to decide whether to support Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. This choice is, of course, possible in an open primary state such as South Carolina. But what could possibly be happening, I asked myself, that the same voter could be considering Sanders and Trump? When I dropped out of the welfare state 33 years ago and became a conservative and a Republican, I felt I was walking out of one world and into another that was totally, irreconcilably different.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is doing the nation a service by announcing he will work to block President Obama's appointment to replace Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia and delay until after the election. The inevitable resulting clash between the Senate and the White House, made sharper in the midst of an election, is a confrontation vital for the nation. This is more than raw politics, Democrats versus Republicans. It is about ideology and bringing clarity to what the country has become and where it is headed. America is extremely polarized today compared to where it was just 20 years ago.
The 2012 presidential election delivered a wake-up call to the Republican Party to improve communication with minorities. The realization that the American presidency can now be won with support of less than 40 percent of white voters — Obama won with just 39 percent — was a bombshell. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in November 1980, 88 percent of the electorate was white. In 2012, when Barack Obama was elected, this was down to 72 percent. Pew Research projects that in 2016 the percentage of white voters will be down to 69 percent. This trend will continue, as America becomes a nation that is less and less white.
Donald Trump is running a pretty successful presidential campaign saying that he wants to "Make America Great Again." But he seems to have very little interest in what exactly it is that makes America great. This paradox is very much on display when Trump talks about eminent domain, the authority given to government in the constitution to take private property for public use. Trump says, "Eminent domain is wonderful." The Fifth Amendment to our Constitution tells us: "No person shall be ... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood (the nation's largest provider of abortions), wrote an opinion column noting the 43rd anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, which legalized abortion-on-demand in our nation. They claim that Republicans want to turn back the clock and take away "women's right to safe, legal abortion." "Every woman should be able to make decisions about her pregnancy," they continue, "including whether to end it, without shame, judgment, harassment, or intimidation — and certainly without interference by politicians."
As the political landscape started to crystallize at the onset of the 2012 election, I wrote a column making a comparison to the election of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was elected. My point then was that the common ground of these two elections was the fracturing of Americans' most basic sense of what the nation is about. The 1850s saw the collapse of the Whig Party and the birth of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party fractured into two and ran two separate candidates. The Republican Lincoln was elected with just 39 percent of the popular vote.
A recent forum on fighting poverty, sponsored by the Jack Kemp Foundation and moderated by House Speaker Paul Ryan and South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott, showed why the Republican Party is America's party of vision. The forum featured six Republican presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Chris Christie, John Kasich, Mike Huckabee and Marco Rubio. Each responded to questions from Ryan and Scott and weighed in with their ideas for fighting poverty.
