Columnist.
Even though he is a columnist for The Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer often makes shrewd observations about American politics. On Fox News the night before the Iowa caucuses, however, Krauthammer indulged in a false appeal to common knowledge -- before casually dismissing Rick Santorum as a nonviable presidential candidate. Bill O'Reilly asked: Who is going to win Iowa? "I'll tell you that it's win, place and show, everybody knows: Romney, Santorum and Ron Paul," Krauthammer responded. "And I'm not sure it will matter either way, because Santorum has a one-in-50 chance of winning the nomination. Paul has zero chance."
When I managed Pat Buchanan's presidential campaign in 1996, I learned that some states conducted fair and honest caucuses and primaries and that some did not. Iowa, historically the first caucus state, and New Hampshire, historically the first primary state, conducted their political business fairly. New York did not. Today Virginia's political system is beginning to resemble New York's in 1996. To get on the Republican primary ballot in New York that year, a candidate needed to submit signatures from 1,250 registered Republican voters in each of the state's 31 congressional districts or signatures from 5 percent of registered Republicans in a district if that number were less than 1,250.
Under this administration and this Congress -- which includes the Republican-controlled House of Representatives led by Speaker John Boehner -- the right of Catholics to freely exercise their religion is treated with less deference than the presumed right of stockyard owners to fill the skies with effluvia. I mean this literally. When Congress wants to stop the Executive Branch from doing something, it has a simple constitutional means: Deny funding for that activity. The $914.8 billion spending law Congress passed last week to keep the government funded through the end of fiscal 2012 -- which does not come until Sept. 30 of next year -- is full of provisions that use this mechanism to achieve aims both great and small.
Considering the debate around President Barack Obama's health care plan and the lawsuits filed against it, then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan's written answers to some of the 13 written questions relating to Obamacare that Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans submitted to her during her Supreme Court confirmation process were remarkably simple and straightforward. "No," she said. That was how she answered question No. 2, which inquired if she had ever been asked her opinion about the merits or underlying legal issues in Florida's lawsuit against Obamacare.
The Rev. John Becker, S.J., sat at the front of the classroom, paperback in hand, glasses pushed to the end of his nose. As he spoke, he looked intently from one student to another. "This semester, I am going to teach you how to read 'King Lear,'" he said. "It may be Shakespeare’s most difficult play. But it has a powerful message to tell." When we were done reading "Lear," the priest promised, we would not only understand it, but we would have learned the secret of understanding any thing written in English -- anything, that is, with a meaning to discern.
When he ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992, Paul Tsongas repeatedly made it clear: He loathed President George H.W. Bush's flip-flopping on abortion and his inattentiveness to what Tsongas perceived as the urgent need for global population control. And he won Mitt Romney's vote in the 1992 Massachusetts presidential primary. "This land, this water, this air, this planet, this rain, this is our legacy to our young, yet the Reagan-Bush years have been a time of cynical avoidance of one environmental issue after another -- acid rain, energy conservation, depletion of the ozone layer, global warming and uncontrolled world population," Tsongas, a former U.S. senator from Massachusetts, said when he announced his presidential campaign in April 1991.
Will Michelle Obama's efforts as first lady help or hurt American children and the nation in which they live? When speaking about her "Let's Move!" program to fight childhood obesity, Mrs. Obama often explains her vision of government as parent -- the Big Mother who will teach children the important things their derelict real moms and dads do not. Big Mother made an early appearance in 2009, when Mrs. Obama talked to bureaucrats at the Department of Health and Human Services.
Since March 4, federal spending has no longer been a Democrat-only responsibility -- as it essentially was in the previous Congress. Since March 4, federal spending has been the result of a Republican-Democrat partnership.
About a decade before he began a Nashville recording career that has included five platinum albums, Collin Raye was singing at a nightclub in Beaverton, Ore., when he experienced something he would later recognize as an act of Providence. There was a couple that came every weekend to see him perform. "As I was working the crowd, I would sit down with them," Raye told me in an interview for CNSNews.com. "I realized they would have a glass of wine and a beer. But they never really partied. They just came because they liked my singing and they liked our band."
If anything good came out of the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with President Barack Obama to increase the limit on the federal debt by as much as $2.4 trillion, it was that the legislation enacting that increase also provided that by the end of this year both houses of Congress must vote on a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. However, Boehner may now turn that good thing bad.
Events unfolding in the Middle East are proving that Henry Hyde was right and George Bush was wrong on the wisdom of a foreign policy focused on promoting democracy. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared in Hyde's House International Relations Committee on Feb. 16, 2006, she presented written testimony touting Bush's messianic policy. "In his second inaugural address, President Bush laid out the vision that leads America into the world: 'It is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world,'" said Rice.
U.S. District Judge Ellen Huvelle, a Clinton appointee, ironically provided evidence last week that seals the case that Justice Elena Kagan is required by law to recuse herself from cases challenging Obamacare. The law in question is 28 U.S.C. 455. It mandates that a justice "shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might be reasonably questioned" or "(w)here he has served in governmental employment and in such capacity participated as counsel, adviser or material witness concerning the proceedings ..."
In yet another stunning attack on freedom of religion, President Barack Obama's Justice Department asked the Supreme Court last week to give the federal government the power to tell a church who its ministers will be. The case involves a former teacher at Lutheran school, who along with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is pushing a claim that a Lutheran congregation should be forced to restore her ministry position.
I followed along on a short tour that Catholic University gave on Tuesday to Hilda Solis, President Barack Obama's Catholic secretary of labor, who has spent much of her political career zealously advocating legalized abortion. When Solis served in the U.S. House in 2003, she voted against the partial-birth abortion ban. The day President Bush signed it, she called for the Supreme Court to reverse it. "I would just like to say it's the wrong decision that the president is making today," Solis said, "and we have to stand up and challenge him."
When Thomas More was in the Tower of London waiting to be tried for refusing to take an oath that claimed Henry VIII was the supreme authority over the church in England, he explained to one of his daughters why it did not matter to him if almost every other man in England was willing to take that oath. "Verily, daughter, I never intend -- God being my good lord -- to pin my soul at another man's back, not even the best man that I know this day living; for I know not whither he may hap to carry it," More said, according to documents published online by the Center for Thomas More Studies at the University of Dallas.
Asia Bibi, a mother of five, hails from one of only two Christian families that lived in the Pakistani village of Ittanwali. In June 2009, she was working with a group of Muslim women, picking berries in a field. She was sent to fill a bucket with drinking water. When she returned, the Muslim women would not drink from it. It was impure, they said, having been touched by a Christian. What Bibi said then is a matter of dispute.
Mitt Romney may believe Social Security is constitutional, but he would have a hard time convincing some of the people who pushed the Social Security Act into law. As I wrote in my book, "Control Freaks," some of the main players involved in creating Social Security believed it was unconstitutional -- and for good reason. Yet, for them, not unlike many in today's Washington, the ultimate questions were not: Is this good for the long-term future of the country, and does Congress have authority to do it? They were: Will this serve our immediate political interests, and can we get away with it?
When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts in April 2006, he signed a health care reform bill that required all adults in that state to purchase health insurance by July 1 of the following year. Under Romneycare, people making up to 300 percent of the poverty level get a subsidy -- i.e., wealth redistributed from others -- to help them pay for their state-government-required insurance plan.
Will Barack Obama become the first president in the post-World War II era during whose term real gross domestic product never grew in any quarter at an annual rate greater than 4 percent? With less than optimistic recent forecasts from the Federal Reserve System's Federal Open Market Committee and the Congressional Budget Office, it now seems like a very real possibility.
Vice President Joe Biden's talent for using many words to say little or nothing -- or worse -- was never more conspicuously displayed than during his trip to China. At Sichuan University on Sunday, after Biden delivered a 4,600-word speech, a student asked him about the importance of public speaking. "That is a very good question," Biden said -- as he launched into an 863-word answer.
