Columnist.
By the end of September, when fiscal 2011 ends, House Speaker John Boehner must answer a simple yet profound question: Will he lead a Republican-controlled House of Representatives in enacting government funding bills for fiscal 2012 that allow tax dollars to flow to a group that kills an average of 910 unborn babies per day? Boehner ought to say: No way. Case closed. Because Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says that "No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law," a voting majority of the House has veto power over federal spending items.
Newsweek ran a cover story this week intended to be a brutal hit piece on Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, who has emerged as a top candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. Translated into plain English, however, Newsweek's piece was actually a valuable seminar in why the elitist left fears successful female conservative politicians and why it perceives Bachmann to be a particularly formidable threat to its own ambitions to direct the future of our country. Early in the article, Newsweek's Lois Romano writes: "But in Iowa, Bachmann's simple, black-and-white distillations of complex problems are cheered as refreshing and tough."
When Speaker John Boehner and President Barack Obama cut their deal in April on a continuing resolution to fund the government for the remainder of fiscal 2011 at a level only $78.3 billion below what Obama had originally requested for the year, it should have been obvious Boehner would come back and cut a similarly bad deal to increase the debt limit. In the April CR, Boehner agreed to a level of federal spending that predictably required running a massive deficit in this fiscal year -- which ends on Sept. 30.
Two employees of contractors working at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory used dead peoples' Social Security numbers, according to DOE's Office of Inspector General. Four others used Social Security numbers the government has not yet issued, and two shared the same Social Security number. The fact that workers for contractors at DOE's Berkeley lab were misusing Social Security numbers -- and thus, by definition, working under false identities -- was revealed in a report DOE's IG completed on April 15.
Eventually, the 2012 Republican presidential primary race will boil down to just two candidates. One will be the establishment candidate and the other will be the conservative candidate. Either would have a real chance of beating Barack Obama in the general election, but the conservative candidate would have the better chance. As early as it is, the Republican Party's internal "establishment" primary is almost over. Only two candidates are now competing for that nod: former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman -- who most recently served as Obama's ambassador to China.
Fourteen-year-old Tommy, on his way to baseball practice at a neighborhood park, detours by a local computer-and-appliance store. He has cash in his pocket, earned from mowing lawns. He now invests most of it in a vile video game. At the ball field, Tommy hands the game to his friend, Billy -- who instantly stashes it in his equipment bag. "Thanks, Billy," says this hypothetical 14-year-old. "My mom would kill me if she knew I bought that game. We can play it tomorrow when I come over to your place."
When the New York legislature passed a law last Friday legalizing same-sex marriage, all of New York's Roman Catholic bishops signed a statement warning that they now expect efforts to enact laws attacking churches that defend the truth. "We strongly uphold the Catholic Church's clear teaching that we always treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with respect, dignity and love," said the bishops.
"Today, the United States has reached the statutory debt limit," Treasury Department Spokeswoman Colleen Murray said in a May 16 statement. Did it really? Or is the legal debt limit merely a sleight-of-hand tactic in the most high stakes shell game every played? Take a look at what the Treasury Department has reported on its Daily Treasury Statements since May 16, when Treasury said it had "reached the statutory debt limit."
Americans, who live far from the Washington Beltway, may have never heard of Tysons Corner, Va. But something is happening there today that has already hit them in their pocketbooks and may ultimately strike deeply into their lives or the lives of their children. Big government is laying siege to Tysons Corner. Whether it triumphs there will help determine whether most Americans remain freely moving people, who own and operate their own cars and trucks -- and go where they want when they want -- or whether we become a nation predominantly populated by mass-transit-riding government dependents who rely on the state to get them where they need to go.
When Elena Kagan became solicitor general of the United States in March 2009, she applied a high standard in recusing herself from her job as the administration's top advocate in federal court disputes. This standard was exemplified by the case of Horne v. Flores. Horne v. Flores, in which a school superintendent contested the efforts of federal courts to micromanage how his state's public schools helped Spanish-speaking students learn English, came out of Arizona. Kagan came out of Cambridge, Mass. -- a long way geographically and philosophically from Arizona.
Looking back from 2,000 years in the future, were a historian to see that America had sent men to the moon in the late 1960s and early 1970s and then never sent them back again, he would justifiably conclude that this nation had peaked as an historical force in the last half of the 20th century. By the time America elected Barack Obama, this historian would see, it was already on the way down. Were he to simultaneously examine the rise of the welfare state, he would notice a telltale trend: As socialism dug deeper into the soul of America, America's pioneering spirit waned.
Ted Cruz knows the American Dream because his family has lived it. As teenager in the 1950s, his father, Rafael Cruz, fought with Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution, not knowing Castro was a communist. He was eventually imprisoned and brutally beaten by the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship's police. Rafael's father bribed his son's way out of prison. The son fled Cuba with a hundred dollars sewn into his underwear -- and earned a degree in mathematics from the University of Texas.
Just how much the welfare state has damaged America's political culture over the past 50 years was demonstrated on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, when former House speaker and current Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich dug a political knife into the back of House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan -- who is the most effectively outspoken fiscal conservative in Congress. The knife had been handed to Newt by "Meet the Press" host David Gregory. "Do you think that Republicans ought to buck the public opposition and really move forward to completely change Medicare, turn it into a voucher program where you give seniors some premium support ... so that they can go out and buy private insurance?" Gregory asked Gingrich, alluding to the Medicare reform plan included as a long-term policy goal in the House Republican budget authored by Ryan.
To President Barack Obama, securing the border is a laughing matter -- and a lying matter. When Obama spoke in El Paso, Texas, yesterday, he claimed that (1) the federal government has now "basically" completed the border fence that security minded Republicans wanted built and (2) El Paso and other border communities are "among the safest in the nation." "They wanted a fence. Well, the fence ... is now basically complete," said Obama. "Maybe they'll need a moat," he added. "Maybe they want alligators in the moat."
In a White House briefing held by conference call shortly after midnight on Monday morning, a group of unnamed "senior administration officials" described the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that resulted in the death Osama bin Laden. "It was a model of really seamless collaboration across our government," one official said, according to the White House transcript. "Since 9/11, this is what the American people have expected of us, and today, in this critical operation, we were able to finally deliver."
On Feb. 12, 2010, President Barack Obama signed a law increasing the legal limit on the national debt from $12.394 trillion to $14.294 trillion. That gave the U.S. Treasury the legal authority to go out and borrow an additional $1.9 trillion -- about another $16,165 per American household. By the close of business on Monday, the Treasury had almost finished borrowing all that. The portion of the national debt subject to $14.294 trillion limit stood at $14.246886 -- leaving the Treasury another $47.114 billion in borrowing authority before hitting the legal limit.
When President Barack Obama declared last week that America "would not be a great country" were it not for Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and unemployment insurance, he committed one brief moment of partial candor. "By 2025, the amount of taxes we currently pay will only be enough to finance our health care programs -- Medicare and Medicaid -- Social Security, and the interest we owe on our debt," he said. "That's it. Every other national priority -- education, transportation, even our national security -- will have to be paid for with borrowed money."
"Nope. Zero." According to a story in Sunday's New York Times, that is what President Barack Obama told House Speaker John Boehner last week when Boehner, as the Times put it, "was demanding a provision to restrict financing to Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions." Boehner asked again, the Times reported, and Obama again said: "Nope. Zero." The bottom line: Boehner agreed to a deal to fund the government for the rest of fiscal 2011 that will permit continued federal funding for Planned Parenthood, a group that says it did 332,278 abortions in 2009 -- or about 910 per day.
If you look at the historical tables attached to President Barack Obama's latest budget proposal, they say the federal government took in $2.165 trillion in revenues in fiscal 2010 and spent $3.720 trillion, leaving a federal deficit of approximately $1.555 trillion. This looks like a horror story, of course. Yet the true story is more horrible. To find that story, you have to look at the financial statements quietly posted by the U.S. Treasury on the website of the Financial Management Service. These documents show the actual accounting for the federal government in much the same way your bank statements show the actual accounting for your household.
President Barack Obama shares at least one thing in common with one of the lesser Founding Fathers. He and Pierce Butler, a South Carolina delegate at the Constitutional Convention, both flip-flopped on their interpretation of the Constitution's war power. The difference between Obama's flip-flop and Butler's is that Butler's was defensible. In fact, it can now help contemporary Americans understand exactly where the Framers intended the war power to reside. You see, Butler took the wrong position at the Constitutional Convention itself, during the actual debate on the war power -- before it and other elements of the document were finalized and sent to the states for ratification.
